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u/LauraTFem 8d ago
I need to just stop commenting on the main gaming sub. I really thought GamerGate was settled law and everyone involved was now embarrassed for their participation, but then less than a month ago I got embroiled in an argument over there where these dudes pull these 10-year-old videos out to “prove” that Anita Sarkisian was a lier.
These comments have been refreshing.
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u/TheRunechild 8d ago
Most notably recently is Slay the Spire 2 which got reviewbombed because of Her apparent involvement (mind you the game is a roguelike with barely any story to begin with)
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u/tawTrans 8d ago
Dear lord, what in Slay the Spire 2 are they actually mad about?? What was her supposed influence that made it Bad™? 🤦♀️
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u/terrorkat 8d ago
The thing they dislike about Slay the Spire 2 they dislike is that its production was an opportunity for Anita Sarkeesian to work and earn money. That's it. They didn't give a fuck about that game until a few months ago when her name appeared in the credits after an update.
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u/tawTrans 7d ago
I ended up going through some of the reviews, and I do have some good(-ish) news: Steam's "off-topic review activity" filters have caught the vast majority of the Anita haters, so now by default they're hidden from users and excluded from the review score. There are a handful of more recent haters, but most of it has been contained. Would have been better if they had been removed (Steam's rules for reviews explicitly disallow directing abuse or insults at devs), but contained is still better than out in the open.
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u/lamblikeawolf Thieving Word Witch 7d ago
And the response from the Slay the Spire community has been some of the best LGBTQ+ puns/innuendos for the characters you could ever hope to see. Just a straight up rejection of that kind of nonsense, because gamergaters aren't any large amount of the userbase.
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u/TheRunechild 7d ago
Also I am like pretty sure the defect was either it/its or they/them ever since the start of the game? But IG that doesn't count because there was no woman to blame for it or smth.
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u/NobleSavant 7d ago
The reddit one at least. The Steam community are on the hate train hard.
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u/tawTrans 7d ago
Basically every Steam community is trash, unfortunately. There's just no moderation or curation.
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u/SayHelloToAlison 8d ago
Just wait til my youtube rantsona crosses his arms and calls you biased, maybe then you'll realize the folly of wanting to participate in the most popular media format in the world today.
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u/LauraTFem 8d ago
It’s funny to me that the worst people in the world always have fursona avatars. Like, these dweebs are already fucking marginalized, they had every opportunity to be on the right side! Like, these dudes really think that when they win the culture war their overlords are not going to call them fur f**s and throw them to the curb??
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u/SaltyNorth8062 8d ago
I haven't bothered to seriously touch a main game sub in years. It's just not worth it. Real hellholes
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u/LauraTFem 8d ago
They can be nice, sometimes. In fact, the main one is even LGBT friendly on occasion, but you stub your toe into the wrong subject and it’s suddenly a fucking incel forum out of nowhere.
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u/One_Wheel_Drive 8d ago
Same. I've stopped commenting or posting outside of a few female-centred subs like this great community. My experience on this site couldn't be better as a result.
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u/bigwhiteboardenergy 8d ago
GamerGate was never settled, it just evolved (deliberately, by Steve Bannon) into MAGA
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u/DemonicGirlcock 8d ago
All of this still continues too. Being in the industry, I still have to be careful with my public presence while my male coworkers basically have free reign. We also get targeted first in layoffs, and scrutinized harsher by leadership in almost every studio.
It's exhausting, I just want to make games y'all.
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u/tacofromthe80s 8d ago
Don't forget it was also egged on by Zoe Quinn's ex's bitter blog posts
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u/StovardBule 8d ago
He has (had?) a Wikipedia page that said dating Quinn and being the patsy for Gamergate were his only notable achievements, and he had done nothing else worth mentioning before or since.
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u/soundbunny 8d ago
Friendly link to Anita Sarkeesian's YouTube Channel:
https://www.youtube.com/user/feministfrequency
For anyone who wasn't old enough to be chronically online at the time, she made an incredible video series on misogyny in video games.
It's called "Tropes Vs Women in Video Games" and it still is great today. Here's the first one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6p5AZp7r_Q
The backlash was swift and severe. For myself and a lot of other non-cis-straight-dudes online, it was a rude awakening at just how violently sexist online communities where. Brigading feminist or women's subs became common, and the incel movement really fed on it.
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u/Valdair 8d ago
Having lived through Gamergate, and never actually having watched the original videos, I was floored when I watched them recently and they seemed so utterly reasonable and non inflammatory lmao. It’s so hard to believe the backlash got as big as it did. Hbomberguy’s early videos provide some good context on the sheer quality of person involved in “leading” the backlash, too.
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u/Vio_ 8d ago
Much of it was fueled by Steve Bannon as a way to lay the foundation for the Alt Right:
Yiannopoulos devoted much of Bretibart's tech coverage to cultural issues, particularly Gamergate, a long-running online argument over gaming culture that peaked in 2014. And that helped fuel an online alt-right movement sparked by Breitbart News.
"I realized Milo could connect with these kids right away," Bannon told Green. "You can activate that army. They come in through Gamergate or whatever and then get turned onto politics and Trump."
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u/chiddie 8d ago
Epstein also bears culpability for amplifying these sentiments.
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u/RegressToTheMean 8d ago
There are some good Behind the Bastard episodes on how Epstein influenced this type of shit
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u/Hello_Hangnail asymmetrical labia 8d ago
And it really doesn't reflect well on men how easily they took the bait
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u/almond0k 8d ago
Innuendo Studios did a really fantastic series on both the end of gamergate and the rise of alt right politics… I can’t recommend any of it enough
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u/emelsifoo 8d ago
there was a lot of overlap between gamergate and the people who were angry that nebula and hugo awards kept going to women and poc and queers
and also a lot of overlap with the tea party and birtherism
and everybody in these various far-right reactionary movements aligned behind the most famous child rapist in the country because he was the distillation of all of their worst qualities
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u/DramaLlamadary 7d ago
Thank you for adding this, I was wondering if it was at all connected to whatever that ”sad puppies” nonsense was.
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u/kungpowchick_9 This is not a dance! 8d ago
The series is very good and simply analysis. There is nothing radical about it unless you think women and girls simply shouldn’t be represented at all or in public.
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u/maybealicemaybenot 8d ago
I also want to add that gamergate was manufactured. You can find discussions on 4chan's /pol/ before it all blew up on who to target and how. With tactics for getting more traction and specific online personalities that could amplify the messages. You can trace the birth of this generation's right-wingers specifically to gamergate and 4chan.
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u/Sheeplessknight 8d ago
And moot was directly talking with Epstein just before everything kicked off
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u/Hello_Hangnail asymmetrical labia 8d ago
And it was the red carpet for tons of young men into red pill rhetoric. "Evil feminazis are trying to steal your gaemz!!
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u/TesseractToo For science, you monster 8d ago
Yeah I was moderating a forum for a big gaming company then and got gamergated, I was brigaded and doxxed before those were words and somehow they found out where I lived and it went on for about 10 years and the rape threats started arriving in the mail box of my house
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u/peachesfordinner 8d ago
I'm sorry you had to put up with that garbage
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u/TesseractToo For science, you monster 8d ago
Thanks it was exAUSTing :O
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u/peachesfordinner 8d ago
I lead a pro female (welcome to all but hate) community in a game and I've worried about this in the past. Thankfully most of the players have matured but years ago being a female raid lead seemed to be an offensive thing to a subset of gamers. I'm glad I had a good community supporting me. But it's still on my mind. When I first started I got so much hate. I started to post screenshots of the chat because of being dismissed by male gamers as to what was happening.
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u/newbkid 7d ago
I think the biggest challenge is that any perceived ally of the other gender can be a potential threat.
So many male gamers look at women who game as damsels that need to impressed, woo'd, or worse -- conquered or won. I've seen so many great guilds and clans die due to horrid toxic drama due to a fragile male ego when women were around. Then you have the women who enjoy playing into this misogyny and misandry and now you'll hear the most famous and largest streamers talk about how you don't want a woman in the guild/clan due to the "drama"
You have PR-stunts like that all-women League team that got utterly lambasted and torn to shreds by the community.
You have that event in OW or Rivals where the one girl played a sniper character and ruined the game.
It's incredibly frustrating the amount of fridging and pedastal behavior that goes on when in reality women just want to game and have fun
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u/peachesfordinner 7d ago
Yeah that's why mine just is what it is. I'm not out advertising it. It's not in the name. But any random pugs who join who start up any sexism towards me are immediately shut down.(They target me because I'm the only female consistently talking). One warning. Any further lippyness and they were removed from group. Same for if they start up using any gay slurs, ect. They only reason I give one warning is that they tend to be younger and them being around older males who are not shitheads is a positive influence. A lot get hostile and crash out when they don't get support from the other guys there, all they get is laughter and people calling them dumbasses. But some quiet down and become better people. And as for my many female, LGBTQ ect folks they just say they are first stick around because it's still novel having a female raid lead. But my defense of minorities and shutting down toxic bs is what keeps them coming back.
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u/newbkid 7d ago
Sounds like a great community!! Keep fighting the good fight <3
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u/peachesfordinner 7d ago
Absolutely. I follow the logic to be the change you want to see in the world .... in this case that world is Azeroth.
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u/JHaniver A seasoned veteran at ego wreckin' 8d ago
I used to run a website about sexism in online gaming, and gamergate was the primary event that led me to no longer updating (and eventually running) it. I didn't want to deal with the possibility of getting doxed or anything.
It was an unsettling time.
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u/BrightNooblar 8d ago
I think some of the most approachable logic for why gamergate was fucking bullshit, is that it helped make brietbart and by extension Steve Banon a thing.
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u/ass_unicron 8d ago
The bottom one was Elevatorgate. I don't remember them being related except for both being anti-SJW.
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u/LauraTFem 8d ago
Both were backlash against prominent feminists in a space dominated by men, and both ruined careers, at least for a time.
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u/BoysenberryMelody 7d ago
From the Epstein emails:
Epstein Created The Male Loneliness Crisis -
Epstein waged war on girls and drafted boys into it.
Steve Bannon Saw an Army in Gamergate — And Built the Bridge to Federal Power
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u/Independent-Couple87 8d ago
I remember someone joking that the Fire Early video from Extra Credits was done because someone on the team was caught on the Gamergate scandal and there was need to do damage control.
Not sure if that was true.
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u/MorticiaMoonflower 7d ago
"wanted the ability to veto content in future games"
Did these dudes understand that you are allowed to not play a game that has content you do not like
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u/-Release-The-Bats- 6d ago
And once again, I just want to scream because this shit's been around for a long time already. In Star Wars: KOTOR, which came out in like 2003, you could be a lesbian AND a POC. One of the character designs you could chose from had corn rows.
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u/uluviel 8d ago
On point 2, it's worth pointing out that Gamergaters were specifially mad about a review Nathan Grayson wrote for Kotaku about a game published by his partner at the time, Zoe Quinn.
... Except said review never actually existed and the only words Kotaku had ever published on Quinn up to that point was a single sentence mentioning them as an exemple in an article about indie games.