Timeline of Gamergate

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Gamergate is what happened when the reactionary rejects of 4chan teamed up to attack women who make and write about video games with a molecule-thin veneer of being a consumer movement for "free speech" and "ethics in video game journalism". These are their stories.

Contents

August 2014

September 2014

(Side note: The article makes a huge impact on the stagnate site )

October 2014

November 2014

December 2014

January 2015

February 2015

March 2015

  • March 2: The 2015 Game Developers Conference begins. Gamergate responds by disrupting their planned #GDC2015 hashtag with their usual vitriol. Usage of Randi Harper's auto-blocker by game devs at the event surges in response.
  • March 3: Jordan Owen fires Davis Aurini from his position in working on their "film" The Sarkeesian Effect. Aurini claims his chumminess with Roosh V is to blame. A week of hilarity ensues.
  • March 4:
  • March 7:
    • Gamergate targets a Google employee under the impression that he was responsible for the deletion of a tweet that unintentionally supported Gamergate, and was followed by an immediate retraction and apology that condemned Gamergate two days earlier.
    • At the annual PAX East convention, an "Enforcer" (a volunteer for the event) live tweets his attempts to approach Brianna Wu, peppered with retweets of friends making rape jokes about his attempt. When he realized he was being noticed by critics of Gamergate, he claims he's "neutral" on the situation; multiple tweets promoting Gamergate are found in his timeline and his account was previously suspended for harassing Jonathan McIntosh, Anita Sarkeesian's collaborator on Feminist Frequency.
    • @j_millerworks tweets a terrorist threat to PAX East; he later claims he was drunk.
  • March 9: Blogger Zennistrad posts about how social scientists had come forward to say that Gamergate was negatively affecting academia's views on studying video games and that Gamergate was pleased with the result. One claimed that Gamergate set back the view of video games decades and the other, who goes by @8BitBecca, tried to archive video games (as with film archiving) and discovered that she would have likely been denied funding for her project had Gamergate happened the year before. Gamergate responds by doing their best to dox and harass her, leading her to shut down her social media.
  • March 11: Sarah Nyberg writes about her experiences with Gamergate for Ravishly for the first time with her name rather than as @srhbutts
  • March 12: Davis Aurini and Jordan Owen announce they have come to an agreement and will continue to work together on The Sarkeesian Effect.
  • March 13: Chris Mancil, Director of Digital Communications for EA, writes that on February 15, after he had retweeted a comment made by Milo Yiannopoulos, he suffered a loss of nearly 2500 followers on Twitter. He attributes this to the Good Game AutoBlocker, calling his alleged inclusion on the list a "Scarlet Letter" and the act of the blocker creating a "tribal apartheid"; he also makes allusions to Israel and Palestine. He is unaware that the third-party tool that allows the Good Game AutoBlocker to work does not work on Twitter accounts the user intentionally follows, which means 2500 people manually unfollowed him.
  • March 17: Twitter announces new rules that prohibit harassment by sending "large numbers of unsolicited @replies or mentions"; Randi Harper deduces this as the issues concerning sea-lioning.
  • March 18: James Desborough announces his intent to sue Randi Harper over his inclusion in the list of users on the autoblocking tool she developed unless he is removed.
  • March 22: For some inexplicable reason, Richard Dawkins is drawn into Gamergate because he discovers his listing on "The Block Bot" (different from Randi Harper's Good Game Auto Blocker) through Breitbart and the participation of many Gators to tell him Gamergate is about "ethics in video game journalism". Mark Kern reaches out to him. Dawkins demands a follower apologizes to Sargon of Akkad. Dawkins ultimately decides to remain "ignorant" of what Gamergate really is, but remains indignant over alleged libel.
  • March 24:
    • The moderator of 8chan's /gamergate/ board reveals he had been doxxed by TheRalphRetort and Araf, and ceases supporting the movement after the board is hacked. 8chan's Gator contingent moves back to the original board /gg/.
    • Jeremiah True, a student at Reed College who has been in the press for having been banned from his class over disruptive discussions of rape culture, for some inexplicable reason aligns himself with Gamergate when he calls out Anita Sarkeesian in his 16-page essay on why he should be allowed back in the class. Not even Reason.com can make heads or tails of this guy's antics.
    • Salon notices Milo Yiannopoulos's and others' attempts to dump video games for the culture war over progressivism in comic books with concerns over the titles Thor (now a woman), Captain America (now a black man), Ultimate Spider-Man (now a black/Latino biracial boy), Ms. Marvel (now a Turkish-American Muslim girl), and Batgirl (because a variant cover got pulled due to implications of rape).
  • March 26: Brianna Wu reports that a Gamergate supporter tried to verbally hijack a panel she was participating in at Youngstown State University. Police barred him from reentering the room and investigated the bag he left behind as Wu has been sent threats concerning explosives in the past.
  • March 29: A transphobic joke is discovered in Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity, having been submitted by one of the game's backers on Kickstarter. A member of the Obsidian development team is reached and agrees that the content should not have been added and the concern is amicably resolved. Unless you're Gamergate. The transgender woman who brought the content to light is harassed for having dared to say anything.

April 2015

  • April 1: Zoe Quinn and Alex Lifschitz meet with Representative Katherine Clark to discuss Gamergate. Gamergaters attack all three by bombarding Rep. Clark with messages on Twitter and beginning an 8chan thread to discuss how the free and not asking for donations Crash Override Network is a scam.
  • April 2:
    • David Draiman comments on his recent feud with comedian Trevor Noah,[wp] who has recently been tapped to replace Jon Stewart as host of The Daily Show. Draiman found several of Noah's old tweets anti-Semitic in nature, and in his Twitter discussions sought out support from his Gamergate followers to take a stand against anti-Semitism. Instead, he was assaulted by anti-Semitism and blocked and reported by his count more than 250 followers for their anti-Semitic statements.
    • The "IMO: Crash Network Override" article on Techraptor is discovered by Izzy Galvez, Zoe Quinn, and Alex Lifschitz. Observers contact the official TechRaptor Twitter account whose operator denies culpability and uses their "Hebrew" heritage as a shield, while also admitting they cannot read the text in question. Another observer discovers that it the image is the first result in Google for "thirty pieces of silver", the price Judas Iscariot was paid to betray Jesus as written in the Gospel of Matthew.
    • Randi Harper is subject to a swatting attempt.
  • April 4: The Hugo Awards[wp] nominees are announced and a group of politically conservative sci-fi writers come out on top, revealed to be the result of gaming the vote by pushing Brad R. Torgersen and Larry Correia's "Sad Puppies" slate for the third year in a row and Gamergate supporter Theodore Beale's (Vox Day) "Rabid Puppies" slate (which actually gets more votes); Gamergate supporter "Daddy Warpig" actively recruits people in Gamergate to "humble SJW in Sci-Fi, too". The following week, George R. R. Martin[wp] opines that "the Sad Puppies [and Beale] have broken the Hugo Awards" beyond redemption; he also writes how he fears the groups "are beyond the pale, raging and ranting about SJWs and cliques and secret conspiracies."
  • April 6: For some reason /r/KotakuInAction decides Reddit's interim CEO Ellen Pao[wp] has to do with their goals of "ethics in video game journalism" after all of the news concerning her pro-diversity hiring practices and her loss in her lawsuit against former employer Kleiner Perkins[wp] goes around. For this reason, they decide to organize a boycott of buying Reddit Gold memberships for themselves or others. The original post and several subsequent posts by the proposer are gilded in response. Later, /r/EllenPaoInAction is formed by this set.
  • April 12: Anita Sarkeesian went to a board game parlor in Columbus, Ohio, and later discovered Ben, a collaborator of TheAmazingAtheist and operator of their Drunken Peasants Twitter account, took her photograph without her permission and posted it. Gamergate comes out to support Ben, for obvious reasons.
  • April 14: Running With Scissors' Postal 2[wp] receives downloadable content 12 years after its initial release. Milo Yiannopoulos has been included, with his blessing as an Easter Egg that turns all NPCs into him, and he can of course be killed.
  • April 15: Zoe Quinn speaks at a congressional briefing on cyberstalking. The panel decides to start the #StopWebH8 hashtag to begin discussion on the dangers of cyberstalking and harassment over the Internet. Gamergate supporters disrupt it in their usual ways.
  • April 17: On the second day of the Calgary Comic & Entertainment Expo, attendees discover a booth run by the "Honey Badger Brigade" having a banner with Gamergate propaganda on it as well as posters of Vivian James. In addition, there were reports that the group had disrupted a panel with feminist topics the night before. After the booth is removed and its representatives asked to leave and not participate in future events, The Mary Sue uncovers the truth behind the "Honey Badger Brigade". The group is actually Honey Badger Radio, the official feMRA podcast for A Voice For Men, made up AVfM writers Karen Straughan, Alison Tieman, Hannah Wallen, Mike Stephenson, and Sage Gerard. They crowdfunded their way into the convention for the sole purpose of disrupting it, even using Tieman's webcomic as a front for their true intentions. An attendee gave The Mary Sue a report of the group's disruption of the Women Into Comics panel on the night of the 16th. So, because of the Honey Badgers' intentional disruption, harassment of attendees, and the fact they lied in order to even get a booth in the first place, all violations of the contract they signed with Calgary Expo, they run to Gamergate and the MRAs crying of censorship and misogyny (as they're feMRAs of all things) and #ExpoGate is born, once again showing that Gamergate will stand up for unethical behavior so long as it benefits them.
  • April 21: The documentary GameLoading: Rise of the Indies is released on Steam. Gamergate goes after it when they learn Zoe Quinn was interviewed for it.

See also

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