THE INTERNET ARGUMENT THAT NEVER REALLY ENDED

Everyone has heard what Gamergate was.

Most people have heard it from journalists, activists and commentators who regarded everyone involved as the enemy.

Inside Gamergate: A Social History of the Gamer Revolt records the controversy from the other side of the barricade.

Written by James “Grim” Desborough, a game designer, commentator and participant in Gamergate from before the hashtag acquired its name, this is an openly partisan social history. It does not pretend to have descended from the heavens in a cloud of academic neutrality. It presents the experiences, arguments and evidence of people whose version of events was frequently ignored, distorted or declared illegitimate before they had finished speaking.

Gamergate is commonly reduced to a simple morality play: misogynistic gamers launched a harassment campaign against women in the games industry, courageous journalists resisted them, and civilisation was saved by several stern opinion columns.

Reality was considerably messier.

The revolt brought together anger over conflicts of interest in games journalism, hostility towards censorship, suspicion of ideological conformity, fury at the coordinated “Gamers Are Dead” articles and a growing conviction that the specialist media no longer respected—or even particularly liked—the audience it was supposed to serve.

It also became entangled with trolls, threats, political opportunists, professional victims, bad actors, competing propaganda campaigns and the broader culture war that has since swallowed much of Western public life.

You may believe Gamergate was a consumer revolt, a harassment campaign, an internet civil war, a moral panic or some unholy mixture of all four.

What it plainly was not was simple.

A PARTICIPANT’S HISTORY

Desborough did not arrive several years later to conduct interviews about some strange internet tribe he had never encountered.

He was there.

He participated.

He argued.

He knew many of the issues before the hashtag existed and watched them coalesce into something much larger than the original disputes.

That gives Inside Gamergate the advantages and disadvantages of any participant history.

There is proximity.

There is anger.

There is first-hand experience.

There is bias.

The book makes no effort to disguise the latter.

That is considerably more useful than pretending perspective does not exist.

Read it as testimony from inside the revolt: an attempt to explain what its participants thought they were doing, why they distrusted the games press, why accusations of censorship and ideological conformity resonated so strongly, and why the public description of Gamergate became another front in Gamergate itself.

This is not the final word on Gamergate.

It is the word that other histories would prefer you never heard.

BEFORE THE HASHTAG

Internet explosions rarely begin when somebody invents the hashtag.

There is usually fuel lying around first.

Inside Gamergate places the controversy within a longer history of moral panics, media scares and attempts to control popular culture.

The book reaches back into earlier gaming controversies, the relationship between enthusiasts and specialist media, the growth of online activism, arguments over political correctness, censorship and representation, and the increasing collision between internet subcultures and mainstream political language.

That contextual material matters because 2014 otherwise looks bizarre.

Why were people suddenly screaming at one another over videogame reviews?

Why did specialist gaming sites become proxies for enormous arguments about politics, feminism, journalism and free expression?

Why did an obscure cluster of interpersonal and professional disputes turn into an international news story?

Why did people who had never previously displayed the slightest concern about game reviews suddenly develop remarkably strong opinions about games journalism?

The answers require looking further back.

Gamergate had precursors.

It also had descendants.

THE FRANZ FERDINAND PROBLEM

One of the book’s chapters is called Franz Ferdinand.

The comparison is deliberate.

Nobody seriously believes the First World War happened because one archduke had an exceptionally bad day in Sarajevo.

His assassination was the trigger.

The causes were already sitting there, armed and irritated.

The book treats the events immediately preceding Gamergate in much the same way.

Personal controversy, allegations of conflicts of interest, arguments about disclosure and relationships between journalists and developers became the spark. What followed drew energy from grievances which had been accumulating for much longer.

That distinction gets lost surprisingly easily.

People still argue endlessly over the event that started Gamergate, as though identifying a single tweet, blog post or individual would explain millions of subsequent messages and several years of cultural warfare.

Inside Gamergate instead tries to reconstruct the surrounding conditions.

The tinder matters as much as the match.

GAMERS ARE DEAD

One of the defining moments in the revolt was the appearance of a cluster of articles arguing, in various forms, that the traditional “gamer” identity was obsolete, unpleasant or no longer useful.

To critics of Gamergate, those articles were commentary on a changing audience and a toxic subculture.

To many people who became Gamergate supporters, they looked remarkably like an industry press suddenly declaring its own readers embarrassing and disposable.

That interpretation poured petrol onto the dispute.

The resulting anger was not merely about whether individual articles were correct. It fed an existing belief that sections of specialist games journalism had become socially and politically hostile towards the people consuming it.

Inside Gamergate examines that collapse in trust from the audience side.

You may conclude that the reaction was justified.

You may conclude it was paranoid.

You may conclude, as is depressingly common with internet history, that several mutually contradictory things were true at once.

At least you will know what the argument actually was.

ETHICS IN GAMES JOURNALISM

Yes.

The phrase.

The meme.

The punchline.

The thing people still say with air quotes.

The book takes the ethics complaint seriously.

Relationships between writers and subjects, disclosure of conflicts, crowdfunding support, professional networks, advertising pressure and the remarkably intimate social world surrounding specialist games media all became points of contention during Gamergate.

Opponents frequently argued that these concerns were exaggerated or served as respectable cover for misogynistic attacks.

Supporters argued that observable problems were being dismissed because acknowledging them would legitimise the revolt.

Inside Gamergate comes down firmly on the latter side.

It records the complaints, the examples participants circulated and the changes they regarded as victories.

Again, you are being told where the author stands.

The point is to understand the case, not disguise it.

HARASSMENT, VIOLENCE AND CENSORSHIP

Any serious account of Gamergate has to deal with harassment.

This one does.

Threats, abuse, doxxing, trolling and accusations of organised harassment became central to public understanding of the movement.

Women including Zoe Quinn, Anita Sarkeesian and Brianna Wu became internationally associated with claims of Gamergate harassment, and mainstream coverage increasingly defined the controversy through those experiences.

Gamergate supporters disputed the extent to which anonymous threats and abuse could legitimately be attributed to a decentralised movement consisting largely of people using a hashtag.

That disagreement became almost impossible to separate from the wider battle.

Was harassment the defining activity of Gamergate?

Was it one ugly component of a much larger revolt?

Were unaffiliated trolls being attributed to the movement?

Were genuine victims being dismissed because their experiences damaged the preferred narrative?

How much responsibility can a leaderless internet movement bear for anyone who uses its name?

The book argues its position, but more importantly it records the argument itself.

Those questions remain relevant well beyond Gamergate.

CENSORSHIP AND BLACKLISTING

Freedom of expression became another major fault line.

Games had spent decades being blamed for social problems.

Violence.

Sex.

Addiction.

Moral decay.

Corruption of children.

By the early 2010s, many gamers who had grown up defending the medium against conservative censorship found themselves confronting arguments for restrictions, boycotts, pressure campaigns and ideological gatekeeping coming from somewhere they regarded as politically very different.

That produced considerable confusion.

People who thought of themselves as liberal, libertarian or left-wing suddenly found themselves being described as reactionaries for defending many of the same free-expression principles they had held for years.

The book examines censorship, attempted blacklisting and campaigns to pressure platforms, advertisers and employers as part of the wider dispute.

Gamergate became a fight not merely over what people said but over who had the power to make somebody else stop saying it.

That argument has hardly vanished.

THE CULTURE WAR ESCAPES THE GAMING FORUM

Reading the book now is rather different from reading it in 2017.

Gamergate once seemed like an extraordinarily niche catastrophe.

People were screaming at one another about Kotaku, indie developers, disclosure policies, Patreon, Twitter blocks, videogame feminism and the political implications of consumer entertainment.

Normal people could be forgiven for wondering whether everyone involved needed to go outside.

Then much of the rest of public life started behaving exactly the same way.

Online pile-ons.

Cancellation campaigns.

Competing victim narratives.

Deplatforming.

Institutional distrust.

Accusations of ideological capture.

Alternative media.

Screenshots used as ammunition.

Anonymous accounts entering political battles.

Journalists becoming participants in the stories they covered.

Endless arguments over who is being censored and who is merely suffering consequences.

Gamergate did not invent these things.

It did provide one of the earliest large-scale demonstrations of what politics would look like once social media, subcultures, journalism and permanent online mobilisation were smashed together.

That makes it worth studying even if you could not care less about videogames.

A SOCIAL HISTORY, NOT THE LAST WORD

The subtitle is important.

A Social History of the Gamer Revolt.

This is not presented as the divine revelation of What Really Happened In Gamergate.

A subject this disputed would laugh at the attempt.

It is one substantial account, written by somebody with a declared position and a reason for believing that position was disappearing from the historical record.

That makes the book particularly useful when read alongside accounts from the other side.

Read contemporary journalism.

Read academic treatments.

Read critics of Gamergate.

Read accounts from people who suffered harassment.

Then read this.

History gets more interesting when the sources start arguing with one another.

WHAT THE BOOK COVERS

The book moves from background and context into the outbreak of the controversy itself, then tackles the ugliest disputes surrounding it before attempting a retrospective assessment:

• Introduction

• Inside Baseball

• Context

• Franz Ferdinand

• Gamergate Itself

• Harassment, Violence and Censorship

• Gamergate in Summation

• References

The digital edition runs to approximately 216 pages, with illustrations by Kuku Ryo.

It was first published in 2017.

WHY READ IT NOW?

Because the argument did not stay in 2014.

Many people first encountered the terminology, tactics and fault lines of the modern culture war through Gamergate.

Some participants moved into politics.

Others went into journalism, activism, alternative media, YouTube and broader cultural commentary.

Arguments over games spread into comics, films, tabletop gaming, science fiction, publishing and eventually ordinary party politics.

“Culture war” stopped being a phrase used by people writing strange essays on obscure websites and became something politicians themselves talked about.

Looking back, Gamergate increasingly resembles a rehearsal.

Not for one particular political movement, and not as a magical explanation for everything that happened afterwards, but for a style of conflict that became normal.

Networked factions.

Competing realities.

Information warfare conducted with memes.

No recognised leaders.

No agreed membership.

No mutually trusted referees.

Everybody keeping receipts.

Everyone accusing everybody else of harassment.

Nobody logging off.

The future arrived.

Unfortunately, it had Twitter.

PAPERBACK EDITION

If you prefer an actual book rather than another glowing rectangle, Inside Gamergate is also available in paperback.

The print edition is 214 pages, black and white, perfect bound and produced in a compact 4.25 × 6.875-inch pocket-book format.

ISBN: 978-0-244-62772-0.

Buy Inside Gamergate in paperback from Lulu

This product is the digital ebook edition.

AUDIOBOOK EDITION

There is also an unabridged audiobook edition for people who would rather have the entire argument injected directly into their ears.

Buy Inside Gamergate as an audiobook from Audible

Useful for commuting, painting miniatures, exercising, or angrily remembering 2014 while doing the washing-up.

A NOTE ON PERSPECTIVE

This is a deliberately pro-Gamergate account written by a participant.

That needs saying plainly.

Readers seeking a tidy, officially approved summary will probably dislike it.

Readers who want to understand what Gamergate’s participants believed they were doing—and why the accepted media narrative remains so bitterly contested—will find a perspective rarely allowed into the record.

That does not mean accepting every conclusion.

It means engaging with the argument actually being made.

There is a peculiar habit in modern political discussion of claiming to understand a movement while refusing to read anything written by somebody inside it.

That may be excellent tribal discipline.

It is terrible history.

READ THE ARGUMENT THEY TOLD YOU WAS SETTLED

Gamergate remains one of those subjects where asking five people what happened produces seven incompatible answers and at least one accusation that the question itself is harassment.

That is exactly why primary and participant accounts matter.

Inside Gamergate does not ask you to believe it arrived without prejudice.

It tells you where it stands.

It then makes the case.

If your entire understanding of Gamergate consists of “misogynists harassed women over videogames”, there is considerably more history here than that sentence permits.

If your entire understanding consists of “it was only ever about ethics in games journalism”, there is more mess here than that sentence permits too.

The controversy involved journalism, censorship, harassment, feminism, political identity, internet culture, consumer activism, trolling, media power and the first rumblings of a culture war that subsequently became very difficult to ignore.

This is the story from inside the revolt.

Agree with it.

Argue with it.

Check the references.

Read the opposition.

Just don’t mistake only hearing one side for understanding what happened.