You must log in or register to comment.
Fell for this initially but bailed out as soon as gamergaters started saying bigoted stuff about gay people.
Started as one thing and changed to something completely different.
Paid promotions are everywhere nowadays. Want your thing in a news article? Few hundred bucks and yahoo publishes your propaganda as an article. No mention of it being paid either.
There’s no ethics in journalism because there’s generally no ethics in business whatsoever.
deleted by creator
As firmly as I am on the left, watching GG happen in real time and seeing plainly the manipulation and lying the Literally Whos orchestrated definitely made me want to distance myself from both sides. None of that is in the Wikipedia article.
Yeah, GG was completely hijacked by misogyny and alt-right politics and absolutely fuck Milo and the other proto-Trumpist cunts that paved the way for that but the common narrative that it began as just evil gamers attacking innocent women for daring to exist is a blatant lie. Funny how the article mentions the sockpuppets but seems very certain that everyone doing that were definitely on the GG side, not the antis harassing themselves to have more ammo. People were caught doing this multiple times but it’s all been conveniently buried. There was a massive culture of fear built around being even slightly critical of anyone on the anti side so nobody without a significant established online presence dared to speak up. The article doesn’t mention the amount of death treats and harassment people who did speak got from the antis either. Because again, nobody dared to even acknowledge it, lest they be considered to be on the wrong side of the debacle. The natural consequence of that was that it was a whole lot of anonymous people flinging shit at each other, and the only safe option was to either be quiet, or be a vocal victim of GG. Like you say, many young men who were involved in it then found themselves warmly welcomed by actual neo-nazi shitheads that had been lurking on 4chan for many many years and of course, manipulating GG for their own ends as well.
Nobody is immune to propaganda.
deleted by creator
This always felt like to turning point for the decline of online discourse to me.
Yeah, the fact that Epstein was a fan of 4chan and hung out with moot makes everything about this moment make a lot more sense in retrospect
Same. 2015-16 is when I think everything went to shit. Gamergate. Brexit. Trump. The internet stopped being fun and turned into what it is now.
I remember this starting and just being confused. Somebody made an indie game, some people didn’t like the game, and her ex boyfriend says she slept with a guy who blogged about it? Why does anyone who’s not directly involved with the situation care?
Yes and the larger picture given was how SJWs (what year is it) were trying to police gaming.
I thought that was going to be the equivalent of Tipper Gore going after metal and hip-hop.
I do remember earlier moral panics about violent video games and music lyrics, but the suggestion that people trying to police political correctness in games was the same kind of threat seemed absurd to me.
On the other hand, the first Witcher game from 2007 has cards the player collects as achievements for having sex with female NPCs, and that doesn’t seem like something a major title in 2026 would do unless it was actively trying to be provocative.
Because gaming is a man’s space. The subset of men who believe that statement were looking for a reason to yell about it.
I was surprised to learn that many young men were that sexist. If anything, I figured gamer men would be glad to have more women around because it would increase their chances of getting laid.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Losers are exclusionist, no matter where you find them.
Gamergate was such a wild time. SJWs suddenly started picking apart games for anything they considered offensive. Now nazi-snowflakes are picking apart games for anything they consider “woke” or DEI. “hurrduur, it has one non-white, must be wOKe”. The pendulum has swung the other way and maybe in 10 years it’ll be back at “ermagerd, her b**bs are too big, that’s sexist!”.
I like “Nazi-snowflake”. I use “orange snowflake”.
One of the craziest parts in retrospect to me is Adam Baldwin (Jayne from Firefly (no, not one of those Baldwins)) is the guy who coined the actual term “Gamergate”
