Several game developers, scholars, and critics were harassed by users of the #GamerGate hashtag beginning in August 2014.[2] Threats particularly affected game designer Zoe Quinn and critic Anita Sarkeesian.[2] Some individuals associated with Gamergate accused the game research community of being part of a conspiracy.[3] DiGRA president Mia Consalvo considered the controversy an opportunity to further understanding of game culture.[4] Some supporters of Gamergate feared that politically correct video games were part of a broader effort to promote Cultural Marxism.[5] Several claimed that academics promoted Jewish or Muslim interests at the expense of white men, after the fashion of Anders Breivik's manifesto.[5] The GamerGate hashtag was used to spread misinformation and attempt to discredit game scholars, particularly Mia Consalvo and Adrienne Shaw, whom some Gamergate supporters saw as instigating the conflict.[6] The activity of Gamergate was not planned but emerged from the behavior of individuals reacting to limited circles of peers. Some individuals carried more influence than others, though this influence was communicated through second- or third-hand interactions.[7]
Gamergate appeared to begin as a harassment campaign against Zoe Quinn.[8] It was initiated by complaints about Quinn from her ex-boyfriend, Eron Gjoni, which he posted on forums at Something Awful and Penny Arcade.[9] According to logs, Gjoni's accusations were used by certain users of 4chan and an IRC channel #burgersandfries to stoke anger against Quinn. The chats also reference a prior conflict between Quinn and users of Wizardchan. The veracity of these logs has been disputed but not disproven.[10] When Anita Sarkeesian in the same timeframe released an installment of her video series, she also became a target of Gamergate-related harassment. John Bain (also known as TotalBiscuit) accused Sarkeesian of using the video to insert herself into the conversation.[11] A series of articles known as the "gamers are dead" articles were published by several outlets. The sharply-worded condemnations of gaming culture in these articles caused outrage, bringing more attention and participants to the nascent #Gamergate hashtag on Twitter. The volume of hate-messages increased following this incident.[12] Some of the leading figures in Gamergate, such as Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos, were not themselves gamers and had in fact been critical of gamers in the past.[13] Estimates of the number of Gamergate supporters ranged from 38,000 to 150,000 - a much much smaller number than the 155 million people who play electronic games.[14] A tool created by Randi Harper to automatically block Twitter followers of Gamergate figureheads blocked fewer than 10,000 accounts, including false positives, suggesting an upper bound on the number of such followers.[15] Regardless of size, Chess and Shaw considered Gamergate to be "an important cultural moment" with implications for the future of online society.[16]
The #Gamergate hashtag was coined on August 27, 2014 by actor Adam Baldwin in a tweet that linked to a video by YouTube user "Internet Aristocrat". Activists both supporting and opposing Gamergate agree however that the origins of the conflict lie earlier.[17] According to a wiki maintained by supporters, the earliest relevant incident was the controversial firing of Jeff Gerstmann in 2007.[18] Following up on Gjoni's allegations, John Bain examined close relationships between game companies and journalists, justifying the framing of the issue as a matter of journalism ethics.[19] Yiannopoulos revealed that approximately a week before the publication of the "gamers are dead" articles, journalists using a mailing list had discussed giving public support to Quinn. Some in Gamergate saw this as evidence of collusion.[20] In the principal representative of these articles, Leigh Alexander wrote not that "gamers are dead", but rather "gamers are over", referring to the fact that self-identified gamers are a small subset of people who play games. While not using the term "Gamergate" - a name only a day old at the time - Alexander referred to the same movement by writing, "people who know so little about how human social interaction and professional life works that they can concoct online ‘wars’ about social justice or ‘game journalism ethics,’ straight-faced, and cause genuine human consequences."[21] A wiki maintained by opponents of Gamergate focused on Gjoni and his personal allegations against Quinn. Following online and offline threats against her, Quinn lived in hiding throughout the autumn of 2014.[22] Because of the effects on Quinn, media reactions tended to align with critics of Gamergate who called it a harassment campaign. Some individuals writing from an academic background have however disagreed with this framing, such as feminist Christina Hoff Summers or New Mexico University professor Nick Flor.[23]
Gamergate was not a unified group. Many who argued in support of it did not know its origins or disagreed with the more aggressive tactics employed on its behalf.[24] Some participants used "sockpuppet" accounts to argue from multiple sides of the issue. [25] Outsiders to the movement used the hashtag to engage in harassment or to discredit the tag.[26] Women and men in the Gamergate movement were vulnerable to harassment. The extent of that harassment is obscured by the social norm within the movement that one should not publicize the harassment received.[27] The anti-Gamergate forum Gamerghazi was sometimes a cause of Twitter "dogpiling", which the forum's moderators took steps to mitigate.[28] People participating in Gamergate tended to maintain anonymity out of recognition they could suffer negative repercussions from being identified.[29] Gamergate opponents such as Sarkeesian, Quinn, game developer Brianna Wu, and actress Felicia Day were doxxed early in the controversy.[30] Doxxing can have consequences ranging from unwanted pizza deliveries to hoax SWAT raids. Although very few people were likely involved in these sorts of pranks, they could effectively terrorize victims. [31] The anonymous nature of Gamergate was a double-edged sword when it came to attributing responsibility for doxxing and harassment. On the one hand, it was difficult to prove these were actions of genuine supporters. On the other hand, it was difficult to prove that they were not.[32] Drawing the attention of Gamergate carried risks that might be expected in general of ethnography but less so of digital media studies.[33] There are prior examples of gamers doxxing game developers and producers who drew their ire, along with targeting journalists reporting on them.[34]
Online aggression against journalists is not characteristic only of Gamergate, but also of the imageboard culture it inhabits.[34] Imageboard culture encourages anonymity as a means to privileging the merit of an argument over the identity of the speaker.[35] Freedom of speech on imageboards can facilitate valuable creativity and activism, especially for ideas marginalized by the mainstream[36] However, norms against taking offense to others' speech also tend to silence objections to overt racism and sexism.[37] Doxxing is sometimes used as a tool of imageboard culture norm enforcement, for example as in the case of Sarah Nyberg, a former troll who was doxxed after becoming critical of Gamergate.[38] Imageboard software regularly purges its forums, making content there relatively ephemeral.[39] Ideally, this aspect of the boards would cause false or misleading information to be discarded. In practice, entertaining lies may be much more persistent than boring or unpleasant rebuttals.[40] Information on the Internet is rarely lost forever, as illustrated by images of Quinn from an adult photo shoot that were located and redistributed.[41] Quinn identified with imageboard culture, musing that she would have been on the same side as Gamergate had it happened to target someone else.[42] Her familiarity with these forums allowed her to access and record logs of discussions of her harassment that otherwise would not have become public.[42]
Gamergate bears some parallels with football hooligan culture.[43] Gamergate devalued traits deemed as feminine, though they did value women in the movement.[44] The hashtag #NotYourShield, started by an African-American 4chan poster, was meant to showcase women and minorities who disagreed with media framing of diverse representation in games.[45] There were also instructions given on how white men could support the tag with sockpuppet accounts.[46] Gamergate has provided a bonding experience for participants, including through real-life meetups. Photos of these occasions show predominantly white men, but include some women and racial minorities.[47] Women in Gamergate defended sexual imagery and depictions of violence against women found in games.[48] Gamergate members see themselves as victims, in that they belong to a persecuted subculture.[49] During the 1990's, mainstream media generally regarded gaming as merely childish, apart from moral panics linking games to mass shootings.[50] The article by Alexander reiterated these stereotypes of gamers as being dangerously aggressive or socially inept.[51] Although the pastime has become more accepted, experience had primed gamers to be defensive.[52]
Supporters of Gamergate commonly hold suspicions that Quinn and Sarkeesian have profited financially from the controversy.[53] Although it does not justify the abuse these women received, that interpretation is correct inasmuch as public sympathy brought them opportunities they would not otherwise have had.[54] The controversy was also a financial windfall for crowdfunded creators of pro-Gamergate commentary. These included Jordan Owen and David Aurini working on the documentary The Sarkeesian Effect, YouTubers Thunderf00t and Sargon of Akkad, and the "Honey Badger Brigade" (a group of female Mens' Rights Activists).[55] Jay Allen called this trend examples of "professional victimizers".[56] The socioeconomic status of many participants in Gamergate means they are "punching down" when targeting freelancing women.[57] Others however are relatively disadvantaged and fear that criticism of game communities could undermine a source of social support.[58]
Though Gamergate might be regarded as illogical and confusing, it is not an isolated phenomenon. The controversy and the people in it are embedded throughout all types of social media interaction.[58] It was an object lesson in how the design of technological systems can suppress speech or create ideological echo chambers.[59] The diversity of opinions on the topic confirms that game players are not a single demography.[60]
- ^ Mortensen, Torill Elvira (2016). "Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate". Games and Culture. doi:10.1177/1555412016640408.
- ^ a b Mortensen, Torill Elvira (2016). "Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate". Games and Culture. doi:10.1177/1555412016640408.
August/September 2014 saw the rise of the hashtag #GamerGate (GG) on Twitter. GG users had harassed and threatened several people engaged with games; journal-ists, designers, scholars, and critics, mainly targeting game designer Zoe Quinn (K. Stuart, 2014) and critic Anita Sarkesian (Wingfield, 2014); and the people who stood up for them.
- ^ Mortensen, Torill Elvira (2016). "Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate". Games and Culture. doi:10.1177/1555412016640408.
GG was a surprise to the game research community for the conspiracy accusa-tions against researchers (Chess & Shaw, 2015; Sargon of Akkad, 2014), and because it targeted what might be a preference in game studies toward identifying as gamers.
- ^ Mortensen, Torill Elvira (2016). "Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate". Games and Culture. doi:10.1177/1555412016640408.
DiGRA president Mia Consalvo's response to the conspiracy accusations was, Ironically, Gamergate will help create more knowledge (Straumsheim, 2014). This is perhaps the best reason for the game research community to care about GG. It is a unique chance to understand more about games and their culture. It exemplifies how certain structures of online media facilitate echo chambers and harassment, and it may contribute to the general understanding of Internet research.
- ^ a b Mortensen, Torill Elvira (2016). "Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate". Games and Culture. doi:10.1177/1555412016640408.
They adopted ideas from the extreme right wing in the fear of the so-called Cultural Marxism, as can be seen from the video by Sargon of Akkad (2014) cited by Chess and Shaw (2015) but also from several different sources more or less in favor of GG (Bokhari, 2015; Cross, 2015; Frye, 2014; Orselli, 2014; SilverwolfCC, n.d.; L. Stuart, 2014; Wolfshead, 2015), ranging from Breitbart.com, the news site most in favor of GG, to random and anonymous bloggers. Several GG'ers embraced this conspiracy, and claimed Jews and western academics have joined forces to pacify White men, and planned to hand the power of the western world to the Jews or Islam by encouraging politically correct digital games, reso-nating with the claims against Cultural Marxists made by the killer Anders Behring Breivik in his manifesto (J. Wilson, 2015).
- ^ Mortensen, Torill Elvira (2016). "Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate". Games and Culture. doi:10.1177/1555412016640408.
Between August 2014 and 2015, the GG hashtag was used to spread misinforma-tion about game studies (Unknown, 2014b), and efforts were made to discredit game scholars (The Leader of Gamergate, 2014). GG has been used to stalk female game scholars, such as DiGRA president Mia Consalvo and game and gender scholar Adrienne Shaw, both repeatedly used as examples of writers who started the unrest causing the hashtag (IHE_Carl, 2014; Sargon of Akkad, 2014) and opposition to GG caused my own dox on the 8chan subboard /baphomet.
- ^ Mortensen, Torill Elvira (2016). "Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate". Games and Culture. doi:10.1177/1555412016640408.
GG consisted of individuals not formally organized nor entirely aware of what was happening around them, but who acted in accordance with the individuals they could perceive in their online proximity. Like a swarm, their behavior was not determined by a clear plan but was given direction by the actions of some core individuals, often perceived at second or third hand, through the reactions of others in the swarm.
- ^ Mortensen, Torill Elvira (2016). "Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate". Games and Culture. doi:10.1177/1555412016640408.
As far as it is possible to tell, GG started as a harassment campaign aimed at developer Zoe Quinn,
- ^ Mortensen, Torill Elvira (2016). "Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate". Games and Culture. doi:10.1177/1555412016640408.
Gjoni was drumming up sympathy for himself, justifying his anger through telling stories about Quinn in comments (later deleted) at forums Something Awful and Penny Arcade (2014c).
- ^ Mortensen, Torill Elvira (2016). "Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate". Games and Culture. doi:10.1177/1555412016640408.
It was discussed on the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel #burgersandfries (Unknown, 2014c), and while the available chat log has been disputed, it has so far not been disproved. According to this chat log Gjoni also posted on 4chan, and the stories he had been telling in his blog The Zoe Post (2014a) were refined and used to fuel the anger of members of these different forums. This log also indicates previous disagreements between Quinn and members of another image board, wizardchan.
- ^ Mortensen, Torill Elvira (2016). "Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate". Games and Culture. doi:10.1177/1555412016640408.
Included in the chat log is Anita Sarkeesian, as it coincided with the release of her video Women as background decoration II (2014), a feminist reading of women's representation in digital games. Soon Sarkeesian was included in the GG attacks. Sarkeesian was later accused by John Bain (also known as [aka] The Cynical Brit aka TotalBiscuit) of having inserted herself into the conversation (2014) by publishing this video.
- ^ Mortensen, Torill Elvira (2016). "Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate". Games and Culture. doi:10.1177/1555412016640408.
The barrage of hate messages online and off-line increased when a group of journal-ists wrote articles questioning gamer identity, the so-called gamers are dead articles (Alexander, 2014; J. Bernstein, 2014; Chu, 2014; Golding, 2014; Johnston, 2014a; Luke Plunkett, 2014; O'Rourke, 2014; Pearl, 2014; Plante, 2014; D. Wilson, 2014). Some of these articles are sharply worded, and the outrage that followed brought more attention and more participants to the case, now mustering behind GG on Twitter.
- ^ Mortensen, Torill Elvira (2016). "Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate". Games and Culture. doi:10.1177/1555412016640408.
Some of the lead actors were not gamers and had previously been deliberately critical of gamers, such as online writer Milo Yiannopoulos (2014a).
- ^ Mortensen, Torill Elvira (2016). "Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate". Games and Culture. doi:10.1177/1555412016640408.
Despite their claim to represent all gamers—there are 155 million players of digital games registered by the Entertainment Software Association (2015) just in the United States—GG was mainly important to a relatively small group of the online community engaged with image board activism. The real size of GG is contested and hard to establish. Chris von Csefalvay published several studies both on the size and on the content of GG (2014), and his work was received warmly by GG. He estimated that GG had approximately 150,000 members (Unknown, 2015), but the article with the analysis is currently unavailable, along with his blog. Another quantitative study of GG was made in October 2014, when Newsweek hired Brandwatch to look at tweets tagged with GG (Wofford, 2014a). This study did, however, not address the size of GG, only their level of activity and the quality of the content. A study that does address the size was done by Andy Baio, and it shows that over the 3-day period he used for his study, 38,630 user accounts posted to the hashtag (Baio, 2014). Of other numbers we can see that KotakuInAction, the GG board on Reddit, has 55,332 followers (January 2016).
- ^ Mortensen, Torill Elvira (2016). "Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate". Games and Culture. doi:10.1177/1555412016640408.
The automatic Twitter blocker created by Randi Harper to block GG members from your personal Twitter account blocked between 9 and 10,000 accounts in 2014 (Wofford, 2014b), and it contained several false positives. This hints that less than 10,000 users followed the core actors of GG on Twitter and not all of these did so because they agreed with the ideas.
- ^ Mortensen, Torill Elvira (2016). "Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate". Games and Culture. doi:10.1177/1555412016640408.
Disregarding size, researchers Shira Chess and Adrienne Shaw describe the GG event as an important cultural moment (2015, p. 209), and I agree. GG offers a unique lesson for the future in a society where the limits between private and public are shifting,
- ^ Mortensen, Torill Elvira (2016). "Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate". Games and Culture. doi:10.1177/1555412016640408.
The hashtag GG was coined by actor Adam Baldwin in a tweet linking to a later removed YouTube video by Internet Aristocrat, August 27, 2014 (Gamergate Wiki, 2014). However, Gamergate Wiki and the Wiki curated by critics of GG, Gamerghazi Wiki (2014), both agree that this conflict started before the hashtag was coined.
- ^ Mortensen, Torill Elvira (2016). "Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate". Games and Culture. doi:10.1177/1555412016640408.
According to the GG wiki the conflict dated back to 2007, and it was about ethics in games journalism: "Game reviewer and editorial director Jeff Gerstmann is fired from his position at GameSpot closely following his negative review of Eidos Interactive's game Kane and Lynch: Dead Men."
- ^ Mortensen, Torill Elvira (2016). "Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate". Games and Culture. doi:10.1177/1555412016640408.
John Bain followed up the ethics in games journalism claim. With more than 400,000 Twitter followers and 2 million YouTube subscribers his support carried weight in the gaming community. His own criticism of the tight connections between game companies and game journalists, exposed in October 2014 (Kain, 2014), justified the ethics in games journalism argument. These justifications came after Gjoni's accusations of Quinn having slept with five journalists for reviews of her game—an accusation later amended to favorable coverage when it was clear that the reviews did not exist.
- ^ Mortensen, Torill Elvira (2016). "Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate". Games and Culture. doi:10.1177/1555412016640408.
Breitbart.com writer Yiannopoulos had access to an e-mail list for game journalists, and under a heading mentioning gaming journalism elite in September, he exposed that the journalists had wanted to do something to support Zoe Quinn (Yiannopoulos, 2014b). The e-mail to the list was dated August 19, more than a week before the articles on gamer identity started appearing online; and confirmed what GG saw as collusion.
- ^ Mortensen, Torill Elvira (2016). "Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate". Games and Culture. doi:10.1177/1555412016640408.
However, Leigh Alexander doesn't use that term in Gamasutra August 28th (2014) but claims that gamers are over. She discusses how gamer may not be the best word to use when describing people who play digital games. This article clearly referred to the movement Baldwin the day before had dubbed GG: "'Games culture' is a petri dish of people who know so little about how human social interaction and professional life works that they can concoct online 'wars' about social justice or 'game journalism ethics,' straight-faced, and cause genuine human conse-quences. Because of video games." (Alexander, 2014) Alexander and other writers in game and tech media wrote about the problem with gamer as a demography describing people engaging with digital games. Disregard-ing a connection to the accusations against Zoe Quinn, the common point of these articles was the great distance between people who happen to play games and people who identify as gamers.
- ^ Mortensen, Torill Elvira (2016). "Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate". Games and Culture. doi:10.1177/1555412016640408.
The Gamerghazi Wiki focuses on Eron Gjoni, and the timeline links to examples of his bids for support to attack Quinn. One of these is an archived version (Gjoni, 2014b) of The Zoe Post (Gjoni, 2014a). In this post he introduces the five guys claims of Quinn having sex for reviews. Gjoni, at the time of writing under a restraining order concerning Quinn, later retracted the claims. But the original claims kept being repeated, citing the now removed video by the Internet Aristocrat (TheMalesOfGames, 2014). In response to the flood of online and off-line aggres-sion toward Quinn and her family, Quinn left her home and lived in hiding for the entire autumn of 2014 (K. Stuart, 2014).
- ^ Mortensen, Torill Elvira (2016). "Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate". Games and Culture. doi:10.1177/1555412016640408.
This caused the critics of GG to name it a harassment campaign against women. The evidence available in the mainstream media as well as from logs of discus-sions on IRC channels and archives from 4chan (Johnston, 2014b) favors the critics' point of view. There are still voices from an academic background that disagree strongly, such as feminism critic Christina Hoff Summers, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and known by GG as based mom, who has sup-ported GG since September 2014 (Growcott, 2014), and Nick Flor, associate pro-fessor at New Mexico University,
- ^ Mortensen, Torill Elvira (2016). "Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate". Games and Culture. doi:10.1177/1555412016640408.
It is vital to keep in mind that GG was not a unified group—the individuals of the swarm were not the whole. Many of those arguing strongly in favor of GG never knew how it had started, where the different operations were planned, and never agreed to the aggressive methods used since the beginning of the campaign.
- ^ Mortensen, Torill Elvira (2016). "Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate". Games and Culture. doi:10.1177/1555412016640408.
A person could argue in favor of GG ideas in one instance and against them in another, agree with one part of the argument but not another, or argue with themselves from different sock puppet accounts. One notorious example was Joshua Goldberg, one of the more prolific participants in the GG discussions (Damion Schubert, 2015),
- ^ Mortensen, Torill Elvira (2016). "Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate". Games and Culture. doi:10.1177/1555412016640408.
Outsiders used the hashtag to discredit it, to harass others from the anonymity of a mob, or to attack GG'ers.
- ^ Mortensen, Torill Elvira (2016). "Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate". Games and Culture. doi:10.1177/1555412016640408.
Using the GG hashtag or agreeing with other gamergaters did not guarantee freedom from harassment, neither from GG nor from others. The women of GG were vulnerable to this, same as some of the male personalities. It is however difficult to determine the extent of the GG claims of harassment. They followed their own policy for online harassment, which included not admitting to it, and not involving the police.
- ^ Mortensen, Torill Elvira (2016). "Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate". Games and Culture. doi:10.1177/1555412016640408.
Still, there were examples of dogpiling on Twitter if an account had been linked from the Gamerghazi forum. This caused moderators to change and restrict posting policies several times in attempts to avoid causing harassment.
- ^ Mortensen, Torill Elvira (2016). "Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate". Games and Culture. doi:10.1177/1555412016640408.
Another important aspect is how GG emphasized anonymity. GG Twitter users expressed the danger of using their real names, as that would cause people to attack them. (...) This fear of being exposed demonstrated a realistic understanding of the online culture GG belonged to and was understandable in light of what happened regularly to the opponents of GG.
- ^ Mortensen, Torill Elvira (2016). "Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate". Games and Culture. doi:10.1177/1555412016640408.
Zoe Quinn, feminist critic Anita Sarkeesian (Wingfield, 2014), and game developer, Brianna Wu (Reid, 2014), were doxed early on and received protection or left their homes. Actor Felicia Day wrote about her sense of estrangement from the gaming community due to the fear GG generated (2014) and was promptly doxed (Hern, 2014).
- ^ Mortensen, Torill Elvira (2016). "Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate". Games and Culture. doi:10.1177/1555412016640408.
When this game was played as a prank, the doxed person would receive pizzas they had never ordered (Phillips, 2015, p. 61) or weird magazine subscriptions. GG's critics received groups of fully armed police officers ready to break down doors and shoot the people inside in what is known as SWATing (Hern, 2015). Several critics of GG were swatted or attempted swatted. It may have been the work of just one or two persons, such as the 17-year-old member of the lizard squad, who was swatting and terrorizing girls who turned him down online (Harrison, 2015) but the threat was an efficient terror tactic.
- ^ Mortensen, Torill Elvira (2016). "Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate". Games and Culture. doi:10.1177/1555412016640408.
The swarm nature of GG, with anonymous participants and active denial using the no true Scotsman fallacy (Dowden, n.d.), made it hard to prove that GG was behind doxing. They claimed no affiliation to the /baphomet doxing board, and when a person had something unpleasant happen to him or her after he or she had spoken out against GG, GG would claim no responsibility. No true gamergater would harass, threaten, hack, or dox other people, and if it happened, either in the name of GG or not, it was supposedly the work of somebody unaffiliated with the move-ment. At the same time, the anonymity made it impossible to disprove that GG was behind it, creating a paradox that was both useful and harmful to GG.
- ^ Mortensen, Torill Elvira (2016). "Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate". Games and Culture. doi:10.1177/1555412016640408.
While risk is not a new thing to anthro-pology and ethnography (Calvey, 2008; Lauder, 2003), the risk GG added is not frequently encountered in media studies.
- ^ a b Mortensen, Torill Elvira (2016). "Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate". Games and Culture. doi:10.1177/1555412016640408.
Players of digital games are an active audience group, used to participate through gaming and in meta-discussions, and known to act out if annoyed. There is evidence of angry gamers tracking producers or developers, doxing them and their families, trolling them, flooding their twitter with abuse, and posting threats against the family (Batchelor, 2014; Crecente, 2013). When this behavior was reported, they have attacked reporters, as when The Guardian reporter Jenn Frank was attacked for reporting on the aggression GG directed at their targets (Cox, 2014; Frank, 2014). This was not a behavior limited to GG but typical of image board culture.
- ^ Mortensen, Torill Elvira (2016). "Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate". Games and Culture. doi:10.1177/1555412016640408.
On chans, it is a matter of pride to not rely on the ethos of a name but the logos of the argument. Ideally anonymity creates a pure meritocracy where arguments survive due to merit, not because of signifiers of power.
- ^ Mortensen, Torill Elvira (2016). "Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate". Games and Culture. doi:10.1177/1555412016640408.
M. S. Bernstein et al. (2011), Coleman (2014), and Phillips (2015) all demonstrate that the anonymity of chan culture can create interesting new dynamics and release con-structive, positive creativity. It can at the best of times be a catalyst for daring and important activism and create communities that support those who feel estranged in mainstream debates.
- ^ Mortensen, Torill Elvira (2016). "Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate". Games and Culture. doi:10.1177/1555412016640408.
Taking offense was proof of being a newfag and not yet able to deal, and offended users were considered too weak to survive the furnace of the chans. In this manner, language and images were used to silence unwanted voices (...)
- ^ Mortensen, Torill Elvira (2016). "Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate". Games and Culture. doi:10.1177/1555412016640408.
In this manner, language and images were used to silence unwanted voices and if that was not enough, the participants had other methods. Doxing can be used to ruin the ethos of speakers. Sarah Nyberg, active GG critic, described her old writings as, the decade-old account of a troubled young person raised on 4chan and internet edgelord culture trying to out-shock and out-troll the people around her (2015). Her old lies and exaggerations came back with a ven-geance, as other edgelords decided GG criticism made her a target.
- ^ Mortensen, Torill Elvira (2016). "Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate". Games and Culture. doi:10.1177/1555412016640408.
Coleman describes the speed with which a message will be pushed off the board on the image boards; on busy boards it will be gone in minutes (2014, p. 43). M. S. Bernstein et al. (2011) discuss this feature more specifically and point out how it facilitates a particular kind of communication, turning the conversations on the board ephemeral.
- ^ Mortensen, Torill Elvira (2016). "Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate". Games and Culture. doi:10.1177/1555412016640408.
On chans, uninteresting information is supposed to scroll off. If the image board motto realz, not feelz had any meaning, easily debunked, false information should scroll off the screen. However, if that false information is sufficiently entertaining or supports the agenda of participants on the board, what will scroll off is the debunking and the corrections. This way the system serves to retain entertaining information that supports the agenda or drama, while the less entertaining facts will be lost.
- ^ Mortensen, Torill Elvira (2016). "Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate". Games and Culture. doi:10.1177/1555412016640408.
How long a message is available to others has proved to be important when it comes to the use of online media, and GG highlights how nothing is lost forever on the 'Net. One attack on Zoe Quinn distributed old pictures from adult photo shoots.
- ^ a b Mortensen, Torill Elvira (2016). "Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate". Games and Culture. doi:10.1177/1555412016640408.
Simultaneously Quinn, who says about herself, If Gamergate had happened several years ago to someone else, I would have been on that side (Newton, 2015), was aware of where the operations would be planned, and when the members of the IRC channel Burgers and Fries discussed how to make Quinn's life more uncom-fortable, she was logging it (Johnston, 2014b), which is the only reason why we have these logs today.
- ^ Mortensen, Torill Elvira (2016). "Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate". Games and Culture. doi:10.1177/1555412016640408.
Another way to understand GG is to look at other leisure-centered aggression. There are several parallels between GG and hooligans. Like the football hooligans, these gamer fans organized into groups and were ready to attack the other team. Like hooligans, they appeared to join the fight for the thrill, not because they always believed their actions would be the best persuasive tactics.
- ^ Mortensen, Torill Elvira (2016). "Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate". Games and Culture. doi:10.1177/1555412016640408.
Like hooligans GG language was hypermasculine, and they had little need for values seen as more feminine. That doesn't mean GG had no use for women.
- ^ Mortensen, Torill Elvira (2016). "Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate". Games and Culture. doi:10.1177/1555412016640408.
Another GG phenomenon was the hashtag #notyourshield used by ethni-cally diverse and/or female avatars. Started by an African American participant of /v/ on 4chan, #notyourshield was supposed to show that female and non-White gamers did not want more diversity in games, stopping critics of game culture from using them as an excuse for more diversity.
- ^ Mortensen, Torill Elvira (2016). "Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate". Games and Culture. doi:10.1177/1555412016640408.
The design of this hashtag came with instructions concerning how White men could make non-White and female sock puppets (Johnston, 2014b).
- ^ Mortensen, Torill Elvira (2016). "Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate". Games and Culture. doi:10.1177/1555412016640408.
To many of the participants, GG was a bonding experience. On the board /kotakui-naction/ on reddit.com, one of the tags for posts is meetups where GG online participants meet face to face. The meetups happened mostly in the United States, but there have been descriptions of meetings in Australia and the United Kingdom. Many of these contain pictures, most of which show groups of predominantly young men, mostly White and of college/university age, sometimes accompanied by men of other ethnicities, and women.
- ^ Mortensen, Torill Elvira (2016). "Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate". Games and Culture. doi:10.1177/1555412016640408.
Women in GG defended nudity, sexually explicit images, and aggression against women in games, and GG highlighted their female supporters, particularly the pornography workers.
- ^ Mortensen, Torill Elvira (2016). "Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate". Games and Culture. doi:10.1177/1555412016640408.
Another similarity was GG's sense of martyrdom, of being persecuted victims, which is visible in recent hooliganism (Poupore, 2014). GG believed firmly in their own status as victims. The death of the gamer articles confirmed this as attacks on their entire culture. In this narrative, they were victims of consistent persecution, even if they have not experienced the actual violence seen by the Egyptian Ultras.
- ^ Mortensen, Torill Elvira (2016). "Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate". Games and Culture. doi:10.1177/1555412016640408.
To understand how consumers of time-consuming high-tech entertainment can even briefly consider themselves victims of a large-scale, global conspiracy to suppress them, look at how gaming has been treated. While an economic success since the 90s, passing Hollywood box office sales in 2004 (Kerr, 2006, p. 49), digital games are not universally accepted. At best, gaming is viewed as a childish waste, at worst the topic of media panics (Karlsen, 2013). The negative feelings toward games peak after mass shootings by young men, when games are repeatedly put forward as the cause of mindless violence. Jack Thompson, disbarred lawyer, blamed games for the 1999 Columbine killings (Giumetti & Mar-key, 2007).
- ^ Mortensen, Torill Elvira (2016). "Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate". Games and Culture. doi:10.1177/1555412016640408.
Disregarding the fact that digital games in the last 15–20 years have become ubiquitous, this created an image of gamers as either aggressive killers in training, addicts to the mind-controlling power of games, or socially inept losers, well described by Alexander in her controversial article (2014).
- ^ Mortensen, Torill Elvira (2016). "Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate". Games and Culture. doi:10.1177/1555412016640408.
The gamergaters had grown up actively engaging in a hobby where they were on the one hand catered to by increasingly inventive designers and creators and at the other hand vilified by the value-conservative who feared what this seductive new medium might lead to. They had been trained to be defensive.
- ^ Mortensen, Torill Elvira (2016). "Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate". Games and Culture. doi:10.1177/1555412016640408.
Resonating with angry class overtones, one of the more interesting myths about the targets of GG was that they were wealthy. (...) This was a recurring topic in the descriptions of Quinn, such as in an article on the PUA website Return of Kings, where the author repeatedly pointed out how much money Quinn must have been making (Chubbs, 2014). Through it all GG was obsessed with money. They aggressively criticized Anita Sarkeesian because her kick-starter was overfunded. Since this happened during a period of prevalent and public attacks, they called her a professional victim who made money of the abuse she received (Yiannopoulos, 2015). This was also a common claim against Zoe Quinn.
- ^ Mortensen, Torill Elvira (2016). "Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate". Games and Culture. doi:10.1177/1555412016640408.
Interestingly, they are to a certain degree right, the focus on both Sarkeesian and Quinn brought them attention and new options. This does not justify the treatment they received, but it is easy to imagine that if the haters had ignored Sarkeesian's feminist criticism of games, the videos might have caught the attention of some audiences with a special interest in feminism but otherwise been a fairly low-key series of YouTube videos.
- ^ Mortensen, Torill Elvira (2016). "Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate". Games and Culture. doi:10.1177/1555412016640408.
The Sarkeesian Effect is the work of Jordan Owen and David Aurini who received approximately US$8,800 a month for close to a year in order to create a documentary to criticize Sarkeesian and demonstrate her supposed fraud (Owen & Aurini, 2014). In 2014, Sargon of Akkad was a minor YouTuber with a Patreon account where he made approximately US$200 per video. A year later each video made him US$900. Considering the low-production costs and frequency of posted videos, this was not bad. Add the advertising revenue of almost 200,000 followers of his YouTube channel, the GG year was good to him. Thunderfoot, a dedicated Sarkeesian critic, makes more than US$3,000 from each video he uploads to his Patreon. The Honey Badger Brigade is another group that found a new source of income through GG. These are women supporting the MRAs.
- ^ Mortensen, Torill Elvira (2016). "Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate". Games and Culture. doi:10.1177/1555412016640408.
This is a sufficiently pronounced trend that Jay Allen talks about professional victimizers (2015).
- ^ Mortensen, Torill Elvira (2016). "Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate". Games and Culture. doi:10.1177/1555412016640408.
Many of the gamergaters are in safe positions and have more than enough money, education, contacts, and privilege that they are definitely punching down when attacking self-employed, often poor, and freelancing women.
- ^ a b Mortensen, Torill Elvira (2016). "Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate". Games and Culture. doi:10.1177/1555412016640408.
But several gamergaters are unemployed, very young, undereducated, or have social problems. They often speak about themselves as undesirable and express the opinion that if games change, they will lose the only thing that holds value to them.
Cite error: The named reference "Mortensen2016-q57" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page). - ^ Mortensen, Torill Elvira (2016). "Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate". Games and Culture. doi:10.1177/1555412016640408.
Through this variety and very visible exploitation of weaknesses in the different systems, GG taught us how technology designed for increased openness can be utilized to create echo chambers and to silence opposing voices.
- ^ Mortensen, Torill Elvira (2016). "Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate". Games and Culture. doi:10.1177/1555412016640408.
They also demonstrated very clearly what Leigh Alexander tried to say, that gamer culture is extremely varied and often in conflict with itself. They underlined the claim of the gamers are dead articles: We cannot assume that all who play games are one demography. Even fans of the same game can have widely conflicting values and desires.