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I don't know a huge amount about GamerGate either. At least, not the start of it. We'll get to that.
The end part, the part that... well, not quite "matters", but the part that turned heads, was basically this: SJ openly declared culture war on nerdy men; the Grey Tribe ruptured fully from the Blue Tribe. I say it doesn't matter because the cracks had been growing for a while due to SJ's increasingly-censorious nature (indeed, Scott's criticism of SJ started a couple of years before GG); something was going to explode sooner or later, and it merely happened to be GG.
...all of which means there's a bit of an issue with reading up on it: since the Grey Tribe as a separate identity didn't actually exist for the most part until GG, it didn't have any narrative-producing institutions of its own, and the Red Tribe didn't care yet. So nearly all the media coverage is Blue propaganda intended to make the "pro-GG" side - the Grey side - look as bad as possible. Frankly, at the time I mostly bought it.
GamerGate is one of those cases, in hindsight, where each side had a public definition of what they thought it was about, and both of them were lying or self-deluding. This is necessarily a simplification, since neither side of GamerGate was univocal - both were unsteady coalitions and contained substantial diversity of motive - but it's one that helps make sense of it to me.
What pro-GG said GamerGate was about was ethics in game journalism. They were concerned about lack of disclosure, conflicts of interest, a journalistic field controlled by the industry it claims to report on, and to an extent (though GG was always a bit cautious and divided in expressing this) by journalists who were not culturally members of or sympathetic to their audiences.
What GamerGate was actually about, to pro-GG, was video games as a cultural scene being taken over and gatekept by cliques of progressive journalists, people alien to and contemptuous of the traditional gamer demographic, but who, by taking over journalistic institutions, arrogate to themselves the power to define who is and is not a 'gamer', and who also seize privileged access to publishers and developers and thus influence the types of games that get made. What it was really about was entryism.
What anti-GG said GamerGate was about was a harassment campaign. It was about a bunch of reactionary troglodytes who hate women and minorities lashing out to try to punish the diversification of video games, both as products and as an audience.
What GamerGate was actually about, to anti-GG, was a bunch of gross ugly people being gross and ugly in public, and worse, trying to exert control over a cultural or media sphere that anti-GG felt they were rightful custodians of. GamerGate was about a bunch of basement-dwelling virgins acting out their resentful misogyny against people who are leading the rise in diverse games. I realise this sounds very similar to what anti-GG said it was about, but I think the distinction is that the public anti-GG line was about behaviour ("they're harassing people") while the real feeling was about identity or even essential attributes ("they're gross").
In a sense, what GamerGate was about was control of 'gamer' as an identity - about who gets to decide what it means to play video games, what 'gaming' is as a subculture.
Seen in that light, I feel like the ultimate result of the controversy was probably a marginal pro-GG victory. Anti-GG got to control the narrative, to the extent that e.g. the Wikipedia article on GamerGate is pure anti-GG propaganda, but that control didn't translate into success because the traditional video game journalistic scene that anti-GG had their base in was becoming irrelevant. If I think about the movers and shakers who get to define gaming as a subculture now, it's all much more crowdsourced - it's streamers and YouTubers and content creators. If I think about the people with privileged access to gaming companies whose feedback changes the way games are made now, it's, well, it's content creators. It's not journalists. Asmongold doesn't have a journalism degree, but he has significantly greater access to Blizzard than anyone working for Kotaku.
It's not a total victory and journalism still matters - Jason Schreier, say, still has a lot of influence - but it's not got the stranglehold that I think it was felt to have in 2014.
Whether this is good or bad overall is a separate question - I think personally I prefer the streamer/content-creator-based world to the progressive journalistic clique, but frankly I dislike both of them - but insofar as it was about gaming as a scene, I think pro-GG have probably come out better than anti-GG have. Even if all the official histories favour anti-GG and will probably do so forever.
W/o evidence, this doesn't strike me as charitable as your "What GG was actually about, to pro-GG..." explanation. Pro-GG cares about entryism, but anti-GG is just about denying people who trigger a disgust response?
All right, that’s fair. I suppose I’m not unbiased. I remember the narrative from GamerGate at the time was obsessed with expressions of contempt towards them (e.g. that Sam Biddle tweet), but it would be unfair to present that as necessarily representative.
I'll admit that I might be reading a more general progressive politics of contempt into it - the smug style and all that. But it may not be helpful of me to pattern-match GamerGate to later cultural disputes.
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I think there's another layer to it, where even within behaviour the Blue perspective insistently defines GG as being a "harassment campaign" despite GG doing stuff other than harassment (most obviously, awareness-raising, and IIRC also boycotts) and TTBOMK only a tiny minority of GGers actually doing things normally considered to be harassment.
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Your breakdown of the motivations and rhetoric of both factions seems accurate.
I don't play many video games these days, but of the few recent ones I bought, Elden Ring seems celebrated in GG circles for being especially non-woke. Its character creation uses "Body Type A / Body Type B" rather than a gender option. Another celebrated non-idpol game, Hogwarts Legacy, apparently lets you play as a black male witch in the female dormitories in 19th century England, and has openly transgender NPCs.
Yes, traditional gaming journalism is a shadow of its former self, but that's just social media killing the legacy press. The culture of AAA games shifted with everything else. Calling the situation a pro-GG victory seems like telling a 1924 Russian white that he won the civil war because Lenin died.
Oh, certainly the last decade or so has been a defeat for social conservatism in video games. Actual conservatives have been consistly losing. Even in games or franchises that in my experience are particularly beloved by conservatives we can see this - BattleTech, for instance, has no gender selection for PCs, but merely lets you select 'pronouns', which can be mixed-and-matched with any body shape or facial features without limitation.
But I think it would be a bad misreading of GamerGate to see it as a social conservative response? GamerGate was never conservative.
Thus to take the case of Hogwarts Legacy - that game's success strikes me as much more compatible with the narrative that pro-GG won? The anti-GG position on Hogwarts Legacy isn't "Hurrah for trans representation!" The anti-GG position on Hogwarts Legacy is "boycott this transphobic filth". (Indeed that review is a perfect example of everything that drove GamerGate up the wall - a 'review' that barely touches on the game itself, which is mostly an autobiographical ramble, and which doesn't even seem to care about the question of whether the game is fun to play. At the time I remember pro-GGers citing this review as an example of what they were angry about - a review that seems more interested in passing moral judgement on a sin, in this case sexism or objectification, that it does in considering whether or not a game is fun or well-made.)
Pro-GG never cared about gay or trans characters in video games. Pro-GG was team "shut up and play video games", and was opposed to any sort of moralising. GamerGate was not anti-woke in the sense of "don't have LGBT characters in games". GamerGate was anti-woke in the sense of "stop lecturing me you puritanical douchebag".
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Yeah, in the context of gaming I'd have to say anti-GG won.
In the broader political context, it's hard to say, particularly since as I said something like GG was essentially inevitable.
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I have seen plenty of complaints about the latter from people who care about IDPOL.
My gripe with it is more that it makes absolutely no sense in the Harry Potter universe, they've got polyjuice potions, presumably other means of body altering via magic too. There shouldn't be any trans people who have a visible mismatch between their expressed phenotype and what they desire to be, let alone a glaringly obvious case.
They could easily have just had a character who you don't even know is trans until you dig into their backstory and figure out they're on it
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I don't think the red tribe cares about gamergate even now. "Some degenerate internet weirdos getting into it over something retarded, IDK and IDC, it's so stupid it really just demonstrates why the blue tribe shouldn't be in charge of things that they care about this enough to blow it up" is probably the median red tribe opinion when it's brought to our attention.
I mean, of course it doesn't care about GG; GG's long-past. But there've been quite a few Greys who've become Red-adjacent in the years that followed (the alt-right and alt-lite), which means this sort of fight gets more attention. Elon Musk buying Twitter and the AI debate are, of course, more important, but they're also centrally Grey-on-Blue conflicts (Grey-on-Grey-on-Blue in the latter case, since Grey has both Butlerian Jihadis and uncensored-AI-for-all types), and you do see Red media taking some sort of interest and sympathising with Grey.
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Even at the time, they were pretty divided? GamerGate made conservative media for a short time in 2014, but the reaction seemed to be mostly incomprehension plus a little contempt - look at those weirdo nerds.
There were a few people who thought it might be a chance to do outreach to gamers (re: Milo Yiannopoulos and Breitbart), but they didn't get that far. Even post-2014, there is still the occasional, token attempt to reach out - consider something like this, arguing that games are a conservative medium and describing GamerGate as a "gamer-led consumer revolt" against "the attempted control and corruption of leftist-dominated gaming journalism sites", but it never went past a few lone voices. The traditional right, overall, just isn't really trying.
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