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I think pro- and anti-GamerGaters both tend to overestimate its impact. I tend to think GamerGate was just one instance of Toxoplasma of Rage that served as a political awakening for some people. I don't think it was more impactful than other Toxoplasma skirmishes, like New Atheism or BLM.
Though I must admit, GamerGate was also a conflict that almost entirely passed me by. I had one friend in college who I had one conversation about it with, and I was vaguely aware of Anita Sarkeesian, but neither side was salient to me (I play video games from time to time, but I'm not a "gamer", and I've never been an SJW or woke scold) and so I was never very invested in it. It would be like me trying to get involved in the "pro-shipper vs anti-shipper" debate in fan fiction communities. I have my principles, and they might align with one or the other side of that debate more than the other, but I'm also not fighting in that war because it seems dumb and fake to me.
I never heard of GamerGate at the time but it was still salient to me, in that I was reading Polygon and Rock Paper Shotgun reviews and I started noticing when they became anti-male and anti-nerd. I was still in a 'it would be nice if games were a bit less hyper-macho' mode but I noticed the tone of the conversation change, to the point where it felt like the games industry was actively trying to reject me. It was just the small waves caused by explosions deep beneath the sea, but it made me Notice for the first time that lots of people online seemed to actively dislike me for being a bog-standard white male teenager.
EDIT: I mean mostly the "gamers are dead" articles referenced by @theincompetencetheorist
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There was a period where people were claiming memes got Trump elected (or at least selected in the primary). This obviously wasn't the case except in the most trivial sense. It wasn't God Emperor Trump memes or the_donald, those were all riding on existing enthusiasm for the guy who broke with the learned helplessness strategy on a few issues central to the base.
It's just overly online people over-estimating the impact of the things they care about.
I'm probably above the 90th percentile of grass deficiency here. I was actually still reading IGN and other games sites for reviews and even I couldn't be fucked to drill through the tangle of claims that was Gamergate. It was just another populist vs journalist flashpoint AFAICT.
I'm sure there were people saying memes got Trump elected, like people saw him shopped as God emperor and were overcome with the need to vote for him, because the internet is hilarious. But there is a defensible version of that claim I think, which is that Trump's meme game won him the election. But by that I mean his intuitive understanding of the zeitgeist and the various thoughts and emotions that were being ignored by the establishment.
I mean, sure. He has good political instincts for where the base is (not that it was unclear immigration was an issue voters cared about). So did Obama.
But, if we're going with that older definition of meme, then the mainstream media would arguably be more responsible for "memeing" him into existence. Both in terms of the free advertising/transmission and by condemning him so much.
Something they've never psychologically recovered from.
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What makes a meme funny is in part the truth communicated by it. It is just a form of satire
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Let me take the neutral ground and say that GamerGate wasn't the precipitating event, but it was pivotal insomuch as videogames were (and still are) a universal hobby of young men. And when confronted with the blunt and obvious truth of Noticing the blue-hairs ruin everything, one could either go down the trail of Noticing everything else or sticking your head in the sand and saying it's a good thing. The 4chan/Resetra divergence, the chud/woke speciation.
It was the universal radicalizing event of the generation, and even those who were normie enough to not care were inculcated with the memes (on both the left and right.) No one questions the cultural impact of music or movies. Video games as a medium are larger than both combined. At some point, video games transitioned from being influenced by political trends to making them. Comparing the financial success of chudgames vs wokegames has become a tribal sport.
Which is to say... if someone plays a piece of media for thousands of hours, having it consume every waking moment of their lives, of course it would effect their political values. New Atheism and BLM are dead and gone but people are still mad that they got rid of Tracer's ass wiggle. I think you're just disconnected with what young men back then and now consider important.
And so I am so sorely disappointed that the Chinese one I'm currently sinking hundreds of hours in is still steeped in the same oppressor-oppressed narrative in the story. Not even a Marxist modes of production one, which at least would be novel in the $current_year, but the same old identity one. Well, at least I can quit it anytime. Just after one more day.
Chinese Skinner box uses Western Monomyth to appeal to Western audiences? Say it ain't so...
I think you expect too much from a mass-market product.
I expected something different, not even necessarily better, from a mass-market product that, to the best of my knowledge, targets the domestic Chinese market as a priority. Well, at least they still remember what is a woman.
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Let's grant that it was radicalizing. I'm not sold that a certain sort of anti-woke radicalism matters.
It takes a long time to get people to some Rufo stage. A lot of the critics of Anita Sarkeesian were still fundamentally in agreement with progressives. It was just "mostly the same values, can you just leave our shit alone?". Around this time atheism was having a moment online and the GOP were the loser squares who talked about the body shutting down legitimate rape. Working with them to break wokies was unthinkable and the sheer unconstrained nature of woke demands and their who/whom mentality wasn't fully accepted. Some people are still in denial (until it impacts them)
A lot of people didn't care, and a lot of people were embarrassed by attempted strike backs against the heart of the problem or to rally people against that a la "they came for gamers, gamers".
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It simply cannot have been, because I was of that generation and I was mostly put off by how much people cared about the whole thing on either side.
If I had to pin a name on what it seemed like from the outside, it was like "Asking Disney Corporation for a handjob." The nature of top tier media (AAA video games, blockbuster movies, etc.) is that only a small number of companies are able to marshal the resources in order to make them, and they can only make a few such releases a year, so if your tastes aren't represented in what they produce, you are left out in the cold. So people complain about the big corporations, and their failure to deliver what they want. Woke feminists want ugly, disabled women in the top tier media, and anti-woke coomers want sexy eye candy. Those desires are mutually exclusive, and so one or the other of them will be disappointed.
Some people have really started to invest in the idea of symbolic victories that can be provided by this or that big corporation kowtowing to their desires, and I'm sure I won't be able to dissuade anyone in that camp. But I really think people need a Diogenes and Alexander moment. When Alexander the Great comes up to your wine tub in the middle of the agora and asks if you want anything, you should be prepared to answer, "Stand a little out of my sun."
Nobody needs Blizzard. Nobody needs EA. Nobody needs Disney, or a thousand other big media corporations.
Either create your own stuff, or engage with enduring cultural artifacts that are 30+ years old, or support the smaller creators who are making things closer to your tastes. Like, the ancient Greeks made commentary after commentary about the Homeric epics and engaged with those stories on a deep level for centuries. But our culture is so temporally parochial, so obsessed with novelty, that we enslave our imaginations to big corporations and lose our souls in the process. Human flourishing is not merely to consoom. And it's certainly not to win pointless little cultural victories in a product you paid $60 on Steam.
Not totally related to the thrust of your point but this isn't even true. Skin packs already exist. Very little of the games cost is actually making a few extra models. There really could be a woke and non-woke addition of any AAA game. Hell, this is already done in practice for some international copies that remove LGBT flags or less radioactively the chinese version of WoW that gave a bone dragon flesh because of Chinese sensibilities around exposed skeletons.
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I largely agree with you but I just want to point out that the situation is much less symmetrical than you make it out to be, at least in video games.
What I mean is that the woke feminists demanding only ugly women in all the games never intended to actually stoop as low as actually playing the games in question. They don't have an interest in engaging the media, they only have an interest in using it as a kudgel.
It's more like when you kill your enemy and display his corpse. You even get this sense from the developers themselves: to the extent that they care about the game, it's due to it being a propaganda vehicle that allows them to push an agenda.
It's the old lament about how video games used to be made by neckbearded (white) autists and everything has gone to shit since.
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I dont care how much people care about things in the appropriate internet forums, or how petty they get. The "radicalising" part is how ouside society reacted to it. Like when one of those people got a hearing at the UN - what does that say about "our institutions"? In googling for this article, I found one from Austrias major center-left newspaper on the topic - from 2021. I think gamergate was mostly not causal - plenty of other things happened that could have done its work, but in the actual history it did play a major role. It was the first example of "blob enforcement" outside the traditional political arenas.
I've seen Zoe Quinn analogized to Franz Ferdinand.
World War I was always going to happen, because the entangling web of alliances was predisposed to make all the great powers go to war with each other; the assassination of the archduke was simply the spark that lit the waiting powder keg.
Likewise, gaming journalist had already been taken over by SJWs who hated games and hated gamers; some slut fucking five gaming journalists in exchange for giving her shitty game good reviews was simply the point where it went public.
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Wasn't the kickoff event of Gamergate to do with artsy SJW types capturing some sort of indie game award, though?
My sense is that the drama about wokeness in expensive "AAA games" actually came later - the community was instead taken over from below, with the points of incursion being along with the gaming-liberal arts border (journalism, awards, small-scale narrative games). I vaguely recall people asking an evil genie that video games finally be recognised as an artform in the years leading up to it.
The rage was ignited by the coordinated attack of about bunch of articles(about 20 IIRC) showing up in various media outlets trying to "kill" the gamer identity, because a small bunch gamers of notices the SJW types getting coverage for their shit. Gamergate wouldn't exist and nobody would have noticed if it weren't for the "gamers are dead" articles. It just showed that activist had infested the gaming journalism space and people started noticing on how the infestation was present in regular media.
For me, it was The Zoe Post. Before GamerGate, The Quinnspiracy, the Five Guys Saga, this is was the event that engaged my now dead and putrefying hobby horse.
People largely don't even remember it anymore, but this guy Erin Gjoni came out exposing Quinn as essentially a serial abuser with receipts. How did our good feminist SJW community react?
They sauntered over to the bookshelf and pulled out the How to Gaslight and Re-traumatize an Abuse Victim Field Manual and threw the whole fucking thing at him. Oh my god, it was absolutely everything and the kitchen sink. It was:
Erin's biggest mistake was hearing all the rhetoric his community put out about holding abusers accountable and failing to read between the lines that none of it was for men. He's been living in exile from his people ever since.
My biggest mistake was believing anyone would give a shit about this part of the story, or that it would even be remembered. If I was paying closer attention I could have realized this then rather than a decade later. But I guess all of us have things we have to learn the hard way.
The Zoe Post was the turning point for me as well. Before that, I bought into the whole progressivism. After seeing them eviscerate Eron, who obvious victim of abuse, I understood that actually we are the baddies. It really changed my entire perspective. What really sealed the deal was Untitled, though.
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Or/also- that the regular media was aligned enough to be partisan allies. Had GamerGate stuck to just the gaming media, it would have been a tempest in a teacup. When major media influence networks began weighing in, it both demonstrated it was a broader issue, and that the broader media was inclined to picking sides rather than neutrality (which was still the nominal stance of the media of the era- the Obama-era 'we are objective, it's just that reality has a liberal bias,' which started as a Steven Colbert comedic gag line but was unironically adopted).
What was also notable about GamerGate is that it was one of the first major sustained partisan media cancellation storms of its type that didn't actually crush the targets. While 'victory' was proclaimed in the ability to dominate the wikipedia and establishment media records, it lacked the career / identity destroying effect that previous such media storms had, which were known for forcing Republicans to drop Problematic People or deplatform people from, well, entire platforms. GamerGate, while driven off of some platforms as part of the partisan push, survived in others, which started to establish the lines of what spaces were / were not controlled by the party-media, which in turn is what allowed the alternate/right (not alt-right) media systems to grow beyond progressive-media control.
This led the a reduced-but-defiant rather than beaten-and-cowed demographic, which by existence demonstrated both (a) the ability to survive attempts at media cancellation and (b) the nascant support base for the unapologetically-resistant.
Previously, this was broadly thought impossible. Afterwards, Donald Trump took a similar approach- openly confrontational and defiant to attempts at Gamergate-style coordinated media warfare- that ultimately won the white house in 2016.
It wouldn't be right to say that Trump won because of gamergate, but gamergate was a paradigm shift that increased not just hostility to coordinated media efforts, but the belief in the ability of a force to survive such attacks, and thus view such a strategy as not intrensically doomed.
Put another way- the media-juggernaut that 'won' gamergate was shown to be more limited and vulnerable than it had been believed, and so more people were willing to believe it could fail.
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles.
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In my view Gamergate is only a symptom and not the cause for anything. It didn't do anything with the political landscape although I agree that it just happened to malign a group people that happened to be used to it so they stood tall to the abuse, and gave the opportunity to spotlight it for the more general populace. But I'm convinced that could have happened in other ways because the core of the ideology these activist in media espouse is rotten. There are no blank slates and noble savages!
I think it pretty much had to happen in gaming. Gaming provides a nexus of necessary factors - gamers had huge overlap with the very online, and indeed were comprised in part of people who had been using the internet for a very long time. Gaming draws logic oriented personality types and trained them pavlov style to employ it. And it contained a large population of people who were specifically interested in escaping modern reality. So when the worthless pieces of shit that passed for journalists at the time told them to stop using the internet for its primary purpose - communication - for completely nonsensical reasons, and they were evil if they just wanted to read about vidya, they understandably lost their shit.
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I think it was "The Zoe Post". Her Depression Quest had already been mocked for its lack of traditional gameplay and unusually positive critical reception (in essence, it was a typical contemporary art piece), but now this discrepancy could be resolved with a very glib explanation: Zoe Quinn had fucked game journalists in exchange for positive reviews.
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Copyright law is at fault for this. Letting individuals monopolize cultural icons neuters our ability to use them as shared myths... And that destroys our society's ability to self-reflect. "Superman" for example is a potent shorthand for a vision of what it means to be american, but only warner bros is formally allowed to use that shorthand to make money which in practice serves as a massive disincentive for artists to portray the same values in the same package and discuss them in a salient way.
And in the end, the only people that benefit are middlemen, not artists. Fanfiction artists getting patreon money is proof that in a world without copyright artists could still make a living, but we only stick doggedly to it because copyright is the means by which corporations rent-seek.
(All the same logic applies to patents, by the way, and in general all ip law except trademarks. Trademarks can stay because impersonating other people or groups is identity theft.)
Copyright law also means that entire videogame libraries vanish into the aether every five years when a new generation of consoles comes out.
And the move from physical media to streaming has been brutal for the classics; Netflix barely has any movies from before 1970.
Books themselves only sell for a decade or two before falling into obscurity because it is not worth paying the author to print them but nobody else is allowed to make copies until they enter the public domain a century later.
Makes it hard to "engage with enduring cultural artifacts that are 30+ years old".
And books get junked from public libraries a lot quicker nowadays too.
I doubt if anybody under 40 has ever read Arthur Herzog's Heat or IQ 83, or Robert Silverberg's The Calibrated Alligator.
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The classics are perfectly safe. Any classic movie can be streamed for a small fee on numerous platforms. If it's old enough, you can even find it for free on IA or YouTube since they're out of copyright.
Almost no such classic movie is even in DVD quality, although sometimes they claim to be 480p or 1080p but are actually upscaled from very low resolution sources. That one included; that's absurdly low resolution.
I skipped around a little and it didn't seem terrible. This one is maybe somewhat better. I don't really know how good a quality you can expect from a Russian movie from 1929.
You are correct.
For some reason if you load the page and don't play it, the still it shows is very low quality. If you actually play it it's fine.
I have in the past tried to get videos from archive.org and they really were poor quality, so I had assumed this was another instance of that. It seems that higher quality videos are more common now.
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"Cultural appropriation" is, strangely, an attempt to do this even to things that can't be copyrighted, by people who otherwise can't stop complaining about capitalism.
On the flip side we have no end to Superman expies: Homelander, Omni-Man, The Plutonian, Brightburn. They're just deeply, deeply cynical and aimed at subverting the character. Which may say something about the audience.
In other words: not portraying the same values in the same package. I fail to see how this is anything other than agreeing with the grandparent post.
Most of those examples started as comics which have a much lower barrier to entry than AAA games or movies.
They became organically popular, at which point studios and corporations jumped on them for adaptations.
People did go out and make their own. And this is what they made and were rewarded for making.
Indeed, comics that did not portray the same values in the same package became popular.
This does not appear to refute the point.
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Or may say something about the creators?
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I agree wholeheartedly. Copyright in its current shape is a travesty.
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It's a bit sad when you think about it - the greatest generation got world war 2, the boomers got the free love revolution, and millenials got... gamergate. (Gen x get nothing, as is tradition.)
"Baby Boomers got sex, drugs and rock'n'roll. We got AIDS, crack and techno."
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GenX got 9/11 and the war on terror.
GEN X GET NOTHING. Just for that we're taking the eighties off them and giving it to the millenials.
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You know where the name "millenial" comes from, right?
Most Millennials were children when the towers were hit.
I guess the actual fighting in the WoT was done mostly by millennials though.
The Millennial generation was so named (in the 90s) because the Millennium was expected to be the defining event of the generation -- turned out that was a pretty lame event, but the overturning of American hegemony by a gang of religious fanatics came just after and has shaped life since.
Most people put the first millennials at around 1980 -- which makes the bulk of the generation at least aware of what was going on, and the oldest of them 21. The last Boomers were 4-9 y.o. during the Summer of Love (depending where you want to draw that line), and the first ~24. This does not seem like a big difference to me, unless you are arguing that the defining event of the Boomer generation wasn't until sometime in the late 70s when all of them were grown up?
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