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Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate

Torill Elvira Mortensen1

Abstract The event known as #GamerGate (GG) emphasized the need to take the study of game culture seriously and pursue it across several platforms. It demonstrated how seemingly ephemeral media created echo chambers of anger, and how the outbursts of hypermasculine aggression exemplified by hooligans also can connect to games and play. Starting from how GG gained popular attention, this article outlines and discusses the nature of GG, the relation to the victims, the sense of victimization among the participants, and how it may have been provoked by the long-standing, general disregard of games as a culture and a cultural artifact of value. It discusses GG as a swarm using this metaphor to describe its self-organizing nature. Further comparing GG to hooligans, this article also introduces a class and marginalization aspect to understanding the event, opening up for discourses that complicates the image of game culture as mainly a culture of isolated consumption.

Keywords gamers, #GamerGate, game studies, Internet research, harassment, activism, game culture, gender, hooligans, image boards

1 IT University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

Corresponding Author:

Torill Elvira Mortensen, IT University of Copenhagen, Rued Langaards Vej 7, 2300 Copenhagen S,

Denmark.

Email: [email protected]

Games and Culture 2018, Vol. 13(8) 787-806

ª The Author(s) 2016 Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/1555412016640408

journals.sagepub.com/home/gac

Introduction

August/September 2014 saw the rise of the hashtag #GamerGate (GG) on Twitter.

GG users had harassed and threatened several people engaged with games; journal-

ists, designers, scholars, and critics, mainly targeting game designer Zoe Quinn (K.

Stuart, 2014) and critic Anita Sarkesian (Wingfield, 2014); and the people who stood

up for them. It followed several years of aggressive attacks on women and feminists

in gaming in general and feminist critic Anita Sarkeesian in particular, and this time

included game scholars.

GG was a surprise to the game research community for the conspiracy accusa-

tions against researchers (Chess & Shaw, 2015; Sargon of Akkad, 2014), and

because it targeted what might be a preference in game studies toward identifying

as gamers. This left many of us baffled by the attacks, a sentiment expressed in

discussions online and off-line and on the Digital Games Research Association

(DiGRA) mailing list—which was open also to people identifying with GG. DiGRA

president Mia Consalvo’s response to the conspiracy accusations was, ‘‘Ironically,

Gamergate will help create more knowledge’’ (Straumsheim, 2014). This is perhaps

the best reason for the game research community to care about GG. It is a unique

chance to understand more about games and their culture. It exemplifies how certain

structures of online media facilitate echo chambers and harassment, and it may

contribute to the general understanding of Internet research.

At first the unrest leading to GG appeared to be just one of several gendered

online harassment campaigns. Scholars with a greater focus on gender have been

looking at this problem for a while (Consalvo, 2012; Shaw, 2013), but it did not get

much attention. But this time the self-identified gamers organized to grab attention.

There was no way to ignore this very visible group with members who acted aggres-

sively and hatefully. They adopted ideas from the extreme right wing in the fear of

the so-called Cultural Marxism, as can be seen from the video by Sargon of Akkad

(2014) cited by Chess and Shaw (2015) but also from several different sources more

or less in favor of GG (Bokhari, 2015; Cross, 2015; Frye, 2014; Orselli, 2014;

SilverwolfCC, n.d.; L. Stuart, 2014; Wolfshead, 2015), ranging from Breitbart.com,

the news site most in favor of GG, to random and anonymous bloggers. Several

GG’ers embraced this conspiracy, and claimed Jews and western academics have

joined forces to pacify White men, and planned to hand the power of the ‘‘western

world’’ to the Jews or Islam by encouraging politically correct digital games, reso-

nating with the claims against Cultural Marxists made by the killer Anders Behring

Breivik in his manifesto (J. Wilson, 2015). GG also found allies among the men’s

rights activist (MRA) and pick up artist (PUA) community. The known PUA Roosh

V created Reaxxion, ‘‘gaming news and reviews for masculine men’’ (Valizadeh,

2015).

Between August 2014 and 2015, the GG hashtag was used to spread misinforma-

tion about game studies (Unknown, 2014b), and efforts were made to discredit game

scholars (The Leader of Gamergate, 2014). GG has been used to stalk female game

788 Games and Culture 13(8)

scholars, such as DiGRA president Mia Consalvo and game and gender scholar

Adrienne Shaw, both repeatedly used as examples of writers who ‘‘started’’ the

unrest causing the hashtag (IHE_Carl, 2014; Sargon of Akkad, 2014) and opposition

to GG caused my own dox on the 8chan subboard /baphomet. The members of GG

displayed some similarity to the popular gamer stereotypes research has resisted

(Williams, Yee, & Caplan, 2008, p. 995), and the emotional force of the campaign,

which was driven by a language of pathos, defied rational argument and criticism. In

this article, I attempt to describe GG, but a description cannot, due to the raw

emotional rhetoric of the campaign, ignore the subjective impression the event

made. I will still attempt to discuss what it means for the digital ecosphere and

studies of gamers. What happened and does it change anything?

One cue to the progression of events lies in their swarm-like behavior. GG

consisted of individuals not formally organized nor entirely aware of what was

happening around them, but who acted in accordance with the individuals they could

perceive in their online proximity. Like a swarm, their behavior was not determined

by a clear plan but was given direction by the actions of some core individuals, often

perceived at second or third hand, through the reactions of others in the swarm. Their

organizing paradigm resembled an ant colony. Among ants nobody is in command,

nobody bosses the workers, it is all a matter of each individual following simple

rules in a self-organizing system (Miller, 2007). In GG, some personalities were

more popular and their opinions were repeated more frequently than others. Still,

when at one point the swarm heard the press was looking for ‘‘the leader of GG,’’

like Spartacus, all accounts associated with them gained the identifier ‘‘leader of

Gamergate.’’ Self-organization and equality were the ideals of the movement.

Another way to understand the event is by comparing the actions, opinions, and

attitudes to other play-related cultures, specifically hooliganism. The hooligans’

passionate relationship to the teams they follow combined with similarities in beha-

vior between GG and hooligans may open for exploration of gamer culture along

lines of class and race, directions which so far have been among the weaker

approaches in game studies.

What Was GG?

As far as it is possible to tell, GG started as a harassment campaign aimed at

developer Zoe Quinn, with her previous boyfriend Eron Gjoni as the initiator for

the first accusations against her. Gjoni was drumming up sympathy for himself,

justifying his anger through telling stories about Quinn in comments (later deleted)

at forums Something Awful and Penny Arcade (2014c). It was discussed on the

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel #burgersandfries (Unknown, 2014c), and while

the available chat log has been disputed, it has so far not been disproved. According

to this chat log Gjoni also posted on 4chan, and the stories he had been telling in his

blog The Zoe Post (2014a) were refined and used to fuel the anger of members of

these different forums. This log also indicates previous disagreements between

Mortensen 789

Quinn and members of another image board, wizardchan. Included in the chat log is

Anita Sarkeesian, as it coincided with the release of her video Women as background

decoration II (2014), a feminist reading of women’s representation in digital games.

Soon Sarkeesian was included in the GG attacks. Sarkeesian was later accused by

John Bain (also known as [aka] The Cynical Brit aka TotalBiscuit) of having

‘‘inserted herself into the conversation’’ (2014) by publishing this video.

The barrage of hate messages online and off-line increased when a group of journal-

ists wrote articles questioning gamer identity, the so-called gamers are dead articles

(Alexander, 2014; J. Bernstein, 2014; Chu, 2014; Golding, 2014; Johnston, 2014a;

Luke Plunkett, 2014; O’Rourke, 2014; Pearl, 2014; Plante, 2014; D. Wilson, 2014).

Some of these articles are sharply worded, and the outrage that followed brought more

attention and more participants to the case, now mustering behind GG on Twitter. It

was in this shape the event caught the eye of most journalists and researchers, and so

the first efforts to understand GG focused on Twitter. Despite being an event that

resonated with the subcultures around games and gaming, it was mainly played out in

different social media. Some of the lead actors were not gamers and had previously

been deliberately critical of gamers, such as online writer Milo Yiannopoulos (2014a).

Despite their claim to represent all gamers—there are 155 million players of

digital games registered by the Entertainment Software Association (2015) just in

the United States—GG was mainly important to a relatively small group of the

online community engaged with image board activism. The real size of GG is

contested and hard to establish. Chris von Csefalvay published several studies

both on the size and on the content of GG (2014), and his work was received

warmly by GG. He estimated that GG had approximately 150,000 members

(Unknown, 2015), but the article with the analysis is currently unavailable, along

with his blog. Another quantitative study of GG was made in October 2014, when

Newsweek hired Brandwatch to look at tweets tagged with GG (Wofford, 2014a).

This study did, however, not address the size of GG, only their level of activity and

the quality of the content. A study that does address the size was done by Andy

Baio, and it shows that over the 3-day period he used for his study, 38,630 user

accounts posted to the hashtag (Baio, 2014). Of other numbers we can see that

KotakuInAction, the GG board on Reddit, has 55,332 followers (January 2016).

The automatic Twitter blocker created by Randi Harper to block GG members

from your personal Twitter account blocked between 9 and 10,000 accounts in

2014 (Wofford, 2014b), and it contained several false positives. This hints that less

than 10,000 users followed the core actors of GG on Twitter and not all of these did

so because they agreed with the ideas. Disregarding size, researchers Shira Chess

and Adrienne Shaw describe the GG event as ‘‘an important cultural moment’’

(2015, p. 209), and I agree. GG offers a unique lesson for the future in a society

where the limits between private and public are shifting, time and place are close to

irrelevant for communication, and we all have the power to publish at the tip of our

fingers. It is a teaching moment for how ideals of freedom can facilitate

790 Games and Culture 13(8)

harassment and silencing strategies, and a clear lesson in how certain online

structures support tight, self-reinforcing echo chambers.

Ethics or Harassment?

The hashtag GG was coined by actor Adam Baldwin in a tweet linking to a later

removed YouTube video by ‘‘Internet Aristocrat,’’ August 27, 2014 (Gamergate

Wiki, 2014). However, Gamergate Wiki and the Wiki curated by critics of GG,

Gamerghazi Wiki (2014), both agree that this conflict started before the hashtag was

coined.

According to the GG wiki the conflict dated back to 2007, and it was about ethics

in games journalism:

Game reviewer and editorial director Jeff Gerstmann is fired from his position at

GameSpot closely following his negative review of Eidos Interactive’s game Kane

and Lynch: Dead Men. Due to the heavy advertising of Kane and Lynch: Dead Men

featured on GameSpot at the time, rumors erupt that Gerstmann was fired due to

giving the game a poorer review than what Eidos Interactive paid for. (Gamergate

Wiki, 2014)

John Bain followed up the ‘‘ethics in games journalism’’ claim. With more than

400,000 Twitter followers and 2 million YouTube subscribers his support carried

weight in the gaming community. His own criticism of the tight connections

between game companies and game journalists, exposed in October 2014 (Kain,

2014), justified the ethics in games journalism argument. These justifications came

after Gjoni’s accusations of Quinn having slept with five journalists for reviews of

her game—an accusation later amended to ‘‘favorable coverage’’ when it was clear

that the reviews did not exist. This justified further attacks on game journalists,

particularly those connected to the earlier mentioned gamers are dead articles of

August 2014, which inspired a persistent conspiracy theory in GG. Breitbart.com

writer Yiannopoulos had access to an e-mail list for game journalists, and under a

heading mentioning ‘‘gaming journalism elite’’ in September, he exposed that the

journalists had wanted to do ‘‘something’’ to support Zoe Quinn (Yiannopoulos,

2014b). The e-mail to the list was dated August 19, more than a week before the

articles on gamer identity started appearing online; and confirmed what GG saw as

collusion. Jenni Goodchild (PixieJenni) wrote an overview of the articles in question

and counts 12 articles as ‘‘gamers are dead’’ articles (Goodchild & @firehawk32,

2014).

However, Leigh Alexander doesn’t use that term in Gamasutra August 28th

(2014) but claims that ‘‘gamers are over.’’ She discusses how ‘‘gamer’’ may not

be the best word to use when describing people who play digital games. This article

clearly referred to the movement Baldwin the day before had dubbed GG:

Mortensen 791

‘Games culture’ is a petri dish of people who know so little about how human social

interaction and professional life works that they can concoct online ‘wars’ about social

justice or ‘game journalism ethics,’ straight-faced, and cause genuine human conse-

quences. Because of video games. (Alexander, 2014)

Alexander and other writers in game and tech media wrote about the problem with

gamer as a demography describing people engaging with digital games. Disregard-

ing a connection to the accusations against Zoe Quinn, the common point of these

articles was the great distance between people who happen to play games and people

who identify as gamers. For the game community to cater mainly to the self-

identifying gamers would be to ignore a significant part of the actual players. The

reaction was immediate online retaliation, where Alexander became a main target.

Chess and Shaw (2015, p. 212) further describe how these articles contributed to

what became known as the DiGRA/DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects

Agency) conspiracy as GG was looking for a source of criticism against gamers.

The Gamerghazi Wiki focuses on Eron Gjoni, and the timeline links to examples

of his bids for support to attack Quinn. One of these is an archived version (Gjoni,

2014b) of The Zoe Post (Gjoni, 2014a). In this post he introduces the ‘‘five guys’’

claims of Quinn having sex for reviews. Gjoni, at the time of writing under a

restraining order concerning Quinn, later retracted the claims. But the original

claims kept being repeated, citing the now removed video by the Internet Aristocrat

(TheMalesOfGames, 2014). In response to the flood of online and off-line aggres-

sion toward Quinn and her family, Quinn left her home and lived in hiding for the

entire autumn of 2014 (K. Stuart, 2014). This caused the critics of GG to name it a

harassment campaign against women.

The evidence available in the mainstream media as well as from logs of discus-

sions on IRC channels and archives from 4chan (Johnston, 2014b) favors the critics’

point of view. There are still voices from an academic background that disagree

strongly, such as feminism critic Christina Hoff Summers, resident scholar at the

American Enterprise Institute and known by GG as ‘‘based mom,’’ who has sup-

ported GG since September 2014 (Growcott, 2014), and Nick Flor, associate pro-

fessor at New Mexico University, who in an interview claims that GG was:

gamers pushing for free enterprise and free markets in the gaming industry; gamers

asking for a competitive market free of collusion, free of corruption, and free of control

of artistic creativity by authoritarians. In short, GamerGate is a freedom movement.

(Bokhari, 2015)

Talking About GG

It is vital to keep in mind that GG was not a unified group—the individuals of the

swarm were not the whole. Many of those arguing strongly in favor of GG never

792 Games and Culture 13(8)

knew how it had started, where the different ‘‘operations’’ were planned, and never

agreed to the aggressive methods used since the beginning of the campaign. The

swarm logic of GG allowed all participants to determine their own motivation.

It was near impossible to keep track of the individual opinions. A person could

argue in favor of GG ideas in one instance and against them in another, agree with

one part of the argument but not another, or argue with themselves from different

sock puppet accounts. One notorious example was Joshua Goldberg, one of the more

prolific participants in the GG discussions (Damion Schubert, 2015), who was

arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in September 2015 (CBS Interactive,

2015; Moulitsas, 2015; Zavadski, 2015). Among his many online personae was a

profile used to post on GG critics forum Gamerghazi. Goldberg specialized in this

type of double-sided arguments, as he impersonated a Jewish lawyer and wrote in

Israeli newspapers, while simultaneously participating in the anti-Semitic forum

Daily Stormer.

Outsiders used the hashtag to discredit it, to harass others from the anonymity of a

mob, or to attack GG’ers. Using the GG hashtag or agreeing with other gamergaters

did not guarantee freedom from harassment, neither from GG nor from others. The

women of GG were vulnerable to this, same as some of the male personalities. It is

however difficult to determine the extent of the GG claims of harassment. They

followed their own policy for online harassment, which included not admitting to it,

and not involving the police. This means that unlike the cases of Quinn, Sarkeesian,

and other targets like Brianna Wu and Randi Harper, there is very little reliable

evidence of harassment targeting GG. Still, there were examples of ‘‘dogpiling’’ on

Twitter if an account had been linked from the Gamerghazi forum. This caused

moderators to change and restrict posting policies several times in attempts to avoid

causing harassment.

Goldberg’s example demonstrates how the only thing limiting a person’s partic-

ipation for or against GG was their creativity. Another important aspect is how GG

emphasized anonymity. GG Twitter users expressed the danger of using their real

names, as that would cause people to attack them. In one conversation on Twitter

dated May 16, 2015, @codeGrit claimed people had sent e-mails to his workplace to

have him fired, and also that his real name and address had been revealed twice. This

fear of being exposed demonstrated a realistic understanding of the online culture

GG belonged to and was understandable in light of what happened regularly to the

opponents of GG.

Doxing, revealing otherwise hard to find information about individuals, happened

frequently to opponents or critics of GG. Zoe Quinn, feminist critic Anita Sarkeesian

(Wingfield, 2014), and game developer, Brianna Wu (Reid, 2014), were doxed early

on and received protection or left their homes. Actor Felicia Day wrote about her

sense of estrangement from the gaming community due to the fear GG generated

(2014) and was promptly doxed (Hern, 2014). The terror of doxing isn’t having your

address and phone number revealed but what may come after. The ‘‘doxer’’ leaves

information in public, implying ‘‘do what you like with this.’’ When this game was

Mortensen 793

played as a prank, the doxed person would receive pizzas they had never ordered

(Phillips, 2015, p. 61) or weird magazine subscriptions. GG’s critics received groups

of fully armed police officers ready to break down doors and shoot the people inside

in what is known as ‘‘SWATing’’ (Hern, 2015). Several critics of GG were swatted

or attempted swatted. It may have been the work of just one or two persons, such as

the 17-year-old member of ‘‘the lizard squad,’’ who was swatting and terrorizing

girls who turned him down online (Harrison, 2015) but the threat was an efficient

terror tactic.

The swarm nature of GG, with anonymous participants and active denial using

the ‘‘no true Scotsman’’ fallacy (Dowden, n.d.), made it hard to prove that GG was

behind doxing. They claimed no affiliation to the /baphomet doxing board, and when

a person had something unpleasant happen to him or her after he or she had spoken

out against GG, GG would claim no responsibility. No true gamergater would

harass, threaten, hack, or dox other people, and if it happened, either in the name

of GG or not, it was supposedly the work of somebody unaffiliated with the move-

ment. At the same time, the anonymity made it impossible to disprove that GG was

behind it, creating a paradox that was both useful and harmful to GG. The result was

that talking about gamers meant putting yourself at risk if you were critical of GG,

but also if they were critical of you, as demonstrated by the intense scrutiny of and

attacks on game critics and game scholars. While risk is not a new thing to anthro-

pology and ethnography (Calvey, 2008; Lauder, 2003), the risk GG added is not

frequently encountered in media studies.

Players of digital games are an active audience group, used to participate through

gaming and in meta-discussions, and known to act out if annoyed. There is evidence

of angry gamers tracking producers or developers, doxing them and their families,

trolling them, flooding their twitter with abuse, and posting threats against the family

(Batchelor, 2014; Crecente, 2013). When this behavior was reported, they have

attacked reporters, as when The Guardian reporter Jenn Frank was attacked for

reporting on the aggression GG directed at their targets (Cox, 2014; Frank, 2014).

This was not a behavior limited to GG but typical of image board culture.

Image Board Culture

A good description of GG was written by Jay Allen, and focused on the relationship

to image board culture (2014), the culture on the discussion boards made famous by

the activist and hacker group Anonymous. Anonymous grew out of 4chan and was

named after every person discussing on 4chan’s boards (Coleman, 2014, p. 4). On

chans, it is a matter of pride to not rely on the ethos of a name but the logos of the

argument. Ideally anonymity creates a pure meritocracy where arguments survive

due to merit, not because of signifiers of power. Thus, anonymous image boards may

facilitate exchanges of pure intellect and reason, free of emotional consideration or

political correctness.

794 Games and Culture 13(8)

Totally free speech justifies the image boards’ place in the online ecology, and

the idea that every topic needs to be allowed a place for discussion has virtue. M. S.

Bernstein et al. (2011), Coleman (2014), and Phillips (2015) all demonstrate that the

anonymity of chan culture can create interesting new dynamics and release con-

structive, positive creativity. It can at the best of times be a catalyst for daring and

important activism and create communities that support those who feel estranged in

mainstream debates.

This ideal is only one part of the truth. As described in Michael S. Bernstein

et al.’s study of the /b/ board on 4chan (2011), image boards use language and

images to establish credibility. What this meant for 8chan, home to GG, was that

sexual or racist slurs were common and swearing close to mandatory. Taking offense

was proof of being a ‘‘newfag’’ and not yet able to deal, and offended users were

considered too weak to survive the furnace of the chans. In this manner, language

and images were used to silence unwanted voices and if that was not enough, the

participants had other methods.

Doxing can be used to ruin the ethos of speakers. Sarah Nyberg, active GG critic,

described her old writings as, ‘‘the decade-old account of a troubled young person

raised on 4chan and internet edgelord culture trying to out-shock and out-troll the

people around her’’ (2015). Her old lies and exaggerations came back with a ven-

geance, as other ‘‘edgelords’’ decided GG criticism made her a target. In this com-

munity supposedly dedicated to free speech and true meritocracy, winning an

argument can be a pyrrhic victory, if the opponent can find your information. A

focus for the attacks by ‘‘channers’’ is destroying the credibility of the individual,

indicating an exceptionally strong concern about ethos. In the case of Nyberg, a

transgender woman, they attacked her gender identity using her pretransition name

and claimed she engaged in bestiality based on old posts. Channers spend their time

focused on the status of others in time-consuming searches. Rather than meritocra-

cies, many of the subboards of the different chans can perhaps be said to be tempoc-

racies1 controlled by those who have the most patience and time, strongest

dedication to their own opinions, and most ruthless ways to silence their opponents.

Coleman describes the speed with which a message will be pushed off the board

on the image boards; on busy boards it will be gone in minutes (2014, p. 43). M. S.

Bernstein et al. (2011) discuss this feature more specifically and point out how it

facilitates a particular kind of communication, turning the conversations on the

board ephemeral. Naomi Baron uses the metaphor of not stepping into the same

river twice, as with the coming of the digital media writing stops being enclosed and

goes on to be fluid (2008, pp. 206–207). Considering writing as a fluid medium is

traditionally paradoxical, as we are used to seeing it as the most stable of media. This

has radically changed.

How long a message is available to others has proved to be important when it

comes to the use of online media, and GG highlights how nothing is lost forever on

the ‘Net. One attack on Zoe Quinn distributed old pictures from adult photo shoots.

Simultaneously Quinn, who says about herself, ‘‘If Gamergate had happened several

Mortensen 795

years ago to someone else, I would have been on that side’’ (Newton, 2015), was

aware of where the ‘‘operations’’ would be planned, and when the members of the

IRC channel Burgers and Fries discussed how to make Quinn’s life more uncom-

fortable, she was logging it (Johnston, 2014b), which is the only reason why we have

these logs today.

On chans, uninteresting information is supposed to scroll off. If the image board

motto ‘‘realz, not feelz’’ had any meaning, easily debunked, false information should

scroll off the screen. However, if that false information is sufficiently entertaining or

supports the agenda of participants on the board, what will scroll off is the debunking

and the corrections. This way the system serves to retain entertaining information

that supports the agenda or drama, while the less entertaining facts will be lost. The

selectively ephemeral nature of chans supports the attitudes and feelings of the

members, rather than the boring or even unpleasant facts they might want to ignore,

and the medium itself supports and strengthens any existing echo chamber effect in

the community.

The Hooligans of the ’Net

Another way to understand GG is to look at other leisure-centered aggression. There

are several parallels between GG and hooligans. Like the football hooligans, these

gamer fans organized into groups and were ready to attack the other team. Like

hooligans, they appeared to join the fight for the thrill, not because they always

believed their actions would be the best persuasive tactics. They were not afraid to

ruin the image of the leisure activity they followed or attack the infrastructure and

the arena, and they were frequently criticized by those who wanted to see gaming

taken seriously. Like hooligans GG language was hypermasculine, and they had

little need for values seen as more feminine. That doesn’t mean GG had no use for

women. Another GG phenomenon was the hashtag #notyourshield used by ethni-

cally diverse and/or female avatars. Started by an African American participant of

/v/ on 4chan, #notyourshield was supposed to show that female and non-White

gamers did not want more diversity in games, stopping critics of game culture from

using them as an excuse for more diversity. The design of this hashtag came with

instructions concerning how White men could make non-White and female sock

puppets (Johnston, 2014b).

Strategic maneuvering with language trending toward hypermasculine war-

fare rhetorics was common. From their plan for ‘‘Digging DiGRA’’—an attempt

to read all DiGRA’s open-access articles, ‘‘You must treat DiGRA website as

ENEMY TERRITORY. We have been doxxed before because of IPs getting

leaked, and rogue admins helping SJWs’’ (Unknown, 2014a). This aggressively

defensive language had as strong a tone of machismo. GG’s protectiveness of

the male space of video games resonates with the hooligans’ description of their

own culture:

796 Games and Culture 13(8)

I honestly cannot remember ever seeing any women at matches - and so the male

characteristics of swearing, lying, drinking and fighting were not only prevalent, they

were almost compulsory. To be among thousands of young - men, all of whom, for

those ninety minutes at least, had just one focus in life, was to be part of what Amer-

icans would call a huge male-bonding process. (Brimson & Brimson, 1996, loc. 132)

To many of the participants, GG was a bonding experience. On the board /kotakui-

naction/ on reddit.com, one of the tags for posts is ‘‘meetups’’ where GG online

participants meet face to face. The meetups happened mostly in the United States,

but there have been descriptions of meetings in Australia and the United Kingdom.

Many of these contain pictures, most of which show groups of predominantly young

men, mostly White and of college/university age, sometimes accompanied by men

of other ethnicities, and women. These posts are always positive and happy about

meeting friends. Breitbart.com summary of the first year of GG bears witness to

strong bonding among the participants:

At the time of writing this, I’m preparing to move in to a new apartment, which would

not have been possible if not for the help of some very generous people that I’ve met

because of GamerGate. Thank you for saving my family’s lives, you ethical sockpup-

pets and gentlemen. (Bokhari, 2015)

Bokhari’s article also shows several women, another similarity to hooligans.

According to Dr. Matt McDowell, the first hooligans were female fans, fighting

after a match in 1898 (The Herald Scotland, 2013), and there are still women among

the hooligans in images in the news. The bonding experiences of intense, often

aggressive mass events are not reserved for men. In what is termed ladette (Dobson,

2013; Jackson, 2006) or raunch culture (Levy, 2006), women are both unapologe-

tically aggressive and obsessed with objectification of the female body. Both terms

describe a femininity of excess and aggressive sexiness, where being part of the

group and bonding with men and other, similar women is vital. Women in GG

defended nudity, sexually explicit images, and aggression against women in games,

and GG highlighted their female supporters, particularly the pornography workers.

Another similarity was GG’s sense of martyrdom, of being persecuted victims,

which is visible in recent hooliganism (Poupore, 2014). GG believed firmly in their

own status as victims. The ‘‘death of the gamer’’ articles confirmed this as attacks on

their entire culture. In this narrative, they were victims of consistent persecution,

even if they have not experienced the actual violence seen by the Egyptian Ultras. To

understand how consumers of time-consuming high-tech entertainment can even

briefly consider themselves victims of a large-scale, global conspiracy to suppress

them, look at how gaming has been treated.

While an economic success since the 90s, passing Hollywood box office sales in

2004 (Kerr, 2006, p. 49), digital games are not universally accepted. At best, gaming

is viewed as a childish waste, at worst the topic of media panics (Karlsen, 2013). The

Mortensen 797

negative feelings toward games peak after mass shootings by young men, when

games are repeatedly put forward as the cause of mindless violence. Jack Thompson,

disbarred lawyer, blamed games for the 1999 Columbine killings (Giumetti & Mar-

key, 2007). In the United States and Europe, one of the first things the media focused

on would be whether perpetrators of mass shootings played games.

Disregarding the fact that digital games in the last 15–20 years have become

ubiquitous, this created an image of gamers as either aggressive killers in training,

addicts to the mind-controlling power of games, or socially inept losers, well

described by Alexander in her controversial article (2014). The gamergaters had

grown up actively engaging in a hobby where they were on the one hand catered to

by increasingly inventive designers and creators and at the other hand vilified by the

value-conservative who feared what this seductive new medium might lead to. They

had been trained to be defensive.

Who Benefits?

Resonating with angry class overtones, one of the more interesting myths about the

targets of GG was that they were wealthy. From an interview with Zoe Quinn:

Most targets of online harassment Quinn has spoken with are subject to conspiracy

theories that they are secretly rich, she said. ‘‘It’s this thought that if what they’re going

after is so powerful and so corrupt, they still get to be the underdog,’’ Quinn said.

‘‘They get to be the good guys.’’ (Newton, 2015)

This was a recurring topic in the descriptions of Quinn, such as in an article on the

PUA website Return of Kings, where the author repeatedly pointed out how much

money Quinn must have been making (Chubbs, 2014). Through it all GG was

obsessed with money. They aggressively criticized Anita Sarkeesian because her

kick-starter was overfunded. Since this happened during a period of prevalent and

public attacks, they called her a ‘‘professional victim’’ who made money of the

abuse she received (Yiannopoulos, 2015). This was also a common claim against

Zoe Quinn.

Interestingly, they are to a certain degree right, the focus on both Sarkeesian and

Quinn brought them attention and new options. This does not justify the treatment

they received, but it is easy to imagine that if the haters had ignored Sarkeesian’s

feminist criticism of games, the videos might have caught the attention of some

audiences with a special interest in feminism but otherwise been a fairly low-key

series of YouTube videos.

On the other hand, if GG had ignored Quinn, Sarkeesian, Wu, and Harper, several

of their own would never have benefited. The Sarkeesian Effect is the work of Jordan

Owen and David Aurini who received approximately US$8,800 a month for close to

a year in order to create a documentary to criticize Sarkeesian and demonstrate her

supposed fraud (Owen & Aurini, 2014). In 2014, Sargon of Akkad was a minor

798 Games and Culture 13(8)

YouTuber with a Patreon account where he made approximately US$200 per video.

A year later each video made him US$900. Considering the low-production costs

and frequency of posted videos, this was not bad. Add the advertising revenue of

almost 200,000 followers of his YouTube channel, the GG year was good to him.

‘‘Thunderfoot,’’ a dedicated Sarkeesian critic, makes more than US$3,000 from each

video he uploads to his Patreon. ‘‘The Honey Badger Brigade’’ is another group that

found a new source of income through GG. These are women supporting the MRAs.

Apart from gaining more listeners for their channel through the GG audience, they

have also received donations. This is a sufficiently pronounced trend that Jay Allen

talks about ‘‘professional victimizers’’ (2015).

While the wealth of the opposition is a myth, the GG attack may for some be

slightly punching up. Many of the gamergaters are in safe positions and have more

than enough money, education, contacts, and privilege that they are definitely

punching down when attacking self-employed, often poor, and freelancing women.

But several gamergaters are unemployed, very young, undereducated, or have social

problems. They often speak about themselves as undesirable and express the opinion

that if games change, they will lose the only thing that holds value to them. They see

women gaining benefits in ‘‘their’’ field and attack the targets closest to them, the

ones they can reach. Even their attack on DiGRA was an attack at those closest to

them, as DiGRA members study topics GG could both understand and relate to.

A Weakness of Participatory Culture

It was easy to disregard GG, not the least because it was illogical and confusing. But

GG demonstrated how complex game culture is. It is a child of the Internet, and

gamers cannot be distinguished from the users of other social media. GG’ers were

channers, tumblerinas, and redditors. They produced endless videos and live

streams. They used Facebook and wrote blogs. Twitter was full of them, and they

used tools that enhance Twitter: TwitLonger for when you need more than 140 signs

and Storify when tweets need to be organized and structured. Through this variety

and very visible exploitation of weaknesses in the different systems, GG taught us

how technology designed for increased openness can be utilized to create echo

chambers and to silence opposing voices. They also demonstrated very clearly what

Leigh Alexander tried to say, that gamer culture is extremely varied and often in

conflict with itself. They underlined the claim of the ‘‘gamers are dead’’ articles: We

cannot assume that all who play games are one demography. Even fans of the same

game can have widely conflicting values and desires.

GG showed us that the game culture doesn’t exist in isolation on the Internet, as

the participants spread their messages over such a wide range of platforms. The

particular key words and concepts such as ‘‘ethics in games journalism’’ had a far

wider reach than was expected from a games topic and provoked discussion and

change in platforms that until this point had not been obviously influenced by games,

such as the massive social media networks. And while we still don’t know if games

Mortensen 799

somehow create an aggressive and obsessed audience, we do know they are suffi-

ciently mainstream to spark an intense online debate.

GG reminds us that remaining focused on an exclusive game culture means

dwelling on an ideal that perhaps never existed. Games have, through the engage-

ment of players, been used as an example of the benefits of participatory culture, but

very rarely to describe the dark, potentially hateful side. We need to be willing to go

into such uncomfortable conversations and face the risk that comes with research.

Playing games is not an isolated event. While Aarseth’s seminal editorial (2001)

emphasizes the importance of games being its own object, GG has underlined that no

matter which platform games are played on, their communities go far beyond that.

And as game elements and structures start being used elsewhere, it may be time for

game research to live up to its interdisciplinarity and study cultures of play beyond

the narrow circle of games.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, author-

ship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of

this article.

Note

1. Not to be confused with Stanislaw Lem’s definition of tempocracy, where the tempocrats

are travelers from the hidden millennia, in his example from Isaac Asimov’s The End of

Eternity. Retrieved from http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/3/lem3art.htm

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html

Author Biography

Torill Elvira Mortensen is an associated professor at Digital Society and Communication

(DiSCo), IT University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark. Her research has been

focused on games, gamers, and social media since 1995. She was in the original editorial

committee of gamestudies.org, has been a member of the Digital Games Research Association

(DiGRA) board, and is a member of the board for the European Communication Research and

Education Association (ECREA) games research section. Her most recent publication was as

an editor of the anthology The Dark Side of Gameplay in 2015. She currently studies playful-

ness in culture, teaches digital rhetoric and transmedia storytelling, and is an active member of

the Games and Transgressive Aesthetics project at the University of Bergen. She reads too

much and neither plays nor writes enough.

806 Games and Culture 13(8)