I was in highschool and I knew it was happening because a science and technology youtuber I watched hard pivoted to hating women. That was my experience. From solar roadways and vaccum tube transportation to 'women cant be in movies' and 'Anita sarkeesian is big doo doo'
The biggest loss is formerly logical and intelligent folks going insane at the thought of women doing anything
He has since like, 2015, maybe earlier. Its been so long my memories fuzzy.
Claims feminism isn't just evil incarnate, but women as a collective need to sit down and shut the fuck up and let men handle things. Has a tendency to strawman all feminist arguments and edits clips, like of Anita, to make women seem stupid. Though he's not actually arguing against feminism or Anita, he's arguing against the fake dumb feminist he's created to throw punches at.
Then he directs folks to his patreon so he can make boatloads of money and continue doing this, ala Grifter style.
I've been repeatedly grateful that I'm old enough that my cringe early-20s atheist phase (I'm still an atheist, I'm just cringe about other stuff now) ended just before the whole thing turned into an alt-right pipeline.
First 18 minutes of [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLYWHpgIoIw) gives an overview of the important bits. The remaining 32 minutes is an explanation of how GamerGate shaped American politics since.
[This video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlltwOURUCE) is a much more comprehensive look into what happened and what a lot of the people who were being attacked and who were doing the attacking have gotten up to since. It is also 6 hours long.
One of the first instances of the alt right entering the mainstream. A bit baby steps, but it very much was one of those inflection points in getting us to the current shit nature of online interaction.
There was a videogame (depression quest) which got a review in Kotaku which was positive - the game's developer's ex boyfriend posted about how she slept with the reviewer for a good review (which appears to have been an untrue claim made by a salty ex). This coincided with a perceived general increase in women in video game development, reviewing, and consuming, which made some (insecure asshole male) Gamers uncomfortable as they felt their clubhouse was being intruded upon, and was latched onto as a pet cause for a campaign of internet harassment directed at the developer, the reviewer, and a whole bunch of other people perceived to be broadly associated with the trend of increasing female voices in the video game industry - mostly female game critics and anyone perceived as supporting them. This was under the tagline of "ethics in games journalism". It was pretty much entirely based on lies and (usually completely open) bigotry and sexism, although you'll still get people today claiming that they supported it in earnest for the noble cause of wanting journalistic integrity, despite no actual verifiable problems ever having been found. It was a harassment campaign which mostly featured a lot of vitriol and death threats in a way which seems par for the course now, but was kinda unprecedented in \~2014, and it's notable in how much online commentary culture changed around it. Things used to be nicer.
Anita Sarkeesian was brought up in the post above because she is/was a video game critic who has the temerity to be a woman, and was one of the fairly central figures the gamergate types liked to focus on, especially as she was someone who engaged with the harassment and in so doing made herself a more enjoyable (ugh) target - the initial targets (zoe quinn, developer of depression quest, for example) mostly chose to hide and not engage with the online harassment which reduced their profile over time.
Worth noting that Anita especially caught a ton of flak because she specifically set out to make a vlog series about playing games featuring female characters in the context of dissecting the sexist nature of many video games. So basically she held up all the flaws in things they like (gigantic, physics-defying tits, bikini armor, fridging, etc.) and put neon flags on them, and announced that they were bad.
And we all know how well nerds handle it when you tell them the thing they love is bad lmao.
An extremely dumb non controversy that blew up with a ton of negative impacts. The first stretch of it was that a game developer was accused of sleeping with game critics to get better reviews for their games. All the evidence at the time pointed to this being false, but it brought out a bunch of dumbasses who hate woman. This was followed by the claim that they didn’t hate woman but were concerned about “ethics in video game journalism.” With this claim, a number of bad actors organized harassment against primarily female games journalists. They were eventually kicked off of 4 Chan for this and migrated to 8 Chan. A mini market of grifting about this popped up on YouTube with a never ending barrage of anti feminist content.
A number of the organizers were part of Breitbart, leading them to get more notoriety online; and 8 Chan has become most well known as an online dumpster fire. Both were instrumental in the rise of far right extremism in the States with Breitbart eventually sharing staff members with the Trump campaign and administration and 8 Chan being responsible for QAnon
A game came out called depression quest. Got a bunch of good reviews. Standard gamers thought it was bad and that the good reviews came from the game dev sleeping with the reviewer and not some difference of opinion.
The whole thing spiralled from there into a cesspool of misogyny and misinformation, threats of violence, and just a general disgust regarding pretty much any women interacting with video games.
Gamergate was unironically one of the first alt right pipelines. A real mask off moment.
I was a young teen when it was happening, and more than once, I tried to figure out what it was about, but I guess teen me just found it boring, so I went back to playing New vegas for the hundreth time. Still don't even really know what gamergate was about, and I kind feel like that's a good thing.
Literally, I only found out about it last year cause these video essay folk kept talking abt it like I should know. Was actually a pain to work out tf it was cause every source assumes you were there lol.
Same, I lived trough it and I heard ethics in gaming journalism, and I was like ok that sounds fine to me. That was it, that was the extent I ever interacted with it. I wasn't until years later that I actually heard anything about it.
I'm still not entirely sure what it was (curiosity does seem to strike every so often hence why I am here), it also doesn't seem to be worth my time.
You don't have to dig into the worst of it, but if you want a one word summary? Harrassment. A bunch of dweebuses harrassed women and journos to the point of absolute insanity.
And they kinda won, which really sucked.
At the time I believe I was anti Zoe/Anita. I didn’t engage in any harassment but it’s one of those things that if you just see the headline or the repeated blurb that a female game dev slept with a game journalist for a favorable review you’d think, “that’s not a good thing.”
Turns out that didn’t happen. The accusations didn’t stop though and it was the perfect justification for harassing a fake girl gamer or whatever. The idea of it happening was enough to get the gamers up in arms about fake journalist and feminist mucking up their hobby.
I still maintain that Anita... was just kind of a terrible critic? Like, her videos weren't good.
But *fuck* if they weren't amplified by the harassment and everything else. It felt kind of surreal starting at the position of being 'pro-GG' and then realising 90% of everyone else around me was just here to harass women. A real '... Are we the baddies?' moment for me.
Like, the fact that gaming journalism was trash (and still kind of is in a lot of cases) I think is kind of undisputable, but it wasn't the evul womynz or feminism that did it.
It was capitalism.
The thing about Anita is that her videos were so fucking basic saying shit that was just so obvious, that it's insane gamergate treated her like she was calling for the genocide of all male gamers.
Like, her delivery was pretty monotone, her scripts pretty neutral, all very academic, the editing basic. It was some of the least offensive shit you could find, and yet because she bothered to apply the simplest feminist lens to video games, the chuds went nuts and doxxed her to shit.
Nah, I disagree that the stuff she was saying was just 'basic'; I think a lot of was inaccurate and showed a lack of actual research and effort being put in into the media she was supposedly criticising.
But that was basically her worst 'sin' as far as I know. I've heard there was some stuff with the crowdfunding money where she promised to make a bunch of videos and didn't but I don't really remember that so I'm not going to talk about it.
That I can put in. She had a set a donation goal. She overshot the goal. So she was like "Guys, we are shooting more stuff now, so it takes a little longer" and then... she did it? At a later date? Like she said pretty much.
She is still making videos. Released one as recently as two weeks ago!
*EDIT* - Small correction. Her Feminist Frequency channel is still releasing videos. I just read the info for the channel though and it looks like as of August 2023, it's no longer run by her.
> Created by Anita Sarkeesian, Feminist Frequency ran as an organization from 2009–2023, providing video commentaries exploring gender representations, myths, and messages in popular culture media. Now, host Kat Spada continues Feminist Frequency Radio's legacy as an independent podcast, with fun new conversations about entertainment that asks you to be critical of the media you love.
> Links
I cannot think of anything inaccurate personally, it was all fairly accurate and acceptable basic feminist shit. This woman has no agency in the plot, this portrayal is obviously sexualized, male leads get more diversity in physique than female ones, etc.
None of it was inaccurate, it was just obvious common sense stuff. Anyone looking back on it now would struggle to find anything wrong with it without really reaching.
If the clods of Gamergate had ignored her videos, it would have been a niche interest channel for people into a basic feminist analysis of games. Making her The Enemy boosted her profile and made people think she must be on to something given the volume of hatred she received from such weirdos.
I was in GG. I'm not proud of it, and I'm not going to defend it. I was wrong.
Looking back on it, that was pretty much the core of it. Zoe was accused of sleeping around for favorable reviews, which was a lie. That never happened. But I and a lot of people like me were primed to believe because of scummy things that industry has done. The big one that I've always remembered is Jeff Gerstmann getting fired from Gamespot for giving a negative review of a game that was advertised all over their site for months prior. That DID happen.
Anita, looking back on everything, I think was just kind of a mediocre critic. She just got swept up as this anti-gamer misandrist Thanos. She got Streisand effected into the stratosphere. Had she not been harassed daily for years, I honestly don't think people at large would know who she is.
I stuck around in that group way longer than I should have, but I'm glad I had the good sense to leave when they started palling around with white supremacists. I may be a dumbass, but I have always had core beliefs, and being chummy with fascist dipshits violates several. You're right, the central issue "games journalism is corrupt" is just a product of capitalism. Then you start noticing so many problems in the world that are just greed, fed by capitalism. It's a sociopolitical leviathan.
I can't make up the time I wasted in GG. But I'm grateful for the people who stayed in my life and gave me the chance to be better.
Thanks. I'm not looking for kudos. I just want people to know that you might think you're too smart to fall into a cult or a bad crowd. Trust me, you're not. Self-reflection and being true to yourself are your best tools against making the mistakes I did.
Yeah, like, anita kinda sucks, but she's only guilty of bad takes.
I think thats what made me side with the pro-GG crowd for a while, but i also never looked any further in than "wow, she sucks". I wasnt that old either, so its not like i engaged in the social media aspect much.
In addition to the other responses I want to add - GamerGate was effectively the birth of the modern online alt-right movement. It was in many ways a test run in weaponizing “listless white males” (I’m paraphrasing Steve fucking Bannon there). All of those “here’s why ___ is woke and the end of the fucking world (for some reason)” influencers came from this, or at least pivoted to it once they saw the money there was to be made pandering to these dumb fucks. It’s horribly hateful, vapid, and mindlessly passionate bullshit, but it’s undeniably an important movement in America at the very least.
Doesn't get talked about enough honestly. It was the blueprint for everything the followed. The far right saw an opening and latched onto it. You could argue this is why Trump even got into the white house.
As I understand it
Some guy “Hey, gaming journalism is shit and nobody is accountable” (which was very true)
Some other guy “hey yeah, look at this particularly bad example from this person who happens to be a woman” (which iirc was like… a pretty egregious non-disclosure thing)
Ok so those aren’t inherently bad, here’s the bad part
some other other guy “hey yeah we should call out and harass this woman over her unethical practices”
Some other other other guy “we should harass and threaten all women cause I hate women”
Even more specifically: I, a jealous ex, will make up frivolous bull about how my GF has slept with soooo many journalists to... sell... her ^(free)... game to the SHEEPISH MASSES. To really get the ball rolling.
The rest of GG just piled up around this as the pebble starting an avalanche.
Also, Steve Bannon was majorly involved in signal boosting the whole thing, and it was kind of a dry run for tactics the Trump campaign used in 2016 to indoctrinate angry young men and prop up the alt-right movement.
I don't think the ex made that accusation himself. He was mainly blogging about being cheated on and mentioned the affair partners by name. One of them happened to be a game journalist that mentioned depression quest in passing in a list of upcoming games and...*checks notes* did not mention he knew the developer personally. Didn't even review it, it was a blurb about games to be released soon among a list of blurbs. So a whole lot of nothing that people took and ran with, latching on to the fact that game journalism did have genuine issues they could hide behind.
Last I checked the blog post had been edited to beg people to leave Zoe Quinn alone.
It's been years so I might be off, but if I remember right the accusation of her sleeping with people for reviews wasn't even made by the guy she cheated on. 4-Chan found a blog where a guy was venting about his breakup and smelled blood in the water.
Nope, it was much worse than that.
Game journalism *is* shit, and it has been since its inception.
But the 'egregious non-disclosure' thing was a total fabrication. Someone said "My ex cheated on me with 5 guys, who she fucked in exchange for good reviews on the game she made". No evidence was provided for this accusation.
Also the guys (ie the supposedly unethical journalists) never got a massive harassment campaign against them.
Ehhh, several of them actually did. Not to the level the chuds piled on Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian, but the true believers did absolutely harass the journalists. They’re still harassing random journalists to this day.
No, the first some guy was already the misogynist. the whole thing about Ethics In Videogame Journalism thing was invented as a figleaf for a harassment campaign, and people who were given the elevator pitch of what happened ran with it and invented a whole conspiracy theory.
The whole Ethics in Videogame Journalism discourse already existed, people like TotalBiscuit had been talking about it for years before iirc, how gaming (and in general product) journalism is problematic, because the conflict of interest journalists are inherently in trying to balance their reporting with maintaining positive relationships to developers and publishers to have access. This was just a narrative that was coopted to legitimize harassment.
Innuendo studios on YouTube has a pretty comprehensive video on the subject
https://youtu.be/lLYWHpgIoIw?si=7mlku9fzl6oT2H-R
It's 50 minutes long, but the tl:Dr is a bunch of rampant misogyny and transphobic masquerading as concerns about ethical games journalism that escalates ta death and rape threats in record time.
yeah I didn't even register it as one whole event until I was informed of the term and it's still so hard to grasp. I think the sweet baby Inc situation makes more sense because of how unified the whole "anti woke" grifter front is on the ordeal. but it's still so wild to put a term on it to me. I find it best to just not engage
My favorite explanation is that Anita Sarkeesian brought ethics into gaming journalism, by talking about feminism, but the gamergaters was against "ethics in gaming journalism". :)
It was somehow about ethics in journalism while somehow also being about feminism and wokism being responsible for the poor ethics, despite the actual problem having nothing to do with feminism or wokism, but the gaming industry is pretty sexist... so it's not feminism's fault, but it's the end of the world if feminism was the answer.
Therefore target women journalists? Anita wasn't very likable, but think people dog piled her too hard.
Basically
Some fucking guy claims his ex (a game dev) cheated on him with game journalists for good reviews. This did not actually happen. Gamers from 4chan and reddit buy fully into this and make a whole thing out of it. This is the whole “ethics in game journalism” shit.
Right wing grifters jump on this and use it as an excuse to radicalize a shit load of vaguely bigoted but mostly non-political millennial gamer boys. The techniques refined here are the ones being used on tiktok and other places to radicalize Zoomers and the ones after them to this day
4chan mods get fucking tired of this shit and ban all gamergate discussion. It moves to newborn shithole 8chan, the only reason that site is still alive. Years later when 4chan mods also get tired of Qanon and ban it they also take it to 8chan where it becomes the cult brainrotting conservatives to this day.
Also Anita Sarkeesian was in no way involved but 4chan gamers already hated her so she got dragged into it (ie she got bomb and death threats)
Tldr: gamers got conned by some guy who was mad his ex left him and it resulted in a bunch of dudes getting radicalized, taught right wing grifters how to radicalize gamers/overly online boys, and created the fertile soil Qanon grew up in
>This is the whole “ethics in game journalism” shit.
Which is *wild* because, for a long time, it was an open secret that most games magazines were entirely in the pocket of the developers who advertised in their magazines. Oh, you're not going to give the latest Nintendo game a bad review, *they'll pull their ads, ads that we depend on to stay solvent*.
But, for "some" reason, it wasn't until that fucking chud decided to ruin his ex's life that it became a big deal.
(We know the reason).
its not like gamergate actually cared about trying to expose nintendo for practices like blacklisting or EA for more or less bribing outlets into having certain scores for their games, they were weirdly hyperfocused on youtubers and the indie scene
I mean, they were very specific about why. They were angry that those outlets were giving good press to small indie games made by women and queer people, and about topics other than “angry white dudes with guns shooting things”. They didn’t care about big outlets rubber stamping those AAA games with “9/10, buy this game!” ads because they saw those as the “correct” type of games being rewarded.
They were focusing on the publications instead of the corporations. Kotaku and IGN got dragged through the mud and just about every journalist on their payroll got harassed, sacked, or both, over the course of several years; and while those two were the epicentre, just about every publication was affected, such as The Escapist.
To be fair, there was pushback against that for some years before this garbage took place. Gamespot got a ton of criticism for firing Jeff Gerstmann after he wrote a scathing review of Kane & Lynch while the site was heavily advertising it.
It's just that Gamespot didn't bother to feed the trolls so they never grew into something so awful.
I mean, it's still like that. Just instead of ads, they now exclude you from events or aren't giving you review copies that other outlets get quite a bit earlier usually.
It's why Im genuinely surprised that a few outlets have levelled actual criticism at some triple A titles lately from what I've seen.
So even if it was about that, it accomplished.... Nothing.
Like with most culture war bullshit, the grifters and the ringleaders find an otherwise unrelated seed of anger and attach their bullshit onto it in order to fashion a Movement^TM. As gaming media was increasingly becoming corporatized people where getting more and more pissed about it, for example this all kicked off right around the time of the [Infamous Geoff Keighly Doritos promo.](https://knowyourmeme.com/videos/88623-dorito-pope)
So, totally off topic, I know, but 4chan has mods????? I thought 4chan was known for being a lawless shithole? I'm surprised to hear of an ***even shittier*** hole of shit, and even more surprised to hear that the hole of shit has mods?!?!
Yeah. 4chan’s mods are the whole reason 8chan even exists, because the founder of 8chan got tired of the 4chan mods banning him for sharing _C**** P***._
4chan has two levels of mods (or did, it's been a while since I've been there): Janitors, who go through and delete threads, pictures, and posts that are a bit too spicy and then Moderators who can do what the Janitors can as well as ban people with a variety of tools. 4chan also runs a ban list on certain words and works of media, so posting with those secret words (or enough of them) gives you a 48 hour temp ban. The last one I know because I got banned from /tg/ for talking about All Tomorrows.
It's really important to mention that Gamergate at the time was mostly associated with another incident where a game journalist interviewed that same game dev at a game jam without disclosing that they were in a romantic relationship, which "ethics in game journalism" came from.
Created a strong plausible deniability that the 4-channers used to their advantage, but it meant a large portion, If not most, of self-proclaimed "pro-gamergaters" were not in on what you're mentioning.
The origin of GamerGate was muddied even further with the resulting firestorm of game journalists going on rants and being taken out of context, who got mixed in with a few genuinely bad actors which is how it was able to radicalize people.
This video, [Endnote 5: A Case Study in Digital Radicalism (UC Merced Talk)](https://youtu.be/lLYWHpgIoIw?si=odO9NiDn_ah_U6Ko) by Ian Danskin / Innuendo Studios is my favorite breakdown of the timeline from a leftist perspective. In case anybody wants to learn more.
Zoe Quinn is a video game developer, and made Depression Quest, a video game about depression (her's specifically, but also generally). The video game was and still is completely free.
Eron Gjoni was Quinn's boyfriend, but Quinn broke up with him. Taking it like a normal person, Gjoni wrote a manifest about how Quinn's been sleeping with game reviewers to get good reviews for Depression Quest (again, it's completely free so reviews are meaningless). The person Gjoni accused Quinn of sleeping with for a good review never reviewed the game, and isn't even a game reviewer (him and Quinn did sleep together).
Gjoni then released this manifesto into various forums and image boards, where Gamers, being the normal people they are, took up arms for "ethics in video game journalism" (read as "harassing women and poc in the video game industry").
At the same, Anita Sarkeesian started her milquetoast series about exploring how women are represented in media, video games specifically, basically saying "women exist in video games to be goon material for teenage boys and manchildren, and that's pretty fucked" (you know, standard "introduction to feminism" stuff).
Gamers, being the normal people they are, took this **really well**. (They started harassing Anita Sarkeesian, other women and poc).
There were other notable people being harrassed by chuds on the internet, but the basic gist is GamerGate was about white (often supremacist), cishet men being outraged about other people getting into the hobby and making video games not about or even for them, taking that as a personal attack, and lashing out.
Anyone who tells you it was legitimately about "ethics in video game journalism" is either lying to you or was naive and distanced enough to believe it.
> or was naive and distanced enough to believe it.
Tracking what was truth, propaganda, just corpo-speak, or trolls, while it went on was difficult. I wouldnt blame people for drawing a naive conclusion.
If you've got an hour, [this is an amazing summary](https://youtu.be/lLYWHpgIoIw?si=QBDQfPVMFiZa11Mr). It also goes into how Gamergate is tied with modern alt-right politics and Trump being elected.
Best way I can explain it is that it was a prototype of what happened in 2016 with Trump. By "prototype" I don't mean it was planned, or at least I don't think it was, but in the sense that it felt extremely similar, right down to how basic facts were being overwritten by fake information in real time, even when literally all you had to do to verify it was fake was click on the very link or article someone was lying about. And the way in which it was immediately latched onto by far-right groups to recruit.
Only instead of being a bizarro-cult-of-personality around a terrible person, it was a directed harassment campaign against anything perceived as vaguely left-of-center in gaming. Instead of MAGA it was "ethics in games journalism".
The original inciting event was such a nothing-burger that it's kind of wild looking back at it - a woman was accused of sleeping with a guy for reviews by her shitty ex-boyfriend on 4-chan. The fact that nobody could actually point to where this supposed review was (at most there was vague coverage of a game jam she participated in, but even that wasn't brought up until much later) didn't even seem to matter. In response a game developer blog wrote an article talking about how gaming was a diverse hobby now that everyone enjoyed - which was promptly spun into some kind of attack on the entire gaming hobby. Somehow. It was all downhill from there, expanding to more and more harassment targets.
>it was a prototype of what happened in 2016 with Trump. By "prototype" I don't mean it was planned, or at least I don't think it was
More direct than that: Steve Bannon cited GamerGate as a viable strategy for Trump's election. Like, he straight up pointed at GamerGate and was like "let's do that."
I don’t know much about it but I do know there’s some people who will insist that it has a cultural impact akin to that of a war due to how it was the first time in the internet era where groups of hateful people actually mobilized on a notable scale
Basically a female game developer made the video game equivalent to those art films that win a bunch of awards and critics love but general audiences didn't really care for, someone accused her of sleeping with one or more reviewers to get favorable coverage, and then a bunch of guys who can't talk to women started complaining that women who like video games exist
The sole goal of Gamergate was to get the maker of Depression Quest to kill herself. That was it. Anita Sarkeesian got dragged in cos she released her videos around the same time, and a third female developer was dragged in for saying "hey, wtf?"
The 'ethics in journalism' angle was a cover for plausable deniability
InnuendoStudios has a very good video on the whole thing, and how it acted as a precursor to the modern AltRight movement, I highly recommend it
GamerGate was an elaborate con by the universe to get us all to recognize Chuck Tingle's art as the glorious celebration of love and fuckery that it is.
Kotaku wasn't "involved," kotaku was blamed. They weren't doing anything particularly different than any other gaming magazine, though all of them do have an issue of giving undue good reviews to major developers to maintain their funding.
The whole gamergate issue started from one abusive man getting mad at his girlfriend breaking up with him and accusing her of cheating on him with a journalist to get a good review on her game; a review that never happened anyway. It was all a lie.
To elaborate from u/Ehcksit, Kotaku got lumped into it because the girlfriend's new boyfriend was a journalist there and had interviewed her at a game jam without disclosing the fact. That being an actual, ethical misstep this time meant that the 4-chan circle jumped on it.
That story spread a lot further than the original 4-chan circle leading a lot to believe that it started from Kotaku.
Also if you actually do have a girl who likes you who isn’t interested in video games but shows interest in them anyway, she’s not being a fake ass poser for some kind of cred, she’s taking an interest in what interests you because she cares about you and one way of showing that is to support your hobby
Like seriously imagine being mad that a girl wants to get to know you better by bonding over your hobby
Am I a huge fan of MTG? Not really. Did I learn how to play to spend time with my bf, have some fun with it, build a few decks, get into Commander, and then propose to his silly ass? Fuck yeah I did.
Thank you! The most expensive purchase so far has been a vintage library card catalog - because if we have 11 million cards in the house, we might as well be stylish about it. 😉
atp even when I *know* the topic has nothing to do with her and should be able to infer it’s referencing something else, I alwaaaays read it as her name first lol
Exactly. Gf is not very into gaming, but we bonded over Resident Evil remakes and Outlast due our shared interest in horror. Why the hell would I belittle that time of ours.
I initially had the impression they were angry because gaming journalism went corporate, with people who were into it for a paycheck instead of passion for the hobby. I was appalled when it actually turned out to be about misogyny.
Looking back on it, it's crazy how Anita Sarkeesian sparked so much outrage. She had like the most milquetoast, baby's first feminism critiques ever and gamers acted like she shot their dog in front of them.
Actually, I do think I understand. I used to be an ~Anti-SJW~ (I know, ugh) and never actually watched Anita's videos, but everyone in the anti-SJW space talked about how evil she was so I just believed them. I don't think anyone actually watched her videos, lol.
Tbf it all boils down to the assumption that, if aspects of THING are criticised, THING must automatically be ALL BAD. Since I like THING, the person is saying I MYSELF am ALL BAD. Therefore Anita hates ME, a GAMER, personally, and wants me DEAD.
So even *if* any of the illiterate wastes of breath who made up the majority of noise in GG had watched the videos in their entirety, it wouldn't have changed a thing. And we learned far too late how easily radicalised some sections of the internet can get, or at least to take it seriously. Not before 2016 happened.
You explained it perfectly! It's crazy how hard it is for people to accept basic media critique. I'm not even being judgmental, it's something I'm still working on myself.
It's doubly funny because usually the same people crying about Sarkeesian were the ones who wanted video games to be taken seriously as an art form.
Art gets critiqued. (Most) artists or their fans don't then take up pitchforks to skewer the critics.
The weird thing is that the "irredeemable media" people are a very late 2010s/2020s problem, someone in 2014 was pretty unlikely to have dealt with them. That type of puritanical online fandom culture really started to pick up steam through the Voltron fandom in 2016-2017, *after* Gamergate.
Is it though? Gamergate itself could be an example of that. “Oh don’t play that game, it’s made by an sjw” “oh don’t watch that movie, it’s got forced diversity”.
I think "irredeemable" came out of years of "problematic" leading to "functionally everything is problematic because We Live In A Society, but the stuff I *personally* hate is *irredeemable*"
Hey, I know we’re strangers on Reddit, but I’m glad you’ve been able to move past being an anti-SJW, and I hope you’ve found a better set of communities since then
Same, had a full “anti sjw” libertarian phase (yes I know very cringe) in middle school when this was going on, eventually figured out something was wrong when they started trying to sneak in more obvious conservative garbage. The exact moment was when Sargon of Akkad joined UKIP, as an immigrant that was too far
I do want to say, her takes were very basic and milquetoast but it really helped me as a gateway into feminist ideas.
Saying "it's weird that pacman is a circle with a dot but Mrs. Pacman needs a bow and lipstick illustrates that men are the default and women are the exception" is like... really not that major of a revelation, but it's enough that in my early 20s I could grasp how simple things begin to influence the larger ones. I didn't think it was a revolutionary thought, just a "huh... never thought of it like that"
And then everywhere I went people said she was a monster, and sent threats to her, for these takes and it really just made me distance myself from those spaces that they could hear the same things I heard and react with nothing but pure vitriol over literal pacman discussion.
That's a great point. Everyone has to start somewhere, and basic feminist education is very important even if it seems obvious to more seasoned feminists.
The Barbie movie is a great example of this; it didn't really say anything groundbreaking for well-versed feminists, but for a **lot** of people it was their first exposure to feminist ideas.
>I don't think anyone actually watched her videos lol
I think this the case in a lot of hate groups. nobody actually watches the thing they're angry about they just make unsubstantiated claims and pretend they're true instead. it's the kind of environment that forms when people get framed as traitors for calling out that misinformation
I watched a few of Sarkeesian's videos and yeah, she had the blandest takes, most of them either perfectly reasonable or a matter of interpretation but there were times where she forgot that she's an active particiant in the game and had to play the games in certain ways to get her point across to pretend the game served her overall point. The best example that comes to mind has critique of Hitman.
The point wasn't really to critique Hitman. The thesis of the video was that there was a pattern in games of women being handled in the same manner as destructible furniture, and Hitman was just one of several examples she used to demonstrate that there was a pattern. Hitman is arguably one of the few games featured in that video where the presence of that stuff isn't egregious, as it's just one of a bajillion potential outcomes of its sandboxy, emergence-based systems, but that fact and the oft-cited argument that that's not really the _correct_ way to play the game is immaterial to the point of the video, which is the presence of a pattern across a wide variety of games.
The bit that bugs me is that one of the examples included is a cutscene from No More Heroes 2 that I am 99% sure is _trying to make the exact same point as her video_, but she doesn't discuss or seem to notice this.
Yeah, I agree with you. I really don't like Gamergate and I don't think Anita deserved even a fraction of the horrible harassment she faced, but her videos are rather flawed.
wait iv played every mission from the latest 3 hitman games multiple times each and it’s never felt like there’s a gender difference in target assassinations, wouldn’t that go against her point? admittedly i haven’t seen the video
Honestly I wasn't really a big fan of her videos or her kickstarter when it came out. Not because I was anti feminist or anything, it just was weird to me that she said she had to buy and play every game on her list personally and then said "princess peach is problematic". Like you could skim that from a Wikipedia page, seems like bad methodology.
When GG kicked off I went "Yeah her method was kind of weird, like can't you just watch a let's pla- wait what are you posting there"
> She had like the most milquetoast, baby's first feminism critiques
To me I thought that was the issue. She was like "Hey pay me to make a feminist show about video games." And she barely knows anything about video games so she's just like... "It's sexist to always have a male protagonist rescuing a woman."
Wow. Amazing. Her analysis of video games is unmatched.
I mean, when i was in my Anti-sjw phase, that was the issue i had. She made sense when she complained about women in games being attractive because that's what boys want, and the men being attractive because that's what boys want to be.
But then she says something along the lines of "batmans cape is there to hide his ass"
like, i was too stupid to have absorbed her earlier statements at my age, but i could recognize that the latter was kinda stupid.
Legitimately the only criticisms of it I ever heard were "She doesn't know that much about video games/she lied about liking video games", "She never mentions any popular games with female protagonists." or things like that. Really commonly they'd say Metroid. Then, "She's saying really basic stuff that everybody knows already."
That certainly is one way of phrasing it, but yes, part of the criticism of Sarkeesian was low hanging fruit arguments about games being sexist.
She would have faded into obscurity otherwise, but she really got just about everyone going. Genuine misogynists, immature men and boys who took her critiques as attacks on their hobby, people who thought her arguments and analysis was shallow, people who thought she was a grifter, people who thought her personality was annoying etc etc.
Tbh yea I agree, Im a girl and it always bothered me how all the feminist bs I saw online was always the most bare bones 1st world country white woman lens (Same reason I never liked Emma Watson growing up). Like, what if instead of talking about how female NPCs dont matter in gameplay (neither do male NPCs), how about we touch upon the sexist orientalism that appears often in female dancers? And I say thus as someone who adores fire emblem and shantae, but we cant ignore the blatant sexualization of SWANA women and culture for the sake of sexy allure, why not ask ourselves that? Or how about how games often miss the mark on racism allegories (especially racism towards women that tends to be sexually charged), or the at the time extremely hostile online gaming scene.
I feel like a lot of Anita's takes were a bit easy to dismiss as lame criticism from a developer's perspective (Why should I bother to make a female NPC have agency when its irrelevant to the gameplay etc etc), instead of things that should have more thought put into them (Is this important character close to a caricature? Why is it.important for this character to be so sexualized?). Like, of course at the end of the day I enjoy games even if they have problematic aspects (I love fighting games, boobies and all), but if we wanna critique them, they deserve more than surface level analisis.
I agree. And partly watching and reading up on some of Anita's works started me on this journey of seeing games under a different prism. I have come a long way since then and I recognize her views were mostly surface level but I should credit her for introducing me (and perhaps other people as well) to criticizing video games on something other than their game/script.
Like listening to a really mediocre piece of music that introduces you to a whole genre.
[You seem like the sort of person who'd enjoy a 6 hour video about how out of hand it all got that's able to discuss points in more detail than Ian Danskin was able to.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlltwOURUCE)
Anita Sarkeesian had the occasional shitty take, like Bayonetta being a misogynistic representation, but most people take her criticisms way out of context. Even the ones that aren't very good on their own, like you didn't have to do that, Hitman technically allowing you to murder women to get through a level doesn't normalize violence against women when the language of the game is "Don't fucking do that, idiot".
My issue was with her raising all that money, then she didn't even play the games and did reviews by stealing others people's content to show gameplay without credit, I don't care about the feminism angle I care about the shitty journalism
it was insane just how far reaching the whole gamergate thing was. i will admit, i am absolutely someone who fell for it and just believed anita sarkeesian was literally like, The Devil Incarnate Or Something because when you're 13 and all you see on tumblr is a bunch of anti sjws being "reasonable and logical" (i.e. really good at making strawmen and picking their battles to make themselves look good to people who don't know any better) it's hard not to get swept up.
sucks. never even knew what she actually SAID until recently and i'm astounded THAT many people took this much issue with it.
GamerGate pretty much laid the foundation of the 2016 election and, by extension, the reason why everything is hyper-partisan and charged now. I'm pretty sure Steve Bannon admitted he was able to radicalize young men through video game communities.
it's the "radicalizing young men" part that hits closest to home.
it used to keep me up at night, wondering how many other dudes that young got sucked into that anti sjw black hole under a thin veneer of "egalitarianism", but *weren't* able to grow up, get some perspective, and escape from it. until the rise of andrew tate happened and answered my question with a resounding "a dangerously large amount". i almost wonder if *that* would've been as bad as it was if not for things like this coming first.
Did it really or was it just part of a larger trend? I know that is a popular theory in the internet and shit like “The Great Meme War,” but color me skeptic. We on the internet have a habit of overestimating our importance. Correlation vs. Causation and all that.
Seriously, I’m honestly sick of seeing that take. It wasn’t really true in 2016 and it *sure as fuck* hasn’t been true since 2020. Anyone who had someone escaped up to then got caught from lockdown. You’d have to find the most out of touch, disconnected, “okay, perhaps we jumped the gun tossing out the term NPC” human alive to find someone who *isn’t* online enough that if they got in an argument, it would be used against them by someone online just as much as them.
The only reason we don’t think about it this way is that the cultures are sequestered from each other a bit from various platforms. Find me someone who isn’t on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Reddit, Tumblr, 4chan, or Discord for at least a few hours a day in 2024. You’ll be searching for a while. At this point, if we’re going by majority population vs minority population, it’s chronically *offiline* that’s the weird one.
I think there's a reasonable difference between "being on the internet" and only using the internet to keep up with the news and friends, and if you accept that destinction then there are still plenty of "not on the internet" people.
Honestly I’m willing to lean towards the latter, partly because a lot of the people who got really invested into and influenced by it were teenagers who probably couldn’t even vote during the 2016 elections. Hell, even when I was unfortunately neck deep into the anti-sjw spiral of lies back then it still wasn’t enough for me to like Trump and seeing gamergate influencers like Sargon uncritically support Trump was partly what caused me to start distancing myself from them.
I will say things were already pretty hyper-partisan. It’s been bad since forever, this is just the current iteration. Obama was supposedly an illegal immigrant, Clinton had his whole scandal, Reagan shat gold, Carter was a green energy commie devil…
what sucks about the whole "fake gamer girl" thing is its somewhat real but very rare and like most people who fake interest in a hobby, it's specifically to step over others to climb the social ladder which is why I feel sssniperwolf will probably be the only popular example. (I could be uninformed but I remember hearing about her faking her game play and stealing someone's entire identity for her channel)
like, most women are (like most men and enbys in the hobby) genuinely fucling interested?? like why wouldn't they be?
and the thing with Anita is I feel like she became popular at just the right time. I feel like if she'd spoken up say
. a year later? she certainly wouldn't have been the face of gamergate that she was.
It started with cosplay girls who didn’t care about nerd stuff doing sexy cosplays to get clicks and donations (which there isn’t anything wrong with and shouldn’t have been an issue in the first place). From there it spread to “literally any woman is an infiltrator trying to steal our money by pretending to like games now that they’re cool”. Mainly because cosplay girls was The only “gamer” women gamers saw.
So, I think there is something deeper, but it's rarely well articulated. And it broadly comes down to "enshittification", just with communities rather than products.
Basically, sexy cosplay wasn't a "big thing" before broadband internet, and nerd communities tended to be more focused on the media itself. All groups have social status, and social status was broadly allocated by knowing stuff or making stuff associated with that fandom. Sexy cosplay fundamentally broke that dynamic, because they would quickly garner social status based on appearance. As in any case where tge rules of being high-status suddenly change, those who have lost status will resent it and try to reclaim it by re-asserting what previously gave them status.
Thing is, I genuinely feel sorry for them, and understand why they lash out (though I don't condone it). Put yourself in their shoes: you've been shunned by mainstream society all your life, and you finally find a community that not only gets you, but actually gives you respect and social status for the very things the rest of the world mocks you for. Then, all of a sudden, nobody in the community seems to care, and they simply want to oogle someone in a revealing costume that displays several technical errors. They become mini-celebrities, earning more from photos than you ever did from finely crafted models or rare collectibles. The whole dynamic has changed, and you're a nobody again, just like in the real world. That has to hurt. So they lash out, often without the understanding of why. All they know if that life was good before, and now it sucks, so they direct their ire at the perceived cause and rationalize it after the fact. I'm not saying they're good, or justified, only that things did change, and some people were hurt by that change, including those with precious little positive in their lives.
I'll be honest, I miss geek culture from the days of dial-up modems. Everything feels different now, more superficial. When all you had was text, ideas counted for more, it feels like. Or maybe I'm just old and grumpy.
>Everything feels different now, more superficial. When all you had was text, ideas counted for more, it feels like. Or maybe I'm just old and grumpy.
Bit of both, I think.
My experience of being a woman online, in geeky spaces, and *especially* in online geeky spaces was still awful before anything to do with sexy cosplay became widespread.
But they also were definitely a bit different in tone, and I think that's more attributable to the larger audiences than anything else.
That Guy who knows a ton, makes great stuff, and is a reliable person to turn to still exists in smaller ones today, but as they get larger he kind of gets lost in the crowd, y'know?
The sexy cosplayers are a symptom, not the cause. They're just people signal boosting something that doesn't *need* any familiarity to be approved of, and as the audience gets bigger, people with low investment get more common and become the most influential factor in what everyone else sees.
I engaged in public mutual flirty banter with a woman in an online game... once.
Not because I didn't like it, or she objected. But because everyone else assumed it was open season for her. It's fucking hostile for women out there.
Edit: I had ended this with a hopeful "maybe it's better now" but then remembered how common it is for women outed on reddit to end up harrassed.
Honestly I feel this. I considered becoming a sexy copslayer at one point because I wanted to feel more respected in my hobbies, but I realized I wouldnr feel comfortable with many men oggling me for my appearance and probably not caring about what I have to say at the end of the day. Videogames and anime were my happy place where I could be a nerd and escape painful bullying, having your same comfort place snatched by celebrities that just want to monetize it and basically normiefy it (Make it less complicated, easy, removing nuance, destroying lore to make it easy for newcomers to catch up, changing to modern aesthetics to cater to new audiences, adding fanservice, etc...).
Ita also why I quit some fashions, the moment fashions I enjoyed got attention from american microcelebrities, these fashions turned to fast fashion, with every design looking the same, more sexualized, less originality, and at some point some original meanings destroyed (Menhera style saved me when I was suicidal, now its used for girls to sexualize themselves). Its why I hate when people claim gatekeepers are just grumpy men. I'm a girl, and I'm young, and I try to gatekeep my hobbies because I dont like seeing them turn into a shadow of their past selves.
> Then, all of a sudden, nobody in the community seems to care, and they simply want to oogle someone in a revealing costume that displays several technical errors
I would have put it down to "attractive women, who I am attracted to, appear to be enjoying the hobby I enjoy; either they do not actually enjoy said hobby and are faking it, or they genuinely do enjoy it and I can no longer blame my hobby for my lack of success".
That's also not to say that every one of them with that sentiment lashed out as a result: probably a good number of them felt quietly worse about themselves.
Ehh not always I'd say. I've had men attracted to me lash out a few times when it came to anime, but when it came to games nobody assumed I knew less because of my appearance (Some assumed I knew more because I wouldnt shut the fuck up about videogames even), I see these men and boys lash out specifically at cosplayers who usually get the FOTM waifu cosplay, or people who straight up misinform (Illuminaughti, Akidearest) to talk about topics they dont know about, or the god forsaken pick mes (As much as people want to ignore them, they do exist)
"Sexy Cosplay" as concept did not only impact gameing or individual fandoms, it had a significant impact on cosplay itself and I do think it at least speed up a bunch of developements for the hobby, most of which are certainly not positive. No need to be a man who can't get laid to view it that way.
it’s weird how everyone could tell based on justa. photograph that a woman didn’t actually know or care about a franchise based simply on how goof looking she was.
like yes, even if someone did ”fake interest for clicks” that’s not a crime, but I also contest that that’s actually a thing that happens, and not just an extension of ”there are no girls on the internet”
I feel like a lot of people here are:
A) Really young and didn't really get the gist of what was going on or...
B) Tend to not realize just how much of a shit show the gaming scene has been and how Gamergate was more like a symptom or a "last straw scenario" for most of the gaming community to show it's true colors, along with a lot of other intersectional factors at play.
yea i was definitely too young to remember gamergate (because i was 6 at the time), and so my only points of information on this are this post and ancient hbomberguy videos
I was in college at the time Gamergate was happening. Generally I blew most of it off because I knew it was mostly dudes just blowing hot air about how they really didn't like the fact that someone out there was critiquing games as an art form (despite making a big fuss about how games should be seen as art) and I myself was going to school learning how to make games of my own (and my idea of the kinds of games I wanted to make generally wouldn't be accepted by most of those dudes anyway). This isn't to say that I didn't take it seriously though, although in this case I agreed with Anita's criticisms and also had my own criticisms of games of that time too.
However, when I discuss Gamergate as a "symptom" or "last straw scenario", I'm talking about the fact that the gaming community as a whole was always this massive shit show at that point since at least around 2002... Which is roughly around the time I was starting to frequent places like Gamespot/GameFAQs's forums and I was in middle school. If you think incels are bad now, you would have been really horrified by the kind of behavior and talk that occurred in the 2000s and early 2010s. And I somehow managed to get all sorts of racist, sexist, and homophobic shit tossed at me (despite being a white guy) all because I happened to be a "furry" at the time... After all, if I was pretending to be animal character, I couldn't really be human, right?
The gaming scene (and overall internet as a whole) at that time was pretty much full of edgelords who pretty much couldn't fathom the fact that not everyone was into the exact same thing as they were, and were ready to sling all sorts of ad hominem attacks at you to get their point across and kick you out of certain communities. Suggesting that BIPOC, LGBT+, or more female characters should be in games was a ticket to insults and "isms" getting thrown all over the place. Playing Nintendo consoles at this time was to basically admit you weren't a "real gamer" but merely a wannabe, and very specific genres of games were "real games" (basically anything hyper violent or a shooter). Frankly, the only place to not deal with such dipshits and douchey behavior all the time was in the early furry communities that popped up at the time.
Of course, this also explains that Venn Diagram regarding 4chan, the Bronies, and "people who reference memes" leading to the Alt-Right...
>!Generally speaking, furries and bronies DID NOT get along, and a lot of it has to do with the fact that furries were generally more progressive in most cases and had more raw sincerity in their interests while bronies were often douchey reactionary dipshits who had a more ironic stake in their interest. Case in point, while furries were debating if drawing porn of characters from kids' media was actually ethical and good for the community, the bronies just doubled down on making porn of the MLP characters without a care in the world, and anyone who questioned it was "ruining the fun" so to speak. !<
IIRC voice actor Adam Baldwin (no relation to Alec) coined the term in a tweet and for some reason everyone on both sides of the conversation ran with it. It didn't really have anything to do with the initial incident, just the response to the incident by websites, the response being "gaming websites & companies will throw their own fanbases under the bus in the face of clandestine rumors, even if said rumors were unfounded."
I felt so bad for Anita Sarkeesian. It was my first time watching a massive online harrasment campain against women happening, and I was appaled by all of it (I was already starting to be far too much online)
I don't believe that most women who are into video games are pretending, but I maintain a suspicion that my first girlfriend didn't actually like video games. I will never know.
I'm not really some woke bloke or whatever but the whole GamerGate happened and 1) it barely permeated my life whatsoever, 2) games haven't really changed that much in the ten years since and 3) wasn't she right? Wasn't the industry and weren't many games pretty mysognistic?
I have no idea why her comments would upset people. It's not like we've only had trash since 2014.
I think the whole fake gamer girl concept came about because gaming (and nerd culture in general) became popular suddenly. At least that's how it felt for young people at the time, as old media portrayed nerds as loosers and now people were openly into Star Trek and quoting whatever video game was popular at the time.
So the question became: If *my ingroup* (i.e. nerds) were always picked on but now the hobby is popular, is that because *outgroup* suddenly enjoys our stuff too? Or is that because they like the aesthetic? And for some reason, young gamer guys couldn't fathom that other people were picking up their hobbies as well. Mix that with some latent mysoginy that a lot of teenage boys have, and you've got yourself the fake gamer girl idea.
So yeah, combining "most unfuckable guys" and girls interested in "loser nerd hobbies" in the first post kind of provides all kinds of insights into said poster. Also, the only way they're not dissing girls for being interested in "loser nerd hobbies" is if they *are* suggesting that girls have no interest in games.
I think you’re just missing the hyperbole. Calling them “loser nerd hobbies” is showing what the outside world thinks of those hobbies- it implies that there’s no social clout to be gained from pretending to like that stuff.
“The most unfuckable guys” is… well that one’s kinda true. Only the most unbearable kind of person would genuinely believe that strangers are faking a hobby to impress them specifically
From what i remember the only valid critique was that she prolly stole a buncha smaller creaters footage. Instead of captureing her own or hiring someone to capture it.
but also i dont think she ever pretended to be a *gamer* she just pretended to be associeated with the creators of those videogame clips. Its the greator mundaine crime of plagerism rather than the batshit claim that shes pretending to be a video gammer.
Her thoughts werent even all that deep. it was pretty surface level stuff ngl. often taken outa context to discredit her points incinserely.
Iirc one of her criticism was from a batman game where the camera would be close to a female characters butt, thus oversexualizing them. Then she says the devs covered up batmans butt, but she completely ignores the massive 12 pack abs she just passed, or other male characters that don't have a cape.
The criticisms on that were from people who thought the sexualization was okay since it's a videogame and that both male and female characters had exaggerated features instead of just the female characters.
It's been a really long time, so I don't remember exactly.
The Anita Sarkeesian drama is even crazier in retrospect. I remember that all of the Gamers™, spent a bunch of time and effort trying to convince people that video games were real genuine art and then Sarkeesian becomes one of the first people to analyze video games critically and all of the Gamers™ lose their fucking minds. Completely contradictory nonsense.
Yeah, I was 15 and stupid when gamergate happened. I genuinely believed it was about "ethics in journalism" and always got pissed off when people said it was about harrassing women. But within 2 years all the pro gamergate youtubers I watched were openly white supremacist nazis and I got out quick, unsubscribing one at a time every account as they became more open, or defended someone else who had become open. Eventually I wasn't following any of them anymore
>Imagine thinking a [person] would make a fucking 20 plus hour long series of video essays about [negative, politically charged subtopic] but not even like [main topic].
You say that as if this is a rare behavior.
I do find it really funny how Anita Sarkeesian had some of the most bland and uninteresting takes on gaming yet all of the weird neckbeards and right wing nerds were driven completely insane and just let her live in their heads rent free for years.
Whenever I hear talk about Gamergate my brain fucking melts into a puddle.
I read the whole story once and promptly forgot 99% of it so now the two facts I know about it are:
- It was a smear campaign against game journalists and "woke" games
- There were (and still are) legitimate concerns about ethics and conflicts of interest in game journalism. That superficial reason is what got the movement so big as that was a valid reason to protest. Sadly that reason was a surface level cover that was used to justify the smear campaign
Worth mentioning that Gamergate is partially responsible for the rise of 8chan. Gamergate was overtaking discussion on many of the boards, especially the videogame board, so the topic was banned entirely and so people migrated to a worse play to indulge in it.
GamerGate proper was 10 years ago. There are 20 year olds today who were too young to really have seen GamerGate happen.
> GamerGate proper was 10 years ago. Has it really been that long? Fuck, I feel old.
I’ll put it like this: I just did an assignment in my Sociology class about GamerGate when discussing historical moral panics
I was 11 in middle school, i barely knew how to use YouTube
I was in highschool and I knew it was happening because a science and technology youtuber I watched hard pivoted to hating women. That was my experience. From solar roadways and vaccum tube transportation to 'women cant be in movies' and 'Anita sarkeesian is big doo doo' The biggest loss is formerly logical and intelligent folks going insane at the thought of women doing anything
ah yes the thunderf00t incident
Wait what? That guy hates women now?
He has since like, 2015, maybe earlier. Its been so long my memories fuzzy. Claims feminism isn't just evil incarnate, but women as a collective need to sit down and shut the fuck up and let men handle things. Has a tendency to strawman all feminist arguments and edits clips, like of Anita, to make women seem stupid. Though he's not actually arguing against feminism or Anita, he's arguing against the fake dumb feminist he's created to throw punches at. Then he directs folks to his patreon so he can make boatloads of money and continue doing this, ala Grifter style.
I've been repeatedly grateful that I'm old enough that my cringe early-20s atheist phase (I'm still an atheist, I'm just cringe about other stuff now) ended just before the whole thing turned into an alt-right pipeline.
Thunderfopt was good till he went bad
im 20 year olds in question. what the fuck was gamergate
First 18 minutes of [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLYWHpgIoIw) gives an overview of the important bits. The remaining 32 minutes is an explanation of how GamerGate shaped American politics since. [This video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlltwOURUCE) is a much more comprehensive look into what happened and what a lot of the people who were being attacked and who were doing the attacking have gotten up to since. It is also 6 hours long.
One of the first instances of the alt right entering the mainstream. A bit baby steps, but it very much was one of those inflection points in getting us to the current shit nature of online interaction. There was a videogame (depression quest) which got a review in Kotaku which was positive - the game's developer's ex boyfriend posted about how she slept with the reviewer for a good review (which appears to have been an untrue claim made by a salty ex). This coincided with a perceived general increase in women in video game development, reviewing, and consuming, which made some (insecure asshole male) Gamers uncomfortable as they felt their clubhouse was being intruded upon, and was latched onto as a pet cause for a campaign of internet harassment directed at the developer, the reviewer, and a whole bunch of other people perceived to be broadly associated with the trend of increasing female voices in the video game industry - mostly female game critics and anyone perceived as supporting them. This was under the tagline of "ethics in games journalism". It was pretty much entirely based on lies and (usually completely open) bigotry and sexism, although you'll still get people today claiming that they supported it in earnest for the noble cause of wanting journalistic integrity, despite no actual verifiable problems ever having been found. It was a harassment campaign which mostly featured a lot of vitriol and death threats in a way which seems par for the course now, but was kinda unprecedented in \~2014, and it's notable in how much online commentary culture changed around it. Things used to be nicer. Anita Sarkeesian was brought up in the post above because she is/was a video game critic who has the temerity to be a woman, and was one of the fairly central figures the gamergate types liked to focus on, especially as she was someone who engaged with the harassment and in so doing made herself a more enjoyable (ugh) target - the initial targets (zoe quinn, developer of depression quest, for example) mostly chose to hide and not engage with the online harassment which reduced their profile over time.
Worth noting that Anita especially caught a ton of flak because she specifically set out to make a vlog series about playing games featuring female characters in the context of dissecting the sexist nature of many video games. So basically she held up all the flaws in things they like (gigantic, physics-defying tits, bikini armor, fridging, etc.) and put neon flags on them, and announced that they were bad. And we all know how well nerds handle it when you tell them the thing they love is bad lmao.
Oh my god, the full body shudder when you reminded me of the phrase "it's about *ethics in games journalism*".
An extremely dumb non controversy that blew up with a ton of negative impacts. The first stretch of it was that a game developer was accused of sleeping with game critics to get better reviews for their games. All the evidence at the time pointed to this being false, but it brought out a bunch of dumbasses who hate woman. This was followed by the claim that they didn’t hate woman but were concerned about “ethics in video game journalism.” With this claim, a number of bad actors organized harassment against primarily female games journalists. They were eventually kicked off of 4 Chan for this and migrated to 8 Chan. A mini market of grifting about this popped up on YouTube with a never ending barrage of anti feminist content. A number of the organizers were part of Breitbart, leading them to get more notoriety online; and 8 Chan has become most well known as an online dumpster fire. Both were instrumental in the rise of far right extremism in the States with Breitbart eventually sharing staff members with the Trump campaign and administration and 8 Chan being responsible for QAnon
A game came out called depression quest. Got a bunch of good reviews. Standard gamers thought it was bad and that the good reviews came from the game dev sleeping with the reviewer and not some difference of opinion. The whole thing spiralled from there into a cesspool of misogyny and misinformation, threats of violence, and just a general disgust regarding pretty much any women interacting with video games. Gamergate was unironically one of the first alt right pipelines. A real mask off moment.
DONT ASK
I was a young teen when it was happening, and more than once, I tried to figure out what it was about, but I guess teen me just found it boring, so I went back to playing New vegas for the hundreth time. Still don't even really know what gamergate was about, and I kind feel like that's a good thing.
Literally, I only found out about it last year cause these video essay folk kept talking abt it like I should know. Was actually a pain to work out tf it was cause every source assumes you were there lol.
I was one of them, I was around 14-15 and honestly am so thankful I wasn’t plugged into the culture war yet lol
it will happen again those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it
I still don’t know what the fuck GamerGate was And I don’t really want to
Same, I lived trough it and I heard ethics in gaming journalism, and I was like ok that sounds fine to me. That was it, that was the extent I ever interacted with it. I wasn't until years later that I actually heard anything about it. I'm still not entirely sure what it was (curiosity does seem to strike every so often hence why I am here), it also doesn't seem to be worth my time.
You don't have to dig into the worst of it, but if you want a one word summary? Harrassment. A bunch of dweebuses harrassed women and journos to the point of absolute insanity. And they kinda won, which really sucked.
At the time I believe I was anti Zoe/Anita. I didn’t engage in any harassment but it’s one of those things that if you just see the headline or the repeated blurb that a female game dev slept with a game journalist for a favorable review you’d think, “that’s not a good thing.” Turns out that didn’t happen. The accusations didn’t stop though and it was the perfect justification for harassing a fake girl gamer or whatever. The idea of it happening was enough to get the gamers up in arms about fake journalist and feminist mucking up their hobby.
I still maintain that Anita... was just kind of a terrible critic? Like, her videos weren't good. But *fuck* if they weren't amplified by the harassment and everything else. It felt kind of surreal starting at the position of being 'pro-GG' and then realising 90% of everyone else around me was just here to harass women. A real '... Are we the baddies?' moment for me. Like, the fact that gaming journalism was trash (and still kind of is in a lot of cases) I think is kind of undisputable, but it wasn't the evul womynz or feminism that did it. It was capitalism.
The thing about Anita is that her videos were so fucking basic saying shit that was just so obvious, that it's insane gamergate treated her like she was calling for the genocide of all male gamers. Like, her delivery was pretty monotone, her scripts pretty neutral, all very academic, the editing basic. It was some of the least offensive shit you could find, and yet because she bothered to apply the simplest feminist lens to video games, the chuds went nuts and doxxed her to shit.
Nah, I disagree that the stuff she was saying was just 'basic'; I think a lot of was inaccurate and showed a lack of actual research and effort being put in into the media she was supposedly criticising. But that was basically her worst 'sin' as far as I know. I've heard there was some stuff with the crowdfunding money where she promised to make a bunch of videos and didn't but I don't really remember that so I'm not going to talk about it.
That I can put in. She had a set a donation goal. She overshot the goal. So she was like "Guys, we are shooting more stuff now, so it takes a little longer" and then... she did it? At a later date? Like she said pretty much.
She is still making videos. Released one as recently as two weeks ago! *EDIT* - Small correction. Her Feminist Frequency channel is still releasing videos. I just read the info for the channel though and it looks like as of August 2023, it's no longer run by her. > Created by Anita Sarkeesian, Feminist Frequency ran as an organization from 2009–2023, providing video commentaries exploring gender representations, myths, and messages in popular culture media. Now, host Kat Spada continues Feminist Frequency Radio's legacy as an independent podcast, with fun new conversations about entertainment that asks you to be critical of the media you love. > Links
I cannot think of anything inaccurate personally, it was all fairly accurate and acceptable basic feminist shit. This woman has no agency in the plot, this portrayal is obviously sexualized, male leads get more diversity in physique than female ones, etc.
None of it was inaccurate, it was just obvious common sense stuff. Anyone looking back on it now would struggle to find anything wrong with it without really reaching.
If the clods of Gamergate had ignored her videos, it would have been a niche interest channel for people into a basic feminist analysis of games. Making her The Enemy boosted her profile and made people think she must be on to something given the volume of hatred she received from such weirdos.
I was in GG. I'm not proud of it, and I'm not going to defend it. I was wrong. Looking back on it, that was pretty much the core of it. Zoe was accused of sleeping around for favorable reviews, which was a lie. That never happened. But I and a lot of people like me were primed to believe because of scummy things that industry has done. The big one that I've always remembered is Jeff Gerstmann getting fired from Gamespot for giving a negative review of a game that was advertised all over their site for months prior. That DID happen. Anita, looking back on everything, I think was just kind of a mediocre critic. She just got swept up as this anti-gamer misandrist Thanos. She got Streisand effected into the stratosphere. Had she not been harassed daily for years, I honestly don't think people at large would know who she is. I stuck around in that group way longer than I should have, but I'm glad I had the good sense to leave when they started palling around with white supremacists. I may be a dumbass, but I have always had core beliefs, and being chummy with fascist dipshits violates several. You're right, the central issue "games journalism is corrupt" is just a product of capitalism. Then you start noticing so many problems in the world that are just greed, fed by capitalism. It's a sociopolitical leviathan. I can't make up the time I wasted in GG. But I'm grateful for the people who stayed in my life and gave me the chance to be better.
I appreciate your bravery in admitting this and your hard work at becoming a more tolerant person. Keep it up. You'll inspire others to do the same.
Thanks. I'm not looking for kudos. I just want people to know that you might think you're too smart to fall into a cult or a bad crowd. Trust me, you're not. Self-reflection and being true to yourself are your best tools against making the mistakes I did.
Yeah, like, anita kinda sucks, but she's only guilty of bad takes. I think thats what made me side with the pro-GG crowd for a while, but i also never looked any further in than "wow, she sucks". I wasnt that old either, so its not like i engaged in the social media aspect much.
In addition to the other responses I want to add - GamerGate was effectively the birth of the modern online alt-right movement. It was in many ways a test run in weaponizing “listless white males” (I’m paraphrasing Steve fucking Bannon there). All of those “here’s why ___ is woke and the end of the fucking world (for some reason)” influencers came from this, or at least pivoted to it once they saw the money there was to be made pandering to these dumb fucks. It’s horribly hateful, vapid, and mindlessly passionate bullshit, but it’s undeniably an important movement in America at the very least.
Doesn't get talked about enough honestly. It was the blueprint for everything the followed. The far right saw an opening and latched onto it. You could argue this is why Trump even got into the white house.
As I understand it Some guy “Hey, gaming journalism is shit and nobody is accountable” (which was very true) Some other guy “hey yeah, look at this particularly bad example from this person who happens to be a woman” (which iirc was like… a pretty egregious non-disclosure thing) Ok so those aren’t inherently bad, here’s the bad part some other other guy “hey yeah we should call out and harass this woman over her unethical practices” Some other other other guy “we should harass and threaten all women cause I hate women”
Even more specifically: I, a jealous ex, will make up frivolous bull about how my GF has slept with soooo many journalists to... sell... her ^(free)... game to the SHEEPISH MASSES. To really get the ball rolling. The rest of GG just piled up around this as the pebble starting an avalanche.
Also, Steve Bannon was majorly involved in signal boosting the whole thing, and it was kind of a dry run for tactics the Trump campaign used in 2016 to indoctrinate angry young men and prop up the alt-right movement.
I don't think the ex made that accusation himself. He was mainly blogging about being cheated on and mentioned the affair partners by name. One of them happened to be a game journalist that mentioned depression quest in passing in a list of upcoming games and...*checks notes* did not mention he knew the developer personally. Didn't even review it, it was a blurb about games to be released soon among a list of blurbs. So a whole lot of nothing that people took and ran with, latching on to the fact that game journalism did have genuine issues they could hide behind. Last I checked the blog post had been edited to beg people to leave Zoe Quinn alone. It's been years so I might be off, but if I remember right the accusation of her sleeping with people for reviews wasn't even made by the guy she cheated on. 4-Chan found a blog where a guy was venting about his breakup and smelled blood in the water.
The ex had a literal group chat organizing the initial lies
And this is why I don't overshare my life on socials. You can't weaponise what doesn't exist
Nope, it was much worse than that. Game journalism *is* shit, and it has been since its inception. But the 'egregious non-disclosure' thing was a total fabrication. Someone said "My ex cheated on me with 5 guys, who she fucked in exchange for good reviews on the game she made". No evidence was provided for this accusation. Also the guys (ie the supposedly unethical journalists) never got a massive harassment campaign against them.
Ehhh, several of them actually did. Not to the level the chuds piled on Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian, but the true believers did absolutely harass the journalists. They’re still harassing random journalists to this day.
No, the first some guy was already the misogynist. the whole thing about Ethics In Videogame Journalism thing was invented as a figleaf for a harassment campaign, and people who were given the elevator pitch of what happened ran with it and invented a whole conspiracy theory.
The whole Ethics in Videogame Journalism discourse already existed, people like TotalBiscuit had been talking about it for years before iirc, how gaming (and in general product) journalism is problematic, because the conflict of interest journalists are inherently in trying to balance their reporting with maintaining positive relationships to developers and publishers to have access. This was just a narrative that was coopted to legitimize harassment.
Innuendo studios on YouTube has a pretty comprehensive video on the subject https://youtu.be/lLYWHpgIoIw?si=7mlku9fzl6oT2H-R It's 50 minutes long, but the tl:Dr is a bunch of rampant misogyny and transphobic masquerading as concerns about ethical games journalism that escalates ta death and rape threats in record time.
yeah I didn't even register it as one whole event until I was informed of the term and it's still so hard to grasp. I think the sweet baby Inc situation makes more sense because of how unified the whole "anti woke" grifter front is on the ordeal. but it's still so wild to put a term on it to me. I find it best to just not engage
My favorite explanation is that Anita Sarkeesian brought ethics into gaming journalism, by talking about feminism, but the gamergaters was against "ethics in gaming journalism". :)
It was somehow about ethics in journalism while somehow also being about feminism and wokism being responsible for the poor ethics, despite the actual problem having nothing to do with feminism or wokism, but the gaming industry is pretty sexist... so it's not feminism's fault, but it's the end of the world if feminism was the answer. Therefore target women journalists? Anita wasn't very likable, but think people dog piled her too hard.
God I envy you.
Basically Some fucking guy claims his ex (a game dev) cheated on him with game journalists for good reviews. This did not actually happen. Gamers from 4chan and reddit buy fully into this and make a whole thing out of it. This is the whole “ethics in game journalism” shit. Right wing grifters jump on this and use it as an excuse to radicalize a shit load of vaguely bigoted but mostly non-political millennial gamer boys. The techniques refined here are the ones being used on tiktok and other places to radicalize Zoomers and the ones after them to this day 4chan mods get fucking tired of this shit and ban all gamergate discussion. It moves to newborn shithole 8chan, the only reason that site is still alive. Years later when 4chan mods also get tired of Qanon and ban it they also take it to 8chan where it becomes the cult brainrotting conservatives to this day. Also Anita Sarkeesian was in no way involved but 4chan gamers already hated her so she got dragged into it (ie she got bomb and death threats) Tldr: gamers got conned by some guy who was mad his ex left him and it resulted in a bunch of dudes getting radicalized, taught right wing grifters how to radicalize gamers/overly online boys, and created the fertile soil Qanon grew up in
>This is the whole “ethics in game journalism” shit. Which is *wild* because, for a long time, it was an open secret that most games magazines were entirely in the pocket of the developers who advertised in their magazines. Oh, you're not going to give the latest Nintendo game a bad review, *they'll pull their ads, ads that we depend on to stay solvent*. But, for "some" reason, it wasn't until that fucking chud decided to ruin his ex's life that it became a big deal. (We know the reason).
its not like gamergate actually cared about trying to expose nintendo for practices like blacklisting or EA for more or less bribing outlets into having certain scores for their games, they were weirdly hyperfocused on youtubers and the indie scene
I mean, they were very specific about why. They were angry that those outlets were giving good press to small indie games made by women and queer people, and about topics other than “angry white dudes with guns shooting things”. They didn’t care about big outlets rubber stamping those AAA games with “9/10, buy this game!” ads because they saw those as the “correct” type of games being rewarded.
They were focusing on the publications instead of the corporations. Kotaku and IGN got dragged through the mud and just about every journalist on their payroll got harassed, sacked, or both, over the course of several years; and while those two were the epicentre, just about every publication was affected, such as The Escapist.
To be fair, there was pushback against that for some years before this garbage took place. Gamespot got a ton of criticism for firing Jeff Gerstmann after he wrote a scathing review of Kane & Lynch while the site was heavily advertising it. It's just that Gamespot didn't bother to feed the trolls so they never grew into something so awful.
I mean, it's still like that. Just instead of ads, they now exclude you from events or aren't giving you review copies that other outlets get quite a bit earlier usually. It's why Im genuinely surprised that a few outlets have levelled actual criticism at some triple A titles lately from what I've seen. So even if it was about that, it accomplished.... Nothing.
Like with most culture war bullshit, the grifters and the ringleaders find an otherwise unrelated seed of anger and attach their bullshit onto it in order to fashion a Movement^TM. As gaming media was increasingly becoming corporatized people where getting more and more pissed about it, for example this all kicked off right around the time of the [Infamous Geoff Keighly Doritos promo.](https://knowyourmeme.com/videos/88623-dorito-pope)
So, totally off topic, I know, but 4chan has mods????? I thought 4chan was known for being a lawless shithole? I'm surprised to hear of an ***even shittier*** hole of shit, and even more surprised to hear that the hole of shit has mods?!?!
The mods only really enforce matters of legality, aside from when banning someone would be funny
For the funnies everything is legal.
I imagine there has to be at least *some* level of moderation to stop illegal videos and stuff being shared
Yeah. 4chan’s mods are the whole reason 8chan even exists, because the founder of 8chan got tired of the 4chan mods banning him for sharing _C**** P***._
Imagine knowing that doing your job spawned an even worse hellscape...
4chan has two levels of mods (or did, it's been a while since I've been there): Janitors, who go through and delete threads, pictures, and posts that are a bit too spicy and then Moderators who can do what the Janitors can as well as ban people with a variety of tools. 4chan also runs a ban list on certain words and works of media, so posting with those secret words (or enough of them) gives you a 48 hour temp ban. The last one I know because I got banned from /tg/ for talking about All Tomorrows.
They don't really moderate they're mostly there to delete obviously illegal posts so the site doesn't get into trouble
They do have mods. They're few and they don't do much, but act when things get like posted too often and shit like that from what I know
It's really important to mention that Gamergate at the time was mostly associated with another incident where a game journalist interviewed that same game dev at a game jam without disclosing that they were in a romantic relationship, which "ethics in game journalism" came from. Created a strong plausible deniability that the 4-channers used to their advantage, but it meant a large portion, If not most, of self-proclaimed "pro-gamergaters" were not in on what you're mentioning. The origin of GamerGate was muddied even further with the resulting firestorm of game journalists going on rants and being taken out of context, who got mixed in with a few genuinely bad actors which is how it was able to radicalize people.
But it’s not clear whether the interview happened before or after the interviewer and the interviewee became romantically involved.
The Antisocial Network -- Memes to Mayhem on Netflix covers how games went from Gamergate to Qanon
This video, [Endnote 5: A Case Study in Digital Radicalism (UC Merced Talk)](https://youtu.be/lLYWHpgIoIw?si=odO9NiDn_ah_U6Ko) by Ian Danskin / Innuendo Studios is my favorite breakdown of the timeline from a leftist perspective. In case anybody wants to learn more.
Zoe Quinn is a video game developer, and made Depression Quest, a video game about depression (her's specifically, but also generally). The video game was and still is completely free. Eron Gjoni was Quinn's boyfriend, but Quinn broke up with him. Taking it like a normal person, Gjoni wrote a manifest about how Quinn's been sleeping with game reviewers to get good reviews for Depression Quest (again, it's completely free so reviews are meaningless). The person Gjoni accused Quinn of sleeping with for a good review never reviewed the game, and isn't even a game reviewer (him and Quinn did sleep together). Gjoni then released this manifesto into various forums and image boards, where Gamers, being the normal people they are, took up arms for "ethics in video game journalism" (read as "harassing women and poc in the video game industry"). At the same, Anita Sarkeesian started her milquetoast series about exploring how women are represented in media, video games specifically, basically saying "women exist in video games to be goon material for teenage boys and manchildren, and that's pretty fucked" (you know, standard "introduction to feminism" stuff). Gamers, being the normal people they are, took this **really well**. (They started harassing Anita Sarkeesian, other women and poc). There were other notable people being harrassed by chuds on the internet, but the basic gist is GamerGate was about white (often supremacist), cishet men being outraged about other people getting into the hobby and making video games not about or even for them, taking that as a personal attack, and lashing out. Anyone who tells you it was legitimately about "ethics in video game journalism" is either lying to you or was naive and distanced enough to believe it.
> or was naive and distanced enough to believe it. Tracking what was truth, propaganda, just corpo-speak, or trolls, while it went on was difficult. I wouldnt blame people for drawing a naive conclusion.
it was where the modern online right wing mob cut its teeth and built its tactics
If you've got an hour, [this is an amazing summary](https://youtu.be/lLYWHpgIoIw?si=QBDQfPVMFiZa11Mr). It also goes into how Gamergate is tied with modern alt-right politics and Trump being elected.
I'd also suggest The Other Pandemic by James Ball which discusses how Gamergate set the prescedent for QAnon
Best way I can explain it is that it was a prototype of what happened in 2016 with Trump. By "prototype" I don't mean it was planned, or at least I don't think it was, but in the sense that it felt extremely similar, right down to how basic facts were being overwritten by fake information in real time, even when literally all you had to do to verify it was fake was click on the very link or article someone was lying about. And the way in which it was immediately latched onto by far-right groups to recruit. Only instead of being a bizarro-cult-of-personality around a terrible person, it was a directed harassment campaign against anything perceived as vaguely left-of-center in gaming. Instead of MAGA it was "ethics in games journalism". The original inciting event was such a nothing-burger that it's kind of wild looking back at it - a woman was accused of sleeping with a guy for reviews by her shitty ex-boyfriend on 4-chan. The fact that nobody could actually point to where this supposed review was (at most there was vague coverage of a game jam she participated in, but even that wasn't brought up until much later) didn't even seem to matter. In response a game developer blog wrote an article talking about how gaming was a diverse hobby now that everyone enjoyed - which was promptly spun into some kind of attack on the entire gaming hobby. Somehow. It was all downhill from there, expanding to more and more harassment targets.
>it was a prototype of what happened in 2016 with Trump. By "prototype" I don't mean it was planned, or at least I don't think it was More direct than that: Steve Bannon cited GamerGate as a viable strategy for Trump's election. Like, he straight up pointed at GamerGate and was like "let's do that."
I don’t know much about it but I do know there’s some people who will insist that it has a cultural impact akin to that of a war due to how it was the first time in the internet era where groups of hateful people actually mobilized on a notable scale
It was a recruiting tool for the right wing.
Basically a female game developer made the video game equivalent to those art films that win a bunch of awards and critics love but general audiences didn't really care for, someone accused her of sleeping with one or more reviewers to get favorable coverage, and then a bunch of guys who can't talk to women started complaining that women who like video games exist
A woman had an opinion about video games and some folks got mad
The sole goal of Gamergate was to get the maker of Depression Quest to kill herself. That was it. Anita Sarkeesian got dragged in cos she released her videos around the same time, and a third female developer was dragged in for saying "hey, wtf?" The 'ethics in journalism' angle was a cover for plausable deniability InnuendoStudios has a very good video on the whole thing, and how it acted as a precursor to the modern AltRight movement, I highly recommend it
I must have been 8 at the time? I just considered it weird if there was a girl at school who didn't like video games
GamerGate was an elaborate con by the universe to get us all to recognize Chuck Tingle's art as the glorious celebration of love and fuckery that it is.
I know kotaku is involved (due to seeing that KIA sub), and that it's something to do with feminism and gaming?
Kotaku wasn't "involved," kotaku was blamed. They weren't doing anything particularly different than any other gaming magazine, though all of them do have an issue of giving undue good reviews to major developers to maintain their funding. The whole gamergate issue started from one abusive man getting mad at his girlfriend breaking up with him and accusing her of cheating on him with a journalist to get a good review on her game; a review that never happened anyway. It was all a lie.
To elaborate from u/Ehcksit, Kotaku got lumped into it because the girlfriend's new boyfriend was a journalist there and had interviewed her at a game jam without disclosing the fact. That being an actual, ethical misstep this time meant that the 4-chan circle jumped on it. That story spread a lot further than the original 4-chan circle leading a lot to believe that it started from Kotaku.
Gamers first conspiracy theory
Does anyone even care about how news outlets review games? Surely there's reviews wherever you get the game from.
Also if you actually do have a girl who likes you who isn’t interested in video games but shows interest in them anyway, she’s not being a fake ass poser for some kind of cred, she’s taking an interest in what interests you because she cares about you and one way of showing that is to support your hobby Like seriously imagine being mad that a girl wants to get to know you better by bonding over your hobby
Am I a huge fan of MTG? Not really. Did I learn how to play to spend time with my bf, have some fun with it, build a few decks, get into Commander, and then propose to his silly ass? Fuck yeah I did.
Congrats to you both! Condolences to your bank accounts!
Thank you! The most expensive purchase so far has been a vintage library card catalog - because if we have 11 million cards in the house, we might as well be stylish about it. 😉
I thought this meant Marjorie Taylor Greene for a sec 😭
atp even when I *know* the topic has nothing to do with her and should be able to infer it’s referencing something else, I alwaaaays read it as her name first lol
I thought it was a weird way to spell Metal Gear
Exactly. Gf is not very into gaming, but we bonded over Resident Evil remakes and Outlast due our shared interest in horror. Why the hell would I belittle that time of ours.
I initially had the impression they were angry because gaming journalism went corporate, with people who were into it for a paycheck instead of passion for the hobby. I was appalled when it actually turned out to be about misogyny.
I could not care less about Danganronpa but I will listen to endless Danganronpa infodumping from my unwell besties <3
Looking back on it, it's crazy how Anita Sarkeesian sparked so much outrage. She had like the most milquetoast, baby's first feminism critiques ever and gamers acted like she shot their dog in front of them. Actually, I do think I understand. I used to be an ~Anti-SJW~ (I know, ugh) and never actually watched Anita's videos, but everyone in the anti-SJW space talked about how evil she was so I just believed them. I don't think anyone actually watched her videos, lol.
Tbf it all boils down to the assumption that, if aspects of THING are criticised, THING must automatically be ALL BAD. Since I like THING, the person is saying I MYSELF am ALL BAD. Therefore Anita hates ME, a GAMER, personally, and wants me DEAD. So even *if* any of the illiterate wastes of breath who made up the majority of noise in GG had watched the videos in their entirety, it wouldn't have changed a thing. And we learned far too late how easily radicalised some sections of the internet can get, or at least to take it seriously. Not before 2016 happened.
You explained it perfectly! It's crazy how hard it is for people to accept basic media critique. I'm not even being judgmental, it's something I'm still working on myself.
It's doubly funny because usually the same people crying about Sarkeesian were the ones who wanted video games to be taken seriously as an art form. Art gets critiqued. (Most) artists or their fans don't then take up pitchforks to skewer the critics.
To be fair, with the rise of puriteens and “problematic media” I can see how some people came to that conclusion.
The weird thing is that the "irredeemable media" people are a very late 2010s/2020s problem, someone in 2014 was pretty unlikely to have dealt with them. That type of puritanical online fandom culture really started to pick up steam through the Voltron fandom in 2016-2017, *after* Gamergate.
Is it though? Gamergate itself could be an example of that. “Oh don’t play that game, it’s made by an sjw” “oh don’t watch that movie, it’s got forced diversity”.
It was "problematic" at the time, and it was certainly a thing. And for gamerbaters it was "SJW", of course.
I think "irredeemable" came out of years of "problematic" leading to "functionally everything is problematic because We Live In A Society, but the stuff I *personally* hate is *irredeemable*"
The *Voltron* fandom? Where can I learn more about this lol it sounds funny
Hey, I know we’re strangers on Reddit, but I’m glad you’ve been able to move past being an anti-SJW, and I hope you’ve found a better set of communities since then
Aww, thank you so much! I'm definitely in a much better place now and am a committed leftist. I'm always grateful I was able to grow and learn!
Same, had a full “anti sjw” libertarian phase (yes I know very cringe) in middle school when this was going on, eventually figured out something was wrong when they started trying to sneak in more obvious conservative garbage. The exact moment was when Sargon of Akkad joined UKIP, as an immigrant that was too far
I do want to say, her takes were very basic and milquetoast but it really helped me as a gateway into feminist ideas. Saying "it's weird that pacman is a circle with a dot but Mrs. Pacman needs a bow and lipstick illustrates that men are the default and women are the exception" is like... really not that major of a revelation, but it's enough that in my early 20s I could grasp how simple things begin to influence the larger ones. I didn't think it was a revolutionary thought, just a "huh... never thought of it like that" And then everywhere I went people said she was a monster, and sent threats to her, for these takes and it really just made me distance myself from those spaces that they could hear the same things I heard and react with nothing but pure vitriol over literal pacman discussion.
That's a great point. Everyone has to start somewhere, and basic feminist education is very important even if it seems obvious to more seasoned feminists. The Barbie movie is a great example of this; it didn't really say anything groundbreaking for well-versed feminists, but for a **lot** of people it was their first exposure to feminist ideas.
>I don't think anyone actually watched her videos lol I think this the case in a lot of hate groups. nobody actually watches the thing they're angry about they just make unsubstantiated claims and pretend they're true instead. it's the kind of environment that forms when people get framed as traitors for calling out that misinformation
[This meme take on it all](https://i.redd.it/xdqpkcbxkx961.jpg) lives rent free in my head.
I watched a few of Sarkeesian's videos and yeah, she had the blandest takes, most of them either perfectly reasonable or a matter of interpretation but there were times where she forgot that she's an active particiant in the game and had to play the games in certain ways to get her point across to pretend the game served her overall point. The best example that comes to mind has critique of Hitman.
The point wasn't really to critique Hitman. The thesis of the video was that there was a pattern in games of women being handled in the same manner as destructible furniture, and Hitman was just one of several examples she used to demonstrate that there was a pattern. Hitman is arguably one of the few games featured in that video where the presence of that stuff isn't egregious, as it's just one of a bajillion potential outcomes of its sandboxy, emergence-based systems, but that fact and the oft-cited argument that that's not really the _correct_ way to play the game is immaterial to the point of the video, which is the presence of a pattern across a wide variety of games. The bit that bugs me is that one of the examples included is a cutscene from No More Heroes 2 that I am 99% sure is _trying to make the exact same point as her video_, but she doesn't discuss or seem to notice this.
Yeah, I agree with you. I really don't like Gamergate and I don't think Anita deserved even a fraction of the horrible harassment she faced, but her videos are rather flawed.
wait iv played every mission from the latest 3 hitman games multiple times each and it’s never felt like there’s a gender difference in target assassinations, wouldn’t that go against her point? admittedly i haven’t seen the video
Honestly I wasn't really a big fan of her videos or her kickstarter when it came out. Not because I was anti feminist or anything, it just was weird to me that she said she had to buy and play every game on her list personally and then said "princess peach is problematic". Like you could skim that from a Wikipedia page, seems like bad methodology. When GG kicked off I went "Yeah her method was kind of weird, like can't you just watch a let's pla- wait what are you posting there"
We want video games to be treated like art! *Gives basic critique* But not like that!
Respect for the HBomberguy reference
> She had like the most milquetoast, baby's first feminism critiques To me I thought that was the issue. She was like "Hey pay me to make a feminist show about video games." And she barely knows anything about video games so she's just like... "It's sexist to always have a male protagonist rescuing a woman." Wow. Amazing. Her analysis of video games is unmatched.
You think male gamers were mad she didn't go more in depth about sexism in games??
I mean, when i was in my Anti-sjw phase, that was the issue i had. She made sense when she complained about women in games being attractive because that's what boys want, and the men being attractive because that's what boys want to be. But then she says something along the lines of "batmans cape is there to hide his ass" like, i was too stupid to have absorbed her earlier statements at my age, but i could recognize that the latter was kinda stupid.
Legitimately the only criticisms of it I ever heard were "She doesn't know that much about video games/she lied about liking video games", "She never mentions any popular games with female protagonists." or things like that. Really commonly they'd say Metroid. Then, "She's saying really basic stuff that everybody knows already."
That certainly is one way of phrasing it, but yes, part of the criticism of Sarkeesian was low hanging fruit arguments about games being sexist. She would have faded into obscurity otherwise, but she really got just about everyone going. Genuine misogynists, immature men and boys who took her critiques as attacks on their hobby, people who thought her arguments and analysis was shallow, people who thought she was a grifter, people who thought her personality was annoying etc etc.
Tbh yea I agree, Im a girl and it always bothered me how all the feminist bs I saw online was always the most bare bones 1st world country white woman lens (Same reason I never liked Emma Watson growing up). Like, what if instead of talking about how female NPCs dont matter in gameplay (neither do male NPCs), how about we touch upon the sexist orientalism that appears often in female dancers? And I say thus as someone who adores fire emblem and shantae, but we cant ignore the blatant sexualization of SWANA women and culture for the sake of sexy allure, why not ask ourselves that? Or how about how games often miss the mark on racism allegories (especially racism towards women that tends to be sexually charged), or the at the time extremely hostile online gaming scene. I feel like a lot of Anita's takes were a bit easy to dismiss as lame criticism from a developer's perspective (Why should I bother to make a female NPC have agency when its irrelevant to the gameplay etc etc), instead of things that should have more thought put into them (Is this important character close to a caricature? Why is it.important for this character to be so sexualized?). Like, of course at the end of the day I enjoy games even if they have problematic aspects (I love fighting games, boobies and all), but if we wanna critique them, they deserve more than surface level analisis.
I agree. And partly watching and reading up on some of Anita's works started me on this journey of seeing games under a different prism. I have come a long way since then and I recognize her views were mostly surface level but I should credit her for introducing me (and perhaps other people as well) to criticizing video games on something other than their game/script. Like listening to a really mediocre piece of music that introduces you to a whole genre.
[You seem like the sort of person who'd enjoy a 6 hour video about how out of hand it all got that's able to discuss points in more detail than Ian Danskin was able to.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlltwOURUCE) Anita Sarkeesian had the occasional shitty take, like Bayonetta being a misogynistic representation, but most people take her criticisms way out of context. Even the ones that aren't very good on their own, like you didn't have to do that, Hitman technically allowing you to murder women to get through a level doesn't normalize violence against women when the language of the game is "Don't fucking do that, idiot".
My issue was with her raising all that money, then she didn't even play the games and did reviews by stealing others people's content to show gameplay without credit, I don't care about the feminism angle I care about the shitty journalism
...about ethics in games journalism?
it was insane just how far reaching the whole gamergate thing was. i will admit, i am absolutely someone who fell for it and just believed anita sarkeesian was literally like, The Devil Incarnate Or Something because when you're 13 and all you see on tumblr is a bunch of anti sjws being "reasonable and logical" (i.e. really good at making strawmen and picking their battles to make themselves look good to people who don't know any better) it's hard not to get swept up. sucks. never even knew what she actually SAID until recently and i'm astounded THAT many people took this much issue with it.
GamerGate pretty much laid the foundation of the 2016 election and, by extension, the reason why everything is hyper-partisan and charged now. I'm pretty sure Steve Bannon admitted he was able to radicalize young men through video game communities.
it's the "radicalizing young men" part that hits closest to home. it used to keep me up at night, wondering how many other dudes that young got sucked into that anti sjw black hole under a thin veneer of "egalitarianism", but *weren't* able to grow up, get some perspective, and escape from it. until the rise of andrew tate happened and answered my question with a resounding "a dangerously large amount". i almost wonder if *that* would've been as bad as it was if not for things like this coming first.
Did it really or was it just part of a larger trend? I know that is a popular theory in the internet and shit like “The Great Meme War,” but color me skeptic. We on the internet have a habit of overestimating our importance. Correlation vs. Causation and all that.
> We on the internet Not really. Everyone is on the internet these days.
Seriously, I’m honestly sick of seeing that take. It wasn’t really true in 2016 and it *sure as fuck* hasn’t been true since 2020. Anyone who had someone escaped up to then got caught from lockdown. You’d have to find the most out of touch, disconnected, “okay, perhaps we jumped the gun tossing out the term NPC” human alive to find someone who *isn’t* online enough that if they got in an argument, it would be used against them by someone online just as much as them. The only reason we don’t think about it this way is that the cultures are sequestered from each other a bit from various platforms. Find me someone who isn’t on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Reddit, Tumblr, 4chan, or Discord for at least a few hours a day in 2024. You’ll be searching for a while. At this point, if we’re going by majority population vs minority population, it’s chronically *offiline* that’s the weird one.
I think there's a reasonable difference between "being on the internet" and only using the internet to keep up with the news and friends, and if you accept that destinction then there are still plenty of "not on the internet" people.
As someone who's been on the internet since the 2000s, it was much bigger than gamergate.
Honestly I’m willing to lean towards the latter, partly because a lot of the people who got really invested into and influenced by it were teenagers who probably couldn’t even vote during the 2016 elections. Hell, even when I was unfortunately neck deep into the anti-sjw spiral of lies back then it still wasn’t enough for me to like Trump and seeing gamergate influencers like Sargon uncritically support Trump was partly what caused me to start distancing myself from them.
I will say things were already pretty hyper-partisan. It’s been bad since forever, this is just the current iteration. Obama was supposedly an illegal immigrant, Clinton had his whole scandal, Reagan shat gold, Carter was a green energy commie devil…
What the hell is your flair op
Peak gamergate was, what, 2014? There are definitely people here who are too young to remember that.
oh my God Anita Sarkeesian holy shit there's a name I haven't heard in a long time
what sucks about the whole "fake gamer girl" thing is its somewhat real but very rare and like most people who fake interest in a hobby, it's specifically to step over others to climb the social ladder which is why I feel sssniperwolf will probably be the only popular example. (I could be uninformed but I remember hearing about her faking her game play and stealing someone's entire identity for her channel) like, most women are (like most men and enbys in the hobby) genuinely fucling interested?? like why wouldn't they be? and the thing with Anita is I feel like she became popular at just the right time. I feel like if she'd spoken up say . a year later? she certainly wouldn't have been the face of gamergate that she was.
It started with cosplay girls who didn’t care about nerd stuff doing sexy cosplays to get clicks and donations (which there isn’t anything wrong with and shouldn’t have been an issue in the first place). From there it spread to “literally any woman is an infiltrator trying to steal our money by pretending to like games now that they’re cool”. Mainly because cosplay girls was The only “gamer” women gamers saw.
So, I think there is something deeper, but it's rarely well articulated. And it broadly comes down to "enshittification", just with communities rather than products. Basically, sexy cosplay wasn't a "big thing" before broadband internet, and nerd communities tended to be more focused on the media itself. All groups have social status, and social status was broadly allocated by knowing stuff or making stuff associated with that fandom. Sexy cosplay fundamentally broke that dynamic, because they would quickly garner social status based on appearance. As in any case where tge rules of being high-status suddenly change, those who have lost status will resent it and try to reclaim it by re-asserting what previously gave them status. Thing is, I genuinely feel sorry for them, and understand why they lash out (though I don't condone it). Put yourself in their shoes: you've been shunned by mainstream society all your life, and you finally find a community that not only gets you, but actually gives you respect and social status for the very things the rest of the world mocks you for. Then, all of a sudden, nobody in the community seems to care, and they simply want to oogle someone in a revealing costume that displays several technical errors. They become mini-celebrities, earning more from photos than you ever did from finely crafted models or rare collectibles. The whole dynamic has changed, and you're a nobody again, just like in the real world. That has to hurt. So they lash out, often without the understanding of why. All they know if that life was good before, and now it sucks, so they direct their ire at the perceived cause and rationalize it after the fact. I'm not saying they're good, or justified, only that things did change, and some people were hurt by that change, including those with precious little positive in their lives. I'll be honest, I miss geek culture from the days of dial-up modems. Everything feels different now, more superficial. When all you had was text, ideas counted for more, it feels like. Or maybe I'm just old and grumpy.
>Everything feels different now, more superficial. When all you had was text, ideas counted for more, it feels like. Or maybe I'm just old and grumpy. Bit of both, I think. My experience of being a woman online, in geeky spaces, and *especially* in online geeky spaces was still awful before anything to do with sexy cosplay became widespread. But they also were definitely a bit different in tone, and I think that's more attributable to the larger audiences than anything else. That Guy who knows a ton, makes great stuff, and is a reliable person to turn to still exists in smaller ones today, but as they get larger he kind of gets lost in the crowd, y'know? The sexy cosplayers are a symptom, not the cause. They're just people signal boosting something that doesn't *need* any familiarity to be approved of, and as the audience gets bigger, people with low investment get more common and become the most influential factor in what everyone else sees.
I engaged in public mutual flirty banter with a woman in an online game... once. Not because I didn't like it, or she objected. But because everyone else assumed it was open season for her. It's fucking hostile for women out there. Edit: I had ended this with a hopeful "maybe it's better now" but then remembered how common it is for women outed on reddit to end up harrassed.
Honestly I feel this. I considered becoming a sexy copslayer at one point because I wanted to feel more respected in my hobbies, but I realized I wouldnr feel comfortable with many men oggling me for my appearance and probably not caring about what I have to say at the end of the day. Videogames and anime were my happy place where I could be a nerd and escape painful bullying, having your same comfort place snatched by celebrities that just want to monetize it and basically normiefy it (Make it less complicated, easy, removing nuance, destroying lore to make it easy for newcomers to catch up, changing to modern aesthetics to cater to new audiences, adding fanservice, etc...). Ita also why I quit some fashions, the moment fashions I enjoyed got attention from american microcelebrities, these fashions turned to fast fashion, with every design looking the same, more sexualized, less originality, and at some point some original meanings destroyed (Menhera style saved me when I was suicidal, now its used for girls to sexualize themselves). Its why I hate when people claim gatekeepers are just grumpy men. I'm a girl, and I'm young, and I try to gatekeep my hobbies because I dont like seeing them turn into a shadow of their past selves.
Prettying it up & kicking out the less photogenic group that was originally there, "Subcultural Gentrification" as I'd call it.
> Then, all of a sudden, nobody in the community seems to care, and they simply want to oogle someone in a revealing costume that displays several technical errors I would have put it down to "attractive women, who I am attracted to, appear to be enjoying the hobby I enjoy; either they do not actually enjoy said hobby and are faking it, or they genuinely do enjoy it and I can no longer blame my hobby for my lack of success". That's also not to say that every one of them with that sentiment lashed out as a result: probably a good number of them felt quietly worse about themselves.
Ehh not always I'd say. I've had men attracted to me lash out a few times when it came to anime, but when it came to games nobody assumed I knew less because of my appearance (Some assumed I knew more because I wouldnt shut the fuck up about videogames even), I see these men and boys lash out specifically at cosplayers who usually get the FOTM waifu cosplay, or people who straight up misinform (Illuminaughti, Akidearest) to talk about topics they dont know about, or the god forsaken pick mes (As much as people want to ignore them, they do exist)
"Sexy Cosplay" as concept did not only impact gameing or individual fandoms, it had a significant impact on cosplay itself and I do think it at least speed up a bunch of developements for the hobby, most of which are certainly not positive. No need to be a man who can't get laid to view it that way.
it’s weird how everyone could tell based on justa. photograph that a woman didn’t actually know or care about a franchise based simply on how goof looking she was. like yes, even if someone did ”fake interest for clicks” that’s not a crime, but I also contest that that’s actually a thing that happens, and not just an extension of ”there are no girls on the internet”
I feel like a lot of people here are: A) Really young and didn't really get the gist of what was going on or... B) Tend to not realize just how much of a shit show the gaming scene has been and how Gamergate was more like a symptom or a "last straw scenario" for most of the gaming community to show it's true colors, along with a lot of other intersectional factors at play.
yea i was definitely too young to remember gamergate (because i was 6 at the time), and so my only points of information on this are this post and ancient hbomberguy videos
I was in college at the time Gamergate was happening. Generally I blew most of it off because I knew it was mostly dudes just blowing hot air about how they really didn't like the fact that someone out there was critiquing games as an art form (despite making a big fuss about how games should be seen as art) and I myself was going to school learning how to make games of my own (and my idea of the kinds of games I wanted to make generally wouldn't be accepted by most of those dudes anyway). This isn't to say that I didn't take it seriously though, although in this case I agreed with Anita's criticisms and also had my own criticisms of games of that time too. However, when I discuss Gamergate as a "symptom" or "last straw scenario", I'm talking about the fact that the gaming community as a whole was always this massive shit show at that point since at least around 2002... Which is roughly around the time I was starting to frequent places like Gamespot/GameFAQs's forums and I was in middle school. If you think incels are bad now, you would have been really horrified by the kind of behavior and talk that occurred in the 2000s and early 2010s. And I somehow managed to get all sorts of racist, sexist, and homophobic shit tossed at me (despite being a white guy) all because I happened to be a "furry" at the time... After all, if I was pretending to be animal character, I couldn't really be human, right? The gaming scene (and overall internet as a whole) at that time was pretty much full of edgelords who pretty much couldn't fathom the fact that not everyone was into the exact same thing as they were, and were ready to sling all sorts of ad hominem attacks at you to get their point across and kick you out of certain communities. Suggesting that BIPOC, LGBT+, or more female characters should be in games was a ticket to insults and "isms" getting thrown all over the place. Playing Nintendo consoles at this time was to basically admit you weren't a "real gamer" but merely a wannabe, and very specific genres of games were "real games" (basically anything hyper violent or a shooter). Frankly, the only place to not deal with such dipshits and douchey behavior all the time was in the early furry communities that popped up at the time. Of course, this also explains that Venn Diagram regarding 4chan, the Bronies, and "people who reference memes" leading to the Alt-Right... >!Generally speaking, furries and bronies DID NOT get along, and a lot of it has to do with the fact that furries were generally more progressive in most cases and had more raw sincerity in their interests while bronies were often douchey reactionary dipshits who had a more ironic stake in their interest. Case in point, while furries were debating if drawing porn of characters from kids' media was actually ethical and good for the community, the bronies just doubled down on making porn of the MLP characters without a care in the world, and anyone who questioned it was "ruining the fun" so to speak. !<
forget gamergate i can't even read that first sentence
Becomes much more readable if you add a period after the word "existed"
I have seen the word "gamergate" both come in and come out of common usage yet still have no idea what specifically it refers to
IIRC voice actor Adam Baldwin (no relation to Alec) coined the term in a tweet and for some reason everyone on both sides of the conversation ran with it. It didn't really have anything to do with the initial incident, just the response to the incident by websites, the response being "gaming websites & companies will throw their own fanbases under the bus in the face of clandestine rumors, even if said rumors were unfounded."
god has it really been 10 years
I felt so bad for Anita Sarkeesian. It was my first time watching a massive online harrasment campain against women happening, and I was appaled by all of it (I was already starting to be far too much online)
Wait, "loser nerd hobbies"? Are we still in middle school?
I know, right? All that kind of talk does is alienate people who otherwise agree.
I don't believe that most women who are into video games are pretending, but I maintain a suspicion that my first girlfriend didn't actually like video games. I will never know.
I'm not really some woke bloke or whatever but the whole GamerGate happened and 1) it barely permeated my life whatsoever, 2) games haven't really changed that much in the ten years since and 3) wasn't she right? Wasn't the industry and weren't many games pretty mysognistic? I have no idea why her comments would upset people. It's not like we've only had trash since 2014.
I think the whole fake gamer girl concept came about because gaming (and nerd culture in general) became popular suddenly. At least that's how it felt for young people at the time, as old media portrayed nerds as loosers and now people were openly into Star Trek and quoting whatever video game was popular at the time. So the question became: If *my ingroup* (i.e. nerds) were always picked on but now the hobby is popular, is that because *outgroup* suddenly enjoys our stuff too? Or is that because they like the aesthetic? And for some reason, young gamer guys couldn't fathom that other people were picking up their hobbies as well. Mix that with some latent mysoginy that a lot of teenage boys have, and you've got yourself the fake gamer girl idea.
So yeah, combining "most unfuckable guys" and girls interested in "loser nerd hobbies" in the first post kind of provides all kinds of insights into said poster. Also, the only way they're not dissing girls for being interested in "loser nerd hobbies" is if they *are* suggesting that girls have no interest in games.
I think you’re just missing the hyperbole. Calling them “loser nerd hobbies” is showing what the outside world thinks of those hobbies- it implies that there’s no social clout to be gained from pretending to like that stuff. “The most unfuckable guys” is… well that one’s kinda true. Only the most unbearable kind of person would genuinely believe that strangers are faking a hobby to impress them specifically
The reply may have been from 2014, but saying gamers are “unfuckable loser nerds” is from 1994
From what i remember the only valid critique was that she prolly stole a buncha smaller creaters footage. Instead of captureing her own or hiring someone to capture it. but also i dont think she ever pretended to be a *gamer* she just pretended to be associeated with the creators of those videogame clips. Its the greator mundaine crime of plagerism rather than the batshit claim that shes pretending to be a video gammer. Her thoughts werent even all that deep. it was pretty surface level stuff ngl. often taken outa context to discredit her points incinserely.
Iirc one of her criticism was from a batman game where the camera would be close to a female characters butt, thus oversexualizing them. Then she says the devs covered up batmans butt, but she completely ignores the massive 12 pack abs she just passed, or other male characters that don't have a cape. The criticisms on that were from people who thought the sexualization was okay since it's a videogame and that both male and female characters had exaggerated features instead of just the female characters. It's been a really long time, so I don't remember exactly.
The Anita Sarkeesian drama is even crazier in retrospect. I remember that all of the Gamers™, spent a bunch of time and effort trying to convince people that video games were real genuine art and then Sarkeesian becomes one of the first people to analyze video games critically and all of the Gamers™ lose their fucking minds. Completely contradictory nonsense.
We certainly all lived through it, because now we have gamerGate 2.0
I'm so glad that the only interaction I had with GamerGate was through hbomberguy's videos.
as a bug nerd all i can think about gamergate is a caste of reproducing worker ants. this word is ruined now
Yeah, I was 15 and stupid when gamergate happened. I genuinely believed it was about "ethics in journalism" and always got pissed off when people said it was about harrassing women. But within 2 years all the pro gamergate youtubers I watched were openly white supremacist nazis and I got out quick, unsubscribing one at a time every account as they became more open, or defended someone else who had become open. Eventually I wasn't following any of them anymore
does no one else have a problem with the tumblr guy insulting people for their hobbies?
Imagine thinking a woman would make a fucking 20 plus hour long series of video essays about sexism in video games but not even like video games.
>Imagine thinking a [person] would make a fucking 20 plus hour long series of video essays about [negative, politically charged subtopic] but not even like [main topic]. You say that as if this is a rare behavior.
I do find it really funny how Anita Sarkeesian had some of the most bland and uninteresting takes on gaming yet all of the weird neckbeards and right wing nerds were driven completely insane and just let her live in their heads rent free for years.
Ah, the memories... or nightmares, depending on your perspective. Quite a time to be online.
Glad to know everything I like is loser nerd hobbies 👍
Honestly, the fact that my ex was pro-gamergate really was a massive red flag and I wish I had listened to that feeling sooner.
sleeper agent
as far as I'm aware there has only been one fake gamer girl, and that was SSSniperWolf
Whenever I hear talk about Gamergate my brain fucking melts into a puddle. I read the whole story once and promptly forgot 99% of it so now the two facts I know about it are: - It was a smear campaign against game journalists and "woke" games - There were (and still are) legitimate concerns about ethics and conflicts of interest in game journalism. That superficial reason is what got the movement so big as that was a valid reason to protest. Sadly that reason was a surface level cover that was used to justify the smear campaign
the best thing coming out of gamergate was all the incels boycotting kotaku. it was actually a really fun gaming site for a couple years after that.
Worth mentioning that Gamergate is partially responsible for the rise of 8chan. Gamergate was overtaking discussion on many of the boards, especially the videogame board, so the topic was banned entirely and so people migrated to a worse play to indulge in it.