Right now a huge battle is playing itself out on the internet. It goes by the name of Gamergate.
What is Gamergate?
In August of 2014, an spurned ex boyfriend posted a very long, dramatic expose detailing how his ex girlfriend Zoe Quinn had cheated on him with five guys. Zoe Quinn, a not known indie software developer, had made a game called Depression Quest. This game was slight different from your standard video game in that it focused on the day to day life of someone dealing with Depression.
Her game had gotten some good reviews and some pushback by some in the gaming community. There is a section of the gaming community that feels like games that focus on social issues take away from the traditional shoot em up market.
Once these accusations went online, a group of posters began to target and harass Miss Quinn. They sent her vile death threats, rape threats, circulated nude pictures of her, exposed her home address and phone number and called family and friends. Miss Quinn eventually fled her home and is currently in hiding.
The main accusation was that Miss Quinn had slept with a reporter for an online gaming site and had garnered a favorable review out of it. Miss Quinn (she confirmed) did sleep with the reporter but no review ever was written about her game. Around this time, the celebrity nude pictures were leaked. This only relevant because reddit decided to finally clean up their message boards and in doing so also deleted the threads that outed Miss Quinns personal information and nude pictures. In doing so, they outraged the posters and cries of censorship and cover up were born.
A sexist video was made called Five Guys and a Burger, sent to Adam Baldwin (yes that Adam Baldwin) and he in turn came up with the now known hashtag of gamergate.
Around this time, a journalist by the name of Leigh Alexander wrote a piece... see here http://www.gamasutra.com/... declaring that the gamer identity had changed. This ended up being the kick to the hornet's nest.
Immediately, death threats, rape threats and outing of her personal information drove her from her home. This continued to happen to more women associated with the gaming industry, one a software developer Brianna Wu and Anita Sarkeesian who had produced a YouTube series called Tropes vs Women in Video Games. https://www.youtube.com/...
Many, many articles came out within the gaming industry trying to dissect and figure out what was going on. In every single article, the comment section was filled with gamergate supporters claiming that the movement wasn't about misogyny and death threats but about ethics in gaming. The commenters would frequently reference a term called Social Justice Warriors aka SJW's.
SJW were hard core feminist who were supposedly trying to take away the naked ladies and sex scenes out of video games.
Anita Sarkeesian was a prime example of this. They would also proclaim that they had no control over the people sending death threats and making sexist comments online.
As gamergate supporters began to get pushback that they were disgruntled, young white men, they created #notmyshield which was suppose to be a collection of minorities, women and "others" who supported the cause. The mascot was an animated girl (yes, animated!).
The latest incident was Anita Sarkeesian having to cancel an appearance at a university in Utah due to a bomb threat. Today a new Twitter hashtag has come out called #StopGamergate2014 in direct response to all of this.
So what does this all mean? For a great analysis you can read...
http://deadspin.com/...
My personal spin is the following:
Gamergate just one facet of the growing unease white males in this country. You saw it when Obama was elected. You see it when discussing immigration reform. Heck, you see it on this website when talking about white privilege.
You have a group of men who have been stuck with a particular stereotype. The nerdy, unsociable guy who lives in his mom's basement and plays video games. Thanks to the internet, these guys have found a community. Where once they sat alone, now they can congregate together in online games. They have a community that understands that is "them" against the "world". They could play Call of Duty and World of Warcraft and for once they were the people dishing out the abuse.
But then something strange happened....Games and video games evolved. Suddenly your mom was playing Candy Crush. She wouldn't consider herself a "gamer" but in the eyes of the video game companies, she was a new demographic to sell games to. Suddenly not all the games coming out of these companies were shoot em up with women as sex objects. Suddenly video games had to appeal to a broader market. A market that included minorities, LGBT and women.
With the broaden landscape, video games became part of culture and open to criticism. Suddenly people started asking why the female character had to have larger than life breasts. Why were there rape scenes in games? Which games portrayed strong female main characters? The traditional gamer looked up and looked around and realized his world was changing and was none too happy about it.
And then the perfect storm, a supposed jilted ex posting about his "slutty" ex girlfriend sleeping her way to the top, mix in some nice sounding words about ethics, add in some misogynistic characters to cause mayhem and whisper in the ears of these guys about the feminist coming to take away your video games and BOOM...we have gamergate.
I predict we see this battle play out over and over again as the world becomes more inclusive. These battles will play out again and again as the social norm changes to meet the demographics of America. There will be those who cling to the past and the majority who welcome the diverse future.
Thu Oct 16, 2014 at 8:05 AM PT: P.S. For further clarification as noted in the comments. Anita Sarkeesian did not cancel her appearance at USU because of the death threat. She cancelled because the state of Utah allows for concealed weapons and the police could not search anyone coming into the lecture for a weapon.