If you're legitimately concerned about journalistic ethics in the gaming world (which is a real thing), you should really avoid the "GamerGate" moniker as much as possible.

EDIT: My vote total is bouncing up and down like a rubber ball, so I'll just go ahead and post the details I mentioned.

GamerGate was founded around an incident where Eron Gjoni made a blog post accusing his girlfriend Zoe Quinn, who makes free video games, of cheating on him with several men, whom he named. Most of them were also game developers. One of them, Nathan Grayson, was a games journalist. He once wrote an article with a single paragraph about one of Quinn's games, released (by Gjoni's timeline) months before he allegedly slept with Quinn.

This narrative somehow became "women developers everywhere are sleeping with writers to promote their shitty games and it's destroying gaming and must be stopped." This wasn't even an accusation Gjoni made; it was a conclusion jumped to by his readers.

Ethics in games journalism is a legitimate issue. Major publishers have been buying good reviews with cash and perks for almost as long as there's been a gaming industry. No one's ever cared enough to make a lasting fuss about that. It wasn't until a woman who writes tiny, free games was accused falsely of buying good reviews that the cry of corruption went up. I think that illustrates firmly what the real priorities were here.

Some well-meaning people have taken GamerGate's message at face value and been motivated to expose actual ethical issues. That's laudable, but doing it under the GamerGate banner devalues the entire message.

EDIT AGAIN: crooked-v's post and link about the controversy around the GamesJournosPros mailing list is also valuable. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17306791

Your proof is not at all sufficient for your claim

>Just for the record: GamerGate was 100% founded on harassing women.

>Some well-meaning people have taken GamerGate's message at face value and been motivated to expose actual ethical issues. That's laudable, but doing it under the GamerGate banner devalues the entire message.

You seem to have back pedaled from your original absurd claim. That's progress I guess.

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Its hard to find any neutral source that aggregates all the factual information. Does this website cover everything? Do you have an alternate source?

http://thisisvideogames.com/gamergatewiki/index.php/Timeline...

Not at all. The GamerGate movement began with people looking to punish Quinn for her infidelity, and people who already hated her game jumped on the bandwagon to invent conspiracy theories to explain why it was well-reviewed. These people jumped to the demonstrably false conclusion that she had traded sex for reviews, and that narrative, unfortunately, went mainstream, and caught the attention of people who legitimately cared about journalistic ethics and weren't aware of the previous facts.

And that's still continuing--you see a lot of well-meaning people in this thread who are still not aware how much of the sex-for-reviews narrative and the GameJournoPros narrative are outright lies.

> Its hard to find any neutral source that aggregates all the factual information. Does this website cover everything? Do you have an alternate source?

That site may work as a timeline, but whatever your position, I think we can agree that GamerGate's own wiki is not an unbiased source.

Interestingly, the FBI got confessions from some of the attackers, and decided not to prosecute. http://www.businessinsider.com/gamergate-fbi-file-2017-2

Just because they didn't have a central organization, doesn't change the fact that it was a movement that caused a lot of damage. In fact, there's a parallel with the Alt-Right.

Many terrorist organizations operate with individual cells who work independently, so that they can't implicate each other. I'd still call that an organization.

I'd argue there's a more interesting parallel with political terrorist organizations: they often start out as non-violent groups until subsections radicalize over time, therefore attracting a set of new members who further radicalize the group. Think Hamas, PKK, etc.

It's pointless to argue whether GamerGate was about "ethics in journalism" because there's the set of people who care about that and the set of people who like to threaten women over the internet, and it's not clear which one are "GamerGate" and which ones aren't.

Would it be fair to paint the critics of gamergate with the same brush?

My best advice is to look at the majority of the people and see how they act, then make your own judgements.

Nobody is disputing the facts. The problem comes when people take disparate facts and weave a narrative that supports their own beliefs without any supporting evidence.

>Many terrorist organizations operate with individual cells who work independently, so that they can't implicate each other. I'd still call that an organization.

Only because they have a shared goal. There is no shared goal in gamer gate. The thing called "gamer gate" was filled with crazy and non-crazy people with wildly differing goals and beliefs.

Minor details like him not actually being part of Gamergate in any way and his videos being obvious jokes didn't stop the media reporting this as an example of Gamergate death threats against women. Meanwhile, in actual non-media reality Gamergate was split between people who thought his jokes were distasteful but not actually harassment and those who considered them over the line. Then when it became clear he was a fictional character, the narrative changed to one where Gamergate were now threatening him because they'd discovered he didn't really support their harassment of women. Of course, the Gamergate position all along was that he obviously wasn't serious, the fact it was like harassment made him unpopular, and it was still that other internet community sending death threats and harassment. (A community, if I'm remembering rightly, which went out their way to go after a bunch of Gamergate supporters for taking a stand against their harassment.)

The most important thing to understand about Gamergate is this: the entire media (and social media) anti-harassment campaign of the time was primarily about attacking Gamergate and criticism of the game critics in general. Everything else fell by the wayside. All the groups actually doing the harassment went unmentioned. The most powerful, long lasting meme to come out of this fight, "It's about ethics in games journalism", was entirely about crushing the idea that games journalism has ethics problems. About discrediting criticism of games journalism, not stopping harassment or death threats or anything like that.

(The second most important thing to understand is that the media coverage attracted a bunch of hangers-on who wouldn't otherwise have had anything to do with it, and some of them were exactly the kind of people you'd expect to be attracted by that kind of coverage.)

GamerGate wasn't coordinated enough and lacked the centralized leadership to have been "founded" for a purpose or be a "front" to achieve specific clandestine goals.

From what I gather, it was sort of like Occupy Wall Street in that there was really no there there besides a vague ethos shared by the people who took up its flag to pursue their disparate pet causes.

It blew up from there as many people became leaders of multiple subsections of GamerGate, many of whom we see today in the alt-right parts of the internet which I am sure is entirely coincidental. The difference between Occupy Wall Street and GamerGate is that GamerGate rallied behind multiple different leaders which would push the the movement towards various directions. This was all stuff I saw from personal experience.

He did nothing to direct Gamergate, most of what I saw him post in the early days was trying to put the cat back in the bag.

The second was that he was constantly active in various chat channels encouraging and pushing the movement forward while lying about his claims that he was trying to back away from it.

http://antinegationism.tumblr.com/

I would also be interested in seeing any logs of Eron in the chat servers, I was never on those so I only saw what was posted to Reddit.

This blogpost from 2014 has multiple examples of Eron posting under a trip on 4chan as well IRC logs.

The author of that post says that Eron abused Zoe but has not provided any evidence, do you know of anything to back that up? All the evidence that Eron posted was never denied by Zoe afik.

It is a well known fact that game companies pay people to write positive reviews.

One example (Microsoft): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeHjN4oWVfk

However, that was not the claims of corruption and reviews made during the course of GamerGate (ie that Zoe had slept with reviewers for positive coverage). None of GamerGate dealt with the actual issues of corporate influence on reviews and the policies thereof.

Now, is the rest of the statement true?

No, clearly not. There are a lot more problems with the paragraph than can be solved by a simple substitution.

The root problem is that it's very hard (almost impossible) to make statements about the whole of an uncoordinated, loosely defined group that are both specific and true. Also, when you think you can easily make such statements, it probably doesn't mean that you're right but rather your thinking is being driven by biases and group-prejudice.