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Timeline of Gamergate
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Gamergate is what happened when the reactionary rejects of 4chan teamed up to be the personal army of an abuser and 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.
2014
August 2014
- August 15: Eron Gjoni's early draft of his diatribe against his ex-girlfriend Zoe Quinn appears on Something Awful, Penny Arcade, and other websites. He gets banned from them as a result.
- August 16:
- Eron Gjoni publishes "The Zoe Post" on Wordpress, accusing Zoe Quinn of infidelity. This time the post is shared to 4chan's boards /b/, /v/, /pol/, and /r9k/.
- (Note: According to the IRC logs "The Zoe Post" was later edited by Gjoni; Gjoni's original accusations were later debunked by himself.)
- 4chan users already begin to form their preferred narrative for Gamergate, insisting that they focus on the Nathan Grayson claim, as well as the other alleged partners, rather than use misogynistic insults to attack Zoe Quinn, as they want to turn her "social justice warrior" allies against her.
- Eron Gjoni pretends to condemn the harassment against Zoe Quinn, while also admitting that he spread his blog on various forums such as Penny Arcade and Something Awful specifically in order to create a backlash against his ex.
- MundaneMatt publishes a video based on the "The Zoe Post". The video is shortly unavailable. MundaneMatt claims that this is due to a DMCA claim against his video by Zoe Quinn. The claim in question is horribly written and not something one would expect a proper claimant to make.
- (Note: The tactic to use false DMCA claims as a means to discredit an opponent had been pioneered by hacker, white supremacist and former GNAA leader Andrew "weev" Auernheimer
during his harassment campaign against game developer Kathy Sierra.)
- (Note: The tactic to use false DMCA claims as a means to discredit an opponent had been pioneered by hacker, white supremacist and former GNAA leader Andrew "weev" Auernheimer
- Eron Gjoni publishes "The Zoe Post" on Wordpress, accusing Zoe Quinn of infidelity. This time the post is shared to 4chan's boards /b/, /v/, /pol/, and /r9k/.
- August 17:
- Eron Gjoni also spreads his defamation in the forums of The Escapist, finding an audience willing to listen to him. The Escapist's forums would be a major hub for proto-Gamergate activity, despite attempts by the staff to contain the bile.
- The first larger Reddit community to pick up on Eron Gjoni's defamation is /r/TumblrinAction, which rehashes a previous shitstorm against Zoe Quinn started by the Wizardchan community in 2013.
- August 18:
- MundaneMatt and others gather in the #BurgersAndFries IRC channel and begin organizing a harassment campaign against Zoe Quinn, giving it its first name: "The Quinnspiracy." They immediately start talking about doxxing her and others. In their own words, "WE'RE CRASHING HER CAREER WITH NO SURVIVORS" [see IRC logs @ Aug 18 17.23.09]. They coordinate with Internet Aristocrat (among others) in the release of his video.
- John "TotalBiscuit" Bain, host of The Cynical Brit YouTube channel, is contacted by members of the #BurgersAndFries channel.
- Internet Aristocrat releases his first video with the material provided by Eron Gjoni (still available on this mirror).
- #burgersandfries discusses migration to 8chan, after 4chan mods keep deleting the Zoe Quinn doxx. The /burgers/ forum on 8chan, precursor to /gg/ and /gamergate/, is created [see IRC logs @ Aug 18 18.34.33].
- John "TotalBiscuit" Bain propagates the slander against Zoe Quinn to his more than 350.000 followers on Twitter, based on the "Zoe Post," the video by Internet Aristocrat and possibly information from the IRC members. He is heavily criticized by independent game developers in reaction.
- August 19:
- Zoe Quinn, having been doxxed on /v/, is harassed via phone calls to her family.
- The Fine Young Capitalists' Matthew Rappard claims on Reddit that Zoe Quinn sabotaged their game jam and doxxed him, without providing any proof (the claims he made under his username SillySladar were deleted and/or edited later on). His call for support is spread on Reddit and 4chan. His accusations seem to be based upon a conversation with Zoe Quinn from March, compiled by /u/metroidcomposite, that apparently was settled in private.
- A Reddit thread on /r/gaming/ about John "TotalBiscuit" Bain's hitpiece gets mass-deleted due to witch-hunting (a breach of global Reddit rules). This was used as an example of "censorship" and "collusion" between Reddit and Zoe Quinn, after one /r/gaming mod warns her about the on-going doxxing in the thread.
- Polytron founder Phil Fish calls out John "TotalBiscuit" Bain for his attack on Zoe Quinn and becomes a target for harassment in the process.
- August 20:
- Stephen Totilo, editor-in-chief of Kotaku, debunks the claim that Zoe Quinn's personal relationship with staff writer Nathan Grayson (one of the few partners named by Eron Gjoni in "The Zoe Post") resulted in any positive reviews for her game as no such review exists on the site and the only article ever written by Grayson that mentions her is from before they ever dated.
- Game developer site NeoGAF cracks down on users persistently defending the doxxing and harassment of Zoe Quinn, resulting in accusations of censorship, etc. GamerGate despises NeoGAF from this day forth.
- August 21:
- In the #BurgersAndFries IRC channel, the organizers celebrate obtaining Phil Fish's "home" folder and discuss how to take control of his website, hosted by Cloudflare [see IRC logs @ Aug 22 02.34.26]. After immense harassment, Fish puts his company and the IP rights to its game Fez up for sale and then leaves social media and game development.
- The same people also attempt to penetrate Zoe Quinn's accounts but with less success.
- 4chan's /pol/ board gets behind funding The Fine Young Capitalists' current crowdfunding campaign, nicknaming it "Operation Chemo", because "they would support the cancer" (feminism), which would make them "PR-untouchable".
- August 22:
- Gamergate's mascot, Vivian James, is created on 4chan's /v/ board, with a color scheme based on the rape joke "Daily Dose"/"Piccolo Dick" (see IRC logs @ Aug 24 19.54.13).
- The Daily Dot becomes one of the first publications to report on the doxxing and hacking of Zoe Quinn and Phil Fish.
- 4chan starts to clean out its boards, possibly due to the negative press after the hack of Phil Fish and Zoe Quinn [see IRC logs @ Aug 22 16.02.37].
- 8chan admin Fredrick "Hotwheels" Brennan shows up in the #BurgersAndFries IRC channel under the name "copypaste" in order to inform the others that he was contacted by Zoe Quinn's lawyers (see IRC logs @ Aug 22 10.34.29). He suggests the group move to 8chan.
- August 23: Internet Aristocrat publishes his second video [now deleted, see below].
- August 24:
- Eron Gjoni is contacted by members of #BurgersAndFries and shortly joins the IRC channel (see IRC logs @ Aug 24 20.08.20). He admits that he does not care about journalism and with regards to Nathan Grayson, he "mentioned Nathan worked for kotaku because I figured I'd leave the community to make what it wanted out of the implications". (see IRC logs @ Aug 24 23.59.42)
- Under the nickname "PaperDinosaur", an editor of TechRaptor joins the IRC (see IRC log @ Aug 24 14.51.01) and coordinates the efforts of his site with the group there. (He gets banned on August 31, due to infighting with other members of the group.)
- /r/KotakuInAction, one of Gamergate's future main hubs, is founded in order to gather those who "demand reform" or - as the IRC puts it - "reddit mods made a subreddit for zoe stuff" (see IRC logs Aug 24 16.50.18). The first scoop is the exposition of a friendship between Kotaku journalist Patricia Hernandez and game developer Anna Anthropy].
- The crowdfunding campaign of The Fine Young Capitalists gets hacked. TFYC blame this on Zoe Quinn later on without providing any proof.
- Davis Aurini and Jordan Owen announce their planned documentary to take down Anita Sarkeesian. Their price? US$15 thousand a month, minimum.
- August 25:
- Eron Gjoni does an AMA on /r/drama and reveals Zoe Quinn's usernames and passwords to the mob.
- Anita Sarkeesian posts a new episode in her Tropes vs. Women in Video Games series "Women as Background Decoration Part 2", and becomes another major target for Gamergate (not that they didn't hate her already).
- August 26:
- Polygon updates its ethics policy to include Patreon support. Gamergate claims this as a victory.
- Kotaku publishes a blog post about possible ethical breaches. Gamergate claims this as a victory.
- Due to the ongoing massive harassment and threats, Anita Sarkeesian contacts authorities, later revealed to be the FBI. (This becomes later on part of a larger FBI investigation.)
- An argument between game developer Tim Schafer and Let's Play YouTuber Jon "JonTron" Jafari over Anita Sarkeesian's newest video leads to the creation of the proto-Gamergate hashtag #IStandWithJonTron, also setting the stage for the first attempts to connect the proto-Gamergate Twitter activists. After Gamergate's formation, they claim JonTron as one of their own because in Gamergate's mind, anyone who disagrees with an "SJW" (in this case Schafer and Sarkeesian) is automatically one of them.
- August 27:
- Ongoing death threats force Anita Sarkeesian to leave her home temporarily.
- Zoe Quinn reveals that she too has left her home in fear; the mob mocks her relentlessly.
- Adam Baldwin coins the hashtag #GamerGate, linking to the videos by the Internet Aristocrat (and not reacting to the articles from the next day, as many Gamergaters claim).
- August 28:
- Reacting to the ongoing toxicity, Leigh Alexander publishes the article "'Gamers' don't have to be your audience. 'Gamers' are over." on Gamasutra The article gets lots of reception among fellow journalists and gets reframed by a variety of journalists in the following days.
- Chris Plante for Polygon's "An awful week to care about video games"
- Casey Johnston for Ars Technica's "The death of the “gamers” and the women who “killed” them"
- Devin Wilson for Gamasutra's "A Guide to Ending "Gamers""
- Luke Plunkett for Kotaku's "We Might Be Witnessing The 'Death of An Identity'"
- Joseph Bernstein for BuzzFeed's "Gaming Is Leaving “Gamers” Behind"
- Patrick O'Rourke for Financial Post's "Sexism, misogyny and online attacks: It’s a horrible time to consider yourself a ‘gamer’"
- Arthur Chu for The Daily Beast's "It's Dangerous to Go Alone: Why Are Gamers So Angry?"
- Dan Golding's "The End of Gamers"
- These enter Gamergate's tale of collusion as the "Gamers Are Dead" articles (see IRC logs @ Aug 28 21.40.25), claiming that they were meant to oppress gamers.
- (Side note: Actually, Dan Golding's blog post was released before Leigh Alexander's article, but it was quickly thrown together with the other articles.)
- The situation is so dire, that even the International Games Developer Association releases an official statement.
- Gamergate points out that the statement does not condemn Gamergate. At this time the hashtag has only existed for one day.
- Reacting to the ongoing toxicity, Leigh Alexander publishes the article "'Gamers' don't have to be your audience. 'Gamers' are over." on Gamasutra The article gets lots of reception among fellow journalists and gets reframed by a variety of journalists in the following days.
- August 29: The Fine Young Capitalists backpedal on their claims that Zoe Quinn doxxed or hacked them.
- August 30:
- Internet Aristocrat creates a third video [The video is no longer available, see below].
- Alexander Macris, founder of The Escapist, comes out in favor of proto-Gamergate in the neverending forum thread against Zoe Quinn. In a response to Anita Sarkeesian, he reposts an old "call to arms" on Twitter.
- August 31:
- MRA activist Mike Cernovich, one of Gamergate's "e-celebs", quickly nicknamed "Based Lawyer", joins the mob, grandstanding by taunting Anita Sarkeesian after the attacks on her.
- Gamergate launches its Operation "Disrespectful Nod", creating email campaigns to cut off ad revenue from publications critical of Gamergate. It is named "Disrespectful Nod" as a means to mock Marc Threadingham, who had sent Zoe Quinn a message of support in the early days of the harassment sent to her. Gamergaters turned him into a meme and labeled him a white knight.
September 2014
- September 1:
- Hundreds of game developers condemn the ongoing harassment in an open letter
- After writing a piece on harassment of women in the tech industry, which mentions Sarkeesian and Quinn, games journalist Jenn Frank gets harassed because she supported Quinn's Patreon, a fact that the Guardian editors considered insignificant, although Frank disclosed it. Frank gets targeted by Gamergate anyway.
- Breitbart.com writer Milo Yiannopoulos joins the mob, possibly recruited by the Internet Aristocrat. Milo publishes a summary of the Gamergate narrative thus far.
- (Side note: The article makes a huge impact on the stagnant site )
- September 2: #NotYourShield is starting up, planned on /v/ as a "special jamming op", in order to expose "SJW hypocrisy". (The invention of the hashtag is most often attributed to Jason "j_millerworks" Miller). Its first use is by Twitter user and /pol/ participant Ninouh90
- (Side note 1: The IRC members discussed how non-minority members should join #NotYourShield in order to boost it [see IRC logs @ Sep 03 00.04.52].)
- (Side note 2: Jay Allen, a.k.a. @a_man_in_black, would later point out that many accounts in #NotYourShield were sockpuppets from an earlier /pol/ campaign, "Operation Lollipop", that had been covered in "Clutch" magazine )
- September 3:
- The IRC organizers celebrate that Jenn Frank left her job at the Guardian [see IRC log @ Sep 03 21.32.19]. In order to protect its image the group aims to control the harassment of Frank [See IRC log @ Sep 03 22.03.43]. But quickly admits that it can't do anything about it: "its too big now".
- The Guardian calls out Gamergate, being one of the first major newspapers to do so.
- September 4:
- In desperation of the ongoing harassment, Jenn Frank, takes a leave from her profession for several weeks.
- (Side note: Frank resumed her journalistic career on Dec 18 )
- The Los Angeles Times publishes a critical article on Gamergate and the harassment of Anita Sarkeesian in its print edition
- In desperation of the ongoing harassment, Jenn Frank, takes a leave from her profession for several weeks.
- September 6:
- Alexander Macris of The Escapist calls out to the Gamergate organizers and gets in touch with them in a new IRC [see IRC log @ Sep 06 14:35:26]
- After Wikipedia's article on Gamergate
is mentioned on KotakuinAction for the first time, Gamergaters turn up on Wikipedia and complain about the "bias" of the entry.
- Zoe Quinn publishes the data she gathered on the various 4chan/8chan boards and IRC, which later on leads to the release of the entire IRC logs of #BurgersAndFries by 4chan mods. The IRC is abandoned on the same day; a new IRC is created elsewhere.
- September 7: After many major edits to the Wikipedia article on Zoe Quinn, two Gamergate supporters get called out on Wikipediocracy. The writers publish many personal details about them.
- September 9: In a show of solidarity with Zoe Quinn, the New Yorker reviews her game Depression Quest.
- September 11: Milo Yiannopoulos falsely accuses Zoe Quinn of embezzling money from her game, falsely accuses Anita Sarkeesian of lying about her police report, and then celebrates on 4chan.
- September 12:
- Gamergate begins to target Mattie Brice, game developer and vocal feminist, because of her friendship with Zoe Quinn and for being on the panel of the Independent Games Festival.
- Milo Yiannopoulos' stories on Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian get debunked.
- The Guardian interviews Zoe Quinn, her first appearance in a major publication since the beginning of Gamergate.
- Liana Kerzner writes her first article on Gamergate, attempting to be "neutral" on matters.
- September 15: WikiLeaks endorses Gamergate and adds some conspiracy theories of their own, linking to a video by the MRA website A Voice For Men to drive its point home.
- September 16:
- Christina Hoff Sommers, commentator for the American Enterprise Institute, chimes in by downplaying a study by the Entertainment Software Association which contradicts her "egalitarian feminism". She is quickly adopted as another of Gamergate's "e-celebs", receiving the nickname "Based Mom".
- Zoe Quinn files a temporary ex parte restraining order against Eron Gjoni, which included a gag clause to prevent him from discussing her online. This clause was due to Gjoni's deliberate attempts to encourage internet communities to harass her.
- September 17:
- Milo Yiannopoulos claims to have "exposed" the professional mailing list GameJournoPro as a secret, agenda pushing conspiracy. The list is leaked to him by William Usher.
- A news report unveils that there was a bomb threat against Anita Sarkeesian during the Game Developers Conference 6 months earlier.
- September 18: 4chan admin moot enforces the site's "no personal information/no raiding/no calls to invasion" rules, effectively banning Gamergate threads. This is seen as a betrayal by Gamergate, which started out on 4chan, and a move to 8chan is planned.
- September 19: Brianna Wu, lead developer at Giant Spacekat studios, decides to make a joke Twitter account to mock Gamergaters (without mentioning them at all). 90 minutes pass. She reports being targetted by harassment.
- (Side note: Wu wrote an opinion piece for Polygon in July 2014 discussing the issues of harassment of women in video gaming, including threats sent to her months before Gamergate ever started. She includes stories shared to her from a woman who made a Tumblr post Anita Sarkeesian shared on her own blog that led to harassment from Reddit, a former editor for IGN who discovered people only saw her and her female colleagues as sex objects, a woman being sexually harassed through her own website by an obssesive stalker, and a transgender editor for GameSpot who was targetted after joining the company.)
- September 20:
- Alleged #NotYourShield inventor Jason "@j_millerworks" Miller loses his job. This is blamed on critics of Gamergate and often used as proof of harassment against Gamergate, although Miller admitted himself that the layoff was a case of mistaken identity.
- Jesse Singal, writing for The Boston Globe, discusses Gamergate for the first time, laying the blame on male gamers' insecurity.
- September 21:
- Milo Yiannopoulos tweets that he received a syringe in the mail. He blames opponents of Gamergate, but does not want to "make himself the story" and declines to contact authorities.
- Brad Wardell, CEO of software developer Stardock, comes out in defense of Gamergate.
- (Side note: Wardell has an existing grudge against Ben Kuchera, Kotaku, and somehow Zoe Quinn as seen below.)
- The first pro-Gamergate Wikipedia editor, Titanium Dragon, gets banned due to his edit warring over the entry on Zoe Quinn (more will follow)
- September 22:
- Foundation of /r/GamerGhazi on Reddit, in order to mock Gamergate and support its victims
- Milo Yiannopoulos releases the full member list of the GameJournoPro mailing list, accusing them all of collusion and agenda pushing
- Milo Yiannopoulos holds a talk on 8chan, validating the site
- September 23:
- Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales comments on Gamergate for the first time
- Various Gamergate activists (Stephen "Boogie2988" Williams, Jon "JonTron" Jafari, Eron Gjoni, Adam Baldwin, Milo Yiannopoulos, and shoe0nhead) get doxxed in an anonymous pastebin.
- Author and former video game journalist Oliver Campbell joins Gamergate, claiming he faced difficulties in the industry as a black man and Gamergate welcomed him with open arms.
- September 24: Damion Schubert, engineer at BioWare and Gamergate critic, posts a blog entry condemning Milo Yiannopoulos's coverage of what is apparently Ben Kuchera trying to ruin the life of Brad Wardell by tearing it apart and revealing what had actually happened between Wardell and a former employee who had filed a sexual harassment suit against him (and that Kuchera was not the original writer).
- September 25: Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales makes a first assessment of the Wikipedia article on Gamergate. Gamergate is not satisfied, the edit war goes on.
- September 26:
- Gamergate activists accuse a Wikipedia editor of slandering and doxxing without providing any proof of their accusations. The Wikipedia editor is later on banned from the topic.
- The Fine Young Capitalists, Gamergate's "weaponized charity", successfully closes its Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign at $71.000
- September 27: "Based lawyer" Mike Cernovich encourages members of Gamergate to dox its opponents.
- September 28:
- Gamergate organizer King of /pol/ claims to have been doxxed. At first he blames this on critics of Gamergate. Later on, he exposes the infighting behind the scenes and proves that the dox came from within Gamergate (see below).
- Pro-Gamergate game developer E. McNeil accuses PR representative Maya Kramer of sexual relations with jury members of the Independent Games Festival in order to secure an award for "The Stanley Parable". The accusation is nonsense because "The Stanley Parable" received an award decided by public vote. It does not stop Gamergate to paint Maya Kramer as a mastermind behind various activities against Gamergate and the "DiGRA conspiracy".
- September 29: Liana Kerzner writes a new article on Gamergate, blaming Gamergate and 8chan of ongoing harassment after she attempted to call out Milo Yiannopoulos on his misogynistic remark towards her
- September 30:
- In collaboration with Milo Yiannopoulos, pro-Gamergate blogger Ethan "TheRalphRetort" Ralph, publishes a deeply demeaning and sexist hitpiece on Liana Kerzner.
- Video game studio Running With Scissors,
known for the extremely violent video game series Postal,
comes out in support of Gamergate.
October 2014
- October 1:
- Gamergate finishes its exodus from 4chan to 8chan, which becomes its new home besides Reddit's /r/KotakuInAction
- Pro-Gamergate news site TechRaptor publishes a hitpiece on Dina Abou Karam, community manager of the game Mighty No.9 who has already been targeted by Gamergate before [see IRC log @ Sep 04 01.54.23].
- Intel pulls its ads on Gamasutra after a Gamergate emailing campaign. Gamergate claims this as a first major victory.
- October 2: Linux kernel developer Matthew Garrett, appalled by Intel's removal of advertising in support of Gamergate, declares he will no longer fix Intel bugs in Linux outside his day job. This is thought to be an important factor in Intel later significantly backing a diversity initiative — Garrett's work was essential to quite a lot of Intel hardware working properly on Linux at all.
- October 3:
- Intel clarifies its position on the takedown of ads on Gamasutra, refusing to take positions in the "increasingly bitter debate in the gaming community". The statement condemns discrimination and sexism.
- Gamergate gets kicked off of Github because the "repository was being used as a central point for organizing harassment campaigns".
- October 4:
- Conspiracy central Infowars endorses Gamergate
- The Internet Aristocrat claims to have been partly doxxed on 8chan and getting harassed on the phone. This is blamed on opponents of Gamergate, despite 8chan's firm pro-Gamergate stance.
- October 8:
- Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales gets harassed on Twitter by Gamergate supporters for the first time
- Infamous white supremacist and hacker Andrew "weev" Auernheimer endorses Gamergate.
- LGBT gaming convention GamerX officially denounces Gamergate following some confusion over a previous tweet. Gamergate claims that GaymerX was "bullied" into making the statement, and that they want to protect it from SJWs.
- October 9: Gamergate Thunderclap for social outreach ends. Despite widespread support from within Gamergate, it only manages 3716 supporters, suggesting the group's real size.
- October 10:
- The Escapist publishes another article on Gamergate, calling it "What Game Developers Think of #GamerGate". It is mostly made up of male pro-Gamergate voices. After immense backlash the article is renamed "What Male Game Developers Think of #GamerGate" and interviews of pro-Gamergate interviewees (Slade "RogueStar" Villena and James Desborough) are removed due to the level of involvement they have in harassing people on behalf of Gamergate. An anonymous alleged Microsoft employee who calls himself "Xbro" makes the claim that 95% of his studio supports Gamergate.
- (Side note: The Escapist would later be struck by the departure of high-profile contributors and massive layoffs.)
- Game developer Brianna Wu is driven from her home by death threats.
- The temporary restraining order against Eron Gjoni is made permanent and extended for a year after a hearing before the court. He vows to appeal, claiming that his free speech is being restricted unfairly in a prior restraint.
- The Escapist publishes another article on Gamergate, calling it "What Game Developers Think of #GamerGate". It is mostly made up of male pro-Gamergate voices. After immense backlash the article is renamed "What Male Game Developers Think of #GamerGate" and interviews of pro-Gamergate interviewees (Slade "RogueStar" Villena and James Desborough) are removed due to the level of involvement they have in harassing people on behalf of Gamergate. An anonymous alleged Microsoft employee who calls himself "Xbro" makes the claim that 95% of his studio supports Gamergate.
- October 13:
- After heated discussions on NeoGAF Gamergate activist Stephen "Boogie2988" Williams gets perma-banned
- After Polygon publishes a review of Bayonetta 2 which criticizes the heroine's attire and the sexist undertone of the game, Gamergate throws a fit and screams bloody murder.
- The Guardian takes takes a firm stand against Gamergate
- MSNBC covers Gamergate, featuring an appearance by Brianna Wu
- October 14:
- An anonymous Redditor decries the child pornography on 8chan for the first time.
- Anita Sarkeesian cancels her talk at Utah State University due to threats of an anti-feminist killing spree.
- (Side note: Blogger Zennistrad found potential links of the USU threat on 8chan.)
- Writer and journalist Veerender Jubbal creates the hashtag #stopgamergate2014, in a show of solidarity for the victims of harassment.
- (Side note: Jubbal becomes a victim of harassment himself afterwards)
- October 15:
- The Washington Post covers Gamergate and the threats against Anita Sarkeesian. The Entertainment Software Association condemns the ongoing harassment in a statement to the newspaper.
- The ongoing campaign against Anita Sarkeesian appear on the frontpage of The New York Times, directly blaming Gamergate
- Gamergate and its ongoing campaign are covered by CNN.
- October 16:
- Sam Biddle, contributor to Gawker, tweets the following: "Ultimately #GamerGate is reaffirming what we’ve known to be true for decades: nerds should be constantly shamed and degraded into submission" and "Bring Back Bullying". This sets off Gamergate's "Operation Baby Seal" email campaign against all of Gawker Media's advertising partners.
- The Southern Poverty Law Center puts Gamergate on its "Hatewatch" list.
- Internet film reviewer and Gamergate critic Kyle Kallgren gets doxxed by Gamergate. Unlike earlier harassment, the Gamergate activist is not even hiding the fact that the mob is engaged in doxxing anymore.
- Jesse Singal, writing for New York magazine, says Gamergate is bringing non-standard indie games to the public's knowledge, and how much time Gamergate spends on attacking women detractors.
- October 17: Polygon's editor-in-chief Christopher Grant discusses Gamergate openly. He mentions how minuscule Patreon donations are, despite Gamergate's insistence that they be disclosed, how infrequently Polygon has had to append these disclosures after acquiescing to demands, and how despite all of this they are still harassed and singled out as unethical. Grant also brings up the Society of Professional Journalists' Code of Ethics and its "Minimize Harm" doctrine and how that factored in to not delving into Zoe Quinn's personal life, as well as how "objective game review" doesn't make sense and how it all boils down to "SJWs".
- October 18: Mike Cernovich goes after Anil Dash
in the name of Gamergate for no apparent reason; Dash has never written about Gamergate or video games, but has a history of Cernovich stalking him.
- October 20:
- Jesse Singal, writing for New York magazine, writes about Gamergate based on his attempts at discerning what Gamergaters want on both 8chan and /r/KotakuInAction. He goes into detail on how its leaderless and decentralized nature will be its undoing, and how its "ethics in video game journalism" stance is belied by how much time it spends attacking women. He calls out Gamergaters for their use of the "Literally Who" system and their adherence to the No true Scotsman fallacy.
- Allistair Pinsof accuses the members of GameJournoPros of blacklisting him; Pinsof was fired from Destructoid after outing a suicidal trans woman on Twitter. Even though Pinsof does not condone Gamergate, he is quickly considered a key witness by the mob.
- October 21:
- Former NFL-player and avid gamer Chris Kluwe publishes a very widely circulated denounciation of Gamergate.
- (Side note: Despite his outspokenness, Chris Kluwe would not be doxxed until 70 days later, unlike many female victims of Gamergate.)
- Dan Olson releases a critical analysis of Gamergate in video form
- Adobe, having been subject to Operation Baby Seal, clarifies that they do not advertise on Gawker Media. Gamergate claims this as a sign of support for the mob.
- Former NFL-player and avid gamer Chris Kluwe publishes a very widely circulated denounciation of Gamergate.
- October 22:
- "Based lawyer" Mike Cernovich gets unintentionally doxxed by blogger Margaret Pless (IdleDilletante) when she links to his home address as he listed it as his office on a legal assistance website. He blames this on Zoe Quinn (after Quinn tweeted a link to Pless's blog post) and then claims to have avoided swatting because another post on Pless's blog describes how to report him to the LAPD crimestoppers hotline.
- Pro-Gamergate site Mangotron ends its coverage of Gamergate after the site owner got doxxed by Gamergate. The owner of Mangotron comes under fire from several Gamergate supporters, Lizzy "lizzyf620" Finnegan among them, who would get a similar treatment a few months later (see below).
- Brad Wardell responds to Damion Schubert's blog post from a month prior. Schubert retracts and apologizes.
- October 23: Actress and geek icon Felicia Day speaks out against Gamergate. She gets doxxed in the comment section of her own blog post within an hour.
- October 24:
- John "TotalBiscuit" Bain, Slade "RogueStar" Villena, and various other Gamergate organizers take part in a livestream by the Internet Aristocrat [the video is no longer available, see below]
- Oliver Campbell speaks to The Washington Post, claiming Gamergate is not about women and is actually about ethics in video game journalism. He also points out an anti-bullying charity drive Gamergate donated to.
- Jon "JonTron" Jafari, whom Gamergate considers one of them, says that he has no idea what Gamergate is even about and that he does not support Gamergate. For whatever reason, Gamergate considers JonTron a "martyr" as if he was forced by someone into saying these things and was silenced by the SJWs.
- October 27:
- FILM CRIT HULK SMASH GAMERGATE
- Christina Hoff Sommers chimes in again with a second video, deflecting all attacks on Gamergate, because of "affectionate messages and declarations of support" for herself.
- Wikipedia admins start to sanction various opponents in the ongoing edit war. The list grows longer by the day.
- October 28: Adobe clarifies on its corporate blog that it does not support Gamergate nor harassment in any form.
- October 29:
- John "TotalBiscuit" Bain interviews Steven Totilo, editor-in-chief of Kotaku, about Ethics in Games Media
- Anita Sarkeesian appears on The Colbert Report
- October 31: A redditor gets a response from IGN which promises to publish its ethic policies. Gamergate claims this as a victory
November 2014
- November 1: Brad Wardell publicly contacts an artist on Twitter who had drawn a comic strip where Zoe Quinn has sex with the artist for a review, asking the artist to work for his company Stardock.
- November 3:
- It is recognized that Gamergate cannot tell the difference between two Asian male Gamergate critics during their harassment spree on Twitter: one is Jeopardy! champion and writer Arthur Chu and the other is Gameranx editor-in-chief Ian Miles Cheong whom Gamergate accuses of being a neo-Nazi because of decade-old chatlogs.
- Programmer Randi Harper plays around with an idea for an autoblocking tool on Twitter. Gamergate immediately attempts to stop the project.
- Stormfront endorses Gamergate.
- S. Rachel Martin writes "GamerGate Launched in My Apartment, and, Internet, I’m Sorry. (Not that sorry.)", describing how she helped Eron Gjoni craft "The Zoe Post". She repeats multiple Gamergate myths about Zoe Quinn to justify what she did (including inventing a new one concerning herself), while showing no real remorse for what happened to Quinn and other women in Gamergate's wake.
- November 4:
- Eron Gjoni openly admits once more that he never cared about journalism in his pursuit of revenge against his ex.
- A fake account of Nick Denton, founder of Kotaku owner Gawker Media, spreads a message that there is a whistleblower in his own company. Gamergate organizer King of /pol/ spreads the news.
- Oliver Campbell claims to be in contact with federal authorities, particularly the FBI, FTC, and DHS; when asked for more details, he instructs Gamergaters to make Freedom of Information Act requests to confirm for themselves. Nothing comes out of this and he backpedals months later.
- November 5: After achieving its goal of confusing Gamergate, the fake Nick Denton account gets deleted. King of /pol/ is blamed for its disappearance and the event marks his ultimate fall from Gamergate's grace.
- November 6: Gamergate organizer King of /pol/ leaves Gamergate after having come under fire and blows the whistle on the organizers behind Gamergate. In recordings of their Skype calls and chats of a group that he refers to as a "cabal", he shows how Gamergate organizers doxxed their own, among them himself and Internet Aristocrat; how pro-Gamergate game developer Slade "RogueStar" Villena was attacked with sockpuppet accounts; and how other Gamergate activists were harassed and how he himself was threatened of being discredited to his employer. He also implies that the infamous troll group GNAA is involved, having gathered 6923 real names of various Gamergate supporters for potentially malicious purposes.
- November 7:
- Comedian Brock Wilbur gets doxxed.
- Mike Morhaime, CEO of game development behemoth Blizzard, condemns the ongoing harassment and consents when co-host Geoff Knightley mentions Gamergate by name.
- (Side note: 8chan's Gamergate board had called out for a boycott of Blizzard products the day before)
- Milo Yiannopoulos spends an entire evening defaming Ian Miles Cheong, editor-in-chief of Gameranx. For this Yiannopoulos' Twitter account gets suspended for a day.
- (Side note: Yiannopoulos claimed that his suspension was a mistake and thus revoked after just one day. This is false. The suspension was valid, but was only for one day.)
- November 9: After prolonged harassment, Mattie Brice jokes about using her vote in the Independent Games Festival (IGF) awards against Gamergate. This immediately attracts the attention of Gamergate and turns up the harassment. After IGF condemns Brice's tweet, she resigns from the IGF. The IGF responds with an all-out call for solidarity with Brice and asks her to remain a member of the IGF.
- November 10:
- Gamergate calls out on 8chan in order to slander critical Wikipedia editors to the Arbitration Committee.
- Daryush "Roosh V" Valizadeh opens Reaxxion, an alternate "gaming news" website.
- November 11: Randi Harper publishes the first version of the "Good Game Auto Blocker" for Twitter.
- November 12:
- Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales attempts to defuse the ongoing edit war by offering Gamergate to write an article on Wikia.
- Australia's ABC 7:30 news airs a news report on Gamergate, describing the mob as one solely focused on harassing women, including several interviews with attendees at PAX Australia 2014. Gamergaters are outraged. By December, the Australian Communications and Media Authority is urged by Gamergaters to investigate the "breach of ethics" made by the organization in not giving due time to Gamergate's stance on ethics in gaming journalism.
- November 13: Intel re-instates its advertisement campaign at Gamasutra.
- November 14: After an ESA scientist is criticized for wearing a shirt covered in pin-up girls on an internationally broadcast interview on the Rosetta mission, Gamergate adopts #shirtgate" as its (short-lived) new cause.
- November 15: Jim Sterling, host of The Jimquisition, announces he has left The Escapist.
- November 17: Paul Elam, the patient zero MRA and founder of A Voice for Men, endorses Gamergate.
- November 18: In a bizarre move, Davis Aurini and Jordan Owen interview Jack Thompson, the disbarred lawyer who had attempted to prohibit the sales of violent games, in order to discredit Anita Sarkeesian for their documentary.
- November 19: The International Games Developer Association creates the "Harassment Resources" list which includes various sites and tools maligned by Gamergate.
- November 20: Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter writes an article for The Lancet in which he discusses systemic violence against women. He discusses Anita Sarkeesian and Gamergate as examples.
- November 24: Little by little, Randi Harper's tool gets spun into a source of malice by Gamergate, calling it a "blacklist"
- November 25: After being accusing of "sealioning", Gamergate organizes a fundraiser to adopt an actual sea lion.
- November 26: Internet Aristocrat declares to leave Gamergate after infighting and denounces the mob. All his videos are henceforth unavailable.
- (Side note: He returns to social media and the mob about 3 weeks later.)
- November 27: Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee (Arbcom) accepts
to find a solution to the ongoing edit war.
- November 30: After several threatening tweets, a Gamergater turns up in front Randi Harper's workplace.
December 2014
- December 1: The CBC's Ombudsman Esther Enkin responds to the complaints from "Lunar Archivist", dismissing them as he complained about unfair coverage in blogs written by CBC staff when the posts did mention Gamergate's "side" of the "debate", but focused on other aspects within. Enkin also said to "Lunar Archivist", "The fact that you reject the negative narrative does not mean it should not be discussed."
- December 2:
- Gamergate on 8chan doxxes the family of Brianna Wu.
- Twitter updates its reporting system. The use of an alligator in its instructional video is seen as a jab against Gamergate.
- Niko of Death gets control of 8chan's Gamergate board /gg/ and makes supposed GNAA member Teridax a mod. The Gamergate community is alarmed by this change as it does not trust Niko of Death anymore. This leads to a migration to 8chan's /gamergate/ board.
- Zoe Quinn discovers Brad Wardell's conversation with the cartoonist who harassed her and documents Wardell's subsequent misogynistic attacks on her.
- Liana Kerzner does her best to get back in Gamergate's good graces by insulting Anita Sarkeesian.
- December 4: With the migration from /gg/ to /gamergate/ on 8chan, doxxing worsens as the mods condone doxxing by proxy.
- December 5:
- Gamergate organizer and game developer Slade "RogueStar" Villena attempts to blackmail opponents of Gamergate; due to this and various other instances of harassment, Villena gets banned multiple times, but always succeeds to evade the ban.
- Charity AbleGamers gets contacted by a representative of porn star Mercedes Carrera to organize a charity stream. They are at the time unaware Carrera is a Gamergate supporter and this has been planned on /r/KotakuInAction.
- Zoe Quinn publishes statements from two Microsoft employees debunking "Xbro"'s statement that most of the company supports Gamergate. She also includes a message from Xbox Senior Communications Manager Will Tuttle that "Xbro" does not represent Xbox in any way.
- "Xbro" responds and says he meant 95% of his team, but still makes untenable and baseless claims about Microsoft.
- December 6: Margaret Pless publishes a teardown of Eron Gjoni's state of mind, exposing his abusive behavior.
- December 7: Ablegamers questions the transparency and motives of the charity and shies away from it. Instantly it comes under fire by Gamergate supporters and its site suffers from a DDoS attack.
- December 8: Gamergate organizer and game developer Slade "RogueStar" Villena spreads documents from the hack of Phil Fish's computer in an attempt to slander the Independent Games Festival.
- (Side note: Villena's own game lost an IGF award against Fish's game Fez.)
- December 9: Oliver Campbell compares opposing Gamergate to disowning a gay child.
- December 10: Milo Yiannopoulos publishes a hitpiece on programmer and journalist Shanley Kane who had dared to point out sexism in the tech industry. The article makes her a target for Gamergate in the process.
- December 11:
- Mercedes Carrera and The Fine Young Capitalists team up for "The Porn Charity".
- Allistair Pinsof defuses some of the accusations he made earlier and aims to prevent further harassment by Gamergate of the trans woman he outed.
- It is reported that James Desborough, a tabletop RPG author, mistook Randi Harper's bot account for a real person and argued with it. The same day, it is revealed that his new game #Gamergate: The Card Game has been removed from the tabletop RPG online retailer DriveThruRPG due to its controversial subject matter; this is the first time DriveThruRPG has removed any product under these circumstances.
- December 12: Oliver Campbell somehow equates Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech to the actions of Gamergate.
- December 13: The Gamergate Wikia entry on the ongoing Wikipedia edit war gets deleted by site admins as it singled out various Wikipedia editors which had dared to oppose Gamergate's efforts to distort the Wikipedia article. Jimmy Wales calls the Wikia article an attack page and thus draws the ire of Gamergate onto himself.
- December 17: Gamergaters create /r/WikiInAction to be angry about issues with Wikipedia. They also reference RationalWiki where we're always happy to have new fans.
- December 18:
- The FBI discloses that it has a "pending or prospective law enforcement proceedings" regarding Gamergate, but it does not disclose anything else.
- Jimmy Wales answers to an email by a Gamergate redditor and criticizes the mob. The mob turns on him very quickly.
- December 20:
- Jimmy Wales gets attacked by Gamergate on Twitter. Soon thereafter he gives up communicating with Gamergate.
- Popular Gamergate supporter Lizzy "lizzyf620" Finnegan gets to write an op-ed for MRA site A Voice For Men.
- December 21: Patreon updates its community guidelines, effectively banning 8chan from using the site to gather funds.
- December 22: Dan Olson exposes the child pornography abundant on 8chan. Gamergate attempts to blame Olson of spreading child pornography in order to defuse the severity of his accusations.
- December 23: Dan Olson gets doxxed.
- December 27: Margaret Pless talks about the harassment she received from Mike Cernovich after she unintentionally provided his home address (having thought it was a false address for his office).
- December 28: Camgirl "Princess Kora" starts her #BoobFreq series, dressing up as Anita Sarkeesian and performing sexual acts on herself. Gamergate goes all in. In the end, however, she doesn't make as much off of Gamergate as she hoped.
- December 29: Gamergate critic Chris Kluwe and Gamergate's "based lawyer" Mike Cernovich engage in a Youtube debate, one of the first direct discussion between a vocal proponent and a vocal critic of Gamergate
- December 30:
- [Date uncertain] Probable formation of /baphomet/ on 8chan, an "old-style raid" board, which claims independance from Gamergate, despite its founder openly embracing Gamergate. /baphomet/ almost exclusively targets Gamergate critics.
- (Side note: In February, a /baphomet/ mod would openly admit that "Gamergate is not completely uninvolved".)
- Due to the debate, Chris Kluwe gets doxxed on the newly founded /baphomet/ board.
- 8chan site owner Fredrick Brennan publishes an article in the neo-Nazi publication Daily Stormer.
- December 31:
- Gamergate critic and watchtog Sarah Nyberg (a.k.a. @srhbutts) is doxxed on 8chan's /gamergate/ board; this also includes the name she used prior to her gender transition.
- Jay Allen, vocal critic of Gamergate and analyst of the mob, is given space on BoingBoing to elaborate on a previous analysis of the connection between Gamergate's toxicity and "chan" culture.
- (Side note: Two more articles of his, also building up previous research, elaborate further on the "professional victimizers" of Gamergate and the origins of /baphomet/)
2015
January 2015
- January 1: Gamergate organizes a hitpiece on Sarah Nyberg for Encyclopedia Dramatica, which contains further libel. The libel is then spread across the mob by many supporters, including Milo Yiannopoulos.
- January 2: /baphomet/ picks up the dox of Sarah Nyberg and expands on it, in order to find more "trolling material".
- January 3:
- Game developer and Gamergate critic Israel Galvez gets doxxed by /baphomet/
- Former Gamergate supporter turned critic @pixelgoth gets almost swatted, after /baphomet/ was "bored". Fortunately, the police went to an old address of hers.
- January 6:
- During the 2015 International Consumer Electronics Show, Intel pledges $300 million to a campaign to increase diversity in technology. For this purpose, Intel intends to cooperate with both Anita Sarkeesian's Feminist Frequency organization and the International Game Developers Association. This is seen as a rebuke to Gamergate and the mob responds by an attempt to take over the #ces2015 hashtag.
- Reaxxion publishes an op-ed from an "Allan Quatermain"
titled "#Gamergate Is A Critical Battle In The War To Save Western Society".
- January 7: 8chan suffers from a DDoS attack and stays offline for about 3 days. Despite various accusations, the origin of the attack remains unknown.
- January 8:
- The Electronic Frontier Foundation condemns Gamergate as a "magnet for harassment".
- It is uncovered that the article submitted to Reaxxion by "Allan Quatermain" is a word-for-word reproduction of a John Birch Society propaganda advertisement from the 1960s with the phrases "John Birch Society" and "communist" replaced by "Gamergate" and "SJW", respectively.
- January 9:
- After he had already been doxxed before, Israel Galvez, gets threatened by imminent "swatting" during the night of January 9, but can prevent the worst. Due to the police investigation, the incident was not disclosed until January 13.
- David Draiman,
lead singer and songwriter of heavy metal band Disturbed,
comes out in support of Gamergate as he sees it as a throwback to the attempts at music censorship by the Parents Music Resource Center. Draiman, as a Jew, is told to look to Gamergate's primary discussions at 4chan/8chan's /pol/ "Politically Incorrect" boards to see the anti-semitism rampant amongst Gamergate but claims to see nothing.
- January 12:
- 8chan's domain gets seized for hosting child pornography. The site admin quickly finds a new registrar and reopens the site with another address.
- After 4 different persons report 8chan to its new hosting company Cloudflare, due to the child pornography on 8chan, Fredrick Brennan, 8chan site owner, doxxes them on Twitter
- Lizzy "lizzyf620" Finnegan gets to publish a community post on Buzzfeed.
- January 13:
- Gamergate rejects responsibility of swatting @pixelgoth and lays the blame on members of GNAA that operate within /baphomet/. @pixelgoth herself speculates about elements within Gamergate using "the anonymity of 8chan/Gamergate for personal vendettas".
- The Washington Post reporter Caitlin Dewey publishes an article about the child pornography on 8chan and its raid board. /baphomet/ doxxes her the same day.
- After The Fine Young Capitalists renewed the harassment of Veerender Jubbal at the turn of the year, Gamergate ramps it up by sending Jubbal obscene and racist material over Twitter.
- Tyler Wilde writes an op-ed for PC Gamer asking the video game community to drop the term "PC Master Race" from its vocabulary due to its Nazi connotations. Gamergate digs up that his girlfriend Anne Lewis works at Ubisoft as a communications associate and he had once reviewed Ubisoft games, but of course not while they were dating.
- January 14: /baphomet/ organizes a swatting of Ashley Lynch, whose crime is following anonymous Gamergate watchdog @Cernowatch on Twitter.
- January 15: Gamergate gets covered by ABC Nightline, featuring interviews with Anita Sarkeesian, Brianna Wu, and Tim Schafer. The segment strongly focuses on the victims of Gamergate's harassment. Due to vocal outrage by Gamergate, the comments of the segment quickly turn into the usual mudslinging against Gamergate's opponents. Comments on the corresponding YouTube video get shut down. The producer of the segment gets accused of conspiracy by Gamergate on Twitter.
- January 16:
- PC Gamer updates its disclosure policy due to Gamergate's digging on Tyler Wilde, officially forbidding him from covering Ubisoft products in the future. Gamergate also complains when Wilde deletes something from his personal Facebook account concerning Ubisoft, accusing him of censorship (when they want to censor him in the first place), but of course all his prior reviews are still up for anyone to see.
- Shanley Kane partly doxxes Milo Yiannopoulos by publishing his phone number; he files a police report against her. The situation escalates further as Gamergate comes to Yiannopoulos' "defense" and doxxes Kane and her entire family.
- January 17:
- Stephen "Boogie2988" Williams comes around. Although not condemning the mob, he "Boogie2988" Williams_most_harassment_is_bs_and_organizing/ speaks openly of the harassment he received himself and expresses his sympathies for other Gamergate targets.
- Dan Olson reveals that there were over 20 reports sent in to the RCMP's Integrated Child Exploitation Team due to his 8chan exposé. All charges are cleared as unfounded.
- January 19: Zoe Quinn and boyfriend Alex Lifschitz launch Crash Override Network, a resource and support network for victims of online harassment.
- January 20:
- Computer scientist Mark Bernstein writes the first of a series of essays regarding the treatment of Wikipedia editors trying to prevent Gamergaters from derailing several Wikipedia articles in Gamergate's favor. He specifically discusses the Arbitration Committee case where nearly all of the long-term Wikipedia editors acting against Gamergaters were all to be heavily censured by the original draft of the final decision while no Gamergaters were to be punished at all.
- Swatting victim Ashley Lynch clarifies the details of the event and summarizes the media response to the swatting incident.
- Shanley Kane responds in a brutally honest disclosure to the harassment that she received due to Milo Yiannopoulos' hit piece and harassment from Gamergate.
- January 21:
- Gamergate targets the only woman on Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee because of "bias"
- Feminist activist group "Destroy the joint" starts a joint effort to disinvite actor and pro-Gamergate activist Adam Baldwin from an Australian convention. A petition is started to achieve this goal.
- The Fine Young Capitalists announce the #NotYourShield Project art sale to have "artists in developing countries" create posters of people who posted in #NotYourShield. Their proposal mocks and directly quotes both Anita Sarkeesian and her collaborator Jonathan McIntosh, even seeing fit to twist Sarkeesian's statement to their own goals. A fun fact: they allow gender-based violence as submissions.
- January 22: Supporters of the petition against Adam Baldwin get doxxed, as Gamergate is furious about the move.
- January 23:
- For unknown reasons Lizzy "lizzyf620" Finnegan gets doxxed on /baphomet/ and instantly becomes a target for harassment, despite attempts to contain the information. In the process, she abandons Gamergate and deletes all of her social media accounts.
- Self-declared "Gamergate neutral" (read "definitely pro-Gamergate") news site TechRaptor runs an article on Zoe Quinn and Alex Lifschitz's Crash Override Network. The header image is of a bag of shekels spilling out on top of a torah. No anti-semitism there that's for sure.
- January 24: While the petition against Adam Baldwin makes headlines, Gamergate attempts to falsify a counter-petition.
- January 29:
- Self-proclaimed #NotYourShield creator Jason "@j_millerworks" Miller attempts to dox himself on 8chan's /baphomet/ board. He is called out by mods, but Gamergate quickly forgives him.
- Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee passes its judgement
in the ongoing edit war on the Gamergate article. Several Wikipedia editors who had resisted Gamergate's attempts to flood the article are banned or topic-banned, as well as several pro-Gamergate accounts. Gamergate celebrates by attempting to undo previously made changes by the banned editors and calls out for the banishment of more editors.
- January 30: "Jace Connors," who had already threatened Brianna Wu before, allegedly crashes his car on his way to confront her.
- January 31: A contributor to Know Your Meme whitewashes an entry on the "Daily Dose / Piccolo Dick" page, the meme associated with Gamergate's unofficial colors and their mascot Vivian James.
February 2015
- February 1: The owner of 8chan's /baphomet/ board is investigated by U.S. federal authorities, while still engaging in obstruction of justice, attempting to protect the perpetrators of the swatting of @pixelgoth.
- February 3:
- On Twitter a bot shows up, "naming and shaming" Gamergate supporters who voted for Brianna Wu's game "Revolution 60" on Steam Greenlight
- Pro-Gamergate journalist Alistair Pinsof shows up again, making several claims about corruption in gaming on pro-Gamergate site TechRaptor. Despite the attempt of Gamergate to spread this as news under the #PinsofInterview hashtag, Pinsof's claims are quickly debunked.
- February 7: Brianna Wu's life is threatened once again, this time by an associate of "Jace Connors".
- February 9:
- After watchdog @Cernowatch gets in touch with 8chan's site owner, about Social Security Numbers and other obviously illegal content on /baphomet/, the board gets wiped. Among the illegal content was personal information of more than 40 police officers and the social security number of the federal judge who presided over the Silk Road criminal case. Despite the wipe of /baphomet/, its illegal content remains online on other sites.
- Liana Kerzner writes the first of a five part article series critical of Anita Sarkeesian.
- Canadian Gamergater "Lunar Archivist" receives a response with regards to complaints he made to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission
(CRTC) for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's coverage of Gamergate in October 2014.
- February 11: NBC broadcasts Law & Order: SVU "Intimidation Game", an episode inspired by Gamergate and the harassment of its victims. While the reactions are mixed, yet Gamergate claims that the end of the show, depicting the retirement of a harassed, kidnapped, and gang-raped game developer from the gaming industry, is a victory for the mob. This "victory" lasts a day until they watch the whole episode and begin complaining that gamers were shown in an unfair light.
- February 12: /baphomet/'s repository on the hidden TOR network which hosted stolen information gets seized by the FBI, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Europol, and Eurojust.
- February 13:
- Milo Yiannopoulos declares in an article titled "The Wacky World of Wu: The Tortured History of GamerGate’s Self-Styled Feminist Martyr" that "GamerGate is not a 'transphobic' mob, as you may have been misled to believe." He then spends the rest of the article deconstructing Brianna Wu's gender identity in a creepy amount of detail, followed by a comments section which is full of transphobes.
- (Side note: The article is not linked here as its wingnuttery is off the charts.)
- Bob "MovieBob" Chipman announces he has been fired from The Escapist; Gamergate claims this is because on October 12, 2014, he got into an argument on Twitter where he was not sympathetic to a Gamergate supporter having been harassed. However, Chipman himself claims that it had nothing to do with GamerGate.
- Milo Yiannopoulos declares in an article titled "The Wacky World of Wu: The Tortured History of GamerGate’s Self-Styled Feminist Martyr" that "GamerGate is not a 'transphobic' mob, as you may have been misled to believe." He then spends the rest of the article deconstructing Brianna Wu's gender identity in a creepy amount of detail, followed by a comments section which is full of transphobes.
- February 15: Mercedes Carrera politicizes and weaponizes her support of another pornographic actress who was recently identified as the victim of a home invasion robbery and rape for Gamergate, by attacking Gamergate critics and Anita Sarkeesian in particular for perceived slights against sex workers. In talking with The Daily Dot, Carrera continues to attack Sarkeesian and Brianna Wu because they were only threatened with rape whereas the pornographic actress was actually raped, and goes on to accuse Sarkeesian and Wu of being professional victims.
- February 16: Disgraced MMO developer and former Red 5 CEO Mark Kern starts a petition blaming "a rift between gamers" on "the gaming press [...] accountable for conflagrating through a slew of articles that only served to fan the flames, celebrate the hate on both sides, magnify the rift and sensationalize the issue", while entirely ignoring any issues with Gamergate. Kern denies to be part of Gamergate, but wants to "contribute" to the mob.. The petition is welcomed by Gamergate and gets support by BioShock creator Ken Levine.
- February 20: Alexander Macris announces that Brandon Morse and Lizzy "lizzyf620" Finnegan have been hired as new writers at The Escapist.
- February 22: Alexander Macris announces that Liana Kerzner has been hired by The Escapist, as well.
- February 23: "Jace Connors" is revealed to be a persona created by Maine comedian Jan Rankowski, who claims to have acted as Connors to "satirize 'the over-the-top, super-hyper-macho armed GamerGater'". Rankowski had actually crashed his car, but ad-libbed the video where he threatened Brianna Wu. Rankowski claims to be suffering from harassment by Gamergaters, while Wu plans on taking him to court as he was one of the reasons her company pulled out of the gaming convention PAX East.
- February 24: @pixelgoth releases a conversation she had with Alexander Macris months prior in which he admits he plans on using his position at Defy Media (owners of The Escapist) to push his conservative and pro-Gamergate standpoint.
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 Daryush "Roosh V" Valizadeh is to blame. A week of hilarity ensues.
- March 4:
- Zoe Quinn speaks on a GDC panel discussing harassment on social media. She announces a partnership between her Crash Override Network and Randi Harper's non-profit Online Abuse Prevention Initiative.
- Tim Schafer speaks at the GDC Awards ceremony, taking a jab at Gamergate by using a literal sockpuppet to talk about Gamergate his behalf. Because he references #NotYourShield in the bit, Gamergate claims he's racist and sexist for doing so and starts #SayItToMyFaceTim as a hashtag, referencing yet another ancient meme.
- (Side note: The full bit can be viewed here)
- 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 realizes he is being noticed by critics of Gamergate, he claims he is "neutral" on the situation. Multiple tweets promoting Gamergate are found in his timeline and it is discovered that his account was previously suspended for harassing Jonathan McIntosh, the co-writer of Feminist Frequency.
- Jason "@j_millerworks" Miller tweets a terrorist threat to PAX East; he later claims he was drunk.
- Mark Kern revives his "League For Gamers" to serve as an alternative to the International Game Developer's Association. It was originally created in 2012 as a video game lobbying group in response to the Entertainment Software Association's support of the Stop Online Piracy Act.
- March 8: Sam Smith (a.k.a "Matthew Hopkins", a.k.a. "Vordrak") proposes a crowdfunding campaign to help him develop a Twitter bot that spams Twitter's abuse report system and sends messages to people who have already blocked others. Needless to say, this violates Twitter's terms of service and various moral lines. He later backpedals and says it was a parody.
- 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. She touches on how Gamergate dug far back enough to find her birth name by means of her parents' obituaries and when they could not find anything against her otherwise, began to spread false rumors instead.
- 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 Auto Blocker, 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 Auto Blocker 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 Good Game Auto Blocker unless he is removed.
- March 20: Ars Technica interviews Fredrick "Hotwheels" Brennan about owning 8chan. The interview is heavily panned by Gamergate's victims and critics as being a massive puff piece, and it is revealed that Ars Technica edited old articles on 8chan to be more sympathetic, several more hard-hitting questions were cut out of the final article, and Ars only agreed to interview him so long as previous dox of a reporter was removed from 8chan. Days later, Ars Technica would publish their interview with Zoe Quinn and Alex Lifschitz, who both expressed displeasure with Brennan's interview as well as the fact it is hyperlinked to theirs. Interviewer Sam Machkovech is doxxed by /baphomet/ soon after for not being as lenient as he could have been when discussing them.
- 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 Carl "Sargon of Akkad" Benjamin. Dawkins ultimately decides to remain "ignorant" of what Gamergate really is, but remains indignant over alleged libel.
- March 23: Intel tweets support of GaymerX; Gamergate gets upset.
- March 24:
- The moderator of 8chan's /gamergate/ board reveals he had been doxxed by Ethan "TheRalphRetort" Ralph and ceases supporting the mob after the board is hacked. 8chan's Gamergater 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' 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 28: Mark Kern's video gamer's lobby turned consumer advocacy group League For Gamers announces that they have added a tool to their website that allows people to see if they're blocked by either Randi Harper's Good Game Auto Blocker or the Atheism Plus Block Bot. What does this have to do with video game consumers' advocacy? Why is there so much crossover between a block list that sees if someone follows multiple Gamergate figureheads and a block list curated to prevent interaction with assholish people in the atheist and skeptic communities? How many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop? The world may never know.
- 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 U.S. 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 Crash Override Network—which is free and not asking for donations—is a scam.
- April 2:
- David Draiman comments on his recent feud with Trevor Noah,
Jon Stewart's heir-apparent as host of The Daily Show. Draiman considered Noah's older tweets anti-Semitic, and sought out support from his Gamergate followers to take a stand against anti-Semitism. Instead, he was met with a flood of anti-Semitic jokes, and ended up blocking more than 250 followers as a result.
- 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.
- David Draiman comments on his recent feud with Trevor Noah,
- April 4: The Hugo Awards
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); [Gawker.com: archive.is, web.archive.org Gamergate supporter "Daddy Warpig" actively recruits people in Gamergate] to "humble SJW in Sci-Fi, too". The following week, George R. R. Martin
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
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
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 goes to a board game parlor in Columbus, Ohio, and later discovers that a collaborator of TheAmazingAtheist known as Ben 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
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: It is discovered that contributors to A Voice For Men's official feMRA podcast Honey Badger Radio had operated a vendor's booth at the Calgary Comic & Entertainment Expo, selling Gamergate posters, and had disrupted a panel on women in comics the night before. The group, who entered under the false name "Honey Badger Brigade", are asked to leave the convention center and not participate in future events. It is also discovered that they had crowdfunded their entrance fees into the event for the sole purpose of disrupting it. The group appeals to Gamergate with cries of censorship and misogyny (because they are women [well two of them are]) and #ExpoGate is born. The group begins to crowdfund a "legal fund" to sue Calgary Expo for damages.
- 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.
- April 24: Brianna Wu speaks at RavenCon in Richmond, Virginia, and Ethan "TheRalphRetort" Ralph states his intention to attend and "interview" her. RavenCon announces they will step up security in response to his essential threat. He shows up anyway at her panel to raise shit and be kicked out. Wu and event security fulfill his wish. Gamergate does things in response, as usual.
- April 25: Denver Comic Con states the Gamergate logo falls under its "no hateful symbols" rule when asked on Twitter. They later reverse that position after Gamergaters get angry.
- April 28: Boston Magazine publishes "Game of Fear", describing the genesis of Gamergate. It features interviews with Zoe Quinn and Eron Gjoni, among others, with both telling the events that led up to Gjoni's post and the initial wave of harassment against Quinn. As a result of the article, Michael Dorn of Star Trek fame comes out in support of Quinn.
- April 29: Someone in Gamergate decides that their boycott should extend to The New York Times due to its negative coverage of the mob.
- April 30: S. Rachel Martin updates her blog post "GamerGate Launched in My Apartment, and, Internet, I’m Sorry. (Not that sorry.)" in response to the Boston Magazine story to say, "I regret what I’ve done and left undone contributing to attacks on those affected by the events following the publication of [The Zoe Post]. I maintain my hopes that women in games and all fields are able to keep doing what they love and that the actions against them STOP." (emphasis hers).
May 2015
- May 1: A group of D.C. area Gamergaters, apparently organized by Milo Yiannopoulos and Christina Hoff Sommers, go to a local restaurant for what is dubbed #GGinDC; also in attendance is Lizzy "lizzyf620" Finnegan. Arthur Chu contacts the bar on Twitter, warning it that Gamergate is a hate mob and is organizing there, leading to predictable indignation. Sometime after this, a bomb threat is called into the bar, leading to an evacuation, although the DC police do not confirm anything to Kotaku reporters. Gamergaters predictably blame SJWs/feminists without evidence, while Slade "RogueStar" Villena decides to implicate Chu. Meanwhile, Mark Kern makes a tasteless joke about "professional victimhood".
- (Side note: Months later, Arthur Chu remarks that he had heard the threat to this meet up was planned on 8chan.)
- May 2: The German antinazi website Netz Gegen Nazis (Internet against Nazis) publishes an article which refers to gamergate as an example of a far-right hate group. To this very day the site takes interest in publicizing pieces where German people express interest to fight against the harassment present in gaming culture.
- May 4:
- Joss Whedon
closes his Twitter account after the new Avengers movie opens in theaters. Gamergaters believe it is because he was "bullied" off Twitter by feminists who criticized the portrayal of the character Black Widow. Whedon attempts to set the record straight in a BuzzFeed interview by saying he left Twitter to focus on his writing. He adds that blaming "militant feminists" is "horseshit". The Gamergaters on Reddit go full tinfoil hat.
- Society of Professional Journalists regional director Michael Koretzky gives Gamergate the time of day after their disruption of the #SPJEthicsWeek hashtag, apparently believing in their claims about being about "ethics in video game journalism". Gamergate seemingly ignores his own issues with ethics in journalism and his background. He plans to hold a debate for both sides dubbed "AirPlay".
- Joss Whedon
- May 8: After soliciting advice from /r/KotakuInAction when his previous pro-bono attorney went missing, Eron Gjoni has determined that he will appeal the restraining order placed against him. Unfortunately for him, $10,000 is required to retain the necessary legal counsel. A further appeal is made to /r/KotakuInAction for funding.
- May 11:
- Michael Koretzky announces his committee for choosing representatives for the "AirPlay" debate, currently scheduled for August 15, 2015. The committee members are Allum Bokhari, a Breitbart contributor and Gamergate supporter; Dave Rickey, a game designer who supports Gamergate; "John Smith", a 19-year-old 4channer (admin of a rival site 38chan) who describes the "SJW Wars" in his bio; and William Usher, the man responsible for leaking the GameJournoPros list. Koretzky apparently reached out to a woman to be on the committee, but she unsurprisingly declined the offer. Jay Allen heavily critiques Koretzky's ethics, saying that journalists are supposed to minimize harm. This leads to Usher asking him if he wants to be on the panel and revealing his shortlist. Allen points out that the people on the "anti-Gamergate" list wouldn't want to be within 300 miles of a Gator let alone the same room, and the "neutrals"—Allistair Pinsof, Erik Kain (wrote several blog posts about the mob for Forbes), Derek Smart (a game dev known for causing one of the largest flame wars in Usenet history), and Alexander Macris (The Escapist)—all lean in Gamergate's favor.
- Gamergate loses the support of Japanese game developers Roninworks due to harassment by Slade "RogueStar" Villena and Margaret "@_icze4r" Gel, a member of the so-called "Gamergate Harassment Patrol".
- May 12: Brianna Wu's personal cellphone number is posted to 8chan's /baphomet/, /r/KotakuInAction, Twitter, and Japanese image board 2chan, resulting in several threatening phone calls. Additionally, she finds that several hundred dollars of fraudulent purchases were made with her credit card on the Steam video game platform; Randi Harper also reports having a fraudulent purchase made with one of her credit cards through Steam.
- May 13: Gamergate gains the support of Denis Dyack, another video game developer with a sordid past in the industry and an axe to grind for Kotaku.
- May 15: The Gamergaters at /r/KotakuInAction grasp at the biggest straw ever by accusing that /r/GamerGhazi "is named after an event where a gamer was murdered by terrorists. The real kind." Somehow instead of associating their name with the conservative conspiracy theories that came about as a result of the 2012 Benghazi attack, they chose to associate it with Sean Smith,
an American diplomat killed in the attack who just happened to be a well-known player of Eve Online and a Goon at Something Awful.
- May 16: Michael Koretzky's AirPlay panelists are chosen, and what a great crop of people: Milo Yiannopoulos, Brad Wardell, Cathy Young of Reason, Christina Hoff Sommers, Oliver Campbell, illustrator Mark Ceb, William Usher, and indie game dev Jennifer Dawe. Still no word on "neutrals" or "anti-Gamergate" representatives, obviously.
- May 18: Eron Gjoni is banned from all of Reddit, as he has violated the site's self-promotion rules in posting links to his donation fund to fight against the restraining order. After furore from Gamergaters, Gjoni is able to get the ban overturned. Throughout the ordeal, Gjoni has been given $15k, all for the sole purpose of being allowed to harass Zoe Quinn, again; meanwhile, his personal Patreon account earns him less than $50 a month.
- May 20: Brianna Wu releases a threatening phone call she received after her phone number was doxxed, mentioning Ron O'Brien, the prosecuting attorney for Franklin County, Ohio, in her op-ed for The Mary Sue as someone who could solve her problem with the threatening calls from Columbus, Ohio. However, there was a mix-up with how the case was handled by Wu's staff, as she later clarified in talking to the Columbus Biz Insider; her information had been sent to the Columbus City Attorney's office rather than the Franklin County Attorney's office, and she apologized for the mix-up from her end, and later had a conversation with O'Brien on the matter. However, Breitbart London still published an article saying she had lied about the situation without bothering to include any of the actual facts while citing Columbus Biz Insider in the hitpiece.
- May 24: Charles C. Johnson, an extremely right wing "journalist" [Gawker.com: archive.is, web.archive.org who was so thoroughly hated by his college classmates that they spread a rumor that he took a shit on the floor in their dormitory], is banned from Twitter after he threatens Ferguson and Baltimore activist DeRay McKesson. This makes it the sixth time he's been banned from the service. Because of his shining record of journalistic excellence (and at one point supporting Gamergate), Gamergate figureheads try to rally the group behind him.
June 2015
- June 1: Gamergate rallies behind novelist Anne Rice
and the blog Stop the Goodreads Bullies after STGRB posts Randi Harper's Amazon.com review where she calls out Vivek Wadhwa, a dispute that predates Gamergate. The followup post on STGRB is full of Gamergate-related screenshots and tweets. Harper reports receiving threatening emails from Anne Rice fans dogpiling her on top of Gamergaters.
- June 3-6: The Canadian Game Studies Association's 2015 conference has extensive efforts put in place to prevent Gamergate from disrupting online discussion of the event, as has happened over and over in the past. Attendee Natalie Zina (Zed) Walschots who expressed displeasure with how events unfolded decides to come up with the joke hashtag #DeathEaters, referencing the Harry Potter novels, to allow attendees to discuss a Gamergate panel and Gamergate in general. This works until the final day when one attendee uses "Gamergate" in a tweet, and is public for 10 minutes until it is taken down. By June 6, Walschots is Gamergate's newest target, as they tracked down the use of #DeathEaters to her, and they begin to assail her university to disqualify her planned PhD on Gamergate under the usual baseless conjecture.
- June 9: The Australian Communications and Media Authority announces its findings with regards to complaints about ABC's 7:30 news feature on Gamergate. There were no breaches of ethics on behalf of the broadcaster, throwing out the complaints of a lack of due impartiality and a lack of diversity of perspectives. The ACMA specifically stated, "Impartiality does not require that every perspective receives equal time, or that every facet of every issue is presented," and also pointed out the program said other facets existed, and the production team went above and beyond in their attempts to find someone "pro-Gamergate" to speak with and found no one.
- June 10: Reddit announces the banning of several subreddits that were used for harassment only. While /r/TumblrInAction and /r/KotakuInAction are unscathed, somehow the shuttering of /r/FatPeopleHate brings out the usual Gamergate related crowd.
- June 11: Reddit competitor/clone Voat begins to buckle under the increased server strain as a result of the exodus from Reddit, with the new user base trying to rally for Bitcoin payment to help. Voat is now favored by Gamergaters, pedophiles, and neo-Nazis for some reason.
- June 12: Gamergate decides to rally behind Hulk Hogan
because of his pending lawsuit against Gawker Media for having hosted his sex tape. This again has nothing to do with ethics in video game journalism but simply Gamergate's irrational hatred of Kotaku.
- June 16: A memorandum (page 18) from the Society of Professional Journalists' president Dana Neuts discusses #SPJEthicsWeek and Gamergate's disruption of the hashtag, and the statement that they chose no to engage with the Gamergaters. The memo also brings up the SPJ's decision to ban Michael Koretzky from using the SPJ logo for his AirPlay website, where a nearly unanimous vote (one member voted in favor of use, and that member was not Koretzky) decided to keep the ban in place.
- June 17:
- The Honey Badger
RadioBrigade finally announces they've hired legal counsel for their totally legitimate case against the Calgary Comic & Entertainment Expo: unlicensed Canadian lawyer Harry Kopytowho was permanently disbarred in 1989 for overbilling Legal Aid.
- Gamergaters claim that "SWJs" raged (because a few hundred people going "ugh" is raging, now) against the use of the tagline "Mechanical Apartheid" in the new Deus Ex: Mankind Divided promo. Someone, presumably the person whom made the tagline, makes vague complaints about "SJWs" on Reddit and provides no evidence for anything he says. This spurs Mark Kern to announce he's now a supporter of Gamergate. Mark's support surprises no one except Gamergaters.
- Gamergaters get angry at Anita Sarkeesian for criticizing their waifu on the E3 guest badge.
- Someone at 8chan thinks its a smart idea to stalk Jonathan McIntosh at E3 and then mock him for having an expensive backpack. Turns out it's not even his.
- A dispute between TechRaptor and rival pro-Gamergate video game site GamesNosh over the latter copying the former's "ethics" policy reveals that TechRaptor staff punished and censored a staff writer who (rightfully) deduced Gamergate was dead (when it comes to "ethics in video game journalism") and had turned into an SJW witch hunt (it was like that from the start) when Gamergaters generally didn't give a shit about this turn of events.
- The Honey Badger
- June 18: Multiple people report seeing posters featuring attacks on Anita Sarkeesian, Jonathan McIntosh, Kotaku with "Gamergate" repeatedly printed on them outside the Los Angeles Convention Center as E3 is underway. This is more proof that Gamergate (despite its claim that it has nothing with feminists) has all to do with anti-feminism, with "Gamergate" as an imprinted watermark for Anita Sarkeesian's posters [1]. They also twist famous memes such as the "All Your Base Are Belong To Us" into the anti-Sarkeesian poster reads "All your tropes are belong to us". A so-called "right-wing graffiti artist collective" that apparently has no ties to Gamergate is fingered as responsible.
- June 19: Voat announces their German hosting service, Host Europe, has shut down their servers due to "political incorrect" content, and you should send donations. Their website goes down for several days.
- June 21: The week's Last Week Tonight with John Oliver focuses on Internet harassment. Clips of Anita Sarkeesian and Brianna Wu speaking on Nightline are used, before Oliver discusses the issues regarding the ineptitude of the legal system with regards to the Internet as well as revenge porn, with the latter being the main focus. Despite never mentioning Gamergate once and only focusing on Sarkeesian and Wu for about 17 seconds, threads on /r/KotakuInAction spring up trying to either spin Oliver's words in their favor or declaring they are cancelling their HBO subscriptions.
- June 22: Host Europe releases a statement regarding their shutdown of Voat's server, although they do not mention Voat by name. They deny that the server shutdown was over "politically incorrect content", and instead state that they draw the line when laws are broken and when they have a moral obligation for the safety of others. They described Voat as such: "The site in questions was publicizing incitement of people, as well as abusive, insulting and youth-endangering content." Or in German as the English is a bit wonky, "Im angesprochenen Forum wurden offensichtlich volksverhetzende, beleidigende, bloßstellende und jugendgefährdende Inhalte zur Verfügung gestellt, von denen wir uns explizit distanzieren möchten." Basically, everything /r/FatPeopleHate and /r/Jailbait were shut down for.
- June 23:
- Gamergate talking head MundaneMatt decides his prospective audience isn't big enough and branches out into the lucrative market of racist Southerners by bemoaning the fact several retailers have voluntarily stopped selling products bearing the Battle Flag of the Confederate States of America. As more stores ban sale of the Battle Flag, Gamergate co-opts it as a new symbol; Gamergaters are even using it in the #NotYourShield tag.
- Mark Kern has an AMA on /r/KotakuInAction where he theorizes that other video game developers oppose Gamergate don't understand what it's really about or they do understand and they're pussywhipped by their wives. Game developer Damion Schubert isn't so sure about that.
- Voat announces they've banned several subverses (their version of subreddits) due to pressure from their hosting services and PayPal. These boards are /v/DoxBin, /v/Jailbait, /v/TrueJailbait, and /v/TheFappening.
- June 25: Several tech and gaming websites (International Business Times, Polygon, MCV, Destructoid) discuss the discovery of a joke at Gamergate's expense in Batman: Arkham Knight:
“”"Y do u attack B@tman? He is BASED! U r a fa-"
Riddler deleted the email, and all the others like it, as prickly hot anger and shame squired through his insides. No point denying it: #CrusaderGate had been a disastrous social media campaign. He couldn’t understand it. It seemed the internet's idiotic and easily roused rabble could froth itself into a full-fat cappuccino of frenzy over 'white knights'. But offer it up a Dark one - on a plate! - and you get a soy latte's worth of indignation at best! Didn't they understand what Batman had done? |
- June 26:
- Gamergate attempts to sway children's author Judy Blume
to their cause because she said something negative about trigger warnings, which to Gamergate means she's already on their side.
- "Lunar Archivist" is still sending reports to the CRTC.
- Margaret Pless raises issues of Allum Bokhari's original involvement in the #BurgersAndFries IRC channel, where he tried to rally the group into disrupting gaming convention PAX Prime.
- Gamergate attempts to sway children's author Judy Blume
- June 28: Jason "@j_millerworks" Miller releases several Gamergate-themed books onto Amazon.com. He has priced his 50 page e-book Beyond GamerGate: a PR Crisis Strategy Guide at US$10, while Sh* t SJWs Say: The picturebook of the perpetually offended (a collection of Twitter and Tumblr screencaps no doubt) is a much more affordable US$3.
July 2015
- July 2: GamerGate discovers an alleged tool that combs an ISIS blocklist for Twitter usernames, and they're elated when they find their members on the list, allowing them to tenuously link "anti-Gamergate" to ISIS. It seems no other "resistance sites" link to this one, which is hosted in Arizona by GoDaddy.
- July 3: /r/GamerGhazi goes dark for several hours in solidarity with the other subreddits messed around by Reddit's corporate incompetence (they open again when it's clear their action has been co-opted by the FPH diaspora). /r/KotakuInAction remains open for business throughout to discuss and document the blackout.
- July 4:
- Jordan Owen announces the premiere of The Sarkeesian Effect, to be at a Gamergate meetup in Atlanta on July 31st! However, he and Davis Aurini have broken up, again. Aurini announces a new crowdfunding effort for post-production on the film, without Owen's name on it; Owen advises supporters not to give it any money, Aurini comes back again ...
- Kendra "HOTEL" McHale, a former Gamergater who helped organize a meetup in Victoria, British Columbia, explains how she realized how bullshit the mob was and why she left after becoming a victim to its harassment. She points out how complicit Gamergate is in harassment (calling it out is either stifling free speech or uncovering No True Scotsman), how Gamergate is a crank magnet for conspiracy theorists (primarily the cultural Marxism camp), and how appalled she was that Gamergate was being praised by A Voice for Men contributor Alison Tieman for accomplishing anti-feminism goals in less than a year, when Tieman and other AVFM people had been trying for over a decade. She terms her realization of the bullshit as "vomiting up the red pill".
- Gamergate's Norwegian contingent comes out in full force in the article's comments section because of McHale's reference to Anders Behring Breivik.
- Carl "Sargon of Akkad" Benjamin quickly tries to deny everything McHale said and even denies McHale even exists, despite complaints from people in the GGinBC Skype chat that McHale was one of their associates.
- July 5: /r/KotakuInAction only now discovers the results of the Australian Communications and Media Authority's investigation into ABC's 7:30, clearing the news program of any complaints against ethical breaches, and are outraged.
- July 6: Derek Smart tries to rope Gamergate into his campaign against Star Citizen, a video game he crowdfunded that he has accused of being vaporware despite multiple updates about the development process. Over the next several months, Smart digs an even deeper hole through multiple attempts at litigation against the developers, who have chosen not to directly engage him because they know he never actually tested their product as he claims and used a fake address when receiving the refund they gave him in order to remain ligitious. They also say that his history of not being able to publish a functioning or successful video game himself negates anything he has to say about their own beleaguered development on this multi-million dollar project.
- July 9: Gamergaters on /r/KotakuInAction (including the subreddit's moderators) spam requests to /r/RedditRequest, a subreddit where people can take over abandoned subreddits, to take control of subreddits for names of gaming websites, arguing that the acquisition of /r/GamerGate (now /r/GamerGhazi) justifies their actions. As of writing, /r/polygon and /r/kotaku have been snatched up by Gamergaters; requests exist for /r/ign, /r/jezebel, /r/gamespot, /r/salon, and /r/rockpapershotgun.
- July 12: Following the announcement of the death of Nintendo president and CEO Satoru Iwata,
Gamergaters tastelessly use it as a weapon against Anita Sarkeesian by producing a fake set of tweets credited to her and distributing them in their circles, knowing full well it was faked. A second fake tweet is attributed to Polygon allegedly mixing up Iwata with Nintendo game developer Shigeru Miyamoto,
later revealed to have been made by someone who runs an alleged rival website to Polygon. For once, /r/KotakuInAction users urge people not to distribute the false information, but the conspiracies still fly.
- July 13:
- Michael Koretzky announces the details of the AirPlay panel, including allocating 15 minutes to define Gamergate (a huge time in real-time media), and coming to the realization that no one representing "anti-GamerGate" will come near this shit show.
- Ashe Schow, a contributor to the right wing newspaper The Washington Examiner (where all she seems to write about is campus rape and rape denialism), is added as a speaker at AirPlay at the request of her friend Allum Bokhari. She has never written about Gamergate before and has no video game experience. Even Gamergaters don't like how she's been added as a panelist, as no one voted for her to be a representative; nor did they vote for Bokhari who previously was a committee member to pick the panelists in the first place.
- July 14: Michael Koretzky realizes the mess he's involved in after Oliver Campbell and Mark Ceb vociferously object to getting only 15 minutes to define Gamergate (before Koretzky realized no one "anti-GG" or "neutral" would show, he dedicated an hour, so each group could have its say), forcing him into an hour-long call that ate into his family time. During this call, Campbell revealed to Koretzky that he had been shown Koretzky's blog updates before they were posted. Koretzky only showed these to SPJ members and the Gamergater AirPlay committee members, which means one of the Gamergaters (later identified as "John Smith") had leaked the information to Campbell and others despite Koretzky's requests to keep things confidential. Ethics.
- July 15:
- Davis Aurini releases 40 minutes of his "rough cut" of The Sarkeesian Effect. And thirty minutes' ranting about Jordan Owen.
- Oliver Campbell pulls out of AirPlay. Michael Koretzky gets a bit terse.
- Of note is Eron Gjoni of all people calling the previous update with regards to Oliver Campbell's behavior a "call-out".
- The Honey Badger
RadioBrigade puts up their legal draft against the Calgary Expo (archive), prepared by their disbarred lawyer. (/r/GamerGhazi analysis. The claim is ... audacious.) - Following a Paris Gamergate meetup, Le Monde describes Milo Yiannopoulos, Mike Cernovich, and Theodore Beale (Vox Day) as "three ideologues trying to hijack Gamergate for their own benefit" ("Trois idéologues arrivés en cours de route, et tentant de détourner le mouvement à leur profit.").
- John "TotalBiscuit" Bain starts a Steam game curation group called "The Framerate Police". Its only purpose appears to be to identify video games that do not run at 60 fps.
- July 17:
- The Internet as a whole condemns Gawker for the publication of an article allegedly outing a major executive as gay. Gamergate shows up to lay claim to being against Gawker from the beginning, when it's simply an extension of their hatred for Kotaku and feminist affiliate Jezebel. Despite what they think, being on the right side of an event for the first time in 11 months doesn't mean shit when it comes to the whole of their behavior.
- A new study is released correlating male gamers' sexist attitudes towards women with their decreasing scores in games.
- The developers of Guild of Dungeoneering block John "TotalBiscuit" Bain's "Framerate Police" curation group from curating their game. The lead game dev reports being threatened for having blocked FRP and the group is unblocked.
- After GOG.com promotes a sale for games picked by John "TotalBiscuit" Bain, Rowan Kaiser, a regular contributor at The A.V. Club and Joystiq, discusses how Bain is a serial harasser (even before Gamergate when he used his Twitter followers to vote brigade on his behalf) and that no gaming company should use him as a spokesman. Over the next few days, Gamergaters descend upon him, forcing him to close off his Twitter account while Gamergaters conspire to report him to his superiors because he's insulting a cancer survivor (#NotYourShield, am I right?) and once mockingly called Bain "Tuberculosis".
- July 18: Sam Smith (a.k.a "Matthew Hopkins", a.k.a. "Vordrak") dives headfirst into the morass at Wikipedia in order to get Mark Bernstein banned. He is soon banned himself. He writes a blog entry detailing the events of his ban, as well as the fact he started up a subreddit for the sole purpose of disrupting Wikipedia in Gamergate's favor and started threads asking for ways to link Wikipedia to pedophilia. His blog entry also blames Wikipedia administrator Gamaliel for his ban; in fact, Floquenbeam is responsible for instituting the ban.
- July 19: Rather than apologize for the actions of his rabid fanboys, John "TotalBiscuit" Bain instead denies everything Rowan Kaiser said about him and instead blames Kaiser for the harassment he gets for being dehumanized. Bain only denies the Gamergate involvement because he never directly linked to the original Five Guys videos by MundaneMatt and Internet Aristocrat; he only namedropped Internet Aristocrat and directed his legion of fans to IA's channel to see MundaneMatt's video which had been taken down as a result of a DMCA claim which he bemoaned that it happened.
- July 20: Michael Koretzky announces that Derek Smart will be joining the AirPlay speakers, representing a "neutral" stance on the subject, despite his prior attempts at using Gamergate to attack Star Citizen.
- July 21: A blogger points out the hypocrisy within Gamergate by showing how Ethan "TheRalphRetort" Ralph does everything that Gamergate claims to be against when attributed to their targets. Gamergaters at /r/KotakuInAction respond by saying they shouldn't police others blogs, showing even more hypocrisy as that's exactly what they do to their targets.
- July 23: Variloh, hardline Gamergater, discovers that Carl "Sargon of Akkad" Benjamin had used Kickstarter to defraud people and his close friends by raising money for a game they never released, and dissolving the private company the game was to be released by without notifying the other collaborators.
- July 24: Caroline Sinders discusses how Gamergate SWATed her mother after she began to investigate how to improve user experience on Twitter by examining how Gamergate operates.
- July 26: Know Your Meme moderators (yes, really) temporarily shut down the comments section on the Gamergate page there, recognizing how it has been used to abuse the system locally. A commentator on /r/GamerGhazi states that the website's moderation team is mostly against Gamergate, and are hated by the Gamergaters using the page.
- July 28: In a series of tweets, Milo Yiannopoulos details the reasons he has become involved in Gamergate: to use Gamergaters as pawns in the culture war against progressives.
- July 31: Jordan Owen's version of The Sarkeesian Effect "premieres" at a Gamergate meetup in Atlanta. Total audience: nine people, including Owen. Davis Aurini is not happy.
August 2015
- August 1:
- Jesse Singal, writing for The Boston Globe, discusses his latest foray into /r/KotakuInAction, where he hypothesized that Gamergate had lost steam since Sam Biddle's tweets. They disagreed. He reiterates his stance from October where he states Gamergate's decentralized nature will be its undoing, with regards to long-term relevance at least, and refutes that this is because of unfair coverage in journalism when capital A Anonymous, which is structured in practically the same way, seems to maintain mainstream relevance.
- Gamergaters on /r/KotakuInAction celebrate the retirement of Independent Games Festival chairman Brandon Boyer; they forget to mention he's retiring because he is undergoing treatment for cancer.
- August 2: Christina Hoff Sommers is interviewed by William Kristol. Gamergate is discussed. Before the interview is posted, /r/KotakuInAction is mixed as to whether or not having one of the most well-known neocons and the man known in right wing circles as "The Guy Who's Wrong About Everything" in on Gamergate is a good thing; most know this proves their detractors right about them being a right-wing hate mob, while others think this will be beneficial for their campaign on Wikipedia for whatever reason and ignore those who say that Kristol is one of the worst journalists ever.
- Bob "MovieBob" Chipman provides his opinion on Kristol.
- August 3: Eron Gjoni informs /r/KotakuInAction that he is appealing his restraining order to the Massachusetts State Supreme Court. Aaron Caplan, a professor of law at Loyola, and Eugene Volokh
of The Volokh Conspiracy
fame have both filed amici curiae in Gjoni's favor.
- August 4:
- Daryush "Roosh V" Valizadeh's "gaming news" website Reaxxion closes due to lack of interest.
- Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian summarise events.
- August 6: /r/KotakuInAction has a thread about alleged "collusion" between Cory Doctorow and John Scalzi. Scalzi responds.
- August 8: Siobhan Thompson, a writer at College Humor posts two tweets mocking Gamergate. /r/KotakuInAction has a conniption, goes digging for undisclosed affiliate links and decides to collectively report College Humor to the FTC. Anticipated results:
- August 10: Michael Koretzky claims that there have been attempts to stop AirPlay; he also claims that "a former international boxing champion" will be part of the event's security detail.
- (Side note: One of the so-called attempts to stop AirPlay was Margaret Pless trying to write a story about him.)
- August 11:
- Al Jazeera America publishes an op-ed by Megan Condis in which she denounces Gamergate's various instances of hypocrisy when it comes to attacking progressive voices. She cites their defense of a "free market" to decide what goes in video games while decrying how Anita Sarkeesian's Kickstarter was successful enough that she should be allowed to create what she wants without their interference as well as their claims they stand for game creators' freedom of expression while attacking game creators who they don't like, such as Zoe Quinn and Depression Quest.
- Felicia Day's memoir You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost) is released, and she discusses what happened to her with regards to Gamergate. In 2013, a group of posters on 4chan doxxed her, which led to a stalker make his way into her own home. She includes a tweet from when she spoke up against Gamergate in October:
@feliciaday Felicia could have supported #gamergate and became a hero. But she took the SJW shill route and paid the price.
Gamergaters bombard her book's Amazon.com page with bogus bad reviews. Someone better tell Anne Rice and the STGRB crowd.
- Gamergate turns on Margaret "@_icze4r" Gel when she criticizes how she has been treated from within the mob, in particular how Gamergaters wanted to use her being SWATed to suit their narrative.
- August 12: Google delists 8chan from its search engines for "suspected child abuse content". 8chan blames /r/GamerGhazi; /r/KotakuInAction blames Dan Olson and Sarah Nyberg. There remains no evidence the child porn on 8chan was put there by anyone other than its regular users.
- August 13:
- /r/KotakuInAction cries censorship over a moderator of /r/books deleting a thread they started about Anne Rice, leading to moderators being threatened.
- The Seattle Times profiles Zoe Quinn one year after Gamergate began, and speaks to Kate Edwards, executive director of the International Games Developer Association and former game developer for Microsoft where she worked on Halo; Alyssa Jones, game producer at Microsoft and organizer of GeekGirlCon; Kim Swift, game designer at Amazon Game Studios who previously worked on Portal; and students at the DigiPen Institute of Technology.
- August 14: The originally planned release date for Afterlife Empire, the game funded by 4channers-cum-Gamergaters through The Fine Young Capitalists to give themselves good PR for superficially supporting a so-called "feminist" cause. However, hours before its intended release, TFYC says they're delaying it to work on bugs reported to them by their early-access key backers.
- August 15:
- The SPJ AirPlay event is held in Miami, organized by Society of Professional Journalists Regional Director Michael Koretzky. Unlike the premiere of The Sarkeesian Effect, the attending audience is in the double digits.
- The morning panel, featuring Allum Bokhari, Mark Ceb, and Ashe Schow, discusses five instances of unethical video game journalism within the past 5 years. The first two both concern Patricia Hernandez, a woman discovered to be friends with Zoe Quinn through Gamergate's digging; the first so-called lapse is an opinion piece she wrote, and the second is not disclosing her friendships with Anna Anthropy, Christine Love, or Zoe Quinn when writing articles that mentioned them or their work (even when those articles resembled nothing like a review). The third is about Jeff Gerstmann's firing from GameSpot for writing a negative review of a video game heavily advertised on the website. It's too bad that all of these happened before Gamergate was ever a thing and were only discovered because of Gamergate's hatred for Quinn, or fell way outside Gamergate's 5-year historical limit. They run out of time before getting to the next two points.
- While this goes on, the YouTube live stream's comment section is flooded with ASCII swastikas, racial epithets, and at some point Koretzky and other panelists are doxxed.
- Derek Smart, who is supposed to represent a "neutral" stance, is reported as saying this is a victory against SJWs.
- After lunch, the afternoon panel featuring Milo Yiannopoulos, Christina Hoff Sommers, and Cathy Young is set to start and discuss how the media should cover Gamergate and controversies like it, but Yiannopoulos and Hoff Sommers derail it into an attack on feminism, with Koretzky doing his best to get things back on topic. Before anything else can happen, two bomb threats are called in to the Miami Police Department and The Miami Herald, forcing the venue and nearby homes to evacuate; Koretzky had previously said that bomb threats would not have been an issue. When the event is restarted, Koretzky allegedly uses a homophobic slur to start things off well. Oliver Campbell apparently also shows up despite his dramatic departure weeks earlier.
- An individual claiming to be the same person who threatened Brianna Wu when one of her dogs had died and the one who attempted to SWAT @pixelgoth claims responsibility for the threat on AirPlay; the 8chan thread containing posts by the individual is later scrubbed of all evidence.
- Zoe Quinn writes a retrospective blog post.
- Erik Kain pens a brief blog entry on AirPlay.
- Rise Miami News, a small "millennial" oriented blog, covers the bomb threat at AirPlay. They then open their inbox to accept editorials; as of writing, only one editorial critical of Gamergate has been submitted, and that's after they had to ask Gamergaters to stop sending them
puff-pieceseditorials featuring pro-Gamergate opinions.
- The SPJ AirPlay event is held in Miami, organized by Society of Professional Journalists Regional Director Michael Koretzky. Unlike the premiere of The Sarkeesian Effect, the attending audience is in the double digits.
- August 16:
- Daniel Nye Griffiths, another blogger on Forbes, writes a much more in depth entry on AirPlay, noting:
- The poor attendance.
- Lynn Walsh's "I hope you get to work with a good journalist" comment to Milo Yiannopoulos that may or may not be intentionally a sick burn.
- How much Gamergate doesn't really matter if they're at best a few thousand people on the Internet.
- How incredibly uncontroversial actual better ethics in video game journalism is.
- How the actual journalists asked to appear already know how shitty a baseline Gawker is.
- How Yiannopoulos, Christina Hoff Sommers, and Cathy Young are more appropriate for a panel on opposition to feminism rather than how to best discuss video game journalism, considering Yiannopoulos and Sommers tried to hijack the panel into being one on being anti-feminists.
- How Gamergaters praise any sort of mainstream media message about them to use as tools in their war on Wikipedia.
- And how anyone trying to discuss Gamergate a year after it started is at best 10 months late and people can see what Gamergate really stands for in their behavior rather than trying to interrogate them directly.
- Donald Clarke at The Irish Times is more or less coerced by Gamergaters into covering AirPlay on his blog (having done so in October), and he deduces that it accurately shows Gamergate supporters' stance on things when 5 out of the 6 people chosen to represent them are all right-wingers, when Gamergaters continue to assert that they are apolitical.
- Daniel Nye Griffiths, another blogger on Forbes, writes a much more in depth entry on AirPlay, noting:
- August 17:
- Michael Koretzky pens his thoughts on AirPlay, coming to the conclusion that Gamergate has both the people who believe in improving ethics in journalism on video game websites and people like Milo Yiannopoulos and Christina Hoff Sommers who only want to preach to the anti-feminism crowd, despite his attempts to steer the conversation back to being about ethics in video game journalism. He described the afternoon's bomb threat as a "mercy killing".
- Voting on panels begins for the 2016 SXSW. Brianna Wu and Arthur Chu team up for a panel on harassent of women on the Internet; Randi Harper, Caroline Sinders, and Katherine Cross (who has extensively written about Gamergate with regards to feminist and transgender issues) have a similar panel on harassment; while Wu also has a panel on virtual reality. All three are linked on /r/KotakuInAction for vote brigading.
- Livio De La Cruz, a program manager at Microsoft who also serves as a software engineer and does game design for fun publishes an extensive research report that shows that people who support Gamergate are vastly outnumbered by people who do not, despite their own internal claims of being representative of all gamers. He debunks their claim that the mainstream media ran with a narrative against them when many news outlets (including gaming websites) covered both sides of the story and determined that Gamergate was not what its supporters claim it is. And it highlights the fact that Breitbart is the only major website that has consistently pushed any pro-Gamergate material, while several others did not make the cutoff at an Alexa ranking of 11,000, arguing that they were far too obscure to have any significant impact. He also casts doubt on things "Xbro" has said.
- August 20:
- Michael Koretzky wonders why Kotaku and Polygon have not covered AirPlay's panels, despite Polygon covering the bomb threat.
- A group called "The Open Gaming Society" says that they have been selected to host a panel at SXSW. Their proposed list of panelists is a who's who of Gamergate.
- August 21:
- Brianna Wu writes an editorial for The Guardian discussing how Gamergate's only power exists in comment sections and how Gamergate is only a part of how the tech industry is deeply affected by sexism.
- The Fine Young Capitalists' Afterlife Empire, crowdfunded by Gamergaters and featuring waifu Vivian James, is released. Reception is non-existent outside of Gamergate websites.
- August 22: The Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies comprehensively lose at the Hugos despite careful application of, per Theodore Beale (Vox Day), Gamergate methods. Beale, of course, considers everyone hating him and his slate voters and telling them to go away a moral victory. (George R. R. Martin hosts an afterparty where he gives out his own awards to the potential nominees that got bumped out of competition due to the Puppies' slates.)
- August 23:
- Tadgh Kelly at TechCrunch discusses how Gamergate stifled video games in 2014 and 2015 and how major companies have yet to say anything.
- Andrew "weev" Auernheimer says Gamergate is a gateway to white supremacism, partly because Gamergaters like to portray Anita Sarkeesian in the style of an anti-semitic propaganda image.
- August 24:
- MTV talks to Zoe Quinn and Brianna Wu about what has changed over the past year with regards to Gamergate.
- August 25:
- Eugene Volokh posts his amicus brief to his blog The Volokh Conspiracy on The Washington Post. His opinion is that Eron Gjoni's right to free speech was unfairly restricted by the restraining order preventing him from posting information about Zoe Quinn on the Internet. His argument rests on his insistence that "The Zoe Post" is protected speech despite having incited others to criminal activity because it lacked an imminent direction to readers. This argument is somewhat weakened because Gjoni has been on record as saying he wrote and shared "The Zoe Post" to cause the most damage to Quinn as possible and has actively participated in and conducted the mob to accomplish his goals, though the imminence of the acts he intended to incite is debatable, and is unfortunately potentially relevant from a legal standpoint. Not to mention that the incentive he gave to the Gamergaters funding his legal battle is a sequel to "The Zoe Post".
- (The link to Volokh's blog is not included here as he uses a name Quinn has ceased using publicly and has been used to harass her throughout Gamergate.)
- HuffPost Live broadcasts the first of a week's worth of interviews concerning Gamergate. The first topic is "What the Internet Got Right & Wrong in #GamerGate", and features guests Andrew Eisen (GamePolitics), Caroline Sinders (digital anthropologist and computer scientist for IBM Watson), and David Rudin (Kill Screen Daily). All point out that Gamergate is what its participants want it to be at any particular time, and there is infighting within Gamergate as to what Gamergate is even about, Gamergate's tendency to dogpile and sealion, gatekeeping, and how the panelists will be "investigated" for participating in the panel and being critical of Gamergate.
- Theodore Beale (Vox Day) releases his magnum opus SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police. "It analyzes well-known SJW attacks as well as the two most successful examples of resistance to the SJW Narrative, #GamerGate and Sad Puppies." Somehow he gets 200 pages out of this. It also features two Chapter 5s. For those who don't remember, Beale nominated himself for Best Editor in his Rabid Puppies slate at the 2015 Hugo Awards.
- A group of programmers makes Free Reddit Check, an application that shows how many times someone has posted on various reactionary subreddits. /r/KotakuInAction is not pleased and also enthusiastic that they score so high.
- Eugene Volokh posts his amicus brief to his blog The Volokh Conspiracy on The Washington Post. His opinion is that Eron Gjoni's right to free speech was unfairly restricted by the restraining order preventing him from posting information about Zoe Quinn on the Internet. His argument rests on his insistence that "The Zoe Post" is protected speech despite having incited others to criminal activity because it lacked an imminent direction to readers. This argument is somewhat weakened because Gjoni has been on record as saying he wrote and shared "The Zoe Post" to cause the most damage to Quinn as possible and has actively participated in and conducted the mob to accomplish his goals, though the imminence of the acts he intended to incite is debatable, and is unfortunately potentially relevant from a legal standpoint. Not to mention that the incentive he gave to the Gamergaters funding his legal battle is a sequel to "The Zoe Post".
- August 26: The second HuffPost Live broadcast on the one year anniversary of Gamergate discusses "#GamerGate & The Ethics In Gaming Journalism", featuring panelists Georgina Young (TechRaptor), Cathy Young (Reason), and Jesse Singal (New York magazine, The Boston Globe). The two Ms. Youngs claim Gamergate was unfairly covered and that the liberal-leaning gaming publications led to this unfair coverage. Singal points out that Gamergate has yet to admit that it is political and conservative and that most of their complaints center around alleged progressive totalitarianism, which is the only way Cathy Young at Reason fits into Gamergate's Venn diagram of "ethics". The issue of harassment is raised, and Georgina Young mentions that it should just be expected of being someone on the Internet with some form of celebrity, brushing it off, shortly after Singal points out that Gamergaters seem to lack any and all empathy for those who say that they've been subject to the harassment she thinks is no problem to her personally.
- August 27:
- The third HuffPost Live segment discusses "#GamerGate: Gender Violence & Online Threats", featuring guests Brianna Wu, Shannon Sun-Higginson (director of documentary GTFO
), and Jenny Haniver (Not in the Kitchen Anymore). As in her editorial in The Guardian the week before, Wu says how Gamergate isn't itself the problem but rather a symptom of the larger problem of sexism in the video game and tech industries, and how when women say anything, they're harassed and they are not welcome in the gaming industry. Haniver discusses sexist comments and threats she has received simply by playing video games, and says that it's "horseshit" to believe Gamergate has nothing to do with sexist harassment in video games and the tech industry. Sun-Higginson mentions how her film GTFO was based on the toxicity within the video game scene long before Gamergate happened and how it only enforced what her film covered. Wu mentions how no one in Gamergate seems to have empathy for the people who are attacked, and how they attack the character of herself, Zoe Quinn, and Anita Sarkeesian in order to justify the other attacks they make on them, and they fight so they can't be held accountable for things done by the whole. Moderator Caroline Modarressy-Tehrani brings up what Georgina Young said the previous day with regards to threats being just something that happens on the Internet, and Wu responds that all harassment is reprehensible but Gamergate is indeed involved in what has happened to her and others. Haniver says that just because the threats are online doesn't make them any less serious. Sun-Higginson states that if it's about ethics in journalism, then it makes no sense that the majority of the women attacked are not journalists, and no one has denounced the trolls operating within Gamergate but rather relied on the No true Scotsman fallacy to deny culpability.
- Gamergaters go after Ice-T after resurrecting their hate boner for the Law & Order: SVU episode "Intimidation Game", prompting this response from him. After sealioning him for hours, Ice-T says he is "pro-gamer" and tells them to ignore what the press says about gamers, which Gamergate takes as support for their side. Despite the fact Ice-T told one of them to "Eat A Dick".
- Theophilus Pratt (author Alexandra Erin) releases John Scalzi Is Not A Very Popular Author And I Myself Am Quite Popular: How SJWs Always Lie About Our Comparative Popularity Levels. Not to be outdone by Theodore Beale (Vox Day), it features three Chapter 5s. It rapidly reaches number two in Amazon's political philosophy section, producing some truly beautiful screenshots. John Scalzi hopes to do the audiobook edition.
- The third HuffPost Live segment discusses "#GamerGate: Gender Violence & Online Threats", featuring guests Brianna Wu, Shannon Sun-Higginson (director of documentary GTFO
- August 28:
- HuffPost Live broadcasts its fourth and final discussion on Gamergate "#GamerGate: Authorship In The Online Space", featuring Jennie Bharaj (BasedGamer, a perennially failed Gamergate start-up), Elissa Shevinsky (author of Lean Out), Michael Koretzky, and of all people Oliver Campbell. Shevinsky, who claims "neutrality" on Gamergate, says "there's trolls on both sides" and "there needs to be proper investigative journalism into Gamergate" (there has been a ton of investigative journalism, but Gamergaters never like the results showing that they're a bunch of misogynistic assholes). Bharaj talks about the "love" she receives from Gamergate, tries to advertise her website and plenty of other pro-Gamergate websites, and goes into a nice victim blaming and "professional victim" downward spiral by saying people who get harassed online shouldn't talk about it or else they're just opening themselves up for more harassment. Koretzky blames the "biased" coverage on "lazy journalism" stemming from young journalists not reporting original content and old editors not knowing what Gamergate even is. Campbell parrots Koretzky's talking points, pats himself on the back for getting screencapped and posted on Imgur, compares Gamergate to Black Lives Matter (after Koretzky already said it was a poor example because BLM and Occupy Wall Street have representatives and Gamergate doesn't), calls himself the best person to talk to about Gamergate, gets called out by a commentor that his Twitter feed seems to be filled with anti-feminist and anti-SJW rhetoric, and somehow tries to generalize all gamers' opinions on politics in games after Caroline Modaressey-Tehrani tried to press him for his own personal opinion on the matter.
- Reddit user "The_YoungWolf" posts his research regarding Gamergate's origins, showing extensive logs of both original 4chan posts on the "politically incorrect" board /pol/ that shows they were the ones to push Gamergate and attacks on Zoe Quinn onto other websites, and it wasn't necessarily the video games board /v/, proving Gamergate's origins in misogyny and reactionary voices rather than a concerted effort to push for better "ethics in video game journalism". He also cites #BurgersAndFries IRC channel logs showing the early decision to rope in attacks against Anita Sarkeesian into "The Quinnspiracy" by appealing to Phil "thunderf00t" Mason, coordination of #NotYourShield, the movement's obsession with "Cultural Marxism", its concerted efforts to defend 8chan from the accusations of hosting pedophiles and child pornography, and its direct connections to the /baphomet/ board. He concludes that Gamergate doesn't actually want to hold a proper conversation with anyone because they can't win, and they don't want to organize in any way because the harassment they perpetuate would be incredibly easy to trace back to them instead of when they pretend it's not from Gamergaters.
- Commenters in the thread realize that he is right that Gamergaters do not want to have a conversation. They simply want to win in an argument and validate Gamergate as a result.
- A Gamergater falsely claims to have communicated with the murderer of Alison Parker and Adam Ward,
claiming he supported Gamergate. Gamergaters get mad that the lie has been circulated because people and the local news affiliate actually believed it. A completely separate Gamergater decides to be an asshole and changes their Steam profile information to that of the shooter.
- Jordan Owen releases an update on The Sarkeesian Effect (actual information from 1:19 on): the film is finished, it's 2 hours 35 minutes, he has a distributor, and it will have some sort of release in the next few weeks and backers will get their promised swag. His next project will apply everything he's learnt on this one. "EVERYTHING." The update itself suggests he's been spending a bit much time watching David Lynch.
- August 29:
- Anita Sarkeesian speaks to Jessica Valenti for The Guardian about how her life has changed due to the attacks as a result of her project, as well as from Gamergate. She says that the media has actually ignored the facet of Gamergate that it was started as domestic abuse against Zoe Quinn by Eron Gjoni and that if it truly is about ethics in video game journalism then it makes no sense that no journalists were victimized to the extent Quinn, herself, and other women were. Sarkeesian also directly connects Gamergate to the harassment that surrounded her Kickstarter in 2012.
- Free Reddit Check is taken down due to personal threats directed at its creators. One of them posts on /r/GamerGhazi, revealing that Sam Smith (a.k.a "Matthew Hopkins", a.k.a. "Vordrak") was behind the continued legal threats that led to the app's shuttering.
- August 30: A Gamergate meetup in Birmingham decides that Five Guys is the perfect location. It definitely took some effort for this meme to be revived, considering there are only around 30 Five Guys restaurants in all of the UK.
- Gamergaters on /r/KotakuInAction relish the response while continually mocking a third bomb threat that was sent to a meetup in Melbourne.
- August 31:
- Gamergater "LeoThePirate" doubles down on Gamergate's baseless attacks on Sarah Nyberg by publishing a video accusing her of being a pedophile, accompanying it with the hashthag "#FreeEncyclopediaDramatica". The evidence used against her is gleaned from nearly 10-year-old IRC chatlogs obtained from when Gamergaters hacked her personal websites wherein, and here's the kicker, she is explicitly expressing disgust with having found pedophilic roleplaying on LiveJournal that she was not engaging in herself. Gamergate has for months been accusing her of pedophilia because of she had copied and pasted the content and they removed the context that showed she was clearly against it. The fact that this information has been available for 7 months at this point, alongside debunked accusations that Nyberg is the "Sarah Butts" who wrote for The Mary Sue that they have other context-less chatlogs that may not even be from Nyberg, shows the ethical standards of people who align with Breitbart in action.
- Chelsea Clinton tweets out support for Anita Sarkeesian with regards to the article in The Guardian. Gamergaters don't react until about a week later.
September 2015
- September 3: Attorney Richard DeLossa of Kelley Drye discusses the legal battles between Zoe Quinn and Eron Gjoni on the Drye Wit blogs. He agrees with Eugene Volokh's determination that the restriction on Gjoni from posting about Quinn could be considered prior restraint
and that "encouragement [of] hate mobs" doesn't fall within the incitement of violence exceptions of the First Amendment, he notes that the Massachusetts courts never decided whether or not the content of the original writing of "The Zoe Post" was unlawful and defamatory. If that is determined, it could prevent Gjoni from repeating content within "The Zoe Post" considered as such, and modifications (or expansions) to the original to sidestep his injunction would easily broaden it to cover the new content. Like his planned sequel if the court clears his restraining order.
- (As with The Volokh Conspiracy's blog entry, the Drye Wit blog entry is omitted as it uses Quinn's former name. But unlike Volokh, DeLossa actually refrained from repeating this name repeatedly throughout his writing.)
- September 4:
- Peter Moore, COO of video game publisher Electronic Arts, reveals Gamergate helped see that EA had an issue when it comes to gender diversity.
- Katherine Cross writes for Jacobin, covering how Gamergate's Vivian James represents Gamergate's ideal woman that they had to manufacture themselves and how they paint her as a victim of Gamergate's strawman critics.
- Milo Yiannopoulos admits that he publishes libel from 8chan threads on Gamergate victims for Breitbart articles; such as the one he has published on Sarah Nyberg covering the rehashed false accusations against her (which took several days and 7 revisions by Breitbart editorial and legal staff because of all the libel he pulled from 8chan and /r/KotakuInAction).
- As a side note to this, the "chat logs" that Gamergaters are using to attack Nyberg with were apparently uploaded to the server in question on August 12, 2015, bringing into question their authenticity.
- September 5: The Digital Rights Foundation, a Pakistani civil rights group, holds an event on misogyny on the Internet and brings up Gamergate as an example. The person who announces this speech on Twitter comes under immediate attack by Gamergaters.
- September 8: After posters on /r/KotakuInAction are critical of Breitbart's ethics, Milo Yiannopoulos decides the honeymoon is over, saying KIA doesn't know what bad journalism is and their reputation is going down the toilet and is no longer useful as a journalistic source. Three stopped clocks in a row, even though they're more of a threat that he's going to abandon supporting Gamergate unless he and Breitbart become sacred cows for them.
- September 9: A Gamergater calls into Sam Seder's show The Majority Report to try to say something about Sarah Nyberg. After asking the caller why this matters to which the caller cannot properly form a response, Seder shuts him down by saying that the actions of this one person that he personally does not know about at all does not have any impact on his own opinions on Gamergate.
- September 10: [Date uncertain]Formation of /8diamonds/ on 8chan. The board is essentially /baphomet/ 2.0 but unlike its predecessor, Gamergaters don't even try to hide the fact that they have connections to it.
- September 11: Vlad Chituc at The New Republic identifies Gamergate as a culture war, involving people who don't play video games (as evidenced by the participation of Milo Yiannopoulos, Christina Hoff Sommers, and Cathy Young at the SPJ AirPlay event) and that it is not between libertarians and authoritarians as Gamergate supporters seem to suggest but rather between people who exalt free expression and people who value equal protection of marginalized voices. Chituc also points out research that shows media does affect people's perception of others (despite what Gamergate wants to believe), with sexist statements coming from studies revolving female video game characters and how positive depictions of the African American community in The Cosby Show and gay people in Will & Grace and more recently Modern Family have changed American attitudes towards the marginalized groups.
- September 12:
- Brianna Wu reports that a Gamergater has been arrested by the FBI on terrorism charges, later linking to an article on The Daily Beast discussing the FBI's arrest of Joshua Goldberg of Florida. Goldberg had been arrested after weeks of monitoring on suspicion of plotting a terrorist attack in Kansas City. He had been operating many, many, MANY alternate identities for malicious purposes, primarily used to attack opponents of hate speech. The most notable of these identities was the pro-DAESH handle "Australi Witness", which is what led to his arrest when he told an FBI informant how to make a pressure cooker bomb like the ones used in the Boston Marathon bombing. However, he used his personal screen name "Moon Metropolis" to support Gamergate and also attack Anita Sarkeesian since 2012.
- Wu discovers that Goldberg fed Milo Yiannopoulos the false story that Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King was allegedly white.
- People uncover a tweet by Goldberg as "Moon Metropolis" where he falsely represented himself as a woman. #NotYourShieldInAction
- Redditors at /r/AgainstHateSubreddits identify Goldberg's Reddit accounts "Emily_Americana" and "European88", both infamous for racist shitposting. The latter account moderated over 100 racist, misogynistic, and anti-Semitic subreddits, including several for 8chan and several named after African Americans killed by police and nearly 30 of these were "Quarantined" by Reddit under their new terms of service.
- Mark Kern gets on the first $3 million bus out of Gamergate after the news goes around. Although it may instead be because Gamergaters called him out on misgendering Sarah Nyberg, not because misgendering is fucking wrong but because it would make Kern look bad.
- Milo Yiannopoulos is caught trying to delete every Twitter conversation he had with Goldberg, and denies he used Goldberg as a source. And he, like many other Gamergaters, believes that there's a conspiracy against him because he recently released his hitpiece on Sarah Nyberg (when his hit piece is what distracted everyone from the 2 day old news that Goldberg was arrested). He also tries to pin things on other people as one of Goldberg's personas tried to get close to Brianna Wu and used this "feminist" persona to write about his own activities on The Daily Kos's open submissions. However, this persona was as strawman feminist as they came and served only to further Goldberg's free speech extremist views.
- Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian speak at the XOXO Festival. Quinn discusses how she empathized with Gamergate's supporters who were probably only a part of the movement for the sake of fitting in with people they think are cool online. She also discusses how her harassers, and other online harassment groups, all think they're heroes in thinking they're heroes fighting an elite and corrupt evil "like some kind of crappy internet Batman", seeing as there are conspiracies built around victims of online harassment (including herself) being rich and powerful. Sarkeesian also touched upon the harassment she receives on a daily basis, but said that she has seen positive movement from the video game industry inviting her to studios to discuss how to improve their characters and stories.
- Brianna Wu reports that a Gamergater has been arrested by the FBI on terrorism charges, later linking to an article on The Daily Beast discussing the FBI's arrest of Joshua Goldberg of Florida. Goldberg had been arrested after weeks of monitoring on suspicion of plotting a terrorist attack in Kansas City. He had been operating many, many, MANY alternate identities for malicious purposes, primarily used to attack opponents of hate speech. The most notable of these identities was the pro-DAESH handle "Australi Witness", which is what led to his arrest when he told an FBI informant how to make a pressure cooker bomb like the ones used in the Boston Marathon bombing. However, he used his personal screen name "Moon Metropolis" to support Gamergate and also attack Anita Sarkeesian since 2012.
- September 14:
- Jordan Owen's cut of The Sarkeesian Effect is released on Vimeo... behind a paywall. One intrepid viewer concludes it's "too boring, even for a hate watch". It takes over an hour to even mention Gamergate and lies about how Zoe Quinn was involved in it. Even 40 minutes in, the viewer can't discern a narrative or argument being made. Jack Thompson goes Godwin when he compares Anita Sarkeesian receiving a video game industry award to receiving an award from Nazi Germany. In the end, the brave viewer who spent US$4 to rent the film for 48 hours gave this review: "In summary: incompetent, boring and incoherent. No idea what the film was meant to say but I am sure it failed."
- Commenters on /r/KotakuInAction say:
- "Sorry, not drunk enough to watch it. I'll later. :)"
- "Haven't watched it myself either, waiting for a torrent to pop up."
- "No, thank you. I need my IQ in order to get through life."
- David Futrelle of We Hunted the Mammoth watched it so you don't have to.
- Commenters on /r/KotakuInAction say:
- Sarah Nyberg responds to the allegations Gamergate has made on her which were published by Milo Yiannopoulos, owning up to her past as a 4chan veteran trying to out-do others through being edgy. She also calls out the hypocrisy of Gamergate falsely attacking and reporting others of being pedophiles when they organize their actions on a website so infamous for hosting child pornography that it's been delisted from Google and cannot be funded through normal means. One point she makes is that she hired a lawyer and contacted the police and both examined the reports against her and saw no reason to believe that she committed any crime.
- Jordan Owen's cut of The Sarkeesian Effect is released on Vimeo... behind a paywall. One intrepid viewer concludes it's "too boring, even for a hate watch". It takes over an hour to even mention Gamergate and lies about how Zoe Quinn was involved in it. Even 40 minutes in, the viewer can't discern a narrative or argument being made. Jack Thompson goes Godwin when he compares Anita Sarkeesian receiving a video game industry award to receiving an award from Nazi Germany. In the end, the brave viewer who spent US$4 to rent the film for 48 hours gave this review: "In summary: incompetent, boring and incoherent. No idea what the film was meant to say but I am sure it failed."
- September 18: Gamergaters try to start "Operation Poly Gone" to contact the FTC over Polygon contributor Samit Sakar not "disclosing his friendship" with an executive producer at Disney Interactive when covering Disney Infinity or with a public relations writer at Harmonix and his former boss at Destructoid when covering Rock Band 4. In two days, #OpPolyGone is tweeted only 150 times. Compare this with how much energy they have expended attacking Sarah Nyberg in the same period.
- September 21: The BBC covers the Joshua Goldberg case, revealing more of his impersonation victims and that he is currently undergoing psychiatric evaluation to see if he is competent to stand trial.
- September 22: Justin Trudeau, leader of the Liberal Party of Canada (and Prime Minister come October 19), names Gamergate as an issue regarding discrimination against women.
- September 23: Zoe Quinn, Anita Sarkeesian, Randi Harper, Feminista Jones, Rose Eveleth, Jamia Wilson, and the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative work with Google Ideas to fight online abuse. Gamergaters react predictably enough that Google Ideas responds to make that point themselves.
- Derek Smart, the so-called "Gamergate neutral", joins in on Gamergate's attack on Google, calling in the big dogs Milo Yiannopoulos and Mike Cernovich.
- September 24:
- Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian speak at the United Nations General Assembly as part of UN Women's report on Cyber Violence Against Women & Girls: A Worldwide Wake-Up Call. It will be broadcast live here (Quinn and Sarkeesian begin speaking around 1:22:30). The accompanying report leaves much to be desired.
- Gamergate's list of boycotts grows to include American anime distributor Funimation
after this sick burn made its way into the English dub of Prison School.
They begin to form conspiracies after finding a screenwriter who follows Brianna Wu and Anita Sarkeesian on Twitter (despite the fact she didn't write the line), and decide to stick with their anime snobbery by declaring fansubs better than dubs (not that they would ever pay to watch an anime like this anyway).
- Randi Harper comments on Derek Smart's attack on her and others for their participation in Google Ideas' online abuse project, saying he propositioned her. What follows is over 24 hours of Smart yelling at or about Harper, nearly unabated, including a threatening text sent to her.
- September 25:
- Reason writer Elizabeth Nolan Brown tries to distance libertarianism from its connection to anti-feminism like MRAs and Gamergate.
- Beige Alert: Derek Smart is no longer neutral.
- September 26:
- Yvette Cooper, one of the candidates for leadership of the Labour Party in the United Kingdom (having come third behind Jeremy Corbyn), names Gamergate as an example of issues facing women online in her address to the annual Labour Party Women's Conference.
- Gamergaters on the subreddit /r/AgainstGamerGate (meant to serve as a "neutral" ground where people with opposing stances can debate) feel that the sub has gone too
liberal"anti-Gamergate" for their liking and announce a fork off to /r/GGDiscussion.
- September 28:
- Jesse Singal points out the problems with the UN Broadband Commission's report, including its unfortunate use of a Lyndon LaRouche crony's puffpiece for LaRouche as a citation, and its errors only seem to empower the people attacking Gamergate's targets.
- David Futrelle digs up the worst of Gamergate's shit theories on Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian's talk at the United Nations.
- Polygon publishes an article that contains an excerpt from Phil Owen's book WTF Is Wrong With Video Games?: How a multi-billion-dollar creative industry refuses to grow up. Gamergate freaks out because apparently the paragraph preceding the excerpt needs to be attributed to whatever Polygon staff member who wrote it (and later they just changed it to be under his own name). Owen responds, and then more seriously.
- September 29: The Escapist runs a Cory Rydell and Grey Carter cartoon about Gamergate producing "God-Emperor Sarkeesian" ... stealing a widely-repeated joke that was first made on RationalWiki in January. Well done, Cory, Grey.
- September 30: Patreon is hacked, with 14 GB of data dumped including user information, their SQL database, and their python port. The hacker facetiously claimed involvement in Gamergate, as he also claimed responsibility for taking down Gamergate.me, which currently redirects to wikipedia:Gamergate controversy.
October 2015
- October 1:
- Zoe Quinn and Randi Harper speak to Motherboard about how bad the UN Broadband Commission's report was, such as the LaRouche supporter citation, as well as the inclusion of sex trafficking, sex work, and pornography which had no place in the discussion. Quinn and Harper both feel that the writers of the report had an agenda concerning pornography and anonymity on the Internet.
- Chris Roberts, lead developer of Star Citizen, responds to an article on The Escapist which repeats all of Derek Smart's attacks on his game while claiming the comments come from former employees. He points out that the author is Lizzy Finnegan and may be pursuing her own agenda with the article considering the lack of ethics in her reporting.
- In response to news and general chatter that the suspect in the Umpqua Community College shooting
had posted his intent to massacre on 4chan's /r9k/ board, Zoe Quinn notes that /r9k/ is where Gamergate began and where people also said they wanted to murder her. Gamergaters go apeshit, saying she's making it about her (she isn't) and that they shouldn't discuss gun control (totally not a conservative mob guys).
- October 2: The Escapist hastily releases a response to Chris Roberts saying that their sources are legitimate and totally not Derek Smart. Posters on the Star Citizen subreddit discover that several of the statements in Lizzy Finnegan's original article appear verbatim on Glassdoor reviews for Star Citizen's development studio and they were all posted within the same week.
- Chris Roberts updates his post from the previous day to include a formal response to The Escapist's edits. These include points that Roberts' wife and RSI's head of marketing Sandi Gardiner was never contacted to give her side of the claims against her despite The Escapist insisting they did, the "anonymous sources" were a group of former employees who all knew each other and acted in concert to sell the story, that there was no way to even contact the people who posted the shit reviews on Glassdoor because there's no messaging system there, The Escapist's claim that one of the sources was vetted because he had shown his company ID card is false because RSI doesn't give out ID cards, that The Escapist was not the only website sold the story and other websites had been contacted to publish the attacks but The Escapist was the only one to bite, Derek Smart called Roberts personally to tell him the story was going out hours before it went up, and that Lizzy Finnegan has zero background in journalism to be trusted with a story like this, particularly because she extensively talks to Derek Smart on Twitter (more than any Gamergater can point out that someone who said "Gamergate is bad" follows Zoe Quinn and tweeted at her once). Derek Smart claims inside knowledge.
- October 3:
- FUNimation issues a non-statement with regards to the email campaigning Gamergate did in response to the line in the Prison School episode.
- Gamergaters start a petition to get Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian arrested under...the Logan Act?
Apparently the UN Broadband Commission and UN Women count as a foreign government with which the U.S. is at war and Quinn and Sarkeesian are supposed to be arrested because they are attempting to use a foreign government to stifle American constitutional protections to free speech. So not only is Gamergate totally not about these two women, Gamergaters are experts at applying an esoteric law favored by xenophobic conspiracy theorists that in 200 years has only resulted in one indictment.
- Milo Yiannopoulos, along with fellow reactionary Lauren Southern, attends a slut walk in his own special way and is appalled when he and Southern are removed from the event for "telling" the women their "opinions" on rape culture. Gamergate gets angry for them.
- October 5: Zoe Quinn responds to the petition to have her tried for treason under the Logan Act.
- October 6: The Honey Badger
RadioBrigade reveals more of their plans for their lawsuit against Calgary Expo. Their requested damages? $50 grand. The amount they raised to hire their disbarred lawyer? $40 grand. - October 7: A representative for the UN International Telecommunication Union apologizes for the inaccuracies and poor sourcing in the Broadband Commission's report, saying the original version was rushed. An updated set of highlights from a new version of the report is released, omitting many of the problematic and irrelevant topics found in the original report.
- October 9:
- The UN Broadband Commission begins the #TakeBackTheTech hashtag to better discuss the issues of threats against women online. Gamergate reacts predictably.
- Quartz analyzes the #ShoutYourAbortion hashtag, made in response to the U.S. Congress trying to defund Planned Parenthood, and finds an overlap between conservative Twitter users and Gamergaters with regards to opposition to the hashtag.
- October 10: Randi Harper reveals that Gamergaters have used the hacked Patreon data to dox her patrons and intimidate them to stop funding, as well as send the information off to Milo Yiannopoulos.
- October 11: Eron Gjoni does "research" to prove the Quartz article from the other day wrong by asking Gamergaters to RT his question asking if they're pro-choice. Ethics ensues.
- October 12:
- Anita Sarkeesian visits Bungie (Halo, Destiny) to give a talk. Gamergaters get angry.
- Randi Harper reveals that Sam Smith (a.k.a "Matthew Hopkins", a.k.a. "Vordrak") is currently trying to blackmail her Patreon donors to stop supporting her through an email campaign where he threatens to contact their employers. Not only does she also state that Smith tried to get her fired from running her own non-profit but one of her patrons shows that the email Smith sent was flagged as spam.
- October 13:
- In a stopped clock moment, posters on /r/KotakuInAction call out Sam Smith (a.k.a "Matthew Hopkins", a.k.a. "Vordrak") for the bullshit he pulled.
- It turns out Gamergaters are actually trying to conspire against the United Nations for having Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian speak during a panel on violence against women online. Gamergaters are currently fighting people who have been active for years in trying to ensure human rights offline apply to online, while believing that their right to free speech is somehow going to be suppressed by intergovernmental cooperation to end online harassment.
- October 17: Gamergaters on /r/KotakuInAction have a grand old time when Sam Harris uses a mention of Gamergate to verbally criticize western feminism.
- October 20:
- Gamergaters proudly claim responsibility for having increased Breitbart's web traffic by 75% in the past year. But they're totally not right wing, guys.
- Gamergaters take Sarah Nyberg being critical of a video game developer's statements as a sign she's starting a campaign against him so they proactively go after her
againmore. - The Open Gaming Society announces that their panel has been approved and will be at SXSW in March. Their speakers are: SPJ AirPlay veteran Lynn Walsh, Gamergate's official weaponized porn star Mercedes Carrera, completely unknown game developer Nick Robalik of Pixel Metal Studios, and The Open Gaming Society's own Perry Jones.
- October 23: Motherboard criticizes SXSW for failing to acknowledge safety concerns with regards to The Open Gaming Society's panel which is transparently about Gamergate, considering two prior Gamergate-oriented events were subject to bomb threats. The Open Gaming Society's founder Perry Jones says his group keeps a "neutral stance" on Gamergate, despite the obvious links all of the panel's proposed speakers have with it.
- October 26:
- Caroline Sinders and Randi Harper both say that their SXSW panel with Katherine Cross on preventing harassment online has been cancelled because of violent threats. Ashe Schow reports that the Gamergate panel (which she actually refers to as such) has also been cancelled, while equivocating the others' panel as "anti-Gamergate".
- SXSW releases a statement on their decision to cancel both the Gamergate panel and the anti-harassment panel after having announced their inclusion the week before. Their explanation also plays into a balance fallacy.
- Zoe Quinn reveals details she knows about Gamergate's intended SXSW panel.
- The panel was planned openly on Reddit, like previous attempts at falsely presenting a legitimate face.
- Mercedes Carrera was herself involved in Gamergate's last attempt at trying to have a legitimate face when it came to the AbleGamers charity stream debacle.
- Nick Robalik has sent her several dozen harassing messages on Twitter and even stalked her at a convention he had spoken at, and took a photo to prove it to Gamergate.
- "The Open Gaming Society" has only been around since March 2015 because it is solely an attempt for Gamergate to have a public face while still repeating all of their debunked talking points.
- The final speaker on the panel would have been Lynn Walsh, one of the speakers at AirPlay who was supposed to represent the uninvolved Society of Professional Journalists.
- And Quinn had sent SXSW her concerns about the panel and its members' prior actions but received no response other than a confirmation that her email had been received.
- Perry Jones announces that host the panel somewhere else with their own money. Sounds like another fundraising campaign.
- Sarah Nyberg reveals that a founding member of The Open Gaming Society was a Gamergater who doxxed her earlier in the year.
- October 27:
- In the wake of the SXSW panel cancellations, people uncover The Open Gaming Society's "Doctrine of Gaming" and have a field day with how this was supposed to be Gamergate's Trojan Horse into legitimacy. And also Mark Kern signed it twice. And not even in two separate parts of the document. There are only 6 signatories, and he's two of them.
- BuzzFeed and Vox Media withdraw from participation in SXSW unless the cancelled panels are reinstated.
- The Mary Sue reports on the SXSW cancellations, and notes that The Open Gaming Society's founder Perry Jones revealed that the issues with hosting their panel was with regards to event resources, and not at all the threats levied at the other panels. The response he received from SXSW also shows how much the event organizers are applying a balance fallacy to Gamergate those victimized by the mob.
- Arthur Chu writes about his experience in dealing with SXSW, including his attempts to have festival organizers prevent and remove harassing comments left on the brigaded panel voting pages as well as how he was misled into believing Gamergate's "Open Gaming Society" panel would not have been approved at all, considering it was never put up to public vote and it never went past the panel advisory committee, meaning SXSW staff approved it without any oversight. He calls bullshit on how Randi Harper's anti-harassment panel as being cancelled to serve as some sort of "anti-Gamergate" panel to appease Gamergaters, when Chris Kluwe somehow managed to evade Gamergate's attention altogether in the voting process with his anti-harassment panel which explicitly mentioned Gamergate in its description.
- Brianna Wu speaks to The Frame and says that this could have all been avoided, because she and others have been to smaller venues where security issues were handled much better, but Gamergate had set a precedent that if they threaten violence no one gets free speech.
- Re/code is told by sources that SXSW is attempting damage control by dedicating an all-day event on panels to combat online harassment. The panel hosted by Randi Harper, Caroline Sinders, and Katherine Cross has been reinstated, but there is no information on the panel by The Open Gaming Society.
- October 28:
- The American Civil Liberties Union releases a statement on SXSW's mishandling of the panel cancellations and how their actions have effectively made them succumb to the Heckler's veto.
- Former Texas State Senator and gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis
condemns SXSW for empowering misogynist harassers.
- Leigh Alexander writes in Wired how she had been contacted after SXSW 2015 for her input on a panel discussing Gamergate at the 2016 event. She had advised the SXSW representative to avoid focusing on harassers and also avoid having the victims come in and talk about their experiences, but rather have a forum to discuss anti-harassment and community-building as well as discussions on the creations and perspectives of women and other marginalized voices in tech. Alexander recognizes that SXSW wants to have diversity of opinions at their event, but they refused to acknowledge one group's concerns as a result.
- Chris Kluwe writes on the blunder by SXSW in his own way, particularly how none of the events cancelled had anything to do with Gamergate other than the panelists being harassed nonstop for a year by Gamergaters, as well as criticize them for allowing the obvious Gamergater panel through without any outside insight.
- Milo Yiannopoulos's use of Gamergate to boost his readership on Breitbart leads his editors to place him in charge of their new technology section. Questions posed to him by Gamergaters and his answer of not knowing how to answer instead shows how little he actually knows about technology (which is apparently nothing at all).
- October 30:
- SXSW officially announces the reinstatement of Randi Harper et al.'s panel "Level Up: Overcoming Harassment in Games" as well as The Open Gaming Society's Gamergate Trojan Horse "SavePoint: A Discussion on the Gaming Community" and that they will be part of an Online Harassment Summit at SXSW on March 12, 2016. Others who will speak as part of the summit include Brianna Wu, Rep. Katherine Clark (D-Mass.), Wendy Davis, Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, amongst several professors of law and civil rights advocates.
- Randi Harper, Caroline Sinders, and Katherine Cross all announce their intentions not to participate in SXSW's anti-harassment summit so long as The Open Gaming Society's Gamergate smokescreen panel is included as part of this event. Brianna Wu and Sarah Jeong (Motherboard) also announce they will not be participating in the event so long as the Gamergate panel is considered part of the anti-harassment summit. Harper says she is trying to work with SXSW to solve the problems they keep getting themselves into. Earlier in the day, she revealed Mercedes Carrera was directing her followers to harass her; Milo Yiannopoulos felt left out after Harper said her panel wouldn't participate if he showed up at SXSW, so he joined in the dogpiling as well.
- October 31: Australian Greens Senator Scott Ludlam speaks to Mashable at PAX Australia on how a government would not be able to solve a problem like Gamergate directly. Making a law wouldn't solve Gamergate, but understanding the issues of gender and diversity that caused it would help understand how to address the concerns on a larger scale.
November 2015
- November 3: Arthur Chu writes about how much SXSW fucked up by including The Open Gaming Society's panel as part of the "anti-harassment summit" when they were told multiple times that Gamergaters on that panel are responsible for the harassment directed at the women on the other panel, as well as the speakers they had asked to participate in the talk.
- November 5: Another Gamergate sockpuppet came to light when "Alison Prime" attempted to raise money to assist their family in recovering from a housefire. "Alison Prime" had previously been held up by Christina Hoff Sommers at AirPlay as "a lesbian gamer who apparently enjoys gazing at images of busty women," which proved that Gamergate was not just a bunch of anti-social losers living in their parents' basements. "Alison Prime" also reported that they were driven to tears when Tim Schafer made jokes using a sockpuppet at the GDC Awards. And on top of all of that, "Alison Prime" denied that transwomen could truly understand the plight of women like "her" - because they never had a uterus, claiming hers was removed while making a transphobic attack on Brianna Wu. All of this came crashing down when "Alison Prime" was called out by the person whose photos they were using to pose as a woman. Nacho shield.
- November 6: Zoe Quinn is writing a memoir titled Crash Override: How to Save the Internet From Itself, to be published by Simon & Schuster's Touchstone imprint in September 2016. The film rights to the memoir have been acquired by Amy Pascal, the result of a bidding war by several movie and TV studios, and Scarlett Johansson is one of many actresses interested in starring.
- November 13: SXSW announces more speakers for their anti-harassment summit. Randi Harper, Caroline Sinders, and Katherine Cross will be holding their anti-harassment panel as part of the summit, as
Gamergate'sthe Open Gaming Society's panel will not be part of the summit but be held on a completely different day. - November 14: Veerender Jubbal discovers that Gamergaters had photoshopped one of his selfies into framing him as one of the terrorists responsible for the attacks in Paris (and also adding a dildo in the background). Sky News Italy uses the photo in a story on the attacks. Gamergaters gloat that they've created unethical journalism and Milo Yiannopoulos openly mocks and threatens to write an article on Jubbal; he follows through with it the next day and fills it full of tweets Jubbal made mocking white people but titles it in a way that makes it seem he's sympathetic.
- November 17:
- Vice proves that Gamergaters are to blame for modifying Veerender Jubbal's photo, following days of denial from Gamergaters that one of their own was responsible, by pointing out that the original editor of the photograph has also attacked other Gamergate critics and targets with other edited photos and that the person disseminating the photograph is heavily involved in Gamergate as evident by his posting in /r/KotakuInAction which had been deleted by the forum's moderators to hide evidence.
- Gamergaters deny that moderators of /r/KotakuInAction have been covering up evidence, pointing to how the individual deleted his entire account on Reddit, but /r/KotakuInAction has a public log of all moderator actions and the post is clearly shown as having been deleted by a mod of KIA rather than as a result of closing the account.
- The moderator in question deleted the post because the author of the Vice article hadn't archived it, a "rookie mistake".
- Gamergaters deny that moderators of /r/KotakuInAction have been covering up evidence, pointing to how the individual deleted his entire account on Reddit, but /r/KotakuInAction has a public log of all moderator actions and the post is clearly shown as having been deleted by a mod of KIA rather than as a result of closing the account.
- Arthur Chu writes about Gamergate's treatment of Jubbal, and how Gamergate only persists through their own actions as a gamification of social media presence.
- Vice proves that Gamergaters are to blame for modifying Veerender Jubbal's photo, following days of denial from Gamergaters that one of their own was responsible, by pointing out that the original editor of the photograph has also attacked other Gamergate critics and targets with other edited photos and that the person disseminating the photograph is heavily involved in Gamergate as evident by his posting in /r/KotakuInAction which had been deleted by the forum's moderators to hide evidence.
- November 22: Gamergaters have rallied behind Gregory Alan Eliott, a Canadian man facing criminal harassment charges for cyberstalking and threatening two feminists over Twitter, after all of their figureheads and general right wing rag writers in Canada willingly misinterpret the case against him as one of freedom of his speech and feminists arguing with him and calling it harassment when he responded back (all while the complainants cannot respond in public until the sentencing in January 2016). To date, he has received over US$40k.
- November 23: The Columbia Journalism Review examines why Gamergate and the Society of Professional Journalists have become entwined, highlighting how Gamergate sees endorsement by the SPJ as a means to have the media relabel them away from being a hate mob and how the SPJ may be seeking to revitalize itself by courting video game reviewers. Others that spoke to CJR were more critical, with some saying that there's pressure against the media to write a factual record of what has happened and others who believe that Gamergate shouldn't be approached by the media in this way as they are nothing more than trolls or rather they are not a group with a fringe movement but the fringe movement itself and it sets up a false equivalence between Gamergate supporters and their critics.
- November 24: Japanese video game developer Team Ninja reveals that Koei Tecmo's Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 won't be released in the west allegedly over the issues surrounding the depiction of women in video games in western countries. The manager of the Twitter account for import website Play-Asia blames it on SJWs and promises to sell the Asian editions of the games which come with English subtitles. This is all despite the fact no one in the west ever gave a shit about DOAX3 to petition it not be released.
- November 30: The Honey Badger
RadioBrigade reveals that the disbarred lawyer they hired with Gamergater money told them to sue the wrong legal entity to get back at Calgary Expo for kicking them out. They seem to ignore Calgary Expo's explanation that there was never a contractual obligation between the event organizers and Honey Badger Alison Tieman, and even if there was a contract, Tieman and her associates violated it and therefore they had the right to kick them out. But no, it's Harry Kopyto's fault for picking the wrong target and not a complete waste of a bunch of Canadian taxpayer and reactionary idiot money.
December 2015
- December 1: Breitbart writer Richard Lewis taunts and attacks a notable esports player and Gamergate instantly joins his side , despite overwhelming evidence of the Lewis' culpability and eye witness accounts.
- December 2:
- Jesse Singal debunks a story Milo Yiannopoulos had "reported" on that the UK Home Office had begun telling teachers to distribute material labeling Gamergate as a terrorist organization alongside Daesh and the English Defence League. Singal uncovered that the printout was not a government mandate.
- Yiannopoulos responds to a request for comment that he did contact the school and someone in the headmaster's office informed him that the terror warning came from "the government".
- December 3: Jesse Singal updates his article to say that it appears that Yiannopoulos never actually contacted the school in question, despite his claims in his piece on Breitbart. He received a comment from the school that denies that anyone there ever spoke to Milo Yiannopoulos. Yiannopoulos doubles down when confronted over the fact he lied.
- December 7: After The Washington Post publishes an opinion piece that links Gamergate and GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, Gamergate is affronted and harangues the writer on social media.
- December 10: In order to protest against what Gamergate considers "censorship" of Japanese video games, Gamergate starts a hashtag campaign #1MillionGamersStrong and a petition. As critique arises within Gamergate itself, the campaign fails to attain 1 million signatures on the petition.
- December 14:
- Gaming channel Twin Galaxy starts the #Right2Game campaign in order to promote "the benefits of gaming". Gamergate subreddit /r/Kotakuinaction decides to back the campaign, after the campaign curator shows up in a relevant KiA thread. The #right2game hashtag is taken over by Gamergate activity and Gamergate lashes out against anyone who dares to point out Gamergate's dominance over the campaign.
- Kotaku first points out Gamergate's hatred for Alison Rapp, an employee at Nintendo who works with the "Treehouse" localization team. They're upset that the international editions of Xenoblade Chronicles X have not only removed the player avatar breast size slider but also the option for a thirteen-year-old female character to wear a bikini. Rapp is a marketing specialist and does not work on localizing video games. Gamergate doesn't care to recognize this because she's a woman with progressive social views.
- December 29: Due to the slow decline of the Gamergate hashtag, Twitter is no longer auto-completing it. Gamergaters call this censorship.
2016
January 2016
- January 6: One year after Intel began its campaign for more diversity, the company re-affirms its stance and aims to broaden its endeavors to fight online harassment.
- January 8: Milo Yiannopoulos loses his "Verified" tick on Twitter for many TOS violations. Both Milo and /r/KotakuInAction (more) consider this a vitally important free speech issue. The tag #JeSuisMilo shows up on Twitter. Ethan "TheRalphRetort" Ralph blames Randi Harper, who is mostly amused.
- January 9:
- After Milo Yiannopoulos loses his little blue "verified" checkmark on Twitter, Breitbart publishes a stirring indictment of this terrible assault on freedom.
- After months of silence, Youtuber John "TotalBiscuit" Bain steps into the Gamergate fray again, repeating long debunked talking points and once again promoting the movement. His own fans as well as Gamergate are delighted.
- January 11: As if Gamergate's #JesuisMilo campaign had not already been embarrassing enough for the movement, it adds a petition to the U.S. President to its efforts.
- January 16: After Stolen!, an app which uses a Twitter API to turn user profiles into a trading game, gets pulled by its creators due to privacy concerns, Gamergate takes up its banner. US representative Katherine Clark, who asked for the cancellation of the app, instantly gets attacked on Twitter by Gamergate, while the journalist who broke the story also gets harassed.
- January 17:
- After Anne Wheaton, wife of actor and prominent Gamergate critic Wil Wheaton, leaves Twitter due to harassment, Gamergate is delighted.
- As its funding time draws to a close, TwinGalaxies' #Right2Game campaign falls short of its goal. It had become almost indistinguishable from Gamergate, after its founder had only ever spoken to Reddit's Gamergate subreddit during the funding period.
- January 18: Comedian and actress Amy Schumer objects to a statement made by a critic on Twitter. The critic apologizes and Schumer accepts the apology. This is reason for Breitbart to bash Schumer and Gamergate instantly joins in, because of "ethics in video game journalism" or something.
- January 21: After Nintendo decides to rework a controversial scene during the localization process of the game "Fire Emblem Fates", Gamergate instantly targets female Nintendo employee Alison Rapp, again, instigated by Gamergate-affiliated game dev Mark Kern. Rapp's personal information is spread on Reddit and in other Gamergate forums.
- January 22: When a harassment case against a Canadian activist with a history of harassing women falls apart in court, Gamergate celebrates the "defeat" of the plaintiffs, two feminist activists. The hashtag #FreedomofTweets quickly turns into a toxic mess from the usual Gamergate activists and allies, it results in new harassment, while Gamergate makes "demands" towards the Canadian government.
- January 23:
- It is uncovered that Gamergate-affiliated gaming site The Escapist has hired PressFarttoContinue (AKA Nick Tomasheski AKA Nick Monroe), a known Gamergate figurehead and alleged serial harasser who has been at odds even with other notable Gamergate figureheads. Gamergate can't decide what to do with this blatant display of ethics in videogames journalism.
- With a display of perfect timing, internal Gamergate drama demonstrates its dedication to "ethics in videogames journalism", as Gamergate YouTube channel BroTeamPill publishes the conversations with Ethan "TheRalphRetort" Ralph, revealing how Ralph attempts to undermine other Gamergate news channels. After threats of suing BroTeamPill, parts of Gamergate turn against Ralph.
- January 27: Richard Dawkins: "I'm a feminist, but this Sargon of Akkad fellow has made an interesting youtube video about how Feminism and Islamism are the same thing". Facepalm omnes. He's now deleted the tweet.
- January 31: Gamergate figurehead Christina Hoff Summers posts an image macro of debatable taste, origin and purpose on Twitter. When a reporter from the Vox media group (owner of Polygon) calls Summers' posting a display of "white privilege", Gamergate rallies on Reddit and attacks the Vox reporter on Twitter.
February 2016
- February 1: U.S. Representative Katherine Clark, prominent Gamergate critic, sponsor of the Interstate Swatting Hoax Act, and Representative for Zoe Quinn (initially) and Brianna Wu, gets swatted herself.
- February 8: News emerges that Veerender Jubbal, a frequent target of Gamergate's attacks, had to leave Twitter, because law enforcement was worried about a possible threat to his life.
- February 9: Twitter announces the formation of a council which is supposed to advise the company on issues of harassment and abuse. One of the 40 organizations represented in the council is Anita Sarkeesian's organization Feminist Frequency. Gamergate's reaction is predictable.
- February 10: Zoe Quinn reveals she has dropped criminal harassment charges she had filed against Eron Gjoni, stating she was tired of the prolonged legal battles with her ex. Gjoni stated his appeal of her original restraining order would still proceed.
- February 15: In order to protest the localization of Nintendo's Fire Emblem Fates, Gamergate starts a campaign under the name of #TorrentialDownpour aimed at Nintendo's localization team (mostly at Alison Rapp). Undeterred by Gamergate's opposition, the game sells exceptionally well.
- February 21: League of the South member Robert Stacy McCain is banned from Twitter for harassment. With the support of various right-wing blogs, Gamergate lays the blame on Anita Sarkeesian, simply because she is a member of Twitter's advisory council (see entry on February 9). Sarkeesian responds with calling this a conspiracy theory "as the justification for more extreme forms of harassment".
- February 27: A hitpiece on Alison Rapp is published by neo-nazi website The Daily Stormer, adding anti-semitic conspiracy theories to the toxic mix. Andrew "weev" Auernheimer posts a comment featuring contact information for executives at Nintendo on Gamergate's behalf.
- February 28: Jamie Walton, president and co-founder of a non-profit to end child sex trafficking, is apparently duped into joining Gamergate's attack on Alison Rapp, as Gamergaters have been accusing her of defending pedophilia over a college essay in which she discussed how Japanese anti-child pornography laws have been influenced by international pressure.
- February 29: Moderators on /r/KotakuInAction attempt to uphold a facade of credibility with regards to Alison Rapp, while other parts of Gamergate approve of these tactics.
March 2016
- March 1: Jamie Walton is revealed to have been participating in Gamergate's stalking of Brianna Wu for a year on the Kiwi Farms site. Wu confirms. Despite some raising doubts about the account belonging to her, more and more evidence piles up of her having owned the account and using Gamergate to benefit her foundation all while attacking Wu.
- On March 30, Jesse Singal uncovers this year old tweet where Walton is victim blaming and sincerely using "SJW" while attacking Wu.
- March 4: Kotaku attempts to explain how Gamergate's attacks on Alison Rapp are par for the course, revealing Andrew "weev" Aurenheimer was instrumental in doxing several top Nintendo executives in order to get her fired. Other victims of Gamergate (or "Gamergate Revolt" as Gamergaters like to cast blame elsewhere) in this issue over Fire Emblem Fates include actual localization employees at Nintendo (Rapp is a marketing specialist). Kotaku even found Eron Gjoni realizing how stupid all this shit is.
- March 9: Gamergate member and anti-feminist activist Lauren Southern initiates The Triggering, an event to oppose International Women's Day. The aim of the campaign is to be assholes on social media. Most of Gamergate think that is a great idea, even though parts of Gamergate consider the campaign to be a "jewish conspiracy".
- March 12:
- Gamergate is angry at image hosting company Imgur, accusing it of censorship of a picture which is allegedly showing counter-protestors at a Donald Trump rally. The image proving the claimed censorship is not in the style of Imgur, furthermore it shows a preview image underlied in yellow that has no connection to the content of the image that was supposed to have been censored.
- The SXSW festival hosts its online harassment summit, with talks hosted by U.S. Representative Katherine Clark, former Texas State senator and gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis, Brianna Wu, Randi Harper, and Katherine Cross. SXSW for some reason hosts the event a mile away from the main SXSW venue, audience attendance was poor, and those who did attend were mostly women, resulting in a lot of preaching to the choir. The festival also unexpectedly cancelled a live stream of Harper's panel, which was one of the panels originally cancelled due to the threats of violence months earlier.
- March 15: "SavePoint: A Discussion on the Gaming Community", the Trojan horse Gamergate panel, is held at SXSW. Panelists are SPJ President-Elect Lynn Walsh, known Gamergate harasser Nick Robalik of the Pixel Metal video game studio, and Perry Jones who founded The Open Gaming Society, the group serving as a front for Gamergate. Gamergate's official porn star Mercedes Carrera was also slated to be a panelist, but withdrew at the last minute after SXSW staff asked her to remove tweets insulting Harper. How ethical.
- March 16:
- In the wake of the SXSW conference U.S. President Barack Obama speaks out and condemns online harassment against women and advocates the recruitment of more women in tech and proving the collusion goes all the way to the top. Gamergate is not amused.
- Brianna Wu is featured in an episode of the Syfy documentary series The Internet Ruined My Life, discussing the origins of her harassment at the hands of Gamergaters. After the episode's broadcast and Gamergate's response to it, she reports that Gamergaters prove everything she said during the interviews she gave Syfy.
- March 17: Gamergate figurehead Mundane Matt gets swatted. Although the perpetrator(s) is unknown, Mundane Matt said in his video about the ordeal and in an interview with the local news that while he had no idea who had done it to him, he believed it could have been an "enemy" of his he had been arguing with on Twitter earlier that day seeking to frighten him so that he stops making YouTube videos. He also said he had forewarned the police that a swatting could happen to him someday, perhaps because swatting is a tactic used against Gamergate's targets and he became paranoid he'd anger them and gain their hatred. (He that lieth down with dogs shall rise up with fleas.)
- March 18: Hulk Hogan wins his case against Gawker. As mentioned above, this has nothing to do with Gamergate (except for their hatred with one of its subsidiaries), but they claim credit anyway.
- March 27: Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 is released and panned by pretty much all Western critics, even those favorable to Gamergate's party line. Gamergaters single out the reviewer for Destructoid and direct their outrage his way. Minor subreddit /r/GGforAll goes so far as to dox the writer and openly advocates to abuse him on Twitter.
- March 28:
- Davis Aurini finally releases to YouTube Immersed in Subversion: Control the Culture, Control the Man (Davis Aurini's Sarkeesian Documentary), which is totally not The Sarkeesian Effect or a version of it, although it uses footage filmed for it (i.e., all the Aurini footage Jordan Owen cut out of his version). He still doesn't know how to record sound properly.
- Blizzard responds to beta tester feedback concerning a pose made by the character "Tracer" in their upcoming game Overwatch, agreeing with the poster on the issue of the pose being over-sexualized and not fitting the character's in-game story, and that they had considered changing it as well. Gamergate goes mad, claiming that Blizzard has "given in to the SJWs", calls it censorship, and instantly targets the person who made the first negative comment. That single character pose instantly becomes Gamergate's most important topic. #ButtGate begins.
- March 29: The hit piece on Cloud Imperium Games (developer of Star Citizen) released on The Escapist in September 2015 wins third place at the SPJ's Kunkel Award for Excellence in News Reporting. The site also lists the criteria for its judgments.
- March 30: Alison Rapp announces that Nintendo of America has fired her as a result of Gamergate's harassment towards her. In a statement to IGN, NoA claims that Rapp was terminated for having a second job, which Rapp (probably unwisely) confirmed, but also claimed was perfectly kosher under NoA policy. Gamergate couldn't stop gloating for days.
April 2016
- April 2: After a writer for game developer Beamdog mentions a new approach to writing in the upcoming expansion of the revered Baldur's Gate franchise, Gamergate decides to whip itself into a frenzy over this minor issue and targets the writer of the game. Soon Gamergate is accused of heavily brigading the relevant communities and the Steam reviews of the game, up until the point that the founder of Beamdog begs the game's community to counter Gamergate's toxic influence.
- April 3: Davis Aurini admits that he has never actually watched any of Anita Sarkeesian's videos despite having spent a year and a half and thousands of donated
plastic skullsdollars making a film about her. This surprises no one. - April 5: In response to earlier criticisms, Blizzard patches in a new pose for the character Tracer in their game Overwatch. Despite being a good compromise, Gamergate still claims victory while simultaneously wishing that the old pose was still available.
- April 6: After Gamergate keeps on pressuring Beamdog, CEO Trent Oster releases a statement that they won't cave to the pressure of threats and "stand behind all our developers 100%", but does admit that the NPC causing much of the controversy could've been written better and announced that a joke line from a character about "ethics in heroic adventuring" would be removed. Gamergate considers this to be a victory. Meanwhile veterans of the Dungeons & Dragons RPG, as well as members of the official D&D team openly support Beamdog, and even Gamergate's birth place, 4chan, gets sick of the drama.
- April 9: Not content with just getting Alison Rapp fired from her job at Nintendo, Gamergate continues to target her and finds what they claim to be her listing on an escorting website, allegedly the "moonlighting" that Nintendo fired her over. Gamergate immediately begins spreading the nude photos of the escort they had found, because of course they would, and post many threads about it on /r/KotakuInAction. The moderators begin deleting threads and banning people for sharing anything regarding this renewed attempt to completely ruin a woman's life, which is of course just to save face on Reddit because every other Gamergate meeting place doesn't care about their public image.
- April 10: Gamergate smells blood in the water and continues their onslaught against Alison Rapp and begins to dox her family members. Rapp says her sister and a friend's employer were contacted, and said that her family has begun deleting their web presence and issued warnings to their employers in hopes of mitigating Gamergate harassment.
- April 13: A Kickstarter is opened for a website called Social Autopsy, allegedly to combat online harassment by cataloguing people's actions. The campaign is shut down by Kickstarter a day later as it is clearly set up to be a doxing database.
- April 15: Randi Harper takes the Social Autopsy group to task, calling them out on attacking Zoe Quinn when she spoke to them on the phone as she broke down in tears during the call (their official Twitter's since deleted tweets about the phone call, note them talking to Cathy Young of all people). The Social Autopsy team leader Candace Owens decides the next course of action is to talk to Ethan "TheRalphRetort" Ralph. Ralph seems to have convinced them of the Gamergate party line.
- April 16: Candace Owens, head of Social Autopsy, begins to openly side with Gamergate. Even MRA figurehead and Gamergate supporter Paul Elam wants to get in touch with her now. Thus Gamergate rethinks its position towards the site, hoping to use it against its targets.
- April 18: Jesse Singal covers how Candace Owens fell into the Gamergate conspiracy theory hole because she has no idea how the Internet works when it comes to going viral and when it comes to online abuse. As Owens threatened to post an "exposé", before Singal published his piece he contacts her about it and warns her that her post is a bad idea. Owens ignores Singal and confirms all of his theories about her state of mind on her company's blog hours later.
- April 24: Candace Owens of Social Autopsy lashes out at Caitlin Dewey and David Malitz of The Washington Post after Dewey interviewed her and tried to corroborate part of her story and uncovered a lie. Owens' attempts at "preventing libel" results in siccing her thousands of Twitter followers on Dewey while she is at a family affair and later Malitz (Dewey's editor) killing the story because Social Autopsy is not newsworthy enough, while also defending his reporter's ethics. Owens is still furious, believing that everyone involved is in the pockets of
Big PharmafeminismMonsantoAmazon.com and places Jeff Bezos at the top of her conspiracy theory pyramid featuring Zoe Quinn, Randi Harper, Jesse Singal, and now The Washington Post. - April 26: Candace Owens tries in vain to get "#journalgate" to trend in response to her "mistreatment" (translation: actual ethical reporting) at the hands of Jesse Singal and Caitlin Dewey.
May 2016
- May 19: Eron Gjoni's appeal against Zoe Quinn's vacated restraining order is denied on all grounds. The court found the "deluge of harassment" to be "uncontested".
- May 26: After an appearance of Breitbart Tech editor Milo Yiannopoulos at DePaul University gets disrupted by activists of the "Black Lives Matter" movement, Gamergate and various subreddits linked to Donald Trump dox one of the protestors.
June 2016
- June 22: Zoe Quinn expresses disdain towards a few lines from Paper Mario: Color Splash that she feels are a jab against her. She, and others, construe the "Five Fun Guys" and "Shufflegate" dialog as references to her early harassment at the hands of Gamergate. People across the Internet who have suddenly become experts in American history mansplain to her that it must instead be a reference to Watergate. After hours of being told "well actually", she points out the hypocrisy of her detractors.
- June 23: Nintendo issues a public statement that the entire scene the lines are from are indeed references to the Watergate scandal and not "...a crude reference to an online hate campaign". While this is the first time Gamergate has been called out for what it is by a major video game company, it doesn't excuse the fact that the allegedly unintentional juxtaposition of "five guys" and "-gate" were a problem to begin with, a fact Zoe has to make clear.
July 2016
- July 20: Milo Yiannopoulos is banned from Twitter on the grounds that he was inciting his followers into sending Ghostbusters
actress Leslie Jones
a deluge of racist harassment by repeatedly tweeting insults at her and sharing fake tweets of her making bigoted remarks. As usual, multiple people fake Tweets after the fact implying it was a false flag or falsely accuse several Gamergate targets as perpetrators. Because it's actually about ethics in how busting makes you feel good.
- July 21: Zoe Quinn announces that Eron Gjoni had tried to appeal his restraining order, which she had initially placed on him but since vacated, to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court after being rejected at a lower appeals court. The SJC also rejected his appeal, ensuring that Commonwealth of Massachusetts law allows domestic violence victims to modify their restraining orders should the original restrictions cause more harm than good. She then assures her followers she will return to work on "the finest vampire night bus smut fanfic game ever made".
August 2016
- August 15: Cathy Young commemorates the second anniversary of Gamergate by posting a link on Twitter to an interview with Eron Gjoni she wrote for Heat Street, in which she gets Gjoni to admit that if he had to do the Zoe post all over again, he would. [2]
- August 19: Max Read, the former editor-in-chief of Gawker, publishes his piece "Did I Kill Gawker?" where he names a total of six parties that he argues to have played a role in the later demise of Gawker — listing GamerGate as one of them. Regarding the fatal inaccuracy of GamerGate's initial premises (Zoe Quinn's alleged "sex-bought game review"), he stated;
That no such review ever actually appeared on [Kotaku] should tell you a lot about Gamergate’s relationship to the truth; that Gamergaters believe this is how sex works should tell you a lot about the Gamergate demographic. But none of the specifics of the story really mattered, because ultimately Kotaku was being targeted less for specific ethical violations than for its critical coverage of the portrayal of women and minorities in video games and the sexism of the gaming community.
September 2016
- September 7: Ethan Ralph, publisher of the Rush Limbaugh-esque The Ralph Retort, is arrested on two counts of assault on law enforcement and one count of obstruction of justice.
December 2016
- December 6: A Freedom of Information act request to the FBI is fulfilled, resulting in pages of investigatory notes regarding Gamergater harassment and threats. Many pages are redacted per court orders. There are multiple instances where people parroting gamergate and anti-feminist talking points engage in targeted harassment, including someone who discussed Gamergate on 4chan, and mocked one of the targets he considered a "professional victim." To draw attention to false victimhood, this person sent them threats. Another gator admitted to the FBI that they made 40-50 phone calls with threats.
- December 20: Brianna Wu announces her run for a Massachusetts Congress seat in 2018. "She fought the Alt.Right and won. Now she's fighting for all of us. Fearless leadership for 2018."
2017 onwards
2017
- July: Lane Davis, a.k.a. seattle4truth, an integral gamergate "digger," who allegedly uncovered nefarious connections between the gaming press and DARPA, is accused of murdering his father, with court documents saying he said the victim was a "leftist pedophile."
- September 6: Zoe Quinn's book Crash Override, on her Gamergate experience and how to deal with online harassment, is released.
- October 21: Game developer site NeoGAF, one of the first gaming communities to take a firm stance against GamerGate, goes up in flames after accusations of sexual harrasment are made against site administrator Tyler "EvilLore" Malka. In response to this, a large part of the moderation staff resigned and most site regulars requested to be banned. A few days later, several prominent former NeoGAF members & former moderators launched a new forum named ResetEra.
- November 4: Techraptor announces a change in focus to mark many of their old stories as "Not up to current editorial standards" and remove four stories due to them being unsupported attack pieces. They state that they were always neutral on gamergate but now are even more apolitical.
2018
- March 31: Zoe Quinn's book Crash Override is a 2018 Hugo Awards finalist in "Related Works."
- May 24: John "Totalbiscuit" Bain succumbs to cancer at age 33.
- July 13: Reddit forum /r/KotakuInAction is shut down by its founder and head moderator, david-me, after he suffers a crisis of conscience and calls it a "cancerous growth" comparable to /r/The_Donald. Reddit admins step in and reopen the subreddit, which promptly brands david-me a traitor.
- July: The Escapist is sold to former Editor in Chief Russ Pitts and Enthusiast Gaming, pushing out Alexander Macris and instituting a more apolitical stance. "To make matters worse, beginning at some point in 2013 or 2014 The Escapist’s former publisher had allowed the website to become a home to political extremists."
- September 4: Brianna Wu loses her primary bid for congress.
2019
- February 6: Prominent Gamergate supporter and right-wing activist Mercedes Carrera is arrested for eight counts of sexually abusing a girl under the age of 10. Gamergaters pretend they never knew her.
- August 27: Elder Scrolls composer Jeremy Soule is accused of sexual assault. This inspires Zoe Quinn to reveal accusations of Night in the Woods programmer and designer Alec Holowka involving sexual abuse. Meanwhile, other people within the indie gaming scene also expose developers, in a moment compared to the #MeToo movement.
- August 29: The other developers of Night in the Woods, Scott Benson and Bethany Hockenberry, cut ties with Alec Holowka, following other accusers revealing similar stories about him.
- September 1: Alec Holowka's sister, Eileen, reveals that Holowka passed away that day, following years of struggle with mental illness. In the post, she implies that the accusations against Holowka are true, clarifying that she discourages abuse against Quinn, while still mourning the loss of her brother. Due to the resulting furore, she is forced to close her account, with many Gamergaters blaming her and Zoe Quinn for Holowka's death.
- September 3: Follwing Alec Holowka's death, Scott Benson published an article on Medium about Alec's passing and his past relationship with Alec.
- September 3-10 Right-wing news outlet The Post Millenial publishes hit-pieces claiming that Zoey Quinn lied about her accusations about Alec.[3] [4] [5]
2020
- June: The gaming Industry faces numerous accusations of gender-based discrimination, harassment and sexual assault. [6] [7] [8]
- July: Ubisoft is accused of covering up sexual misconduct in the company.
- November: Buzzfeed Studios announces the film 1up a comedy movie about an underdog all-female Esports team that is said will cover gamergate in the film. [9] Wu and Quinn both come out against the film saying that it was wrong to make a comedy over the controversy. [10]
2021
- January: Brianna Wu states in the aftermath of the 2021 Storming of the U.S. Capital that “everything I tried to get the FBI to act on in the aftermath of GamerGate has now come true...We told people that if social media companies like Facebook and Reddit did not tighten their policies about these communities of organized hate, that we were going to see violent insurrection in the United States … We told people that these communities were organizing online for violence and extremism. That, unfortunately, has proven to be true.” Wu also states that while Big Tech recent changes were a step in the right direction, she worries it may be "too little, too late." [11]
See also
External links
- A comprehensive timeline of Gamergate (with sources) (/r/GamerGhazi), which this page was originally forked from with kind permission