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Comment by madamelic | Hacker News Reader

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!

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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.

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