Gamergate
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“”If anyone thinks this is really a debate about corruption and nepotism within games media, you are kidding yourself. That would be like looking at the Battle of the Somme and saying "what we are seeing here is a difference of opinion about the legitimacy of the expansionist aspirations of the Austro-Hungarian Empire." We're way beyond that now.
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| —Ally Fogg, [1] |
Gamergate is a conservative and reactionary backlash in the online video game community, particularly set on ousting feminism and other liberal ideologies from the industry. Although rumblings of Gamergate could be seen in the years leading up to its naming and mainstream emergence, it began in earnest in August 2014 when indie game developer Zoe Quinn's ex-boyfriend wrote a blog post to spur the dregs of the Internet into making her life a living hell. As the threats she received led her to flee her home for her own safety, other women despised by the "gamer" community were targetted next, namely Anita Sarkeesian, and anyone else who dared to speak up against Gamergate and the attacks on Quinn and Sarkeesian became a target as well.
The Gamergate movement's supporters, known as "Gamergaters" or derisively as "Gators", claim they are a grassroots consumer movement standing for "ethics in video game journalism", freedom of speech, and game developer's freedom of expression. This is in turn because they believe Zoe Quinn had sex for positive game reviews (no such review exists), they were banned from various websites for trying to disseminate her personal information, and because they believe feminists want to censor video games based on never watching any of Anita Sarkeesian's video series. And on top of that, they solely rally behind unethical journalists and actively try to censor and silence writers and game developers who don't share their point of view, often derisively called by Gamergaters as "social justice warriors". It is also seen as a backlash against the maturation of video games into a form of art worthy of academic study and subjective criticism rather than software to be subject exclusively to technical and objective review.
Despite the fact that none of Gamergate's claims hold up under scrutiny, early on they were able to disguise their intentions and gain a positive spin in some areas, and even began an astroturfing campaign that successfully recruited useful idiots into a token subgroup to counter claims of exclusivity. Gamergate was also courted by opportunistic right-wingers, reactionaries, misogynists, MRAs, neo-Nazis, and others who saw Gamergate as it really was and sought to exploit it for their own means. Later hangers on used Gamergate as their personal grindstone to rally the group against anyone they held grudges against as Gamergate annointed them as new heroes despite their obvious hang-ups to the rest of the world.
Background
Video gaming culture and the video games industry are male-dominated. Despite large numbers of female gamers (various studies have shown that in recent years women outnumber men as consumers),[2] games are primarily marketed to male tastes. Recent years have seen some moves away from the status quo, especially within the independent sector and alternative games journalism, including games marketed for women, games with more inclusive or feminist messages, and feminist criticism of the implicit and explicit sexism in gaming culture.
These shifts have been met with vocal and obnoxious resistance from certain quarters of the gaming community. This was most obvious in May 2012 when Anita Sarkeesian launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund her Tropes vs. Women in Video Games web series to analyze the portrayal of women in video games. Her "crime" of criticizing video games led to extreme harassment, which the mainstream media covered and led to an outpouring of support for her project.[3][4]
Another example was the harassment and cyberstalking of Dina Abou Karam which started in December 2013 after she was hired onto the team of the crowd-funded video game Mighty No. 9.[wp] In her introduction to the game's Kickstarter backers, she included a piece of fan art she made which depicted the game's male protagonist as a woman. This led to attacks from those who believed she was going to inject feminist messages into the game, despite the fact she was only hired as a community manager with no say in the game's development.[5]
Zoe Quinn
In February 2013, Zoe Quinn independently released her video game Depression Quest, an interactive fiction[wp] game which portrays living with clinical depression and featured an interface similar to a website. It received praise for its message, but was trashed by various self-styled hardcore gamers claiming the simple design and "lack of gameplay" meant it was "not a proper game" and that it was "social justice warrior" (SJW) propaganda. After she submitted the game to the Steam Greenlight[wp] independent game distribution platorm, she was doxxed.[6] Threats included messages saying she should kill herself or that the sender would rape her.[7][8] Depression Quest was eventually approved for release in August 2014, and Quinn had to deal with releasing it shortly after Robin Williams' suicide made international news; she ultimately decided to release the game for free for these reasons, only including an optional donation-based payment system that would send proceeds to the National Suicide Prevention Hotline.[9]
Eron Gjoni and "The Zoe Post"
On August 15, Quinn's ex-boyfriend Eron Gjoni posted "Cringe Worthy Breakup Stories" to several gaming-related message boards, a 9,000-word tirade[10] about his breakup with Quinn, alleging that she had cheated on him during their relationship with multiple partners.[11] After he was banned from these sites and the posts deleted, he made a blog to specifically host the accusations and called it "The Zoe Post".[12] He would later admit that he had crafted the post to make it appealing for an audience of trolls who would delight in attacking Quinn, namely Reddit and 4chan users.[13] He would deny that was his intention,[14] but an early draft suggested otherwise.[13]
Among the vindictive and slut-shaming musings in "The Zoe Post", one that attracted a lot of attention and amusement from readers was the following:
“”Five guys. Man. she cheated on me with five guys? Five guys. And now I can’t stop mentally referring to her as Burgers and Fries.[12]
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This direct reference to the American fast food restaurant Five Guys Burgers and Fries[wp] gave the hate campaign its first name: #BurgersAndFries.
Gjoni stated that he posted the screed to "warn" potential future partners about Quinn's alleged behavior,[12] a shaming tactic common in the manosphere.[Note 1] He wrote, "I believe that to stay quiet about someone who will hurt others is to be complicit in perpetuating the harm they will cause".[15] He also tried to distance himself from the harassment of Quinn his post inspired, but chat logs and other sources confirm he was actually very active in promoting what his work had caused.[13]
"The Quinnspiracy"
Many of the readers of "The Zoe Post" focused on the mention of Nathan Grayson, a writer for the video game news site Kotaku, as one of Quinn's sexual partners. This led them to jump to the conclusion that Quinn had slept with Grayson to get positive reviews for Depression Quest and boost her career in game design.[16] Some proponents of this sex-for-reviews scandal which became known as "The Quinnspiracy" argued that it represented an example of the "lack of integrity" they saw in video game journalism.[16]
Kotaku editor-in-chief Stephen Totilo quickly debunked the claims: Grayson had written only one article about Quinn for the website, and that had been prior to the start of their relationship.[17] The mob responded by bringing up a piece Grayson wrote months earlier at Rock, Paper, Shotgun which listed Depression Quest amongst 50 other games approved through Steam Greenlight[18] as further proof of collusion. The article, however, was merely a list, not a review.[19] Gjoni also edited his blog to clarify that, "if there was any conflict of interest between Zoe and Nathan regarding coverage of Depression Quest prior to April, I have no evidence to imply that it was sexual in nature".[12]
Gamergate becomes a thing
“”A few weeks ago our message board and general inbox were bombarded with demands we address something called the "GamerGate Scandal", posts written with the urgency and rage one would associate with, say, discovering that Chipotle burritos are made entirely from the meat of human babies. It's apparently a big deal in some circles, so we followed the links and read the piles of data presented, and had to stop and take a deep breath just to grasp it all. "Gentlemen," we said amid the stunned silence, "do you realize that if what they're saying is true, then this is still the most pointless fucking bullshit anyone has ever forced us to read?"
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| —Cracked.com, [20] |
Harassment and doxxing
"The Zoe Post" and the widespread accusation that Quinn used sex to further her career inspired a fresh wave of harassment against her. In late August, her email, Tumblr, Twitter, Skype, and Dropbox accounts were all hacked, as well as those of her friends. Private nude photographs they acquired in the hack were distributed to various websites and to her family and employers.[6] Also included in the hack was controversial indie developer Phil Fish[wp] who had stood up for Quinn; the hack of his personal and professional data (including his SSN and banking records) led to him dropping out of the game industry and putting all he had worked on up for sale.[21][22] At the time, the anonymous mob denied responsibility, claiming that Quinn and Fish had faked the hacks and were perpetuating a false flag operation; the only proof of this was the mob's belief that Quinn's current boyfriend Alex Lifschitz was secretly Fish.[23] The harassment intensified to include death threats, forcing Quinn and Lifschitz to move out of their apartment in fear for their safety.[9] One of Quinn's close friends wrote that other women in the gaming industry feared being targeted next, and some opted to leave gaming, destroying projects they had been working on or just going into hiding.[24]
Those perpetuating the so-called "Quinnspiracy" were eager to dig up dirt on her, and drew attention to a feud several months earlier between Quinn and a group known as The Fine Young Capitalists (TFYC). Quinn was critical of the rules of their "women in game design" competition, accusing the group of exploiting inexperienced game designers by asking them to work for free (the winner would only get a cut of the game's sales in the end, with the rest going to charity), and brought up the wording of their policy on transgender contestants which required that the contestant must have publically identfied as a woman before entering. This debate, which largely took place on Twitter, and the attention it attracted from Quinn's followers, had fed significant traffic to TFYC's website, unintentionally crashing it and leading Quinn to be accused of coordinating a denial-of-service attack[wp] against TFYC.[25] In August, a member of TFYC posted about this feud on Reddit, stating that Quinn "started a fucking Twitter storm, crashed our website, got my personal information doxxed, [and] got us banned from Twitter";[26] of course, he failed to admit anything that had happened was intentional, and that someone talking to Quinn simply found his public Facebook profile by happenstance.
As Quinn was being harassed, Anita Sarkeesian released a new video in her Tropes vs. Women in Video Game series[27] and immediately recieved "some very scary threats" against herself and her family, leading her to leave her home temporarily.[28]
Operation Chemo and Vivian James
4chan users were among the most active in championing what would become known as Gamergate, primarily on /v/, the video games board, and /pol/, the "politically incorrect" board, a haven for neo-Nazis, neoreactionaries, and red pillers. On August 21, some enterprising anonymous poster on /pol/ suggested that they should donate to TFYC as a way of spiting Quinn and her supporters (due to the animosity between Quinn and TFYC) as well as inverting 4chan stereoytypes by superficially supporting a "social justice warrior" cause.[29] The poster said, "We will look really good if we donate to this," and, "There will be a lot of asshurt."[26] Another anonymous poster replied with "4chan attacks the cancer and simultaneously sponsors the chemo", using the common chanspeak metaphor of "cancer" as anything which is seen as a threat to 4chan culture. "Operation Chemo" or "Operation Fuck the Cancer, Fund the Chemo" soon spread to /v/ and other boards and quickly raised over $5,000 in donations to TFYC.[26]
TFYC, who were either unaware of or indifferent to the channers' vindictive and machiavellian reasons for sponsoring them, gladly accepted the donations and allowed 4chan to come up with a character which would appear in their project's finished game, since their funding drive had offered this reward for donations over $2,000.[30] One /v/ poster suggested that this character should be "just an average female gamer" to deliberately challenge expectations that 4chan would produce something misogynistic or an obscure meme. Thus was born Vivian James, a surly, red-haired everygirl, dressed in casual clothing (with the 4chan clover logo on her headband), whose name is intended to sound vaguely like "vidya games" (/v/ slang for video games).[26] Vivian, who quickly became a mascot for Gamergate, is a character who just wants to game and doesn't want to think about social issues.[29][31] As the major donor to TFYC's project, 4chan was also permitted to choose the charity which would benefit from proceeds of the finished game. Out of the charities suggested (which included JIDF and various men's rights causes), the one chosen by straw poll was the Colon Cancer Alliance, continuing the Operation Chemo meme of "chemo for butthurt".[32]
Of course, per Rule 34, immediately after creating an imaginary teenage girl to agree with them that they aren't misogynistic, 4chan users started making porn of the character, some of which were included in the files submitted to TFYC.[26] As if to further underscore the stupidity of their movement, 4chan users and Gamergaters in general seem to think Vivian is an example of a "real woman" that Gamergate supports,[33] while others used Vivian in a friend argument.[34]
Observers see that Vivian James' green and purple color scheme references an old 4chan meme known as "Piccolo Dick", a.k.a. "Daily Dose": an animated GIF of the character Piccolo from the anime Dragon Ball Z[wp] raping another male character from the show.[35][32][36] When the original GIF was banned on 4chan, 4chan users took to posting more heavily corrupted versions of the image until only the colors green and purple (the colors of Piccolo's skin and clothing, respectively) were identifiable, making any combination of green and purple a sly reference to the original; those who acknowledged the connection would respond with, "Thanks Doc." Gamergaters regularly deny the connection,[35] and TFYC did not consider the link a problem, citing the fact that they had already been sent Vivian James porn and, "there have been multiple pornographic images created [of Vivian James], many of which are more offensive than the three-year-old meme you referenced".[37]
- Actual unedited artwork
Vivian James: Gamergate's waifu and daughter.
- Artists' renditions of Gamergate's actual ideals
There are also various ethical failings with TFYC, such as the lack of transparency with their relationship to Autobótika, the Colombian VFX studio TFYC is contracting the game development to. The barest searching shows that TFYC is essentially just the crowdfunding front for Autobótika, as they share all the same staff, except TFYC excludes all of the male Autobótika staff from its lineup, including Autobótika's executive producer and TFYC's vocal spokesman Matthew Rappard.[38][39]
The winning game in TFYC's competiton was Afterlife Empire and TFYC put it up on Steam Greenlight on April 7, 2015. Their preview shows absolutely no gameplay footage and has an inexplicable slide of Vivian James. And it's also a casual puzzle game which Gamergate has said they abhorred for the prior 8 months. Afterlife Empire may have been pre-planned to win TFYC's competition, as the "entrant" claimed on Twitter she had been in contact with Autobótika before the competition started.[40]
Journalists and pundits weigh in
As the harrassment of Quinn and Sarkeesian began to generate media attention, commentators at various video game and popular culture news sites explored the nasty streak within gamer culture exposed by these activities. Several of these articles suggested that, with video games having become mainstream in recent years, the conventional notion of an exclusively male gamer demographic was a thing of the past. These are collectively known as the "gamers are dead" articles.[41][42][43][44] The emerging Gamergate movement cried foul, accusing the media of perpetuating harmful stereotypes of gamers as misogynistic white males (despite the articles claiming the exact opposite), and, drawing on the fact that several similarly-themed articles came out within a relatively short period of time, of "collusion" and "corruption."
Vlogger John "TotalBiscuit" Bain[wp] attacked the critiques, maintaining that they were othering gamers and fostering division instead of dialogue.[45] His extensive online following (he had some 250,000 Twitter followers) made him an early figurehead of the movement, though he wavers between officially supporting it and professing a "neutral" take.
At this point, the alleged scandal regarding Quinn was usually being referred to with the hashtags "#BurgersAndFries" and "#TheQuinnspiracy". On August 27, Adam Baldwin, actor and sometime blogger for the conservative website Breitbart, tweeted a link to YouTube videos about the so-called "Quinnspiracy" with the hashtag "#GamerGate",[46] giving the controversy a name that stuck. Baldwin was unaware that "gamergate"[wp] is an entomological term for a reproductively viable female ant in queenless colonies.
In September, game designer and journalist Jenn Frank wrote an article for The Guardian regarding the treatment of Quinn, Sarkeesian, and other women in gaming.[47] Gamergaters soon accused Frank of a "conflict of interest" because they had found she had contributed to Quinn's Patreon account; Frank had actually included this meager disclosure in her original draft, but The Guardian did not find it worthy of mention. It was only added after the fact, but the damage had already been done and she decided she was leaving gaming entirely. She was joined by game designer Mattie Brice who wrote that the experiences she and others have had due to harassment have long been disregarded and she had given up waiting for things to change for the better. This was met with celebration in Gamergate, with one person writing, "SJWs [are] dropping like flies before the might of #GamerGate," and another that, "The dominos are falling. We're winning. It's brilliant."[48]
Gamergate escalates
In order to deflect criticism that Gamergate is entirely focused on Zoe Quinn or Anita Sarkeesian, Gamergaters began to refer to these women invariably as "Literally Who" (as in "I literally have no idea who that is"), often shortened to "LW", to imply, paradoxically, that Gamergaters don't know or care who these women are. However, observers easily noticed how much time Gamergate spent on obsessing over these women and their perceived slights to the status quo.[49] And as Gamergate progressed, more and more women became "Literally Who" to where there was an "LW7" at one point.[50] The use of "Literally Who" has been seen as an attempt to dehumanize their targets so as to make it more palatable to spend months harassing them.
Those critical of Gamergate have also had help in coming up with terms to refer to the tactics used by the mob. One of these is "sealioning", where Gamergaters insert themselves into conversations about Gamergate, with zero provocation (and often without ever using the #Gamergate hashtag) to just ask questions. This was named after a strip in the webcomic Wondermark where a sea lion employs these tactics on an unsuspecting couple.[51][52] "Freeze peach" is also often used to mock how Gamergaters (and other anti-progressive voices) perceive the concepts of "censorship and "freedom of speech" when it comes to being denied a platform on privately owned websites while actively trying to censor and silence their ideological opponents.[53]
Revelation as coordinated hate campaign
Soon, #NotYourShield began to trend within Gamergate circles. These tweets, ostensibly from women, non-white people, and other underrepresented groups in gaming culture, meant to signal that Gamergate had support from outside the claimed straight white male gamer demographic, and they did not want their gender, ethnicity, or sexuality to be used by the gaming press as a shield from criticism over their coverage of Quinn and Sarkeesian and questions of "ethics in video game journalism".[54][55]
By September 6, Quinn blew this conceived notion out of the water by providing a series of 4chan posts and IRC chatlogs that proved Gamergate was not a grassroots movement concerned with ethics but a co-ordinated attack against herself, Sarkeesian, and others viewed as "social justice warriors", and included proof that #NotYourShield was an astroturfing campaign to shield Gamergate from criticism.[56] Gamergaters created sockpuppet Twitter accounts to push #NotYourShield, fabricating user profiles and swiping profile photos from the internet for use as avatars.[57] The members of the chatroom attempted to defend themselves by dumping the entire week of chat logs but they only showed what Quinn had proven, that Gamergate was about her and not about ethics at all and they had orchestrated #NotYourShield from the beginning.[58][59]
The players in Gamergate, partcularly those from 4chan's "/pol/ - Politically Incorrect" (read neo-Nazis and misogynists) board, had spent much of the year making up fake hashtags to discredit feminism[60][61] but with #NotYourShield, they had actually managed to recruit useful idiots to turn it into a friend argument and culture jamming[wp] campaign.[62] However, people can only be #NotYourShield for so long until they recognize the toxicity within Gamergate and call them out on it, ultimately becoming victims to the mob themselves.[50] This is exemplary of the subculture that surrounds these websites, as anonymity reigns supreme and any attempt at individuality is seen as seeking unnecessary attention. The fact that Quinn, Sarkeesian, and others speak openly about what happens to them is seen by posters on these "chan" websites as lying for self-aggrandization rather than sincerity and openness about their situation.[52]
4chan shows Gamergate the door
4chan's owner Christopher "moot" Poole announced on September 18 that 4chan would ban any Gamergate threads as violations of its "no personal information/raids/call to invasion" rule[63] Gators cried foul, demanding their right to free speech[52] and accusing moot of having fallen to SJW wiles, as they believed he was dating former Gawker employee Mallory Blair.[64] By January 2015, moot would decide to leave 4chan entirely;[65] in an interview with Rolling Stone in March, he admitted that the stress over policing "The Fappening" (leaks of celebrity nude photos) and Gamergate on 4chan led to this decision.[66]
Many of the "disenfranchised" posters moved to 8chan, a similarly-styled forum founded a year earlier that promised less-restrictive rules. There, Gators created a board called called "/gg/".[67][68] After some time there was dissention over how it was run, which led to the creation of a splinter board called "/gamergate/". Another board at 8chan called "/baphomet/" was set up during Gamergate, reviving the old-school nature of raiding and doxxing boards; while Gators deny any relationship between Gamergate and "/baph/", harassment of Gamergate victims is organized there.[69][70]
Right-wing opportunists pile on
Several conservative and libertarian commentators supported Gamergate. Christina Hoff Sommers of the conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute released a YouTube video that dismissed the existence of sexism in video games and gaming culture, taking a potshot at Sarkeesian along the way.[71] Cathy Young of the libertarian magazine Reason wrote a piece backing Gamergate, arguing that "the feminism GamerGate rebels against is not simply about equality or diversity," but "authoritarian, far-left brand of gender politics."[72]
Gamergate also attracted the support of reactionary Theodore Beale (Vox Day).[73] Beale has blogged:
“”At this point, #GamerGate is about more than games now. It is a Schwerpunkt in the ongoing cultural war for the West. And the gamers of #GamerGate are the only defenders of freedom and Western civilization who are counterattacking and causing enemy casualties. That is why it is more than important, it is vital to see non-gamers joining the cause rather than sneering from the sidelines.
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| —Vox Day, [74] |
A number of bloggers piled on:
- Men's rights activist Roosh V launched a gaming website called Reaxxion which mostly hosts Gamergate propaganda; the site was once duped into publishing a submission that was a doctored old John Birch Society screed where "Gamergate" and "SJW" replaced every mention of "John Birch Society" and "communist".[75]
- Davis Aurini revealed to Gamergate he was planning a documentary with Jordan Owen to "critique" Anita Sarkeesian.[76] In addition to asking for $15 thousand a month (to arguably fund his skull collection),[77] his crowing achievement was to distribute a hoax that Sarkeesian was lying about contacting police about the threats she received[78] because the San Francisco Police Department representative he spoke to wasn't aware that SFPD had handed her case over to the FBI.[79]
- Thunderf00t also joined in, mostly to capitalize on his existing hatred of Sarkeesian.[80]
- Anti-feminist writers Janet "JudgyBitch" Bloomfield of A Voice for Men[81][82] and Karen "GirlWritesWhat" Straughan[83][84] also threw their support behind Gamergate.
The new website Techraptor ran several articles supporting Gamergate, boosting their traffic. Quinn called the website out for capitalizing on her abuse while discrediting herself and others along the way. She pointed out that Techraptor's ethics policy shows they crowdsource ideas from Reddit's Gamergate supporter board /r/KotakuInAction, leaving in multiple errors that are rarely if ever corrected, and makes no mention of objectivity, which is one of Gamergate's talking points. She wrote, "[their articles are] written with such an extreme slant [that] the italics have leaned so far they have fallen over and become underscores."[85]
Milo Yiannopoulos
Milo Yiannopoulos[wp] an openly gay (which Gamergate thinks makes him immune to criticism a la #NotYourShield[86]) contributor to Breitbart London became an early Gamergate hero when he published "Feminist Bullies Tearing the Video Game Industry Apart".[87] Many were quick to call him out on his sudden 180 on gaming by bringing up several pieces he had written that were critical and even vicious towards the gamer demographic he was now courting.[88][89][90] A 2013 post on his failed start-up The Kernel bemoaned the level of "sex, drugs and violence" in video games.[91] A day before "The Zoe Post" was published, he argued that video games were to blame for Elliot Rodger's genocidal fantasies.[92] And mere days before his "Feminist Bullies" piece, he tweeted, "If you're a grown man with hands clamped to an Xbox controller instead of a pair of tits you need a good slap".[93] Although he would later proclaim that he was an avid gamer, it was clear to outsiders that this new interest was a thinly veiled attempt at gaining conservative political allies, as well as Gamergate's inability to discern between bias in their favor and neutral journalism.[88][89]
Much of this criticism was in response to Yiannopoulos's leaking of a gaming writers' mailing list called "GameJournoPros", including unredacted emails where people discussed Quinn's harassment, only reinforcing Gamergate's conspiracy theory that there was collusion and corruption amongst gaming journalists.[94] Of note were emails discussing a potential letter of solidarity for her that was shot down and an argument between Ben Kuchera of Polygon and The Escapist's editor-in-chief Greg Tito over a refusal to shut down a forum thread at The Escapist where harassment towards Quinn was being organized.[95][96][97] As a result of the leak, the list was shut down.
Conspiracy theories
There are several largely interchangeable conspiracy theories in circulation concerning the actual nature of Gamergate and what the media are hiding. Most of these use terms like "corruption and collusion" and clichés about "social justice warriors", along with dog whistles like "cultural Marxism", "social engineering", and "mind control".
InfoWars and SyrianGirlPartisan take particular joy in promoting these theories, especially when Gators started speculating about Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) involvement with the situation.[98][99]
"Send those emails!"
One of Gamergate's primary efforts in trying to deal with what they believed to be corrupt journalists, including beliefs that people were blacklisted, was to set up a massive blacklist of websites that weren't obviously biased in their favor. Part of this actively involves trying to remove advertising revenue from websites. Their primary choice is archive.today, a web archival service that saves pages on demand and will strip advertisments from the archived page. Moderators at /r/KotakuInAction actively enforce that all links to the blacklisted websites be archive.today links, and someone even developed a browser extension to do it automatically. Vice's Motherboard imprint was first to notice the plot when they realized that most of their traffic was being routed through archive.today, and that articles entirely unrelated to gaming were being saved, bringing into question whether or not Gamergate's actions could be considered copyright infringement.[100]
With this not providing enough damage to these websites, Gamergate decided on several occasions to contact the advertisers directly. The first effort was to attack websites that had published the so-called "gamers are dead" articles in what was called "Operation Disrespectful Nod"; the name is intended to mock a tweet sent to Quinn by Marc Threadingham and Gamergate turned him into a meme.[101] They gained some traction when Intel responded and pulled ads from developer-oriented website Gamasutra where Leigh Alexander had written one of the articles that called out Gamergate for what it was.[102][103] Alexander was described by Gamergaters as a "final boss"; she was sent anonymous threats which included someone expressing the desire to "pay her a visit and jam a screwdriver in her eyesocket" and Gators scrounged her Twitter account to find old and out-of-context tweets that they claimed were "racist" to serve as "dirt" against her.[104] Intel was widely panned for its decision, and they released an apology, but did not reinstate advertising on the website[105] until a month later.
Gamergate would again focus its efforts into removing a website's revenue after Sam Biddle, a Gawker contributor, posted a series of Tweets that concluded with a poor taste joke: "[Gamergate] reaffirm[s] what we've known to be true for decades: nerds should be constantly shamed and degraded into submission."[106] This spawned "Operation Baby Seal" (no one is sure why this name was chosen[107]), directly pressuring companies that advertised on Gawker Media on the basis that Biddle was promoting bullying. Mercedes-Benz USA was the first company to respond, pulling ads from across Gawker while they "assessed" the "situation"; ads were reinstated a few days later.[108] Adobe also responded to a Gator's request that they pull ads from Gawker as the website "endorses bullying and hate speech". A representative responded by first clarifying that Adobe was not presently advertising on the website, but that they had requested the company's logo be removed;[Note 2] they also declared that "[our company] stands against bullying."[109][110] Adobe was called out for responding to Gamergate as they did,[111].[112] leading to the company publically denouncing Gamergate and its actions.[113] Word processor software developer Literature & Latte[114] and high-end vacuum cleaner manufacturer Dyson[115] were also contacted, leading to advertisments being pulled and then quickly reinstated after they realized they had played into Gamergate's hands.
The Escapist goes green and purple
The Escapist was one of the few "mainstream" video game websites that gave Gamergate the time of day. Their forums were one of the few locations where Gamergate discussion (and harassment of targets) was not stifled, and apparently condoned by the editor-in-chief at the time. The website was then soon host to interviews/essays with various game developers to share their thoughts on Gamergate. The first batch was titled "Female Game Developers Share Their Views on #GamerGate"; all of the women remained anonymous.[116] A couple of weeks later, another article in the same style but with men sharing their opinions, titled "What Game Developers Think of #GamerGate"; this time, some of the participants went on record with their names publicized.[117] Many would point out the disparity with the women's interviews labeled "female" and the men's interviews lacking any such descriptor, leading The Escapist to retroactively add "male" to the title of the second set.[117][118] This was only the first edit to the group, as it would be revealed that two of the participants in the group were active harassers in Gamergate: Slade "RogueStar" Villena, prominent member of the #BurgersAndFries chatroom who expressed a desire to falsely report Sarkeesian for tax fraud and was quoted as saying "NONE of this would have happened if [Quinn] kept her vagina shut,"[118] and James "Grimachu" Desborough, tabletop game designer who had a Gamergate-themed card game he developed become the first product ever pulled by that online retailer.[119][120] It was later revealed that Alexander "Archon" Macris, who works for The Escapist's owners Defy Media, was the one who conducted the interviews at the behest of a forum request, and had gone over the head of the website's actual editorial staff to publish the interviews and then enforce a corporate ban on discussing Gamergate in any future articles.[121] Macris also failed to disclose a conflict of interest, as he had financially supported Desborough's planned Gorean roleplaying book;[122] Gamergate was silent on this unlike with Jenn Frank's "lack" of disclosure towards crowdfunding one of Quinn's projects.
As Gamergate progressed, several popular contributors to The Escapist left amicably to go off on their own, ending the shows The Jimquisiton, Escape to the Movies, and Miracle of Sound. In January 2015, Defy Media underwent budget cuts that led to massive layoffs across their company, including The Escapist's editor-in-chief Greg Tito.[123] A month after this, Defy Media apparently had enough money to hire new people, and Macris was first to give the good news that he had hired several people that were known to be pro-Gamergate: Brandon Morse, @Lizzyf620,[124] and Liana Kerzner. Morse's hiring led to a team on the website leaving entirely, citing his prior transphobic statements.[125] Macris also acted on behalf of the new editor-in-chief at The Escapist Joshua Vanderwall to reach out to Oliver Campbell, an author and major Gamergate supporter who had previously remarked he had fled his home due to threats he claimed were coming from "anti-Gamergate" and compared the events within Gamergate to what Martin Luther King spoke about in his "I Have a Dream" speech. Damion Schubert, former dev for BioWare who was critical of Gamergate when he participated in the interviews for The Escapist, remarked on these changes and how the site was obviously gaining a right-wing bias; he doubted The Escapist would actually do better with taking Gamergate on as their intended audience considering their small size and how successful other websites that were targetted by Gamergate have been doing.[126] Sometime after this, former Gamergate supporter Amber Coal (@pixelgoth) publicized a conversation she had with Macris while she was still actively part of the movement where he made it obvious he intended to use his position to force his views on Gamergate at The Escapist and other Defy Media websites.[127]
The campaign of harassment expands
Quinn was doxed again on 8chan on September 26. Would-be harassers discovered the post on October 14, and made plans to stalk Quinn at her home.[128] The post was removed by 8chan moderators only after Lifschitz called the site out on it; prior to that, 8chan hadn't touched the post, as it isn't against the site's rules to dox people.[129] Meanwhile, on 4chan, the site from which Gamergate was supposedly banned, someone explicitly advocated murdering Quinn, horrifyingly saying "Why don't we just kill her? ... In the past, we've killed people who said stupid shit just fine..."[130]
Brianna Wu singled out
On October 9, indie game dev Brianna Wu who leads the studio Giant Spacekat (GSX) tweeted several memes that had been sent to her by a fan in which her criticisms of Gamergate were superimposed over an image of an angry child. Gamergaters's reaction was predictable: Wu was doxxed and received charming tweets like, "I've got a K-Bar and I'm coming to your house so I can shove it up your ugly feminist cunt," and, "If you have any kids, they're going to die too. I don't give a fuck. They'll grow up to be feminists anyway." She contacted the police and fled her home.[131] Gators "justified" their hate by saying Wu was mocking autism, as they found a photograph of the child used in the meme on an autism activism website; in reality, it's just a stock photo with no specific ties to autism.[132]
This led to her stalking by Gamergate figureheads "PressFart2Continue" (so named because he previously stalked a YouTube vlogger whose channel was called Press Heart to Continue[133]) and "TheRalphRetort" who used his website to host content Fart produced that was banned elsewhere for doxxing Wu[134] as well as dox on everyone in Wu's immediate family.[135] These stalkers allege that Wu has lied about her experiences (an accusation similar to those levelled at Sarkeesian), and had never left her home as she maintained. Their proof? The blurry outline of a chair she was sitting in and some blurry chair rails in the background of her Skype sessions from a hotel room compared to her home office in interviews, saved as "Wu never left.jpg" at the Gamergate Wiki.[136]
Gators also baselessly allege that Wu is transgender, as if that were relevant. Wu addressed the accusations on Reddit, saying she had concluded that whatever she said would only perpetuate transphobia; she preferred to keep silent on the question out of respect for transgender people she knew.[137] Two weeks later, Milo Yiannopoulos compiled all of Gamergate's "evidence" in a massive hit piece that simultaneously claimed that Gamergate isn't transphobic for having created this conspiracy theory in the first place.[Note 3]
A round of "healthy debate"
In September, (now former) The Young Turks member David Pakman began a series of interviews with Gamergate figureheads on his show, following an interview with Wu addressing what had happened to her. He spoke with (in order) Milo Yiannopoulos, "Pro-#Gamergate advocate" Jenni Bharaj, John "TotalBiscuit" Bain, 8chan's administrator Fredrick "Hotwheels" Brennan,[Note 4] Liana Kerzner[wp] (whose relationship with Gamergate is on again,[138] off again,[139] but currently on[140][141][142]), The Fine Young Capitalists, and adult film actress Mercedes Carrera (you'll see more on her later). The only other Gamergate critic (and target) he ever interviewed was Arthur Chu[wp] of Jeopardy![wp] fame who came on the show to call Pakman out on his attempts to contact Zoe Quinn through dot-replies as her harassers had done[Note 5] and by noting Pakman had crowdsourced questions for the present interview and his interview with Wu weeks earlier.[Note 6] Pakman also spent some time voicing his opinions on the subject, playing the neutral card, and other videos discussing the negative impacts of being seen the world over as a Gamergate supporter.[143]
On October 14, The Huffington Post's HuffPost Live hosted a panel discussion on Gamergate, featuring Wu, Forbes contributor Erik Kain who had written on the subject several times, and Fredrick Brennan. During the interview, Brennan refuted the charge that his website was providing a platform for harassment, stating that it is, "well within the confines of the law," and, "we have no data retention requirement under the law, therefore we don't retain any data."[67] He issued a Parthian shot to Wu in the final seconds of the discussion: "Believe it or not, Brianna, 8chan is not all about you."[67] Quinn was also invited to join the discussion, but backed out after she had found out on her own that she was not agreeing to an interview but a debate as she saw Kain and Wu discussing being invited as well. She called out HuffPo for forcing this balance fallacy that she should be talking to people who have aided and abetted with her harassers or could have very well been one of her harassers, as HuffPo was not forward with who was representing the "other side" when she asked. However, the answer would come directly to her, with Brennan gleefully tweeting he was going to be on and taunting her in the process.[144]
Sarkeesian in Utah
Sarkeesian was scheduled to speak at Utah State University on October 15. On the day before her talk, university staff received an anonymous e-mail threat that warned that "a Montreal Massacre style attack [would] be carried out" unless the event was cancelled.[145] The author of the threat claimed that "feminists have ruined my life and I will have my revenge, for my sake and the sake of all the others they've wronged," and that this would be "the deadliest school shooting in American history."[145] The university initially remained determined with to proceed with the event as planned;[145] Sarkeesian was never informed by the school of the threat and in fact learned of it through social media when she arrived in Salt Lake City.[146] She requested extra security measures to ensure that no one would have guns in her audience, but the school would not check for concealed firearms under Utah state law, leading to her decision to cancel the talk.[147]
Many thought the school's decision was bullshit; even an attorney interviewed by a local Fox News affiliate even said that the school could have said "no guns today".[146] Gators still took this as a victory, somehow, by saying she was a coward fo backing out, despite her experience with prior threats and venues actually helping her. They also constantly deny that the threats were sent by someone in Gamergate (despite the obvious reference to Gamergate in one of the threats) and instead cast blame on a "Brazilian clickbait journalist".[148] Months later, USU would prevent guns from being allowed on campus during a visit by Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor,[149] and USU would claim that the change of heart was due to Justice Sotomayor's protection under federal law and Sarkeesian's status as a private citizen.[150]
"Based Lawyer" joins the fray
On October 19, Mike Cernovich, a California-based First Amendment lawyer, posted a portion of the restraining order filed against Gjoni by Quinn.[151][152] Cernovich, acting as an informal legal counsel to Gjoni, obtained the document abusing his privileges as an attorney.[151][152] He asserted that the one-year restriction against publicly discussing Quinn's personal life or "encouraging 'hate mobs'" which the restraining order imposes on Gjoni violates his right to free speech.[151][152] A few days later, on October 23, he revealed that he had hired a private investigator to stalk Quinn.[153] In addition to being a lawyer, Cernovich sells fitness supplements, and promotes both bodybuilding and men's rights issues via his blogs.[151][154] He also actively promotes Roosh V's websites[152] and has displayed a curious obsession with jizz, tweeting that, "Semen is a man's life force" and "Once they've bad [sic] my 'super serum', they don't want anything else. Girls become addicted to cum."[155] Critics of Gamergate then found he had made a claim that straight men can't get HIV and also found that he argued against condom usage because he never got an STD in his life of going bareback. These critics were attacked by Gamergate for having the gall to suggest Cernovich wasn't perfect.[156]
Felicia Day sets a doxxing speed world record
Actress and geek culture icon Felicia Day weighed in on Gamergate in a long post on her blog on October 22, explaining that she opposed the movement but was afraid to speak out because of the possibility that she would be doxed and harassed.[157] Within an hour, someone posted her address in the comments section.[158] Quinn, who was still homeless at this point due to the Gamergate mob,[159] begged people to stop: "When the fuck is it going to be enough? When the fuck will this end?"[160]
Gamergate reaches the attention of the general public
“”And let us acknowledge for a moment the awful irony that, after decades of defending video games from accusations that they inspire school shootings, we now have a threatened school shooting explicitly inspired by games culture.
|
| —Eurogamer, [161] |
On October 15, in the wake of the terrorist threats made against Sarkeesian's speaking engagement at Utah State University, the hashtag "#StopGamerGate2014" was created and it soon became a trending topic worldwide.[102][162][163]
The Entertainment Software Association (ESA), an American trade group representing all major game companies and best known for hosting the annual E3 trade fair, released a statement on October 16, declaring, "There is no place in the video game community—or our society—for personal attacks and threats."[164]
The New York Times ran a front-page article on October 16, with the headline "Feminist Critics of Video Games Facing Threats".[102][165] On October 28, it also ran an op-ed from Sarkeesian on the matter.[166] On October 25, Newsweek ran an analysis of Gamergate tweets showing that Gamergaters have directed substantially more tweets at feminist critics than they have at game journalists.[167]
Meanwhile, on October 24, Gamergate attempted to regain favor with the real media and the general public by holding an 8chan /gg/ meetup in a strip club and inviting New York magazine along to document it, figuring this would reassure normal people of their good attitude toward women.[168]
But the final nail in the coffin was hammered in on October 29, when Sarkeesian had a 10-minute segment on The Colbert Report talking about Gamergate and the surrounding issues, which concluded with Sarkeesian declaring Colbert a feminist.[169] Needless to say, Gamergaters were not pleased.[170][171][172]
Gamergate's inevitable decline
As a media relations device, Gamergate's crowning glory was to publicize its most hated enemy and her ideas to an audience of millions, and gain the name "Gamergate" a public reputation as a tag for misogynists, harassers, and trolls. But, of course, it continued in decline, like the Black Knight of ethics in video game journalism. And, of course, they are still harassing the women they've been harassing all along. For five more months.
Gamergate and Wikipedia
“”A project which punishes editors for defending the good names and reputations of living people from vicious Internet trolls does not deserve to survive.
|
| —NorthBySouthBaranof, one of the "Five Horsemen" |
Gamergate set its sights on Wikipedia fairly early, intending to use its "anyone can edit" policy to skew the primary Gamergate article in their favor while inserting attacks on their various targets to articles on their biographies and creations. Of course, these additions violated multiple Wikipedia policies and guidelines, so when they were met with opposition, they took to harassing Jimmy Wales to get their way. He effectively issued them a challenge to use a Gamergate "sanctioned" Wikia to host their own preferred version of a Wikipedia article that he would assess to see if it met Wikipedia's standards.[173] However, Wikia's staff would respond to reports that a page on the Gamergate Wikia served to solely house a list of Gamergate's Wikipedia editor targets and "blackmail" from their personal lives to use against them by deleting this other page. Gators rioted, leading to a flurry of anger towards Jimbo which included an email campaign declaring that they would no longer donate to Wikipedia's annual fundraising drive. One response was posted to /r/KotakuInAction, and Wales' position on Gamergate was made loud and clear. Selected quotes include:
“”Wikipedia is not for sale, not to any donors, so even if donations were dropping, that would not mean to me that we should compromise on our principles of quality and neutrality in response to a pressure group.
|
“”I've recently seen web pages in which people who are – and I don't know how else to put it – vicious assholes – are gathering data to attack the personal lives of volunteers.
|
“”It is very difficult for me to buy into the notion that gamergate is "really about ethics in journalism" when every single experience I have personally had with it involved pro-gg people insulting, threatening, doxxing, etc.
|
“”...the name "gamer gate" is toxic.
|
“”I have had several people over the past weeks say to me "It is not about mysogyny [sic]." I was prepared to believe that. But discussions usually very quickly move to attacking a female game developer for events surrounding her personal life. That's sick.
|
“”...#gamergate has been permanently tarnished and highjacked by a handful of people who are not what you would hope.
|
“”Bitching and moaning on a twitter hashtag is getting you nowhere...
|
Needless to say, Gators weren't happy with this response.[174][175][176] This also led to an exodus from the Gamergate Wikia to a privately-operated wiki-style site. Gamergate also got its claws into a dispute over the Wikipedia article on "Cultural Marxism", a common term amongst the neo-reactionaries and MRAs who had pervaded Gamergate, leading Wales to overturn a community decision based on these complaints levied at him on Twitter.
However, through sheer persistence, Gamergate got part of its way on Wikipedia after a third successful attempt at appealing to the Arbitration Committee. The early draft of their decision which discussed topic bans of a group of established editors Gamergate had identified as "The Five Horsemen" led to condemnation in the media for how the bans were worded at the time.[177][178][179] These editors' crimes, in ArbCom's eyes, boiled down to violations of the civility policy in the face of Gamergate harassment and "recidivism", leading to 3 out of five being topic banned and one being banned entirely.[180] Attempts to codify ways to stem disruption from new or "zombie" accounts failed to pass. However, Gamergate still had to contend with all the new eyes on the page, with attempts to start a new case on the new editors, while one of the topic banned editors found a new job in using the biographies of living persons policy to prevent editors who escaped bans in the ArbCom case from having their way on Wikipedia's Gamergate pages.
Attempts to counter Gamergate harassment on Twitter
In response to increasing complaints concerning harassment, Twitter teamed up with the feminist group Women, Action, and the Media (WAM!) in early November to trial a tool for speedily reporting online abuse.[181] Despite criticism from Gamergaters, the tool was put through its full trial period,[182] and the data collected by WAM! will be analysed in order to improve the Twitter service.[183] In December, Twitter announced they had updated the reporting tool. In the video to explain the feature, they included an alligator.[184] The allusion was not lost on observers.[185] However, many reported that the updated tool, or at least the review team, was not effective.[186] In late February 2015, Twitter announced they would begin requesting phone numbers of serial abusers when they request to have their account restored in order to better track and prevent abuse.[187]
Game engineer Randi Harper developed the "Good Game Auto Blocker" tool in November after having dealt with several hundred harassing tweets from Gators after her blog post about the harassment she suffered from working in tech went viral. A bot-account she runs cross-checks if Twitter users follow at least two Gamergate "ringleaders" (such as Yiannopoulos and Cernovich) and then blocks them; people can then subscribe to this block list through a third party tool and automatically block all accounts on the list, which gets updated in real time. After the International Game Developers Association suggested use of the tool to its constituents, it was found that the tool had resulted in some collateral damage; the official Twitter account for Kentucky Fried Chicken[wp] was on the list, but so was the account of Roberto Rosario, chairman of IGDA's Puerto Rico branch. Harper, who has said the tool is more of a sledgehammer than a scalpel, was not worried personally as she would rather block thousands of people than deal with several hundred harassers. There is an appeals system to be whitelisted where a team investigates the blocked user's account to see if there was a false positive;[188][189][190] with Rosario, however, it was found he was deeply involved in supporting Gamergate and followed practically every figurehead on the tool's sourcelist (itself renamed from "blacklist" because of Gators' incessant whining[191]) and he had appealed to Gamergate when he found he was on the list.[192] The IGDA's Puerto Rico chapter was shut down sometime later; Rosario blamed feminism. Other game devs found that they were also on the auto blocker's block list for similar reasons, and all went crawling to /r/KotakuInAction to decry being "blacklisted" by "the SJWs".
The aforementioned bot account she uses is intended to tweet random snippets of text culled from her main account in order to avoid arguments with unruly Gamergaters, which several, including James Desborough, mistook for an actual human being and proceeded to spout talking points at it.[193] Another Gamergate-targetting Twitter bot (based on the 50-year-old chat program Eliza) drew an identical reaction when it debuted in October.[194] Harper's bot inspired others to create their own bots that tweet pieces of text from their main account to deal with Gators so they don't have to. One intrepid Gator decided to make one of his own, only to have the account permanently banned from Twitter for harassing people.[195]
Gamergate claims to have a "Harassment Patrol" on Twitter to deal with internal problem users.[196] However, they only exist as a PR stunt to attempt to show Gamergate isn't about harassment; Lifschitz looked back in several of the timelines of "Gamergate Harassment Patrol" members to find that they were personally responsible for harassing Quinn and others, just without having posted it in the #Gamergate hashtag and while actively supporting the figureheads personally responsible for large scale harassment.[197] The Gamergate Harassment Patrol has also been compared to the firemen of Fahrenheit 451.[198]
There also exists a separate entity known as "The Block Bot" which isn't solely dedicated to Gamergate, but rather came out of the controversy over Atheism Plus. It is designed to silently block several thousand people on Twitter for subscribers based on the subscribers' and moderation team's discretion. It has drawn ire from Gamergate, since nearly all of the movement's various figureheads found that they were on the list and decided to use someone's vague claim that their inclusion on the list means they can sue for libel in the United Kingdom (people also threaten to sue Harper over inclusion on the autoblocker). The article on the list on Breitbart also drew attention from Richard Dawkins (he's namedropped in the article) who Gators flocked to in order to gain a new atheist messiah for their movement. His last statement on the matter was that he preferred "to remain ignorant" on Gamergate.
Gamergate tries to open other -gates
With its own movement floundering, Gamergate decided to branch out, attaching itself to (and possibly launching) other reactionary hashtag wars against progressive dialogue. "#Shirtgate" (or sometimes "#Shirtstorm") was started by Gators (and misogynists in general) as a result of criticism leveled at Rosetta mission scientist Dr. Matt Taylor's sci-fi pin-up girl shirt worn in an interview where he made comments that brought into question the casual sexism in the sciences.[199][200][201] Meanwhile, "#metalgate" was spawned by a heavy metal enthusiast complaining social justice warriors had ruined metal because of Spin magazine's comment about improved progressive voices in the genre;[202][203] the hashtag was picked up by Gators[204] but dropped after a day.[205]
In 2015, "Puppygate" was coined by science fiction/fantasy author George R. R. Martin[wp] to refer to the actions by authors Brad R. Torgersen, Larry Correia, and Theodore Beale (Vox Day) who led their fans in gaming the nominations for the 2015 Hugo Awards.[wp][206] The only requirement needed to nominate anyone is a $40 membership to the World Science Fiction Convention, so Torgersen and Correia for 3 years had provided a list of names for their fans to put up on the ballots and they were known as the "Sad Puppies"; Beale decided for 2015 to put forward his own list to his fans, a list known as the "Rabid Puppies". At first, observers only saw their actions as an analog to Gamergate, being a bunch of conservative and reactionary white men angry at the fact that the more popular titles in science fiction aren't solely about space travel or high fantasy but use sci-fi/fantasy settings for discussion of social topics. It's only a coincidence that several authors on the Sad Puppies' and Rabid Puppies' ballots happen to be racists, misogynists, and overall reactionaries.[207] However, others discovered that a supporter of Gamergate had made an effort to rally the troops to fight their SJW bogeymen via the Hugos.[208] The acts weren't against the rules, and had been done in the past, but it just sours the Hugos for the future, at least in GRRM's eyes. Martin also noted that one of the prior attempts by a group to game the awards was by the Church of Scientology in 1987 to push one of L. Ron Hubbard's books in the "Best Novel" category but it lost to Orson Scott Card. A real good bunch that year.[209] Martin also poined out that it was absurd to think that "SJWs" had somehow fixed the awards to lean left and the Hugos' ballots even without the Puppies' efforts have always been full of white men.[210] Arthur Chu noted that 10 of the nominees across several categories were John C. Wright or Vox Day and all through Beale's own publishing house, and questioned the claims by the "Sad Puppies" that the liberal fans have swept the Hugos in the past, but mainstream writers and so-called "liberal elitists" haven't won.[211]
Gamergate attempts to "weaponize" porn
On December 5, the AbleGamers Charity, a group that works to increase accessibility of video games to the differently abled, were contacted by adult film actress Mercedes Carrera who wished to perform a cam show to raise money for them. AbleGamers initially accepted the offer, but found out they had been duped upon discovering posts on /r/KotakuInAction that showed Carrera was acting on behalf of Gamergate, with one post saying, "Gamergate [has] just weaponized porn". They declined Carrera's offer, releasing a statement that they wanted to remain neutral on Gamergate, which led to their website being taken down in a DDoS attack.[212][213][214] Carrera then partnered with TFYC, forming "The Porn Charity"[215] which would begin a campaign of cam shows to raise money for a magnification device for a legally blind gamer and then for a "merit-based" STEM scholarship.[216][217] TFYC commissioned an artist to create an illustration of Vivian James so they could hawk posters and T-shirts to support The Porn Charity.[218]
On December 15, a self-published author known only as "Valeria O." released an explicit short story sold through Amazon Kindle titled Roughed Up By #GamerGape, wherein a "controversial game designer" named Zada Quinby is gang-raped by "five upset players" bent on "teach[ing] her a lesson." Subtlety was never Gamergate's strong point. The story was on sale for a few days until after a reporter at Raw Story contacted Amazon.com for details.[219][220][221] Later, the author somehow made their way to /r/KotakuInAction and claimed zero involvement with Gamergate.[222]
Meanwhile, cam show performer and former sex worker "Princess Kora" launched a weekly show dubbed "#BoobFreq",[Note 7] in which she impersonates Sarkeesian by donning a plaid shirt, red lipstick, and hoop earrings while performing sexual acts on herself and talking about sex workers' rights. She has said it is a critique of Sarkeesian's feminist stance, as a statement she had made once was taken as derrogatory to sex workers.[223][224] Although Gamergaters flocked to her channel and began tipping her, she actually began to lose money and her rank on the webcam site had actually fallen.[225]
After the brutal home invasion and rape of an adult film actress on February 16, 2015, Carrera made a video where she said her stream's revenues would go to a donation fund for the traumatized actress, which ballooned after the video made its rounds on Reddit. But for no reason whatsoever she decided to politicize it for Gamergate by taking entirely unnecessary potshots at Sarkeesian and Wu, claiming that they were profiting off of the harassment they publicized receiving (a.k.a. using the Gators standard insult of "professional victim") and her assumption that the feminism they preach does not benefit sex workers.[Note 8] Many critical of Gamergate called out Carrera for exploiting the crime to give Gamergate a positive spin; Arthur Chu tweeted, "...the video being shared...is shit, the use of this situation as a tool to attack other women is shit, & GG is shit".[226]
Gamergate defends 8chan's tolerance of child porn
As 8chan became more of a focal point for tracking Gamergate's terrible behavior, many saw that the website had several established boards for the discussion of pedophilia and posting photographs that straddle the legal borders of what constitutes child pornography, such as photographs of clothed children in sexual poses posted alongside textual descriptions of the rape of said children — and that's just a starter. When these were brought up in an interview at The Daily Dot, Fredrick Brennan said that while he personally finds such content detestable, he argues that it is protected free speech and he will not impose rules on his website stricter than what U.S. federal laws prohibit.[227]
At this time, 8chan was using crowdfunding website Patreon[wp] to ask its users to pay for its server funds. Many who had been subject to Gamergate's harassment began to send in complaints that Patreon was allowing 8chan to continue its attacks and to host child pornography. In response, Patreon announced it was changing its terms of service to include rules to basically ban 8chan from using their service by now forbidding the use of their website to promote child sex abuse, self-harm, or harassment. Brennan announced he had changed his account to instead be used to fund YouTube videos of his cat Hachi,[Note 9] claiming the cat is a service animal, but Patreon wasn't fooled.[228][229] Brennan announced in a December 22 interview on a pro-Gamergate YouTube channel that he has hired Cernovich as a lawyer with the intent of launching a disability discrimination lawsuit against Patreon.[230][231] Gators also tried to report various targets' Patreon pages for fake violations of the new terms of service.
On December 22, Dan Olson (a.k.a. "Foldable Human" of Channel Awesome, who happens to be Canadian) published an exposé on 8chan's pedophilia problem, blowing a hole in Brennan's and 8chan users' claims that the moderation team takes down explicit child porn and leaving things that aren't "illegal". He instead found that there was plenty of utterly indefensible child porn to be found, in threads weeks or months old on boards publically listed on 8chan's front page.[232] The only reason U.S. federal prosecutors don't respond is because they focus on producers rather than distributors. Despite saying nothing about them in his article, Olson was attacked by Gamergate. He was doxxed and reported for violating Canadian child porn laws, arguing he had intentionally sought it out and that the heavily blurred photos he included in his article meant he was distributing child porn; people who shared the link on Twitter were also subject to these accusations.[233][234] By December 23, Brennan reported that he had deleted one of the pedophilia-related boards, claiming that the earlier story from The Daily Dot "advertised" 8chan to "actual pedophiles", causing them to suddenly flock to the board and flood it with explicit photos,[235] ignoring the proof that Olson had uncovered threads on the board older than The Daily Dot article.
Gamergate rings in 2015 with a new wave of harassment
Former NFL player and avid gamer Chris Kluwe[wp] was an early critic of Gamergate, having written a scathing piece entitled "Why #Gamergaters Piss Me The F*** Off" in October 2014. He insulted Gators repeatedly, at one point calling them, "slopebrowed weaseldicks with zero reading comprehension skills and even less critical thinking skills".[236] Because of his Y chromosome, he remained off Gamergate's radar, until he decided to host a "debate" with Mike Cernovich on December 29.[237] He was doxxed by 8chan the next day,[238][239] and later reported receiving empty mailing boxes from the his local post office[240] and a dildo in the mail; he signed the dildo and auctioned it off for charity.[241]
On December 29, Jon Rosenberg released a strip of his web comic Scenes from a Multiverse which criticized Gamergate without actually naming it.[242] His website was hit by a DDoS attack, forcing him to use Twitter to temporarily host the comic.[243] He responded with two other comics criticizing Gamergate and the response they had to his first strip on January 5 and January 7, with the last proclaiming, "Today's strip brings our Asshole Trilogy to a close."[244][245]
Gamergate critic Sarah Nyberg was doxxed by 8chan on January 3, and the information was used to create an article about her on Encyclopedia Dramatica, which included the name she used before transitioning[246][247] (an act known in the transgender community as "deadnaming"). In an unusual turn of events, a Gator actually claimed responsibility for the doxing and the ED article.[248][249] When feminist and skeptic blogger Rebecca Watson (herself the subject of a mass misogynistic tantrum in 2011) came out in defense of Nyberg, suggesting that the people involved in such harassment deserved to be identified and reported to the authorities, Gamergaters descended upon her, too.[250] Nyberg also reported that one of her friends had been doxxed in an attempt to blackmail her.[251] She would later describe what had happened to her in more detail for Ravishly, as well as layout to the uninformed how Gamergate takes the most minimal information and morphs it into the perfect tool for harassment.[252]
A series of Gamergate critics were subject to swatting attempts. Former Gamergater Amber Coal (@Pixelgoth) had to prevent police from descending on one of her old addresses;[253][254][255][256][257] Ashley Lynch reported having been subject to a swatting attempt after her information was posted on 8chan in a failed attempt to intimidate Gamergate critic "@Cernowatch" whom she follows on Twitter.[258] Israel "Izzy" Galvez had already contacted his local police department before they came to his house to inform him a call had been made, among other more benign pranks.[259][260]
Gamergate also used a Valentine's Day Twitter bot to send seasonal anonymous threats to their victims; Wu reported receiving a "card" saying, "I'm in your house #Gamergate".[261] Later in February, two Gamergate critics received custom printed "gifts" from /baphomet/ and Gamergate. Alex Leal reported receiving custom postcards with gory photos opposite messages like "Baphomet Loves You". Amanda Thorntree reported receiving a poster where someone had photoshopped the Islamic State flag to include Gamergate's logo, with the message "We will behead you, Amanda Thorntree" printed on it. Blogger Margaret Pless questioned what printing company would approve sending such a document.[262]
Intel joins forces with Anita Sarkeesian
On January 6, 2015, Intel announced at the annual International Consumer Electronics Show that they were budgeting $300 million to counter the lack of gender and racial diversity within their company and the tech/gaming industries as a whole.[263] Sarkeesian's Feminist Frequency was included in the keynote, and will help shape Intel's diversity program along with groups such as IGDA, Rainbow PUSH, and the National Center for Women in Technology.[264] Wired UK noted that Sarkeesian's involvement with the new initiative is "the clearest indicator that Gamergate has prompted the push for greater diversity."[265]
Gamergaters responded by attempting to hijack the #CES2015 hashtag.[266] They branded Sarkeesian and her producer/co-writer Jonathan McIntosh anti-Semites after digging up a three-year-old tweet by McIntosh criticizing the Israeli government for its construction of the West Bank wall.[267] This is ironic, given that they have spent months denigrating Sarkeesian as "The Jew" or "Jewkeesian" despite her lack of Jewish heritage (her parents are Iran-born ethnic Armenians who emigrated to Canada), going so far as to depict her in the style of a neo-Nazi propaganda caricature by A. Wyatt Mann (the general anti-semitic caricature had long been a meme on 4chan's /pol/ as "Le Happy Merchant") and referring to any money she obtained (or rather money in general) as "shekels".[268] McIntosh recently revealed he had been subtly trolling Gamergate through his Twitter feed by constantly posting opinions identical to those of Noam Chomsky to show that they are a bunch of right-wing reactionaries[269] and also intentionally posting provocative Tweets whenever he had discovered that trouble was brewing.[270]
They also began disseminating an insensitive statement Sarkeesian has allegedly made in regards to feminism in Japan[Note 10] tastefully juxtaposed with a photo of a mushroom cloud.[271] However, the alleged quote was sourced from a single blog entry which no one has been able to corroborate; it was also discovered that the original writer had become a Gamergate supporter.[272][273] There were rumblings that she may have indeed said the statement, but had later retracted her condemnation as she later felt it was inappropriate.
After the conference, Genna Bain, TotalBiscuit's wife and general manager of his brand, announced she was selling off her personal stocks in Intel due to the "lack of diversity" in her stock portfolio.[274] When this sour-grapey display was met with criticism, her husband came to her defense (it's not whiteknighting when the damsel in distress is your ideological ally), accusing critics of "trying to infantalise [his] wife over her financial decision today" and being "wonderfully sexist."[275]
"August Never Ends"
On January 11, Quinn posted her personal account of the events of the past few months on her blog.[276] She wrote about how she has been doing her best to work with law enforcement regarding the harassment she has received and the advocacy she has performed on behalf of others who have been subjected to similar treated by members of the new /baphomet/ board.[276] She noted that it is difficult to find anyone within the legal system who will take the death and rape threats sent on the Internet seriously.[276] She also remarked on how Mike Cernovich had acquired her court proceedings against Eron Gjoni, prompting Gamergaters to pore over them in search of so-called inconsistencies, such as a simple stutter. It was at this point she revealed that Gjoni had been physically and emotionally abusive towards her during their time together, pointing to court records leaked by Cernovich along with everyone's criticism of her from those records.[276]
Tyler Wilde and Anne Lewis
On January 13, PC Gamer's executive editor Tyler Wilde wrote an article arguing that they should retire the term "PC Master Race" due to its origins as Nazi terminology.[277] Gators, mad that somebody called out something terrible that they do to protect freedom of expression, searched every nook of Wilde's life for an undisclosed conflict of interest, and found that his girlfriend Anne Lewis was a communications associate at Ubisoft, and he at one point reviewed Ubisoft's Watch_Dogs. In response to this "exposé", PC Gamer updated its policies such that Wilde was now officially forbidden from writing about Ubisoft games (he had already stopped when he began dating Lewis) where before he and other writers simply had to disclose such conflicts of interest.[278] PC Gamer was criticized for kowtowing to Gamergate.[279][280][281] Despite all this, Gamergate kept harping on the points that they believed they had picked up on, attempting to call him out for having deleted something regarding Ubisoft from his personal Facebook profile, while all of the articles he had written are in fact still up on PC Gamer, making it clear that Gamergate can't make up its mind when it comes to their targets of harassment definition of ethics. Either the articles stay up and remain a conflict of interest, or be taken down and be proof of censorship.
Further media "triumph"
Industry analyst Joost van Dreunen said that Gamergate was one of the many disruptive changes[wp] in gaming for 2015 that would result in the video game industry start taking the female gamers more seriously as an audience and begin to increase visibility of women in the industry in leadership roles;[282] just what Gamergate wanted.
On January 14, ABC's Nightline featured a segment on Gamergate, with Juju Chang interviewing both Sarkeesian and Wu on their experiences. Sarkeesian revealed she was now escorted to events by police, and showed Chang some of the threatening messages she had been receiving. Tim Schafer[wp] was also interviewed, and he revealed he supported the idea to improve women's representation in games, and they managed to find someone to represent "gamers" who was critical of Sarkeesian's work but did not condone Gamergate's harassment.[283][284] Chang spent the next day dealing with angry Gamergaters on her Twitter account. And the token gamer decided to do an AMA at /r/KotakuInAction to complain that not everything he said had made it to air (namely comments on how it's about "ethics in video game journalism").[285]
The SJW Illuminati rises
On January 16, 2015, Quinn and Lifschitz revealed that for the past several weeks they, and some others who wished to remain anonymous, had formed a support group called the Crash Override Network. They have been working together to prevent and mitigate the damage caused by the doxxing attacks perpetrated by Gamergate based on their own experience, providing emotional support, as well as practical information on online security, PR, and legal protection. Within minutes of opening the Twitter account, it was bombarded with Gators demanding "proof" that they had helped anyone, decrying the project as a scam even though they do not plan on taking money from anyone, or claiming that it is somehow a false flag operation.[286][287][288][289] The 8chan side of Gamergate then tried its best to disrupt their new toy as much as possible.[290] In an unrelated event, Quinn and Lifschitz also revealed their support of goats.[291][292][293] At the 2015 Game Developers Conference, Quinn announced Crash Override Network had partnered up with Randi Harper's non-profit organization the Online Abuse Prevention Initiative whose goals are to prevent harassment from a technical viewpoint.[294][295][296]
TFYC's pretense dropped
On January 21, 2015, TFYC's website was updated, removing the information on the "Women in Video Game Production" project and the "Snless" project for black representation in graphic novels to instead feature their newest endeavor: "The #NotYourShield Project". In this they fully admit their support of Gamergate by using those who posted in the #NotYourShield hashtag as their newest source of revenue having "minority artists in the developing world" design posters featuring "anyone who is a member of Not Your Shield...as a powerful figure". The profits from the sale will apparently go to a fund to "create awards that will be given out to the graduating class of Video Game Design schools," and such that the award will go to, "a member of the graduating class to help make their first game."[297] Their proposal directly quotes both Jonathan McIntosh[298] and Sarkeesian[299] directly, while calling them a "wise troll" and a "moral crusader", respectively; the quote they stole from Sarkeesian directly concerns the harassment Gamergate and its predecessor incarnations caused, bringing into question exactly what TFYC was thinking when they came up with this press release.
"Jace Connors"
Wu's GSX had planned on having a booth at the annual PAX East[wp] convention, but announced that they were pulling out due to concerns over her staff's safety, while she would attend on her own, resulting in inevitable criticism from Gamergate over her decision, which she responded by telling them it was none of their business.[300] Later, it was revealed that Wu had received some frightening threats from a man known as Jace Connors, who had posted a YouTube video claiming he had gotten into a car wreck on the way to confront her; Connors had posted conflicting details about his history, along with claims of mental illness.[301] However, an investigation by BuzzFeed found that "Jace Connors" was a persona created by comedian Jan Rankowski, who claimed he had been creating this persona to, "satirize 'the over-the-top, super-hyper-macho armed GamerGater'," and had ad libbed the video where he threatened Wu.[302] Wu responded by saying that it was most certainly not a "joke" to her, as the threat was one of the factors of her company's withdrawal from PAX East, and this would only cause police to continue to not to treat threats sent over the Internet seriously, concluding that she planned on taking him to court.[303] Others raised questions about Rankowski's defense, with Katherine Cross revealing Rankowski had made comments after the reveal that echoed Gamergate discourse.[304] Margaret Pless spoke of how men in the media were quick to dismiss the event as a "joke" or "trolling" while the only woman who wrote about Rankowski pointed out the dangers in his actions.[305]
SVU: "Intimidation Game"
In late January, NBC announced that an upcoming episode of crime drama Law & Order: SVU[wp] titled "Intimidation Game" would focus on a female game developer being harassed on the Internet. Quinn and others quickly saw the similarity to the events of Gamergate.[306] When the preview was made available online,[307] others noted that the guest character Raina Punjabi appeared to be a pastiche of Quinn (feminist indie game dev) and Sarkeesian (feminist of non-European descent wearing hoop earrings),[308][309] while Wu noted some similarities to herself (feminist game dev who has her own studio).[310] Apparently, cast member Ice-T,[wp] an avid gamer, wrote his own lines for the episode.[311] Before the broadcast, Caitlin Dewey had spoken to Jeff Thompson, who has documented how Law & Order treats the information age, and he said that it was likely that Gamergate would not be treated in a way that reflected its victims' expereinces, rather how the production team thought it would be seen by people in middle America.[312]
The episode was broadcast on February 11. The Special Victims Unit investigates the harassment Raina Punjabi and her employees are subjected to due to a controversy that her planned video game has received undue press coverage and that she only married her husband for his money. Much of this abuse is levied at her from "Redchanit", a website on the "Dark Net", by a poster known as "Acid Rain". After she is swatted on live television, SVU serves as security for the premiere conference for her game which is disrupted by "Acid Rain" and others who then kidnap her in the confusion. They send SVU a series of videos showing them torturing her, and raping her, which Det. "Fin" Tutuola (Ice-T) recognizes are events (and a mod) from a video game he plays on his time off. The cops ultimately save Raina, who has been set up to be killed by the SWAT team they are accompanied by, and Fin subdues "Acid Rain", killing him when he has two other SVU detectives at gun point. The episode ends with Raina saying she is leaving gaming, deciding after her ordeal that the trolls had won.[313]
Quinn had initially feared the plot would feature a twist where the victim faked the threats she was receiving[314] (which Gators immediately assumed was not hyperbole);[315] after broadcast, she was let down by the take-away that she and everyone else should just give up.[316] Lifschitz was also upset with the episode, as it appeared that the threats used by "Acid Rain" and his supporters were direct quotes he and Quinn had received.[317] Sarkeesian expressed displeasure, remarking, "They trivialized and exploited real life abuse of women in gaming for entertainment,"[318] while Wu said she skipped watching the episode, remarking, "I know Gamergate is entertainment for a lot of people, but it's destroyed my life."[319] Other commentators, while finding the gaming lingo and treatment outdated (even with Ice-T at the helm), also found the downer ending unnecessary.[320]
Gators initially took the episode as a victory. Slade Villena temporarily renamed his Twitter profile after "Acid Rain", believing their online avatars were similar, while using the opportunity to hawk his latest Kickstarter campaign to get his game off the ground for the umpteenth time.[321] The mods at /r/KotakuInAction decided to modify their banner to be read as "REDchanIT",[322] while Wu later discovered that Brennan had bought the domain "redchan.it" to redirect to the current location of 8chan.[323] Although later, Gators decided that the episode did indeed put them in a bad light, complaining that their depiction in the media might send a bad message, in the most ironic display of a lack of self-awareness ever. TotalBiscuit went on a Twitter rampage, blaming the games media,[324] blaming the victims,[325] still denying his fans are Gators and complicit in the stereotype portrayed,[326] and concluding with, "Anyone who used terms like 'ISIS', 'KKK' 'Misogynists', yup, you're all in part responsible for throwing your audience to the Dick Wolf".[327]
Days later, Lifschitz noted a silver lining in that the episode led to increased interest in combating online harassment among the show's older viewers.[328] And a poster at /r/GamerGhazi decided it was time to poke some fun at the situation.
“”God, that episode of SVU was over the top and unrealistic.
|
| —HelloAnnyong on GamerGhazi, [329] |
"Let's blame the media"
After the SVU episode aired, game developer Mark Kern[wp] decided to make a petition to get Kotaku and Polygon to take the blame for it for some reason. Kern (with Gamergate's help) presents himself as one of the lead developers on World of Warcraft[wp] and a cofounder of Red 5 Studios;[wp] however, he neglects to mention that he was voted out of his position within his own company[330][331] for not only spending $3 million on refurbishing a bus to advertise their product but also other awful business practices like verbally abusing employees to where a "safe word" was in use in the offices.[332] But we digress. Kern called "Intimidation Game" the "Reefer Madness"[wp] that slanders video games and gamers and said that the coverage by Kotaku and Polygon in particular (no one's sure why) of all of the attacks and harassment on Zoe Quinn, et al. caused irreparable damage for the video game industry's public face.[333] You know, rather than the horrible mass of gamers that caused all of the harassment because they're worried feminism is going to do more damage to video games than Atari's E.T.[wp] did. Or the coverage by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, the BBC, ABC, Comedy Central, etc., rather than the piss poor lack of coverage of Gamergate Kotaku and Polygon originally gave. Gators were quick to support Kern's petition, which explains why it only has around 2 thousand signatures.
Patrick Garratt at VG247 called out Kern and Ken Levine,[wp] a developer for BioShock[wp] who also supported Kern's petition, for their misplaced blame, as the SVU episode didn't put gamers in a negative light, but was a fairly accurate depiction of the horrible behavior in Gamergate which itself puts gamers in a bad light.[334] Dina Abou Karam spoke up about the petition, saying that Kern's claim that they shouldn't feed the trolls is the same thing she was told when she came forward about the harassment she was receiving and the tenet doesn't do any good to people at the center of these hate storms.[335] Damion Schubert, former game designer at BioWare,[wp] wrote how the gaming press had actually actively ignored talking about Quinn while it was mainstream media that took over things[336] and that Kern's complaints that Kotaku and Polygon are somehow to blame for Gamergate was "like blaming Walter Cronkite for Vietnam".[337] Ben Kuchera, who Kern singled out as one person he wants fired for having written something — when pressed for specifics, Kern was evasive — noted that Kern explicitly compared himself to the birthers and how Kern apparently doesn't even know where Kuchera works.[338] The whole debacle just proved that Gamergate doesn't give a shit about "ethics in video game journalism" but it serves as its various figureheads' personal army to take out their critics and personal enemies.[339]
After all the criticism of Kern's petition made the rounds, Kern demanded VG247 publish his response to their article on their website. When they refused, he stirred up the Gamergate shitpot to birth the "#LetMarkSpeak" hashtag, despite the fact that he is being quite vocal about all this garbage and not actually being censored for being called out on having no idea what the fuck he is talking about. Scott Jennings,[wp] a well known video game designer and critic, came out of two years of silence to call Kern out on this new round of bullshit. He noted Kern was deftly using the existing Gamergate hate mob to do his bidding, and reiterated the obvious fact that freedom of speech doesn't mean you're entitled to an audience on a privately owned website.[340] Leigh Alexander also expressed distaste at Kern's actions with the petition and #LetMarkSpeak, only for Kern to demand Alexander give him airtime, too. Someone stepped in and told him that Alexander's Gamasutra allows any game developer to submit a blog post to be published.[341] Kern ultimately decided he didn't want to be heard after all.[342] Jennings also remarked on his sudden change in behavior, and that the corruption he was claiming is in video games journalism isn't that people have viewpoints but that some people express no viewpoint other than what the PR department at the big game studio wants them to have. He also remarked that Leigh Alexander got harassed for 2 days for liking the message of his previous blog, while he got all of like 4 hours.[343] Jennings continued to document Kern's reprehensible behavior,[344] his refusal to actually use various megaphones as he so desired with his hashtag,[345] and Gamergate's blind devotion to their latest annointed hero as he got back in the blogging game.[346] As much of Kern's ire was directed towards Randi Harper and her Good Game Auto Blocker, she developed and released a block list to exclusively cover all of his followers, while leaving him unblocked.[347] Observers also discovered that Kern possessed his own blog throughout the ordeal, and it ironically lacks a comment section.
Those on Twitter critical of Gamergate decided to revive the "#LetWomenSpeak" hashtag in response, but Gators flooded it with their vitriol and graphic pornography and gore. A few days earlier, Gamergate had tried to get #DontDateSJWs trending to attack their targets,[348] but the hashtag was hijacked by Gamergate critics to mock how childish it was. Meanwhile, as with #LetWomenSpeak, Gamergate has consistently hijacked hashtags to attack their targets by any means necessary and then flood it with graphic photographs.[349]
Gamergate becomes a punchline
At the 2015 Game Developers Choice Awards (GDCA, essentially the Academy Awards for the game industry), Gamergate and Gaters were turned into humor and jokes by the likes of Ashly Burch of Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin'? and Double Fine's Tim Schafer. Ashly produced a sketch comedy piece about the concept of a social justice warrior[350] to a rousing ovation by game developers for the Independent Game Developers' segment.[351] Later, the presenter of the IGA segment went on a rant at the end about how Gaters act and used it as a call to not ignore this treatment (to a long standing ovation).[352] Tim Schafer took the stage for presenting the second half (the GDCA, as opposed to the IGA) and immediately went off on Gamergate. "...I won't be making any jokes about Gamergate. All of tonight's Gamergate jokes will be made by this sock puppet. (Audience Laugh Break) Now I cannot be held responsible for anything this sock puppet says, it's not associated with me at all."[353] Later, the puppet joked, "How many Gamergaters does it take to make a single piece of armor? Fifty! One to do the modeling, one to do the materials and forty [sic] to tweet that it's not your shield!"[354] Gaters, who have spent 7 months telling women facing rape threats to grow a thicker skin, went up in arms, claiming Schafer was making a racist and sexist joke at their expense. Their reaction however is the biggest joke of all.[355][356]
Biting the hand that feeds
After several failed attempts at slinging mud at Reddit's interim CEO Ellen Pao,[wp] Gamergate's contingent on /r/KotakuInAction decided to begin a ham-fisted attempt at boycotting Reddit itself, by one person demanding that its readership not buy Reddit Gold (premium membership options) until Pao is fired from her position. He received gold for his posts.[357] A new sub titled /r/EllenPaoInAction was also started up.
Substantive efforts against journalistic corruption
“”If you get punched in the face every time the doorbell rings, and in the evening someone knocks on your door to explain it's not really about the punching, you're going to have a hard time believing them.
|
| —Ben Kuchera, Polygon, [358] |
While Gamergaters claim they are fighting for "ethics" in video game journalism, they have to date dedicated a tellingly high amount of energy to harassment and character assassination of people with whom they disagree, and very little to investigating, exposing, and condemning actual instances of journalistic corruption.[359][360]
The targets of Gamergate, on the other hand, frequently address ethics in the gaming press. Kotaku, for instance, was the first to report on accusations that GameSpot reviewer Jeff Gerstmann (who currently just wants everybody to stop being so hateful[361]) had been fired for panning a game in 2007,[362] and was the only source to follow up on the story, confirming it five years later.[363] More recently, both Gamasutra and Rock Paper Shotgun have written stories about pay-for-play deals by YouTubers.[364] Kotaku was also the outlet that broke the hacking of EA's Firemonkeys' studio that was covered up by EA for a year.[365]
The Escapist and Kotaku were quick to denounce the stringent rules and screening Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment[wp] required of those receiving copies of the game Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor[wp] for YouTube, apparently brought to their attention by TotalBiscuit himself.[366][367] Gamergaters like to claim the Shadow of Mordor event for themselves due to TotalBiscuit's involvement, only after they were called out by Zaid ilani at Salon and Erik Kain at Forbes for their silence; Jilani attributed this to the lack of a woman involved in the controversy.[90][368]
It has also been pointed out that if a close relationship between game journalists and developers is imagined to be "corrupt", the examination of sex and gender issues in the games, and cultural critique in general, is the sort of thing an independent and journalistic game publication would undertake. It isn't like the developers themselves are pushing these issues. "If you're promoting #GamerGate because you like the way the gaming press covered games before writers starting investigating topics like labor exploitation and the gender divide, then you may want to stop insisting on higher journalistic standards. If those standards are important to you, then you'll have to tolerate those sorts of articles, even when you don't like the light they cast on gaming."[369]
Finally, through their tactics of pressuring sponsors such as Intel to remove advertising from websites that publish articles or reviews they do not agree with, Gamergate actively magnifies one of the most serious issues of journalistic ethics in gaming: the lack of an editorial "separation of Church and State," and the resulting undue influence of advertisers on the editorial content of the gaming press. The Daily Mirror released an analysis of the boycotting attempts by Gamergate, showing that they had barely any impact on big websites but a significant impact on smaller ones.[370]
Gamergate has done exactly what they have set out to be against. They claimed to fight unethical journalism with the help of an unethical journalist. They denounced what they perceived to be a blacklist while curating lists of websites and people they were boycotting. They persistently deny their obsession with Quinn and Sarkeesian while attacking them every chance they get. And they proclaim games are inclusive for all while doing their best to uphold the industry and community that actively excludes women.[371]
Obligatory Gamergate wiki
After finding significant difficulties with pushing their POV onto Wikipedia's Gamergate article, and then with having attack pages deleted from their site at Wikia,[Note 11] the 'ethical gamers' decided to build their own wiki. With blackjack and hookers! It can be found here. Time will tell if they'll manage to be even more unintentionally hilarious than Conservapedia. They're already at a good start with an enemies list of 'evil' Wikipedia editors.
There were also on-and-off plans to fork Wikipedia so they have their own project with their own biased focus.
See also
| |
For those of you in the mood, RationalWiki has a fun article about Real Gamers. |
Notes
- ↑ See, for example, Register-Her.com.
- ↑ An Adobe logo was featured on a portion of Gawker's website that listed companies that had been advertising partners in the past.
- ↑ We won't link to pages that allegedly out people - even if they are totally wrong, even if the information is all over the Internet. Google it yourself.
- ↑ Fredrick Brennan is wheelchair-bound as a result of being born with osteogenesis imperfecta[wp] (brittle bone disease). He was given this nickname for that reason. His posts on 8chan are also always marked with the International Symbol of Access[wp] (the wheelchair symbol) ♿. His disease is often used as a #NotYourShield to deflect criticism.
- ↑ If you tag another Twitter user at the start of a message, called "tweeting at" them, it only appears in the timelines of users who follow both the sender and the tagged user, e.g. "@RationalWiki Look at this goat." In contrast, "tweeting out" is when the message does not start with a tag, so the tweet is visible in the timelines of all of the sender's followers regardless if they also follow the tagged user, e.g. ".@RationalWiki hates jerboas" or "I can't believe @RationalWiki hates jerboas". "Tweeting out" rather than "tweeting at" has been used as a form of harassment in GamerGate.
- ↑ As a side note, for some reason Gamergate can never tell the difference between Arthur Chu and Ian Miles Cheong, editor-in-chief of gaming news website Gameranx. This is clear in Gamergate's targetted harassment of the two, constantly forgetting that Chu was on Jeopardy! and that they're accusing Cheong of being a neo-Nazi because they dug up 13 year old forum posts he made as an edgy and stupid teenager. While this Storify compilation of Tweets where Chu keeps count of how many times it has happened is from October 2014, Gamergate continues to be unable to tell two Asian men apart to this day
- ↑ Anita Sarkeesian's Twitter and general Internet handle is @femfreq, short for Feminist Frequency.
- ↑ For Anita Sarkeesian, this is attributed to her one-time use of the term "prostituted women" in one of her Tropes vs. Women videos. Sex worker rights activists see this term as denying sex workers agency, and it is used by feminists who are exclusionary towards sex workers.
- ↑ Hachi (八?) is Japanese for the number "eight".
- ↑ "The US bombed them back to traditional values – feminism does not exist in Japan. While I don’t like judging an entire culture… that does not excuse them"
- ↑ GamerGate.Wikia.com was created by "Snowfox413" on September 1, 2014. Previously, Snowfox413 was a contributor to the Prison Planet Intelligence Agency Wiki (ppia.wikia.com), based on Alex Jones' Prison Planet.
References
- ↑ Ally Fogg "Extraordinary delusions and why gamers need to grow up", Heteronormative Patriarchy for Men, September 17, 2014.
- ↑ Meg Jayanth, "52% of gamers are women – but the industry doesn’t know it", The Guardian
- ↑ Oliver Moore, "Woman's call to end video game misogyny sparks vicious online attacks", The Globe and Mail, July 11, 2012.
- ↑ Katherine Fernandez-Blance, "Gamer campaign against Anita Sarkeesian catches Toronto feminist in crossfire", Toronto Star, July 10, 2012.
- ↑ Fernando Alfonso III, "Gamers are outraged that this massive Kickstarter-backed game hired a woman", The Daily Dot, December 13, 2013.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 Fruzsina Eördögh, "Gamergate and the new horde of digital saboteurs", The Christian Science Monitor, November 25, 2014.
- ↑ Why the co-creator of Depression Quest is fighting back against Internet trolls", Edge, January 23, 2014.
- ↑ Ben Kuchera, Developer "Zoe Quinn offers real-world advice, support for dealing with online harassment", Polygon, March, 19, 2014
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 Simon Parkin, "Zoe Quinn's Depression Quest", The New Yorker
- ↑ Male Gamer Eron Gjoni Is a Patriarchal Asshole", Mancheeze, August 28, 2014, updated August 31.
- ↑ Adam Thomas, "In the war over Zoe Quinn, there are no winners", Ogeeku, August 31, 2014.
- ↑ 12.0 12.1 12.2 12.3 Eron Gjoni, "The Zoe Post", August 16, 2014.
- ↑ 13.0 13.1 13.2 Margaret Pless, "Eron Gjoni, Hateful Boyfriend", idledilettant, December 6, 2014
- ↑ Eron Gjoni, "CMV: Reddit's handling of the Zoe Quinn 'conspiracy' has been an appalling display of misogyny", r/changemyview, Reddit, 23 August 2014.
- ↑ Screenshot from Reddit, August 19, 2014, reposted by Gjoni in "The Zoe Post" blog.
- ↑ 16.0 16.1 Emma M. Woolley, "Don't believe the 'conspiracy,' gaming has bigger problems than 'corruption'", The Globe and Mail, August 27, 2014.
- ↑ Stephen Totilo, "In recent days I've been asked several times ...", Kotaku, August 20, 2014.
- ↑ Nathan Grayson, "Admission Quest: Valve Greenlights 50 More Games", Rock, Paper, Shotgun, January 8, 2014.
- ↑ Josh Wirtanen, "How I Know Zoe Quinn Did Not Exchange Sex for a Game Review", GeekParty, August 20, 2014.
- ↑ 5 Things I Learned as the Internet's Most Hated Person, Cracked.com, September 16, 2014.
- ↑ Aja Romano, "4chan hacks and doxes Zoe Quinn's biggest supporter", The Daily Dot
- ↑ Brian Albert, "Fez Creator Sells Company After Hackers Expose His Personal Info", IGN
- ↑ Matt Maguire, "Hackers post personal details of Fez and Depression Quest developers online", Gameplanet
- ↑ Elizabeth Sampat, "The Truth About Zoe Quinn"
- ↑ "Zoe Quinn and The Fine Young Capitalists", Storify of Twitter posts from February 28, 2014, to March 1, 2014.
- ↑ 26.0 26.1 26.2 26.3 26.4 "The Birth of Vivian", collage of 4chan, Reddit and Twitter posts from August 21-22, 2014, at KnowYourMeme.com.
- ↑ Anita Sarkeesian, ""Women as Background Decoration: Part 2 - Tropes vs Women in Video Games", Feminist Frequency, YouTube, August 25, 2014.
- ↑ Colin Campbell, "Sarkeesian driven out of home by online abuse and death threats", Polygon, August 27, 2014.
- ↑ 29.0 29.1 Allegra Ringo, "Meet the Female Gamer Mascot Born of Anti-Feminist Internet Drama", Vice, August 28, 2014.
- ↑ Cite error: Invalid
<ref>tag; no text was provided for refs namedTFYC - ↑ Jeff Kunzler, "The Gamification of Terror: Manufacturing GamerGate's Sphere of Delusion", Design is Law, October 22, 2014.
- ↑ 32.0 32.1 "Vivian James", Know Your Meme (NSFW).
- ↑ David Futrelle, "The Top Five Most Ridiculously Ironic #GamerGate Memes", We Hunted the Mammoth, November 6, 2014.
- ↑ David Futrelle, "Today in #GamerGate: Entitled manchildren use manic pixel dream girl as their shield (again)", We Hunted the Mammoth, October 25, 2014.
- ↑ 35.0 35.1 Steven Melendez, "The Secret Meaning Behind GamerGate's Branding", Fast Company, November 3, 2014.
- ↑ "Her jacket is literally daily dose.", archived 4chan thread from August 25, 2014.
- ↑ The Fine Young Capitalists, "On conspiracies", September 19, 2014.
- ↑ Jenni Goodchild, "TFYC, Their Relationship with Autobotika + Charity Proportions", PixieJenni talks GamerGate with both 'sides'
- ↑ "#GamerGate exposed - the corruption of TheFineYoungCapitalists", Cathode Debris
- ↑ https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B47qerlCUAMp51k.png:large
- ↑ Joseph Bernstein, "Gaming Is Leaving 'Gamers' Behind", Buzzfeed, August 27, 2014.
- ↑ Luke Plunkett, "We Might Be Witnessing The 'Death of An Identity'", Kotaku, August 27, 2014
- ↑ Leigh Alexander, "'Gamers' don't have to be your audience. 'Gamers' are over.", Gamasutra, August 27, 2014.
- ↑ Casey Johnson, "The death of the 'gamers' and the women who 'killed' them", Ars Technica, August 29, 2014.
- ↑ John Bain, "This game supports more than two players", [Blog Plz!], August 29, 2014.
- ↑ Adam Baldwin, "#GamerGate:...", Twitter, August 27, 2014.
- ↑ Jenn Frank, "How to attack a woman who works in video gaming", The Guardian
- ↑ David Futrelle, "You’ll never guess what misogynistic gamebros did to these two women in gaming! (HINT: Drove them out.)", We Hunted the Mammoth
- ↑ Jesse Singal, "Gamergate Should Stop Lying to Journalists — and Itself", New York
- ↑ 50.0 50.1 Dan Olson, "S4E7 - #GamerGate", Folding Ideas
- ↑ David Malki, "#1062; The Terrible Sea Lion", Wondermark
- ↑ 52.0 52.1 52.2 Jay Allen, "How imageboard culture shaped Gamergate", Boing Boing
- ↑ Adam Lee, "Free Speech vs. Freeze Peach", Patheos
- ↑ William Usher, "#NotYourShield Hashtag Shows Multi-Cultural Support For GamerGate", Cinemablend
- ↑ Sarah Kaplan, "With #GamerGate, the video-game industry’s growing pains go viral", The Washington Post
- ↑ "#GameOverGate: Zoe Quinn blows #GamerGate wide open", Storify.com
- ↑ Casey Johnston, "Chat logs show how 4chan users created #GamerGate controversy", Ars Technica
- ↑ David Futrelle, "Zoe Quinn’s screenshots of 4chan’s dirty tricks were just the appetizer. Here’s the first course of the dinner, directly from the IRC log", We Hunted the Mammoth
- ↑ David Futrelle, "Spamming, Doxxing and Sockpuppeting: 4Channers’ dirty tricks, straight from their IRC log", We Hunted the Mammoth
- ↑ Robyn Pennacchia, "No, feminists are not trying to #EndFathersDay — it’s a 4chan hoax", Death and Taxes
- ↑ Fernando Alfonso III, "No, feminists aren't trying to #EndFathersDay—it's a hoax", The Daily Dot
- ↑ Ashley Lynch, "A Final Word on #notyourshield", Medium.com
- ↑ moot, "Regarding recent events" 4chan
- ↑ "So yeah. Mallory Blair takes pictures and hangs out with Moot....", The Spideygirl Blog (archived)
- ↑ Nicky Woolf, "4chan founder 'Moot' bids farewell: 'This is it for me. This is goodbye'", The Guardian
- ↑ David Kushner, "4chan's Overlord Christopher Poole Reveals Why He Walked Away", Rolling Stone
- ↑ 67.0 67.1 67.2 "Sexism And Misogyny In Video Game Culture", Huffpost Live (video)
- ↑ "Q&A with Fredrick Brennan of 8chan", Know Your Meme
- ↑ Jay Allen, "/baphomet/, 8chan's Black Board", Storify.com
- ↑ Kim Crawley, "Child Porn, SSNs, and Gamergate: The Vile Tale of 8chan", InfoSec Institute (archived)
- ↑ American Enterprise Institute, "Are video games sexist?", YouTube
- ↑ Cathy Young, "GamerGate: Part I: Sex, Lies, and Gender Games", Reason
- ↑ Vox Day, "As the game media grows, the probability of it being co-opted by women who want to make it all about their vaginas approaches 1. #GamerGate", Twitter
- ↑ Vox Day, "Brad Wardell sets the record straight", Vox Popoli, October 30, 2014)
- ↑ David Futrelle, "Roosh V’s game site Reaxxion tricked into publishing an old John Birch Society pamphlet as a #GamerGate manifesto", We Hunted the Mammoth
- ↑ David Futrelle, "A proposed new anti-Anita Sarkeesian “documentary” promises to give voice to the loudest “silent majority” the world has ever known", We Hunted the Mammoth
- ↑ David Futrelle, "#GamerGate question of the day: Does Davis Aurini own multiple skulls, or is he moving one skull from room to room?", We Hunted the Mammoth
- ↑ David Futrelle, "Did Professional Sarkeesian-hater Davis Aurini Commit Felony Wire Fraud? Hell if I know, but he’s definitely an unethical dick.", We Hunted the Mammoth
- ↑ Brian Cercente, "FBI investigating death threats against Feminist Frequency creator Sarkeesian", Polygon
- ↑ Jay Allen, "How crowdfunding helps haters profit from harassment", Boing Boing
- ↑ Sarah Nyberg, "theralphretort, janet bloomfield caught blatantly lying redhanded. #gamergate ethics!"
- ↑ David Futrelle, "Antifeminist instigator and serial liar Janet “JudgyBitch” Bloomfield attacks Jessica Valenti for having the abortion that may have saved her life", We Hunted the Mammoth
- ↑ David Futrelle, "Men’s Rights White Knights rush in to protect Karen “GirlWritesWhat” Straughan from MRA criticism", We Hunted the Mammoth
- ↑ Sarah Nyberg, "#gamergate's new favorite person: batshit MRA anti-feminist karen straughan. people surprised: 0.", Twitter
- ↑ Zoe Quinn, "Let’s Talk About Ethics In Games Journalism!", Medium.com
- ↑ "Check Your Privilege", "The more you know" "...Milo Yiannopoulos - Thinks gay marriage is wrong, tweets doxed information, refused to pay employees at his former company, published a book filled with some islamophobic and anti-semitic poetry that also managed to plagiarize numerous Tori Amos songs, is proudly transphobic and has called transgender people mentally ill on several occasions.", SJW Illuminati
- ↑ Milo Yiannopoulos, "Feminist Bullies Tearing the Video Game Industry Apart, Breitbart London
- ↑ 88.0 88.1 Ryan Cooper, "Intel's awful capitulation to #gamergate's sexist thugs", The Week
- ↑ 89.0 89.1 Erik Kain, "GamerGate: A Closer Look At The Controversy Sweeping Video Games", Forbes
- ↑ 90.0 90.1 Zaid Jilani, "Gamergate’s fickle hero: The dark opportunism of Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopoulos", Salon
- ↑ Milo Yiannopoulos, "Am I too old for video games?", The Kernel
- ↑ Milo Yiannopoulos, "12-Year-Old Console Gamers are Being 'Raped' by Dorky Weirdos on Grand Theft Auto," Breitbart London
- ↑ Milo Yiannopoulos, "If you're a grown man with hands clamped to an Xbox controller instead of a pair of tits you need a good slap.", Twitter
- ↑ Milo Yiannopoulos, "Exposed: The Secret Mailing List of the Gaming Journalism Elite", Breitbart London
- ↑ Kyle Orland, "Addressing allegations of “collusion” among gaming journalists", Ars Technica
- ↑ Erik Kain, "The Escapist #GamerGate Forums Brought Down In DDoS Attack", Forbes Contributor Blogs
- ↑ James Fudge, "Editorial: The Truth About GamerGate and GameJournoPros", GamePolitics
- ↑ SyrianGirlPartisan, "What the Media isn't telling you about #GamerGate", YouTube
- ↑ InfoWars, "Syrian Girl: NWO Hijacking Video Games to Socially Control Youth", YouTube
- ↑ Jason Koebler, "Dear GamerGate: Please Stop Stealing Our Shit", Motherboard
- ↑ "Nods Respectfully Towards You", Know Your Meme
- ↑ 102.0 102.1 102.2 Nick Wingfield, "Intel Pulls Ads From Site After ‘Gamergate’ Boycott", The New York Times
- ↑ Heather Kelly, "Intel pulls ads over sexism in video game drama", CNN
- ↑ Katherine Cross, "We must dissent: Intel bows to GamerGate campaign to silence feminist video game critics", Feministing
- ↑ Kwame Opam, "Intel issues apology after backlash from #GamerGate opponents", The Verge
- ↑ Sam Biddle, "Ultimately #GamerGate is reaffirming what we’ve known to be true for decades: nerds should be constantly shamed and degraded into submission", Twitter
- ↑ /r/KotakuInAction, "What's the namesake of Operation Baby Seal?", Reddit
- ↑ Caitlin Dewey, "Inside Gamergate’s (successful) attack on the media", The Washington Post
- ↑ Rob Beschizza, "Adobe walks into Gamergate, staggers around confusedly", BoingBoing
- ↑ Eric Johnson, "Adobe Distances Itself From Gawker After Writer’s Gamergate Tweet", Re/code
- ↑ Adi Robertson, "Adobe's symbolic pro-Gamergate gesture frustrates victims", The Verge
- ↑ Susana Polo, "Adobe, Mercedes-Benz are Latest to Pull Ads at the Behest of GamerGate", The Mary Sue
- ↑ Adobe, "When Anti-Bullying Efforts Backfire", Adobe.com
- ↑ Keith Blount, "Unexpectedly Catching Up with the GamerGate Controversy", LiteratureAndLatte.com
- ↑ Ian Douglas, "Dyson rejects Gamergate, returns advertising to Gawker", The Telegraph
- ↑ Anonymous Female Game Developers, "Female Game Developers Share Their Views on #GamerGate", The Escapist
- ↑ 117.0 117.1 "What Male Game Developers Think of #GamerGate", The Escapist
- ↑ 118.0 118.1 Alex Lifschitz, "Game Devs on Gamergate", Storify.com
- ↑ Andrew Girdwood, "Desborough’s #GamerGate card game banned by DriveThruRPG and SJ Games", Geek Native
- ↑ "Tabletop Gaming News - Gamergate card game pulled from DriveThruRPG", The Cult Den
- ↑ Ian Danskin, "Why The Escapist Won’t Talk About GamerGate", Innuendo Studios
- ↑ "The Escapist’s Alexander Marcis has been crowdfunding #GamerGater James Desborough while giving him preferential press coverage", Cathode Debris
- ↑ "Layoffs Hit Defy Media's The Escapist, GameTrailers, And GameFront", Game Politics
- ↑ /r/GamerGhazi, "Escapist goes full Goobergater: loses Jimquisition, sacks MovieBob, hires Gamergaters.", Reddit
- ↑ Zak Sabbath, "We're Not Playing D&D With The Escapist Ever Again", Playing D&D With Porn Stars
- ↑ Damion Schubert, "What’s Going On With the Escapist?", Zen of Design
- ↑ Amber Coal, "I have been predicting a culture war... and I have dozens of sites that reach 50m people.", Storify.com
- ↑ Zoe Quinn, "#StopGamerGate2014 SO THEY STOP DOING THIS SHIT before one of us gets fucking *killed*", Twitter
- ↑ @feedsforchris, "@TheQuinnspiracy @alexlifschitz Look at how 8chan's mods responded to the leak of your personal info. Disgusting.", Twitter
- ↑ @Notintheface1, "No, 8chan doesn't sound like a terrorist group AT ALL.", Twitter (This tweet incorrectly attributes the post pictured to 8chan; it is in fact from 4chan)
- ↑ David Futrelle, "Yet another woman in gaming has been driven from her home by death threats", We Hunted the Mammoth
- ↑ "Angry Boy In Red Tee Holding His Head Shouting Angrily Stock Photo, Picture And Royalty Free Image. Pic 4412922.", 123rf
- ↑ Brook Leigh Lawson, "A Letter To PressFart", Twitlonger
- ↑ Sarah Nyberg, "sorry, #gamergate and @theralphretort, changing the URL won't stop this. just reported it again.", Twitter
- ↑ Sarah Nyberg, "so ralph doxxed bri's entire fucking family. and #gamergate still won't condemn him.", Twitter
- ↑ "File:Wu never left.jpg"
- ↑ Brianna Wu, "Brianna Wu: Why I don't respond when Gamergate accuses me of being transgender.", GamerGhazi, Reddit
- ↑ Liana Kerzner, "Gamers Live! An In-depth Analysis of GamerGate", Metaleater
- ↑ Liana Kerzner, "The Darker Side of GamerGate", Metaleater
- ↑ r/GamerGhazi, "LianaK panders to the GamerGate crowd by attacking FemFreq and Jonathan McIntosh's latest video as "privileged" -- "I actually spit on my phone"", Reddit
- ↑ Liana Kerzner, "Why Feminist Frequency almost made me quit writing about video games: Part 1", Metaleater
- ↑ Liana Kerzner, "Why Feminist Frequency almost made me quit writing about video games: Part 2", Metaleater
- ↑ David Pakman, "#GamerGate Playlist", The David Pakman Show
- ↑ David J. Cobb, "Huffington Post, Zoe Quinn, and the golden mean fallacy", Storify.com
- ↑ 145.0 145.1 145.2 Cimaron Neugebauer, "Terror threat against feminist Anita Sarkeesian at USU", Standard-Examiner
- ↑ 146.0 146.1 Caroline Connolly, "Feminist gamer won’t speak at Utah schools until guns prohibited", Fox 13, Salt Lake City
- ↑ Erin Alberty, "Feminist cancels talk at USU after guns allowed despite shooting threat", The Salt Lake Tribune
- ↑ Billy D, "#GamerGate: Journalist Allegedly Outed As Twitter Harasser Sending Death Threats", OneAngryGamer.net
- ↑ Annie Knox, "Campus gun laws are not carved in stone", The Salt Lake Tribune
- ↑ Tim Slover, "Firearms, Weapons Banned From Sotomayor Speech at U of U", KUER 90.1, NPR Utah
- ↑ 151.0 151.1 151.2 151.3 Margaret Pless, "Mike Cernovich; #GamerGate Lawyer! (Content Warning: Migraine-Inducingly Terrible)", idledillettante
- ↑ 152.0 152.1 152.2 152.3 Liz Pullen, "Mike Cernovich: Based Lawyer of Gamergate", Medium.com
- ↑ Mike Cernovich, "@MSamenfink Yeah it's pricey. But I'm fired up about Zoe's conduct. So I'll be getting my private investigator on the matter.", Twitter (archived)
- ↑ Rebecca Vipond Brink, "#GamerGate Has Finally Made My Head Explode", The Frisky
- ↑ SJW Illuminati, "Juicebro is fucking nuts", Storify.com
- ↑ Laura Shortridge, "GamerGate is super ethical", Storify.com
- ↑ Felicia Day, "Crossing the Street", FeliciaDay.com
- ↑ Alex Hern, "Felicia Day's public details put online after she described Gamergate fears", The Guardian
- ↑ Zoe Quinn, "Private investigator on the matter." Caps incoming later but Jesus Christ who hires a PI to stalk a homeless woman", Twitter
- ↑ Zoe Quinn, "When the fuck is it going to be enough? When the fuck will this end?", Twitter
- ↑ Oli Welsh, "We cannot let this become gaming culture", Eurogamer.
- ↑ Lindsey Weedston, "12 Hashtags That Changed the World in 2014", Yes! Magazine
- ↑ Michelle Jaworski, "#StopGamerGate2014 trends worldwide as GamerGate hits breaking point, The Daily Dot
- ↑ Hayley Tsukayama, "The game industry’s top trade group just spoke out against Gamergate", The Washington Post
- ↑ "Great job proving "gamers" are innocent.", Imgur
- ↑ Anita Sarkeesian, "It’s Game Over for ‘Gamers’", The New York Times
- ↑ Taylor Wofford, "Is GamerGate About Media Ethics or Harassing Women? Harassment, the Data Shows" Newsweek
- ↑ Adrian Chen, "Gamergate Supporters Partied at a Strip Club This Weekend", New York
- ↑ Rich McCormick, "Stephen Colbert takes on Gamergate with Anita Sarkeesian", The Verge
- ↑ Alex Abad-Santos, "#GamerGate loves Stephen Colbert. Stephen Colbert does not love them back.", Vox
- ↑ David Futrelle, "The Top 22 Most Ridiculous Things Said by 8channers About Anita Sarkeesian’s Appearance on the Colbert Report", We Hunted The Mammoth
- ↑ PZ Myers, "Schadenfreude so thick you could cut it with a chainsaw", Pharyngula
- ↑ Scott Kaufman, "Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales challenges #GamerGate to write neutral entry", Raw Story
- ↑ Dan Van Winkle, "Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales Isn’t Taking Any of Gamergate’s Threats, Tells Them Off Spectacularly", The Mary Sue
- ↑ Mayer Nissim, "Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales replies to #GamerGate criticism", Digital Spy
- ↑ Doug Sibor, "Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales Doesn’t Want Money From “Vicious A**holes” Behind #GamerGate", Complex
- ↑ Mark Bernstein, "Infamous"
- ↑ Alex Hern, "Wikipedia bans five editors from gender-related articles", The Guardian
- ↑ Lauren C. Williams, "Wikipedia Wants To Ban Feminists From Editing GamerGate Articles", ThinkProgress
- ↑ Caitlin Dewey, "Gamergate, Wikipedia and the limits of ‘human knowledge’", The Washington Post
- ↑ Robinson Meyer, The Good (and the Bad) of Twitter's New Bid to Stop Harassment, The Atlantic
- ↑ WAM Twitter Harassment Reporting Tool
- ↑ Brian Fitzgerald, "New Online Tool Lets Twitter Users Report Harassment", The Wall Street Journal
- ↑ Twitter Support, "Starting today we're rolling out an improved way to flag abusive Tweets. See how it works.", Twitter
- ↑ Randi Harper, "Twitter implied that harassment comes from gamergate. Oh, Lordy.", Twitter
- ↑ Lindy West, "Twitter doesn't think these rape and death threats are harassment", The Daily Dot
- ↑ Jon Russell, "Twitter Will Crack Down On Serial Trolls By Tracking Their Phone Number", TechCrunch
- ↑ Taylor Wofford, "One Woman’s New Tool to Stop Gamergate Harassment on Twitter", Newsweek
- ↑ Randi Harper, "Good Game Auto Blocker", randi.io
- ↑ "ggautoblocker", Github.com
- ↑ Randi Harper, "Renaming blacklist.txt to sourcelist.txt", Github
- ↑ "Internet culture puts trolling on a pedestal", MetaFilter
- ↑ Ryan Broderick, "This Woman Built A Bot That Tweets Out GamerGate Buzzwords And Guys Are Falling For It", BuzzFeed
- ↑ Ian Steadman, "The ultimate weapon against GamerGate time-wasters: a 1960s chat bot that wastes their time", New Statesman
- ↑ Sarah Nyberg, "#gamergate creates an ebooks bot. material is sourced from his own tweets. bot gets banned for harassing.", Twitter
- ↑ Billy D, "#GamerGate’s Harassment Patrol Makes Changes To Amp Up Effectiveness", One Angry Gamer
- ↑ Alex Lifschitz, "The GG Anti-Harassment Super Troopers", Storify.com
- ↑ "The Online Abuse Prevention Initiative", Hacker News
- ↑ Catherine Thompson, "Rosetta Scientist Sparks #ShirtStorm With Scantily Clad Women On Shirt, TPM Livewire
- ↑ Phil Plait, "Shirtstorm", Slate
- ↑ David Futrelle, "With #GamerGate floundering, the Internet Douchebag Squad whips up a #Shirtstorm", We Hunted the Mammoth
- ↑ Cory Van der Pol, "#MetalGate", Death Metal Underground
- ↑ "The 20 Best Metal Albums of 2014", Spin
- ↑ David Futrelle, "So #MetalGate is a thing: A survey of the ridiculousness", We Hunted the Mammoth
- ↑ David Futrelle, "Opportunistic pickup-artist douchebag Roosh V jumps aboard the #MetalGate train as it derails", We Hunted the Mammoth
- ↑ George R. R. Martin, "Puppygate", Not A Blog
- ↑ Gavia Baker-Whitelaw, "How the 'Sad Puppies' Internet campaign gamed the Hugo Awards", The Daily Dot
- ↑ Patrick, "The 2015 Hugo finalists", Making Light
- ↑ George R. R. Martin, "Blogging for Rockets", Not A Blog
- ↑ George R. R. Martin, "Where's the Beef?", Not A Blog
- ↑ Arthur Chu, "Right-Wing Trolls Hijack SciFi Oscars", The Daily Beast
- ↑ Emily Gera, "AbleGamers' weird weekend of porn stars, charity and a worries over a DDoS attack (correction)", Polygon
- ↑ Jonathan Holmes, "AbleGamers backs out of charity event after reading it will 'weaponize porn'", Destructoid
- ↑ "AbleGamers' Weird Weekend of Porn, Charity, DDoS Attacks, and GamerGate", GamePolitics.com
- ↑ "Yes, we are becoming a charity now", The Fine Young Capitalists
- ↑ Cindi Spiegler, "Mercedes Carrera Invites Fans To Help Her Raise Money For Charity", The Real Porn Wiki Leaks
- ↑ James Fudge, "The Porn Charity Hosting First Event to Fund Merit -Based STEM Scholarship", GamePolitics.com
- ↑ "The TFYC and The Porn Charity Live Show", Indiegogo
- ↑ David Futrelle, "A new low: One of Zoe Quinn’s harassers was selling rape fanfic about her on Amazon", We Hunted the Mammoth
- ↑ Anna Merlan, "Someone Wrote 'Erotica' About a Video Game Designer Getting Gang-Raped", Jezebel
- ↑ Scott Kaufman, "Amazon publishes thinly veiled rape fantasy of #GamerGate target Zoe Quinn", Raw Story
- ↑ /r/GamerGhazi, "The author of the Zoe Quinn rapefic is doing an AMA on KiA. The title claims he wrote the piece, but doesn't know about GG at all. What?", Reddit
- ↑ EJ Dickinson, "Meet the camgirl whose Anita Sarkeesian parody has made her Gamergate's hero", The Daily Dot
- ↑ Leigh Cuen, "Gamergate Camgirl Imitates Feminist Role Model", Vocativ
- ↑ Slayven, "#GamerGate thread 2: it's about feminism in games journalism", "I was just doing some umm research and happened to see the lady that was doing the Anita Cosplay complaining she wasn't making any money whenever she did it and it lowered her rank. I could only laugh", NeoGAF
- ↑ EJ Dickson, "Why Gamergaters are rallying behind the victim of a brutal rape", The Daily Dot
- ↑ Patrick Howell O'Neill, "8chan, the central hive of Gamergate, is also an active pedophile network", The Daily Dot
- ↑ Laura Dale, "8chan removed from Patreon... Becomes cat sanctuary", Destructoid
- ↑ Matt Purslow, "Patreon community guideline changes outlaws harassment, 8chan now raising money for cats to comply with new rules", PC Games N
- ↑ /r/GamerGhazi, "A massive fail in the making - Hotwheels hires Mike C for disability discrimination case against Patreon", Reddit
- ↑ @ManfredVonKarma, "Mike Cernovich: Based Lawyer of Gamergate", Medium.com
- ↑ Dan Olson, "The Mods are Always Asleep", Medium.com
- ↑ Laura Shortridge, "GamerGate's evolution from defending the child porn on 8chan to claiming SJWs are spreading child porn", Storify.com
- ↑ /r/KotakuInAction, ""Please help report @srhbutts and @FoldableHuman to the FBI for distributing, downloading and publishing child pornography.", Reddit
- ↑ "Lurking on 8chan, thought I'd share this comment.", Imgur
- ↑ Chris Kluwe, "Why #Gamergaters Piss Me The F*** Off", Medium.com
- ↑ Chris Kluwe, "Embrace Debate", Youtube.com
- ↑ Chris Kluwe, "'HAY GUISE, LET'S PLAN OUR DOXXING ON A PUBLIC MESSAGE BOARD.'", Twitter.com
- ↑ /r/GamerGhazi, "Chris Kluwe has been doxxed", Reddit
- ↑ Chris Kluwe, "Boxes delivered to the house. Mail fraud confirmed. Time to roll out the party vans. Well done, #Gamergate.", Twitter
- ↑ "Chris Kluwe auctions off GamerGate dildo for charity", #GamersAgainstGamerGate
- ↑ Jon Rosenberg, "Coffee Talk", Scenes from a Multiverse
- ↑ Jon Rosenberg, "If you're looking for the GG comic that's made some folks upset enough to take my site down, here it is.", Twitter
- ↑ Jon Rosenberg, "It's About Ethics", Scenes from a Multiverse
- ↑ Jon Rosenberg, ""Same Difference", Scenes from a Multiverse
- ↑ @adulus, "Gamergaters on 8chan.co doxxed srhbutts", Storify.com
- ↑ /r/GamerGhazi, "8chan has now doxxed srhbutts", Reddit
- ↑ Screenshot of tweet by Terminal Apathy
- ↑ Screenshot of another tweet by Terminal Apathy
- ↑ /r/GamerGhazi, "Gators respond to the srhbutts doxing, def done by Gators, by finding another woman to hate, stalk, and harass. Today they plan to shut down Rebecca Watson's Patreon.", Reddit
- ↑ Sarah Nyberg, "#gamergate is doxxing, threatening my friends. police have been notified. tell me again how this is about ethics", Twitter
- ↑ Sarah Nyberg, "I Set Out To Expose A Hate Movement In Gaming—So They Set Out To Destroy My Life", Ravishly
- ↑ Casey Parks, "Prank call sends close to 20 police officers to Southwest Portland home", The Oregonian
- ↑ Casey Parks, "Gamergate: Woman blames online harassers for hoax that sent 20 Portland cops to her former home", The Oregonian
- ↑ Adi Robertson, "'About 20' police officers sent to Gamergate critic's former home after fake hostage threat", The Verge
- ↑ Jason Silverstein, "'I am afraid for my safety': California woman has 20 police sent to former home in Portland as part of Gamergate harassment campaign", NY Daily News
- ↑ Nathan Mattise, 8chan user offers to “swat” GamerGate critic, cops sent to an old address", Ars Technica
- ↑ Nick Eagland, "It's '100 per cent terrorism': Burnaby victim decries Internet 'swatting' that brought Mounties to her door", The Province
- ↑ Alex Hern, "Gamergate hits new low with attempts to send SWAT teams to critics", Raw Story
- ↑ "The After Show 01.13.2014", Netroots Radio Pods
- ↑ Brianna Wu, "This was just sent to me by #Gamergate.", Twitter
- ↑ Margaret Pless, "Two #gamergate-critical Twitter Users Harassed via Custom Online Printing Services", Daily Kos
- ↑ Nick Wingfield, "Intel Budgets $300 Million for Diversity", The New York Times
- ↑ "Intel CEO Outlines Future of Computing", Intel.com
- ↑ Mat Kamen, "Intel announces fund for greater tech diversity", Wired UK
- ↑ /r/KotakuInAction, "CALL TO ACTION: TWITTER #CES2015 HIJACKING", Reddit
- ↑ Sarah Nyberg, "#gamergate's latest strategy? use jewish people as a shield to stop criticism of israel, apparently", Twitter
- ↑ David Futrelle, "Why are #GamerGaters so quick to excuse an anti-Semitic caricature of Anita Sarkeesian that’s literally derived from Nazi propaganda?", We Hunted the Mammoth
- ↑ Jonathan McIntosh, "I've been testing GamerGate's claim to be "left" by posting opinions nearly identical to Noam Chomsky. Result: Extreme reactionary outrage.", Twitter
- ↑ Jonathan McIntosh, "A few months ago I started posting deliberately provocative tweets whenever I’d see the angry gamer mob launch a harassment raid on someone.", Twitter
- ↑ /r/KotakuInAction, "Racism: brought to you by Intel", Reddit
- ↑ "ZeGerman1942", "Gamecraft: Gender Equality in the Games Industry", NotPlayed.com
- ↑ "I’m sure the “cultural appropriation” SJW brigade will get right on her for this", "The source of the above quote - and in fact the only source Google is throwing at me, based on a search for “The US bombed them back to traditional values” or “feminism does not exist in Japan” - is this article on notplayed.com which is all about games reviews (with the caveat that all the reviews are deliberately based not on playing the game, but by press and marketing material)....Considering that the only source of this alleged comment comes from someone whom we have documented to possibly have some kind of an agenda against Anita Sarkeesian, not any other third party at the conference or any other writeup that may have mentioned Anita’s remarks about Japan or feminism over there, I would advise extreme caution against believing anything they have to say, especially given recent patterns of fakery.", Not Your Ex/Rotic
- ↑ Genna Bain, "I am a woman in gaming and today I am selling my shares in @intel. I'm afraid there just wasn't enough "diversity" in my stock portfolio.", Twitter
- ↑ John Bain, "Watching a few idiots trying to infantalise my wife over her financial decision today. How wonderfully sexist these people are.", Twitter
- ↑ 276.0 276.1 276.2 276.3 Zoe Quinn, "August Never Ends", Dispatches From The Quinnspiracy
- ↑ Tyler Wilde, "Let’s stop calling ourselves the “PC Master Race”", PC Gamer
- ↑ "A note on disclosure", PC Gamer
- ↑ Katherine Cross, "What unnecessary actions like @PCGamer's serve to do, in pracrise, is legitimise the mob tactics employed against the rest of us.", Twitter
- ↑ Brendan Keogh, "Holy shit, mainstream games journalism. You've had 6 months to learn how to not give into and not validate a shitty hate mob ffs.", Twitter
- ↑ /r/GamerGhazi, "This just in: Ubisoft pressured girlfriend of PC Gamer writer to pressure said writer to publish a mild criticism of the name of /r/pcmasterrace to get back at the subreddit for being mean to Ubisoft (tinfoil hat warning)", Reddit
- ↑ Oscar Raymundo, "6 Reasons the Video-Game Industry Will Be Disrupted in 2015", Inc.
- ↑ Juju Chang, "What It Feels Like to Be a Gamergate Target", Nightline
- ↑ Juju Chang, "When Jumping into Gamergate Turns into Fearing For Your Life", Nightline
- ↑ /r/KotakuInAction, "AMA Chris Scott aka the guy on the Nightline segment about Gamergate.", Reddit
- ↑ Andrew Todd, "The Social Justice Illuminati Is Real, And It’s An Anti-Hate Task Force", Badass Digest
- ↑ Chris Tognotti, "Zoe Quinn Launches "Crash Override Network," A Support Group For Targets Of Online Hate Mobs", Bustle
- ↑ Alanna Bennett, "Zoë Quinn Has Launched A Network to Help Fight GamerGate Harassment & Other Online Abuse", The Mary Sue
- ↑ T.C. Sottek, "Crash Override wants to help survivors of Gamergate and other online abuse", The Verge
- ↑ @adulus, "Gamergate reacts to a support group for harassment victims", Storify.com
- ↑ Zoe Quinn, "@twoscooters @alexlifschitz POST THE GOAT PHOTO", Twitter
- ↑ Elizabeth Sampat, "@TheQuinnspiracy @alexlifschitz your wish is my command", Twitter
- ↑ Alex Lifschitz, "@twoscooters @TheQuinnspiracy i am the master of the dramatic closeup", Twitter
- ↑ Dean Takahashi, "Zoe Quinn and other female game developers speak out against harassment", Venture Beat
- ↑ Matt Weinberger, "A woman who was threatened with death (and worse) for a year explains how to protect against online harrassment", Business Insider
- ↑ Sarah E. Needleman, "Game Developer: The Gaming Industry Is Not Doing Enough to Combat Misogyny", The Wall Street Journal
- ↑ The Fine Young Capitalists, "#NotYourShield Project Art Sale", Creating The Means For The Production (archived)
- ↑ Jonathan McIntosh, "Many desperately want to believe media has no impact on their worldview. But we are not force-field covered islands. Media affects us all.", Twitter
- ↑ Casey Newton, "Anita Sarkeesian shares the most radical thing you can do to support women online", The Verge
- ↑ Brianna Wu, "Responding to PAX East Withdrawal Criticism", Space Channel 6
- ↑ Anna Merlan, "A Man Is Making Bizarre, Terrifying YouTube Videos About Brianna Wu", Jezebel
- ↑ Joseph Bernstein, "GamerGate’s Archvillain Is Really A Trolling Sketch Comedian", BuzzFeed
- ↑ Anna Merlan, "Man Who Terrorized Brianna Wu For Months Says He Was Just Kiddin Around", Jezebel
- ↑ Katherine Cross, "Women’s lives? Just a joke to trolls", Feministing
- ↑ Margaret Pless, "Jace Connors and 4/4 Male Internet Reporters Agree; He Was Just Kidding About The Death Threats", Daily Kos
- ↑ Zoe Quinn, "so like. I had a breakup turn in to the basis of an SVU episode. that's pretty weird, right", Twitter
- ↑ Michael McWhertor, "Get a sneak preview of Law & Order SVU's GamerGate episode", Polygon
- ↑ /r/GamerGhazi, "About the upcoming Law and Order SVU episode", Reddit
- ↑ /r/GamerGhazi, "Law & Order: SVU - Coming Up: Death Threats (Preview)", Reddit
- ↑ Brianna Wu, "I'm Brianna Wu, And I'm Risking My Life Standing Up To Gamergate", Bustle
- ↑ SVU Writers Room, "“This ‘aint a game. Drop that gun.” Never mess with @Finallevel. #GameOnSVU", Twitter
- ↑ Caitlin Dewey, "This is the final word on Gamergate — and it’s from ‘Law & Order: SVU’", The Washington Post
- ↑ Joshua Rivera, "Law & Order: SVU's take on online harassment is uncomfortably accurate", Entertainment Weekly
- ↑ Zoe Quinn, "y'all if the twist is the dev faking her own death threats or some shit I am sure my burning hollywood to the ground will be a second svu ep", Twitter
- ↑ GamerGhazi, "In which KiA is convinced Zoe Quinn wants to burn down LA, calls her a terrorist", Reddit
- ↑ Zoe Quinn, "I don't know what I expected but it wasnt Law And Order telling me to give up.", Twitter
- ↑ Alex Lifschitz, "Watching fake terrorists reading off verbatim threats you've received and then raping/torturing an analog for your loved ones ain't peachy", Twitter
- ↑ Anita Sarkeesian, "Predictably this week's Law & Order SVU was sickening. They trivialized and exploited real life abuse of women in gaming for entertainment.", Twitter
- ↑ Brianna Wu, "For everyone asking, no I did not watch Law and Order. I know Gamergate is entertainment for a lot of people, but it's destroyed my life.", Twitter
- ↑ Sam Machkovech, "Law & Order SVU takes on GamerGate, everyone loses", Ars Technica
- ↑ Slade Villena, "WELP. HEY #SVU THE FAMOUS VILLAIN AVATAR? THATS MINE YO. COME SUPPORT MY KICKSTARTER >:) #GamerGate…", Twitter (archive)
- ↑ GamerGhazi, "I hate saying this, but nice one, KiA.", Reddit
- ↑ Brianna Wu, "Fredrick Brennan bought redchan.it, the the domain name Gamergate rapists used to upload the video on Law & Order, redirected it to 8chan.", Twitter
- ↑ John Bain, "If you were complicit in the narrative that the last 7 months has been about attacking women then you are complicit in that SVU episode", Twitter (archived)
- ↑ John Bain, "If you were complicit in the narrative that the last 7 months has been about attacking women then you are complicit in that SVU episode", Twitter (archived)
- ↑ John Bain, "I've been done with this for months but I'm not gonna stand idly by and see trash games sites accuse parts of my audience of terrorism", Twitter (archived)
- ↑ John Bain, "Anyone who used terms like "ISIS", "KKK" "Misogynists", yup, you're all in part responsible for throwing your audience to the Dick Wolf", Twitter (archived)
- ↑ Alex Lifschitz, "One positive: I'm amazed at how many warm emails we got re: SVU from older folks who had no idea and now want to help end games harassment.", Twitter
- ↑ /r/GamerGhazi, "God, that episode of SVU was over the top and unrealistic.", Reddit.com
- ↑ Phil Hornshaw, "Red 5 Board Votes Out Co-Founder Mark Kern As CEO (UPDATE)", GameFront
- ↑ C. Custer, "The rise and fall of Mark Kern: how one man may have doomed Firefall and The9 (UPDATED)"
- ↑ /r/Games, "This is why Mark Kern was removed as CEO by Red 5", Reddit
- ↑ Mark Kern, "Lead the way in healing the rift in video games.", Change.org
- ↑ Patrick Garratt, "Developers shooting the messenger: stop blaming the press for sexist extremism in games", VG247
- ↑ @strictmachine, "Games deserve better than the games industry.", Storify.com
- ↑ Damion Schubert, "On L&O:SVU and Mark Kern’s Petition Thingy", Zen of Design
- ↑ Damion Schubert, "Mark Kern Doubles Down on Being Wrong", Zen of Design
- ↑ Xavier Glitch, "Ben Kuchera, on the topic of Mark Kern's petition", Storify.com
- ↑ Jay Allen, "#gamergate Axe Grinding Service", Storify
- ↑ Scott Jennings, "I Demand You Listen To Me", Broken Toys
- ↑ Mark Kern, "@simoncarless @leighalexander I'll have to check that out.", Twitter
- ↑ Mark Kern, "If I do the interviews, It's just more words. This isn't about me, and having my face out there detracts from the message.", Twitter
- ↑ Scott Jennings, "On Demands", Broken Toys
- ↑ Scott Jennings, "Twitorama: Mark Kern Can’t/Won’t Stop, We Can’t Have Nice Hashtags", Broken Toys
- ↑ Scott Jennings, "Quick Dispatches On/From Goofytown", Broken Toys
- ↑ Scott Jennings, "Someday, I May Be Important Enough To Demand Fair Reply", Broken Toys
- ↑ "FREEZE PEACHES", Twitter
- ↑ Sarah Nyberg, "origin of #DontDateSJWs is literally "oh yeah, you don't want to date #gamergate? well we don't want to date YOU!"", Twitter
- ↑ @eidlonimp, "#LetWomenSpeak Tells the Story of GamerGate's Misogyny", Storify.com
- ↑ "SJW - Hey Ash Whatcha Playin'? (IGF)"
- ↑ 2015 "Game Developer's Choice Awards", (38:20)
- ↑ 2015 Game Developer's Choice Awards, (Around 54:50)
- ↑ 2015 Game Developer's Choice Awards, (Around 1:01:45)
- ↑ 2015 Game Developer's Choice Awards, (Around 1:29:20)
- ↑ Andrew Todd, "#GamerGate Is Now Literally An Industry Joke", Badass Digest
- ↑ Victoria McNally, "Here’s The Joke Tim Schafer Made That Has Gamergate Freaking Out", The Mary Sue
- ↑ /r/KotakuInAction, "Proposal: Stop buying Reddit Gold until Ellen Pao is fired", Reddit
- ↑ Ben Kuchera, "The year of GamerGate: The worst of gaming culture gets a movement", Polygon.
- ↑ Google Plus post by David Hill
- ↑ Plaguearist, So. What’s GamerGate achieved so far?", Medium.com
- ↑ Jeff Gerstmann, "Letter From the Editor 10/17/2014", Giant Bomb
- ↑ Michael McWhertor, "Gamespot Editor Fired Over Kane & Lynch Review?", Kotaku Australia
- ↑ Luke Plunkett, "Yes, a Games Writer was Fired Over Review Scores", Kotaku
- ↑ Alec Meer, "A Storm In YouTuber Heaven", Rock, Paper, Shotgun
- ↑ Mike Serrels, "EA's Studio Firemonkeys Hacked Last Year, Didn't Immediately Inform Users", Kotaku
- ↑ Jim Sterling, "Shadiness of Mordor," Jimquisition
- ↑ Nathan Grayson, "The Messy Story Behind YouTubers Taking Money For Game Coverage", Kotaku
- ↑ Erik Kain, "'Middle-Earth: Shadow Of Mordor' Paid Branding Deals Should Have #GamerGate Up In Arms", Forbes Contributor Blog
- ↑ L. Rhodes, "To fair-minded proponents of #GamerGate," Medium.com
- ↑ Martin Belam, "Revealed: The winners and losers in #GamerGate's war on web sites", Mirror
- ↑ Katherine Cross, "‘We Will Force Gaming to Be Free’: On GamerGate & the Licence to Inflict Suffering", First Person Scholar