-
Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
-
We have made minor adjustments to how the search bar works on ResetEra. You can read about the changes here.
Why is Gamergate support still so prevalent in gaming communities?
- Thread starter Cranster
- Start date
The longer answer is because 1) gamers have been cuddled by the gaming industry and groomed into reactionary manbabies where women are subservient to their desires and 2) gamers are insecure and think that white men are in the center of everything, and when that power is challenged, then they lash out and turn towards nazis / far-right ideology to maintain this power
Meanwhile the games industry does jack shit because they are the von Hindenburg of gaming culture where they remain silent and would never support feminists or black & brown people or lgbtq people because these companies are run by rich white men who are blind to racism, sexism, etc., so they are more afraid of catching flak from a hate mob and losing potential revenue by being part of a manufactured controversy by far-right reactionaries.
Meanwhile the games industry does jack shit because they are the von Hindenburg of gaming culture where they remain silent and would never support feminists or black & brown people or lgbtq people because these companies are run by rich white men who are blind to racism, sexism, etc., so they are more afraid of catching flak from a hate mob and losing potential revenue by being part of a manufactured controversy by far-right reactionaries.
I don't want to go off topic and didn't watch every episode of the Co Optional podcast but who was Alt Right on it? Jesse and Dodger are pretty normal
Last edited:
Honestly? A lot of things, but the one that bothers me the most is that game companies never came out against it. As long as it's still "acceptable" to support it, there's no real pressure for it to die. If lots of big companies had unequivocally stated "Gamergate is bad" - not little confused jokes, not just statements about harassment that GGers loved to read as being actually about people who were angry at them, but actually saying GG itself was a problem - we might be in a better place with this.
These days, usually how I see it come up is a lot of attempts at revisionism. Lots of "what, no, it was proven to be good and not actually harassment, you're being lied to" style garbage. Which can be so tiring, if we're still at the place where we can't even discuss anything specific that happened during it without having to argue that it happened to begin with. Maybe that's the point of them doing that, but more than anything else it feels like it failed to end in anway that we could actually force people to learn from instead of just fading into background noise that can amp up whenever they feel like it.
Though it can be a bit funny whenever someone recants their past behavior - or makes an obvious attempt to absolve themselves of it without actually changing - and the followers they gained from supporting it trip over themselves in their rush to desperately pull them back to supporting it. If they were just quiet about it, they'd have a figure who might still support them but has some plausible deniability; instead they can't help themselves and have to tell them that it's actually really cool and here's some links to a YouTuber talking about the unethical "SJWs".
These days, usually how I see it come up is a lot of attempts at revisionism. Lots of "what, no, it was proven to be good and not actually harassment, you're being lied to" style garbage. Which can be so tiring, if we're still at the place where we can't even discuss anything specific that happened during it without having to argue that it happened to begin with. Maybe that's the point of them doing that, but more than anything else it feels like it failed to end in anway that we could actually force people to learn from instead of just fading into background noise that can amp up whenever they feel like it.
Though it can be a bit funny whenever someone recants their past behavior - or makes an obvious attempt to absolve themselves of it without actually changing - and the followers they gained from supporting it trip over themselves in their rush to desperately pull them back to supporting it. If they were just quiet about it, they'd have a figure who might still support them but has some plausible deniability; instead they can't help themselves and have to tell them that it's actually really cool and here's some links to a YouTuber talking about the unethical "SJWs".
This is pretty accurate breakdown of the incel idiots.
Also accurate.
It should be made clear that if ResetEra is an exception, it is entirely because an active role is taken in making it one. There is no magic barrier keeping Gamergaters from coming into ResetEra, nor any enchantment that turns ResetEra members into anti-Gamergaters. When the site was first set up, you had a few straight-up Neo-Nazis in here, some of them trying to be sneaky to avoid bans.
Uhhh...what?
EA, for example, is an incredibly progressive in their hiring and other practices. The rise of indie game development - supported by larger companies - has helped feminists, minorities, etc... see a greatly increased role in all aspects of the industry.
I had a bit of a wake up call earlier this year during the controversy surrounding Vavra. I was watching YouTube videos on the topic and kept clicking around... Man, some of these GG or "anti-SJW" channels were getting tens or even hundreds of thousands of views. Maybe I'm in my bubble or whatever but it was genuinely shocking to see.
A lot of it is misogyny, a decent bit is the old axiom of equality feeling like oppression, but I also think some part of it is that we were all shitty teenagers who thought defending games from all attacks was cool and we let that become gatekeeping become hate become harassment.
In the early-to-mid-2000s, when video games were attacked for violence and people were saying Grand Theft Auto was killing people and Jack Thompson was screaming about banning games, the response from gamers wasn't just "No you're wrong about video games." It was "No you're wrong about us and also don't fuck with us." It was bullshit like this:
The defense wasn't a defense of games, it was a defense of gamers, and it was personal and visceral. Gamers tied video games into their identity and anyone attacking games was attacking gamers and the things you personally like, whether or not they were problematic, reflected on you.
Marry that with the gatekeeping aspect that the gaming community had always celebrated by endorsing fandom as a measuring stick for how respected you are with the community and you got this weird thing where games were changing right as a core group were becoming more resistant to change. Games like Gone Home and perhaps more relevantly Depression Quest were doing different things and the people who had tied their identity into a definition of video games became hostile to those things.
So people who cut their teeth on Jack Thompson attacking their hobby saw Anita Sarkeesian also criticizing games in an extremely simple Feminism 101 kind of way, they saw games becoming different from what they knew, and they decided there was no difference between then and now. Attacks on games meant attacks on them, full stop.
I don't know what it would have taken to stop that from happening. We probably should have emphasized the importance of diversity and inclusivity fifteen years ago instead of making it a fight against a cartoonish bad guy. The industry should have been more welcoming to female gamers for the last decade than they had been instead of catering to a male 18-30 demographic that basically begins and ends with Grandma's Boy. We didn't do any of that, though, and hindsight is 20/20.
It's definitely a lesson in learning to see the forest for the trees.
In the early-to-mid-2000s, when video games were attacked for violence and people were saying Grand Theft Auto was killing people and Jack Thompson was screaming about banning games, the response from gamers wasn't just "No you're wrong about video games." It was "No you're wrong about us and also don't fuck with us." It was bullshit like this:
The defense wasn't a defense of games, it was a defense of gamers, and it was personal and visceral. Gamers tied video games into their identity and anyone attacking games was attacking gamers and the things you personally like, whether or not they were problematic, reflected on you.
Marry that with the gatekeeping aspect that the gaming community had always celebrated by endorsing fandom as a measuring stick for how respected you are with the community and you got this weird thing where games were changing right as a core group were becoming more resistant to change. Games like Gone Home and perhaps more relevantly Depression Quest were doing different things and the people who had tied their identity into a definition of video games became hostile to those things.
So people who cut their teeth on Jack Thompson attacking their hobby saw Anita Sarkeesian also criticizing games in an extremely simple Feminism 101 kind of way, they saw games becoming different from what they knew, and they decided there was no difference between then and now. Attacks on games meant attacks on them, full stop.
I don't know what it would have taken to stop that from happening. We probably should have emphasized the importance of diversity and inclusivity fifteen years ago instead of making it a fight against a cartoonish bad guy. The industry should have been more welcoming to female gamers for the last decade than they had been instead of catering to a male 18-30 demographic that basically begins and ends with Grandma's Boy. We didn't do any of that, though, and hindsight is 20/20.
It's definitely a lesson in learning to see the forest for the trees.
EA told their employees in 2014 to bunker down and not say or do anything, and if anyone chose to go out and support Zoe Quinn, Anita Sarkeesian, etc., EA wouldn't have their back
Then you can also wonder how often and outspoken they've been the last 4 years.
Last edited:
I feel like it's the wrong tack to suggest that "gamergate" guys are just "incels" or "neck beards." I think plenty are just regular white guys (or even men of color), with girlfriends, who identify with gamergate because they don't experience sexism/homophobia etc. With many it's a combination of privilege, naïveté, and indifference. With others they're just prejudiced, and have a tribal right wing world view.
i saw this thread and was going to reply with "i STILL dont know what gg is" until i read this post. I even watched an animated video explaining it in another thread about gg and still didnt understand what it is. thank you for spelling it out for those who dont know.
It probably didn't help that the games industry marketed their products for 20+ years in a way that cultivated an identity that ties their consumption to their identity - i.e. that a criticism of a product meant an a criticism or an attack on them. This is especially dangerous when the games themselves usually centered white straight dudes from the US who shoots brown people and subjugates all women around them.
There's also an element of social media where companies like Youtube and Twitter and Facebook and Reddit are perfect platforms for organized harassment campaigns + their algorithms radicalize viewers with recommended videos that lead viewers down an neo-nazi rabbit hole.
People enjoy being outraged, and having something to rally behind to make themselves feel like they are part of something. Pack mentality and stuff I guess.
Because people will ad infinitum be stupid. There are some people that just can't be helped and would rather live in ignorance and vitriol than enlightenment and kindness. Its sad really and fosters negative experiences for genuinely nice people for no other reason than belonging to a certain race, gender, sexuality etc.
To add it is also because the gamergate group is fuelled by hatred of what they consider the 'other' and they have decided to identify instead amongst each other as being the 'truth tellers' who have to fight against some sort of liberal agenda. In actuality, what they consider a liberal agenda is common human courtesy like not sending death threats to people who oppose their views.
To add it is also because the gamergate group is fuelled by hatred of what they consider the 'other' and they have decided to identify instead amongst each other as being the 'truth tellers' who have to fight against some sort of liberal agenda. In actuality, what they consider a liberal agenda is common human courtesy like not sending death threats to people who oppose their views.
Because people who claim to hate identity politics have wrapped themselves so much in their own idea of what a gamer identity is that anything that doesn't fit that narrow image gets shunned, harassed, and terrorized.
The search for identity is a strong fucking drug, my friends. And worse, literal nazi shitheads can easily use people's need for identity to make them do horrible, horrible things en masse.
The search for identity is a strong fucking drug, my friends. And worse, literal nazi shitheads can easily use people's need for identity to make them do horrible, horrible things en masse.
I recommend going to the old site and reading through the new gamergate thread. Its literally nothing but people gaslighting the entire movement and trying to turn it into a call for "ethics in journalism" and it was never about attacking women. Its fucking frightening, to the point where I literally had to do my own rereading of everything just to make sure I wasn't going crazy.
A lot of good answers here, but another big one is simply that there was a window for the mostly unaffected people in this industry, both in the press and in game development, to stomp down on GG, renounce it, and throw it into the trash where it belonged. Instead, the vast majority of people with a voice stayed quiet or only passively dismissed them.
They missed that window by a long fucking shot, and it's still depressing to look back on. As soon as they let that moment pass by, that was when this became something that couldn't just be stuffed back in a box.
A lot of people fucked up real bad, and the end result has been a whole lot of people on the receiving end of some awful shit as a result.
They missed that window by a long fucking shot, and it's still depressing to look back on. As soon as they let that moment pass by, that was when this became something that couldn't just be stuffed back in a box.
A lot of people fucked up real bad, and the end result has been a whole lot of people on the receiving end of some awful shit as a result.
Gamers as a group have always been prone to "us versus them" thinking. I think gamergate was just a particularly malignant manifestation of that, targeting two groups who weren't "real" gamers: women and journalists. It never went away because gamers as a whole never really stood up to it. Too many gamers (and publishers, and even journalists) found it easy to ignore because they weren't in the crosshairs.
Pretty big combination of things. Misdirection, altering history, lack of a simple explanation to lock down just what it is for a lot of people (at least in a satisfactory way for said people), muddying the discussion with semantics and other such nonsense like sealioning.
I think all this combined caused people to not actually call it out when they see it. That gives the impression that it's okay. You can look at gaming (and even some non-gaming) personalities, which are the most known non-product entities for the medium. Every single one of them (including the progressives) has had at least a few friendly interactions with gators or those that run adjacent to them, if not are outright friends with a few. Seriously, name a personality and you'll find some GG association somewhere. People underestimate just how wide-reaching the message of "I don't care about politics" is for large swathes of the medium's base, and so varying levels of abhorrent acts aren't actually called out because to some, they seem tame and not worthy of derision. I guess that would be privilege there.
I think all this combined caused people to not actually call it out when they see it. That gives the impression that it's okay. You can look at gaming (and even some non-gaming) personalities, which are the most known non-product entities for the medium. Every single one of them (including the progressives) has had at least a few friendly interactions with gators or those that run adjacent to them, if not are outright friends with a few. Seriously, name a personality and you'll find some GG association somewhere. People underestimate just how wide-reaching the message of "I don't care about politics" is for large swathes of the medium's base, and so varying levels of abhorrent acts aren't actually called out because to some, they seem tame and not worthy of derision. I guess that would be privilege there.
dorito pope isn't helping matters with giving Trending Gamer Awards to terrible people either:
and then inviting them onto his E3 show in 2018 and obfuscating the voting process after being called out
The "moderates" like Geoff Keighley who just want to stick their heads into the sand are part of the problem too.
and then inviting them onto his E3 show in 2018 and obfuscating the voting process after being called out
The "moderates" like Geoff Keighley who just want to stick their heads into the sand are part of the problem too.
If another gamergater gets Trendung Gamer this year and all those AAA fuckups just shrug their shoulders again...
I occasionally troll the Fox News comments section, and nothing surprises me. Idiots are a dime a dozen.
User Banned (Permanent): Defending hate movements
Imagine thinking that acknowledging the massive amount of whining from one side of the GG shitshow means you support harassing women.
TheBSPolice here is upset because his only argument was bringing up things that aren't a problem or happen years ago. That Halo Wars 2 situation was very dumb on my part and I regret everything that went down. However ive turned myself around since then and 343i/MS willingness to communicate with the Eldewrito team speaks volume on that. I've been in very close contact with 343i devs and they have even acknowledge this, they understand that hold grudges for years is extremely unhealthy.
As for Halo Online if modding the game was really a huge issue MS at the very least would have given us a cease & desist then escalated from there. That was not the case at all, MS is only concerned with removing download links to full builds of Halo Online version MS23 due to it being a pre-release alpha. Since then our team has been in talks with 343i and they have been pretty supportive of our efforts. If this was really as detrimental as TheBSPolice wants everyone to believe, then Phil Spencer and 343i wouldn't have name dropped our team and continuously kept in contact with us.
I find it very pathetic that TheBSPolice felt the need to run here and paint myself(Gamecheat13) and HiddenXperia as misogynist shitlords because he is lacking in any type of valid argument. I personally think that anyone who harasses women is a dickhead and I also support journalistic integrity. No one is a as black and white as some of you would like to believe and movements can easily be hijacked by assholes. Whether GG was originally about holding journalism accountable or just for harassing women is in the past, I honestly dont give a shit. Its been 4 years its time to move on like most sane people have.
Next time find a better argument instead of running here to paint us as bad guys, you spineless pathetic excuse for a human. Keep yelling at the clouds while I keep networking, bye now.
Basically, also bigotry runs rampant. Gaming communities are mostly trash. Idk how many more times this needs to be said before people finally believe it.
I don't know if it's fair to categorize the Co-optional podcast as an alt-right podcast. You think an alt-right podcast regular would have a rainbow flag in their twitter profile? And as a secondary focus of this conversation, here's what that same member had to say about Bain's post-death coverage recently:
No one gives a shit about you or your mysoginistic hate movement. Kindly crawl back to the depths from whence you came.
Phil Spencer and people from the xbox team pal around with trash like crapgamer, so ...
I think it's ultimately tied to entitlement and sexual frustration.
Racism, bigotry, and sexism stem from those two.
In other words, it's a bunch of white men that part of society is telling them that everything is for them. Media. Money. Women. Etc. But because of their laziness, awkwardness, terribleness they don't actually get those things or feel they are losing them.
That leads them down a dark path of extremism.
Racism, bigotry, and sexism stem from those two.
In other words, it's a bunch of white men that part of society is telling them that everything is for them. Media. Money. Women. Etc. But because of their laziness, awkwardness, terribleness they don't actually get those things or feel they are losing them.
That leads them down a dark path of extremism.
Resetera isn't an exception. The people with those views are just good enough at hiding them here to avoid drawing the mods' wrath.
GG is still around because no one involved had the foresight/self-awareness to see how awful and disgusting it was from the get-go, so of course it's going to continue to survive. All those people are still around and I doubt you're getting many, if any, to change their tune. It doesn't help almost no major industry players are willing to call it out and the only people actively fighting it are not well known enough or respected within the GG circlejerk to change it.
Except this shit is still actively going on. At least you seem to know you're just lonely human trash. I pity you.
Because gaming is a safe space for bigotry and hate. Here's a fun experiment; try spending a few hours playing the most popular mainstream multiplayer games and watching the most popular twitch streams along with the chat and counting how many racist or sexist terms you can spot or hear. I'd wager a lot and none will incur any sort of punishment.
The machine that Steve Bannon, Milo Yanninopoulos, Mike Cernovitch, and others crafted is now free from its moorings, gobbling up new resentful, self-loathing, nihilistic people who either are naturally sociopathic or have been lured in by "sympathetic" voices to their mild yet real problems.
Countries like SK and Japan have their own, but I only know enough to know it's different.
Also: Note how fast "Doritogate" disappeared from the public mindset. Geoff Keighley as your Papal Snack! And yet buried by GG. That machine is rather scarily effective, aint it?
Nice stab right in the heart of his misdirection. *toasts*
Countries like SK and Japan have their own, but I only know enough to know it's different.
Also: Note how fast "Doritogate" disappeared from the public mindset. Geoff Keighley as your Papal Snack! And yet buried by GG. That machine is rather scarily effective, aint it?
Nice stab right in the heart of his misdirection. *toasts*
Gamergate was started by Zoe Quinn's ex to attack her personally. It's been toxic and indefensible from the very start. Stop spreading misinformation.
Eh, the Jessica price thread is filled with posters who might as well be in any other reactionary gamer subreddit. The only difference is that they're trying their hardest to sound polite with their veiled sexism
OP
OP
I had an interesting run in about gamer gate from a gay gayme refrained of mine recently who has nothing against women in gaming at all
He said that gamer gate was actually started about review scores and in particular a group email thread between an. Number of high ish profile journalists on various video game mags and sites trying to bury other game joirnos they didn't like. The claim was qhentnuks was uncovered they claimed it was about women in the game industry being hassled to get attention away from:them.
I'm not saying anything more about this as I can't tell if there is any relation to this and what gamer gate became to this.
I found stuff about the email thread he was talking about but decided not to look any further as don't want to go near gamer gate
Was there any relation between them?
He said that gamer gate was actually started about review scores and in particular a group email thread between an. Number of high ish profile journalists on various video game mags and sites trying to bury other game joirnos they didn't like. The claim was qhentnuks was uncovered they claimed it was about women in the game industry being hassled to get attention away from:them.
I'm not saying anything more about this as I can't tell if there is any relation to this and what gamer gate became to this.
I found stuff about the email thread he was talking about but decided not to look any further as don't want to go near gamer gate
Was there any relation between them?
A lot of gamers are insecure little shits who think that if they don't drive women and marginalized people out of games, they won't get their shooty bang bangs anymore.
Anyone who says it's about anything other than this shitty lie is selling you misinformation.
The term "GamerGate" literally came about from a tweet by known shithead Adam Baldwin in relation to information that falsely suggested Zoe Quinn traded sex for good reviews of her video game, which is a thing that I can't even begin to explain how many ways is wrong. And that's all you need to know about this "movement."
Anyone who says it's about anything other than this shitty lie is selling you misinformation.
GG'ers told themselves they were fighting against some unethical boogey(wo)man in gaming journalism, but it was just a weak ass excuse for bitch cowards to avoid admitting that they hate women in public.