#Gamergate

Gamergate, the freewheeling catastrophe/social movement/misdirected lynchmob that has, since August, trapped wide swaths of the Internet in its clutches, has still — inexplicably! — not burned itself out.

Late last week, when many of us thought we’d seen its end, the mob drove yet another woman from her home: This one, Brianna Wu, because she dared to tweet some jokes about the ongoing drama.

Here at the Intersect, we have ignored Gamergate for as long as humanly possible — in large part because it’s been covered in enormous, impressive depth elsewhere, and in smaller part because we’re exhausted by the senseless, never-ending onslaught of Internet misogyny, which really can’t be explained in a blog post — or, frankly, anywhere else.

But that said, the disturbing, violent threats sent to Wu, the co-founder of an indie game studio, makes it all too clear that Gamergate is less a one-off scandal (as the obnoxious -gate suffix would imply), and more a long-term, slow-burning campaign. In other words, Gamergate is not going away.

So even if so much of this bizarre Internet conflict remains inexplicable, it’s important to try to understand what all is going on here — not just for gamers, but for ordinary Internet-users, too.
What is Gamergate?

Whatever Gamergate may have started as, it is now an Internet culture war. On one side are independent game-makers and critics, many of them women, who advocate for greater inclusion in gaming. On the other side of the equation are a motley alliance of vitriolic naysayers: misogynists, anti-feminists, trolls, people convinced they’re being manipulated by a left-leaning and/or corrupt press, and traditionalists who just don’t want their games to change.

The divide is, in part, demographic: It’s the difference between the historical, stereotypical gamer — young, nerdy white guy who likes guns and ? — and the much broader, more diverse range of people who play now.

There are, unsurprisingly, some socio-political overtones, as well: The hashtag only took off once it was tweeted by the conservative actor Adam Baldwin and blurbed on Breitbart. (Truly odd, fascinating headline there: “Feminist bullies tearing the video game industry apart.”) Since then, Gamergate-supporters on 4chan and Twitter have been quick to sling around the acronym “SJW,” for social justice warrior — a kind of shorthand insult for liberals and progressives. It’s not a “an apolitical consumer movement,” Jon Stone argued in The Guardian Monday; it’s “a swelling of vicious right-wing sentiment.”
Why should I care about this?

If you’re not personally a gamer, it can be tempting to dismiss it all as subcultural drama. But as the preceding paragraphs would suggest, that couldn’t be further from the truth: The issues that Gamergate struggles over are also issues of great conflict, and importance, to American culture as a whole. In fact, in many respects, Gamergate is just a proxy war for a greater cultural battle over space and visibility and inclusion, a battle over who belongs to the mainstream — and as such, it’s a battle for our cultural soul. Just writ really small.

Then, of course, there’s the sheer violence of the whole thing. We bust out the term “culture war” to describe any sustained conflict between groups with opposing philosophies and ideals. But when it comes to Gamergate, there’s also an aspect of literal war, as well: Threats have become so violent that the FBI is investigating.
How did it actually start?

This all kicked off on a very specific, if no less troubling, issue. In 2013, an independent game designer named Zoe Quinn released a free game called Depression Quest. Depression Quest isn’t a “game,” in the way we traditionally conceive of it: It’s more a story or a piece of interactive art, which as it unfolds, tells the story of a young adult’s depression.