Citation Needed - Gamergate

Episode Date: April 10, 2024

Gamergate or GamerGate (GG)[1] was a loosely organized misogynistic online harassment campaign and a right-wing backlash against feminism, diversity, and progressivism in video game culture.[2][3][4] It was conducted using the hashtag "#Gamergate" primarily in 2014 and 2015.[1][5][6][7] Gamergate targeted women in the video game industry, most notably feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian and video game developers Zoë Quinn and Brianna Wu.[8][9][10][11][12]

Are you a business owner or marketer looking to reach highly engaged podcast listeners just like you? Advertise Cast can help. Whether you are looking to promote a national brand across Canada or a regional event or service, we've got you covered. Reach out today to Bob at AdvertiseCast.com. That's B-O-B at AdvertiseCast.com. Hello and welcome. Citation needed, the podcast where we choose a subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia, and pretend we're experts. Because this is the internet, and that's how it works now.

I'm Tom and I'll be guarding this particular portal to hell, but I can't do it alone. Joining me are my favorite three heads of Cerberus and also Eli who is here but insisted on being a different part. Okay that is the vibe of the show really upsetting Voltron. Great I get to be the derpy one that thinks he threw the thing and when you just move your arm and I get to chase it. Stupid. And I'm stuck as third head. I feel like third head is logically the punchline head. I'm kind of nervous about that much responsibility. I would like to take middle.

And since this episode is going to get us the balls. I'm the boss. We got it. We got it. Yeah. And this episode is going to get us all doxxed and swatted 24 hours after it goes out. We're going to need a legal fund and relocation expenses.

If you'd like to help keep Heath out of jail, remember what they do to tall men inside, consider signing up to support us over a Patreon. Seriously, it's bad inside. There's very little cheese for Heath. Don't let that be on your conscience. What do they do? They just cheese. What else do they do?

It's little cheese. That's all you got to worry about. With that out of the way, tell us, well, she's what else did they do? Just it's little cheese. That's all you got to worry about with that out of the way. Tell us well, no, what person place thing concept phenomenon or event. We'll be talking about today. How little almost none. We'll be talking about gamer gate. All right.

And Eli, apparently we've had, I know too easy a time on the internet this year. Are you ready for the comments section? Jesus Christ. Together, old friend. You know, you could have done another fucking listicle, you know? Yeah, fair enough. Fair enough. Cool, cool.

So, tell us, Eli. Yay. What was Gamergate? All right, I'm going gonna do a Tom monologue thing No, you can't say you're gonna do it. You just do it. You just launch into the mount. Sorry I I'm not used to okay. So when you saw the title of this episode you had one of two reactions You're darker. Well, what do you? Usually always

When you saw the title this episode had one of two reactions, right? A few of you said, oh boy, but way more said to yourselves, what the fuck is a GamerKate? And I don't blame you. I said both because it was an Eli essay. That's fair. Statistically, a very small percentage of the people listening to this episode were the extremely online millennials who were aware of this thing. But what if I told you that some of the worst shit of the last decade, from the election of Donald Trump to the widespread rejection of the COVID vaccine, can draw a straight

line right back to Gamergate. If you've looked around yourself in the last 10 years and wondered how our country got so fractured, so poisoned, so ridiculously broken, you have, at least in part, Gamergate to thank. Okay. All right, that's good. It's nice to have a better address book from my Kaczynski love letters, I guess. So thank you, Eli. Yeah. So before we start, Bill Bryson did not write a book on Gamergate, but Ian Danskin over at Innuendo Studios, the YouTube channel, he has an amazing six part series on Gamergate called Why Are You So Angry?

That's what this essay is largely based on. So if you'd like a more in depth and smarter version of this story, go check that out. And so really angry and sell. He is the one that you should email. Yeah, we will link his email and notes below. You can email me, too. I'll definitely read it. Yeah. So look, if you've heard my episode on bronies, you're already familiar with the concept of leaderless resistance

and the targeting of communities of young men by white supremacists. I'm not going to rehash that whole history here, but long story short, as white supremacy became less mainstream and the internet became more commonplace, white supremacists changed their recruitment tactics from pamphlets and barbecues to online message boards and YouTube takedowns. And I would argue no community was more vulnerable to this tactic than gamers. Well, they didn't leave the barbecues completely behind. They're still really into tiki torches. So that's a...

And now I can't buy tiki torches for all my delightful backyard gatherings. I just can't do it. I went to Walmart, I took a few off the shelf. A white guy nodded at me and I was like, I have to put this back No, I can't buy now. We're doing an under the sea theme. Okay. Yeah, but he'll victims of the whole thing is me Okay. Yeah, but Heath also every time I try to buy a pineapple

I got winked at by the unwashed couple standing over by the cantaloupe. So yeah, I mean If you don't want to go shopping with Anna and I Tom just say so Just take a bath, please just know the back It's important to the lovemaking which you would learn if you Shopping So you're probably asking yourself why were gamers the most vulnerable? Well, two reasons.

First, gamers are a community defined by expendable income. You are not a gamer if you can't buy and own video games, which means the truly disaffected kids playing with their one action figure next to the drainpipe were not part of the conversation. Okay, now we're just, we're not part of the conversation. Now we're just attacking me and Cecil during the show. We're doing it. Classes. Bullshit. So your dad wanted you to play a sport. Not proud. How about that?

Exactly. Don't make fun of sports. Thank you. So this in turn means you're already talking to like wealthier, whiter audiences by default. But the second reason is that gamers had a victim complex. So not to step too far into the lane of our resident video game expert, but video games have always been mainstream entertainment. Computer games started out as a nerd thing, but video games?

They got their start in bars. The first people to play them were adults. The first people to play them were adults. The first people to own them were rich adults. They have never been for nerds, as so much of gamer culture claims. But the people selling these things didn't know that, or they didn't particularly care, so they've always been marketed to children. Well, you know the first rule of marketing, don't know your customer. What?

That is curiously the first rule of video game marketing for some goddamn reason. In a lot of ways, yeah. So as a result, by the time video game consoles became mainstream, they are very much considered a child's toy. So the first generation of gamers grew up with them. But then as those people got older and their hobby was still marketed to children, they felt ousted and they grew resentful. Right.

They told themselves that the quarter munching games of their youths were the real video games and the easier, more complex modern games were for posers and idiots. Just objectively true. I don't even know what it's going to come to. posers and idiots. Just objectively true. I don't even know what's going on. Gamers in turn took on the identity of nerds, a nascent cultural identity defined by both feeling smarter than everyone else and, most importantly, being hated for it. Stop radicalizing me.

I don't like what's happening. And to give you an idea, by the way, how pervasive this tendency that Eli's talking about is, I've been playing a game called, see how long it takes for this online retro gaming community to reveal itself to be racist, sexist, or homophobic for like nine years now. The current record holder is 11 days. That's longer than I would have guessed. Yeah, it must have been Christmas break or something. Yeah, right.

Then, in 2006, along comes the ultimate betrayal. A moment in video game history that truly deserves its own essay. The Nintendo Wii. See, the two competing machines when the Wii debuted were the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3. Sleek, expensive, high priced machines meant for hardcore gamers who wanted to see every pixel of blood splatter in as high a definition as possible. Their graphics and hardware were so advanced they wouldn't be replaced by the PS4 and

Xbox One until seven years later or by pc users two years earlier i'm gonna get so much email from that comment it's gonna be insane now you earn some right now you're in some you're right though yeah and then in november of 2006 along comes this blocky chunky console with graphics barely above the Nintendo 64 and of all things motion controls and that little console pile drives the competition into the ground yeah if you want to know how bad it was the Wii is the seventh best-selling console of all time the ps3 and Xbox 360 are a distant eighth and ninth. That was what it took to provoke the ire of gamers.

Sure. Well, to put the Wii in a further context, I will admit even I once owned a Wii. Of course you did. Me. I owned a Wii. Yeah. I didn't play it. Yeah.

Worse still, they did it with sports Wii sports to be exact which came bundled with most Wii consoles and was a tremendous hit. Kids loved it. Adults loved it. Hell for the first time old age homes started bringing video games in for older folks to play as a part of their physical therapy. Awesome. Everyone loved the Wii.

Everyone except for self-identified gamers. Okay, when senior homes and 20-something keg parties are having the same bowling party, you have the perfect system. You do. You do. So real. A lot of marriages there. But, for gamers and their newfound identity, the Wii represented everything wrong with gaming, right?

Easy games made for little kids and old folkies, bad graphics, and admittedly bizarre game called Wii Fit that called you fat and permanently made your avatar fat when you stepped on the scale that came with the game. So mean. I feel a lot of personal angst radiating off that previous comment there, Eli. I didn't do that to all of us, Eli. Some of us did. My knee avatar looked like Mr. Potato Head no matter what I did.

It's true, you really can't fathom how horrifying it was. It really was so awful. I'm not over it. I'm okay. It's okay. But like it or not, even with a November debut, the Wii destroyed PlayStation and Xbox sales that year, almost doubling the sales of the PS3 that came out around the same time. By the end of the seventh generation of consoles, the Wii would outsell both the PlayStation and the Xbox by 20 million units. And sorry for this way too nerdy insertion, unlike Sony and Microsoft, Nintendo wasn't

selling their console at a loss. That's just fucking unheard of. Yeah, exactly. But perhaps the Wii's most egregious sin is that it let fucking girls into the clubhouse. Now, I want to say at the outset that this is factually not true, right? But when in fact, it's ever stopped white men from being impressed. Am I right? According to the Entertainment Software Association's annual reports, right? There were actually less girls playing games in 2008 than there were in 2005. But importantly, the marketing for the Wii and Nintendo executives were saying different. The commercials for the Wii had girls in them and hit games like Just

Dance had the audacity to be marketed to girls and like all things that men used to do that women are suddenly included in, they were ruining it. Well, alright, Eli, you have yet to mention a game or a gate. I think not getting to the topic of your essay in the first half is a new best for you, so congrats, I think. It's just, yeah. Thank you, Tom. But now that our stage is set, when we come back from from the break we can talk about the actual shit of this shit storm

Promises promises well while Cecil and I tie Eli to a chair and explain that question What we'll be talking about today is not to be taken lightly We'll take a break for a little apropos of nothing Nothing. or personal grudge, you just can't seem to get off the ground? Yeah, I do. Well, then why not try a brand new energy source that will get America moving again? The anger of young white men. The anger of young white men? What's that? The anger of young white men is a clean-burning,

infinitely renewable resource perfect for energizing anything from a candidate for Senate to a serial boycott. Wow, so versatile. But the best part is, like cold fusion, the anger of white men is self-replicating. As you can see on this chart, the angrier a young white man becomes, the more his life sucks. And the more his life sucks, the angrier he becomes. The possibilities are truly endless. Thanks to angry young white men.

My personal dislike of a piece of media turned into a full blown PR crisis. That's right. It did the anger of young white men. As long as we're never outnumbered, it's totally fine for us to use it. We won. Don't worry about it. Are you a business owner or marketer looking to reach highly engaged podcast listeners, just like you? AdvertiseCast can help. Whether you are looking to promote a national brand across Canada or a regional event or service, we've got you covered.

Reach out today to Bob at AdvertiseCast.com. That's B-O-B at AdvertiseCast, as in podcast, dot com. And we're back. When we left off, Eli was doing video game history. He keeps it up. I'm going to have frequent diarrhea for my next essay and show him how it feels. So tell us, Eli, what happened next? All right. So the year is 2013 and as the audience for video games grew and broadened,

so did its subject matter. Yes, the top games of 2013 were literally Mortal Kombat 9, FIFA 14 and Grand Theft Auto 5, but there were also thoughtful, interesting games like The Stanley Parable and Papers, Please, all of which true gamers now gathered on forums like 4chan and 8chan, which I've spoken about before, despised as an attack on their hobby and adopted identity. But the greatest attack of all came from developer Zoe Quinn's Depression Quest, a text adventure based on Quinn's own experience of depression.

I like that people were threatened by a morose zork. Right. And why was it this game for the very first time that they were mad about? They were never like fucking Scrabble. Other people are spelling stuff that I can't spell because I'm a fucking idiot. Never said anything like that. All of a sudden this and look, man, I'm not shitting on anyone's hobbies, truly. But if your hobby is your adopted identity, you should consider in fact, if you have any identity at all, you don't you do not have

Now there's been a lot of conjecture about why depression quest rubbed so many people the wrong way Mainstream media usually boils it down to its subject matter and the rejection of traditional game formats and to be fair Those are definitely factors right you you can't rip off Those are definitely factors right you you can't rip off anyone's head in depression quest no matter how hard you try and Who makes a text-based game where you can't choose all the option? But other games took on wilder subjects in weirder ways I mean hell the Stanley parable is about arguing with a voiceover until you admit that duality is an illusion But that's hard still way easier than Battletoads. Fair. It's so much easier.

Let's do one hand clapping. I don't care. This is so hard. Yeah, no. Depression Quest rubbed people the wrong way because its creator, Zoe Quinn, rubbed people the wrong way. Quinn, who currently uses they them pronouns, was attractive, brilliant, but more than anything Quinn was outspoken. Now, rape and death threats were just part of being a woman in games in 2013. Sexual harassment was expected and occasionally aired on live TV during fighting game tournaments. And I know what you're thinking, Eli, those are still parts of being a woman in gaming, thinking, Eli, those are still parts of being a woman in gaming, also in everything. And that's true. But Zoe Quinn was talking about it and standing up against it.

When Quinn got rape threats, Quinn called them out. When Quinn got harassed, names were motherfucking named and that put a target on their back. So Zoe Quinn also had an ex, Iran Khunjongi. Now, I might be pronouncing that name wrong. I don't care. I hope I pronounce it wrong. I hope I pronounce it so wrong he gets sucked back into his own dimension

and stops bothering Superman. When the mainstream media talk about Iran, if they mention him at all, they say something like, Zoe Quinn's ex-boyfriend posted a blog accusing Zoe Quinn of ex. And we'll get to what he accused Zoe Quinn of in a moment. But before we do, I want to be clear. The Joji workshopped that blog around the tech community and his friends for months.

It was a smear reviewed paper. Yes. He workshopped it online on message boards. You can still fucking see. He workshopped it with his mom, who is an HR professional and who urged him not to post it, but didn't fucking stop him. Right. The purpose of the accusatory blog in the words of a friend who helped him create it, was to quote, create the maximum amount of damage, end quote. This wasn't an angry post fired off at the last minute by a rejected lover. It was a planned and deployed Psyop, which he then posted two forums which were already

dedicated to attacking and harassing his ex-girlfriend. People like to pretend that GamerGate's villain is a faceless mob and in many ways it is, but it's also Iran Khajoneji, who knew exactly what the fuck he was doing with that post and has expressed absolutely no remorse for what happened as a result. He is a bad person and anything bad that ever happens to him is a net good in the universe. Yeah so like you know how like the media pretends to the villain on January 6th was a mob of people attacking Congress? It's like that. It's like it's kind of like that. Oh you mean the mob of freedom patriot citizen heroes defending America's election integrity, Noah?

It's about integrity in politics. We need to sue all the machines. Right. Exactly. For something. So let's get to the post. Modern gamer gators, what little remain, and hey everybody, check the iTunes reviews

because they're there. Those people have retreated to Gugiongi's claims about emotional abuse and infidelity in the post And I'm not gonna get into those right because he's a lying liar who lies So there's absolutely no reason to believe anything. He says is true the claim we know Unquestioningly without a doubt is 100% Untrue is the one that Gamergate was based on. Namely, that while they were dating,

Zoe Quinn slept with a reporter named Nathan Grayson in exchange for a positive review of Depression Quest on the video game website Kotaku. Now let me be clear, not only did Grayson never review Depression Quest, Kotaku didn't even mention depression quest on their site until well after Gajonji and Quinn were broken up and Grayson and Quinn had started dating. There is nothing there is less than nothing to the central instigating claim of gamer

gain and it did not fucking matter. Because the internet exploded. To say that Quinn was harassed, stalked, and threatened is such a wild understatement to list the terrible life-changing things that happened to them would not only double the length of this essay, but would also make it a real bummer. So suffice it to say, in my extremely online and leftist opinion, literally nobody in the history of the internet has undergone more harassment and abuse than Zoe Quinn and the other targets of Gamergate. Well, you can quibble with that superlative, but they're definitely in the conversation,

right? Which is saying a lot. Yeah. And look, I dealt with a teeny tiny fraction of the abuse they put up with for the short time I thought people on Twitter were reachable. And the fact that Zoe Quinn is alive, let alone creating on the internet and undefeated and unbowed is a testament to their strength. And if you take anything away from this story, I want it to be Zoe Quinn's bravery not the evil

of the mob okay they were not beaten and long after nobody remembers what the fuck I'm talking about when I mumbled gamer gate like one of the guys in the prison in Minority Report Zoe Quinn will be remembered for standing up when it was hard and winning but if you remember at the beginning of the essay I told you, this story is about more than ZOE and it's about more than video games. Because Gamergate was a model that gave birth to the poison internet we now swim in. It birthed the careers of right-wing pundits like Milo Yiannopoulos and Sargon of Akkad, Thunderfoot and Breitbart, which rose to prominence exclusively

because of their pro-Gamergate coverage under the stewardship of, that's right, future Trump advisor Steve Bannon. People don't know who Sargon of Akkad is. Sargon of Akkad is the guy who tried to intimidate Tom by shoulder checking him, and Sargon almost knocked himself out. You're not looking at Tom so you can't, like, it's not readily apparent to you how stupid that is. If I had the choice of trying to intimidate Tom or like a fucking wall, I would, I can't tell you which I would choose.

Yeah. I've seen you put your hand through a wall. Well, and then they called the cops to throw me out of the event because Sargon got scared of me because I calmly Argued with him while he freaked the fuck Every universe but this one you hit him and I like them all better. I'm just saying me too So I just wish he tried to shoulder check Haley. It would have been so much Twisted his head off there'd be a shoe in his eyes right now. He'd be talking at schools.

So look, the tactics used in Gamergate, right? Fake bot accounts for harassment, review bombing, doxxing, right? They weren't created with Gamergate, but Gamergate is where they became the method du jour, right? In fact, many news media outlets have pointed out that not only did many foreign agents use the same tactics against Hillary Clinton about her private email server, they used the same accounts that they'd used during Gamergate to do it. Okay, here's a real sentence that happened in my life.

I said to my friend, who's normally a politically progressive person, I said, either Hillary Clinton is a lizard alien serial killer who eats babies or some people lied on the internet. You decide. He decided on the former. He did? So did millions of other people. Look, every bad thing that has swept the Internet to your horror and confusion in the last 10 years

has Gamergate in its DNA, right? Relatively obscure meat coma enthusiast Jordan Peterson lies about a Canadian bill and propels himself to the top of the bestseller list. Tweets about the COVID vaccine are auto-replied to by dozens of bots spreading misinformation. Gamergate isn't just a bad thing that people did. It is a way of doing bad things. Yeah, and really the thing to remember is that these guys are every day,

very busily not having sex with women. And that gives them way more time to game out this kind of stuff. Yes. So, how did Gamergate- That's not what I do with my time though? I just like why you could though you could I guess I could. So how did you get sex with a woman?

Let's keep it this week. I know he says it every week but let's keep it this week. It's important to be on record. So how did Gamergate end? How do you fight this stuff? Well, you tell the grownups. Because the thing about campaigns like this is they don't stand up to scrutiny.

They thrive in the dark corners of the internet that Noah tells Eli he should probably take a break from. Because contrary to popular belief, they don't thrive on attention. They thrive on a specific kind of attention, an attention that takes them seriously. Right.

Which given the facts of the case is a hard thing to do. Right. Exactly. Enter Stephen Colbert. So Stephen had another journalist who was a huge target of GamerGate's harassment, Anita Sarkeesian, on his show for an interview. And in that interview, he made fun of gamer gate right as the Colbert character He whined about diversity in games he accused her of personally trying to erase all the boobs off the internet in short

He showed a much much larger audience than gamer gate had what gamer gate actually was Feels like the real cell phone for gameramergate is thinking Jordan Peterson is deep. Right. Okay, but Jordan Peterson was right about the diet of nothing but steak and fucking pocket salt. That was real. Gamergaters should get on board. Get on board.

Absolutely. Check the med schedule. Jawline established dominance. Do it. Absolutely. And look, this is not a one-off, this ending, right? Showing a larger group of people what this small group of people already knows tactic, it's worked against internet trolls over and over and over again, right?

Milo Yiannopoulos, flamboyant, undefeated king of the internet trolls, was undone and deplatformed when his pro-pedophilia comments were brought to the mainstream attention, right? Alex Jones was, at least in partophilia comments were brought to the mainstream attention. Right? Alex Jones was, at least in part, exposed for his contribution to the harassment of the Sandy Hook families by a plucky little podcast called Knowledge Fight. And now, he owes those families a trillion dollars! So I guess what you're saying is that this episode of Citation Needed just might save the world.

Wow! I mean, when you put it that way in the script I wrote down for you. And look, I guess that's at least in part why I wanted to do this essay. Like, Lord knows I can't have been easy to write jokes into this for the last couple of paragraphs from my co-hosts, but now

everyone who listened to this show, like it or not, is aware of what GamerKate is. And hopefully if you ever hear someone speak out in favor of it, you'll know how seriously to take. Not at all. That yes. All right.

And Eli, if you had to summarize what you've learned in one sentence, what would it be? I should have got off Twitter when Noah told me to. Yep, absolutely. Yes. All right. Are you ready for the quiz? I am ready.

All right, Eli, which of the following is the best video game for Neo-Nazis? Oh, good Lord. A. Clanimal Crossing. B. Reich Band. Oh, Reich Band is so good. C. President Evil. D. Nice. Sure.

Baldur's Gamer Gate, obviously. Or E. Anything with the white power glove. Yeah. I love it. Got to go with E, anything with the white power glove. Correct. Well done. All right. I have an ever so slightly different question for you. What's the best game system for GamerGaters?

A, Xbox 3.60. If that one doesn't make sense, that's okay. I'm going to reveal it with B. B, the Wii unit. C, the Sega Omega Drive. Or D, in cellular phones. There it is. I'm going to go with in cellular phones.

It is in cellular phones, as it turns out. All right, Eli, I know I joked about it earlier, but why is it a bad thing to build an identity around any single hobby or interest? A. If you are in fact the sum of your parts, at least try to add up to be more than one. That's it. Oh, that's it. Yeah, yeah, no, it's A. Yeah, I'm not trying to startle anyone here, just a little life. Okay, Eli. I would like to also have a very slightly similar question that I clearly wrote first in the notes. What is the most toxically masculine video game? A. Max Pantriarchy. B. Obsessive XCOM.

C. Mega Mansplaining or D mine cromped my Gotta go with mine. Uh, no, I'm sorry. It is It was Max Patriot. Yeah, all right when that means that it is all is the winner. Okay Yeah. All right. When that means that Cecil is the winner. Okay. Well, while they fight, I'll pick Noah.

Noah too. All right. Well, for Heath, Noah, Eli and Cecil, I'm Tom. Thanking you for hanging out with us today. We'll be back next week and by then Noah will have read another Bill Bryson book. Stay tuned for that. Between now and then there are at least as many hours between episodes for you to start listening to some of our other shows.

So go ahead and try downloading some. And if you'd like to help keep this show going, you can make a per episode donation at patreon.com slash CitationPod or leave us a five star review everywhere you can. If you'd like to get in touch with us, check out past episodes, connect with us on social media or check show notes. Be sure to check out citationpod.com. So how do you think people are going to take this essay? I don't know. I mean, I hope I educated some people, deal with some iTunes BS, but you know, hopefully overall it's useful. Sure. Sure. You know, that fatty Arbuckle essay is done.

I mean, see, so I will destroy your computer. Fair. That's fair.