#GamerGate

Within the past few years, women designers and programmers in the gaming world and critics of the gaming world have been verbally harassed by male gamers. These harassers are part of a social movement called #GamerGate.

#GamerGate began when a game programmer, Eron Gjoni wrote some blogs about his recently ended relationship with fellow game developer, Zoe Quinn. In the blogs, Gjoni accused Quinn of sleeping with Nathan Grayson, who was a video game journalist. He claims that the reason she slept with him was in order to get positive reviews of her newly released game Depression Quest. This caused gamers to want to harass Quinn. They spoke of her sexual history and even posted nude photos of her on websites. The big issue with this case is that Quinn was automatically made guilty without any sort of proof of evidence. Grayson did mention the game briefly in one of his reviews, but that was before the supposed relationship took place.

Around the same time of this event, another woman was beginning to be harassed. Anita Sarkeesian is a feminist video game critic who makes videos on YouTube, called “Feminist Frequency”, which talks about women’s role in both video games and the industry. Shortly after she posted a video about the sexualization of women in video games, people started to threaten her life. This caused Sarkeesian to have to move away from her home for her own protection. 

Last fall, Sarkeesian had to cancel a talk at Utah College because harassers said that they would kill her if the talk proceeded. The threat by the anonymous harasser said, “I have at my disposal a semi-automatic rifle, multiple pistols,and a collection of pipe bombs,” the email said. “She is going to die screaminglike the craven little whore that she is if you let her come to USU….I willwrite my manifesto in her spilled blood, and you will all bear witness to whatfeminist lies and poison have done to the men of America.”

The term itself was created by actor Adam Baldwin, who used it to show how the media is trying to “enforce arbitrary 'social justice' rules upon gamers & the culture”. The harassers adopted this hashtag as their own and continuing to harass both these women and others too.

Participants in #Gamergate argue that forcing feminist views of more female representation in gaming will lead to the death of the gamer. This is because these participants are male and young and don’t want other representation in their games except their own.  Another argument among these participants is that the video game industry and the journalists who report on it have become too close. They are trying to say that journalists are now trying to take control of the video game industry and force their views onto the games themselves.

Naturally, not every participant in this so called movement is anti-women or hold misogynistic views. There are also participants who do not harass anyone. Some think that it’s more about control and letting the gamer be a gamer without having other’s views forced upon them and their games. It would be interesting to find out what type of games these participants are into, especially the ones who harass and make death threats.