Asking for a single cause is like asking which snowflake caused the avalanche, or which fart caused the tornado.
@Honka Honka Burning Love covered most of this far better than I could, but I blame all of the things mentioned so far. From "nerd culture" becoming a fashion accessory and "lifestyle" for normies, to greedy corporations looking to increase their bottom line.
I don't want to repeat myself too much. Who am I kidding? I like talking about this stuff. But the quick rundown in my opinion.
- "Nerd culture" becomes a fashion accessory after the Wii and DS become the tickle-me-elmo of their day, loved by young and old and selling massively.
- The mass adoption of the PS2 after generation X grows up with gaming at their side, viewing them in the same manner as music and movies.
- Broadband internet becomes widespread, leading to an explosion in websites rich in content. Old media jumps on this bandwagon.
- Xbox Live Arcade sets the template digital distribution, leading to a wave of high quality indie games not seen since the days of the ZXSpectrum.
- Between 2008 and 2012 a new fad appear. "Hipster".
- The "are games art" debate reignited by Roger Ebert and other snobby critics making dismissive comments, and insecure game journalists make fools of themselves.
- The games press sells out. Scandals like Doritogate and Gerstmanngate more or less proving that payola trumps truth or honesty.
- Outside of gaming, scandals like Atheism Plus and Hawkeye Initiative create divisions in their communities.
- "Sexism" has been criticized previously in gaming before, especially Tomb Raider, but it was never taken seriously.
With the table now set, the rest are things you likely already know.
Normies who had little interest in gaming before it was mainstream suddenly want to pivot into politics and activism, but can't because they are stuck in their dead end game journalism job, and they don't want to give up a platform with a captive audience. On top of this they got older, maybe got married and had kids, or felt insecure that they weren't taken seriously by their peers in "real journalism".
Whatever the motivation they each decided that immature things like cleavage were harmful or ruining their image so it had to go. The nerds who made gaming "cool" to begin with weren't "cool" to normies, and insisted on holding on to their "immature" things, so they had to go as well.
Oh yeah, definitely. The weird part about GamerGate to me was that we'd known about the corruption and payola in the gaming press since basically forever. It's something that predates the current controversy by a huge span of time. I mean, I remember articles as far back as the early 00s where reviewers would frequently brag about private trips with gamedevs and publishers where they'd walk away with literal duffel bags full of merchandise. T-shirts, commemorative statuettes, special editions of the game, whatever the hell. That was influence. That was bribery. It wasn't a secret. Swag Bags were standard practice, not just in gaming, but across vast swathes of the consumer good industry. They've always buttered up the press.
I'd played Depression Quest like a whole year before the Zoe Post, so I knew what it was and how Kotaku had blown smoke up the asses of its creators. It was a text adventure. It wasn't even what I'd consider a video game, exactly. Text-based games are in an entirely different category. It was certainly no Zork. Much lazier, and with a whole lot of bad ends if you did anything other than aggressively pursue therapy.
Depression Quest was done in Twine. It requires no coding skill whatsoever to
make a text adventure in Twine. Anyone can do it. The bar for entry is much lower than doing visual scripting in Unity or Unreal Engine. And yet, Kotaku was willing to shill this unremarkable non-video-game to their readers. In hindsight, it felt weird right off the bat.
Furthermore, I always thought Anita Sarkeesian's critiques of video games and TV shows were really, really far off the mark. I tried explaining to SJWs, as far back as 2013, look, Anita Sarkeesian is extremely gender-essentialist and she gets all her ideas from Carol Gilligan, but they were having none of it. What else do you call it when someone,
in a thesis paper describing their ideas, literally makes a chart of male and female behaviors?
Anita Sarkeesian's entire argument was that when writers come up with protagonists, regardless of the character's sex, they will often draw from the column on the left. The masculine traits. Rational, physically and verbally aggressive, stoic, strong, independent, dominant, competitive, et cetera.
Her complaint was, essentially, that when writers depict an ideal "strong female protagonist", they make her too mannish and unrelatable to women.
Being the moron that she was, and still is, she could not immediately see the problem with her entire worldview. Those so-called masculine traits are the ones associated with power. It's only natural for a protagonist to be someone of importance, and in order to be important, someone has to be powerful. In order to be powerful, someone has to exert power, and violence and intimidation are the most basic forms of power.
What Anita Sarkeesian and her ilk intended to do, essentially, was redefine power. It's kind of a collectivist revision of the typical power hierarchy, where power is redefined as diplomacy, cooperation, and submissiveness. Under this line of thinking, individualism and other "masculine" traits are vilified.
There's a term for this. It's Nietzsche's
Letzter Mensch. The Last Man. A cognate can be found in the modern slang term "bugmen". People who shy away from force and desire only comfort, safety, and consumerist bliss. Basically, once you succeed in stripping people of individualism, romanticism, and a purpose in life, you open the door for authoritarian domination of every aspect of their lives. Every kind of Orwellian control, every kind of Brave New World-esque druggism. That's what everything gives way to, when you deliberately repudiate individual power.
Anyone with a lick of sense can see that this is just repackaged Maoism with a feminist veneer. Submission is elevated on a pedestal, as well as collective responsibility. A question is raised; to whom is this submission owed? Why, the State, of course. It's always the State. When every ounce of power is stripped from people, its remains are heaped upon the State, and the State becomes the new object of worship and obeisance. A literal scapegoat upon which to lay one's sins.
Ever notice how the modern world actually works? People's right to be consoomer weaklings is backed up with force. With terrifying violence. Anyone who steps out of line, anyone who questions the petrodollar or the current economic order? They soon find a JDAM or Tomahawk in their living room. And yet, this weak, cockamamie SJW ideology lets people believe that they aren't complicit in this. If you believe in the Gospel of Anita Sarkeesian, you can hold hands and sing Kumbaya and feel "powerful" while having to do absolutely fucking nothing to sustain your existence, while people on the other end of the planet are crushed and killed enslaved to preserve your luxuries. They repudiate violence, but they rely on it for protection and enrichment.
Any time there is a vacuum in power, any time there isn't anyone around who draws from the column on the left, guess what? Eventually, a warlord rises. Eventually, someone appears who is willing to order the murder, rape, and enslavement of those who will not defend themselves. What has historically happened every single time a colonial power has encountered weaker natives? They consumed them. Like a bag of Doritos.
The hand-holding utopia doesn't exist. It has never existed. Violence has always had the last laugh. Always. It's like a cheat code. If you happen to be a barbarian lord and you encounter a tribe of pacifists who will not defend themselves, you can always brutally buttfuck them to death like something out of a Tarantino movie. The worst they can do to you is whine and make you feel bad about it for a few seconds. Diplomacy without hard force behind it is just complaining. It can always be vetoed by violence.
When you write a strong protagonist of
either gender, it is inevitable that they will be independent and stoic and capable of bootstrapping themselves where others struggle and fail, and you know why? It's because, for one thing, if protagonists were as meek as people like Anita Sarkeesian wanted them to be, then they wouldn't be people of importance. They'd be nobody. Fucking peasants. Victims. Objects. Secondly, people
like escapism. People like grasping and groping at the things they've been denied by the establishment, stifled by our bureaucratic order, by our reams of paperwork and licenses and certificates and forms, and all this other anti-human dreck. They don't want a replica of real life. They don't want to read about powerless people when they already feel powerless. They
want those swashbuckling adventures. They
want to swing from a rope like Tarzan. They
want to get the girl. They
want to turn back the alien armada.
SJWs want us to read stories about some lady who struggled to get an alimony settlement from her ex, and then her dog died and her daughter was raped and the police department mysteriously lost the rape kit, and she somehow found serenity
not by finding her daughter's rapist and pulling out her Glock and giving him a Miami Vice-style Mozambique Drill, but through group therapy sessions where everyone had a big cry at the end. Why the fuck would we want to read about that? That's life. That's the way things already are. It's not an escape. It's nothing.
If expressions of power make SJWs feel unsafe or uncomfortable, then they clearly must lack the spark of humanity. If somebody thinks that they can redefine power as its opposite, they are delusional. Power is force. The abjuration of force is always accompanied by the abjuration of power.