I have some sympathy for Quinn and Grayson. Sure, what Grayson did wasn’t ethical, but in normal circumstances it wouldn’t lead to a culture-war cataclysm. The games press wasn’t unlike any other sort of trade press. It was characterized by pathetically low journalistic standards, an ideologically homogeneous atmosphere, cliquey politics and innumerable overlapping conflicts of interest. However, few people beyond journalism professors really care if a reporter is friends with, or even fucking, one of their reporting subjects. And yet, thanks to the dreadful professional track record of the games press, and their appalling response to gamer’s concerns, it just happened to become a thing.
Following the discovery of the Grayson-Quinn connection, gamers across the web embarked on one of the greatest acts of collective internet sleuthing in history. Virtually overnight, “GamerGate” discussions sprang up on some of the web’s biggest communities, like the anonymous discussion forums 4chan and Reddit, and #GamerGate began trending on Twitter.
Gamers quickly uncovered a web of connections between games journalists and their reporting subjects. Games journalists had reported on their friends without disclosure, and in some cases had even donated money to their reporting subjects.
Critical Distance, a hub of social justice-oriented games critics, repeatedly gave favorable coverage to multiple game creators who had given them monthly donations through the crowdfunding site Patreon.183
Gamasutra editor-at-large Leigh Alexander published dozens of articles lauding her personal friends.184 Multiple other journalists were found to have similarly dire track records, which are now catalogued at the GamerGate-created website DeepFreeze.it.
All of this was embarrassing for the games media, especially since hard-core gamers have an innate respect for fair play. But it was hardly an international scandal. The real reason GamerGate became a gigantic story was due to the reactions of these media outlets when they were exposed as ethically compromised.
For Leigh Alexander, there could be no quarter given to gamers. “These obtuse shitslingers, these wailing hyper-consumers, these childish internet-arguers—they are not my audience,” she wrote.185
In the space of 48 hours, a dozen articles were published in a similar vein. All op-eds, all repeating the same opinion: gamers are bigoted white males trying to make the world of video games less inclusive. Arthur Chu at Daily Beast called gamers “misogynist losers” who were “making us all look bad.”186 Kotaku’s Luke Plunkett described them as “reactionary holdouts that feel so threatened by gaming’s widening horizons.”187 VICE lamented that Eron Gjoni’s “embarrassing relationship drama” was “killing the gamer identity.”188 The Daily Dot described GamerGate simply as a “sexist crusade to destroy Zoe Quinn.”189
At the same time, a discussion about the ethics of games journalism on Reddit’s gaming subforum, one of the largest gathering-places for gamers on the web, was completely nuked. Over 20,000 comments were deleted, making it one of the largest—perhaps the largest—suppressions of discussion in Reddit’s history.190 NeoGAF, already known for its ban-happy owners, started kicking GamerGate supporters off the platform left, right and center. Popular YouTuber Boogie2988 was banned just for taking a neutral stance on the topic.191
Even 4chan, known for hosting discussions about anything, no matter how vile, rolled out a blanket ban on GamerGate in mid-September. The decision sent shockwaves through its pro-free speech user base, leading to a mass exodus to alternative site 8chan.192 Fallout from the decision would eventually convince Christopher “Moot” Poole, the site’s founder, to leave 4chan after 10 years at the helm.193
GamerGate wouldn’t have got off the ground without a great deal of assistance from would-be censors. The very first YouTube video about the drama surrounding Eron Gjoni and Zoe Quinn attracted a meager 4,599 views on its initial run.194 Then Quinn lodged a false copyright claim against the video, taking it offline, and the internet exploded. It’s weird that someone like Quinn, who was deeply embedded in web culture, would make such a mistake. After all, it was false copyright claims that propelled the rise of Anonymous.195
Shortly after the games media launched its volley of articles smearing gamers as sexist, misogynist bigots, #GamerGate surged in activity. It would retain a high trending position for much of 2014, and well into 2015.196
By late 2014, it was apparent that GamerGate no longer described a scandal, but an entrenched consumer movement—tens of thousands of gamers fully prepared to wage war against a gaming media that had turned on them.
GamerGate wasn’t going to be a flash-in-the-pan controversy. It was here to stay.
A COOL FAGGOT, LIKE FREDDIE MERCURY
I entered the story in the early days of GamerGate, when an anonymous Twitter account with an anime profile picture and the handle @LibertarianBlue sent me a couple tweets explaining the controversy. The account belonged to Allum Bokhari, now one of Breitbart’s most gifted writers. He spoke of journalists engaging in nepotism and censorship, and critics being smeared as misogynists. I asked for more information.
Out of our collaboration emerged my first story on the controversy, which was the first published story that unapologetically took the side of gamers. While the rest of the media lamented the alleged “hate-campaign” against women in gaming, I took the ethics concerns of gamers seriously, and listened with an open mind to their complaints about a partisan political press and out-of-control feminist narratives that were slamming the lid on open discussion in the games world. “Feminist Bullies Tearing the Video Games Industry Apart” was the headline I chose—understated, as always.
It turned heads, and it set the tone for later coverage. Having watched the “online harassment” panic grow to absurd heights, I was determined to show that criticizing and even mocking feminists did not make you a misogynist. As for exposing the biases and ethical failings of the press—well, that was even more important. It was also trivially easy to accomplish, thanks to an anonymous source who is now one of my most trusted contacts in the industry.
A month after the gamers and games journalists went to war, I was handed the most explosive story of the entire controversy: a series of leaks from “GameJournoPros,” a secret email list used by journalists from gaming and tech publications including Kotaku, Polygon, Ars Technica, Rock Paper Shotgun, WIRED, PC Gamer and The Verge. I wasn’t sure why I had been chosen to deliver these logs to the public, but I did know exactly what to do with them: publish them all on Breitbart, and watch as the flames of the greatest lulz-fire on the internet leapt ever higher into the sky.
The logs confirmed gamers’ worst suspicions about collusion behind the scenes in the gaming media. Journalists from competing outlets appeared to be in cahoots, making decisions about what to cover and how to cover it.