The Public's Guide to Gamergate: A History of Video Game Journalism

With the mainstream media seemingly hell-bent on keeping the hashtag Gamergate protest alive, it leads many to question what the Gamergate hashtag protest was even about. What was once an angry firestorm with no political allegiance, it seems the meaning behind the controversy is divided by political extremists on both the left and right-wings. So let's dig up this dead fossil of a controversy and do an autopsy to see where everything went wrong.

Depending on who you ask, The topic has been drowned in so much hyperbole now, that its hard for the average person to determine the truth from the lies about it anymore. One side believes it's a sexist hate campaign against women in game development, while the other believes it's a consumer revolt against conflicts of interest in the gaming media. Since the media resurrected this dead horse, a third branch of the political sphere is calling it one side of the culture war on what the right-wing conservatives are now calling the 'Social Justice Warriors', in some crusade to censor right-wing ideas. The truth may surprise you.

I'm not here to tell you which side was right, but only one side is telling the truth. I'm going to show you why, but there is a lot of history that this article needs to flush out in order to gain an informed perspective.

How GamerGate actually started

Most people involved in Gamergate say that it began as a shit-post by a man named Eron Gjoni about his then ex-girlfriend, Zoie Quinn . Quinn is an indie game developer, and in an extremely bitter tirade on his Wordpress blog, Gjoni accused Quinn of having sex with five men that would be instrumental in promoting her chose-your-own-adventure book masquerading as a 'game' called Depression quest. One of the alleged men was a video game journalist for Kotaku named Nathan Grayson, who would go on to write a favorable review of Zoe Quinn's game long after the alleged encounter occurred, while another was a curator for Steam Greenlight, who could potentially get her game published. Grayson has since insisted that the relationship didn't exist until after he repeatedly gave her projects positive coverage, but for many gamers, the explanation strains credulity. The chat logs that were captured in screenshots by Gjoni revealed damning evidence in support of his bitter claims.

Why the Nathan Grayson thing is important

It's Importance is not due to any perceived issue of infidelity or sexism. Despite what the mainstream media has been saying, (without a shred of evidence,) Gamergate's platform didn't seem it was ever about Zoie Quin's faithfulness to her boyfriend, nor was Gamergate against women in video game development to begin with. Gamergate explored the potential conflict of interest game developers could have with the gaming press, and how a lack of professional separation violated the consumer trust.

But what is the consumer trust? When gamers (I E, people who play videogames religiously) look to a print magazine or a website for a video game review, there is a certain level of professional separation expected between game developers and the journalistic figures of the industry. The consumer trust assumes that if a columnist is too close to the developers who make the game, said columnist would recuse themselves in that situation. Basically, when a Journalist recuse themselves, it means they avoid covering a subject that might show themselves to have a conflict of interest. This is to avoid having opinions contaminated by a bias on the part of the person covering the game.

What we find, however, is that many journalists often see key developers as their best friends or colleagues; leaving the gamers who follow the medium to question whether or not the Media were giving honest opinions, or pushing a bias in favor of its constituency.

Gamergate is older than you think | It didn't start with the "woman-hating Incels"

Long before the Gamergate scandal of 2014, the general gaming enthusiast public have seen evidence of pathological corruption between video games and its media. It sometimes seems like development studios would do everything short of bribing video game reviewers for positive coverage on their games, and the trend seems to continue to this day.

• Exhibit A: Low review scores could get you fired

In 2006, veteran games journalist Jeff Gerstmann was fired from GameSpot for giving a low review score to the then new Kane & Lynch game, because the game's publisher threatened to pull their advertising funding from GameSpot as a result.

• Exhibit B: Game publishers attempting to bribe media

In 2010, game publisher Activision invited certain game publications to attend a private event in Santa Monica California, where game reviewers would be the first to play that year's latest Call of Duty game. According to a leaked invitation via one of the its recipients, GamePlanet, it was an all-expenses-paid event that funded outdoor activities. GamePlanet Magazine noted:

"It is Gameplanet’s belief that such gratuity compromises the integrity of any review and as a result, this publication has never and will never accept such an invitation," 

In a later update, GamePlanet added:

"Gameplanet has been contacted this morning by Activision's local representatives who have informed us that, as a result of our publication of this article, our scheduled interview with Call of Duty: Black Ops' military advisor Hank Keirsey has now been cancelled."

In an Interview with John Walker of Rock, Paper, Shotgun!, he said the following:

"One time I was sent to London for a preview event for the game Auto Assault," writes Walker. "What I didn’t know was that I’d spend the day riding on quad bikes and hovercraft. I had a great day, by coincidence with a few good friends, and at the end of it we were shown the average-looking game. That I’d wasted a day pratting around on bikes didn’t make me want to like the game more – if anything it puts the mediocrity of a game in perspective – and the game went on to be a disastrous flop that few journalists sought to defend because they’d had a nice day going on a quad bike. But that day is definitely deserving of criticism – it had nothing to do with the game, and had no purpose other than to try to entertain us. And the publishers had no reason to want to entertain us other than to have us like their game more. It didn’t work, it’s damned stupid. But I was a part of it, and you’d be right to criticise it."

• Exhibit C: Shilling and Censorship

In 2012, during the Video Game Awards, renowned Canadian video game journalist Jeff Keeley could be seen conducting an interview next to a poster of Master Chief, and a table covered in 20.oz bottles of Mountain Dew soft drinks, and bags of Doritos chips, all while staring blankly into the camera as the interview went on. Keeley was talking about a promotional campaign that allowed customers of Mountain Dew and Doritos to get codes that allowed them to get free XP in Halo 4. This picture became a defining moment in video game journalism that would go on to be known as the DoritoGate scandal.

DoritoGate didn't just arouse the ire of the general public, though. Other journalists in the industry like Rob Florance of Eurogamer lambasted the act, calling it "a sad and vulgar image", questioning "How many games journalists are sitting beside that table?" 

But get this: Florance would later be forced to step down for criticizing the shilling behavior, and his original article on the matter ended up being heavily redacted. In his post entitled: Lost Humanity 18: A Table of Doritos, He states the Doritogate situation is not an isolated incident, but symptomatic of a much bigger problem within video game journalism. Florance describes instances where the VGAs claimed journalists could win a free PS3 console if they tweeted about particular upcoming games that year.

• Exhibit D: Enormous conflicts of interest

One of the biggest examples of corruption was, when -unbeknownst to most gamers- that Game Informer had been purchased by a famous video game retailer called GameStop. This meant that if Gamestop wanted to bolster the sales of any game, they needed only print positive coverage of games they already sell in their stores.

As you might imagine from all that, trust between the consumer and the gaming press had been in the process of eroding for decades. A consumer revolt against what the gaming public called corruption has been happening on a much smaller scale for nearly ten years, prior to the big scandal of 2014 that essentially lite the whole thing on fire. The popularity of blogs and alternative media grew as the internet did, and suddenly, the mainstream media wasn't as important as it used to be. When media screwed up, it couldn't simply cover up the scandal and move on the way so many others have in Journalism's past. Now --in the age of fast internet-- complete strangers could freely communicate about the scandal worldwide, ensuring that if the media screwed up, it wouldn't easily be forgotten. GamerGate, could be considered a spiritual successor to DuritoGate, since it sort of picked up where that controversy left off.

It wasn't long before the consumer trust slowly slipped away from magazines and big budget websites, and fell into the hands of individuals on YouTube, such as Angry Joe, TotalBiscuit among others, and given what we just talked about, It isn't hard to see why this shift has been happening. Individual YouTubers didn't have the connection to corporate media giants they saw in large websites with columnists paid to write for them did. It was a much more interpersonal trust expected of a one-man show, and it really isn't something you could find in a faceless organization. Keep in mind, this came on the heels of decades of the gaming public speculating corruption in gaming journalism, and for many conspiracy theorists, the Nathan Grayson event would be the canary in the coal mine.

What Gamergate Isn't:

With what has been happening in north American politics lately, what was once a hashtag campaign that died years ago seems to have spread roots; sprouting into a tree of political controversy growing just between the two major political parties. On one hand, you have opportunistic pundits on the left using it as a straw-man to try and legitimize myths about their ideology being oppressed by hate mongers, and on the right you have pundits claiming it was a culture war on SJWs who spread fake news. Both sides of this issue are wrong. Everything you've heard about Gamergate being a 'harassment campaign against women in game development' simply isn't the truth.

Truth is, there is very little or no real evidence to support what either side of the political paradigm are saying about this. Gamergate isn't about railing against any progressive ideas about female representation, either. At least, not as far as the evidence suggests. Gamergate, and protesting an influx of SJW hostility are mutually exclusive topics that aren't as interchangeable as many in the political ring say that they are. It is, however true, that the majority of those who lied about the protest identified as SJW, and railed against the Gamergate outrage purely for political reasons —mainly very bigoted and sexist ones— like the fact that many gamers just so happen to have a penis between their legs, and so by extension, must also hate women in game development by virtue of having a Y cromosome.

But why would the media lie about the Gamergate protest? What would they have to gain from it? Well, considering the facts as they were outlined earlier, the gaming media didn't have a leg to stand on when its unethical behavior was exposed to the general public. Kotaku's mistake had far-reaching consequences for every other video game media outlet, and put the dying niche in an even more compromising position. Since the media couldn't argue with facts and empirical evidence to defend itself, (Considering the evidence was not in its favor,) it decided to make up facts out of thin air in order to distract people from the media's guilt in the matter.

Top 4 Lies the Media Has Been Telling You About that  Gamergate protest

#1: It's a culture war

A lie you tend to hear about Gamergate is that it is one side of a culture war with social Marxists. To put it bluntly, Gamergate has never had any affiliation with politics. Gamergate has only ever existed --and continues to exist now-- for the sole purpose of addressing corruption in video gaming Journalism, regardless of the political party that corruption comes from. The accusation comes mainly from the targets of the gamergate debate themselves, and their credibility needed to be taken into question when the topic was being reported on. However, the media
—as we know it today— doesn't do that.

#2: It hates minorities

The first and most famously debunked lie was that Gamergate was a racist, white supremacist movement. You see this lie perpetuated even now, conflating Gamergate's consumer revolt with the Alt-Right political upheaval. Many of the privileged, white journalists who wrote this lie couldn't substantiate the claim, (Because they never provided evidence,) which struck outrage in the gaming community that evolved into the #NotYourShield protest that sprung to life right alongside GamerGate. NotYourShield is a culmination of women, LGBTQ and ethnic minority gamers colluding together to lambaste the corrupt gaming media for using them as a shield from accountability. It's been well known among conservatives, independents and libertarians that people who identify politically as cultural Marxists, social justice warriors, or liberals often wildly throw accusations of racism around like a rubber chicken in a competitive Wushu match in the hopes that it would be enough to shut down any argument they happened to be losing. This is no different.

Again, this is another 'claim' coming from the opposition, which, itself, represents an alarming conflict of interest. Had it not been for social media, many in the public would have taken these journalists at their word, because we all assume statements like these come from an 'authoritative news source.'

#3: It's an attack on women in game development

Since the white supremacist lie didn't work, The next logical step was to claim -without evidence again- that Gamergate was a coordinated attack on women in game development, which is a lie that persists to this day. In the far left-leaning journalists mind, because one of the two people directly involved in the Gamergate scandal had a vagina, that would naturally mean criticizing anything with a vagina involved is sexist. The only way it wouldn't be sexist to Journalists in gaming would be if both Nathan and Zoie had penises when the alleged scandal occurred, but, then again, the gaming press might have labeled gamers homophobic instead.

#4: Death and rape threats

The fourth and most Egregious lie was that Gamergate coordinated death and rape threats to people in gaming Journalism. This has been debunked numerous times, both by alternative media sources through research and empirical evidence, as well as a two-year long FBI investigation that found "no actionable leads", meaning that the connection between death and rape threats and Gamergate simply didn't exist. Even after the investigation was made available via the Freedom of Information act, the gaming press had no shortage of illegitimate complaints, claiming the investigation 'wasn't being taken seriously', while continuing to claim that Gamergate was an organized hate campaign. Like most on the political far left, when the evidence doesn't support their political beliefs, the evidence must be sexist. This would also mean that the gaming press doesn't have a problem falsely accusing innocent people of serious crimes that could result in jail time, which shows how morally bankrupt these journalists tend to be.

This is, of course, not to say that the death and rape threats didn't happen at all. anyone who has spent even a mild amount of time on the internet has gone through this kind of thing as the result of internet trolls. The problem arises when the gaming press --en-large-- conveniently decides to scapegoat their political opposition -Gamergate- knowing full well that they weren't telling the truth. Now you're probably saying to yourself: What if it was just a big misunderstanding? How do you know that the video game press knowingly lied about it? Well, consider the following.

Proof that Journalists collude with each-other to lie about Gamergate

Less than a month after the fiasco hit mainstream news outlets like Fox and CNN, many members of the gaming press who were involved in the Zoie Quinn scandal colluded together in a private Google group they called Gaming Journalism Professionals, or GameJournoPros for short. Dozens of articles --many published within hours of each-other on the same day-- started cropping up on many of the major gaming news websites, including:  

• "Gamers are Over" (Gamasutra) 
• “A guide to ending ‘gamers’", (Gamasutra) 
• “There are gamers at the gate, but they may already be dead”, (Destructoid) 
• “Gamers are over”, (Rock, Paper, Shotgun) 
• “The death of the ‘gamers’ ”, (Ars Technica) 
• “Killing the gamer identity”, (Vice) 
• “Gaming is leaving ‘gamers’ behind”, (Buzzfeed)
• and even Kotaku's very own (“We might be witnessing the ‘death of an identity’ ”) 

This includes dissertations by Academics like Dan Golding; writer of "Gamers are Over", wherein he argues --without a hint of evidence-- that “the gamer identity has been broken” and that the gamer outrage “is an attempt to retain hegemony.” Even Nathan (Dick) Grayson linked to an article on his twitter account entitled "Why I'm not a gamer", basically saying the same thing. Each article in this 24-hour blitz were littered with very bigoted opinions on gamers, as well as casual racist diatribes generalizing gamers as white fat people living in their mother's basements.

Proof Journalists lied (again) to cover up a corruption scandal

Before anyone could prove that this blitz of slander and liable was coordinated, this came off as just a little more than convenient to many of gaming journalism's critics. Interestingly enough, the conspiracy theorists would be proven right again.

One of the journalists involved in this private group GameJournoPros leaked private conversations to a then Breitbart Tech editor named Milo Yiannopoulos, who took it upon himself to blow the whole thing wide open shortly after the coordinated attack on consumers occurred. This made an already enormous backlash from the public go from looking like a consumer revolt to looking like a lynch mob searching for the neighborhood child molester. Zoe Quinn herself was involved in the group at the time, and the logs reveal Journalists colluding together to deliberately spread false information about Gamergate.

GameJournoPros may be a bigger scandal than Nathan Grayson's Gamergate

The GameJournoPros Google group, and its resulting articles are a scandal unto itself. The fact that multiple competing news media websites colluded together to lie about the Gamergate protest should frighten a lot of people. Considering how big these names were in the video game media, one can clearly see that these Journalists exploited a position of power to create facts out of thin air, much like the the ministry of truth in George Orwell's 1984.

No matter what side of the debate you are on, the fact that this ever happened eludes to a truly astonishing lack of professionalism on the part of these mainstream media outlets, and one that should concern their readers.

Gamergate was the Public's Earliest Warning about the Fake News Phenomenon of Today

With this information in mind, it isn't hard to determine why the media felt compelled to lie about the Gamergate protest. For a good portion of the general public, the media's word is gospel. Most people don't fact-check, or read sources, because the majority of the public doesn't have time. Major publications like Kotaku, on the other hand, pay people to write for them, and even have writers on retainer. Writing all day is their job, and the idea of being able to influence the opinions of readers was a power they clearly took advantage of, and for all the wrong reasons. The power to influence the minds of the audience was a power that corrupted them. Why wouldn't they lie? They're Kotaku. Rock-paper-shotgun. Destructoid. IGN. No-one is going to take some inferior gamer's opinion over the medias, right? ....Right?

Why Gamergate is still relevant:

Once you read the facts, it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that Gamergate finds its way in the media once again. With all the talk about fake news going around since U.S. presidential election, the public is rightfully concerned about whether or not the media they consume is fact-based, and informed by real evidence. The mainstream media will have you believe you should be proportionally more concerned with largely unknown websites that most people have never heard of. The truth is, the danger doesn't lie with some unknown website sneaking a headline into a Facebook feed: Fake news is far more dangerous in the hands of the mainstream publications, because their lies reach the most people for the longest periods of time.

With what we find in the mainstream media lately, trust between the consumer and news media is at its lowest point in recorded history. Ever since election season, mainstream media has been printing stories with so much personal political bias that they read more like blog posts than actual news stories. Between the rounds of unsubstantiated bull coming from the Left with GoldenShowerGate, to the unsubstantiated nonsense on the Right with regards to the PizzaGate scandal, mainstream media doesn't even hide the fact that it prints hyperbole to manipulate the opinions of readers anymore. In the past, news organizations were divided by their niche, not their political affiliation, but, --clearly-- times have changed. News reads more like Soviet-style propaganda reels than honest reporting of events, so in more recent years, Gamergate transcended being an issue about video game media, anbut a beacon that shed a spotlight on general news media itself. If the big names in the gaming press were willing to engage in this much corruption, could even bigger news media outlets like CNN and FOX be lying to push an agenda as well?

What the Mainstream Media Isn't Telling You

This is Vivian James. (Left.) She was conceived as a collaborative effort to make a video game character that was crowdfunded by 4chan users, for a feminist organization that wanted to promote women in game development known as The Fine Young Capitalists. You heard right; 4Chan crowdfunded feminist game developers way back in 2014. According to Reddit user named Silly Sladar, Zoie Quinn intentionally sabotaged the TFYC's project by repeatedly doxxing the Project's founders and members, calling the crowdfunding project "Oppressive to women." The prevailing theory at the time was that she did this in order to promote her own crowdfunding project called Rebel Jam.

A screenshot of a Reddit conversation with one of the project leads is very revealing here:

Someone the media championed as a paragon of empowerment for women in game development, has a history of making herself one of its biggest obstacles. Of course, you'll never find this information printed by a mainstream news source. You only ever find stories about the Vivian James origins from news sources that conveniently omit this information.

Mainstream Media can't talk about Vivian James, because Vivian James is the elephant in the room.

What consumers need to know about Gamergate

The truth about Gamergate that the media won't tell you is this: Gamergate is not a terrorist organization, a war on political correctness, or a coordinated attack on women. Gamergate is what it has always been: a consumer revolt against financially motivated corruption, and politically motivated lies in video gaming's media. The story of Gamergate's rise is a very important one. It highlights the very real danger posed when the media we trust to report honestly on a topic falls to the dark allure of of political bias, and uses its power in the mainstream media to intentionally print false information for political gain. It's hard to know who is telling the truth, when the media you go to in search of it has everything in the world to gain by lying to you.

What motivated me to make this unusually long article was that Google search results seem to prioritize GamerGate related articles filled with defamation and deliberately false information. Since the GamerGate movement doesn't have its own website, it leaves it open to mountains of hyperbole and misrepresentation by the media giants who have the best SEO. The first results for any search query any newbie has about GamerGate are usually answered by the websites with the biggest conflict of interest in the subject, such as Gawker, The Verge, Gizmodo and Kotaku before anyone else. This issue is at the heart of why Gamergate still matters, and why Fake News has become such a big issue in recent years. The sad reality is, anyone new to the topic will typically be exposed to the lies first, in truly Orwellian Ministry of Truth fashion.

I feel like its time for the gaming public to get off the sidelines on this issue. If the media is able to successfully lie about this, they could lie about anything. It's up to us -the consumer- to decide what is mainstream. It's not up to a big corporation like Facebook, or a government. We need to start being diligent, research the evidence, and find the truth for ourselves. Like I mentioned earlier, truth in news media is becoming scarce, but the only thing standing in the way of its extinction is us.

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