Gamergate at 10

"It was the first undeniable warning that there might be something horribly wrong with our current incarnation of the internet."

Only two days after winning a gold medal in Paris, the Algerian boxer Imane Khelif filed a harassment complaint with French authorities. For almost the entirety of the Olympic games, a right-wing campaign had subjected Khelif to a deluge of online abuse and disinformation that she called a threat to her “human dignity.” 

Khelif is a woman, boxing against women. This is a documented, 25-year fact. But for chaos agents looking to score culture war points, facts are hardly relevant. Instead, anti-trans agitators like Elon Musk, Donald Trump and J.K. Rowling rapidly scaled up a vicious Twitter campaign, falsely claiming that Khelif was trans and suggesting she endangered other female athletes. 

For perhaps the 10 millionth time in 10 years, I lamented: Everything is still Gamergate. 

I hope you don’t remember Gamergate, or that you recall it dimly, like a bad book you read and largely forgot. The ugly, year-long spectacle, which kicked off 10 years ago today, disrupted the lives and careers of dozens of women and non-binary people — and forever changed culture and politics. Depending on whom you ask, and what your precise threshold for “credit” is, Gamergate can be credited with the rise of the alt-right, the prevalence of misogyny in online discourse, the mainstreaming of several harassment tactics and the normalization of abusive campaigns like the one that targeted Khalif in Paris.

“[Gamergate] was the first undeniable warning that there might be something horribly wrong with our current incarnation of the internet,” writes the author David Wolinsky in his new oral history, The Hivemind Swarmed. And 10 years later, the events of Gamergate remain a cipher through which it’s possible to understand a lot about our current sociocultural situation. 

For the next month, Links will be exploring that fraught legacy in a series of essays, interviews and guest appearances. You can expect to hear more from David, whose excellent, wide-ranging book came out Tuesday. I’ll also have an interview with CNN’s Elle Reeve, probably the single best observer of the U.S. far-right and the author of the new book Black Pill, which contains the memorable and chilling sentence “every white nationalist I’ve spoken to has told me that Gamergate changed the white power movement.” 

To kick things off, I’m first revisiting a widely cited explainer that I wrote about Gamergate for The Washington Post in 2014. The original version of that piece has, per Google Scholar, been cited in 184 books and academic papers, including studies of incels, the alt-right and the wider phenomenon of online hate. Over the past few weeks, I’ve read tons of that research — plus dozens of other articles, analyses and reports — to fully revise and rewrite this 2024 version.

Please note that comments on this piece, and the remainder of this series, will be limited to paid subscribers. This is mostly for my sanity, tbqh, but also because their financial support makes projects like this possible. If you value this work and would like to support it, you can do so at this link. Now — onto a topic that I’ve spent a decade happily forgetting (!). 

What was Gamergate?

Whatever Gamergate may have started as, it became an internet culture war and a violent, leaderless harassment campaign. On one side were independent game-makers and critics, many of them women and non-binary people, who advocated for greater inclusion in gaming. On the other side of the equation were a motley alliance of vitriolic naysayers: misogynists, anti-feminists, trolls, proto-harassment influencers, right-wing grifters, media skeptics convinced they’d been manipulated by a left-leaning and/or corrupt press and gaming traditionalists — overwhelmingly and obviously men — who wanted to preserve their supremacy in a culture that seemed increasingly willing to allow other types of people in. 

The ideology of the campaign wasn’t new, and neither were many of its stratagems. In the 10 years since Gamergate began, many academics, targets and other commentators have taken pains to point out that things like systemic bigotry and weaponized disinformation existed before Gamergate did. 

But over several months, Gamergate melded a series of disparate, disaffected groups together, mainstreamed the political and rhetorical tactics of the internet’s anarchic fringe and gave right-wing reactionaries a playbook they could (and have!) run again and again. 

“What we have in Gamergate is a glimpse of how these skirmishes will unfold in the future — all the rhetorical weaponry and siegecraft of an internet comment section brought to bear on our culture, not just at the fringes but at the center,” Deadspin’s Kyle Wagner wrote, all too prophetically, in October 2014. “What we’re seeing now is a rehearsal, where the mechanisms of a toxic and inhumane politics are being tested and improved.” 

How did Gamergate actually start?

In 2013, an independent game designer named Zoë Quinn released a free game called Depression Quest. Depression Quest wasn’t a “game,” in the way we traditionally conceive of games: It was more a story or a piece of interactive art that took players through the experience of a young adult’s depression. Some people were really into Depression Quest, including several video game critics. Other players took issue with what they considered the game’s artsiness or non-game-iness. 

In either case, the stage was already set for some kind of outcry when, on August 15, 2014, one of Quinn’s ex-boyfriends claimed, in a series of disturbingly intimate and VERY long blog posts, that they had cheated on him with several men in the gaming industry. (Fyi, Quinn uses they/them pronouns.) One of those men was a writer for the prominent gaming site Kotaku. Though said writer had never reviewed Depression Quest, and only quoted Quinn once in passing — notably, before the events alleged in the ex-boyfriend’s blog — vengeful readers took to Twitter, Reddit and 4chan to attack Quinn and protest this so-called ethical breach in gaming journalism. To this day, some Gamergaters continue to insist that theirs was a consumer movement aimed at addressing media bias and collusion. 

How do we know that Gamergate wasn’t about ethics in gaming journalism? 

Listen: For some people, maybe it was. It is self-evidently impossible to infer the individual motivations and beliefs of every person in a large (and largely) anonymous mob. But those well-intentioned individuals, if they did exist, were mobilized by a malicious and easily disproved fiction. And the behavior of the mob as a whole suggested some distinctly un-journalistic preoccupations: Newsweek found that, in September and October 2014, Gamergaters sent 14 times as many tweets to Quinn as they did to the Kotaku writer accused of ethical lapses. 

The content of those tweets was even more alarming. Gamergaters publicized Quinn’s personal information, including their address and nude pictures, and posted a flood of rape and death threats. They openly strategized techniques for ruining Quinn’s life that Quinn and others later published. 

In the following days and weeks, Gamergate also broadened out to attack Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist writer and media critic who published a YouTube series on the sexualization of women in video games; Brianna Wu, the cofounder of the independent game development studio Giant Spacekat; and a series of other game designers, journalists and public figures who covered or commented on the harassment. 

The volume of violent threats directed at Quinn, Sarkeesian and Wu, in particular, prompted the FBI to open an investigation in September 2014. Gamergaters also persuaded several major corporations to pull advertising from outlets whose writers had condemned Gamergate or video gamers more broadly. 

Who were these “Gamergaters,” exactly?

Gamergate’s foot soldiers were largely anonymous or pseudonymous, so it’s difficult to say. But one exploratory study, published in the journal Psychology of Popular Media in 2021, surveyed 725 Gamergate supporters recruited from Twitter and Reddit and found that 75% were white and nearly 90% were men. Curiously, a similar share of respondents (86%) called themselves moderate or liberal, which the researchers put quite a lot of stock in. I’m not sure I put a lot of stock in any of these findings, since the sample size was relatively small and online surveys are notoriously prone to self-selection bias.

Instead, it might be more interesting — and more useful — to consider the Gamergate supporters who operated under their real names, such as the men’s rights blogger Mike Cernovich and the Breitbart tech writer Milo Yiannopoulos. Whitney Phillips, a scholar of media studies at the University of Oregon, has credited Gamergate with the rise of so-called “chaos entrepreneurs” or “harassment influencers”: people who profit, financially or ideologically, from online abuse and conflict.

These are “people who are stirring the pot, maybe because they are themselves reactionaries, maybe because they adhere to white supremacist ideology and maybe because they’re trying to make money or some combination of both,” Phillips told All Things Considered in 2019. “And Gamergate was when that life choice, [that] business strategy, became an active road that someone could travel.” In other words, you can draw a direct line between the ringleaders of Gamergate and contemporary right-wing ragebaiters like Chaya Raichik, whose posts about drag queen story hours and trans medical care have been linked to 21 separate bomb threats. 

How was this allowed to happen? 

Gamergate’s worst abuses were coordinated and carried out on social platforms that, by and large, didn’t prioritize moderation or user safety before 2014. Those included Twitter, which only added a “Report Abuse” button to its desktop product in July 2013; Reddit, which at the time still hosted forums devoted to fat-shaming, “creepshots” and “violent racism”; and 8chan, which rose to prominence precisely because it allowed Gamergate content even after 4chan banned it.  

Notably — and this is easy to forget after 10 years — Gamergate was just one of several significant gender-based harassment campaigns that took place in August 2014. Two days before Quinn’s ex published his screed, trolls bullied Robin Williams’s daughter off Twitter, forcing the site to update its abuse policies. Two weeks later, a large trove of stolen celebrity photos, many of them nude, were published to 4chan, Imgur and Reddit. At the time, I called that incident “the internet story of the summer” … which in hindsight was a massive, optimistic and regrettably glib failure of imagination. 

How did Gamergate end? 

By mid-2015, the mainstream media had largely caught on to Gamergate’s tactics, social media platforms had started taking corrective action and the FBI was winding down its Gamergate investigation. Though agents identified and interviewed several people who admitted to threatening Quinn and Wu, they ultimately concluded that their investigation had “failed to identify any subjects or actionable leads.” In other words, no one was ever held criminally accountable for Gamergate. 

Quinn published a book about that experience, called Crash Override, in 2017; Wu, meanwhile, ran for Congress in 2018 and 2020, telling Boston’s WBUR that government would not protect women until they had a greater stake in it. Wu lost in 2018, however, and withdrew from the 2020 race because of the pandemic. 

Meanwhile, some of the forces that most animated Gamergate — including figures like Milo Yiannopoulos, platforms like 8chan and the wider sociocultural grievances of “rootless white males” — gradually found a new political home in the so-called “alt-right” movement. Yiannopoulos, in particular, leveraged the platform he gained through Gamergate to establish a new section at Breitbart, where a Buzzfeed News investigation shows he worked to mainstream white nationalism and white nationalist figures. His boss at the site, Steve Bannon — who later served as chief strategist for President Donald Trump — famously told a Bloomberg reporter that he saw Gamergate as a sort of gateway drug.

"You can activate that army," Bannon said. "They come in through Gamergate or whatever and then get turned onto politics and Trump." These recruitment efforts appear to have succeeded, on some level: A 538 analysis of Trump’s “most rabid” online followers observed a high degree of overlap between r/The_Donald and r/KotakuInAction, the primary Gamergate subreddit. 

Over time, right-wing extremists also “adopted the harassment tactics of Gamergaters,” according to a 2023 literature review in the journal Games and Culture. In other words, much of the nastiness that defined Gamergate — brigading and doxxing; weaponized disinformation; coordinated, bad-faith boycotts — are so commonplace on today’s internet as to almost be unremarkable. 

Did anything get better as a result of Gamergate? 

Both Twitter and Reddit made substantive changes to their content and harassment policies in the wake of Gamergate. In early 2015, Twitter admitted that it “sucked” at policing harassment, prohibited speech that “promotes violence against others” and tripled the size of its user safety team to better address anonymous abuse and brigading.

“We have seen this type of behavior time and time again, including during Gamergate,” Twitter’s then-general counsel wrote in an op-ed for The Washington Post. “... So we are changing our approach to this problem, in some ways that won’t be readily apparent and in others that will be.” (Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, has of course softened these policies.) 

One month later, in May 2015, Reddit also announced a new anti-harassment policy, this one barring "systematic and/or continued actions to torment or demean someone in a way that would make a reasonable person” feel unsafe. While Reddit declined, at the time, to name specific incidents that had prompted the shift, interim CEO Ellen Pao told the Times the move could stifle “harassment that originates on Reddit and spreads to other websites” — of which Gamergate was a prime and very recent example. 

As for the gaming industry itself, there are far more women and non-binary people working in gaming today than there were 10 years ago, according to the International Game Developers Association. Admittedly, “far more” is still not “a lot”: In the IGDA’s most recent survey, 80% of respondents still identified as white, and 61% identified as men. 

But there are other qualitative signs of progress, too. The games researcher Adam Jerrett has argued, for instance, that video games grew more “values-conscious” in the wake of Gamergate. DEI teams come standard at most large U.S. and Canadian development companies. Most importantly, perhaps, there seems to be less tolerance within the industry for the type of rhetoric that defined Gamergate 10 years ago: Earlier this year, when an “anti-woke” harassment campaign targeted employees of a narrative consulting firm called Sweet Baby, Inc., game studios, developers and players rallied to defend them. 

That’s inside the video game industry, though. Outside, the legacy of Gamergate looks a lot more durable. And next week, I’m talking to Elle Reeve about one of the scariest aspects of that legacy: the rise of the internet-incubated alt-right and the larger white nationalist movement. 

That’s it for now, though! Because in addition to being the 10th anniversary of Gamergate, today is my birthday and I’m LOGGING OFF. Until the weekend! Warmest virtual regards,

Caitlin