List of Gamergate claims

Gamergate, leader in the war against SJW journalism! Sadly, they lost the battle for humility.

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The main page for this topic is Gamergate. For the day-by-day, see our timeline of Gamergate.

Gamergate lives in an alternate universe with an alternate history, in which Gamergate has doxxed nobody, has significantly increased ethics in game journalism, is supported by a broad coalition of diverse people (and in particular by the vast majority of gamers), and is generally pretty great. Surprisingly, they're incorrect. This page is a list of Gamergate's claims and reality-based rebuttals.

Gamergate is nice

Like an unctuous stalker.

Gamergate hasn't harmed anyone

Claim

Gamergate is about ethics in journalism, which precludes harassment and doxxing!

Rebuttal

Here's a list:

1. Zoe Quinn:
   • Eron Gjoni made a 9000-word rant designed to gather trolls willing to drive Quinn off the internet, and, preferably, to suicide.
   • After he got banned from Penny Arcade and Something Awful, he shared with 4chan's /r9k/ and /pol/, who then decided to call them a "whore" and a "cunt". How non-misogynist.
   • 4chan then accused Quinn of using sex to get good video game reviews.
   • Proto-Gamergaters hacked their social media and sent nude photos to her employers and family.
   • Quinn and their boyfriend at the time Alex Lifschitz were homeless for half a year because their old home address became public knowledge amongst Gamergate and was accompanied with physical threats.
   • They're not a game journalist at all. THE ETHICS!
2. Phil Fish:
   • After standing up for Quinn, Fish had his personal finances (among other details) revealed in a hack, forcing him to sell off his company and disappear from gaming. The anonymous mob denied responsibility, claiming that Quinn and Fish were running a false flag operation.
   • He's not a game journalist at all. THE ETHICS!
3. Several of Quinn's colleagues were so afraid of being targetted that they left game development, destroying their projects.
4. Anita Sarkeesian:
   • The only reason she's in Gamergate's sights is because she dared to say something negative about stereotypes, especially misogyny, in video games. Why would Gamergate, a nonmisogynist utopia for women, feel threatened by Sarkeesiaan's totally benign criticism?
   • Gamergaters sent her death threats that made her fear for her own safety at home.
   • Someone actually threatened to shoot up a school because of her and because of video games. And no, it wasn't a "Brazilian clickbait blogger".
   • She just makes YouTube videos. Not a video game journalist so the mob claims.
   • Take a look at the article dedicated solely to her to see specific claims made against her. Or the page dedicated solely to thunderf00t's claims against her.
5. Brianna Wu
   • She was not a video game journalist (As in: hadn't written an article on video games) at the time her harassment began. Another game dev though.
   • Because of memes a follower of hers made, she was sent death threats that led her to flee her home temporarily.
   • Gamergaters doxxed her and immediate family. Why?
6. Jenn Frank
   • Finally a video game journalist!
   • She just wrote that the atmosphere is toxic for women in the video game industry, and because the editors at The Guardian cut out the disclaimer that she had crowdfunded one of Quinn's projects because an actual newspaper realized it wasn't an ethical issue, Gamergaters drove her out of the industry.
7. Mattie Brice too.
8. Felicia Day
   • She only wrote that she was afraid to say anything about her criticism of Gamergate because she felt she would be targeted next. She was doxxed in the comment section within an hour.
9. Dan Olson
   • He didn't even mention Gamergate in his exposé on 8chan's harboring of pedophiles and hosting child pornography, but that didn't stop Gamergaters from doxxing him, accusing him of being a pedophile, and distributing child porn (aka heavily blurred screenshots of 8chan's child sex abuse photos in his article).
10. Jennifer Allaway
    • What purpose was there in trolling her game dev survey with messages such as "suck my dick" and "go kill yourself"? Other than helping her analyze Gamergate to show it met an established definition of a hate group.
11. The Digital Games Research Association
    • They have nothing to do with ethics in video game journalism or DARPA or pushing a feminist agenda in video games.
12. Leigh Alexander
    • Only the third video game journalist here!!
    • She only said the gamer "bro" demographic didn't have to be publishers' audience anymore. In retaliation, Gamergate went after her website's ad revenue and began a character assassination campaign, as well as threaten to shove "a screwdriver in her eyesocket".
13. Natalie Zina (Zed) Walschots
    • Not a video game journalist! A social scientist instead.
    • All she did was come up with a code word for Gamergate to be used by other professionals at the 2015 Canadian Game Studies Association conference as they had been told by organizers not to refer to the group by name, but there were still panels about Gamergate at the event. However, when one person accidentally tweeted "Gamergate" and left it up for 10 minutes, Gamergaters found her and began harassing her, eventually discovering that she was planning her PhD thesis on Gamergate and decided to go after her school, demanding that she have her thesis disqualified (because she didn't support Gamergate, which apparently is required for a doctorate).
14. Patricia Hernandez
    • Another video game journalist! Finally!
    • Gamergate keeps citing an opinion piece she wrote concerning Max Temkin, co-creator of Cards Against Humanity, with regards to a rape accusation against him.
    • Also they're mad that she wrote about her friend and former roommate Anna Anthropy, who is mentioned three minor times in one article, a video game she made getting plugged in a three-sentence blog post, another minor blog entry, and plugging a free game made by Antropy elsewhere. Real ethical focusing on these two women's private lives there, Gamergate.
    • And they're mad she wrote about her other roommate and friend Christine Love, as well, in writing about her video game Hate Plus.
    • And of course, she's friends with Zoe Quinn, too. Why else would Gamergate ever care about Hernandez in the first place? Not to mention, the article is a human interest piece and not a video game review. And again, promoting a free video game and not reviewing it.
15. Sarah Nyberg
    • Not a video game journalist!
    • Not even a video game developer!
    • All she's done is document the worst and most prominent of Gamergate's activities on her Twitter. This led to Gamergaters digging up all they could on her, including her name before she came out as transgender and her dead family members' obituaries, all while accusing her of many things based on ancient IRC logs that were uncovered by hacking her website. This is detailed elsewhere, but Gamergate's hypocrisy is showing in that they won't extend their "free speech" or insistence that they're not really racists or pedophiles, but they won't extend this protection to their targets.
16. Peter Coffin
    • Not a video game journalist!
    • Not video game developer!
    • YouTube comedian, not even a video game specific one. Named and doxxed by Fredrick Brennan for reporting 8chan for child porn. Gamergaters also attempted to have Coffin involuntarily committed, in addition to making claim after claim about their wife and child not existing.
17. Alison Rapp
    • Not a video game journalist!
    • Not a video game developer!
    • Worked at Nintendo's localization department as a product marketer but has been made a scapegoat by Gamergate (or is it "Torrential Downpour" now?) for anything regarding a change in video game content that basically boils down to the removal of extraneous sexualized content that pandered to Japanese otaku but won't fly in the United States. This is because she is a woman and one with feminist/progressive ideas.
    • Gamergaters (or this splinter group, but they're basically one in the same) latched onto her college essay about Japan's anti-child porn laws to label her a pedophile apologist, when her essay is supporting this group's insistence that Japan shouldn't have other nation's cultural norms imposed upon it and its media. It just wouldn't be Gamergate without rampant hypocrisy.
    • After months of harassment, Nintendo fired her. They claimed it was because Rapp was moonlighting, but Rapp disputes that being a violation of company policy. Almost nobody believed Nintendo fired her for any reason but to distance themselves from the ongoing harassment campaign.
    • Despite supposedly getting what they want (i.e. removed from a position where she supposedly affects their precious underage anime tits), Gamergate followed this up by doxxing and harassing her family. Months later, they still harass her. As usual, nothing short of death is punishment enough in Gamergate's eyes.
    • Actually it's about ethics in cultural differences.

Gamergate isn't misogynistic

Claim

"[The first sentence of Gamergate on RationalWiki] implies everyone who is, was, or ever will be a member of pro-GamerGate hates women and opposes diversity in gaming culture. As someone who recently joined the pro-GG side, I have no hatred of women and believe women deserve the same dignity and respect men are entitled to, and that men and women in the gaming industry should be judged on the merits of the abilities and contributions to that industry, not their genders, though I also believe gender should never be used by either an excuse, moral absolvation, or justification for any act that diminishes their integrity."

Rebuttal

Congratulations on being the True Scotsman. We're sorry to inform you that when a so-called "movement" is started from a bunch of false allegations regarding one woman's sexual life, it paints the group as a whole as misogynistic. As Gamergate progressed, the misogynistic descriptor was only enforced as more and more women were disproportionately attacked verbally, emotionally, and financially for not agreeing with Gamergate. Even when Gamergaters managed to convince a few journalists to try to understand what Gamergate was actually about, those journalists only saw intense vitriol against the very women that Gamergate constantly claims they do not actually care about. So Gamergate simultaneously does not care about Zoe Quinn, Anita Sarkeesian, Brianna Wu, et al., but still came up with slang terms to bring them up repeatedly but not by name? Just admit it already.

Gamergate also has been, from day 1, a harassment campaign that solely exists because Zoe Quinn was presenting as female. The claims of anything other than that were from the start a smokescreen for the group's true intentions.

"Literally Who?"

Claim

Gamergate is not about Zoe Quinn.

Rebuttal

So why do Gamergaters like to meet up at a restaurant that was used by Eron Gjoni to call Zoe Quinn a slut? Why has Eron Gjoni been given tens of thousands of dollars to fight Zoe Quinn in court? If Gamergaters truly want people to believe that they don't care about Quinn, Gamergaters should probably stop doing shit just to spite Zoe.

Harassers don't represent Gamergate

"Gamergate doesn't harass people. Just check the #Gamergate hashtag. No harassment there."

Claim

"If only the harassers are representative of Gamergate, then [...] Randi Harper and others represent all of anti-Gamergate," RationalWiki pro-Gamergate editor Naqoyqatsi

Rebuttal

The aim here is to absolve the whole of Gamergate from blame for harassment, often deflecting blame on "third-party trolls". The problem is that Gamergate was founded on a case of harassment, and has since continued with a heavily documented track record of harassment. Gamergate began because of Eron Gjoni's desire to ruin Zoe Quinn's life for leaving him, even going so far to desire that they should end up so emotionally broken that they needed therapy.

Gamergate supporters equate "Gamergate as a whole is responsible for harassment" with "all members of Gamergate harass", arguing that because the latter is false, the former is too. Of course it's improbable that all 10 thousand or so people in Gamergate on Twitter have harassed people, but that doesn't mean you can therefore say, "that person who harassed you isn't a Gamergater" when someone who has specifically gone after another person for Gamergate-related reasons is called out on it.

Name dropping individuals like Randi Harper or Phil Fish is several fallacies: nutpicking, false equivalence, tu quoque and two wrongs don't make a right. Neither Harper or Fish have done anything at all like the harassment caused by Gamergate, if they had people would have rightly disclaimed them, and even then it still wouldn't justify Gamergate's harassment, let alone somehow cancel it out. Also, Randi Harper's public feud with Vivek Wadhwa, a man despised by women and feminists in the tech industry, which predates Gamergate and was only highlighted by Stop the GoodReads Bullies, doesn't mean anything. Stop the GoodReads Bullies is essentially the Gamergate for book reviews (doxxing people who leave negative reviews and directing readers to harass them), and instead of Milo Yiannopoulos they have Anne Rice.

Despite all this, when statistical studies come out that show how disproportionately responsible Gamergate is for harassment, all hell breaks loose in haphazard attempts to spin the results in Gamergate's favor.

Newsweek

Claim

Newsweek's analysis of Gamergate tweets showed that there's barely any harassment coming from Gamergate and most of the discussion is positive or neutral.

Rebuttal

Of about 250k Tweets analyzed by a company hired by Newsweek, 85-90% were neutral towards their subject, 0-5% were positive, and 5-10% were negative. The majority of posts (which come from both GG and some "anti-GG") at first glance don't appear to be doxxing, harassing, etc. Gamergate claims this analysis proves that most Gamergate activity and discussion on Twitter and elsewhere is also "neutral". Gamergaters used the "neutral" description to falsely claim 90-95% of Twitter responses were "neutral or positive" in terms of sentiment, when instead they were "the software can't determine from the words used if user sentiment was positive or negative". For example:

• "I like dogs." (Positive)
• "Dogs are mammals." (Neutral)
• "I hate dogs." (Negative)

The Newsweek analysis in question is flawed and automated—Mike Williams, the Brandwatch data scientist who generated the data for Newsweek, confirmed that the "neutral" tweets should have been labeled "undetermined" instead. A hand-sorted analysis of a (admittedly smaller) selection of those same tweets found it was closer to 75% negative (15% positive, 10% neutral/undetermined)—and 95% of all tweets took a clear stance for or against Gamergate. Why the difference? Many Gamergate supporters use terms that will thwart an automated analysis ("narrative" isn't usually negative, but Gamergaters use it in a negative way), and automated analysis ignores details that a human might find threatening, such as images (which may contain sensitive data/libel/nudes), dogpiling certain users, and "polite" trolling, also known as "sealioning".

Also, this analysis is only based on Twitter mentions and avoids analyzing Gamergate on other sites, such as 8chan, where moderation is lax, to say the least (and the content is far more offensive/hateful/negative than Twitter will allow).

WAM!

Claim

The study performed by Women, Action, and the Media (WAM!) proves that only 0.66% of Gamergaters are responsible for harassment.

Rebuttal

WAM!'s study was simple: for two weeks in November 2014, Twitter users who sent in abuse reports to staff could optionally send their report off to WAM! to vet it first and then escalate it if necessary. WAM! recorded the nature of the report and whether or not Twitter acted on it. Their analyzed data was released the following May, showing a disparity on Twitter's part in responding to particular types of harassment. WAM! also acknowledged that Gamergate was happening during their study (it hasn't really ended yet) and compared their data with Randi Harper's Good Game Auto Blocker (GGAB) tool, and found that 12% of the reports they handled were on accounts blocked by GGAB.

As for the "0.66%" claim, it is a vast underestimation and a complete misuse of statistics. Sure, according to their calculations, 12% of WAM!'s data is 65 accounts, and those 65 accounts account for 0.66% of the GGAB account list. However, WAM! only analyzed a small fraction of Twitter harassment: the survey only lasted two weeks, and contributing was optional. Claiming that the 65 accounts represent the full extent of Gamergate harassment is incredibly disingenuous.

At the time of the analysis, Twitter had ~288 million monthly users, yet somehow 12% of the reported harassment came from the 9844 accounts on the GGAB blocklist. Yes, it's true that the study was biased against Gamergate, thanks to selection bias and false positives (which are only there to protect their secret blends of herbs and spices). Once again, Gamergaters make up about .004% of the population on Twitter, and they accounted for 12% of the abuse reports that WAM! was sent. There's no knowing how many support tickets were not part of the trial period, but even with a very generous fudge factor it's clear that Gamergate has an unusually large number of harassers in its ranks considering they make up more than 1 out of 10 reports in a voluntary study.

Zoe Quinn and Phil Fish doxxed themselves

Claim

Zoe Quinn's doxxing and Phil Fish being doxxed even further was a false flag operation.

Rebuttal

If Quinn and Fish were going to perform a false flag operation, they certainly could have done it better. Why would Quinn want people to find their old nude photos, when they could easily have gotten attention without any such release? Why would Fish want to destroy his own business and force his departure from gaming, just for publicity? Gamergate has yet to answer, other than asserting that Phil Fish and Alex Lifschitz are the same person.

What Gamergate decides to use as evidence is how no one could have possibly been able to post damaging things to Quinn's personal Tumblr as they claim happened despite her security precautions. This ignores how Tumblr has a post-by-email feature and the randomized email address set to their account was more than likely uncovered in the hack to her contacts list.

Anita Sarkeesian sent death threats to herself

Claim

"The death threats against Anita Sarkeesian are clearly fake, and most likely made by Anita herself," —Return of Kings

Rebuttal

This argument is based solely on several "odd" things in a screencapture Sarkeesian took of the doxxing.

"Screencap [was] taken only 12 seconds after last post."

The "12 second" tweet was the last in a line of 10 tweets, of which the first had been three minutes prior. If someone were to have clicked through to the account from one of those tweets, then that 12s tweet would still be there, and a new tweet might have been posted right after the image was taken. Twitter timestamps aren't up-to-date by the second, but update every few minutes. Further, time is utterly meaningless due to Twitter allowing a live search.

"Anita [was] logged out."

Consider the simplicity of non-false-flag yet logged-out scenarios: Sarkeesian could have (a) forgotten to log in (totally never happens), (b) not wanted to be logged in while browsing mean tweets (yes, this is a common thing people do), (c) logged out before realizing that someone was being a shithead, or (d) had a lengthy block list and would rather log out than unblock people to see the tweets.

"[The tweets were found] without performing any search."

There's a simple explanation for this. Open up Twitter in Firefox. Do a search. Middle-mouse click or ctrl+click on a date, as if you were opening several tweets in succession. Look at the search bar.

"Perfect capitalization, spelling, and punctuation."

... Because nobody can do that.

"Neck biting and blood drinking is a feminine vampire fantasy. [....] In Anita's fantasy, her stalkers are men overpowered by her beauty, who want to dispose of her beta provider and fulfill her darkest rape fantasies."

There's no possible way that somebody could send sexually threatening tweets to another person, so obviously it's Sarkeesian sexually harassing herself with her fantasies.

Gamergate has support from game developers

Claim

All of these game developers are pro-GG! We're defending what they want to do!

Rebuttal

Yeah. Ignoring the fact that gaming companies like Nintendo have actively distanced themselves from Gamergate (describing GG as an "online hate movement") there are still a handful of very important game developers who seem to have chosen Gamergate as something they want to rally behind. Let's look into them.

• Slade "RogueStar" Villena: Developer of FleetCOMM, a video game that despite multiple attempts at KickStarter, has yet to get off the ground. He has it in for the Independent Games Festival because in 2012 FleetCOMM, then known as Vigrior, lost to Phil Fish's Fez. Villena was also one of the earliest proponents of Gamergate when it was still just the #BurgersAndFries IRC channel, expressing a desire to falsely report Anita Sarkeesian to the IRS and saying, "NONE of this would have happened if [Zoe Quinn] kept her vagina shut".
• James "Grimachu" Desborough: A tabletop game designer. His creations include Nymphology, a Dungeons & Dragons supplement that feature sexual violence as the punchline to a joke; The Slayer's Guide to Female Gamers, a book that is allegedly a joke but is full of the usual "female gamers are fake" sentiment; Hentacle, a card game about tentacle rape; Privilege Check, a card game to mock "social justice warriors"; and an article titled "In Defence of Rape" concerning the use of rape in fiction. He also crowdfunded a Gorean RPG, which was supported by Alexander Macris of The Escapist, who also interviewed Desborough and never bothered to disclose this fact.
• Benjamin Daniel "Bendilin" Spurr: He made Beat Up Anita Sarkeesian. Enough said.
• Ryan Koons: Developer of HuniePop, a pornographic Candy Crush clone with a visual novel aspect, and an unofficial patch to the game to unlock nudity, which was barred from its official release on Steam. After Koons released the game and gave out free review copies to various websites, he was not pleased with one of them that called the game out for the pandering pornographic garbage it is. Gamergaters like to claim that the majority of the developers on the game were women, when in fact Koons just listed all of the voice actresses he hired as members of the development team. A video exists of Koons using pick-up artist techniques on unsuspecting women in public, dubbing it "Field Research" for his game.
• Mark Kern: One of the team members on World of Warcraft and several other games. Kern was never actually involved with hands on development of the game despite what he wants you to believe. He was "Team Lead" which amounts to little more than a producer. He is also responsible for the failure of Red 5's FireFall, where he put millions of dollars into promoting the game while it wasn't even in an alpha release, including buying a bus and refurbishing it for US$3 million to tour gaming conventions. He was also verbally abusive to his staff members at Red 5, as revealed by a former employee on Reddit. The employee went into detail of how Kern would yell at the developers and there had to be a "safe word" distributed throughout the office to get him to stop. In the end, Red 5 ultimately voted him out of the company he co-founded. Kern seems to only be in Gamergate to get back at the games press who panned FireFall. He first got on Gamergate's radar after accusing Kotaku and Polygon for being to blame for the then recently aired Gamergate-themed episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, for which he was rightfully criticized. He in turn demanded the right to response on these websites, despite owning his own blog (without a comments section) and the fact that Gamasutra allows developers to post their own blogs. Also he seems to think all game developers actually support Gamergate but don't say so publically because they're afraid of being pussywhipped by their wives.
• Denis Dyack: Former president of the Silicon Knights studio, with several popular games under his belt like Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain, Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, and the GameCube port of Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes. However, the studio's follow up Too Human was in development for 10 years and upon release was panned by critics. And then they took on X-Men: Destiny on top of Too Human, and it too bombed. Kotaku ran a massive exposé on the company from former employees who all pinned the blame on X-Men's failure on Dyack's ineffectual leadership, which apparently came from treating the company like a high school P.E. class and demanding ridiculous requests for minuscule game features (demanding a truck in the background be recolored red) when the whole of the game was unplayable. Silicon Knights eventually went under because Dyack had led a team to illegally use Epic Games's Unreal Engine without a proper license, requiring the company to pay US$9.2 million in damages. His attempt to use Kickstarter to fund a new game with a new studio (with all of Silicon Knights' assets) also failed.
• Derek Smart: President and lead developer of indie studio 3000AD, Inc.. Their flagship game Battlecruiser 3000AD is described on Wikipedia as being, "noted for its long, troubled development history," and having, "generated one of the longest and largest flame wars in the history of Usenet," before it was even released. The follow-up game Universal Combat was also deep in development hell, and Smart sued the publisher DreamCatcher for discounting the price, which DreamCatcher felt was suitable due to the game's mediocre quality. During all this time, Smart became known for his online combativeness in the face of criticism, with Computer Games Magazine remarking, "over time, his reputation as an online defender of his games and unabashed pistol-whipper of his enemies overshadows the games themselves." Most recently, Smart has been attacking the ambitious Kickstarter project Star Citizen, deeming it as both a Ponzi scheme and vaporware for what he accuses are unattenable project goals and false advertising. In reality, this is part of a 30 year feud between Smart and Star Citizen's creator Chris Roberts which stretches back to Roberts successfully releasing Wing Commander in 1990 and Smart threatening to sue him over copyright infringement over his planned release of Battlecruiser 3000AD to which Roberts said the legal threats were baseless as he had never heard of Smart or his project. Battlecruiser 3000AD would not be released for another 5 years (and it was broken as hell upon release), while Roberts and his team cranked out 3 sequels to Wing Commander. In the present day, Smart demanded that Roberts step down as CEO of his own development studio, a US$1M audit of the company (paid by Smart), a refund for every Kickstarter donor. Roberts' team responded by refunding Smart's initial $250 donation to the Kickstarter, accusing him of drumming up controversy to promote his own unreleased (presently in early access) video game. Since his current crusade against Roberts and Star Citizen began, Smart has been trying to pull Gamergate in as his personal army, but no woman is presently involved in the dispute so Gamergaters don't give a shit. However, Smart did get picked by Michael Koretzky to serve as a "neutral" voice at the disaster SPJ-tangential AirPlay panel. After AirPlay, Smart got totally burned by RSI/CIG in a letter sent by their legal counsel, which revealed that they had proof Smart never even installed the demo game engine they released to Kickstarter donors to test the game and also included the statement, "The complete absence of any functioning or successful game having ever been released by [Derek Smart] in his 20+ year 'career' of game development further raises the question why he would consider himself qualified to cast any judgment on Star Citizen." Smart is also believed to be behind a hitpiece published on The Escapist by (former) Gamergater Lizzy Finnegan which made several claims that Roberts sent a response to debunk 3 hours before the article went up, but was absent from the original posting. Evidence against Smart in this is that he is buddy-buddy with Finnegan on Twitter (to Gamergaters this is a cardinal sin for anyone "unethical" but this isn't a problem here) and Smart has displayed knowledge of the alleged "anonymous sources" for the article being disgruntled former employees mere hours before the article was published. And a fun fact from this is that one of the pieces of evidence Finnegan claimed to have received to vet the anonymous sources was an employee ID badge, which Roberts and his legal counsel and cofounder Ortwin Freyermuth say they don't use in their studios.
• Adrian Chmielarz: Founder of People Can Fly, studio behind Painkiller and co-developer of Bulletstorm and Gears of War, and after selling his shares in People Can Fly founded The Astronauts. He's written a lot of posts on Medium.com being a contrarian like "I Want to Murder Some Nazis and Save a Damsel in DDistress [sic]", "The Boy Who Cried White Wolf: On Polygon’s The Witcher 3 Review", and "The Truth About E3 2015 and Female Protagonists" James Murff very easily tore these apart.
• Daniel Vávra: Co-founder of Warhorse Studios, and lead developer of Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven and Mafia II. He seems to be edgy on purpose, mocking requests for non-white characters in video games has mocked Zoe Quinn and others for having received death threats, as well as mocked one of the actors who worked on the Mafia remake for looking too much like Shrek, never mind the fact that Jeremy Luke's father passed away at the time. All in all, he just seems to be a reactionary who happens to make video games (although Mafia's console releases were panned for being poor conversions of the PC version and Eurogamer panned Mafia II for its cut content, though to be fair it was hardly Vávra's fault as 2K Games decided to pare back the game and sell the otherwise excised content as DLC). Also his latest project Kingdom Come: Deliverance was in development for 6 years.
• Christian Allen: Game designer at Red Storm Entertainment, lead designer on Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon 2. Later released Takedown: Red Sabre after a Kickstarter campaign. Takedown was panned for being unfinished at release. He was one of the first developers to be interviewed by pro-Gamergate site Niche Gamer where he was asked several leading questions. Chmielarz and Dyack were interviewed after he was.
• Brad Wardell: CEO of Stardock, best known for WindowBlinds and the Object Desktop suite or skinning and customisation utilities for Windows. The studio's most recent game Elemental: War of Magic received terrible reviews due to its poor implimentation at release. Wardell also (rightly for once) has a beef against Kotaku for publishing a story regarding a sexual harassment lawsuit against him that was dropped after he appeared to have filed a retaliatory countersuit. However, this doesn't excuse the fact that he extended a job offer to a man who drew a comic strip of himself getting oral sex from a caricature of Zoe Quinn for a review of her game.
• Michael Lawson: A developer who previously worked on The Sims. He has not worked in the video games industry since 2011. His Twitter timeline is full of anti-Black Lives Matter and anti-Planned Parenthood propaganda.
• Jason Truman: A developer who claims to have worked on a game in the Operation: Flashpoint series. A profile of his shows the last video game he worked on was in 2009. He supports UKIP.

There's a lot of commonalities on this list. Games that got panned for being shit. Games that never came out. People who lean right. People who are just straight up assholes. People who haven't properly worked in the video game industry for several years. People who want to take revenge on someone else. What a lovely group to all fly the Gamergate banner.

Meanwhile Gamergaters all go apeshit over extremely minor animation changes in the fighting game Skullgirls to remove some overt panty shots and how major studio Capcom changed how the camera acts in Street Fighter V with regards to two female characters that removes overt sexualization while the game is still in beta. It's not censorship if a video game's creators decide to change something on their own, particularly in an unfinished product like a beta version. It wouldn't be censorship if a shirt color is changed, but the second a character's asscrack changes from being dead center on the screen to slightly off to one side then suddenly "the SJWs have gone too far" despite not being involved at all.

"Citogenesis"

Claim

"We've had this with GamerGate. Certain individuals, all of whom with a vested personal and financial interest, told a number of specific lies - for instance, that Eron Gjoni's ZoePost was a 'bitter ex-boyfriend's rambling screed' that accuses Zoe Quinn of performing sexual favors in exchange for positive reviews (this is an interesting case, because we have a primary source - the ZoePost itself, no material fact of which has ever been denied by any involved party - that no mainstream writer seems willing to actually read), when in actuality it's a chronicle of domestic abuse suffered at the hands of a game developer. That lie is told by writers in tech, and then is picked up by careless writers at larger publications failing to do their due diligence. A chain reaction of public opinion is created from a single lie in the right place. Then, much like you have, everyone approaches the subject with a pre-conceived notion of what the subject is about: 'harassment.'"

Rebuttal

"Citogenesis" is a neologism from a 2011 xkcd strip that raises the issue of circular reporting when it comes to Wikipedia, which has been an issue they have noticed. The quote above, lifted directly from /r/KotakuInAction, nests the entirety of Gamergate's use of "citogenesis" as the cornerstone of their conspiracy theory against Zoe Quinn. According to them, the only reason the message in Eron Gjoni's blog was derided by the mainstream media was because that was how it was covered by tech news websites because the writers at those websites are either financially tied to or personal friends with Zoe Quinn. Things fall apart very quickly when the tech websites never covered anything regarding "TheZoePost". Every single major tech website did their best to not cover it at all because one of the primary tenets in the Society of Professional Journalists' Code of Ethics is DO NO HARM.

All of these websites that would be labeled as "unethical" by Gamergate never wrote about "TheZoePost" because they were ethically not invading Zoe Quinn's personal life. The only people who should have ever known anything about this relationship are Quinn and Gjoni. The earliest coverage of what was not even yet called Gamergate (found as of writing) is a blog entry by Fruzsina Eördögh on Motherboard that doesn't focus on Gjoni's blog but rather the irrational reaction towards it by the mob Gjoni stirred up, and even points out that Nathan Grayson never wrote a review of Quinn's game (before Stephen Totilo ever made that official statement himself). Even Leigh Alexander in her "'Gamers' Are Over" article doesn't even address "TheZoePost" outside of linking to Eördögh's prior blog entry.

It's almost as if people in multiple levels of journalism, from as minuscule as a blog editorial on Motherboard to established journalistic institutions like The New York Times and the BBC, all independently came to the conclusion that Gamergate was bullshit from the start. And not only that, Gjoni's public actions and multiple statements within his blog itself were evidence enough that he was attempting DARVO and got people who already hated Quinn, women in general, feminism, and progressivism in general to enlist themselves to serve as his personal revenge army. After all, it's now (as of writing) August 2015, a year since "TheZoePost" was written. So tell us. Which partner in this supposed case of emotional abuse is currently trying to litigate their way into being able to legally stir up an Internet lynch mob against the other person after being hit with a restraining order and a gag order? And which partner just wants to go on with their life and never have to deal with the other person again?

Gamergate is not right wing

Claim

Anti-Gamergate unfairly paints Gamergate as a right-wing hate mob when it's clear that Gamergate leans left and is libertarian.

Rebuttal

Gamergate oh so loves to post the results of a bulk of /r/KotakuInAction posters taking the test at PoliticalCompass.org showing how many people came out as left-leaning and libertarian. However, that test is incredibly biased to give a left and libertarian result due to its leading questions, the "left/right" axis measures economic liberalism and conservatism rather than social liberalism and conservatism, and it was originally made to attack Tony Blair. The other questions on James "I Believe Rape Is a Valid Storytelling Element" Desborough's blog posting have equally as leading questions, particularly his use of Christina Hoff Sommers' "equity feminism", but we'll get back to that in a bit.

And then there's an entirely different quiz with equally as leading questions that were determined that Gamergaters were still left-leaning and libertarian, but their responses still show a conservative streak rather than a liberal one. Not only that, some statements indicate that they would be eager to endorse far-right political parties such as Alternative for Germany. This means that they are, from a German perspective, far-right, ultra-conservative and right-wing populists.

Gamergaters as a whole need to stop thinking that libertarianism and authoritarianism are even remotely on an axis that concerns social liberalism and social conservatism. The whole concept of "authoritarianism" seems to rise from the fact that Gamergaters don't realize social critique from liberals is not a condemnation or call for censorship. Meanwhile, leading a group to descend on one person who said something critically of the group or perhaps wrote a video game review someone didn't like in order to drive them out of their own profession is authoritarian and censorial. It's almost as if they're doing something.

Gamergaters can take as many Quizilla quizzes as they want to claim that they're totally not a conservative mob, but those results don't provide the whole picture, particularly when the group's actions speak much louder than their shallow words. Over and over, people have gone into Gamergate zones on Twitter and Reddit and found nothing but excessive antifeminism and conservative talking points, despite Gamergaters' insistence that they are not either of these things. And it doesn't help things for Gamergate to claim they're not political and they're totally centrist and not chock full of right-wing antifeminist nutjobs when their chosen representatives for the AirPlay debacle were almost all right-wingers and antifeminists.

• Ashe Schow writes for the right-wing newspaper The Washington Examiner
• Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopoulos both write for Breitbart
• Christina Hoff Sommers is a paid speaker for the American Enterprise Institute
• Cathy Young writes for Reason

Yiannopoulos even explicity said that the only reason he became involved in Gamergate because he saw its utility in fighting the left. And yet time and time again, Gamergaters deny that they're right wing and antifeminist. Nothing is going to happen if Gamergate just owns up to this fact. Because after a year it's beyond disingenuous of Gamergaters to insist otherwise.

Gamergate does not harbor actual suspected international terrorists

Claim

Joshua Goldberg doesn't represent Gamergate. He's a third party troll. Just look at how he played both sides!

Rebuttal

Joshua Goldberg, who supported Gamergate extensively under the Twitter handle "MoonMetropolis", was recently arrested by the FBI for representing himself as a DAESH militant operating out of Australia when he was actually a 20-year-old homeschooled Jewish man from Jacksonville, Florida, after he had instructed an FBI informant on how to make a bomb like used in the Boston Marathon bombing. In the days following his arrest, Australian journalists identified Goldberg as operating several other identities, both fictitious and stolen, while presenting himself as a free speech advocate. All of his online behavior was to attack people who fought against hate speech, such as:

• Australian lawyer Josh Bornstein who was critical of the Israeli government's actions against the Palestinians
• Australian activist Mariam Veiszadeh who battles Islamophobia
• Australian Islamic preacher Mohammed Junaid Thorne who has controversial views in his home nation
• Australian feminist and sex workers rights activist Caitlin Roper who argued Grand Theft Auto V should be banned in Australia
• American Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King whom Goldberg helped spread lies that he was not black akin to Rachel Dolezal, forcing him to reveal his mother's sexual history to the world

He had multiple Reddit accounts where he moderated the worst of the worst of the site's forums where both of his identities–European88 and Emily_Americana–were well known for their repugnant behavior. As the Australian DAESH sympathizer "Australi Witness" he made bomb threats against Australian synagogues and took credit for directing ISIS sympathizers to a "Draw Muhammad" event in Texas where they opened fire before being killed by police. He tried to push a "race war" on 4chan. He wrote for The Daily Stormer under the name "Michael Slay" (which his other accounts tried to out him as). He posed as a far-left Australian liberal feminist "Tanya Cohen" and claimed to work for Amnesty International (his Australian jihadist persona claimed affiliation with AI as well). He's so obsessed with Australia because they have strict laws against hate speech. And of course he was deeply involved in Gamergate.

Gamergaters have been denying Goldberg represented them or was even one of them. They say he played both sides, pointing to his "Tanya Cohen" persona, with which he even delved into a debate Brianna Wu had about transgender representation in video games. However, no one who Gamergate would consider "anti-Gamergate" (which isn't a thing like Gamergate) believed anything the "Tanya Cohen" persona wrote one bit. People thought the writing was satire or even complete bullshit, and Wu herself found the writing unprofessional and was instrumental in "Tanya Cohen's" editorial being taken down. But Goldberg, under his main Twitter profile @MoonMetropolis, tried to convince various people that "Tanya Cohen" was real by pointing to what are probably other strawmen sockpuppets he made himself, and even he was identified as the person behind "her" articles back then. It's under this account that he publically supported Gamergate, and even participated in #NotYourShield by pretending he wasn't a man. It was under this name that he became acquainted with Milo Yiannopoulos enough that he fed Yiannopoulos the fake story about Shaun King's racial background.

Joshua Goldberg is the textbook example of a Gamergater. He's a right-wing batshit libertarian free speech reactionary culture warrior who doesn't give a shit about video games but loves to attack the left and social justice. And the only reason Gamergaters all over are disavowing him at all is because he violated one of 4chan's most "sacred" tenets: he got caught.

Gamergate was proven not to be a harassment campaign in a court of law!

Claim

Zoe Quinn's restraining order against Eron Gjoni was thrown out! That proves Gamergate doesn't harass people!

Rebuttal

Whatever the result is of the legal battles between Quinn and Gjoni has no real bearing on Gamergate's actions. Just because one judge ruled in Gjoni's favor does not mean that everyone else in Gamergate is suddenly exonerated of all that they have done.

It also doesn't help your cause when you post Quinn's doxxed previous legal name (she now is legally named Zoe Quinn) in your declaration of Gamergate's innocence.

Gamergate is tolerant

Best joke of the year.

But charity donations!

Claim

Gamergate has given lots of money to charity. How can Gamergate be evil?

Rebuttal

Gamergate seems to give to charity either out of spite or in order to somehow cancel out claims that they regularly tell women on the Internet to either kill themselves or that they will kill them, essentially treating charity as a form of indulgence.

Gamergate's so-called lawyer Mike Cernovich tried to get Sam Biddle of Gawker (who Tweeted jokes at Gamergate's expense) to do a charity boxing match, and tried to strongarm someone who had never had anything to say about Gamergate into supporting it in exchange for a charitable donation.

Of note, one of the most prominent "charities" is, well, not.

But The Fine Young Capitalists!

Claim

"GamerGate supporters [...] contribute[d] to The Fine Young Capitalists, an organization dedicated to promoting women in the gaming industry, after attempts to derail their fundraising campaign by progressive activists," Breitbart

Rebuttal

TFYC is neither feminist nor a charity. The group is a crowdfunding front for a media studio called Autobotika.

The only reason Gamergate ever learned about TFYC is because their spokesman and executive producer Matthew Rappard went to /r/TumblrInAction to lie about what Zoe Quinn did to him and TFYC's project. The actual events prove otherwise. TFYC is only supported by Gamergate to spite Zoe Quinn and serve as good publicity for superficially supporting "SJWs", to the tune of over $70k and a shitty video game no one actually owns outside of the people who got it for supporting the donation drive.

But Vivian James!

The original Vivian James artwork, created by a 4chan user.

“”Vivian James being created for Gamergate PR was like when a Texas ribs restaurant uses a happy cartoon pig for its sign.

—casersatz

Claims

"I'm not saying we should make effort to change their minds, but I feel we need to have make articles explaining why Vivian James was created and how it proves that Gamergate is not 'misogynist'." (For similar ideas, see the images.)

"Supporting real women in games. Because we're misogynists, right?" (See below for accompanying artwork.)

"Our spokeswoman is Vivian James."

Reality

Vivian James is not a real person. It is a cartoon character who was, according to the pro-Gamergate Gamergate Wiki, "deliberately made an average-looking teenage girl" in order to "deflect accusations of misogyny". In fact, the 4chan user who originally suggested James' design did so specifically because "the tards in the media" wouldn't expect it.

Creating a fictional female character, who cannot consciously affect the Gamergate mob and has absolutely no agency, does not prove that the mob is friendly to living and sentient women. Vivian James exists to lend credence to Gamergate to justify itself as not being against women because they have a fictional female mascot. This drawing is put up as the perfect bastion of what a female gamer is in Gamergate's eyes and this fictional character is idolized more than any living woman that is presented in a friend argument. That is because living, thinking women have agency, and Vivian James does not.

4chan being 4chan, some of the very first drawings of Vivian James were porn. This went well with the fact her clothing colors, dark green and purple, are a reference to a "Daily Dose" meme, which was a reference to an older meme of a rape hentai GIF, again casting doubt on the sincerity of Vivian James. Gamergaters deny the connection and TFYC denies it is an issue. A user at Know Your Meme, one of Gamergate's many walled gardens, saw fit to remove mention of "rape" from their "Daily Dose / Piccolo Dick" page after these allegations were made, changing "anally raping" to "having sexual intercourse with".

• Actual unedited artwork
• 

  Enthics: Unleash them.

• 

  This made-up gamer girl is totally not anybody's shield.

• 

  Vivian James: Gamergate's waifu and daughter.

But #NotYourShield!

Claim

Gamergate is supported by a diverse set of people, as seen in the #NotYourShield hashtag!

Rebuttal

#NotYourShield was planned from the start to be used as an astroturfing campaign of Gamergaters making up Twitter profiles and claiming to be anything but straight white guys forming a reactionary hate mob. #NotYourShield may have actually gotten support from real people, but it just became a tokenist sub-mob and a new pool for friend arguments. While #NotYourShield was started by two self-identified black men, the sincerity of their message is questionable in the long run, considering one was a poster to 4chan's far-right wing /pol/ board and the other has participated in other racially-charged trolling campaigns.

The #NotYourShield hashtag was a response to negative media pressure, who (mostly accurately) saw Gamergate as primarily straight white males. Gamergate claimed that #NotYourShield proved it was diverse, and so the media couldn't hide behind the "shield" of diversity. Meanwhile, Gamergate picked up and used the shield they stole from the media -- because how could you criticize such a diverse group of fake people, pursuing ethics in journalism? It's solely been used to weaponize anyone who wasn't a straight white male into becoming a Gamergate supporter, and those people are the ones who went out and picked fights in order to play the #NotYourShield race card and shut down their targets with a cry of racism or sexism.

Gamergaters also seem to treat #NotYourShield as the anti-matter equivalent to women and other minority voices speaking out against oppression they've faced in the video games industry and the online gaming community. One woman, person of color, homosexual, or transgender individual agreeing with Gamergate does not negate the experiences and feelings of people critical or victimized by Gamergate. This is the equivalent of someone saying, "I broke my toe," and then another person responding with, "I don't know what your problem is, seeing as my feet are fine."

Gamergate has support from feminists

Claim

"Want to [know] something funny? If you bothered doing research...you would know...that gamergate is actually backed by a feminist who has been in feminism LONG BEFORE YOU WERE BORN..."

Rebuttal

This is referring to Christina Hoff Sommers. She isn't a feminist. She calls herself one but that's just to claim that her conservative views (funded by the American Enterprise Institute) are the real feminism and third-wave feminism isn't proper feminism. She does nothing but complain that modern third-wave or gender feminism is unnecessarily harsh on poor defenseless boys and that her equity feminism is the right way to do things. And that people should leave her boys alone! She's what normal people call a concern troll (similar to what S.E. Cupp used to be for the religious right). She's deliberately dishonest and uses lazy arguments that either outright lie or omit important facts (like how her famous "occupational choices" argument with regards to the gender pay gap forgets to mention why women choose those occupations, namely discrimination and gender roles). The fact that she is a registered Democrat and voted for that party lines in previous elections doesn't really mean anything when all she does is repeat the same talking points as every other anti-feminist reactionary and works for a Republican-aligned think tank.

OR this is referring to Gamergate's official "sex positive feminist" porn star Mercedes Carrera who performs live for indulgence charity streams supported by Matthew Rappard The Fine Young Capitalists. However all she does is yell at other feminists for not being feminist enough and for not being real victims unlike her porn star friend who actually got attacked, because how else is Gamergate going to give her money unless she slings mud at Anita Sarkeesian and Brianna Wu in one fell swoop? Not that she's that nice to other sex workers either. And as if all that wasn't awful enough, she along with producer Daemon Cins were arrested in February 2019 for eight counts of sexually abusing a girl under the age of 10.

"Gamergate did not start because of Eron Gjoni."

Claim

"GamerGate did not begin with an online rant by Zoe Quinn's ex-boyfriend. It began when Zoe Quinn tried to disrupt The Fine Young Capitalist's [sic] Game Jam because they limited applicants to people identifying as women before the contest began which Zoe claimed was anti-transgendered [sic]. This is a position impossible for the media to defend so they pretend 4chan's fight with Zoe began later."

Rebuttal

All of this comment left on an article about Milo Yiannopoulos is so incredibly wrong it's almost sad. Gamergate did indeed begin with Gjoni's rant. And it did not begin with the very minor Internet argument between Quinn and Rappard because no one knew about TFYC's project until Rappard appeared in a proto-Gamergate thread on Reddit to talk shit, as referenced above.

Claim

"The joke of this great 'debate' is that before any of the events mentioned, the gender debate was stoked by the commercial production of "GAME_JAM", in which some of the key principals participated - a sort of reality TV code-a-thon for a video game. Great efforts were made to inject drama (and Mountain Dew), after which it fell apart. I couldn't even get people to leave a mention of this genesis in the article. Nonetheless, this is the reason why this is such a confused topic - it isn't really a political issue at all. It's a reality TV show gone rogue, with opportunists seizing on any way to stir trouble hiding somewhere in plain sight."

Rebuttal

No. While it's true that Zoe Quinn participated on the failed GAME_JAM pilot and this article was written by Nathan Grayson, nothing about this event has anything at all to do with the genesis of Gamergate. No one involved in stirring up Gamergate was aware of the failed reality show's existence until they began digging for anything resembling evidence to prove that Grayson had written about Quinn in any fashion during Eron Gjoni's initially erroneous timeline of his relationship with Quinn. Quinn's brief argument with JonTron and producers trying to drum that up for scripted drama has nothing to do with Gamergate considering Quinn was already being harassed for about a year over Depression Quest's initial foray onto Steam Greenlight and Anita Sarkeesian had already been harassed for 2 years at the time of GAME_JAM's filming.

What defense of child pornography?

Claim

Gamergate never supported child pornography!

Rebuttal

In November 2014, The Daily Dot reported on 8chan's rampant problems with child pornography, while site owner Fredrick Brennan said that while he did not support the content morally, he was obligated to keep to his word that anything illegal under U.S. law would be taken down by the moderators, while arguably everything else was in some legal gray area. A month later, Dan Olson ran an exposé that blew the lid off of this assertion, showing that blatantly illegal child pornography was to be found on pedophilia-themed boards that Brennan claimed fell in the legal "gray area", often posted weeks or months prior, and these boards could be easily accessed from 8chan's front page. Brennan deleted one of the more blatantly bad boards, claiming Olson's article "advertised" 8chan to "actual pedophiles", causing them to suddenly flock to the board and flood it with explicit photos. If this is true, who the hell was posting all of the just god awful photographs of sexualized children, descriptions of sexual acts people wanted to perform on said children, expressing the desire to work near or around children, and descriptions of how posters had sexually abused children in the past months before his article and before the one at The Daily Dot?

Throughout this whole article, Olson never once mentioned Gamergate. That did not stop Gamergaters from attacking him and falsely reporting him and others for possessing child pornography. And on top of that, Gamergate doubled up and said that SJWs were posting the porn to frame 8chan.

And of course, what Olson did is practically identical to what Anderson Cooper did with an audience of millions on his CNN show Anderson 360 with regards to /r/jailbait in 2011. The response back then wasn't to pillory him as 8channers did to Olson. The outrage of the world at large still led to a reluctant ban of anything even close to being child porn by Reddit but months after Cooper's report. Just why are these "free speech" sites bastions of pedos anyway?

Gamergate is about ethics in video game journalism

The only thing you really need to know about this claim is that Gamergate, as a whole, sent not one but two reporters from Breitbart to accuse video game journalists of being agenda-driven and unethical.

Gamergate has had almost no impact on gaming journalism, despite claiming to be a movement totally centered around the same. Despite this, they'll proudly tell of the myriad successes they've had in improving ethics. And by ethics they mean attacking websites that publish subjective reviews that discuss social issues within the game rather than entirely objective technical reports on the game's graphics or playability. Point out the lack of representation of anyone who is not a straight white man in a video game, and prepare to be called a racist by the "consumer revolt" that only cares about consumers that share in their groupthink.

Zoe Quinn had sex for good reviews

Claim

As shown by the "Zoe Post", Zoe Quinn slept with Nathan Grayson so that he would favorably review [sometimes replaced with "positively cover"] her game, Depression Quest.

Rebuttal

This argument, first known as the "Quinnspiracy", gave the first impetus for what would be Gamergate and was disproven almost immediately.

A glaring issue is that Depression Quest was free; if collusion occurred, it made no profit. And while getting publicity might be nice, it's questionable whether the articles in question would have substantially achieved that.

Grayson never wrote a review for Depression Quest at Kotaku (as confirmed by leader Stephen Totilo) or at Rock, Paper, Shotgun (as confirmed by Josh Wirtanen). What Grayson did was write a list of video games that mentioned Depression Quest as one of the games and an article sourced from several people's blogs, one of whom was Quinn. Despite this, all were written before Quinn and Grayson ever dated.

Either Quinn travelled back through time (common SJW powers) to have sex to get a mention in a list to get publicity, or Gamergaters are full of shit.

Even Eron Gjoni, who published the "Zoe Post" blogpost that was the sole source of evidence fpr the "Quinnspiracy", rebutted the claims:

There was a typo up for a while that made it seem like Zoe and I were on break between March and June. This has apparently led some people to infer that her infidelity with Nathan Grayson began in early March. I want to clarify that I have no reason to believe or evidence to imply she was sleeping with him prior to late March or early April (though I believe they’d been friends for a while before that). This typo has since been corrected to make it clear we were on break between May and June. To be clear, if there was any conflict of interest between Zoe and Nathan regarding coverage of Depression Quest prior to April, I have no evidence to imply that it was sexual in nature.

And none of this takes into consideration that, even if the conflict of interest were true, generally speaking, ethical standards would have placed the onus of the conflict squarely on Nathan Grayson. This means that, if GamerGate actually cared about ethics, the rhetoric would be "Journalist Nathan Grayson gave review for sex," not "Zoe Quinn had sex for reviews."

Conflicts of interest and crowdfunding

Claim

Video game journalists should disclose conflicts of interest with regards to donating money to Kickstarter or Patreon crowdfunding campaigns.

Rebuttal

This seems to be one of the only vaguely cognizant claims Gamergate has because at first glance it sounds like an actual ethical breach. "Conflict of interest" is one of those things that is really important when it comes to fair and balanced reporting. However, Gamergaters' understanding of what constitutes a conflict of interest couldn't be any further from the truth. Gamergate has dutifully attacked crowdfunding services used by the indie game developers that they so despise such that someone in Gamergate registered the URL HipsterWelfare.com as a redirect to Patreon's website. Of course, when anyone affiliated or parallel to Gamergate uses these services, then there's no problem at all with their usage.

Basically, Gamergaters have the idea of a conflict of interest (when it comes to crowdfunding) entirely backwards. The donor to a Kickstarter or IndieGoGo or GoFundMe does not tangibly benefit from other people donating to the same campaign. Particularly when it comes to crowdfunding campaigns for video games, the donation is at best a pre-order. The donor has bought a product and does not benefit financially or tangibly if they tell other people to donate. This may result in the campaign being funded, but the donor does not gain anything beyond what they originally paid for. This goes doubly for Patreon as the donor doesn't tangibly benefit in any way from other people supporting the same person.

The Society of Professional Journalists, who (as of going to press) are currently being courted by Gamergate, discusses the following:

Refuse gifts, favors, fees, free travel and special treatment, and avoid political and other outside activities that may compromise integrity or impartiality, or may damage credibility.

All of these constitute conflicts of interest. But nothing remotely comes close to resembling buying a pre-order off a Kickstarter as they haven't obtained anything for free. A food critic doesn't gain anything from giving a glowing review to a restaurant where the food was to their liking. It's only a problem if the restaurant paid or bribed for a good review. And Gamergate has yet to prove this has happened with independent video games (it certainly was a problem when Jeff Gerstmann got fired from GameSpot for heavily criticizing Kane & Lynch and it certainly was a problem while Geoff Keighley was surrounded by bags of Doritos and bottles of Mountain Dew while talking about Halo 2), particularly when their biggest claim of a conflict of interest has been debunked since everything started.

This is, however, the only place that Gamergate has allegedly made any headway against what they perceive are ethical violations. That's why Jenn Frank was driven out of the industry because even though she did include a disclosure she supported Zoe Quinn through Patreon, the editors of The Guardian (an actual newspaper) didn't think it was worth mentioning and cut it out. Gamergate is also why both Kotaku and Polygon came up with policies regarding Patreon donations for their writers. Several writers also discussed how they dealt with handouts from the major publishers, which would actually constitute conflicts of interest, but Gamergate didn't seem to care as much as it doesn't directly affect indie devs as much as attacking Patreon does.

Gamergate's definition of a conflict of interest seems to be "Tweeted at person once 3 years ago" or "is acquainted with". And often these "conflicts of interest" are only discovered after someone says something negative about Gamergate, initiating the 4chan-style "background check" of tweet archive hate diving to find anything to use as a "gotcha".

GameJournoPros

Claim

"The expose of the GameJournoPros mailing list shortly after the Gamers Are Dead articles all but confirmed suspicions that gaming journalism was full of collusion and pushed narratives," Gamergate Wiki

Rebuttal

GameJournoPros was a mailing list set up by Kyle Orland of Ars Technica just to be able to let people at other websites keep in touch, possibly to even bounce ideas off each other and suggest new freelance writers to hire. The whole list was leaked by Gamergater William Usher who felt that the list was trying to push a media narrative for whatever reason; he had his access revoked from the list at some point and no longer felt "honorbound" to keep the promise to Orland that the list's discussions should remain private. Everyone else from the outside looking in saw the list as completely benign in nature. Orland noted that he did suggest that they come together in support of Zoe Quinn after "The Zoe Post" made its rounds, but others in the group dissuaded him from this idea, as they decided that they should not invade on Quinn's private life. James Fudge of Game Politics also wrote about his experience on the list with regards to a thread at The Escapist's forums where there was intense discussion of Quinn's sex life, and in his experience he thought letting that thrive would only cause problems, but The Escapist's Greg Tito did not take the advice from him, or Polygon's Ben Kuchera. The only people seeing any issue with GameJournoPros are Gamergaters who were already prejudiced to think there was something resembling collusion and corruption going on, despite every single discussion of Zoe Quinn within the mailing list being contradictory and not at all pushing an agenda.

With regards to the "blacklisting", that comes from the discussions on GameJournoPros with regards to Allistair Pinsof and his work at Destructoid when he outed Chloe Sagal. Sagal had started up a crowdfunding campaign to deal with various medical issues including planned gender reassignment surgeries in order to deal with what she believed was another chronic illness, and Pinsof had approached her in his role as a contributor to Destructoid, and during this time (while dealing with problems with the crowdfunding website IndieGoGo) that she came out to him as transgender. After IndieGoGo pulled the campaign and Sagal had an altercation with her ex-girlfriend, she prepared to attempt suicide, while talking to Pinsof who was insulting her, believing she simply wanted to silence him. After a friend called police and she was hospitalized, Sagal was targeted with virulent harassment over being transgender, and she attempted suicide, again, and was hospitalized, again. It was after this second time in the hospital that she discovered Pinsof had outed her on his Twitter after being told not to discuss her gender identity by Destructoid founder Yanier Gonzalez who had killed the article about her crowdfunding campaigns. Pinsof was fired, obviously. When the GameJournoPros emails were leaked, there were emails from Gonzalez to the group asking what should be done with regards to Pinsof's outing of Sagal, and there were suggestions he should be fired for it. Later, Destructoid's editor-in-chief Dale North wrote to the group that Pinsof was looking for work and that it would probably be a bad idea to hire him after what he did. Gamergate ate this up and tried to push it with a hashtag #PinsofInterview when he spoke to Gamergate publishing house extremely pro-Gamergate website TechRaptor, but most of his claims were found to be bullshit, including the new claims that there was corruption in the Independent Games Festival and that Phil Fish (who was already run off the Internet by Gamergate) had been fraudulent with a friend. Kotaku's Jason Schrier revealed Pinsof had never been blacklisted, and had fielded freelance work for Kotaku after he had outed Sagal. The award that resulted from alleged corruption at the Independent Games Festival was a joke award. And also Fish's friend denied anything Pinsof said about himself in the interview. Pinsof also seemed to take back everything he said in the interview after his narrative was torn down. So to sum things up, Allistair Pinsof was not actually blacklisted for having outed Chloe Sagal as transgender, which is still a shitty thing to do, and defying a direct order from a boss is something that leaves a mark on your resumé. And he lied about other stuff he apparently secretly knew.

Claims that Kevin Dent was censored as a result of the group are flawed; all that had happened was that a journalist had asked others to stop quoting him due to a number of grossly bigoted comments he made, calling a woman a "tranny", a "bimbo", and a "malignant Rihanna." It would be difficult to argue that choosing not to give positive press to someone who acts like an unrepentant creep and harasses women is unjustified any more than choosing not to give positive press to David Duke would be unjustified. Furthermore, Kevin Dent reportedly stated that he didn't even care if people stopped quoting him.

And after all this, pro-Gamergate gaming websites TechRaptor, GamesNosh, and NicheGamer turn out to have their own mailing list in the same vein as what "GameJournoPros" was.

Objectivity

Claim

Gamergate stands for objective game reviews.

Rebuttal

"Objectivity" is thrown about in multiple ways in Gamergate. One way seems to regard the way to review video games, such that the people in Gamergate, who believe they are speaking for all people who play video games, wish to solely know the technical aspects of the video game and do not care about social commentary of its story. They want to know if it plays well, if it has good design, if its free from bugs and glitches, and for some reason they are focused on the framerate. Video games, like all other forms of entertainment, have become art, and these factors don't necessarily come into play when criticizing something for it being a work of art.

Of course then we get to the crux of the issue when it comes to the social commentary. Gamergaters seem to believe that criticism of the content of the video games' story is somehow a demand for a change. This is, of course, still tied to the fact that they think video games should only be technical objects, where criticizing broken software often evokes a change to the software. Criticizing the lack of non-white characters in The Witcher 3, knowing full well that the original work of fiction includes a foreign nation implied to have non-white people in it, is not at all the same as demanding that CD Projekt Red immediately add black people to the video game in a free patch (although a free expansion to the game did include such content, and CD Projekt Red's co-founder Marcin Iwiński did allude to Polygon's reviews when speaking to Kotaku as something that as developers they should not judge but rather listen to the opinions provided). Raising criticism that video games use storytelling elements that negatively portray women is not at all a desire to ban these video games. Constructive criticism with social commentary is not a demand made at gunpoint.

The other side of the "objectivity" coin is rooted in an almost universal misunderstanding (one that transcends Gamergate) that objectivity in journalism means neutrality bordering on a balance fallacy. Objectivity in ethical journalism is investigating what actually is the truth behind a story, not that both sides deserve equal coverage when one side is almost certainly wrong in their interpretation. This holds particularly true when all the investigation and demands for equal coverage from the objectively wrong side only prove what the journalist had determined in the first place.

Intel sided with Gamergate

Claim

Intel sided with Gamergate and pulled ads off of Gamasutra! This proves Gamergate is right!

Rebuttal

Gamergate successfully pressured Intel, among other companies, to cease advertising campaigns on whichever website Gamergate as a whole was most upset with at the time. These suspensions were less than a month at the most. Because of Gamergate, Intel decided to budget $300 million to counter the lack of diversity in the tech industry. Anita Sarkeesian's Feminist Frequency organization is one of the many entities involved with this endeavor.

Tyler Wilde and Anne Lewis

Claim

Tyler Wilde positively reviewed Ubisoft games because of his conflict of interest, without disclosing it. Because of Gamergate, PC Gamer has changed its policy and now prevents collusion!

Response

In short: Very little to no positive reviews happened. Very little to no conflict of interest existed. Very little to no policy change occurred.

In long: Tyler Wilde, executive editor at PC Gamer, wrote an op-ed about the use of the term "PC Master Race" and how the video game community should stop using what was effectively Nazi terminology. Gamergaters responded by digging up anything they could in his personal life to make his SJW opinion null and void. They thought they struck gold when they found he was dating Anne Lewis, a Communications Associate at Ubisoft (she wrote for Ubisoft's public blog), and demanded that PC Gamer punish Wilde, as they found he had written reviews on Ubisoft games and believed (yet again...) that there was a sex-for-reviews scandal. Or in their words,

“”PR from ubisoft found out that one of their communications girls [Anne Lewis] was fucking a writer at PC Gamer [Tyler Wilde]. Made her an offer she couldn't refuse, therefore made him an offer he couldn't refuse...and that is how the article got written. Ubisoft was sick of the negative attention they were getting from here, therefore, via an employee that was fucking a writer, commissioned a hit-piece against /r/pcmasterrace.

—GamerGhazi,

Totally logical, right? I mean, getting a bad rap from a single subreddit is definitely worth getting a sex-commissioned hitpiece.

PC Gamer later clarified that Wilde and Lewis had met each other while they were both working at PC Gamer's owners Future US and then Lewis left for a position at Ubisoft. After this point, PC Gamer took Wilde off of reviewing Ubisoft games, but they did not include a disclosure on any other coverage he made for Ubisoft products. But in response to Gamergate's "sleuthing" of what was never really considered a conflict of interest, PC Gamer did minorly shift policy on disclosures by requiring them if there may be some tenuous relationship with a subject or simply removing the writer from covering that company or game. This officially stopped Wilde from writing about Ubisoft at all. Mind you, Lewis never worked on any of Ubisoft's games as a designer or developer; she was writing for their blog.

Some critical of Gamergate criticized PC Gamer for caving to Gamergate pressure, saying that it legitimized the group's actions.

Gamergaters also dogpiled on Wilde after the disclosure change was made, claiming that he was attempting to hide the truth by updating his Facebook profile to remove a video of himself discussing Watch Dogs. If he was going for censorship, he certainly could have, say, taken down all the articles on Ubisoft he'd written; and if said video was produced as a conflict-of-interest-filled hit piece, surely it should be removed? Which is it, GG: should the content stay online, and be a conflict of interest, or be taken off, and be censorship?

FTC disclosure guidelines

Claim #1

The FTC revised the guidelines because of GamerGate!

Response #1

The guideline change was already underway before Gamergate was around. The common response is to claim that that Gamergate did, indeed, have an effect on the FAQ. Gamergate got this FAQ change by frequently asking questions.^{[citation NOT needed]}

Claim #2

The FTC has Gawker in its sights!

Response #2

In the interview the claim stems from, Associate Director Mary Engle pointed out examples of native advertising on BuzzFeed, Wired, and Gawker (note the re-ordering in one of the KiA posts). Engle then said that they're not "inherently deceptive."

Claim #3

The interest in FTC guidelines shows that Gamergate is about ethics.

Response #3

...So long as it appears to hurt their opponents. (see Claim #2)

Gawker

Claim

We told you about Gawker! Hulkamania's gonna run wild!

Rebuttal

Gawker Media owns Kotaku, one of Gamergate's bêtes noires. Their namesake website Gawker is a celebrity gossip tabloid. Currently, they are embroiled in two major controversies that have nothing to do with Kotaku or writer Sam Biddle who pissed off Gamergate to spawn "Operation Baby Seal" after he called them a bunch of nerds.

• Professional wrestler Hulk Hogan sued Gawker Media in 2012 for hosting parts of a sex tape from when he was in an affair with the wife of a former friend. He was ultimately awarded US$115 million in damages, which forced Gawker to file for bankruptcy in 2016.
• On July 16, 2015, Gawker published an article allegedly outing the CFO of Condé Nast after receiving information from a gay porn actor he had allegedly hired as an escort. It was met with universal condemnation, leading to its retraction, but not before Gamergaters tried to latch onto the outrage.
• On August 3, 2015, Gawker published an article containing Donald Trump's cell phone number, arguably in response to Trump publishing Senator Lindsey Graham's number previously.

Gamergate has decided to basically use these news stories as weapons against Kotaku simply for existing on the same website. They haven't been able to find anything resembling a breach of ethics by the staff at Kotaku so they decide to use these actual reprehensible actions at Gawker as a front for their war against Kotaku. And this is all done while hypocritically ignoring their own actions that mirror Gawker's. One of the earliest things Gamergate did was use Zoe Quinn's nude photos against them, acquired as illicitly as Gawker Media acquired Hulk Hogan's sex tape, and Gamergate spends an inordinate amount of energy in outing their transgender critics, even people only considered transgender as a result of Gamergate's conspiracy theories against them.

And this doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of how the Hulk Hogan lawsuit was bankrolled by PayPal founder, billionaire venture capitalist, and Donald Trump supporter Peter Thiel who has it out against Gawker for revealing Thiel was gay (when he was already out of the closet). Surely Gamergate, the self-anointed champions of ethics and fighters of censorship, would realize how unethical it is to actually attack freedom of the press, but they won't care so long as Kotaku gets taken down.

Anti-Gamergate is mean

Gamergaters go on and on about how they have an opponent that is equally as bad as they are. This situation couldn't be any farther from the truth.

Anti-Gamergate is a unified counter-movement

Claim

Anti-Gamergate is its own movement set on bullying, harassing, and attacking Gamergate just like Gamergate bullies everyone else

Rebuttal

Opposing and criticizing Gamergate does not make someone part of a unified "anti-Gamergate" mob. There is no central organization or culture in opposing Gamergate. In the same way, not all critics of the Westboro Baptist Church are part of a centralized Anti-WBC movement, because there's no central organization or culture in attacking the WBC.

Lumping every critic of a mob into one unified group attacking the mob is the definition of a persecution complex, and is often employed by cults and conspiracy theorists seeking to isolate their members from outside influence that might dispel their bullshit.

There is some level of organization against Gamergate, in the /r/GamerGhazi subreddit, the #StopGamerGate hashtag on Twitter, and general support for Gamergate's various targets like Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian. That said, none of these groups are large or centrally-organized, certainly not to the extent that Gamergate's raids, doxxes, and false flags are and have been. Nearly all of non-internet media has turned against Gamergate, and yet effectively none of them are part of an "anti-GG" group.

And of course, being against Gamergate is in no way being in favor of a "corrupt" video game press, because Gamergate has next to nothing to do with its lofty claimed goals of improved "ethics in video game journalism". This little fact didn't stop their current journalist buddy from wondering why no one wanted to serve as the "anti-Gamergate" side of his debate panel.

Anti-Gamergate is anti-journalist

Claim

When a neutral journalist went on /r/GamerGhazi, they banned him because they hate journalists!

Rebuttal

Brad Glasgow (the aforementioned journalist) originally came to Reddit to see that someone had posted a previous article of his to /r/KotakuInAction, and began to talk to posters there. He never saw his article posted to /r/GamerGhazi, so he took matters into his own hands. His statements in /r/KotakuInAction reflected that he was leaning in Gamergate's favor; a moderator of /r/GamerGhazi pointed out that his article was terribly flawed, misrepresented the original data it covered, and solely served to satisfy Gamergaters and others who think there is a gender divide in desired entertainment, as well as how completely misinformed he has been about Gamergate, particularly when several dozen more reputable news agencies covered it before he did.

Glasgow was ultimately banned from /r/GamerGhazi for falsely representing his own stance on Gamergate, which was belied in the article he had wanted to post. None of this went into Glasgow's article where he "polled" /r/KotakuInAction for their opinions on what Gamergate was actually about. Instead he claimed that "anti-Gamergate" was just as paranoid about journalists as Gamergate.

GamerGhazi and those critical of Gamergate don't hate journalists, Brad Glasgow. They just don't like you and your obvious bias.

Gamergaters are harassed, too

Claim

Gamergaters get harassed, too, so that makes aGG just as bad!

Rebuttal

Firstly, while many people within Gamergate claim that they have been harassed for their participation within it, it would seem a good volume of harassment of Gamergaters comes from other Gamergaters.

• "King of /pol/" was doxxed in September 2014, and initially blamed it on "anti-Gamergate", but later admitted it came from Gamergaters and blew the whistle on various organizers of the mob.
• Liana Kerzner brought to light the sexist attacks she received from Milo Yiannopoulos shortly before Yiannopoulos and Ethan Ralph of The Ralph Retort viciously attacked her together on a piece on Ralph's blog.
• "Internet Aristocrat" claimed fairly early on that he had been doxxed by people on 8chan.
• Dan, the owner of indie gaming site Mangotron, had early on given preferential coverage to Gamergate, only to be doxxed by Gamergaters chasing a conspiracy theory.
• Lizzy Finnegan, a.k.a. @lizzyf620, was also doxxed by Gamergaters (or rather 8channers on /baphomet/) and abandoned the mob (although apparently not permanently).
• Disturbed lead singer David Draiman supported Gamergate early on as he thought it was an anti-censorship movement, only to be inundated by antisemitic attacks for asking his new Gamergate followers to denounce perceived antisemitism from Trevor Noah.
• One of the moderators of 8chan's /gamergate/ board revealed that he had been doxxed by Ethan Ralph and abandoned the mob as a result.
• Michael Koretzky, the regional director for the Society of Professional Journalists' southeast U.S. region, planned an event called "AirPlay" for Gameraters to get their story (allegedly their story on ethics in video game journalism) to actual journalists. However, his decisions in setting up final plans resulted in being berated by Gamergater and intended AirPlay panelist Oliver Campbell and then reported the vitriolic responses to what he had to say concerning his conversation with Campbell. Somehow, this has not deterred him from letting AirPlay go on.
• The Japanese indie game group Roninworks had supported Gamergate (as they operate out of 2ch which is where the Japanese right wing netizens congregate), but abandoned the mob after harassment from American Gamergaters like Margaret Gel, a.k.a. @_icze4r, and Slade Villena, a.k.a. RogueStar.
• Margaret Gel herself blew the whistle on how Gamergate only wanted to use her to suit their narrative, particularly after she was SWATed, and in turn was subject to multiple racist, sexist, and transphobic attacks on 8chan.

Secondly, If one wants to count harassment, the volume, number of participants, and duration of harassment given to others by Gamergaters outweighs anything allegedly done to Gamergaters by critics of the movement.

The syringe!

Claim

aGGers sent Milo a syringe in the mail.

Rebuttal

In September 2014, Milo Yiannopoulos reported having been sent a syringe in the mail, and automatically decided to tag his photo with #Gamergate. He had been pressed on the matter a month later and responded by saying he had thrown it out rather than give it to the police because he didn't want to make a spectacle out of it. Translation: "I'm not one of those SJW feminazi professional victims."

It's easy for Gamergaters to say that someone opposed to them sent Yiannopoulos this syringe. It makes him a victim and bolsters their cause. There's one small snag to their plan. The syringe was sent to him after he had written an editorial attacking drug addicts. This only proves that Milo Wagner Yiannopoulos really likes pissing people off and revelling in the base reactions.

"Claire Schumann"

Claim

aGGros go after their own! Just look at what happened to Claire Schumann!

Rebuttal

The Claire Schumann case is an odd one. She is someone Gamergaters claim to have been harassed off of Twitter after arguing with Randi Harper, at which one point Harper responded, "you made your gamergate bed, now get fucked in it". Jay Allen uncovered a strange history of posts made by "Claire Schumann" leading up to the argument with Harper. Anyone outside of Gamergate largely considers the account to not have been sincere in its creation and usage, if not being a total sockpuppet account as as soon as hypocrisy was uncovered, Claire Schumann's account was deleted on more than one occasion, usually after "she" got caught. One Gamergater in particular even admitted that they had planned the entire altercation between Harper and Schumann because they hate Harper and wanted to make two "antis" fight.

Bomb threats!

Claim

Two Gamergate meetups were disrupted by bomb threats. Those anti-gamers must have done it!

Rebuttal

It is true that bomb threats disrupted a Gamergate meetup in Washington, D.C., and the AirPlay panel in Miami. Gamergaters have zero evidence connecting these acts to anyone opposed to Gamergate. Meanwhile, both threats can be traced back to posts on 8chan, and the threat at AirPlay can be traced back to the same guy who went after former Gamergate supporter @pixelgoth as well as Brianna Wu and Randi Harper.

Non-existent claims

Gamergaters are fond of long lists of "harassment". Not that we aren't — ours are just based in reality.

"A Gamergater appears to have been doxxed"

In this instance, there is literally no evidence presented. Yet Gamergaters still rejoiced at their comrade's loss. In other instances, apparent false flag planning posts were made in public on 8chan's various boards, while they constantly accuse everyone else of perpetrating false flags.

THIS IS IT. WE FUCKING WON.

They fucking lost it and now we can really claim the moral high ground.

Interestingly, evidenceless posts like this are quite common in "harassment" lists.

"Eleanor Varrot"

Varrot is a favorite because it allows Gamergaters to say that "[s]upporters of #gamergate have been victim of targeted racial and gender based attacks so severe that even women brave enough to build girls schools in pakistan [Eleanor Varrot] are afraid of revenge attacks."

Here's the Twitter conversation:

Eleanor Varrot: I built schools for girls in Pakistan despite threats of death but apparantly I hate women because I'm a gamer #GamerGate

J Belmont: You should use the #notyourshield tag too, it's for women/minorities to amplify their voice.

Eleanor Varrot: I'm afraid of being doxxed, sorry :( these people actively target who they consider "gender traitors" or apostates

Varrot has not actually been doxxed, yet this is evidence. Somehow.

Completely unrelated to Gamergate whatsoever

Eliza Sutton

Sutton is a favorite because she was doxxed on Twitter by Rebecca Watson, who's got some publicity, and has spoken against Gamergate. Here's the post in question:

skepchicks: Wow. Online troll @Ellesun who started rumor that @pzmyers had an STD is Eliza Sutton, a doctor at @UWMedicine (linked article)

This post was greeted with contempt by some, who created a petition to prevent Watson from hosting an event at an upcoming conference. The claims of several supporters of the petition are incorrect.

Sutton had previously stated her name online, though this doesn't excuse the doxxing.

The most obvious problem with Gamergate claiming this as harassment is that Sutton isn't, to our knowledge at least, a Gamergate supporter. The only remote connection to Gamergate is that Rebecca Watson is a feminist who was previously embroiled in another online controversy with a -gate suffix regarding feminism and women's place in a field dominated by men.

Wizardchan

First Claim

Zoe Quinn claimed that they were harassed by Wizardchan users. This resulted in several stories attacking Wizardchan, which is a forum full of depressed people.

Rebuttal

Wizardchan had a thread attacking Zoe Quinn for gathering popularity while Wizardchan users were left in obscurity. They claimed that they had only become popular as a result of their gender. Quinn tweeted about the thread, and it is entirely possible that a third-party troll sent harassing calls to them. Quinn has been called a liar over this, but a misunderstanding does not make someone a liar. The stories that popped up attacking Wizardchan were not their responsibility. Also, Wizardchan is not a board for "depressed people". It's for the MRA-adjacent "incels" named after the 4chan meme that 30-year-old virgins become wizards; 8chan's Fredrick Brennan used to own Wizardchan but he admitted he had to voluntarily give up the position after he lost his virginity.

Second Claim

The post on Wizardchan attacking Zoe Quinn was made by Quinn themself to drum up publicity. IP checks confirm this.

Back to Rebuttal

How do they know their IP? Was the IP confirmed as being from their city? Anyone could say "IP checks confirm this" and not give any evidence. Of note, the claim that the IP correlates to Quinn comes from Brennan, who in fact did not own Wizardchan at the time of the original attacks on Quinn, so there's no way for him to even properly know any technical details as to what was going on there.

"Google Helldump"

Claim

Zoe Quinn used Something Awful's Helldump board to dox and SWAT "Based Lawyer" Mike Cernovich.

Rebuttal

Helldump 2000 was an internal callout board for Something Awful so users could suggest bans to the site mods for rule violating creeps like trolls, racists, and pedophiles, but also furries for some reason. Its rules were very specific in what users were allowed to do in digging up dirt on prospective bans, but personal information (i.e. doxxing) was strictly forbidden. We emphasize was here because SA shut down Helldump in 2009, six years before Cernovich began spreading these claims. The only proof Gamergate has of anything tying Zoe Quinn to Helldump is a single joke they made in 2012 and admitting she used to post on SA. Either Zoe Quinn has obtained the SJW powers of time travel or Cernovich and all of Gamergate have been caught in a lie that they persistently stick to.

Modeling profile

Claim

Zoe Quinn faked their harassment on Twitter! It says so on their old modeling profile!

Rebuttal

Quinn ceased using an erotic modeling website years before Gamergate existed. This is where Gamergaters have found all of the photographs of Quinn that they use as evidence against them for whatever reason. Shortly after the harassment they received, their profile was hacked, and "faking harassment on Twitter for shits and giggles" was added under the interests entry ("game journos" was also added under "turn ons"); Twitter wasn't even founded during the time Quinn was using the website in question, and they didn't become a game developer until 2011. The original poster on Reddit later took down the post (which moderators on /r/KotakuInAction had labeled "verified") and then admited it was more likely the account was hacked. Clearly, SJW time travel powers at work, yet again.

"Gamers are dead"

Claim

Anti-GG writers, via the "Gamers are dead" articles, popularized harmful stereotypes of gamers as misogynistic white males!

Rebuttal

Proto-Gamergate's attacks on Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian sparked a couple of writers to pen essays on how toxic the gamer community is despite how mainstream, and lucrative, video games have become. Every article about this basically said that the "gamer" demographic, that is a single straight white guy, was obsolete and video game publishers should stop catering towards what was now a niche market.

Gamergaters claimed that they were outraged that these websites were perpetuating a harmful stereotype that gamers were all single straight white guys. Except each and every article said the exact opposite: that video game players are from all walks of life, so the "gamer" stereotype should be shelved.

Claim

"It is suspected by many that, due to the timing of these articles, both in the quick succession of which they were released and in the midst of an unresolved scandal, the articles were an act of collusion."

Rebuttal

Claims of collusion fly in the face of the fact that two articles came first and almost all of the others were reactions to the originals. Further, nobody accuses ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, CNN, the BBC, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Washington Post, etc., of collusion and corruption for running similar news stories on other topics. It's called the media cycle.

Quinn DDoS'd and doxxed The Fine Young Capitalists

Claim

Zoe Quinn DDoS'd TFYC's website and doxxed their members, including leader Matthew Rappard.

Rebuttal

Quinn did none of these things. What they had been doing was discussing and criticizing TFYC's rules for their competition with a friend over Twitter, and later with the person behind TFYC's account. The traffic caused by their discussion unintentionally crashed TFYC's website due to inadequate server capacity rather than an intentional attack. Also, they didn't post anything about Rappard herself.

Quinn and Rappard (and by extension TFYC) had later reconciled over what had happened, and Quinn even offered to serve as a consultant for the competition. This all changed when Gamergate was underway, and when Rappard decided to reopen old wounds and use Gamergate to fund the failing crowdfunding campaign for their project. Quinn even provided proof that Rappard was willfully lying by providing more context to emails that he had already leaked, and pointing out how he sought out GG figurehead Internet Aristocrat to back him up in his latest character assassination.

Leigh Alexander is racist

Claim

Leigh Alexander, author of one of the "Gamers are dead" articles, is racist.

Rebuttal

Gamergate dug up any dirt they could on Leigh Alexander and likes to present a handful of old tweets she made to call her racist; one of these tweets consisted of lyrics from a Nicki Minaj song.

Brianna Wu hates autistic people

Claim

Brianna Wu's use of an autistic child to represent Gamergate is hateful!

Rebuttal

A fan of Wu's game (not Wu herself) made a meme including a stock photo of a generically angry child. The stock photo was separately used in a PowerPoint template by autism "charity" Autism Speaks, and this was found by a Twitter user (who did post a correction a couple of months later.).

ISIS!!!

Claim

Anti-Gamergate supports ISIS.

Rebuttal

Apparently DAESH utilizes the open source BlockTogether.org tool that Randi Harper's Good Game Auto Blocker uses. Because no one opposed to Gamergate has ever denounced DAESH's use of the tool or ever addressed it, Gamergaters assume that "anti-Gamergate" must support DAESH. This is further "supported" by the fact that no one "anti-Gamergate" is on DAESH's blocklist while a large number of Gamergaters are. The website hosting the blocklist check was registered in June 2015 and only seems to be getting any traction in the first week of July 2015. And this is only being passed around in Gamergate circles. If anything, someone forked Harper's project on Github and didn't bother to cut out the Gamergate-specific content.

Also projection.

Censoring video games

Claim

SJWs like Anita Sarkeesian want to censor video games!

Rebuttal

Anita Sarkeesian's video series is about introducing feminist analysis to the layperson by applying it to negative portrayals of female characters in video games, as others have done for other media. All she is arguably saying is that video games could have better stories that depict female characters as more than helpless prizes for the hero, just female-coded versions of the male character, or as prop pieces to be sexualized or abused. She does not want to censor video games. People can criticize things that they enjoy. She clearly likes video games, because she certainly wouldn't be spending the past 3 years of her life playing them and critiquing them only to suffer the hugest reactionary backlash possible if she didn't. It's also why she's dedicated looking at positive portrayals of women and negative portrayals of men. Her later criticisms of the new DOOM game met with similar derision, despite not addressing anything to do with feminism in her tweets about it at E3 2015. When Gamergate irrationally got angry at her statements, her cowriter Jonathan McIntosh literally wrote "No one wants to ban DOOM". Gamergaters have decided this is a red herring for their true intentions of censoring video games when it is more like a request to praise and promote video games that do not rely on excessive fantasy violence.

Claim

They got Hatred taken down from Steam Greenlight but we put it back on!

Rebuttal

Destructive Creations, the studio behind Hatred, has played Gamergate like a fiddle. They intentionally released an edgy trailer in order to drum up controversy. Valve was perfectly in its rights to drop Hatred from its greenlight service. Nowhere does it say that people petitioned for it to be removed. However, that didn't stop Gamergaters from complaining about "censorship" (something a private company is not doing) and it got put back. Criticism of the dev team's apparent support of Islamophobic and white nationalist groups only pushed Gamergate to further support the game to spite "SJWs". They even began requesting the addition of "SJW" NPC targets (including Sarkeesian). All this was clear by its release, when Hatred was one of the top selling games, despite reviews panning its barely existent story and shoddy gameplay. Not satisfied with this, Destructive Creations tried to foment more controversy by region locking their game from Germany and Australia, as they never bothered to try to get their game rated by Germany's USK and Australia's Classification Board.

False flags

Claim

Anti-GG engages in false flag operations in which they doxx their own or claim to be part of Gamergate while spouting hateful comments.

Rebuttal

This is projection with no actual evidence. False flags are a part of chan culture. As a result, many cases of doxxing see a decent amount of people claiming they're false flags. However, when it comes to proof, prominent GG supporter Jason "@j_millerworks" Miller has been the only one shown to be engaging in false flags, and various boards are awash with threads telling people to "infiltrate the SJWs". A false flag template was even found on 8chan's Gamergate boards to cast blame on "anti-Gamergate" for a doxxing.

Just plain old libel

Claim

"we aren't the ones defending domestic abusers, scam artists, bullies, racists and pedophiles."

Rebuttal

The above was said in response to someone criticizing Gamergate for pulling in Cathy Brennan with their bullshit (as she saw fit to repeat the claims against Sarah Nyberg because she hates trans women). This is apparently being said of "anti-Gamergate" but oh how hypocritical Gamergate is.

• Eron Gjoni is a domestic abuser, not Zoe Quinn. He physically assaulted Quinn and has spent more time than anyone should on trying to exact his revenge on them for the breakup after their 5-month relationship fell apart and has explicitly said he tried to rekindle their relationship to get more dirt on them for "The Zoe Post". Gamergaters have also forked over tens of thousands of dollars to Gjoni to fund his legal battles against Quinn's restraining order and gag order with the promise of a sequel to "The Zoe Post" as a reward for the masses.
• Davis Aurini and Jordan Owen's The Sarkeesian Effect requiring $15k a month to make (which even then they only got half of what they wanted), the Honey Badger Brigade's crowdfunding to hire a disbarred lawyer for their suit against Calgary Expo, Slade Villena's continually crowdfunded game FleetCOMM which still hasn't been released, attempts to raise money for Sarah Nyberg when the only person involved is a Gamergater, BasedGamer requiring $50k to start up what is a user-submitted video game review site, and 3800 people funding TFYC when only 3500 people at best own copies of Afterlife Empire all reek more of scam artistry than the insults Gamergaters constantly fling at Anita Sarkeesian when she puts out exactly what she said she was going to, albeit at a schedule she had to readjust due to her budget being vastly expanded and spending time and energy into reporting her death threats to the FBI.
• Gamergaters seem to think Sam Biddle really wanted to push them into lockers when they've spent the past year attacking people that even so much as say they don't like Gamergate.
• Gamergate started off on 4chan's /pol/, a haven for neo-Nazis, and yet they claim that there are racists in whatever monolithic "anti-Gamergate" they think exists. Usually this refers to that one Anita Sarkeesian quote about feminism in Japan of no provenance other than a proto-Gamergater that modern Gamergaters like to juxtapose with a photo of a mushroom cloud. Or they're referring to reviewer Ian Miles Cheong who had been derided for months as a neo-Nazi because Gamergate dug up chatroom logs of as a teenager making tasteless anti-Semitic jokes. They stopped that when he became a Gamergater after he disagreed with Polygon's reviews of The Witcher 3.
• 8chan has boards dedicated to literal child pornography. When people pointed out the child pornography exists, Fredrick Brennan said he wouldn't do anything about it because he respects "free speech". When Dan Olson reported on how 8chan's moderators don't do shit with regards to the child porn boards, Gamergaters attacked him and claimed he was a pedophile for calling out the rampant pedophilia on the site, and accusing him and "SJWs" of planting child porn on the boards, despite the boards existing long before Gamergate. This is defending pedophiles, Gamergate. They also attack Sarah Nyberg because Gamergate hacked her website and found chatlogs nearly a decade old where she made claims of being a pedophile, but she has since said was her and her friends making 4chan-style trolling jokes at each others' expenses. She doesn't defend what she said in jest, and neither does anyone else who saw through Gamergate's smear job with help from "ethical" Breitbart journalist Milo Yiannopoulos, but acknowledges Gamergate's hypocrisy in attacking her for what she says is insincere when that's their defense for their own similar statements with regards to pedophilia and racism. It also doesn't help them when Twitter accounts with anti-semitic and racist screennames spread the attacks on her, nor did rape decriminalization advocate Daryush Valizadeh and weev. All of the police reports on Olson were dismissed as were any made against Nyberg, for which she was in direct contact with a lawyer and the police who were handling her case. Meanwhile, 8chan got taken down from Google for hosting child porn.

The projection is incredible as always, Gamergate.

The UN wants to ban video games because of SJWs!

Claim

The UN report Cyber Violence Against Women & Girls: A Worldwide Wake-Up Call uses anti-gaming rhetoric and Anita Sarkeesian supported it!

Rebuttal

Gamergate is getting its panties in a knot over a single citation in a single sentence in this 70 page report by the UN Broadband Commission. This one citation was written by Michele Steinberg, one of Lyndon LaRouche's cronies. This one citation used to source one sentence about the normalization of violence in video games, that is immediately followed by a statement that such discussion is related to but not within the scope of this one report, apparently automatically invalidates the whole of the report in Gamergate's eyes. The citation may be shit but at least everyone can recognize that.

Gamergate is also only mentioned twice in the whole report, and that's in reference to both Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian being women who were attacked online. And Gamergate obsessing over this report on how to stop cyberviolence, and how it could allegedly be considered censorship of them, says more about them than it does about the report.

Claim

Cyber-harassment/Cyber-violence isn't a thing, there's no real life consequences!

Rebuttal

In essence, the use of terms like "harassment" and "violence" are essentially elevated terms of "bullying", and on that note, considering the vast number of people who have been victims of cyberbullying (Amanda Todd and Tyler Clementi as the most prominent examples), it's downright silly to claim that there can never be real-life consequences, since it can force people into changes in their own personal life, such as having to employ security to take you to places (as is currently the case with Sarkeesian), fearing for your life when people dox you or turn up at your place of work threatening your life (the latter of which happened with Randi Harper) and of course can make you so miserable that you may feel compelled to suicide, as has happened to numerous cyberbullying victims.

Claim

Sarkeesian is saying stuff like calling her a "liar and "she sucks" is harassment and wants to censor it!

Rebuttal

While the phrasing was admittedly poor, when we consider that some of the examples of calling Anita Sarkeesian a "liar" includes mass-brigading her with baseless, long-debunked accusations of her being a "scam-artist" and a "fraud" as well as claiming that she's doxed herself and that she's faked threats against her, then hell yes that's an example of harassment. Similarly, the ways that members of Gamergate have used to tell Sarkeesian that she "sucks" have included pretty much every female gender-specific insult under the sun, as well as threats of assault, rape, and murder, not to mention attempting to hack her Kickstarter and YouTube accounts, doxing her to the point where she had to flee her home, and threatening places where she is due to speak with massacres unless she doesn't appear. This is the kind of so-called "freeze peach" that she and Zoe Quinn want to root out. Frankly the sorts of people who engage in such vile harassment absolutely deserve to face dire consequences for their actions, and the fact that these people want to protect that kind of free speech says a hell of a lot more about them than it does about the people they claim are "culural authoritarians".

Claim

Why is the UN focusing on this when there's REAL violence going on in other parts of the world?!

Rebuttal

This is the fallacy of relative privation in action, a standby of MRAs. Humanity is capable of focusing on more than one problem at once, and since there are many real victims of cyber-harassment, that fact is compelling enough to treat it as a problem that should be resolved.

The /r/ShitRedditSays Doxxing of JonTron, Boogie2988, et al.

Claim

In September 2014, Anti-GG users of the Reddit subforum /r/ShitRedditSays (SRS) doxxed five people for carrying pro-Gamergate views. This is particularly heinous as one of the people doxxed, Boogie2988, was a kindhearted YouTube comedian decidedly neutral about Gamergate.

Rebuttal

The main piece of evidence claimed to prove this conspiracy is a screenshot of a now-deleted post on Pastebin with the SRS IRC address at the bottom of the page. Pastebin is a service to which anyone can post text anonymously. No IRC logs, SRS posts, etc., have been found to support the allegation that it was posted by members of SRS, and circumstantial evidence indicates the doxxing is more consistent with a false flag operation to get SRS banned than a malicious act by SRS, as a user on /r/KotakuInAction who regularly logs chats on the /r/ShitRedditSays IRC room mentioned that they could not find any instances of the unusual slang found in the dox, and it tends to be an exceptionally unwise choice to physically associate oneself or one's organization with something like this by signing it.

RationalWiki is colluding with anti-Gamergate, in a shady (yet alluring) secret organization of internet-controlling thugs!!1!

Hellz yes we are.

Common objections to this page

It's biased against Gamergate!

True (much as citable reality is). Yet that doesn't mean it's wrong, just as being biased for Gamergate doesn't make something wrong. See SPOV.

It's incomplete! Lying by omission!

This page is a work in progress; give it time. If you feel a claim isn't covered here, add it.

Those aren't my claims!

Not everyone in Gamergate makes the same claims; enough do that they are necessary to rebut. Some claims lack a quote and citation because, again, this page is a work in progress.

It's written by close-minded ideologues!

Nobody ever thinks they're closeminded, and it's very difficult to prove. If RationalWiki's sole objection to Gamergate was "GG is totes closeminded", would that change anyone's mind?

It doesn't allow outsiders to edit it!

This is a publicly editable wiki. See that edit button? Click it.

It's on RationalWiki, which was hijacked by SJWs!

If there was a hostile takeover, we didn't notice. See also the "biased" objection.

More like IRRATIONALWiki!

"But I thought this was supposed to be RATIONALWiki!" Drink!