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A post-Gamergate Gen-Z core retrospective
I can't be the only one with this exact same experience. The worst thing to ever happen to my high school dating life was watching that first “feminist owned” compilation by Milo Yiannopoulos.
Thirteen-year-old me was recruited from the Minecraft let’s plays and dropped into the hardened battle lines of what we now call the culture war.
Since I was a young boy, my enemies and friends were already decided for me. People nowadays often make jokes along the lines of “this is what radicalised me.” But I can, honest to God, say it was videos of ladies with dyed hair throwing hissy fits at a supposed patriarchy.
But how did I get to this point? This was my conception of the state of internet politics circa 2013 at the time. Between 2008–2013 there was an event called Gamergate. Akin to World War I, I arrived after the ossification into trench warfare was already complete. As a person late to the party, the commentary I saw was very confusing and never actually touched on what caused the big shitstorm in the first place. I even tried to watch an explainer video, after which I was left even more confused, because it all seemed so inane and random and everyone kept having Very Strong Opinions about little nuances of the situation that I still am confused about to this day.
My vague understanding: a female indie video game developer slept with a journalist to get a good review for her game. She was also annoying about it or something. (Fun fact: I came across Brianna Wu on Twitter recently, who was also involved, I guess. Turns out she has always been a fairly likeable, nuanced, low-key trans woman. Don’t really know how that fits any narrative.)
At this point it had all become, by my estimation, more about feminist influence in gaming than what actually happened (whatever that was exactly). As an avid consumer of video game reviews at the time, I had the vague understanding that, of the people whose videos I watched the more respectable sort, like TotalBiscuit (RIP), AngryJoeShow, and Jim Sterling (WTF happened there, am I right?) I was supposed to be on the other side. These guys always came across as if they really didn’t want to talk about the topic, treating it as a toxic cesspit.
I’ve set the stage. Drum roll please. Come in:
Carl Benjamin, aka Sargon of Akkad. It all starts with this guy. Pioneer of the political video essay format. Progenitor of the low-effort news commentator. Prime user of the still stock-image background picture.
The “This Week in Stupid” series was the succulent roast-dinner to the “feminist pwned” appetizer. A menagerie of this week’s most epic fails, most ludicrous feminist lies, most egregious overreaches, righteously torn asunder by the smooth, scornful, and eloquent voice of reason.
This man didn’t avoid talking about Gamergate; he bravely confronted it full force. He even had a reaction video to Angry Joe’s video on the topic that honestly was impossibly hard to follow. I don’t understand how people who actually went through the whole Gamergate saga don’t start tweaking when they hear “journalistic ethics in gaming.”
Suffice it to say, embarrassingly so, he was a role model for a young lad like me. (If you want to see how deep the rabbit hole goes: he was also solely responsible for Jordan Peterson getting discovered.)
You had to be there. Imitators popping up left, right, and centre, today uncharitably called grifters, amassing large audiences rapidly. It was a golden era. Anyone with a microphone and vocal cords could make it big. There was a voracious, previously uncatered-to appetite for this content, and I feasted.
I started adding Kraut and Tea (now just called Kraut), Armoured Skeptic, and dozens more to my rotation. I saw them go from a few thousand subscribers to tens of thousands (YouTube wasn’t as big back then; a hundred thousand subs made you a Big Deal).
The content expanded from video game politics to IRL politics. The Establishment joined in as a canonical enemy and ally to the feminists, ruthlessly deplatforming these new up-and-comers left and right. It was literally 1984. You had to be there. Free speech became the core load-bearing belief. But the good times couldn’t last forever. At some point the explosive growth slowed down, people started circling the wagons, collabs were handed out jealously. Production values increased along with the drama.
At this time I noticed the prevalence of a certain type of channel in the network: the Skeptic™ cadre. Names like “The Amazing Atheist” and “Armoured Skeptic.” I started connecting the pieces to a deeper origin story for the whole Gamergate thing. It all invariably led to New Atheism and Atheism+. Fourteen-year-old me didn’t know what New Atheism was, but it clarified to me what the fault lines were. Why was one side of the gamer army so hung up about the sexual proclivities and false statements of an, by all accounts, irrelevant developer, and the other side hated them for it?
Basically, the group with the beef was clearly the disenfranchised remains of New Atheism. These people were veterans who had debated internet creationists from before I was born, hyper-vigilant about correct argument and debate. After winning that war, they had been ruthlessly discarded over… something to do with people being busybodies and entryists making it a feminist thing with Atheism+. The important thing was that these same guys, perceiving that gaming was next, didn’t want a repeat. They dusted off their AOL majigs and went to war. (Sorry, don’t know what AOL is; I’m not unc-coded.)
And then I think they lost that battle too. And they realized the problem must be attacked at the root: the birthplace of the totalising feminist menace, universities.
And whatever your thoughts on these people are, they changed the world. This is a bit crazy to say, but I think they started and defined the online-era culture war.
I have a million more things to say and will maybe make a follow-up post on my view of the continued evolution to the present day. I want to go deeper into my shameful ̶P̶e̶t̶e̶r̶ Stefan Molyneux, Paul Joseph Watson, red-pill era, and how the skeptic-to-Nazi pipeline had more than a grain of truth to it.
Nowadays I feel a lot of resentment for all the broken trust between me and my childhood idols. I fought this war alone in my classrooms. They gave me the forbidden fruit of knowledge, only for years later to become what they taught me to hate.
But really, am I the only one who went through this live?
"The Zoe Post" which served as the catalyst for Gamergate was published in August 2014.
This is true but I don't think it's the whole story. This is anecdotal, but if you were online and involved in gaming discourse in the late 00s and early 10s you would probably remember that gamers and journos already had a kind of culture war going on at the time, but it wasn't yet political. It was over things like day-one/on-disc DLCs, microtransactions, always-online requirements, streamlining in search of a "broader audience," shoddy reboots, and who could forget the Mass Effect 3 ending fiasco? Gamers and neckbeards complained endlessly about these things on online fora, but curiously the gaming journalists always seemed to take the side of the industry, calling gamers entitled manchildren for caring about this stuff. It wasn't until a little later that the Great Awokening happened and hit gaming journalists early, so they started complaining about immoral content in gaming and calling for it to be censored or changed the way conservatives had a few years earlier, and that was just another rift that opened between the two sides. I think among some gamers, they actually felt a sense of betrayal that journalists would do this after dunking on Jack Thompson with them years earlier.
Anyway, I think Gamergate was really just the largest battle in this already-existing war between gamers and journos and the point it became political, and for a lot of participants on the gamer side it was as much about stuff like this as it was about Zoe Quinn or feminism. Even on the journo side, actually--that's what all the "gamers are dead" articles were about, journos had seen gamers quarrelling with them and the industry for years at that point, acting entitled in their view, and this Zoe Quinn thing was just the latest flareup.
I think that's part of where the ethics talk came from as well--because journalists had a track record of defending anti-consumer practices in the gaming industry, a lot of people may've suspected it wasn't just about one dodgy review, but that journalists were probably shills being paid off by the industry to dismiss legitimate criticism of their business practices. To my knowledge no evidence for that was ever uncovered, but it was a suspicion I'd wager a lot of people had.
Oh sure, I'm aware that the Zoe Post was just the catalyst for a whole bunch of cultural issues which had been stewing for years prior. But I still think it's misleading to say that there was an event called "Gamergate" which took place in the period 2008-13.
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