Playbook, flashpoint, permanent pox

18 experts explain the legacy of Gamergate, 10 years after it started

An email subject-lined “Gamergate” is almost never a welcome one. I knew that hypothetically — like, of course — but confirmed it empirically in the course of sending some 52 Gamergate emails to journalists, critics and researchers. 

“Listen,” my email essentially said. “I too am sorry that this message exists! But since I already have you — and it has been 10 years — I hoped you could tell me what it all meant.” 

Roughly half of these people ignored me, which was a sensible thing to do. One professor hurled back a reply that was, frankly, both paranoid and really rude. But 18 people — with expertise in fields including sociology, psychology, media studies, games, games journalism and cyberlaw — very kindly agreed to write up comments or chat by Google Meet. In both cases, I asked them two (super chill!) questions:

What, as they see it, is the long-term legacy of Gamergate? And how did it influence mainstream culture and politics over the past decade?

Their answers ran the gamut, though most everyone in this little anthology agreed that Gamergate was an early, troubling harbinger of the ugliness, polarization and misinformation that have come to dominate much of online discourse.

Several argued that it led directly to the rise of the alt-right, a racist, far-right movement that emerged in the mid-2010s and went on to infect mainstream politics. Others disputed that influence, but said that Gamergate popularized tactics, technologies and rhetorical strategies that have remained visible ever since. Still others saw a whiff of hope in all this toxicity: The video game industry has, they said, grown more diverse and more inclusive since 2014.

This is the third installment of Gamergate @ 10, a month-long Links retrospective on the legacy of one of the worst and most pivotal events in modern internet culture. The first and second pieces revisited the history of Gamergate and its influence on the white nationalist movement.

Comments on this series are limited to paid subscribers, who made it possible for me to devote lots of extra time to reporting these pieces and recruiting guests. If you’d like to support this and other Links projects, please consider upgrading your subscription.

Without further ado, here are 18 takes on the legacy of Gamergate 10 years later — from 18 people who have, in one way or another, grappled seriously with its consequences.

P.S. There will be no Saturday edition this week, on account of the holiday weekend.

The tip of the disinformation spear

Leigh Alexander is a journalist, writer and narrative designer for video games. In 2014, she was the editor in chief of Gamasutra, where a column she wrote about gaming culture attracted the ire of Gamergate.

I truly believe we were on the tip of the disinformation spear. We now recognize disinformation and conspiracy as a common form of right-wing cultural warfare on social media, but the methodology emerged from the climate around Gamergate and was practiced on us. I believe certain political actors saw a movement they could learn from, and now we simply take for granted that our realities are being strained by increasingly absurd narratives from disenfranchised people and the opportunists who cater to them. 

At the same time, when we talk about Gamergate’s “legacy” I think it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that this happened to one person. People like me voluntarily engaged the conversation, and there were yet more professional crisis rubberneckers who made their fortunes by participating in the story in some way. There are still so many strangers in line to tell me about how bad it was for them. But Zoë [Quinn] didn’t ask to become an activist, they didn’t court this kind of attention, they were just trying to develop games in a new and flexible milieu, and they weren’t even the only person doing that.

This was a transformative and violent cultural episode, but it was also the attempted systematic destruction of one person’s life by an unhinged mob. They don’t just get to go back to work after that. And when we take possession of Gamergate as this shared community episode to analyze, I just don’t want anyone to lose the brutal fact that alongside that, this was also one person’s life and their story.

The moment online trolling became a movement

Amanda Hess is a critic-at-large for the New York Times, where she covers the intersection of the internet and pop culture.

For me, Gamergate was the moment when online trolling — once dismissed as apolitical and anarchic — coalesced into a political movement. I spent the early 2010s writing about women and gender on the internet, and I was one of a group of bloggers at the time who saw pop culture as inherently political. One of the ironies of Gamergate is that its participants, who were seemingly mad about video games being influenced by politics, were the ones to elevate that “culture war” into mainstream capital-P politics, building a playbook that would influence far-right figures and fuel the rise of Donald Trump.

I still think about the meme — “actually it’s about ethics in video game journalism” — whenever a trembling fig-leaf of respectability is used to justify some reactionary political argument. Which, it seems to me, is happening less and less — another result of Gamergate is that it empowered the far-right to drop the mask.

A terrifying illustration of male grievance

Mary Anne Franks is the Eugene L. and Barbara A. Bernard Professor in Intellectual Property, Technology, and Civil Rights Law at the George Washington University Law School and an internationally recognized expert on the intersection of civil rights, free speech and technology.

Gamergate was a valuable and terrifying illustration of the sheer adolescent rage that overtakes some men when they discover that something is no longer designed exclusively for them. Whether it’s games or social media or the government or the country itself, Gamergate demonstrated that once that sense of male grievance takes hold, there is virtually no limit to the abuses it can be used to justify: revenge porn, rape threats, stalking, election lies, insurrection. Gamergate provided a playbook for resentful men to dress up incessant demands for attention and coordinated harassment campaigns as “free speech,” a legacy our society has unfortunately yet to outgrow.

The normalization of online hate

Rachel Kowert is a research psychologist, author and consultant whose work examines the relationship between games, mental health, extremism and social harms. 

The loud misogyny of the 2014 online harassment campaign known as #GamerGate combined with the silent support of the industry for the victims of this campaign has had lasting effects on the victims, gaming cultures and the gaming industry.

It created disruption in the lives of the targets of the harassment campaign, the effects of which are felt today by many. It produced a sense of normalization around online hate and harassment, and specifically misogyny, in gaming cultures. It created pathways to mobilization for bad actors to run successful online harassment campaigns (it essentially wrote the playbook). And it set the precedent for what the industry considered acceptable and unacceptable in their digital playgrounds through their (passive) facilitation through a lack of boundary setting (i.e., silent support).

A template for all subsequent rage campaigns

Matt Muir is the author of Web Curios, which remains my single favorite newsletter on internet culture (… or any other subject, for that matter).

Gamergate, looking back, feels like a moment in which a selection of previously disparate movements, ideologies and communities combined, like some sort of shitty Voltron of hate. Previously you had to visit different, terrible corners of the internet to find the racists and the incels and the men’s rights advocates and the ghosts of the PUA movement. Now, thanks to people “just asking questions about eThIcS iN gAmEs JoUrNaLiSm,” you could find them all in the comments on Kotaku!

In many ways it set the template for all subsequent campaigns of rage online, one which you can see being replicated wholesale in 2024 across issues as diverse as immigration, gender politics, trans rights and the welfare state. Without Gamergate, you don’t end up with a world in which “woke” and “antiwoke” are to some people meaningful oppositional poles. Without Gamergate, Elon Musk doesn’t buy Twitter. Gamergate basically fucked up the best part of a decade. THANKS, YOU FUCKS. 

An illustration of the danger of networked harassment

Katherine Cross is an author, critic and Ph.D. student at the University of Washington, best-known for her research on games and anti-social behavior. 

What Gamergate illustrated best was the terribly efficient danger posed by networked harassment. As a harassment campaign par excellence it demonstrated with abundant clarity that a small group of motivated people could do a lot of harm, get a lot of attention and generally punch well above their weight — especially if they found a few well-placed, powerful patrons to amplify and legitimize their message.

What they truly heralded, if anything, was that open social media platforms like Twitter were not going to change the world, merely destroy people’s personal worlds. The networked fantasy of liberation offered to us by microblogging — the false promise of crowdsourced, horizontalist social movements — was revealed by Gamergate to be the sham it was. As a “movement,” Gamergate failed to do anything except hurt individuals. And in the end, that’s a lot of what social media truly allows us to do collectively in terms of changing lives. Its benefits and its harms are ruthlessly atomized. For this, and this alone, Gamergate was proof of concept and a test case.

A flashpoint for ‘manufactured hate’

Vangie Beal is a freelance writer, digital literacy instructor and the former director of GameGirlz, a website and community for female gamers that launched in 1997.

I think Gamergate really showed us how easy it is to manufacture hate on social media. A largely unorganized group of people was able to do that 10 years ago — fast forward to the present, and imagine what they can do when they’re highly organized and we’re all living in our little AI-driven filter bubbles. I still see that diversity is not welcomed. I still see the hate-manufacturing. And I don’t think that is going to go away — Gamergate brought it into the public on a level that I don’t think anybody ever anticipated, but it’s still there today. 

I hate saying that’s the legacy, though. I also look at something like the Activision Blizzard scandal in 2021, and I like to think that Gamergate had a role in it. [Note: In 2021, the state of California sued video game maker Activision, alleging widespread discrimination against female employees; workers later circulated a petition and staged a walkout to demand change.] Would it have been addressed so publicly if Gamergate had not happened? As a gamer, I want to hope that something positive resulted.

A rhetorical playbook for fan harassment

Monia Ali is the author of the Substack newsletter

Fandom Exile

, which examines the culture and politics of fandom from a fan’s perspective. 

In my fandom beat, Gamergate’s noticeable legacy is in the frequency of fan (stan) harassment campaigns that reframe their actions as morally sound. Whether this is fellow fans, journalists or the fan objects themselves being attacked, there is always a greater cause stated that justifies (or even necessitates) the means, and it is very strongly believed in. 

This has been exacerbated by the proliferation of a cottage industry around amplifying, egging on and exploiting conflict, which appeared to really take off with Gamergate. These behaviors are not only normal, but good business for many people.

A blueprint for toxicity and disinformation

Aja Romano is a senior culture writer for Vox, focused on internet culture and communities.

To me, the longest-lasting legacy of Gamergate is the structured, swiftly mobilized nature of collectivized online harassment and spread of misinformation. Gamergate wasn’t the first moment where an entire internet community came together to harass someone (recall Elevatorgate, for example, or Kiwi Farms’ whole thing), but it was the first time where we saw such sustained, systematic, organized brigading, with user accounts being deployed to spread and amplify harassment at scale, across social media platforms, with a maximized number of targets. It was essentially a blueprint for how to spread toxicity in the era of social media, and every extremist with a bot army would follow it. 

Today we see it everywhere, from personal agendas (Depp v. Heard) to the political. On the night before Tim Walz was announced as Harris’s running mate, a friend commented to me that Twitter had suddenly exploded in an array of bot accounts spamming the platform with anti-Walz messaging. “Weird way to find out the news,” they said. I immediately thought about Gamergate and how this rapid-deployment propaganda was its direct descendant.

A model for organizing (anti-)social movements

Kishonna Gray is a professor of racial justice and technology at the University of Michigan and the author or editor of several books on race and gender in gaming.

Gamergate was a very successful social movement. I know we probably don’t want to talk about bad movements as being successful, but it was — they were successful because they were able to garner a lot of attention, use technical tools and then usher in this new way of organizing and connecting online. I think what Gamergate did was show how social media in particular could be leveraged to reach a lot of folks and control a narrative, even when you don’t have that many people in your “movement.” There’s been some research to suggest only a few hundred people were active day in and day out, doing the work of Gamergate. But those people were very savvy with digital technology. They learned to use the affordances of social media. And they figured out how to create bots, spam comments and make connections between people’s gamer tags and their social media profiles, so they were able to generate attention and saturate all these online spaces. Gamergate gave other groups — the alt-right, white nationalists, neo-Nazis — a template, and they perfected it. 

There is also a different story that’s told about Gamergate for me and people who look like me. We were an invisible class of people, because folks couldn’t understand the intersection of the oppressions we experience. I remember there was an Xbox forum, and a group of us Black women entered this Gamergate awareness space, trying to find solidarities. And some white women in the space told us “well, you all are not experiencing what we’re experiencing.” I’d been experiencing harassment in Xbox since 2002 or 2004, when Xbox went live; we’d developed all these tips to help navigate it. But a lot of those women in that forum acted like it was brand new because they had never experienced it. 

An amplifier of extremist behavior and ideology

Alyssa Mercante is a journalist who writes about video games. 

Ten years later, it has never been more clear that Gamergate was the catalyst for the bleeding of extremist online behavior and ideologies into the real world — or as the authors of Meme Wars: The Untold Story of the Online Battles Upending Democracy in America put it, moving from “the wires to the weeds.” The Trump White House utilized the dis- and misinformation channels that made Gamergate such a headache for games industry folks and applied them to politicking and campaigning, forever changing the landscape of American politics and mainstream media.

Today, Gamergate remains — and not just echoes of the movement, but full-blown screams. We are seeing the same kinds of behavior today that we did ten years ago (the promotion of conspiracy theories, the incessant harassment of a few people the group has deemed “untrustworthy” or undeserving of a space in video games, the weaponization of memes, the crafting of false narratives), especially on poorly policed online platforms such as X/Twitter, YouTube and Reddit. It is our duty to continue to point out the falsities perpetuated by such hate groups, and remember that what may seem like a small subcultural group has had and will continue to have an effect on the world at large. It is a dark legacy, but one we can learn from.

A precursor to the alt-right

Kristin Bezio is a professor of leadership studies at the University of Richmond and the author of a 2018 paper on Gamergate and the rise of the alt-right. 

The legacy of Gamergate is, in fact, the increased influence of the alt-right in American politics and, arguably, part of the impetus behind the conservative party’s transformation into the Trump party — especially after Steve Bannon’s position in the White House (as he was one of the more influential figures in the Gamergate movement).

A recruiting ground for political extremists

Garrison Wells is a researcher at the University of California Irvine, where he studies games and the people who play them, as well as the lead author of a 2023 review paper on extremism and gamers. 

From a games perspective, Gamergate was arguably “the” event that put gaming communities on the radar of extremists and the alt-right, which saw a young demographic with a passionate subset of individuals sympathetic to their cause who could potentially be recruited into their movement. They found success by co-opting the campaign to push forward their own ideologies while harassing any critics into silence. What stands out to me now is how commonplace it is to see individuals building their careers off of this type of work, encouraging internet outrage from online communities and fandoms to further their own ideological agendas.

The groundwork for Pizzagate and QAnon

Adrienne Massanari is an associate professor researching digital culture and online communities at American University, as well as the author of the forthcoming book Gaming Democracy: How Silicon Valley Leveled Up the Far-Right. 

I think there are three main ways Gamergate changed our mediascape:

1. It represented a shift away from the utopian visions of social media that dominated the early 2000s. 

2. It represented a public reckoning with what “life online” was really like for many of us. It normalized things like doxing and large-scale harassment, moving conversations that had mostly happened in what I term the “alternative web” (spaces like 4chan, Discord, KiwiFarms, parts of Reddit, etc.) into the mainstream. Gamergaters also demonstrated how easy it was to manipulate systems and algorithms that were ostensibly there to enable mass conversations and protect the social media environment (things like the humble hashtag, flagging, DMCA takedown notices, etc.). While none of this kind of targeted harassment in gaming circles was actually new, what was new was the scale and scope of it and that it was happening in public. 

3. Relatedly, Gamergate definitely drove the ascendance of Trumpism and conspiracism (Rosenblum and Muirhead’s A Lot of People are Saying discusses this in depth), as the vast network of conspiracy theories that Gamergaters created to falsely suggest that their harassment was warranted laid the groundwork for things like Pizzagate and QAnon. Steve Bannon saw Gamergaters as perfect foot soldiers for the Trump 1.0 campaign, tapping into what I term “identity nostalgia” that many core gamers (mostly white cishet young men) felt about their role in the fandom being no longer primary, and leveraged this into a larger conversation about their supposed replacement in American public life generally.

A pox on the public discourse

Henry Lowood is a curator at the Stanford University Libraries, where he oversees a 24-year project on the history and culture of video games, among other things. 

Whenever anybody asks me why I study games, I always say that games are part of history. You cannot understand the late-20th and early-21st centuries without understanding what was going on in and around games. To me, Gamergate is the prime example of that argument, because you can’t fully understand how politics have developed in the United States — at least at the level of public discourse — without understanding Gamergate. 

When you dig into it, Gamergate was very loose. It was difficult to get into what it was, other than a kind of grievance that people in this particular culture had over what they perceived as the entry of other groups who didn’t belong. That vagueness is then accompanied by this radical, direct, violent harassing culture that hits very hard at individuals and that now seems to be the basis for a lot of our public discourse. “Anti-wokeism” is very much a vague grievance, for instance. I also think it’s interesting that in presidential campaigns, issues have become so secondary to personality and insults and cultural positions. 

I see all of those characteristics flowing from Gamergate — and other aspects of web culture, of course, like 4chan and 8chan. It’s not just games. But you could argue that some of the tactics that were practiced through Gamergate were then refined and evolved in the context of the 2016 presidential campaign. And from there, you could also argue that the continued breakdown of clear intellectual lines into this kind of attacking blood sport connects to the part of gamer culture represented by Gamergate. 

A preview of larger culture wars to come

Musa al-Gharbi is a sociologist, an assistant professor at Stony Brook University and the author of the Substack newsletter

Symbolic Capital(ism)

. His first book, We Have Never Been Woke, comes out in October.

#Gamergate is often understood as blowback against game developers and the gaming community growing more concerned about “social justice” issues in the early 2010s. But as I illustrate at length in my forthcoming book, game developers and reviewers were not unique in becoming more concerned about representation, inequality and social injustice at that time. There were simultaneous movements in the same direction that were observable in academic research, journalistic articles, entertainment outputs and beyond. Across the board, people who work in the “symbolic professions” became more politically active and engaged — and focused more intensely on issues like racialized and gendered inequalities, LGBTQ rights, environmentalism and supporting people with atypical bodies and minds. #Gamergate was one of the first indicators that something was changing. 

It was also a preview of the culture wars to come: People who work in the symbolic professions generally have political views and modes of engagement that are different from “normies.” These differences grew larger after 2011, because people like “us” changed while most other Americans were pretty stable. And the differences also grew more salient, because people who work in symbolic fields grew more assertive in pushing their moral vision on others, and grew more confrontational and intolerant with respect to perceived injustice, bigotry or bias. This created an opportunity for right-aligned folks and anti-woke culture warriors to enhance their own position by vowing to bring these institutions and professionals “under control” or return them to their “proper” purpose. #Gamegate was a preview of how an “Awokening” can devolve into a culture war of this nature. 

A wake-up call for the game industry

Adam Jerrett is a game developer, lecturer and researcher at the University of Portsmouth, where much of his work involves the way human values show up in video games. 

I think broadly, the legacy of Gamergate is that it was a big wake up call for the industry. It was, at some level, a point of inflection. Some game companies realized, ‘hey, shit — we probably shouldn’t be empowering this kind of really exclusionary rhetoric. How are we going to make these games more inclusive so that this doesn’t happen again?’ Two or three years after Gamergate, you start seeing these games that reflect other values and have real representation and deal with complex themes and things like that. We have some really cool, interesting and diverse games today — the industry really evolved. It’s hard to say how much of that was a direct response to Gamergate, but I do think a lot of people realized that that’s not what we wanted games to be anymore. 

At the same time, we are now literally 10 years on and I don’t know if Gamergate has necessarily gone away. That whole situation with Sweet Baby Inc. — that was trying to be a mini-Gamergate. Because we still have these weird, exclusionary right-wing politics on the global level, all the arguments against DEI in video games still exist. And that’s shitty, because in an ideal world, the game industry would’ve learned from Gamergate, and that would’ve been the end of it. 

A turning point for indie developers

Karen Rivera is a freelance journalist who formerly covered video games. 

We definitely witnessed the birth of some faceless monster that society is still battling to this day … But the one good thing to come out of Gamergate is the growing respect for indie game developers and the support that audiences are willing to show them. (Some audiences, like queer and BIPOC gamers, supported indie games from the jump.) The explosion of support I’ve seen for non-traditional games has softened my heart a little, well after I stopped reporting on the industry. Even hearing about people coming to the support of companies like Sweet Baby Inc., whose consulting arm helps other companies make inclusive games, gives me a bit of hope. I think the indie dev community is strong and has become more resilient post-Gamergate. You can see it in places like Wonderville in New York City, an indie arcade and bar, and in the list of new graduates from the NYU Game Center. There are so many new and unusual avenues to find games to play.

I also think that if it wasn’t going to be gamers upset about feminism in their games, it was going to pop up somewhere else (see: Star Wars fans and the hate for The Last Jedi). The internet was a festering cesspool of racism and misogyny, especially at that point in time.

More in this series

Gamergate at 10

How the darkest corners of the internet took over U.S. politics