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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?
Gamergate is the one thing I don’t understand from my absurdly online time from day 2004-shit still kinda now.
I’ve had people explain it to me, I’ve watched videos, you just mentioned it, but I have zero idea what happened.
I know - vaguely - someone slept with someone for a good review and then we started talking about how video games are catered to men.
And now you say it started the online culture war ??
The pot had been simmering for a while before Gamergate, honestly - that was just the pebble that started the avalanche. Before then, the vast majority of gamers didn't even know there was a culture war, or if there was, their only point of reference was people like Jack Thompson trying to ban GTA. And it wasn't any surprise which side of that debate the gamers came down on (this guy's trying to take away your games!).
For years it had been known (Dorito pope et al) that the gaming press and the gaming industry were in bed together; the journalists traded good press for access. Although the wider implications of this were not commonly connected and the cynical backbone of marketing had not been exposed fully, there was a naivety about gaming in general. The biggest shockwaves and outrage happened when a site gave a good review to a terrible game, or a terrible review to a good game (the IGN God Hand review is infamous to this day). Where as movies at the time had gotten to the point where outrage baiting was just generally ignored, gamers immersed themselves so fully online that people who were Wrong had to be Corrected, otherwise they clearly had no taste/Weren't A Real Gamer.
But money talks, bullshit walks. The Eye of Sauron had noticed, especially with the exponential growth in gaming. Money was there to be made, and like anything in that era that showed a chance of dollar signs, the grifters showed up in droves. This was around the time where the understanding the entire field of marketing eventually grew to realize: outrage drives engagement more than anything else - had just started to rear its head. You got way more clicks, and ad revenue, by saying something clearly controversial and wrong, because nerds would crop out of the woodwork to scream about it. Anita Sarkeesian somehow turned complaining about hot girls in video games into thousands of dollars in free software and donations.
The other thing is that the field of gaming journalism was changing. One of the key inflection points was the New Games Journalism movement. Rather than churn out formulaic game reviews talking about packaging box quotes, they championed a reviewing and writing style that felt personal, that gave the writer more of an identity and talked more about their relationship with the game. Of course, their intentions were fundamentally kind of good, but naive. They had little clue that this would be used to amplify the most toxic, unpleasant, agenda-driven people in the relentless drive for eyeballs. One of the key people in the New Games Journalism movement is Tim Rogers. Tim Rogers wouldn't hurt a fly. He's the sort of harmless nerd who gets stuffed in lockers and laughed at by girls but fundamentally still doesn't believe in real violence. What gets more clicks, a thousand words about how Doom isn't something a mom can show her daughter, or a bog standard review of Doom talking about its gameplay mechanics?
The other thing is that these people all talk to each other. They are in their own little social club, they go to the big events to drink and party with each other, the same press tours, etc. This was naively, but correctly, perceived as collusion. To which the response is, part of the job is socializing and schmoozing with the industry to get access. And the relationship went both ways. They got all-access tickets, perks, gifts, game publisher's marketing budget trying to find something to spend itself on. The journalists and games media increasingly saw themselves as part of a privileged class, people who got to work closely with the games industry (and seek career opportunities further down the line), whose job it was to explain the more baffling or more controversial things a games studio does to the unwashed masses.
Somewhere along the line, as with everyone who creates content for an audience, contempt sets in. How can it not? The public is an unfeeling, unthinking mob, a senseless monster that doesn't give a shit about the writer other than what information can be communicated to them. And the worst aspects of the public become representative of it. Gamers are not the most socially aware as a class, and the internet only amplified these tendencies, especially when coupled with topics and games that were formative experiences for a lot of young people. An attack on a game I like is an attack on me.
Then came the Zoe post, the five guys scandal, etc. Honestly, the post was more of an indictment on Zoe than anything to do with video games. Zoe, exposed as a serial abuser, cheater, "woman of ill repute", and quite possibly a sociopath, played the game perfectly. She knew what would happen, and the internet didn't let her down. She turned a story about her ex exposing her poor behavior into an indictment on misogyny in gaming, and the gamers fell for the trap. Worse, she was excellent at the social engineering part of the game; her friends and colleagues all fell to defend her in lockstep, and those who weren't only saw the internet bullying a woman. Who the hell was going to read a thousand-word jilted ex blogpost to figure out why it even happened in the first place?
Of course, this only had the effect of setting off a huge brawl and thousands of hitpieces about misogyny in gaming. Gamers who had no idea what the hell was going on suddenly perked up and went, "wait, what? You mean me? But I'm not a misogynist! What the hell!" rallied around flags and started fighting. Worse, Zoe had proved so good at playing the social engineering game "you're either with us or with the misogynists!" that the battle lines were drawn in clear bold 20 point font. It wasn't enough to stay out of it. You had to condemn the gamers, make a statement on
Ukraine Israelhow gaming wasn't welcoming to women. Which the gamers then took as evidence (it was) that the gaming media was all colluding and reading from the same rap sheet (it was), leading to them only becoming further entrenched.Bean counters didn't give a shit, they were trying to crack the elusive female audience for more $ growth. Females deemed most profitable by the faceless corporations, must find ways to get them into gaming to unlock more $. So it's no surprise that Corporate Woke started stretching out of its amniotic caul here.
It sparked the culture war because an area that previously thought itself immune from the culture war realized it had been in the culture war all along, and that there were deep, fundamental disagreements about who gamers were as a group, what sort of games can and should be made, and what the people making and writing about the games wanted vs what the people buying the games wanted.
Nowadays it's interesting as a piece of internet history, but the bombed remnants of a once relatively consolidated gaming media and the cratering efforts of the bloated game developer and publishing industry tell a story of how everyone failed to learn anything at all from the entire experience.
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