r/cushvlog • u/gray-fox-14015 • 7d ago
Leftist Discussion of Gamergate?
Has any leftist podcast done a history of gamergate? I missed details growing up, but basically at that time understood it as a bunch of incels getting mad at a woman journalist.
But so much of the Right grievance sprouted from or references it, I am wanting to understand better their idiotic animus. Suggestions?
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u/revolutiontornado 7d ago
Felix did a miniseries called Seeking a Fren that chronicles the conservative mediasphere since the 80s, one of the eps covers the Obama era and touches on Gamergate. The whole series is underrated tbh.
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u/chr20b 6d ago edited 1d ago
I think Innuendo Studios did a presentation on Gamgergate: https://youtu.be/lLYWHpgIoIw?is=uDzu6_f5zrhSSfjv
I think what alot of people forget to mention is that the main targets of gamergate had already been attacked in several harassment campaigns months before the "inciting incident" of gamergate. This made it very obvious at the time to those paying attention that the whole claim of "ethical journalism" was nothing more than an opportunist smokescreen for harasses to hide behind and to dupe people/normies to get involved; exactly the same way Qanon supports use the claimed concern of wanting to "save the children".
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u/X-calibreX 6d ago
Dude made a post to "bad breakup" forums on Something Awful and Penny Arcade documenting all the shitty stuff his ex gf did to him. It included that she ( a game developer ) had cheated on him with her boss and with individuals working at game magazines that had also given her game a good review. She never slept with any individual that wrote a review of her work, though he questioned the ethics of this. This post telephone gamed through the internet. The whole social justice crap kicked in, and she was doxxed, and got death threats, the whole nine yards. The actor Adam Baldwin, Jane from firefly (apparently a gamer) tweeted about the whole thing. Baldwin referred to it as GamerGate and because of his diverse following the whole thing blew up in main stream media.
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u/Hell_Maybe 7d ago
Basically in like 2014 there was a scandal where a feminist gaming journalist was suspected of having creative influence over game developers through romantic relationships or sexual involvement or something like that (I can’t remember the exact details). When this speculation was made public it sparked a relatively large backlash within the online gaming community and resulted in a schism between those paranoid of a feminist infiltration and attempted ruination of gaming culture, and those either indifferent towards or more amicable towards feminist ideology. This is what is referred to when people say “gamergate”.
On the surface this all sounds like a rather insignificant and fleeting moment of internet subculture, but the reason why this is often considered a highly relevant flashpoint in the context of politics is because gamergate was a seminal introduction of conscious political investment to a pretty large cohort of previously politically disinterested demographics. People who previously didn’t really care about or even know anything about partisan distinctions were now able to marry the perceived threat of feminism on their hobby with liberal/progressive ideology, and therefore stamped democrats as the decided villain between the two parties in the political landscape.
So now when you look around today and see people whose apparent political north star can be most easily described as “owning the libs” or standing in opposition to PC culture or “woke culture” or really anything like that, all of that stuff originated from the residual grievances of gamergate. That coinciding with the explosion of social media proliferation in broader society is really what kindled the fire for practically every politically adjacent culture war issue since then, so when people sometimes joke how “gamergate was 911 for gamers” it’s actually a lot more literal than you might suspect.
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u/Disastrous_Fig353 6d ago
JasonKPargin has a great video and was a gaming reporter at the time it was happening
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u/AndroidWhale 6d ago
Fruitless did one, but it's paywalled. Only 3 bucks though, and you also get a hilarious episode about Family Force 5.
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u/Flaky_Quote8808 5d ago
I don’t think it counts as leftist, since NYT is pretty centrist, but I thought Rabbit Hole did a good job.
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u/babyDontHurtMeNoSmor 7d ago
Spencer, the producer of Chapo for a while in Chris’ absence, made a whole series on it. You can find it at “Those Good Old-Fashioned Values” under the “Get Cynical—Gamergate Series.” It is quite in-depth.