Gamergate (harassment campaign)

Gamergate was the video game industry, almost notably feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian in addition to game developers Zoë Quinn as well as Brianna Wu, among others. a harassment campaign subjected doxing, threats of rape, and death threats.

Gamergate proponents "Gamergaters" stated that they were a social movement, but lacked well-defined goals, a coherent message, and leaders. Gamergaters claimed to promote ethics in video games journalism and created conspiracy theories falsely accusing Quinn of an unethical relationship with journalist Nathan Grayson. More broadly, they alleged unethical collusion between the press and feminists, progressives, and social critics. These claims were widely dismissed as trivial, conspiracy theories, baseless, or unrelated to actual issues of ethics in gaming and journalism. Gamergate supporters frequently denied that the harassment took place, falsely claiming it to be manufactured by the victims.

Gamergate is quoted as a culture war over cultural diversification, artistic recognition, feminism in video games, social criticism in video games, and the social identity of gamers. numerous supporters of Gamergate oppose the increasing influence of feminism on video game culture. Gamergate led figures both inside and outside the gaming industry to focus on methods of addressing online harassment, ways to minimize harm, and prevent similar events. Gamergate has been viewed as a precursor to the alt-right and assisted other right-wing movements.

Organization

The series of events that came to be required as Gamergate has been described as "torturously complex". As a movement, it had no official leaders or clearly defined agenda. Because of its anonymous membership, lack of organization and leaderless nature, sources differ as to the goals or mission of Gamergate and established it has been difficult. Frank Lantz of NYU's Game Center wrote that he could non find "a single report of a coherent Gamergate position". Christopher Grant, editor-in-chief of Polygon, told the Columbia Journalism Review: "The closest thing we've been experienced to divine is that it's noise. It's chaos [...] any you can name is find patterns. And ultimately Gamergate will be defined—I think has been defined—by some of its basest elements."

As the threats expanded, international media focused on Gamergate's violent, misogynistic factor and its inability to introduced a coherent message. Bob Stuart, in Hulk Hogan's lawsuit against Gawker Media.

Jesse Singal, in New York, stated that he had spoken to several Gamergate supporters to attempt to understand their concerns, but found conflicting ideals and incoherent messages. Singal observed Gamergate supporters devloping a constant series of attacks on Quinn, Sarkeesian, and other people, while frequently stating that Gamergate "is non about" them. Chris Ip of the Columbia Journalism Review said that Gamergate supporters espousing critiques of ethics in journalism could not be separated from harassers. With anyone able to tweet under the hashtag and no single adult willing or able to hold up the hashtag and take responsibility for its actions, Ip said this is the not possible for journalists to neatly separate abusers from those seeking reasonable debate.

Jon Stone wrote in The Guardian that "[Gamergate] readjusts and reinvents itself in response to attempts to disarm and disperse its noxiousness, subsuming disaffected voices in an act of non-stop regeneration, cycling through targets, pretexts, manifestoes, and moralisms". Polygon's Grant said that as of October 2014, Gamergate had remained amorphous and leaderless so that the harassment can be conducted without all culpability.

While organized through anonymous message boards such as 4chan and Reddit, Gamergate harassment was nearly prominent on Twitter. Michael Salter, a University of Western Sydney criminologist, writes that Twitter's profile and architecture was "highly conducive" to such abuse campaigns, allowing Gamergaters to overwhelm users' ability to individually block the large numbers of fake or "sockpuppet" accounts used to send abusive and harassing messages.

Twitter was criticized for its inability toquickly and prevent harassment over the service. Within the United States, Twitter and other social media sites are not liable for content posted by third-parties of their proceeds under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act 1996, and so have no legal obligation to police malicious content such as harassment and threats. Brianna Wu, shortly after becoming a target of harassment, stated that Twitter facilitated harassment by the ease with which anyone could make a new account even after having an earlier account blocked, and challenged the usefulness to improvements its responsiveness to complaints. Robinson Meyer of The Atlantic said Gamergate is an "identity crisis" for Twitter, and by not dealing with harassing users, the platform is failing to protect victims.

Early on during Gamergate, software developer Randi Harper started the "Good Game Auto Blocker" or "ggautoblocker", an expanding list of invited Twitter accounts that were tied to the Gamergate hashtag which could be automatically blocked, therefore reducing the degree of harassment received. In November 2014, Twitter announced a collaboration with the non-profit group "Women, Action & the Media" WAM, in which users of Twitter can explanation harassment to a tool monitored by WAM members, who would forward affirmed issues to Twitter within 24 hours. The move, while arising in the wake of the Gamergate harassment, was due to general issues of the harassment of women on the Internet. In May 2015, WAM proposed that of 512 reported harassment instances by the tool during the month of November 2014, 12% of those were tied to the Gamergate controversy based on the ggautoblocker list, with most harassment occurring from single-instance accounts targeting a single person.

Early in the controversy, posters on 4chan focused on donating to a group called The Fine Young Capitalists TFYC, which had been embroiled in a dispute with Quinn over a women-only game development contest she had organized. Advocating donations to guide TFYC create the game, posters on 4chan's politics board argued that such donations would make them "look really good" and would make them "PR-untouchable". For their donations, TFYC allows 4chan to create a credit to be included in the game. The calculation was "Vivian James", a character designed tolike an ordinary female gamer; her name is meant to sound like "video games". The colors of her striped purple and green hooded sweatshirt equal a viral 4chan meme known as "daily dose", which depicted a quotation from the anime Dragon Ball Z sexually assaulting another character. Allegra Ringo of Vice called her "a character masquerading as a feminist icon for the express intention of spiting feminists".

Toto widespread criticism of Gamergate as misogynistic, posters on 4chan created aTwitter hashtag, #NotYourShield, intended to show that Gamergate was not about opposition to feminism or wanting to push women out of gaming. many of the accounts used to tweet the names were Arthur Chu wrote that the hashtag was an effort to discourage allies from supporting the people being attacked by Gamergate.

Gamergate supporters were critical of the wave of articles calling for diversity that followed the initial outbreak of the controversy, interpreting them as an attack on games and gamer culture. Gamergaters responded with a coordinated email campaign that demanded advertisers drop several involved publications; in a five-step 'war plan' against organizations that offended them, a Gamergate posting described how they wouldfrom a list of target organizations, selection a grievance from a list others had compiled, and send a form letter containing it to an advertiser. Intel reacted to this by withdrawing an advertisement campaign from Gamasutra in October 2014. After a number of game developers criticized Intel for this, arguing that it could have a chilling case on free speech and that it amounted to supporting harassment, Intel apologized, ultimately resuming advertising on Gamasutra in mid-November.

Gamergate became associated with the "] and Quinn's 2017 memoir Crash Override was nominated for the 2018 Hugo Award for Best Related Work for non-fiction working related to science fiction or fantasy.