Posted October 25, 2018
Is gog pro-gamersgate? What is gamersgate?
But she broke up with her boyfriend in the meanwhile and since the boyfriend was really a nice guy he made a post in which he basically said she slept with a guy from one of those news site to have a good review (which the guy didn't write, I know because I followed him and even did a bit of googling when I first heard of the thing at the time, IIRC there was only a passing mention in a list of indie games and an interview with the developer).
Thus Gamergate was born (the name was coined by Adam Baldwin, yes that one).
This non controversy was basically used as an excuse by american extreme right wing shitlords to rope gamers into their crusade against anything "leftist", "feminist" and the like by basically siccing angry mobs of gamers against indipendent news sites who dared cover indie games and do extensive critiques of games (think of people like Mark Brown or Noah Gervais) instead of just giving a 10/10 to the latest Call of Duty, some of the people who wrote in these sites (like Leigh Alexander) as a result became thoroughly disillusioned, words flew back and forth and there was also plenty of targeted harassment against journalists that were blacklisted either for being against Gamergate or just not picking a site and ignoring the controversy (one of them was Jim Sterling, at the time working for The Escapist). I still remember the hell that became of the Rock Paper Shotgun forums and comment sections, in particular I remember a shitstorm against Cara Ellison for quoting a running joke about some subtext in the first Indiana Jones movie (the famous "did Indie commit statutory rape?" implication) in an article about the romantic subplot of Indiana Jones and The Fate of Atlantis (a critique I might add that PRAISED the game extensively for how it handled it) with people doing extensive namecalling in the comment section.
The thing is that in the long run gamergate disappeared, many of its main proponents (Like Milo Yiannopoulos) often went on to use their rabble-rousing to campaign for Trump (who ironically would blame school shootings on videogames once he became president) and now it's mostly an underground thing that once in a while rears its ugly head.