> considering women playing video games only became socially acceptable a few years ago
What?
What?
I am sure some was valid criticism. I am not really a fan of "every game must be progressive", etc. but the fact men got mad that women dared criticize video games should say a lot about the state of the video game industry.
Not only that, but also, for a long time, video games just weren't marketed to girls at all. All video games catered to males and were specifically targeted as such.
It's mainly the Wii, Nintendo DS and Switch that were a big on-ramps for women into mainstream gaming. Even now, many men assume "female gamer == Candy Crush" or some other weird idea. Or joke that if you are a woman on a video game that you _must_ be a trap.
The misoginy accusations came later, and only then the whole thing morphed into a culture war thing.
Yes, threats happened, nasty stuff happened, but part of it was false flag too, for example Brazillian police arrested a Brazillian that was making death threats in the name of Gamergate, but also was making such threats in name of a ton of other random organizations, the guy just liked to see the world burn and was self-professed progressive.
The misogyny was the driving force from the start. The original 'Quinnspiracy', before it became 'Gamergate', was a harassment campaign organized around the blatantly false claim that Quinn had slept with a gaming journalist to get good reviews of her work (the only mention he ever made of her work was before they even met).
Around that time people were also upset with other journalists, the Quinnspiracy thing became just the straw that broke the camel back, and gamers weren't upset because she was female, they were upset because Kotaku kept making shitty articles.
The 'Quinnspiracy thing' was harassment and rape and death threats on blatantly false premises.
It is mostly true though. Of course all genres has some women but they skew very heavily in that direction. Strategy games etc barely has any women at all, especially the more complicated ones. Instead they mostly play puzzle games, and more social games like mmorpgs or story based games like rpg's.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_and_video_games#Genre_pr...
I don't have a full knowledge of everything, but I can say with certainty that there are several women who can clean up in AoE2 - even with its top echelons being male dominated (and a relatively non-toxic community from what I've seen). I think that women tend to go unseen intentionally in a lot of video games, avoiding mic use if possible and masquerading as men to avoid sexual attention and abuse.
That journalist briefly mentioned her work once (before she started dating that abusive boyfriend), so conflict of interest argument never made any sense, because... you know, he never actually wrote a review of any of her games.
It then spiralled even more out of control, targetting even more female developers for even more bullshit reasons. Brianna Wu was the target because she mocked Gamergate. Felicia Day was doxxed just for saying she was scared to even mock Gamergate (knowing what happened to Wu). Anita Sarkeesian for daring to kickstart a YouTube series about how women are represented in video games.
In other words, Gamergate was about absolutely nothing but misogyny.
My take is/was similar to David Pakman's: there's evidence of non ethical behavior in the videogame journalism and how the topic was handled, but so what? it's not really one of the greatest issues that plague mankind at this moment. With that in mind, I bear no doubt that the whole thing was astroturfed to culture war topic by right talking heads. But this is in my opinion mishandled on the left, as I dare to say most of the people following the event were not really involved in politics, and were fed a narrative by the misogynists and anti-sjw types.
I could very likely be wrong and have been misled about the core issue of Gamergate. Thanks for the kind correction!
What actually happened is pretty well-documented: a woman developer made a short game about dealing with depression to which various people then responded with rape and death threats; her ex-boyfriend lied about her sleeping with a gaming journalist in exchange for good reviews (the only things said journalist ever wrote about her work was before they met); and thousands of people then jumped on that as a justification for further harassment, doxxing, and wild conspiracy theories that persist to this day.
With that said, I'm not saying it was justified. Gamers are biased against women, yes. Gamers overreact and harass people who don't deserve it, yes. But they don't just harass any woman who publishes games, there are thousands of women who do that and nobody cares. It requires a spark, just like a twitter mob, and they become relentless attacking the target. And of course, if you accuse them of misogyny here they start attacking you, since they didn't attack her due to misogyny, similarly how when a twitter mob attacks a man with little evidence they don't do it due to misandry, they just attack someone they think did something wrong.
> instead of attacking her for cheating the game review system.
Again, he never reviewed any of her games, so unless your argument is that no game journalist should ever date any game developer under any circumstances, what system was she cheating exactly?
For example, lets say a twitter mob attacks a man for something he didn't do. Is that misandry? No, they did it thinking he actually did it.
Why does it matter so much to you whether or not 60%, or 59% of the people engaging in the harassment were sexist?
It is still bad, regardless if we get the literal exact percentage correctly of precisely how sexist each individual was.
Once again -- men got mad because a woman dared to release a game that didn't cater to their expectations or desires. That's Gamergate in a nutshell.