Gamergate

[manofonetitle]

It's a lot to summarize, and I can only go off of my recollection, but I'll give it a try:

Gamergate was started as a hashtag used by gamers to expose foul play among professional game reviewers. Like, reviewers on major websites getting paid by publishers to talk about only the good aspects of the games they were reviewing along with getting free shit. A group of gamers were all like "this is bullshit!" and formed a group called Gamergate, where they mostly called out a bunch of reviewers on said bullshit. Things were going fine until they discovered even more bullshit, which leads into the whole "gamergate is misogynistic" period of gamergate history.
Some time a year, maybe two years ago, a female game developer named Zoe Quinn was called out for giving sexual favors to a writer for some well known gaming blog which created way too positive of a review for Zoe's game. The way this was revealed was because her ex-boyfriend posted the whole story online after they broke up for the very incident. Dayum. Gamergate noticed this and all of a sudden, the gamergate hashtag started being used in tweets calling Zoe Quinn a giant cuntbag in a roundabout way of saying, (also heard about a dox of some kind and death threats though I don't really know the details of those). So after the public sees all these 'gamers' use the gamergate hashtag to 'harrass a woman over the internet', all of a sudden, people start writing articles about how gamergate is a misogynistic troll army. This was also during the time where major game news sites had writers posting about how gamers are losers (backlash to that was pretty hilarious imo). While this was going on, the gamergate members that were not white males made youtube videos posting about how they're sick of the media portraying gamers (especially those involved in gamergate) as fat white neckbeards who hate women (which started the hashtag #notyourshield).
Then we have Arnita Sarkeesian, a feminist vlogger who makes videos where she critiques videogames based on how they treat women. The stuff she says is pretty crazy, she doesn't even play videogames yet she judges them because she runs a feminist blog. If you've never heard of her, she's pretty much the new Jack Thompson (only instead of being a lawyer saying violent videogames makes kids violent, Anita is saying sexist videogames turns boys into rapists, seriously she even made a claim that Princess Peach's character is hatred against women or some shit). But the big reason people hate her is because she's claimed to have gotten death threats that count in the hundreds over the internet, but those claims aren't exactly being backed up and others have countered that a lot of those threats were made by alternative twitter accounts that she created. Not only that, but she uses that story about her death threats as a crutch to get attention by news channels and started a funding campaign to stop online harassment and earned something like millions of dollars from it. Basically, people are claiming that she's a professional victim, and judging by how nutty her online content is, I wouldn't be surprised if it were true. She probably did actually receive a few death threats online though because apparently she's become so influential that games are starting to be affected by them. Apparently the artist for Firewatch confirmed that they were spurred by Anita's videos to change aspects in their story to make it more PC. And when Anita made a video about GTA5 being sexist and harmful, Target and Walmart and some other major retailer pulled it off their shelves in a few countries. I'm sure there's more but basically, she and other feminists that criticize video game representation of women have caused some games to become more PC and some games to not even ship overseas from Japan. Oh and she hates gamergate because they called her out on her shit.

So that's my recollection of what gamergate is about. Again, I don't really subscribe to it, mainly because I feel the same way about gamergate as I do about feminism. It started out as a good cause, but eventually turned into a big confusing, unnecessary mess. The loudest members who take action under each banner are either obnoxious, immature, or have no idea what they're even talking about. My opninion in a nutshell is pretty much what weapon said:


So yeah, just wondered if you guys had any thoughts about the issue or anything to discuss on it.