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I know, I kinda opening a can of worms here, but almost all of us supported the movement when it happened and I know because I was there when everything was unfolded. KYM was one of the biggest website where pro-GG gathers back in the day.

Seeing how things turned out now, and how we all have matured as time goes, I'm dead curious and I'm asking for your own personal opinion and stance here, what're your stance on Gamergate now? Were you a supporter? How do you feel about it now? Do you ever regret taking stance on the movement?

>giving a shit about mated worker ants in 2022
lol

Assuming this thread doesn't get taken down, Gamegate imo is very much irrelevant to me nowadays as it was then, and even if it was relevant I think that controversy should have easily been eclipsed in recent times by scandals documented from employees at studios such as Riot games, Blizzard, and Ubisoft studios.

I wasn't really talking about the relevancy, I was thinking in retrospective. So basically I was asking; how do you feel about it? Do you treat it as a real movement that legitimately trying to do what was right (holding game journalist accountable)? Are the issues brought up legitimate and if you were with it, do you think that you actually fight for the right thing? Or is it a questionable movement with a lot of red flags behind it now that you think about it?

I'm just curious since KYM communities nowadays a bit more leaning to the left side of things although most of us are still centrist leaning and some people claim that GG is what started alt-right movement. How do you all feel about that?

Well, I wasn't trying to ask about the relevancy. My question meant to be more reflective of our views back in the days. So in retrospect, how do you feel about it?

Also, I'm thinking to post this on serious debate, but I wasn't really looking to debate. I'm just curious about how people feel now towards the whole thing and wanna ask people here to think in retrospect.

Moved to Serious Debate. I'm pretty sure a little bit of jabbing is fine, but you will need to actually address the thread's premise if you want to post, and not just mock it.

Honestly, my opinion is pretty much the same as a lot of people's. There were some legitimately kind of shady things going on that seemed to spark GG. These were issues that had been brought up years earlier, like paying for favorable coverage. Personally, none of it really impacted me directly, I was always a "vidya enjoyer" and would rather play mediocre games that appealed to me interests than highly rated games far outside of what I like. Still, I didn't have a hard time understanding why other people cared.

But at somepoint, things really nose dived. Anything that could conceivably be seen as a "social justice issue" was immediately attacked and mocked. They drowned out any alternative views or perspectives, and harassed people who expressed them even if just for sake of argument. Obviously this wasn't everyone and I am biased by what occurred on KYM.

And on KYM in particular… this is basically seen as the Turing point where the old established community died. We still have active users from before then of course, but any sense of actual "community" just feel apart. A lot of the long time best contributing users left. Mods used to be an active part of the site, disproportionately trying to have fun and talk over enforcing rules compared to today. With long time users becoming less active or leaving, other users followed suit.

I do think it perhaps a but unfair that GG gets all the blame. Much of this was bound to happen anyways. Sites in general moved away from forums, and the terrible experience with ads, especially on mobile likely drove people to stop using the site as much as well. Still, GG and it's after effects felt like it was the driving force on wedge issues, even if those issues had nothing to do with video games.

Thank you for moving this thread. I somewhat agree with you. I still legitimately believe that game journos still should hold some standard and GG at its core, really have a legitimate issue that everyone should address. But the whole discussion detracts way too much to something that is more unsubstantial to the actual issues at hand.

Hmm… this is gonna be a bit weird, I guess, but I think the movement itself wasn't all that important. The reactions to the movement were what really mattered, since it exposed seemingly endless layers of bad ethics, dishonesty, and incompetence throughout the entirety of online journalism and everything that feeds from it. A funny consequence of this is that the article here is the most accurate and least biased documentation on GamerGate you can realistically find anywhere online; Wikipedia's rules and institutions mandate that it parrots all the common lies uncritically, and everywhere else is just as bad, if not worse.

On a very broad scale, I'd say the only real negative consequence is the perpetuation of the "gate" suffix for controversies. On more specific scales, I think it played a major part in the current states of 4chan and Reddit, though I think the latter was already well into its downward spiral by 2014.

In my opinion Gamergate was the inevitable crash of an industry that had allowed bad practice to become standard.

The only real distinguishing part here from any other crash was that they wrapped themselves in an ideology that only served to poison everything it touched.

The industry tried to bury the fire of scandal under social justice browbeating, as was the norm in intellectual circles. Only they found that instead of acting like sand and dousing the fire it acted more like dynamite and they blew themselves wide open.

The customers werent cowed; much the opposite it brought a lot of them to political awareness and set dominos tumbling as these previously uninterested gamers started noticing how much of the western world exhbits similar behavior to what had infuriated them in the gaming press.

The internet was somewhat better before Gamergate, not in every way but you can see how before and after gamergate the internet became a scarier and more divided place, like I was there, I live through the gamergate thing, and I can attest….the internet was better before it.

Also it open the doors to the alt-right and those guys have no redeemable qualities, they are so fuckng annoying…

so yeah…I am not a fan at all

This is what people who were against GG argues; that GG brings the surge to the alt-right. So I'm really curious, what do people think about this allegations?

For me, I didn't really even know about gamergate until about 2 or 3 years after it had already happened. And like alot of people, I didn't even really get what it was all about. Everything I know about GG came from this video: https://youtu.be/STl7-_f4_eA

That issue probably would have never affected me back when it first happened because I didn't really use social media at the time. In some ways, it feels like I'm an outsider looking in on a isolated issue that seems like it became bigger that it needed to be. As for GG discussions on KYM, it feels like most people would rather like to see the issue remain burried in the dirt, and after seeing Jill's response to this thread I can see why.

I have allready been schooled on my lack of knowledge on the history of the alt right. All I can say is back then mainstream opposition to Social Justice pushing was pretty much non existant.

There was a vaccum to fill and the Alt Right hadnt gotten thier reputation yet; if there was a prime time for recruitment I would imagine it was right at the start where people were first becoming aware of it and were looking for explanations to the completely unexpected and frankly insane scenario of a niche press suddenly turning around and calling their own customers racist/sexist/anti-gay etc.

It was more like hijacked, the GG in the start is nowhere near anything alt-right because it's actually about a small boycott torwards ZQ and Nathan Grayson. The attention got so large it also got the wrong ppl like Milo for example.

If the mass game journalists did not make articles dogging 1 person that started GG in 2014 they would have avoided the Streisand effect and GG would have been forgotten in a week, but we're in a timeline where game journalists dont make smart decisions, brought the attention of many ppl from their articles, and the wrong people which hijacked this I mentioned earlier.

And the internet was the same before & after GG was created if anyone even payed attention what happened before 2014. So idk what No!! is saying.
So my stance for this is still the same as before. I've been following Brad Gladgow and it's amazing how antis still treat GG as a boogyman.

Anymore I don't have much of an opinion of GamerGate itself, but the whole thing really did open my eyes to just how much people will allow their relationships and political views affect their reasoning.

Cathy Young's retrospective posted 3 years ago sums up my stance, I suppose. Wasn't an active participant, just an observer. I think one thing to note is that not many people who are casual internet users apparently heard about it (Brad Glasgow's litmus test sounds like a good rule of thumb).

As for my experience, I talked to a grand total of 2 people about it, my sister and my cousin. My sister didn't know what it was (I told her to just stay out of it), and my cousin name-dropped GG and the media's reaction to it, before talking about how she found Anita Sarkeesian's views on female game characters ridiculous. My cousin was attending college somewhere in LA when I talked to her, and she apparently mentioned her views on Anita at some point in class, and surprisingly didn't get (metaphorically) killed over them (was apparently a very civil discussion according to her).

My stance is the same as Jill in that there was shady things going on. And like Jill, I feel things would take a nosedive. Then again, I shouldn't of been surprised at that when I heard one of the people that jumped onto GamerGate (Mister Metokur iirc, back then known as Internet Aristocrat) would do it not because "ethics in journalism" but to make a strike against SJW's. Add to what Sanakan said in people hijacking it like Milo jumping on to grift on it and peddle any right wing BS and people like One Angry Gamer thinking a gay or trans flag in a game is as bad or worse than some gaming journalist taking a bribe to give a game better coverage or a score despite said game being crap.

Used to be pro-GG, in it for ethics unironically (yeah point and laugh and all that), ended up losing interest and being nominal to it and seeing how it had its share of spergs and idiots back when I saw it unfold through Kiwi Farms (I know that site is a trash fire but as an old guard, it was marginally before it got infested with pol-tards, and by marginally, I mean it wasn't completely filled with the sort of people that think being trans automatically makes one a lolcow and the web admin going off the rails in right wing BS) and seeing how both sides could be laughable or insufferable in some way. The only objectively good thing I see from it was Vivian James art that wasn't terrible.

To tl;dr it all, I saw it as nerds fighting each other regardless of which side it was and Vivian James was the only good thing to come out of it in terms of art.

Largely the same. A video game journalistic circus filled with so many bad-faith actors on both ends that it swells into a whole subculture and toxic political movements in itself.

Almost every aspect of the modern day American culture wars that dominates the discourse both on and off-line has its roots from this very event, and it's what happens when people can fling shit to each other with impunity. Case in point… the Oppressed Gamer™ movement who doesn't actually play games, but to complain about how depicting gay people is ruining video games. On the other side, you have the extreme SJW Twitter crowd who also complains about the slightest hint of masculinity.

Basically, it's your typical e-drama blown out of proportions by the idiots and shady agenda pushers on both sides.

Gamergate was probably predetermined to happen like a fixed moment in time, it wasnt something that could have been avoided in any way but…I dont know if anything good came from it at all…cant think of anything that improved because of gamergate

The only good I could think of was fan art of Vivian James and that could vary among others. That said, GamerGate in terms of gaming journalism controversy could happen though if it happened from something else, I don't know if it would lead to something like Bannon using Milo to infiltrate it and derail it from "ethics in gaming journalism" over Kotaku articles and the like to whatever right wing idiocy there is like screeching over a trans flag mural in a Spiderman game if GamerGate didn't arise from the Zoe Quinn stuff.

WHTM? It's been ages since I've seen anyone bring up that radical feminist rag. I'm a bit surprised that it's still even live tbh

When two of your three "sources" are from an insane blog whose bias should be obvious from even just skimming any random article on it, and the source behind the remaining one has been dead for years, it'd serve you well to do some actual research.

The nature of GamerGate as a push against trends in mainstream journalism innately taints articles written about it, especially ones written close to its inception. The incident that truly got the ball rolling wasn't the Zoe Post. It was a bunch of seemingly unrelated gaming news sites all publishing articles declaring the "death of gamers" in a suspiciously close time frame.

I've said it before, but like, one of the consequences of this is that the article here, on KnowYourMeme, is the best documentation of it likely anywhere online.

It's insane because the sources are nonsense, Hell i think they're largely woozles and I think you're ideologically poisoned on the topic but you're better informed than most I've been in the trenches from the beginning so if you want more detailed answers i can provide them. I'm not going to deny the dislike for leftists existed before, that is correct you can see it catalogued in /v/ the musical. anita the grifter ,etc.
and she was outside critique, demonstrated very little actual knowledge in the game, most of her arguements were quite poor upon examination and frankly i still see her has a leftist jack, that is to say a puritanical moralist seeking fame and money peddling a hollow critique.
but just like the zoe post these things were ancillary and thats where all of you have a problem, your brains go haywire because you literally do not understand it. gamer gate was coined because there was evidence of clear collusion following the quinnspiracy. that is to say starting with a former writer of gamasutra, there were streams of articles posting "gamers don't have to be your audience, gamers are dead." at which point people formed gamergate. This combined with the collusion from tech companies to censor dicussion of it, on the big social media companies for gamers, this had to devolp beyond it. many people myself included ended up here because we could not discuss it at our home forums, this includes 4chan leading to the great 8chan migration.
zoe, anitia and briana "moon rocks" wu were titled literally who for a reason, they became unimportant following the proper formation. on twitter we had dedicated policing squads targeting people that were acting improperly on ourside and even on 8chan there was an attitude of "keep our head down and email sponsers." with propaganda posters that demonstrated that. there was definitely a faction that wanted to harrass and shitpost, those people were forced out and left to /baph/, and then eventually kiwifarms.
you guys have a fucking fixation on quin for reasons i don't understand
>but but no body actu
i mean i don't know if that's true as i understand it usually it centers around actually the indie movie that she kinda crashed to make into depression quest, see https://archive.ph/mrVxK
but that literally doesn't matter because the leaked games journos pros emails had them fucking colluding to shut down dicussion of it. as you point out which is why it was banned on a lot of reddit, banned on 4chan and the escapist
like you guys can yap on about "well this is technically not true" like nerds but like there is clear impropriety right there and always had been
incredibly corrupt and it's all up on deepfreeze (mind you deepfreeze is like 5 years out of date by now)

Youtube is separate because those people came off the atheism plus, which was a leftism v default liberal (as both sides of atheism at this time were left wing.) and this just rolled into GG, this is what we call scope creep, and i think it's partially because the go to for the journals were to deflect criticism by shouting leftist shibboleths. it doesn't matter they are corrupt nepotistic assholes that blacklist good people because of their hang ups, they're the right politics. also because they're inarticulate it attracted the new atheist scum who were already feasting on bedroom feminists
Distinctly i remember the emerging skeptics headed by sargon and i was disgusted because it seemed to me they were trying to ingratiated themselves into it while it developed.
Tumblr in action is incorrect as i understand, the part of the reason the quinnspiracy became gamergate, hell the reason i joined as a left libertarian at the time was the censorship that was clear and manifest across the internet, the escapist shut things down, reddit did definitely and 4chan even. this was the largest and most far reaching example of censorship and we were not as buck broken by it as we are know. So KYM became a major refuge and so did 8chan. mind you reddit gives me hives so i don't know the distinction between the eventual Kotaku In Action and TIA,

gg disbanded and has been disbaned for years, in the end it's our enemies that got to write our obituary, and people like yourself who weren't there who just parrot this shit
we hunted the mammoth
FOR CHRIST'S SAKE MAN, THAT'S A FUCKING CRAZY MANOSPHERE PICKUP ARIST FUCKING WEBSITE
every other journalist is feeding you shit on that too.

Gamergate is really just the forerunner to the anti-establishment movements we see nowadays. There are good and bad people on both sides, but it seems that a lot of the issues present in Gamergate are present within wider society like ethics in media, collusion between companies and individuals they are covering, censorship, etc.

I'm not going to say everyone who was pro gamergate ended up well (look at Ethan Ralph or Milo for instance), but I think it represents a consumer revolt where the everyday ordinary person was under attack by the elites, and it showed what I consider to be the new issue of the digital era in which the segregation between the common man and the antidemocratic elitist corporations and businesses are working to push an agenda and to make ordinary kept in line.

I still find the drama the whole thing generated, entertaining, but for the most part I was and still I am indifferent since I pirate all of my games.

Here is the perspective from a guy who was monitoring GG on twitter for a whole year during its peak period.

I still like the original idea of "ethics in journalism" (yes, yes, you can point and laugh haha) The shady things that were going on back then really let one think there was some corrruption hiding underneath.

I enjoyed sjw's having a meltdown on twitter. But while i was laughing my ass off i failed to realize how grim the "anti-sjw" side was growing.
People finally found a way to vent at those annoying virtue signalers so you got trolls from /pol/ spouting their horrible ideas.
Then every vocal wannabe e-celeb weighed in trying to make it about them which made things even worse.

Everything derailed into a cesspool i wanted nothing to do with anymore, especially when the main reason gamergate existed didn't seem to be the focus anymore. What was originally beef between Two exes and two Indie devs turned into the greatest shitstorm the internet ever saw.

If you look back at it, it's weird how those Literally Who's were right about some stuff: Recent scandals expose how toxic the game industry really is towards women
Also, I find it sad that the so called "anti-sjw's" are using the tactics they once criticized the sjw's of. Nowadays they are as offended and "triggered" by everything as the opposition. It's all so tiresome.

I am ending this rant with a word of advice for the newbies reading this:

Don't involve yourself in this kind of shit, it's not worth it. You will not get happier.
I have seen too many fellas from back then spiral into madness because of delusional conspiracy theories. And for what? So you will have won that one Twitter argument you spent hours of your life at? It won't bring back the good old times. It's a cruel cold world, time's too short to spent time hanging at each other's throat.

In the end, nobody wanted all this shit; proof is a famous quote from back then:
"I just wanted to play video games for fuck's sake"

It and the 2016 US presidential elections changed the internet for the worse, culturally.

Before then, people online mainly focused on entertainment (producing it or engaging with it) and the niches their interests fitted. There was substantially less desire from the general internet user to broadcast their input on every topic imaginable, or initiate childish virtual wars against interests/topics/subjects they had no interest in.

After, people instead focused their attention on drama, irony-worship, virtue signalling, politics and tribalism. Every day I lament what meta-irony and politics have done to the internet. Discourse, creativity, entertainment, knowledge and rationality have all regressed with their incursion.