Recently I read a piece by John Adkins over on a website called Mic. It’s got one hell of a headline, promising as it does to deliver “The untold origins of Gamergate — and the gaming legends who spawned the modern culture of abuse”.
Since I have mentioned the magic word, let us all take a moment to fill ourselves with sorrow and let loose our mighty collective groan. *GROOOOOOOOOAN.* Okay, are we all groaned out? No?
I’m sorry, but I need to talk about this again for a minute. Gamergate—*grooooooan*—is a loose confederation of videogame enthusiasts united by their complicity in (if not outright enjoyment of) hate crimes. They are particularly complicit in hate crimes directed at women—this is their raison d’etre—though in a pinch, any marginalized person will do.
In 2014, when the whole mess first erupted, there was no universally-agreeable noun for describing these people (which is how actor and ‘Gamergater’ Adam Baldwin came to assign them that ridiculous monicker). Today the situation has progressed: We’d recognize them immediately, each heaving a third groan of exhaustion, as members of the alt-right.
Despite what Mic’s headline suggests, the origins of Gamergate are not “untold”; there are many good pieces on the subject. Here, as just one example, is a Liz Ryerson piece telling us all about them. I myself took a stab at it back at the outset, portraying the so-called ‘movement’ as “a rolling cloud of excrement whose form is impossible to discern” (in an enormously-incendiary screed for which I received no backlash whatsoever, in part because harassing a white dude would not make for an especially exciting hate crime).