The social media harassment campaign Gamergate existed for only a few months during the end of 2014 and the beginning of 2015, but its origins and ramifications extend far beyond its most active period. Supposedly driven by an earnest desire to bring ethics to gaming journalism, the campaign paradoxically sought to achieve this goal through online attacks against women in gaming, with most of their ethical rage directed squarely at developer Zoë Quinn and media critic Anita Sarkeesian. The Gamergate campaign and its hate for these women seemingly erupted out of nowhere in the summer of 2014. However, the foundation for the campaign emerged in 2012 with two disconnected controversies that would later congeal into what we know as Gamergate. In March 2012, Anita Sarkeesian and her website “Feminist Frequency” became the subject of extreme online backlash in response to her Kickstarter campaign to fund her critical video series Tropes vs Women in Video Games. The online responses themselves—unusual at the time but common today—set the bar for violent harassment with threats of rape and death against Sarkeesian, along with the creation of a video game called Beat Up Anita Sarkeesian that bloodily delivered on its promise.^[1] The so-called “Doritosgate” controversy emerged several months later when players became outraged by the perceived coziness between game journalists, corporate sponsors, and the video game industry after a complicated and confusing series of tweets and articles involving journalists, a contest to win a PlayStation 4, and a writer who had once worked for video game publisher Square Enix.^[2] While these controversies gained some limited traction, both eventually receded out of the public consciousness with no apparent impact on the video game culture or industry.

However, nearly a year-and-a-half later, these two impulses converged when a man named Eron Gjoni published a blog post accusing ex-girlfriend and video game developer Zoë Quinn of cheating on him with a Kotaku writer in exchange for a positive review of her game Depression Quest. The review, of course, did not exist^[3]—and would not justify Gamergate’s behavior even if it had—but the accusation against Quinn and Kotaku apparently tapped into lingering rage from the Sarkeesian and Doritosgate controversies. As a result of the accusations, Gamergate exploded online and metastasized from that original blog post to an all-out social media campaign against Quinn organized on 4chan, 8chan, Reddit, and Twitter. Because of the connection to Kotaku, the campaign felt emboldened to claim their actions as a defense of “ethics in games journalism,” but the disconnect between their ethics and their methods of violent harassment deeply undercut the potential for positive changes in the industry that the campaign claimed it wanted. From August 2014 through approximately April 2015, the Gamergate campaign systematically and relentlessly harassed prominent women in gaming, such as Quinn, Sarkeesian, developer Brianna Wu, and anyone brave enough to defend them. These attacks included anonymous online threats, doxing, and swatting, and eventually culminated in a bomb threat against a venue where Sarkeesian was scheduled to speak.^[4] After months of harassment and fury, Gamergate finally appeared to melt away back into the worst recesses of the video game community from which it came.

Despite these appearances, the story and harassment of Gamergate did not end with the campaign against women in the video game community. Instead, much of the unsatisfied intensity of Gamergate reorganized into more explicitly right-wing actions far outside the video game sphere. This shift from gaming to politics was not entirely an organic move for the campaign, but rather one primarily abetted by one of the group’s de facto leaders and alt-right political commentator Milo Yiannopoulos. Yiannopoulos latched onto the burgeoning Gamergate campaign—most likely in an effort to propel himself to personal political stardom—and became the campaign’s most vocal and prominent spokesperson and eventually acted as a conduit for the group’s absorption into right-wing politics. When Gamergate died down in the gaming community, many of the Gamergate participants became involved in the right-wing anti-diversity campaign known as the “Sad Puppies” and subsequently pushed the group’s agenda against minorities in the science fiction community. Rather than doxx and harass these targets, the group attempted to block the inclusion of minority authors from the Hugo Awards in 2015^[5]—which may have satisfied the campaign’s gatekeeping impulses but was fairly meaningless in the grand scheme of things. The further away from Gamergate proper the campaign traveled, the more dispersed and difficult it is to track the movement. However, there are indications that remnants of the Gamergate campaign—or at least its tactics and spirit—merged into the online campaign for Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential bid and formed the foundation for the explosion of right-wing harassment and trolling that has proliferated in the years since.^[6] As the following pieces demonstrate, Gamergate may have failed to drive women from gaming, but its legacy of harassment and exclusion persists in the video game community and beyond.