GamerGate: A More To-The-Point Summary

I actually started out against GamerGate, I can't speak to the intentions of those few people that were active within the hashtag from the actual outset of the tag itself.

And that's really the first point I want to start with. Twitter hashtags are just a searching facility, activity using that search facility doesn't have any endorsement from anybody else. It is irrational to condemn 'GamerGate' because it is not an organisation. 'Members' have no innate internal recourse to police other 'members' and so it would be madness to argue that they should have done so. As for external recourse; the link provided (below), among the blocks and blocks of text it explains that the majority of the community grouped together to identify and bring to justice some of the worst harassers.

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The second point I'll go into is that the vast majority of people who have come to the GamerGate community have done so well after the whole thing with Zoe Quin was just history. 'We', if I can dare to represent, are not involved with that event. More to the point, the actual momentum that turned GamerGate from merely a Twitter search tool feature into a movement and an identity was actually the reaction to criticism by the press: Censorship of genuinely unoffensive comments that happened to bring to light other matters of corruption, brought forward by people who thought these were also relevant. 

The most striking early scandal that I recall was I think called 'GameJournoPros' or something like that, a mailing list full of journalists who were colluding to an incredible extent. There was also, related (I think) the phenomenon (I forget when exactly) several news outlets released articles headlined something to the effect of "Gamers are dead!". These articles advocated that games publishers didn't need to listen to their customers, because the benevolent philosophers of the internet could approve their games for them (I'm being a dick for comic effect). 

The conclusion to this second point is that the 'rallying-cry' event had nothing to do with Zoe Quin, and the vast vast VAST majority of GamerGate do not give a flying pigeon about her work...


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As for the backlash, based on the public perception of GamerGate, here is an excerpt from this link:
http://deepfreeze.it/article.php?a=monster

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