GamerGate at 10: What did it mean, and why do we still care?

Eron Gjoni just wanted to expose his ex-girlfriend, game developer Zoë Quinn, as a serial cheater.

The Zoe Post, the gossipy condemnation he posted on August 16, 2014, did just that. It also hinted that Quinn had used her sexual relationships with gaming journalists to advance her career. This lurid speculation quickly metastasized into a widespread consumer revolt/online harassment campaign that soon had its own hashtag: #GamerGate.

GamerGate's refutation of the leftist agenda may have amounted to little more than 'I don't care,' but to many on the left, that was enough to signal fascist insurgency.

A decade later, long after the original controversy has faded away, GamerGate continues to shape the internet in ways nobody could have expected.

'Ethics in video game journalism'

The series of events that played out between August and November 2014 is convoluted, multifaceted, and difficult to plot. There have been dozens of retrospectives, documentaries, books, and even a "Law and Order: SVU" episode tackling the issue, most blatantly biased to one side or the other.

"Ethics in video game journalism" was the rallying cry of the movement. It targeted the perceived progressive ideological capture of industry publications, which supposedly manifested itself in the preferential treatment journalists gave some of the game developers they covered. Within two months, #GamerGate had been tweeted 2 million times on Twitter.

Game developers, journalists, and commentators immediately split into two camps. One side scoffed at Gjoni's allegations as insubstantial due to timeline discrepancies. The woman involved may have cheated, but they argued that her personal relationships with journalists happened after they reported on her and didn’t qualify as journalistic malpractice.

Those who disagreed, many of them gamers, organized massive online campaigns accusing their opponents of corruption. In some cases this devolved into harassment; several major anti-GamerGate figures were doxxed, and one journalist was visited by the Canadian feds after being falsely accused of distributing child pornography.

'Gamers Are Dead'

Within two weeks, the gossipy bedroom drama escalated to a point where dozens of publications allegedly collaborated to release a series of posts known as the “Gamers Are Dead” articles. These argued that the gaming industry should stop appeasing the demographic leading the revolt: bitter white men angry at losing power and attention.

As Gamasutra’s Leigh Alexander wrote, “Gamer isn’t just a dated demographic label that most people increasingly prefer not to use. Gamers are over. That’s why they’re so mad. These obtuse sh**slingers, these wailing hyper-consumers, these childish internet arguers — they are not my audience. They don’t have to be yours.”

While some self-styled leaders of GamerGate abandoned it after a few months, others kept the controversy going, continuing to incorporate fresh accusations of corruption and collusion well into 2015.

Lasting impact?

A decade later, the major figures who gained from GamerGate have all moved on to new projects or focused on different culture war battles. However, the incident is still cited regularly to this day by culture warriors who see it as some sort of watershed moment. Merely searching “GamerGate” on Twitter is enough to find dozens of hours- or days-old posts from progressives continually complaining about its lasting impact. People refuse to stop talking about it.

GamerGate's surface-level impacts are fairly easy to list. It’s done serious damage to the video game industry’s reputation and fed into the decline of online journalism. Several online publications adjusted their ethics policies. It contributed to a schism in the online atheist community that resulted in a significant portion of the community shifting from anti-creationist advocacy to anti-feminist advocacy. It destroyed dozens of careers while launching conservative activists like Milo Yiannopoulos, Vox Day, Mike Cernovich, Ian Miles Chong, and hundreds of pseudonymous YouTubers.

Beyond that, GamerGate is widely viewed as a model for the past decade of online right-wing political activism. Edgy memes, irreverent trolling, and culture jamming — along with support from dissident sections of the internet like Brietbart, Wikileaks, and Infowars — took GamerGate to heights that hadn’t been seen before. Online conservatives have since tried (with varying effectiveness) to conjure up that GamerGate magic in later movements like ComicsGate, the Fandom Menace, the Manosphere, the Alt-Right, the Bud Light boycott, and GamerGate 2.

GamerGate's initial success was met with aggressive pushback from the mainstream media, including CNN, MSNBC, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Guardian, BuzzFeed, the Daily Beast, ABC's "Nightline," "The Colbert Report," and Gawker. The Southern Poverty Law Center declared GamerGate a hate group. Former President Jimmy Carter even mentioned GamerGate as an example of violence against women.

The blame game

As a result, progressives have come to see GamerGate as the source of every subsequent decentralized anti-progressive reaction. It has been blamed for everything from Donald Trump’s election, the so-called "Battle of Charlottesville," and the the rise of the QAnon, incel, and men’s rights movements to COVID skepticism, the January 6 "insurrection," anti-transgender backlash, the assault of Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Elon Musk’s Twitter buyout, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and even Johnny Depp's successful defamation suit against Amber Heard.

To quote a 2022 Axios report,

The far right learned from GamerGate and other online movements how to use social media attacks to achieve real-world political gains in ways that many key institutions — from journalism to government to tech — are still struggling to understand. … Steve Bannon saw firsthand the power of GamerGate while running Breitbart News. Bannon took notes from the gaming controversy as well as from movements on the left, like Occupy, to develop strategies to apply in mainstream politics in Trump's 2016 campaign and from the White House.

Wired rang in the 10th anniversary of the Zoe Post by arguing that its spirit lives on in contemporary Republican politics. “This same kind of anger and resistance can be seen now in figures like J.D. Vance and Elon Musk, who both decry 'woke-ism' in politics and culture broadly. In interviews, Musk has said that he was motivated to purchase X, formerly Twitter, to fight the 'woke mind virus' that he says is destroying civilization.”

'Kernels of hate'

One day following the January 6 riots, Vox traced the unrest at the Capitol building directly to GamerGate, then indirectly advocated for pre-emptive crackdowns on free speech.

It’s tempting to wonder if we could have stopped GamerGate before it happened, in the years before it coalesced into a systematized movement. Perhaps we could have quashed these kernels of hate with better forum moderation, more serious attention to the problem of misogynistic harassment, and less reliance on the longstanding twin internet wisdoms of "prioritizing free speech" and "starving a troll" until they go away.

Even as the specific events of 2014 fade from memory, GamerGate continues to live rent-free in many people's heads. As the pseudonymous Youtuber ShortFatOtaku argues, GamerGate marked the first time that the predominantly progressive online culture faced a serious culture war battle and partially lost. It traumatized a generation of online progressives, who compensated by spending the last decade spinning conspiracy yarns about how this event was the start of a violent reactionary insurgency that continues to spread to this day. This trauma response continues to haunt the progressive left, which can’t let it go.

Realistically, GamerGate was just the end stage of a decade of internal problems and ideological disagreements bursting in a relatively small online gaming community of tens of thousands of people. It is debatable how much of a real-life impact GamerGate had, given the limited cultural bleed-over between terminally online Millennial gamers and the Boomers who drove Trump’s success. Speaking for myself, a sophomore in college at the time, I was all but totally unaware of the event until years later.

'I don't care'

Key GamerGate figure Carl Benjamin, known online as Sargon of Akkad, reflected on the movement earlier this year. Revisiting the conflict after spending the decade starting a media company, building a family, losing weight, and earning a philosophy degree, he revealed that in hindsight he considers GamerGate to have been largely ineffective. Its attack on a malignant form of identity politics may have been well intended, but its disorganization, dearth of ideas, and overall lack of vision doomed it to failure — just as any movement modeling itself after GamerGate is doomed to fail.

Still, the demonstration that progressives could be pushed back against was enough to traumatize a significant portion of the left. GamerGate's refutation of the leftist agenda may have amounted to little more than "I don’t care," but to many on the left, that was enough to signal fascist insurgency. Moreover, newer post-liberal movements seemed to have learned from GamerGate's failings, whether they acknowledge its influence or not.

Those were the days

Ultimately, GamerGate may just have been the right scandal at the right time; the economic and demographic forces that propelled Donald Trump to victory over Hillary Clinton had been building long before the Zoe Post went viral.

Perhaps the attachment to this ancient contretemps is just nostalgia for a simpler time, both online and off. A visitor to our world from 2014 would confront an utterly disorienting political scene: warmongering Democrats and a Kennedy-endorsed Republican, with neither side able to come to agreement on basic matters of reality.

The hotly contested issues of GamerGate seem quaintly low-stakes now. "Ethics in game journalism"? What divides us in 2024 is far more consequential — and far more intractable.