Then you go on being sad, in your own deluded, pitiful way. Or learn about what is actually going on. Yes Virginia, women can be corrupt and shitheels just like men, and that goes double for liberals.
#GamerGate is a Twitter hashtag, a rolling discussion between tens of thousands of people. It kicked off after a scandal involving a video game developer and several game journalists broke. None of the major gaming press sites —Kotaku, Polygon, IGN, etc. — covered it, though many minor sites did.
Total radio silence from the big guys. This torqued some gamers off.
Gamers opined on the scandal and the silence, and found their comments censored, their threads deleted, and their accounts banned. (On both the press sites and general forums like Reddit, NeoGAF, and 4chan.) The radio silence of the majors was now coupled with an apparently coordinated effort to silence gamers.
At this point, there was no shitstorm. Then something funny happened. On literally the exact same day, sites like Kotaku, Gamasutra, Badassdigest, Polygon, and others all posted articles with substantially similar content and messaging: “Gamers are Dead”.
Not only were these gaming sites triumphing the death of gaming culture, but they were all saying similar things at the exact same time. (For reasons hard to explain, gamers suspected that perhaps collusion might possibly be involved.) And none of them were complimentary towards gamers. Here’s some quotes from the articles in question.
Regarding the scandal, gamers represented the side who “folded its arms, slumped its shoulders while pouting like an obstinate child”. (Chris Plante, Editor-at-Large Polygon.)
Gamers are “socially awkward weirdos who dress like garbage”. (Devin Faraci, Badassdigest)
“These obtuse shitslingers, these wailing hyper-consumers, these childish internet-arguers — they are not my audience.” (Leigh Alexander, Gamasutra)
Got that, gamers? This was how games journalists think of you, as infantile whiners, as socially awkward weirdos who get rejected by real women, and as idiots. . . .
Baldwin watched a video by pseudonymous Youtuber Internet Aristocrat (which you can see
right here). The video detailed the roiling scandal, the intimate relationship — literally, in many cases it was sexual — between gaming journalists and those they covered, and the extent that gaming journos worked in concert to shape coverage and suppress stories. It closed with an impassioned plea for gamers to take back their hobby and call dishonest journalists to account.
Baldwin saw the video. It pissed him off. He coined the #GamerGate hashtag, and tweeted the video to his followers. “Tweet it and they will come.” And the gamers came.
This is where damned politics enters the picture. The original scandal involved a female game developer, a staunch Leftist, allegedly doing some very unsavory things, like giving blowjobs for good reviews. (The allegations were credible but, so far as I know, were never corroborated. Internet Aristocrat’s video discusses the supporting evidence in detail.)
Those who defended her with the “Gamers are Dead” articles claimed that those who objected to her habits were — every single one – white men who hated seeing games made for women, hated women game developers, hated women’s rights in general, and indeed, were sexually frustrated straight, white, male virgins who just hated women.
This political dimension — crusading Leftists (labeled Social Justice Warriors, or SJW) versus the gaming community, many of whom are themselves Leftwing — was baked in from the beginning. This becomes important in a bit. Back to the scandals.
This same female dev was notorious for demanding more female devs in gaming. She then sabotaged the crowdsourcing campaign of a group of female devs, torpedoing their efforts to break in. Then, a few days later, launched her own fundraising campaign.
There was another related scandal, about journalists reviewing devs who they supported financially, via Patreon and other similar sites. These same journalists were giving positive coverage to those they financially supported.
Another scandal had broken, involving a different female dev who hired a female PR rep. The rep was sexually involved with the operator of an Indie games festival, and all of the rep’s clients won awards at the festival. (Six horny little scandals got together to play…)
