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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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