It's the first time the cultural left heard the word "no". They flipped their shit about it and continue to flip their shit about it. It's also why they blame GG for getting Trump elected the first time despite it being far more politically diverse back then. They're mentally 5 years old and think "GG told me no and the voters told me no => GG caused Trump".
To be fair...going through Gamergate allowed many of us to identify parallels with how the media was treating Trump and from there it's just a matter of doing the most perfunctory digging to discover that he's the first candidate in at least a generation to give a shit about America.
GG made me see the media as an entirety was corrupt.
Hell I'm on this fucking sub alongside a bunch of fucks who hate Jews even though I'm not on the same page as them about it because we all can agree on ONE thing.
You don't hate journalists enough. You think you do, but you don't.
Gamergate is perhaps the first time there was organic widespread protest against the cultural left's infection of a medium. In a distant sense, you could argue this paved the way for future rebuttals in other aspects of life by showing there is support for those opposing that encroachment. Also the left hates traitors the most, and a lot of early Gamergaters were liberal-minded to begin with, so they can never let it go.
Because gamers and Gamergate were the first domino to begin their collapse. We were the first group to openly go 'FUCK OFF!' to the leftists and establishment and it burns them on the inside that we never capitulated.
Because we never bent the knee, they hyper focus on gamergate and they become so open and vindictive that they lose ground everywhere else by appearing as retards.
I would argue that it wasn't the first domino. Guys on the right like Alex Jones and Rush Limbaugh had been screaming about how the left captured the media and corrupted it into their propaganda machine for decades.
Gamergate was the moment that everyone was forced to admit that it wasn't just a conspiracy theory. It was the fire under the asses of gamers that was needed to get them off the fence with all of the rest of the uninformed normies and force them to finally start paying attention to the reality of our government and our media.
I just thought it was simple as some chick banged a guy for a good video game review.
To be precise: for good coverage. Their main 'gotcha' is that he never posted an official review of the game. Anyway, leaving aside the chick's moral turpitude, she wasn't really at fault in the coverage-matter, but the 'journalist' certainly was.
But instead of cleaning up their act, they started attacking 'gamers' and declaring them dead, as well as attacking minorities and women as racist and sexist.
A lot of people didn't yet have the experience of being called racist over nothing, so this was quite a shock and a surprise. So an anti-woke movement was formed.
Normally hand + cookie jar = we'll lock the cookie jar and it won't happen again.
In this case
Hand + cookie jar = there was no hand and no cookie jar? What are you, a woman hating, racist, homophobic Nazi? Let's get our big cousins in to all shout that you are and you saying otherwise just proves you are. No! We're not overreacting! REEE!!!!
And the cookie jar turns out to be all the cookie jars and the hands are those who call everyone woman hating, racist, homophobic Nazis i.e. the Control Left.
So what seems like a victory lap to the uninitiated is just those of us who care really nailing in the lid on the coffin because some pricks thought that their ego could outflank the truth and maybe, just maybe, if they understood what a bunch of autismo retards we are who would grind for months to get some pixels on a screen, maybe then they'd have backed off.
It introduced politics to a group that was fairly apolitical up until that point.
It was also a blatant masks-off moment that demonstrated just how much games journalism had changed and just how much those self-same journalists fucking hated the people they were reporting on.
It was also a blatant demonstration of a uniform, artificial front of several different groups saying all the same thing, blatantly co-ordinated behind the scenes.
We got a peek behind the curtain, and some of us didn't like what we saw.
I remember Reddit leftists talking about GG years ago. It was almost a unifying moment. I like your point that back then, not everything was political… yet.
This group of Leftists managed to successfully monopolize a fairly masculine space filled with white people, due to the journalist class loosing influence to YouTubers. The intentional division within the audience that they created was going to turn the people who believed them into Loyalists. However, the vast and sweeping majority of video game consumers either agreed with GamerGate, or thought the reaction to it was a wild and insane over-reaction. For the first time in the lives of the activists, they accidentally attacked a demographic that would eventually become the core of both Left & Right wing populism.
The Leftist activists assumed that they could simply make an appeal to authority, and then (since almost all of Gamers fell into Left-Libertarian on the political compass), they assumed that the Left part would make them fall into line. Instead it pushed the whole of the audience away from them.
As a result it turned a small scandal into a national one which dragged in Brietbart Media.
And let me be clear: everything was thrown against the wall at GamerGate. It was mass censorship, blacklisting, blackmailing, harassing, death threats, defamation, and libel sent... not at journalists... but at video game consumers and YouTubers who were challenging the authority of access journalism. Every grifter was aligned against consumers. This includes Ian Miles Cheong and Candice Owens originally attempting to conduct directed harassment campaigns against consumers. Anita Sarkeesian spoke out against video games at the United Nations. Multiple mainstream media outlets ran insane puff pieces, or full on defamation regarding the outlandish and psychotic claims of Leftist activists. In the "Con Logs" (the chat logs of a group that Zoey Quinn and her gang set up to co-ordinate harassment and defamation), ZQ explicitly stated she had friends in the FBI and around Clinton who would weaponize the FBI against people complaining about the corruption in journalism.
The FBI investigated multiple gamers multiple times and there were no issues whatsoever. Despite accusations of bomb threats, murder attempts, and sniper fire.
At the end of the day, the scandal did almost nothing to save any of the journalism outlets, or their allied punditry and technology moved the industry away from their influence towards a different medium.
In the end, GamerGate (which was our word to describe their media blitz) was a successful rebuke of the Leftist cultural hegemony and aggression. Originally we all thought that we could improve journalism because we hold the money, but it's not true. As you are beginning to see now, our money was no good. Either the idealogues simply don't care if they go bankrupt, or the federal government and allied activists will bail them out no matter how much money they lose.
The events of GamerGate have effectively expanded and regionalized the fight we had. Every single medium now has it's own GamerGate, and every industry does too.
They never forget the first time they lost, and since they think they are divine justice on all of humanity, they see it as one of the greatest crimes ever committed. You can't say no to perfection. Now, they are fighting everywhere, all the time, about everything, and they think it all started from GamerGate. And, in a way, they're right. Gamers were the first people who weren't afraid of them, and as a result, that courage ended up being contageous.
It's incredible how the biggest political event of our lifetime occurred because a woman wanted better reviews on her game. Since they couldn't shut us down, we started pulling on the string and have unraveled such a massive scheme involving everything that the conspiracy theorists were once called crazy for (elite pedo rings, intelligence agencies running everything as secret police, intentional White replacement in the West, hidden media lockstep messaging, one world government attempts, and I'm sure more will be coming) that it's now impossible for them to shut it down by conventional means.
All because they couldn't leave our hobbies alone.
Namely, the woman's behavior was a symbolism of the future behavior of MANY modern women. Refusing to accept responsibility, asking for society to accept their degeneracy with ZERO judgement, put them on pedestals as some sort of victim class above men, and to demonize anything and EVERYTHING that makes a man, a man.
You can see to this day that when a woman is forced to take responsibility, there are still media and other simps crowding around her to white knight for her.
Sorry that I'm sounding like the banned woman hater, but a lot of this behavior was enabled by the modern left.
It's just that at this point, we fucking got sick of it and said FUCK YOU. I learned quite a bit from the "manosphere" sector of YouTube (though I'm not personally part of it) and it was just one brick among many bricks that allowed me to realign my ideology and re-analyze what I believed in.
Thanks. Before Reddit was completely destroyed by communists I remember seeing GG being wildly talked about. For some reason I never looked into it. This reminds of how Jordan Peterson became popular. He handled a ridiculous “interview” where he was accused of everything possible. Then the media in lockstep came to defend the “journalist”.
The political compass is not accurate. The idea that gamergate was primarily left leaning was pushed by lefty goons who couldn't bear the idea that they were fundamentally wrong - it was never accurate, their narrative was just tolerated for the sake of avoiding infighting.
"Left libertarian" is not a real political ideology, it is synonymous with ignorant degenerate.
Arguing about what it actually means isn't super relevant. The point is that these were limited government social liberals, which you would expect given the time period and the age of consumers. What they were not is dedicated Fascists, authoritarians, or even misogynists.
It was the first time that non conspiracy people saw through the media's lies and how they all moved in lockstep over an issue that was simply tiny. It shattered the illusion and now we know our international elites are satanic pedophiles controlled by intelligence agencies and shadowy globalist organizations.
Watershed moments in history, particularly for the right, where some relative normies took a stand against gay race communism and were smeared & punished for it, forcing their enemies to forever drop their masks.
It also drew up ideological "you or with us or against us" battlelines on culture war and existential issues.
simplifying what u/TheOutlaw said, gamergate was a boogeyman that the activists in journalism never got over. It still haunts them to this day.
I wasn't involved at the time, so I can't take any credit, but It was also the first time gamers actually pushed back in anything resembling a meaningful way against the absolute trash that gaming journalism had been (and largely continues to be) for nearly 4 decades.
Activists want to take over video games because they think interactive media is the ultimate brain washing tool. They believe every human is tabula rasa and if you can control what they do for long enough, you can reprogram them to right all the wrongs in the world. As a bonus, they think all video game players are weak submissive nerds who are easily cowed into changing their behavior. So the whole thing ends up being the ultimate test case for social constructionist ideology.
They pathologically fantasize about this kind of manipulation, all day, it's what they live for. So when they finally try it and it doesn't work, they get pissed because you're ruining their life long fantasy. If you also point out some of the inner workings of their manipulation tactics, they get double pissed because that means they can't try again.
It all stems from an incomplete theory of mind, lefties don't understand how other people think. They have this cardboard cutout idea of gamers as just bully-able nerds, so when they encounter hyper fact focused autists they're completely taken by surprise.
I encountered this phenomenon in real life when I was in college (~2001). I took philosophy and it had a small breakout group that was taught by a grad student. He kept trying to prove moral relativism by giving us one sided reading assignments. But often I had some knowledge of whatever fucked up thing the subject was because I liked to spend my time reading this new fangled thing called wikipedia. Also, more importantly, the main way I had success in school was by meta gaming the intent of test questions. So I could tell just by the way he was presenting information that he was up to something and I often called him out on it. This eventually caused him to lose his fucking mind and prepare speech that he gave to the entire class in the passive voice. He went on about how "the class does X" or "this happens" when the only people who ever said anything in class were me and one other guy. He gave his speech, stormed out and we never saw him again, the class got rolled into another group.
Because it's analogous to western culture as a whole.
Gamers called out access media en masse. Exposed how unpopular and propped up SJW dogma was.
The laptop class rallied to defend the access media. This created a cognitive dissonance that they have yet to settle in their own minds, and constantly have to propagandize themselves.
Because everything is access media in corporate journalism. From Hollywood to government. Liberals know it's wrong, they used to fight against it when they were the working class left, but it benefits their side now. So they gotta keep trotting out gamergate as a reason for why you have to control the narrative. Rather than as an example of propaganda/corruption
Because they want a superficial bogeyman to rally against. It's easier to paint yourself as the good guys if you can convince the general populace that your opposition is bad. Same thing happened with the "red menace" in the mid 20th century. A timeless propiganda maneuver.
It's the first time the cultural left heard the word "no". They flipped their shit about it and continue to flip their shit about it. It's also why they blame GG for getting Trump elected the first time despite it being far more politically diverse back then. They're mentally 5 years old and think "GG told me no and the voters told me no => GG caused Trump".
To be fair...going through Gamergate allowed many of us to identify parallels with how the media was treating Trump and from there it's just a matter of doing the most perfunctory digging to discover that he's the first candidate in at least a generation to give a shit about America.
And many GG'ers weren't even Americans. I'm pretty sure I didn't elect Drumpf, because he wasn't on the ballot here.
That said, many GG'ers also claim (ironically?) that we elected Drumpf, perhaps to troll.
GG made me see the media as an entirety was corrupt.
Hell I'm on this fucking sub alongside a bunch of fucks who hate Jews even though I'm not on the same page as them about it because we all can agree on ONE thing.
You don't hate journalists enough. You think you do, but you don't.
Gamergate is perhaps the first time there was organic widespread protest against the cultural left's infection of a medium. In a distant sense, you could argue this paved the way for future rebuttals in other aspects of life by showing there is support for those opposing that encroachment. Also the left hates traitors the most, and a lot of early Gamergaters were liberal-minded to begin with, so they can never let it go.
Because gamers and Gamergate were the first domino to begin their collapse. We were the first group to openly go 'FUCK OFF!' to the leftists and establishment and it burns them on the inside that we never capitulated.
Because we never bent the knee, they hyper focus on gamergate and they become so open and vindictive that they lose ground everywhere else by appearing as retards.
I would argue that it wasn't the first domino. Guys on the right like Alex Jones and Rush Limbaugh had been screaming about how the left captured the media and corrupted it into their propaganda machine for decades.
Gamergate was the moment that everyone was forced to admit that it wasn't just a conspiracy theory. It was the fire under the asses of gamers that was needed to get them off the fence with all of the rest of the uninformed normies and force them to finally start paying attention to the reality of our government and our media.
Seems odd as a question, you understand what it was and why is it important but don't understand why something important is being talked about?
I understand now that it caused an organic movement against leftist communism cancer and that some of the MSM are still bitter and double down on it.
I just thought it was simple as some chick banged a guy for a good video game review.
Some aditional steps: Corrupted game jornos.
Corrupted jornos are the same as game jornos.
Gamers do noticing.
Gamers make memes of Hilary.
Hilary looks like an old out of touch career politician as Trump seems cool.
Bonus, the chick also got to speak at the UN and caused her boyfriend to commit suicide.
To be precise: for good coverage. Their main 'gotcha' is that he never posted an official review of the game. Anyway, leaving aside the chick's moral turpitude, she wasn't really at fault in the coverage-matter, but the 'journalist' certainly was.
But instead of cleaning up their act, they started attacking 'gamers' and declaring them dead, as well as attacking minorities and women as racist and sexist.
A lot of people didn't yet have the experience of being called racist over nothing, so this was quite a shock and a surprise. So an anti-woke movement was formed.
Normally hand + cookie jar = we'll lock the cookie jar and it won't happen again.
In this case
Hand + cookie jar = there was no hand and no cookie jar? What are you, a woman hating, racist, homophobic Nazi? Let's get our big cousins in to all shout that you are and you saying otherwise just proves you are. No! We're not overreacting! REEE!!!!
And the cookie jar turns out to be all the cookie jars and the hands are those who call everyone woman hating, racist, homophobic Nazis i.e. the Control Left.
So what seems like a victory lap to the uninitiated is just those of us who care really nailing in the lid on the coffin because some pricks thought that their ego could outflank the truth and maybe, just maybe, if they understood what a bunch of autismo retards we are who would grind for months to get some pixels on a screen, maybe then they'd have backed off.
But I doubt it. Moths to a flame.
I like the cookie jar analogy and I use it similarly. Nothing grinds my gears more than someone denying reality and arguing against basic truths
This is a really good phrase.
This gentleman is quite the writer lol
It introduced politics to a group that was fairly apolitical up until that point.
It was also a blatant masks-off moment that demonstrated just how much games journalism had changed and just how much those self-same journalists fucking hated the people they were reporting on.
It was also a blatant demonstration of a uniform, artificial front of several different groups saying all the same thing, blatantly co-ordinated behind the scenes.
We got a peek behind the curtain, and some of us didn't like what we saw.
I remember Reddit leftists talking about GG years ago. It was almost a unifying moment. I like your point that back then, not everything was political… yet.
This group of Leftists managed to successfully monopolize a fairly masculine space filled with white people, due to the journalist class loosing influence to YouTubers. The intentional division within the audience that they created was going to turn the people who believed them into Loyalists. However, the vast and sweeping majority of video game consumers either agreed with GamerGate, or thought the reaction to it was a wild and insane over-reaction. For the first time in the lives of the activists, they accidentally attacked a demographic that would eventually become the core of both Left & Right wing populism.
The Leftist activists assumed that they could simply make an appeal to authority, and then (since almost all of Gamers fell into Left-Libertarian on the political compass), they assumed that the Left part would make them fall into line. Instead it pushed the whole of the audience away from them.
As a result it turned a small scandal into a national one which dragged in Brietbart Media.
And let me be clear: everything was thrown against the wall at GamerGate. It was mass censorship, blacklisting, blackmailing, harassing, death threats, defamation, and libel sent... not at journalists... but at video game consumers and YouTubers who were challenging the authority of access journalism. Every grifter was aligned against consumers. This includes Ian Miles Cheong and Candice Owens originally attempting to conduct directed harassment campaigns against consumers. Anita Sarkeesian spoke out against video games at the United Nations. Multiple mainstream media outlets ran insane puff pieces, or full on defamation regarding the outlandish and psychotic claims of Leftist activists. In the "Con Logs" (the chat logs of a group that Zoey Quinn and her gang set up to co-ordinate harassment and defamation), ZQ explicitly stated she had friends in the FBI and around Clinton who would weaponize the FBI against people complaining about the corruption in journalism.
The FBI investigated multiple gamers multiple times and there were no issues whatsoever. Despite accusations of bomb threats, murder attempts, and sniper fire.
At the end of the day, the scandal did almost nothing to save any of the journalism outlets, or their allied punditry and technology moved the industry away from their influence towards a different medium.
In the end, GamerGate (which was our word to describe their media blitz) was a successful rebuke of the Leftist cultural hegemony and aggression. Originally we all thought that we could improve journalism because we hold the money, but it's not true. As you are beginning to see now, our money was no good. Either the idealogues simply don't care if they go bankrupt, or the federal government and allied activists will bail them out no matter how much money they lose.
The events of GamerGate have effectively expanded and regionalized the fight we had. Every single medium now has it's own GamerGate, and every industry does too.
They never forget the first time they lost, and since they think they are divine justice on all of humanity, they see it as one of the greatest crimes ever committed. You can't say no to perfection. Now, they are fighting everywhere, all the time, about everything, and they think it all started from GamerGate. And, in a way, they're right. Gamers were the first people who weren't afraid of them, and as a result, that courage ended up being contageous.
It's incredible how the biggest political event of our lifetime occurred because a woman wanted better reviews on her game. Since they couldn't shut us down, we started pulling on the string and have unraveled such a massive scheme involving everything that the conspiracy theorists were once called crazy for (elite pedo rings, intelligence agencies running everything as secret police, intentional White replacement in the West, hidden media lockstep messaging, one world government attempts, and I'm sure more will be coming) that it's now impossible for them to shut it down by conventional means.
All because they couldn't leave our hobbies alone.
No really. All I wanted to do was play video games, but you couldn't leave well enough alone.
"game"
Namely, the woman's behavior was a symbolism of the future behavior of MANY modern women. Refusing to accept responsibility, asking for society to accept their degeneracy with ZERO judgement, put them on pedestals as some sort of victim class above men, and to demonize anything and EVERYTHING that makes a man, a man.
You can see to this day that when a woman is forced to take responsibility, there are still media and other simps crowding around her to white knight for her.
Sorry that I'm sounding like the banned woman hater, but a lot of this behavior was enabled by the modern left.
It's just that at this point, we fucking got sick of it and said FUCK YOU. I learned quite a bit from the "manosphere" sector of YouTube (though I'm not personally part of it) and it was just one brick among many bricks that allowed me to realign my ideology and re-analyze what I believed in.
Thanks. Before Reddit was completely destroyed by communists I remember seeing GG being wildly talked about. For some reason I never looked into it. This reminds of how Jordan Peterson became popular. He handled a ridiculous “interview” where he was accused of everything possible. Then the media in lockstep came to defend the “journalist”.
That, and it happened to Peterson multiple times.
The political compass is not accurate. The idea that gamergate was primarily left leaning was pushed by lefty goons who couldn't bear the idea that they were fundamentally wrong - it was never accurate, their narrative was just tolerated for the sake of avoiding infighting.
"Left libertarian" is not a real political ideology, it is synonymous with ignorant degenerate.
Arguing about what it actually means isn't super relevant. The point is that these were limited government social liberals, which you would expect given the time period and the age of consumers. What they were not is dedicated Fascists, authoritarians, or even misogynists.
It was the first time that non conspiracy people saw through the media's lies and how they all moved in lockstep over an issue that was simply tiny. It shattered the illusion and now we know our international elites are satanic pedophiles controlled by intelligence agencies and shadowy globalist organizations.
It's like J6th or the trucker convoy protest.
Watershed moments in history, particularly for the right, where some relative normies took a stand against gay race communism and were smeared & punished for it, forcing their enemies to forever drop their masks.
It also drew up ideological "you or with us or against us" battlelines on culture war and existential issues.
simplifying what u/TheOutlaw said, gamergate was a boogeyman that the activists in journalism never got over. It still haunts them to this day.
I wasn't involved at the time, so I can't take any credit, but It was also the first time gamers actually pushed back in anything resembling a meaningful way against the absolute trash that gaming journalism had been (and largely continues to be) for nearly 4 decades.
Because GG was the first time weaponized autism was used for more than the lolz
Activists want to take over video games because they think interactive media is the ultimate brain washing tool. They believe every human is tabula rasa and if you can control what they do for long enough, you can reprogram them to right all the wrongs in the world. As a bonus, they think all video game players are weak submissive nerds who are easily cowed into changing their behavior. So the whole thing ends up being the ultimate test case for social constructionist ideology.
They pathologically fantasize about this kind of manipulation, all day, it's what they live for. So when they finally try it and it doesn't work, they get pissed because you're ruining their life long fantasy. If you also point out some of the inner workings of their manipulation tactics, they get double pissed because that means they can't try again.
It all stems from an incomplete theory of mind, lefties don't understand how other people think. They have this cardboard cutout idea of gamers as just bully-able nerds, so when they encounter hyper fact focused autists they're completely taken by surprise.
I encountered this phenomenon in real life when I was in college (~2001). I took philosophy and it had a small breakout group that was taught by a grad student. He kept trying to prove moral relativism by giving us one sided reading assignments. But often I had some knowledge of whatever fucked up thing the subject was because I liked to spend my time reading this new fangled thing called wikipedia. Also, more importantly, the main way I had success in school was by meta gaming the intent of test questions. So I could tell just by the way he was presenting information that he was up to something and I often called him out on it. This eventually caused him to lose his fucking mind and prepare speech that he gave to the entire class in the passive voice. He went on about how "the class does X" or "this happens" when the only people who ever said anything in class were me and one other guy. He gave his speech, stormed out and we never saw him again, the class got rolled into another group.
Some girl made a shit game
Slept with 5 guys to get it good reviews
There was backlash and the girl used it to be the victim.
Then other girls wanted in on it and became victims too.
Then we got Feminist Frequency.
Then they went in front of the UN to complain about online bullying (Being rightfully called out on their grift)
Because you moved the stairs muffin.
As long as the tourists keep touting it like their own holocaust, we will come out of the woodwork to correct them.
Because it's analogous to western culture as a whole.
Gamers called out access media en masse. Exposed how unpopular and propped up SJW dogma was.
The laptop class rallied to defend the access media. This created a cognitive dissonance that they have yet to settle in their own minds, and constantly have to propagandize themselves.
Because everything is access media in corporate journalism. From Hollywood to government. Liberals know it's wrong, they used to fight against it when they were the working class left, but it benefits their side now. So they gotta keep trotting out gamergate as a reason for why you have to control the narrative. Rather than as an example of propaganda/corruption
Because they want a superficial bogeyman to rally against. It's easier to paint yourself as the good guys if you can convince the general populace that your opposition is bad. Same thing happened with the "red menace" in the mid 20th century. A timeless propiganda maneuver.
It's the alliteration. It sounds cool and it's fun to say. Try saying it like the VO guy in Mortal Kombat, Gamer Gate, Flawless Victory