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Notes -
These were when I first became aware of any of the controversy and I think did more to create the feeling of an us vs them mentality out of the whole thing. I couldn't have been made to care about any of the precipitating events like the depression quest review or whatever, gaming journalism was always terrible slop that no one read. Both the gamers knew it and the people who wrote for the outlets knew it. I think a lot of the anger on that side of the fence came from them not really wanting to do the job, they would much much rather be doing, what we would now call woke, activism but they didn't have the chops to get a spot in any of the outlets that specialized in it. Declaring one of your identity markers is "dead" however is a very provocative move and it did provoke. A wiser and less teenaged aqouta would have recognized this as the false choice that it was but I was prepared to side with basically anyone against the kind of smug jerks who were writing those gamers are dead articles.
‘Gamers are dead’ articles in places like Polygon was the first I heard of the culture war as well. I never realised that Gamergate was a specific thing until I read about it many years later but ‘suddenly the people who make games all gate me’ was a signal even I couldn’t miss.
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