It's a six hour video but it's from a YouTuber whose content I like so I've decided to watch it. Neverknowsbest reads sources and gives an overview of what happened. Key takeaways: 00:49:28 Before...
It's a six hour video but it's from a YouTuber whose content I like so I've decided to watch it. Neverknowsbest reads sources and gives an overview of what happened.
Key takeaways:
00:49:28 Before Gamergate there were warning signs against overreaction to criticism and cliquey circles.
01:03:50 "If you don't allow legitimate criticism from within you encourage illegitimate criticism from outside"
3:41:37, 4:40:36 Journalists covering up the story, not reading source and clearly taking a side is appalling behavior. You really have to read everything yourself because apparently, not even media will. I wonder, can you even trust these people today?
The video is not about "who was right in Gamergate". It's about "how Gamergate was driven by media's inability to question Zoe Quinn".
05:42:28 The funniest thing in the video was lying about your own mother dying. Twice.
There's enough lessons here not to repeat something like Gamergate again but politics trumps over notions of accountability and fairness so it probably will happen again.
Ok, I'm just straight up debunking this right now: Gamergate was nothing more than a trolling harassment campaign against women born and fostered by 4chan. Every other mildly plausible discussion...
Ok, I'm just straight up debunking this right now:
Gamergate was nothing more than a trolling harassment campaign against women born and fostered by 4chan.
Every other mildly plausible discussion about it was fostered as a cover for it, entrapping otherwise well-meaning people into a hot mess of almost completely manufactured outrage.
I'll drop this as a counterpoint by the excellent Innuendo Studios: Why are you so Angry?
I say this as one of those people caught up by the "games journalism integrity" people.
And a personal note: This is not national policy or geopolitical events. It's friggen video games. Journalistic integrity is a joke, and it always has been. The stakes are virtually 0, especially with even a passing semblance of a return policy.
I mean, the stakes are not virtually zero, but they are very, very low compared to what gamergate became. Most movements, no matter how abhorrent, usually start with a tiny grain of legitimate...
I mean, the stakes are not virtually zero, but they are very, very low compared to what gamergate became.
Most movements, no matter how abhorrent, usually start with a tiny grain of legitimate grevience. Taking gamergate in its totality, it's safe to say it was a right wing, misogynistic movement used by racists, sexists, transphobes, and general far right people to push society in general further to the right, and is in large part responsible for Donald Trump being elected.
At the same time though, video games are the most lucrative entertainment industry in the world, and it's by a long shot. There are hundreds of billions of dollars floating around video games, it directly employs hundreds of thousands of people, and it wields massive cultural influence.
Journalism around it is as big of a deal as journalism around sports, movies, fashion, music, or tv. Is it as important as journalism uncovering political corruption or human rights abuses? No, but it still has a lot of influence on a lot of people's livelihood. It still matters, and in a perfect world, you could look into questionable conflicts of interests without it turning into a fascist firestorm that makes women fearful for their lives.
Games journalism follows basically the same standards as journalism in those areas. This is all called “enthusiast” press and depends entirely on the journalists having tight personal connections...
Journalism around it is as big of a deal as journalism around sports, movies, fashion, music, or tv.
Games journalism follows basically the same standards as journalism in those areas. This is all called “enthusiast” press and depends entirely on the journalists having tight personal connections with the people they’re covering. You think Anna Wintour isn’t getting wined and dined by fashion houses every minute of the day during Fashion Week?
If people wanted to talk about ethics in journalism it might help if they actually knew a single thing about what journalism is, or what ethics is, or literally anything at all.
I'd much rather discuss contents of the NeverKnowsBest video so if you disagree with any of the claims he made then please quote them. Gamergate turned into a culture war. The alt-right took over...
I'd much rather discuss contents of the NeverKnowsBest video so if you disagree with any of the claims he made then please quote them.
This is not national policy or geopolitical events. It's friggen video games. Journalistic integrity is a joke, and it always has been. The stakes are virtually 0, especially with even a passing semblance of a return policy.
Gamergate turned into a culture war. The alt-right took over and Trump got elected and we have to live with consequences of it to this day so I don't think the stakes are zero.
Journalistic integrity shouldn't be a joke then otherwise stuff like this is going to repeat.
It's a six-hour video. No one is going to put in that effort if they think it's bad. Plus, you provided a summary. That is open for discussion now that that toothpaste is out of the tube.
I'd much rather discuss contents of the NeverKnowsBest video so if you disagree with any of the claims he made then please quote them.
It's a six-hour video. No one is going to put in that effort if they think it's bad. Plus, you provided a summary. That is open for discussion now that that toothpaste is out of the tube.
In this case, though, it kind of is. Because it’s press releases and reviews about toys, not actual journalism. The expectation that it should be regarded as journalism is children on Reddit who...
Journalistic integrity shouldn't be a joke then otherwise stuff like this is going to repeat.
In this case, though, it kind of is.
Because it’s press releases and reviews about toys, not actual journalism. The expectation that it should be regarded as journalism is children on Reddit who don’t understand how the world works getting easily confused by ragebait.
The idea that people were sincerely outraged about Zoe Quinn beggars belief because she made a random indie game that nobody cared about aside from a few scenesters at Kotaku. The only lesson here is how easy it was to drum up people into having strong opinions about things that don’t matter at all and don’t impact them at all to the point of developing a social media psychosis around it.
That psychosis is what let Trump get elected, and pretending there is any legitimacy to the random outrage these grievance mongers gin up doesn’t serve anyone. We need to call it out as ragebait induced psychosis. Nothing at the bottom of it is real or worth caring about.
If it was simple then I think the video would be much shorter. It's split into sections so you can watch any particular one, or just watch what I timestamped or reply to one of my takeaways.
If it was simple then I think the video would be much shorter. It's split into sections so you can watch any particular one, or just watch what I timestamped or reply to one of my takeaways.
I feel like maybe we've been in this discussion before, so I'm not writing an essay here, but I disagree with both your opinion and your attitude towards the video. Maybe it's different in the US,...
I feel like maybe we've been in this discussion before, so I'm not writing an essay here, but I disagree with both your opinion and your attitude towards the video.
Maybe it's different in the US, but where I'm from the quality of gaming magazines and online media was always low in the literary sense, but they were relatively trustworthy and mainly it felt like the people who wrote for them were videogaming fanatics - certainly not journalists, not worthy of any literary awards, with a bit of an underdog vibe, but reasonably trustworthy and so it felt like they were one of us. (I no longer feel like I'm part of that "us", but I see nothing wrong with it either)
Gamergate revealed that for several big gaming media this is not true at all, they are not one of us, they are untrustworthy, they in fact seem to despise us and they form weird backroom cliques which they use to attack our culture.
That is the big issue. Zoe Quinn was just a red herring pretty much. Most GG sympathizers never harassed anyone, they just felt betrayed and angry because of firstly this discovery and then the completely one-sided coverage of the full blown culture war that ensued.
Also I find it quite frustrating how people are presented with a reasonable explanation for why GG happened, became so big so suddenly and never really vanished completely and instead of trying to learn from that their reaction is "no, this must be wrong, these people are evil and therefore no reasonable explanation may exist". Despite what I say above I would prefer something like gamergate to vanish and never happen again, but as long as the majority of people have this attitude, I think we're bound to repeat it.
I find it very hard to believe that everyone was just so upset to discover that a bunch of websites were trying to keep their advertisers happy. Something that wasnt exactly a secret, and not...
I find it very hard to believe that everyone was just so upset to discover that a bunch of websites were trying to keep their advertisers happy. Something that wasnt exactly a secret, and not really a big deal anyway.
I find it very easy to belive a bunch of turbo needs got mad that women were daring to stick their nose in their sacred hobby and jumped at the chance to be assholes about it.
It’s pretty much people stuck in that 2010s mode of progressivism.
I find it quite frustrating how people are presented with a reasonable explanation for why GG happened, became so big so suddenly and never really vanished completely and instead of trying to learn from that their reaction is "no, this must be wrong, these people are evil and therefore no reasonable explanation may exist".
It’s pretty much people stuck in that 2010s mode of progressivism.
It’s mean, no? I can look at the table of contents and reliably identify that anyone who takes the “the sacrosanct nature of games journalism has been violated” claim seriously is just blinkered...
It’s mean, no? I can look at the table of contents and reliably identify that anyone who takes the “the sacrosanct nature of games journalism has been violated” claim seriously is just blinkered and has no idea what they’re talking about. It’s clear that was the narrative used to gin up the hate and do the little motte-and-bailey thing, but it’s also clear that this was entirely made up bullshit to weaponize online troll mobs.
You don’t have to be a wokie woke to recognize when people all of a sudden having really strident opinions about a topic that doesn’t concern them at all and that they didn’t know existed 15 minutes before they got rage-baited into it is probably not authentic. And it’s not as if we haven’t had decade of processing those events and seeing the exact same dynamics play out about myriad different things since using the same playbook social media outrage mongers perfected during GamerGate. People lost their shit about Lizzo playing a flute. They lost their shit about having to wear masks or get vaccinated for a pandemic. We’ve been a decade into people getting ragebaited by social media into losing their shit and just repeating a canned line about some higher moral principle behind it that isn’t just a fit of pique.
Acting like “oh but we have to take the stuff they claim to be pissed about seriously though” is basically asking me to be stupid on purpose. We’re a decade into people foaming at the mouth over the most inane shit imaginable but we’re supposed to assume that the ur-example of this dynamic might have had a kernel of something legit underneath it and not just be an early instance of idiots getting wound up by rage-baiters taking advantage of social media algorithms to facilitate mass-cyberbullying?
It's interesting how your flippant dismissal displays the exact haughty attitude that this video tries to dispel. And you would know that, if you would have watched even the first 15 minutes of...
It's interesting how your flippant dismissal displays the exact haughty attitude that this video tries to dispel. And you would know that, if you would have watched even the first 15 minutes of it.
But you didn't. Because you think you know better.
They didn't watch 15 minutes of the video, but took it upon themself to open their "rebuttal" with "Ok, I'm just straight up debunking this right now". That's my problem! You can't debunk...
They didn't watch 15 minutes of the video, but took it upon themself to open their "rebuttal" with "Ok, I'm just straight up debunking this right now". That's my problem! You can't debunk something if you don't have a god damn clue what it is even saying!
Hell, the video is even in agreement with most of their points, but it bothers to look closer at the entire clusterfuck that is gamergate because simply saying "Gamergate was nothing more than a trolling harassment campaign against women born and fostered by 4chan" doesn't really explain why it got so big!
We've had harassment campaigns born out of misogyny before and since, but they usually don't blow up this much!
There is a universe where the niche topic of 2014 video game journalism drama for 6 hours could be interesting (something like /r/hobbydrama), but this is simply not that universe. Gamergate was...
There is a universe where the niche topic of 2014 video game journalism drama for 6 hours could be interesting (something like /r/hobbydrama), but this is simply not that universe. Gamergate was an artificially created culture war event that had its main purpose to destroy the lives of random women / feminists. It had nearly nothing to do with games, journalism or ethics.
Doing a "gamergate" video in 2026 and not having the main focus be on the harassment, the manufactured outrage machine and the destruction of countless people's lives is video essay malpractice at best and an attempt to further harassment at worse.
There's no way I'm watching a six hour video on virtually anything, much less gamergate. That said, I think there probably are interesting angles to examine how a drama post containing one little...
There's no way I'm watching a six hour video on virtually anything, much less gamergate. That said, I think there probably are interesting angles to examine how a drama post containing one little miniscule seed of a story (conflict of interest in a story about a virtually unknown video game) is turned into a cultural turning point.
"The internet does misogynistic harassment" is probably the least interesting thing about gamergate at this point. Partially because it's been covered to absolute death, and partially because we've seen the pattern repeat thousands of times since.
In 100 years though, that post could very well be seen as a hugely impactful turning point marking the American descent into open fascism, so examining the mechanisms behind that could be interesting.
That said, I'm not gonna watch a six hour long video to find out. This new breed of YouTube video essayists really need to learn how to edit.
Yeah, I feel like this could potentially be an interesting video to watch, especially since I didnt even really follow along with Gamergate the first time around. But six hours is too long a...
Yeah, I feel like this could potentially be an interesting video to watch, especially since I didnt even really follow along with Gamergate the first time around.
But six hours is too long a commitment for me to gamble, especially since it already seems like the spice factor of this comment section is starting to rise right off the bat.
By the time I finish watching the whole thing the comments will likely be too far gone for me to want to weigh in.
I think it was accidental rather than "artificially created". It didn't start with a thread: "Hey, let's harass some women today" but it snowballed from a lover's scorn story into a culture war....
Gamergate was an artificially created culture war event that had its main purpose to destroy the lives of random women / feminists. It had nearly nothing to do with games, journalism or ethics.
I think it was accidental rather than "artificially created". It didn't start with a thread: "Hey, let's harass some women today" but it snowballed from a lover's scorn story into a culture war. The hostility already existed but there's more that needed to happen for this to blow up. Let's see what the video says:
On the night of August 15th, Zoe Quinn's ex-boyfriend, Eron Gjoni, would make a 9,000 word post to Something Awful detailing their recent breakup. (...) it was quickly deleted and he was banned. (...) Eron then published this to WordPress instead
The earliest threads were on /v/, but moderators deleted them and would continue to delete them for days. So, discussion moved to R9K and then later the politics board. Neither of which seem particularly familiar with who Zoe is, but both had a strong dislike of social justice warriors. In the first R9K thread, there's almost no mention of ethics or corruption in gaming. Most seem to interpret this as a story about SJW hypocrisy and were fairly hostile to Aaron as well, who they also saw as an SJW.
Still, at this point, the story was spreading slowly. People in these threads were trying to change that, but the rest of the internet didn't have much reason to care that the creator of some small indie game had cheated. Yet attempts to spread the story did manage to spread the censorship. (...) it was censorship which drove the growth of this story. In its first days, people became angry over being censored. This acted as confirmation around existing narratives of corrupt press and SJW favoritism. The sense of a cover up made Zoe look guiltier. And all of this made more people aware of the original story through the Streisand effect. (...) even as the story grew, many places just doubled down on trying to censor it. Every large gaming forum outside of The Escapist deleted any mention of this event. Most 4chan boards deleted all mention with 4chan's creator later supporting a stance of total site-wide censorship. And many subreddits also deleted it for a while at least.
People did not like being silenced and it did not work. The story of a small indie game creator cheating didn't disappear. It became Gamergate. And along the way, it picked up momentum (...)
As the controversy grew, the controversy grew like a hydra sprouting new heads whenever one was chopped off, including pulling in pre-existing division over Anita's Tropes verse women in game series, which released a new episode around the same time. Still, it was the ethics in games journalism head that was the most important. You can see the rise of this narrative through the first posts in the R9K threads. The first shows no sign of games journalism. The second now mentioned Zoe having slept with journalists. And by the third, there's mention of a Kotaku member and the claim he reviewed her game, which wasn't true and wasn't something said in the Zoey post or by YouTubers covering this. (...) For many in the online gaming world, there was already a war between entitled gamers and corrupt press. And this was already connected to social justice warriors and their detractors. So, not only did this new scandal confirm people's existing beliefs, but it seemed to continually be proven true by all the censorship. Remember, the main politics behind this for most involved was anti-establishment anger at the people seen as having power online like journalists, SJWs, and forum moderators.
Internet Aristocrat's or Mr. Metokur's 18th of August YouTube video was the first big coverage of this and feels like a perfect distillation of what the Gamergate side believed and cared about. (...) This message would find an audience and far beyond just 4chan.
I'll form my opinion once I can finish the video. For people who are still doubtful I think this comment from the Reddit user should at least convince why this 6-hour long video about a...
I'll form my opinion once I can finish the video. For people who are still doubtful I think this comment from the Reddit user should at least convince why this 6-hour long video about a 10-year-old topic probably has something new to say. I'll quote here:
I am a leftist who has worked in media and progressive politics for about a decade. I watched the video. It changed my perspective from "hard binary" to "shades of grey" on the facts of what happened without turning me into a MAGA chud.
I think at his core, this is an egalitarian, left leaning person trying to uncomfortably sift through the skeletons in our cultural closet that no one wants to acknowledge in order to clean house and regain a moral high ground. Albeit there are also things in the video where I agree he over hammers the point.
I admittedly, in 2013-2014, was not as attuned to gaming journalism as much as I am now and 100% bought "our side's" "woke" narrative and have been outspoken about it ever since. This video made me realize, I never personally dug to the root of the issue beyond the names in the headlines and I have formed my opinion based on existing narratives that were breaking out of gaming world containment and into the political world around 2015. Heck, I've read multiple books on the gaming industry and politics since and even those didn't skim past the headlines of "CHUD gamers just hated that women were involved in gaming and 100% falsely claimed this was about 'ethics in gaming journalism' to try to cover their misogyny."
But from a journalist perspective, the ethics dilemmas laid out in the video are indeed a problem that remains unaddressed by "team woke" in this whole mess.
He's even charitable and acknowledges that these were young people in a new industry who probably weren't thinking hard enough about the ethics of not disclosing interpersonal relationships in their writing. The in-group power dynamics he discusses around the social circles of indie scene developers and the journalists covering them was like, "oh duhhhhh" once I saw the details laid out. What's described (with lots of evidence) is the same dynamic I've seen in every music, art, media, and journalism scene I've been around since I was a teenager: Don't speak up when the actions of someone with more power in the scene than you feel wrong, because you'll lose your slot on the totem pole and risk being ostracized from the scene/industry. Regardless of whether we agree with their political or cultural values, these are indeed cultural in-groups that people jockey for positions and power in. I've been there. The stakes and importance feel so hugely overwhelming when you're deep in it, even if it's not representative of a large amount of people.
This little in-group's ethical deillemas escaped containment because it happened at a rapidly evolving and strange time in internet history in a burgeoning art form that was less sequestered to progressive/liberal/academic corners than other art scenes who know not to mention the unspoken rules and power dynamics at play. I think that is a legitimate thing to critique.
What happened next is that both sides went insane and formed their own partisan narratives.
But "our side" had the bigger mainstream media and culture microphone (at the time... things have shifted a lot since then) and won over a certain narrative that was indeed full of truths about harassment, but shrugged off a lot of other details. The shades of grey I now see are an understanding that there were at least a few people at that time who saw those details being shrugged off and things worthy of critique that weren't 100% rooted in baseless misogyny. The right just did a good job leveraging something that began as minor, anti-establishment grievance into a bigger and more hateful campaign to help them win a culture war on behalf of an authoritarian oligarch class.
Offtopic, can we move pass this attitude of dismissing something just because it's too long, or criticizing somebody's position without having done the work of learning what their position is first? I find it ironic that it's a Reddit user who shows more nuance and understanding that we do here, given how the goal of this place is to have more thoughtful discussion.
It's such tired bullshit. Sorry, but it is. I'm not what I would describe as 'woke'. My response to gamer gate was at the time, and remains to this day: who fucking cares you terminally online...
It's such tired bullshit. Sorry, but it is.
I'm not what I would describe as 'woke'. My response to gamer gate was at the time, and remains to this day: who fucking cares you terminally online weirdos.
It was manufactured by the kind of people who are heavily invested into "streamer drama", trying to create a tempest in a teapot. Some people talk about GG as if it was an investigative journalist scandal at the center of a massive AAA game and the heart of game media when in reality we are talking about the review of a text-based fringe-of-fringe indie game and a very junior reporter (freelancer?) at a relatively small media company. Some people complain about censorship when the primary censors are actually unpaid moderators on 4chan and reddit who surprisingly actually knew better than to stand in the middle of a jilted lovers story. Again, who fucking cares you terminally online weirdos.
I know people are disagreeing with this heavily. And I agree to the extent that this was drama that got overblown. But, I do agree with the notion that there was this idea that we have to elevate...
I know people are disagreeing with this heavily. And I agree to the extent that this was drama that got overblown.
But, I do agree with the notion that there was this idea that we have to elevate and protect Quinn and other people like Anita Sarkesian. And there was this pretense that the progressive side of things was doing at the time. Which was to say they’re actually really smart, and Depression Quest was this masterpiece, and Sarkesian was a great cultural commentator. Eventually both figures were abandoned and everything got recalibrated, and now people pretend like a lot of that stuff didn’t happen.
It is interesting how big a story of an ex getting revenge grew.
Yeah. I remember reading the original Zoe post and coming away with it thinking 2 things: Zoe Quinn seems like a pretty shitty, manipulative person in the context of romantic relationships. But...
Yeah. I remember reading the original Zoe post and coming away with it thinking 2 things:
Zoe Quinn seems like a pretty shitty, manipulative person in the context of romantic relationships.
But more than that,
The guy who wrote it seems very immature and butt hurt about the whole thing.
Its funny looking back on it with the life experience I have now, and I think both of those things still hold true for me.
Still, I've seen a lot of commentary blaming the OP of the Zoe post for all of the fallout of gamer gate, and unless you're assigning clairvoyance to the guy, I don't see how there's any way he could have predicted the insane butterfly affect that resulted from his actions. Was the post immature? yeah. was it whiny? yeah. But it's something a lot of people would do in the same circumstances.
So yeah, Zoe is (or at least was) a pretty shitty person to her boyfriend back then, and the boyfriend was pretty immature and shortsighted for posting it, but gamergate became a gigantic toxic nightmare far bigger than either of their sins very quickly afterwards. Zoe bore the brunt of it, which she didn't deserve, but it's not exactly her ex boyfriend's fault either.
Neither of those takeaways have much to do with ethics in games journalism though.
It really seemed disproportionate, didn't it? It was explained to me at the time, and I remember being so underwhelmed and confused as to why it had grown into this behemoth.
gamergate became a gigantic toxic nightmare far bigger than either of their sins very quickly afterwards.
It really seemed disproportionate, didn't it? It was explained to me at the time, and I remember being so underwhelmed and confused as to why it had grown into this behemoth.
I mostly stayed out of it, but I never heard of depression quest or "ethics in games journalism" till it was dying down and people were trying to make sense of it. Everything I saw was "how dare...
I mostly stayed out of it, but I never heard of depression quest or "ethics in games journalism" till it was dying down and people were trying to make sense of it.
Everything I saw was "how dare these women come in here and tell us how to do video games". The sane response was "women are allowed to talk about games too and nothing they're saying should be that controversial "
Gamersgate was mostly about audience misalignment. It was a big deal in the vertical of "games media", which isn't that big of a vertical to be clear. In that 2013ish time, it was really the peak...
Gamersgate was mostly about audience misalignment. It was a big deal in the vertical of "games media", which isn't that big of a vertical to be clear. In that 2013ish time, it was really the peak of games media online, with ad revenue in a major bubble, and challengers not quite ready. Meanwhile, the population of people who played video games became increasingly working class and older as it got cheaper and more focused on adults.
You can tell the way the mainstream games outlets covered games changed afterwards, for better or for worse. It wasn't just gamergate, but that time was really the cataclysm for traditional games journalism. The ad revenue bubble popped, and alternate media like youtubers took much of the oxygen from outlets like IGN. It's been nothing but layoff after layoff, with no sign of recovery.
In that kind of environment, you can't afford to leave half of your audience pissed off at you, for reasonable or not reasons.
In a vacuum, its weird that gamergate is seen as this moment, because it's centered about an obscure game no one has ever heard of, and the conflict of interest at play isn't really that clear...
It wasn't just gamergate, but that time was really the cataclysm for traditional games journalism.
In a vacuum, its weird that gamergate is seen as this moment, because it's centered about an obscure game no one has ever heard of, and the conflict of interest at play isn't really that clear cut.
To me, the actual moment regarding an industry reckoning about ethical games journalism should have been one with a much more substantial story at its center: the firing of Jeff Gerstmann from Gamespot.
For those who are unfamiliar, Jeff was an editorial director at gamepot in 2007. He published a negative review of the game Kane & Lynch: Dead Men, a AAA game published by Eidos interactive. The issue for Gamespot was that they had just signed a marketing deal with Eidos, branding the whole website with a Kane and Lynch theme.
What followed was Jeff stating Giant Bomb, and a mass exodus from Gamespot by Jeff's colleagues over to Giant Bomb.
This was a real story about games journalism conflicts of interest, with real money behind it, and real careers impacted. It was a big story at the time, but not even close to what gamergate became.
If there was a real moment to examine gaming journalism, it was in 2007, not 2014. It wasn't about a woman though, and there was no salacious relationship story to go along with it. As a result, the real fuel for gamergate wasn't present: misogyny.
It's a six hour video but it's from a YouTuber whose content I like so I've decided to watch it. Neverknowsbest reads sources and gives an overview of what happened.
Key takeaways:
There's enough lessons here not to repeat something like Gamergate again but politics trumps over notions of accountability and fairness so it probably will happen again.
Ok, I'm just straight up debunking this right now:
Gamergate was nothing more than a trolling harassment campaign against women born and fostered by 4chan.
Every other mildly plausible discussion about it was fostered as a cover for it, entrapping otherwise well-meaning people into a hot mess of almost completely manufactured outrage.
I'll drop this as a counterpoint by the excellent Innuendo Studios: Why are you so Angry?
I say this as one of those people caught up by the "games journalism integrity" people.
And a personal note: This is not national policy or geopolitical events. It's friggen video games. Journalistic integrity is a joke, and it always has been. The stakes are virtually 0, especially with even a passing semblance of a return policy.
I mean, the stakes are not virtually zero, but they are very, very low compared to what gamergate became.
Most movements, no matter how abhorrent, usually start with a tiny grain of legitimate grevience. Taking gamergate in its totality, it's safe to say it was a right wing, misogynistic movement used by racists, sexists, transphobes, and general far right people to push society in general further to the right, and is in large part responsible for Donald Trump being elected.
At the same time though, video games are the most lucrative entertainment industry in the world, and it's by a long shot. There are hundreds of billions of dollars floating around video games, it directly employs hundreds of thousands of people, and it wields massive cultural influence.
Journalism around it is as big of a deal as journalism around sports, movies, fashion, music, or tv. Is it as important as journalism uncovering political corruption or human rights abuses? No, but it still has a lot of influence on a lot of people's livelihood. It still matters, and in a perfect world, you could look into questionable conflicts of interests without it turning into a fascist firestorm that makes women fearful for their lives.
Games journalism follows basically the same standards as journalism in those areas. This is all called “enthusiast” press and depends entirely on the journalists having tight personal connections with the people they’re covering. You think Anna Wintour isn’t getting wined and dined by fashion houses every minute of the day during Fashion Week?
If people wanted to talk about ethics in journalism it might help if they actually knew a single thing about what journalism is, or what ethics is, or literally anything at all.
I'd much rather discuss contents of the NeverKnowsBest video so if you disagree with any of the claims he made then please quote them.
Gamergate turned into a culture war. The alt-right took over and Trump got elected and we have to live with consequences of it to this day so I don't think the stakes are zero.
Journalistic integrity shouldn't be a joke then otherwise stuff like this is going to repeat.
It's a six-hour video. No one is going to put in that effort if they think it's bad. Plus, you provided a summary. That is open for discussion now that that toothpaste is out of the tube.
In this case, though, it kind of is.
Because it’s press releases and reviews about toys, not actual journalism. The expectation that it should be regarded as journalism is children on Reddit who don’t understand how the world works getting easily confused by ragebait.
The idea that people were sincerely outraged about Zoe Quinn beggars belief because she made a random indie game that nobody cared about aside from a few scenesters at Kotaku. The only lesson here is how easy it was to drum up people into having strong opinions about things that don’t matter at all and don’t impact them at all to the point of developing a social media psychosis around it.
That psychosis is what let Trump get elected, and pretending there is any legitimacy to the random outrage these grievance mongers gin up doesn’t serve anyone. We need to call it out as ragebait induced psychosis. Nothing at the bottom of it is real or worth caring about.
are you saying we must watch six hours of a video before we can respond to the simple situation?
If it was simple then I think the video would be much shorter. It's split into sections so you can watch any particular one, or just watch what I timestamped or reply to one of my takeaways.
I feel like maybe we've been in this discussion before, so I'm not writing an essay here, but I disagree with both your opinion and your attitude towards the video.
Maybe it's different in the US, but where I'm from the quality of gaming magazines and online media was always low in the literary sense, but they were relatively trustworthy and mainly it felt like the people who wrote for them were videogaming fanatics - certainly not journalists, not worthy of any literary awards, with a bit of an underdog vibe, but reasonably trustworthy and so it felt like they were one of us. (I no longer feel like I'm part of that "us", but I see nothing wrong with it either)
Gamergate revealed that for several big gaming media this is not true at all, they are not one of us, they are untrustworthy, they in fact seem to despise us and they form weird backroom cliques which they use to attack our culture.
That is the big issue. Zoe Quinn was just a red herring pretty much. Most GG sympathizers never harassed anyone, they just felt betrayed and angry because of firstly this discovery and then the completely one-sided coverage of the full blown culture war that ensued.
Also I find it quite frustrating how people are presented with a reasonable explanation for why GG happened, became so big so suddenly and never really vanished completely and instead of trying to learn from that their reaction is "no, this must be wrong, these people are evil and therefore no reasonable explanation may exist". Despite what I say above I would prefer something like gamergate to vanish and never happen again, but as long as the majority of people have this attitude, I think we're bound to repeat it.
I find it very hard to believe that everyone was just so upset to discover that a bunch of websites were trying to keep their advertisers happy. Something that wasnt exactly a secret, and not really a big deal anyway.
I find it very easy to belive a bunch of turbo needs got mad that women were daring to stick their nose in their sacred hobby and jumped at the chance to be assholes about it.
It’s pretty much people stuck in that 2010s mode of progressivism.
It’s mean, no? I can look at the table of contents and reliably identify that anyone who takes the “the sacrosanct nature of games journalism has been violated” claim seriously is just blinkered and has no idea what they’re talking about. It’s clear that was the narrative used to gin up the hate and do the little motte-and-bailey thing, but it’s also clear that this was entirely made up bullshit to weaponize online troll mobs.
You don’t have to be a wokie woke to recognize when people all of a sudden having really strident opinions about a topic that doesn’t concern them at all and that they didn’t know existed 15 minutes before they got rage-baited into it is probably not authentic. And it’s not as if we haven’t had decade of processing those events and seeing the exact same dynamics play out about myriad different things since using the same playbook social media outrage mongers perfected during GamerGate. People lost their shit about Lizzo playing a flute. They lost their shit about having to wear masks or get vaccinated for a pandemic. We’ve been a decade into people getting ragebaited by social media into losing their shit and just repeating a canned line about some higher moral principle behind it that isn’t just a fit of pique.
Acting like “oh but we have to take the stuff they claim to be pissed about seriously though” is basically asking me to be stupid on purpose. We’re a decade into people foaming at the mouth over the most inane shit imaginable but we’re supposed to assume that the ur-example of this dynamic might have had a kernel of something legit underneath it and not just be an early instance of idiots getting wound up by rage-baiters taking advantage of social media algorithms to facilitate mass-cyberbullying?
It's interesting how your flippant dismissal displays the exact haughty attitude that this video tries to dispel. And you would know that, if you would have watched even the first 15 minutes of it.
But you didn't. Because you think you know better.
They probably didn't watch the first 15 minutes because it's a six-hour video so even committing to 15 minutes seems wasteful for most people.
They didn't watch 15 minutes of the video, but took it upon themself to open their "rebuttal" with "Ok, I'm just straight up debunking this right now". That's my problem! You can't debunk something if you don't have a god damn clue what it is even saying!
Hell, the video is even in agreement with most of their points, but it bothers to look closer at the entire clusterfuck that is gamergate because simply saying "Gamergate was nothing more than a trolling harassment campaign against women born and fostered by 4chan" doesn't really explain why it got so big!
We've had harassment campaigns born out of misogyny before and since, but they usually don't blow up this much!
RTFA needs to be updated to include videos imo.
There is a universe where the niche topic of 2014 video game journalism drama for 6 hours could be interesting (something like /r/hobbydrama), but this is simply not that universe. Gamergate was an artificially created culture war event that had its main purpose to destroy the lives of random women / feminists. It had nearly nothing to do with games, journalism or ethics.
Doing a "gamergate" video in 2026 and not having the main focus be on the harassment, the manufactured outrage machine and the destruction of countless people's lives is video essay malpractice at best and an attempt to further harassment at worse.
There's no way I'm watching a six hour video on virtually anything, much less gamergate. That said, I think there probably are interesting angles to examine how a drama post containing one little miniscule seed of a story (conflict of interest in a story about a virtually unknown video game) is turned into a cultural turning point.
"The internet does misogynistic harassment" is probably the least interesting thing about gamergate at this point. Partially because it's been covered to absolute death, and partially because we've seen the pattern repeat thousands of times since.
In 100 years though, that post could very well be seen as a hugely impactful turning point marking the American descent into open fascism, so examining the mechanisms behind that could be interesting.
That said, I'm not gonna watch a six hour long video to find out. This new breed of YouTube video essayists really need to learn how to edit.
Yeah, I feel like this could potentially be an interesting video to watch, especially since I didnt even really follow along with Gamergate the first time around.
But six hours is too long a commitment for me to gamble, especially since it already seems like the spice factor of this comment section is starting to rise right off the bat.
By the time I finish watching the whole thing the comments will likely be too far gone for me to want to weigh in.
I think it was accidental rather than "artificially created". It didn't start with a thread: "Hey, let's harass some women today" but it snowballed from a lover's scorn story into a culture war. The hostility already existed but there's more that needed to happen for this to blow up. Let's see what the video says:
I'll form my opinion once I can finish the video. For people who are still doubtful I think this comment from the Reddit user should at least convince why this 6-hour long video about a 10-year-old topic probably has something new to say. I'll quote here:
Offtopic, can we move pass this attitude of dismissing something just because it's too long, or criticizing somebody's position without having done the work of learning what their position is first? I find it ironic that it's a Reddit user who shows more nuance and understanding that we do here, given how the goal of this place is to have more thoughtful discussion.
It's such tired bullshit. Sorry, but it is.
I'm not what I would describe as 'woke'. My response to gamer gate was at the time, and remains to this day: who fucking cares you terminally online weirdos.
It was manufactured by the kind of people who are heavily invested into "streamer drama", trying to create a tempest in a teapot. Some people talk about GG as if it was an investigative journalist scandal at the center of a massive AAA game and the heart of game media when in reality we are talking about the review of a text-based fringe-of-fringe indie game and a very junior reporter (freelancer?) at a relatively small media company. Some people complain about censorship when the primary censors are actually unpaid moderators on 4chan and reddit who surprisingly actually knew better than to stand in the middle of a jilted lovers story. Again, who fucking cares you terminally online weirdos.
https://i.imgur.com/rvcTAcv.jpeg
I'm actually a terminally online normie, I'll have you know.
I know people are disagreeing with this heavily. And I agree to the extent that this was drama that got overblown.
But, I do agree with the notion that there was this idea that we have to elevate and protect Quinn and other people like Anita Sarkesian. And there was this pretense that the progressive side of things was doing at the time. Which was to say they’re actually really smart, and Depression Quest was this masterpiece, and Sarkesian was a great cultural commentator. Eventually both figures were abandoned and everything got recalibrated, and now people pretend like a lot of that stuff didn’t happen.
It is interesting how big a story of an ex getting revenge grew.
Yeah. I remember reading the original Zoe post and coming away with it thinking 2 things:
But more than that,
Its funny looking back on it with the life experience I have now, and I think both of those things still hold true for me.
Still, I've seen a lot of commentary blaming the OP of the Zoe post for all of the fallout of gamer gate, and unless you're assigning clairvoyance to the guy, I don't see how there's any way he could have predicted the insane butterfly affect that resulted from his actions. Was the post immature? yeah. was it whiny? yeah. But it's something a lot of people would do in the same circumstances.
So yeah, Zoe is (or at least was) a pretty shitty person to her boyfriend back then, and the boyfriend was pretty immature and shortsighted for posting it, but gamergate became a gigantic toxic nightmare far bigger than either of their sins very quickly afterwards. Zoe bore the brunt of it, which she didn't deserve, but it's not exactly her ex boyfriend's fault either.
Neither of those takeaways have much to do with ethics in games journalism though.
It really seemed disproportionate, didn't it? It was explained to me at the time, and I remember being so underwhelmed and confused as to why it had grown into this behemoth.
I mostly stayed out of it, but I never heard of depression quest or "ethics in games journalism" till it was dying down and people were trying to make sense of it.
Everything I saw was "how dare these women come in here and tell us how to do video games". The sane response was "women are allowed to talk about games too and nothing they're saying should be that controversial "
Gamersgate was mostly about audience misalignment. It was a big deal in the vertical of "games media", which isn't that big of a vertical to be clear. In that 2013ish time, it was really the peak of games media online, with ad revenue in a major bubble, and challengers not quite ready. Meanwhile, the population of people who played video games became increasingly working class and older as it got cheaper and more focused on adults.
You can tell the way the mainstream games outlets covered games changed afterwards, for better or for worse. It wasn't just gamergate, but that time was really the cataclysm for traditional games journalism. The ad revenue bubble popped, and alternate media like youtubers took much of the oxygen from outlets like IGN. It's been nothing but layoff after layoff, with no sign of recovery.
In that kind of environment, you can't afford to leave half of your audience pissed off at you, for reasonable or not reasons.
In a vacuum, its weird that gamergate is seen as this moment, because it's centered about an obscure game no one has ever heard of, and the conflict of interest at play isn't really that clear cut.
To me, the actual moment regarding an industry reckoning about ethical games journalism should have been one with a much more substantial story at its center: the firing of Jeff Gerstmann from Gamespot.
For those who are unfamiliar, Jeff was an editorial director at gamepot in 2007. He published a negative review of the game Kane & Lynch: Dead Men, a AAA game published by Eidos interactive. The issue for Gamespot was that they had just signed a marketing deal with Eidos, branding the whole website with a Kane and Lynch theme.
What followed was Jeff stating Giant Bomb, and a mass exodus from Gamespot by Jeff's colleagues over to Giant Bomb.
This was a real story about games journalism conflicts of interest, with real money behind it, and real careers impacted. It was a big story at the time, but not even close to what gamergate became.
If there was a real moment to examine gaming journalism, it was in 2007, not 2014. It wasn't about a woman though, and there was no salacious relationship story to go along with it. As a result, the real fuel for gamergate wasn't present: misogyny.