Ur-Chud: A Brief History of Gamergate

2014 never ended.

I was 17 years old at the time and studying computer science. Due to being depressed and insecure (as well as an abrasive asshole) I didn’t have a lot of friends, so much of my time was spent online or playing video games.

In other words: I was a Gabe.

Being prime recruitment fodder for what became known as “Gamergate”, I still don’t know how it missed me. I remember hearing some of my fellow students talk about how Anita Sarkeesian was apparently the worst, but I never heard a good elucidation of her supposed crimes. I remember seeing some YouTubers talking about the movement as a thing that was happening, but no one I followed seemed to be taking up arms. 

Me not getting swept up by it may have been as simple as me not following the prerequisite influencers, therefore not being exposed to the harassment-inciting side of it. 

But, by this point, the question any normal person who is not as terminally online as me will have is “wtf is a gamergate?”. Let’s talk about it and why it mattered.

Groundwork

Gamergate, a term popularised in a tweet by Firefly actor and libertarian weirdo Adam Baldwin, was an online harassment campaign that was then opportunistically used as a neo-nazi recruitment campaign and a kind of online weapons test. It set the rancid tone for our current political landscape and was used as a trial run for methods that were then applied when Donald Trump ran for president in 2016. Memes, plausibly deniable neo-nazi signalling, social media bot farms, concerted harassment of opponents by decentralised mobs, all methods that were – in part – pioneered during Gamergate, and then used very effectively during Trump’s campaign over a year later.

Where it all starts is also where it stops making any sense. Well, at least if you’re not completely insane.

An important thing to keep in mind is that the entire movement was rooted in one core claim: that game developer Zoe Quinn cheated on their boyfriend, Eron Gjoni, with gaming journalist Nathan Grayson of Kotaku in order to get a good review for their game Depression Quest.

Two problems here: 1) The relationship between Zoe and Nathan did not happen during Zoe’s relationship with Eron, and more importantly 2) Nathan never reviewed Zoe’s game. In a rational world, this whole thing would never have been anything.

But Why Video Games?

Before we continue, I think it’s important to understand why this happened in the gaming community instead of somewhere else. From the outside looking in, it seems almost arbitrary, just a thing that happened to happen, but there are several aspects of the gaming community that meant that the foundation for this kind of movement was already laid.

Gaming is a hobby that normally requires some disposable income. New games are regularly released and can be expensive, and the same applies to the equipment required to run them. Gaming desktop setups can even be a status symbol akin to an expensive golf set, some even costing as much as a decent car. On top of that, many games can be time-intensive (in the hundreds of hours) and can require a certain level of competency to enjoy. We can surmise that the average “Gamer™” is someone who 1) has a certain amount of free time, and 2) has a bit of money to spend.

Gaming is also a hobby that can be picked up at a fairly young age, often being the first hobby that a person finds a sense of identity in, giving the hobby as well as the community around it some sentimental value. It becomes a part of their self-image.

Gaming can be either social or solitary. Many games can be played with friends, either at the same location (often called “couch gaming”) or online, giving some games the status of a sort of simulated third space. The latter is currently the more common choice, and has been for a while now. 

Stigma could also play a role. Gaming has long been associated with angry, lazy man-children, and Gamergate did absolutely nothing to dispel that stereotype. Video games have been covered in the media as a danger to children, the cause for real-world violence, even satanic if you’re fucking nuts. You don’t exactly see that with knitting.

What you end up with is a base that’s in defence-mode by default. They’re used to having to defend their hobbies from people they meet who label them as an angry, lazy man-child, so when someone they are used to being made fun of by (in this case, women) joins their community, they might lose their shit, because they are primed to. Maybe they were made fun of for their hobby when they were 8 years old and brought a Game Boy to school (speaking from some experience). If those kinds of interactions were frequent or meaningful, they may have been enough to push them towards Gamergate-like behaviour in the future.

But the largest reason, by my estimate, is also the most obvious one: gaming has simply been advertised towards men since the 80’s. Gamers have always been diverse, but the most outwardly prominent group was cis-het white dudes. As the studios got larger and the games got more expensive to produce, risk management caused marketing to become even more targeted towards that most outwardly prominent group, further reinforcing the notion that they make up a ruling chunk of all gamers. It was always more of a convenient marketing demographic than any kind of reflection of reality.

There is a weird machismo aspect to it too, where shooting aliens and saving the world in a video game can be a simulacrum of some sort of masculine virtue that is otherwise inaccessible. It targets some of the same impulses as manfluencers who sell incels and divorced dads on an all-meat diet or a fake school on how to grift.

Anita

The ground for Gamergate was laid way back in 2012, when feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian started crowdfunding a new video series with the goal of examining how women were portrayed in video games. She felt that female characters in video games were often scantily clad, one-dimensional props meant to appeal to the male gaze and little else. She not only reached her goal, but absolutely crushed it. 

The attention she got from that, both positive and negative, started a vicious cycle that would go on for a while: Anita did something that caused her to be harassed by incels, people come to her defence and give money to her projects, in turn causing her to be harassed by incels. Rinse and repeat. 

Someone made a video game where the goal was to cause her physical harm, and the Game Developer Choice Awards got a bomb threat when she was supposed to get an award for her work in the gaming community.

 She was booked for a speaking engagement at the University of Utah when an unknown student threatened a mass shooting. In a letter to the school administration, he specifically invoked the mass shooting at École Polytechnique in Montreal in 1989, which is often cited as the first mass shooting perpetrated by an incel with the explicitly stated goal of “getting revenge” on women. Anita ended up cancelling her appearance, partially because the state of Utah’s concealed carry laws made practicalities of carrying out such an attack a bit too real.

Anita would later become one of the main targets of Gamergate due to plain-ol’ bad timing.

Zoe

In 2013, game developer Zoe Quinn released the game Depression Quest, where players put themselves in the shoes of a character who struggles with depression. The game was sold with a pay-at-will system with no minimum, so anyone could play the game for free if they wanted to, with part of the proceeds going to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. Zoe hoped that the game could start a dialogue about how people can deal with depression, basing the game on their own experience. They did however admit that people’s experiences with depression can vary wildly so the game is by no means comprehensive on that topic. The game was generally well received, but its less-than-traditional format made some gamers angry. Very angry.

That year was huge for games. Grand Theft Auto V, The Last of Us, Bioshock Infinite, all extremely popular action-packed adventures. Depression Quest was text-based, meaning you need to read what happens. There are no guns or explosions, no fast cars, no zombies to kill, just a thoughtful story about a person going about their day. Many text-based games had been very successful, but what Depression Quest did differently was not allowing you to select the option that seems like the most obvious one in a given moment. Because that’s what makes depression such a fucky thing, the most obvious option is not always the most accessible to someone who is dealing with it (speaking from experience). Highlighting that aspect of depression was the whole point of that game mechanic.

The Opening of the Gamergates

On august 15th, 2014, a post appeared on the forums SomethingAwful and Penny Dreadful by a man named Eron Gjoni. It was an angsty and vitriolic screed of accusations towards Zoe, accusing her of lying, cheating and being generally manipulative. Moderators of both sites are quick to remove it since it was blatantly just a hit-piece trying to incite harassment, but about a day later that same post finds a place on both 4chan and a Wordpress site owned by Eron. His main accusation became Gamergate’s aforementioned catalyst, that Zoe had cheated on him with journalist Nathan Grayson in exchange for a positive review of their game. Eron had poured jet fuel on the smouldering embers of the harassment Zoe had previously faced.

Stephen Totilo, the editor of Kotaku, soon comes to Nathan’s defence, stating that no ethical violation took place. He confirmed that Kotaku had never given Depression Quest any review, and that Nathan had only mentioned Zoe’s name once in an article before, which was about a failed reality TV show with several other game developers. 

This should have fully put out the fire. Ever wondered how anyone could be such a slave to groupthink as to partake in something like the Salem witch trials? Gamergate. Angry mobs don’t stop to listen to reason. 

After being almost immediately doxxed, they had to flee their home for a while until the heat died down. One could argue that it never truly did. 

She, along with several others, is marked forever, constantly aware that their lives could be uprooted again at any time and for any reason.

Wrong Place, Wrong Time

About a week later, while all this was going on, Anita Sarkeesian released a new episode of her YouTube series “Tropes vs. Women in Video Games” and immediately became a target of Gamergate despite having no connection at all to Zoe, Eron, or Nathan. She was already hated by Gamergaters so the unfortunate timing of her video pulled her back into their line of fire. They were already chomping at the bit because of the Zoe post, so why not dance with the old enemy while you’re at it? The death threats she received were so graphic and frequent that she felt the need to get the FBI involved.

Some known figures in the space came to their defence. Game designer Brianna Wu mocked Gamergate on twitter and then had to leave her home due to doxxing and death threats. Actress Felicia Day made a post condemning Gamergate and mourning how she no longer felt safe talking to people who showed a fondness for video games and she had her home address and personal email leaked online. But then former NFL player Chris Kluwe mocked Gamergate and the mob almost completely passed him by, presumably because Gamergate had a difficult time fitting him into their typical “liberal soy-boy cuck” stereotype.

The campaign keeps going on various forums, but two main factions are formed: Those who support the campaign (which split into other smaller factions), and those who are against it and defend its victims. A large part of the former faction is made up of those who are upset about “ethics in game journalism” and took Eron at his word; if game journalism is corrupt, then something needs to change. Most of those did not partake in any actual harassment. That was another part of the former faction. Those who used the others as pawns to cover for their real stated purpose: to try to get their targets to take their own lives. 

They had to make it look like there were only two sides in the fight: those who wanted ethical gaming journalism and those who didn’t. It was a convenient facade.

Gamers are “dead”

Media outlets who specialise in video games started putting out articles and op-eds about the campaign in late august, many with a similar theme. Former Gamasutra journalist Leigh Alexander puts out an article where she condemns the harassment and voices her embarrassment at belonging to the gaming community. She talks about how the term “gamer” is functionally outdated as a marketing demographic because the group has widened to include so many different walks of life that the term is becoming meaningless. This becomes the start of what Gamergate called the “gamers are dead” articles. They even badgered the microelectronics manufacturer Intel into ceasing their advertising on Gamasutra. They did capitulate for a while, but resumed their advertising when the heat died down.

Many similar articles would be penned where journalists argued that the term “gamer” was dead. Their main reasoning was that with more accessible equipment and the (then recent) omnipresence of smartphones with gaming capabilities, anyone, anywhere can play video games, and the threshold where someone gets officially called a “gamer” is completely arbitrary. This gradual change made some who had called themselves “gamers” get protective of the hobby that had defined them for so much of their lives. Journalist Dan Golding argued that since the hobby itself has become larger and more accessible, but the term “gamer” has failed to grow alongside it, it means that the term will simply lose all meaning and die.

Gamergaters took these articles as threats, and claimed that the journalists were trying to portray everyone who plays video games as a racist misogynist, even though most of the articles make it very clear that that was never the intention. It is still unclear how many of them actually read Leigh’s article, but what is very clear is the fact that it was heavily misinterpreted. She never claimed that everyone who played video games was a terrible person or that the hobby is dead. She said that video games are for everyone, and the gaming community should not be defined by its worst parts. Them taking that as a threat is an incredible self-report as to their motives.

The Notorious Hacker, 4Chan

Some have cited Gamergate as the leaking of chan culture into material reality, and that’s not without merit. The culture that has formed on sites like 4chan and 8chan is strange, esoteric, and completely inaccessible to an outsider, which works in their favour. Anonymity is the norm and content moderation is low to none. That has caused websites like them to become a platform for material that would not be accepted elsewhere, like illegally obtained media, revenge porn, doxx info, or even CSAM. 

4chan’s IRC function (a bit like a primitive Discord group) became the de-facto town square for Gamergate. It still exists as a timestamped archive for anyone to read, so you can confirm for yourself a lot of what I’ve said in this article if you disagree with my stance.

The nature of 4Chan as a website is such that it’s not very accessible to the average user. There’s often porn in the banner ads, the interface is a mess, there are no post histories of users so nothing that’s said is on record, there are absurd in-jokes that sound like weird nonsense to outsiders. All this makes 4Chan seem like a strange alternate universe for anyone who wants to try to even begin to understand the site’s culture.

A side effect of this culture is that those who frequent the site start to become socially isolated, as they are socialised on a website that makes them sound incomprehensible to everyone else. They have their own rolodex of aphorisms, terms, and even slurs that serve a dual purpose: 1) signalling to others within their own online subculture, and 2) giving them plausible deniability to those outside of it.

And Yes, It Was Nazis

In 2017, the journalist collective Unicorn Riot leaked Discord chats from closed neo-nazi groups, from which Bellingcat then compiled a list of users who talked openly about the reason they got red-pilled (internet slang for developing far-right political leanings). The list shows us that a fair few of them either got their start during Gamergate, spent a lot of time in forums where Gamergate was a large topic, like Chan boards, or were simply taken in by influencers who were prominent in the movement, like Sargon of Akkad or Milo Yiannopoulos. 

In the leaked chats, many more mention having participated in Gamergate, but were already active in far-right communities at that time. Those who mention it seem to remember it quite fondly.

The term “redpilling” became ubiquitous on Chan boards, namely 4Chan and 8Chan. Those kinds of forums tend to cross-pollinate their users by linking between each other. A member on Reddit’s (now banned) subreddit r/the_donald may talk about something that was said on r/KotakuinAction, someone there then talks about something that went down on 4Chan’s /pol/ board which has a lot of users in common. This creates a sales funnel where the product ultimately being sold is national socialism.

Neo-nazis have long had to hide their views to fit in with polite society, but Gamergate showed them a world where they could be free to be their chuddy selves without any social repercussions.

The Last of the Gamergaters

The movement itself has mostly gone cold, but there are still many holdouts who seem unaware that the world has moved on from the conflict they were recruited for.

These dead-enders still keep Gamergate going in approximately the same form as it originally appeared, only sadder. They remember the fun they had and are desperate to relive the glory days. If you go on one of the subreddits that became one of the main venues for the movement back in 2014, Kotaku in Action, you will see angry gamers complaining about their precious video game boobies being taken from them by the SJW Kotaku journalists. Reading between the lines it becomes abundantly clear that they do not want to see women in video games (or, seemingly, anywhere at all) unless they are conventionally attractive and underdressed. A fun game you can play on that subreddit is how long it takes you to find an incel forum by going through the post history of its users. 

While the movement itself has evolved, shifted, scattered, and frayed, its genetic material is still very much present in much of online discourse. Gamergate never truly ended, and I don’t think it will anytime soon. To this day the movement itself often appears as anger towards some aspect of the entertainment industry, whether it be because of the little mermaid’s skin colour in the live-action remake of the classic Disney movie or a consulting firm that specialises in narrative development in video games. Even Lindsay Clancy’s mistrial ruling and subsequent difficulties in finding an unbiased jury, as well as the “women are crazy” vibe of the public discourse can be tied back to Gamergate.

Gamergate 2.0

Sweet Baby Inc. is a Canadian company that offers consultation to video game developers regarding scriptwriting. Their position within the industry means that they are often asked to advise on how to responsibly portray characters that belong to certain minority groups. For the game God of War: Ragnarok, for example, they were asked for help with making the character of Angrboda better appeal to Black players. SBI’s role there was to simply point out blind spots exhibited by the writers that could accidentally affect the final script, even if they had no ill intent.

In 2023, a conspiratorial fervour gripped the internet again when some people noticed that SBI was credited for a lot of games that some Gamers™ felt included a lot of “forced diversity” among characters (this means any non-white or female characters). This very quickly melded with the current anti-woke movement (which is itself partly a spin-off of the original Gamergate) and formed an unholy Voltron of internet nerd-rage, aimed squarely at one company.

Nathan Grayson (yes, that same one) of Aftermath points out how it’s “a conspiracy theory that checks all the boxes: It conveniently explains pretty much everything happening right now, ties it back to organizations of which people are understandably suspicious, links to a much larger ongoing panic (DEI), validates preconceived notions like “go woke, go broke,” sprinkles in a few kernels of truth regarding powerful interests, and – most importantly – provides a clear and identifiable enemy.” 

The original Gamergate was also heavily fuelled by conspiratorial thinking. When journalists came to the defence of their friends and colleagues, Gamers™ saw an organised movement against the hobby that had defined them for much of their lives. This newer movement got the title “Gamergate 2.0” simply because it shared a lot of the same DNA.

The Ur-Chud

The campaign has been cited as an example of how a toxic culture can form online. Many of Gamergate’s proponents saw their cause as noble, and themselves as soldiers in a war against “social justice warriors”. They saw their attacks as just or even necessary to defend their culture against those who they deem a threat to it. They longed for the days when video games were made for teenage boys, with guns, zombies, and women in revealing clothing, and mourned how games were now made to appeal to a wider audience because of the increased accessibility afforded with cheaper equipment. Zoe’s game included none of what they wanted to see in a video game, and they saw a relatively small indie game as an existential threat to their favourite hobby.

Gamergate was nothing new, but merely a manifestation of a type of anger that had existed for a while due to the increasing visibility of women and minority groups in society. Just to be abundantly clear, these groups were always there, it just used to be easier to pretend they weren’t. Other campaigns similar to it have been conducted before, and we will likely see more in the future because of how this machine has trained socially isolated Gamers™ to become the obedient attack dogs of the patriarchy. 

The reason I see Gamergate as an important event despite this is because it’s where we saw tactics being deployed and tested that are still in use today as well as a vibe-shift to an internet where that kind of behaviour is accepted or even encouraged. The chuds of Gamergate are the rats in the walls of the web we all increasingly inhabit. They’ve always been among us, but given the right conditions they can become more blunt in their views.

The nazi rally in Charlottesville in 2017 was another example of a similar phenomenon. The election of Donald Trump the year prior and his vocal and unabashed racism emboldened the worst of us. The chuds suddenly had social permission to act the way they wanted to act, and it culminated in the death of counter-protester Heather Heyer.

This article was never meant to be comprehensive, but merely a glimpse into the soupy minds of Gamergaters and why their crusade mattered for the rest of us. The internet is forever poisoned, and it will only get harder for the average user to ignore it.