Zoe Quinn kicked this off through her own practices, but Gamergate didn't gain speed because of her - she was a symptom of the greater problem, not the source. It was the complete lack of any effort to look into the scandal, when just months previous, the same individuals now conducting a blackout of it, had done extensive coverage of a similar story in which a male dev sexually harassed some people - that led people to ask a very simple question:
"Why aren't they covering it? This is pretty much a similar scenario, with the only difference being who's involved."
This led Internet detectives to look into it. Because those involved weren't very careful and weren't exactly secretive in their dealings, we quickly learned about Zoe
having financial support from several people in the industry. This is unusual, but not exactly an earth-shattering revelation. It was what was to follow that got eyebrows raised -
the IGF/Indiecade scandals and people directly associated with this whole scandal
financially supporting people through essentially rubber-stamping their way through the selection process. This happened, again,
because those involved made no effort to cover their tracks. When the entire
Game Journos Pros reveal happened later, which indicated that
not only was the fix in to not cover the story due to a series of rote conflicts of interest, with several people openly involved in the development of Zoe's game and
actively going out of their way to quash discussion of it - that Gamergate actually took off.
What's happened outside of it, however, has been amazing.
We had the "Gamer is Dead" barrage hit, where 12+ articles with the same content - arguing that the gamer identity was dead - hit from the same source on the same day. The response, unsurprisingly, was overwhelmingly negative, since this was a huge group of journalistic publications who we all knew to be in an incestuous relationship with each other essentially declaring their readerbase to be irrelevant. Fittingly enough, this was found eventually to have come, in part, from
Silverstring Media, a PR company, with ties to - you guessed it - Games Journos Pro - and one Zoe Quinn.
The
#Notyourshield hashtag got started because those attempting to demonize Gamergate supporters kept screaming at them that Gamergate was entirely about misogyny and harassment. There's a lot of gamers who are women, who are non-whites, and who really aren't cool with being used as the verbal equivalent of a bludgeon, and this hashtag a
llowed tweeters to show that Gamergate had broad multi-cultural support.
For starting the hashtag, Anti-GGers managed to get him fired after Anti-GGers called his place of business. This was a herald of things to come, as Anti-GGers have been repeatedly going after neutral parties for remaining neutral as well. Boogie, in an
emotionally-charged and phenomenally touching video, goes on about how he was threatened by other Games Journalists with Blacklisting if he didn't side against Gamergate, and how he was Doxxed by Anti-GGers. I want you to remember that first part - because it'll be relevant in about 2 paragraphs or so.
This synopsis is starting to drag, so I'll try banging out the rest of it rapid-fire. Apologies in advance for anything I miss:
A non-Gamergater did research and quickly learned that a lot of the harassment that had allegedly come from Gamergate during this process
were false flag operations - this included Anita Sarkeesian's threatener (who turned out to be clickbaiting Brazilian journalist from a site called Celebrinando), SomethingAwful's FYAD being responsible for a chunk of the Brianna Wu harassment. It revealed that a sizable part of the harassment claims being made against Gamergate are being done by provocateurs.
After the Guardian did a seriously Anti-GG article,
it was revealed later via the Ralph Retort that the fix was in on it from the start, indicating
a genuine desire to skew the narrative and strongly suggesting collusion. For the rest of the mainstream press, them treating gamers like head lice wasn't anything new, considering they already said we were responsible for the Virginia Tech Shooting, Sandy Hook, and Columbine, but it was extremely jarring for this to come from a fairly respected platform otherwise.
The proverbial smoking gun was later involved when it was discovered that
Destructoid had been actively involved in suppressing the story before it went active, and went out of their way to Blacklist the journalist involved to keep him from talking - something highly illegal in the state Destructoid's headquartered in, and providing the largest scandal broken thus far. It also painted comments like Boogie's and several others in an entirely new light - the threats of blacklisting hadn't been limited to this one Journalist, and we now know all too well now just how deep this goes.
Zoe Quinn isn't the cause of Gamergate, nor is she the crux of it. She is, however, irrevocably
tied with it - it got started because of her, and it worsened because people simply followed the obvious trail she had left in her dealings. It's also worth noting that
Quinn herself thanked Gamergaters for fighting attempts to doxx her personal information thus far.
That's a general synopsis, without getting bogged down by the rest of the details. There's a lot more about Gamergate and I urge you to look into it - stuff like the infamous Sam Biddle pro-bullying tweets that Gamergate then used relentlessly against Gawker's advertisers, and how Leigh Alexander's racist comments were used in the same fashion. Above all else, use your own judgment. No one here's going to attack you for being neutral or even against GG - this
is a shitstorm after all - but it's definitely worth looking into and getting some knowledge about.
