Everyone's heard of #gamergate, even if they don't really know what it is. This affair arguably began when feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian began a Kickstarter campaign asking for $6,000 to fund a video series about sexist tropes throughout the history of video games. Her campaign came under attack from cyberbullies and gamers, who were infuriated by the attack on their medium. Ironically, these attacks caused a lot of people to come out in support of Sarkeesian, and probably played a part in her eventually raising $160,000. The series was a huge success, and subsequently the campaign of online abuse and threats escalated. Around August 2014, game developer Zoe Quinn came under attack from people in the online community when a game she made purportedly received favourable reviews from a games journalist she was in a relationship with. There was no evidence that this was actually the case other than purely circumstantial blabbering, but it's from this that the 'Gamergate' slogan was truly born. Gamergate claimed to be fighting against a lack of integrity in games journalism (not an unreasonable goal, as I've already shown earlier in this list) and excessive political correctness in the industry,but it was essentially little more than a massive, fragmented cyber-bullying campaign targeting women working with video games. The unfortunate side-effect of this was that the mainstream press pounced on Gamergate as yet another sign of the depravity of the games industry. It made 'gamers' look bad, even though the campaign was the work of cyberbullies rather than the gaming community at large, and it also made games themselves look bad due to the fact that much of the press during this time referred to Sarkeesian's videos to draw parallels between Gamergate and misogyny in video games. What do you think is the biggest scandal in gaming history? Let us know in the comments!
Gamer, Researcher of strange things.
I'm a writer-editor hybrid whose writings on video games, technology and movies can be found across the internet. I've even ventured into the realm of current affairs on occasion but, unable to face reality, have retreated into expatiating on things on screens instead.
