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Comment by madamelic | Hacker News Reader

Look up what sparked Gamergate. It was largely based in men getting mad about women calling games out for being misogynistic.

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.

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That wasn't what Gamergate was about at all. What started it was first Doritogate, and later the Zoey Quinn and Anna Anthropy Business (both cases of women getting lackluster or bad games reviewed just because they had some kind of relationship with the journalist, Zoey her boyfriend accused her of seducing the journalist, and Anna Anthropy was roomate of journalist that covered her games).

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 misoginy accusations came later

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).

The guy that made the accusations was her former boyfriend, and seemly not a gamer.

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 became just the straw that broke the camel back

The 'Quinnspiracy thing' was harassment and rape and death threats on blatantly false premises.

> "female gamer == Candy Crush"

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 know what mmorpgs you've been playing but they hardly count as social games anymore. I used to play MUDs and those tended to be pretty evenly gender divided and all about that social aspect (at least the ones I played). MMORPGs today are closer to either the MOBA or an RTS with twitch based responses and tactical understanding being key to play at the top levels.

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.

My link contains a survey of 270 000 gamers on what kinds of games they play, I didn't base this on anecdotes.

If I remember correctly, the gamergate controversy was about a female indie developer dating a male indie game journalist. I can imagine why that would make people search for conflicts of interests.

This is like saying WWI was about the life of an Austrian royal. Yes, you might be technically right, but it grew so big and so many people were fighting for so many different reasons that the specific spark isn't that relevant.

Gamergate was a harassment campaign organized against women in gaming. It was organized by men who were assmad that a female game developer released a game with a mental health theme rather than the usual focus on skill and violence favored by men, to critical acclaim. Her dating and sexual history were brought into it because that is a common tactic used by men to undermine women and discredit their achievements.

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.

For anyone wondering, there was plenty of harassment, doxxing, and a number of rape and death threats against Zoe Quinn entirely because people hated her short game Depression Quest for being "political" or "not a game", well before the term 'Gamergate' or any of the 'ethics in journalism' conspiracy nonsense even came into the picture.

Sources for this, please?

The citations section of the Wikipedia article has literally hundreds from various reputable sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_controversy#Referenc...

Except the wikipedia article itself is pretty much one the single most biased accounts of the Event.

This is fascinating. I'll have to look into this more. From my brief understanding, there are multiple narratives of what "true" Gamergate is.

I could very likely be wrong and have been misled about the core issue of Gamergate. Thanks for the kind correction!

The post you're responding to is just repeating the same 'just asking questions' crap that led to the harassment campaign in the first place.

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.

Is there any documentation why people harassed her that isn't just speculation? The gamer culture works just like twitter mobs, they attack things for almost no reason and do it hard, harassment and death threats etc. There is no big plan or conspiracy behind it, just thinking that maybe she slept with some reviewer to increase her score is enough to trigger the hate mob.

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.

Speculation? Her former boyfriend wrote a blog post detailing their relationship (and lying that she slept with a game journalist, something he later said had no evidence of), someone posted it on 4chan, they tried to spin it as "ethics in game journalism" discussion (which never made any sense since he never reviewed any of the games she worked on). That's all there is to it, and it's pretty well documented.

You speculated about the motive of the harassers, not the actual chain of events. Nothing you say here says that the harassers attacked her for being a woman instead of attacking her for cheating the game review system.

She didn't cheat the game review system.

I didn't say she did. Hate mobs can attack people for things that aren't true, happens all the time. There is a reason why we don't use hate mobs in the justice system.

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.

I don't see what the big deal is that you keep bringing.

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.

I didn't speculate shit, I read those threads as they were happening. You know what they've boiled down to? She was a woman (with a couple of feminist takes), this dude made allegations against her, therefore let's doxx her.

> 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?

You put way too much credit in the intelligence of hate mobs. People attack others for nonsense all the time. And I don't view gender bias as misogyny. Women are biased to believe women and men are biased to believe men, that is just natural. So men accusing women leads to male hate mobs, and women accusing men leads to female hate mobs. Of course male hate mobs are usually more vicious, but the workings are the same.

Zoe Quinn's ex-boyfriend claimed that she was dating a gaming journalist to get good reviews. She was dating that gaming journalist, but the only things he'd written about her work were from before they'd met. Despite that, an endless parade of assholes on the internet immediately used that to justify harassment, doxxing, rape and death threats, hacking of accounts, etc.

The ex-boyfriend wrote a post about her infidelity. I have seen the claim that he constructed the story to maximize impact, but the fact that she cheated on him was not disputed. Also the other claim was that the positive coverage was made before they were dating, not before they met, you have to take their word that they were not involved earlier so that point is rightly controversial.

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.

Nope. Gamergate was about an abusive former boyfriend of a female indie developer stepping waaaaaay out of line, exposing details of their relationship in a blog post, while also claiming she slept with a game journalist (and then later saying he had no evidence of that).

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.

Gamergate started with the 'Quinnspiracy Theory' video series. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_controversy#Notes

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