A set of IRC logs released Saturday appear to show that a handful of 4chan users were ultimately behind #GamerGate, the supposedly grass-roots movement aimed at exposing ethical lapses in gaming journalism. The logs show a small group of users orchestrating a "hashtag campaign" to perpetuate misogynistic attacks by wrapping them in a debate about ethics in gaming journalism.

The saga grew from a single blog post written by an ex-boyfriend of Zoe Quinn, a game developer who designed Depression Quest. The post was a lengthy diatribe filled with details about Quinn's alleged relationships with men, including a tryst with a gaming journalist who works for Kotaku. Anonymous users on reddit and 4chan spun this material into a story about how Quinn allegedly slept with multiple gaming journalists in return for coverage, though the allegations did not support such a claim. The journalist in question had quoted Quinn, once, months before they dated; he never wrote about her or her development efforts again.

Nevertheless, Quinn soon had her accounts hacked and her personal information stolen (experiences she was accused of fabricating). Quinn's opponents tried to turn the entire situation into an ethical debate about the relationship between gaming press and game developers.

The "ethics controversy" then sucked in Anita Sarkeesian, founder of Feminist Frequency, a video series aimed at exploring systemic misogyny in video games. Sarkeesian is no stranger to harassment; she has received a series of threats for her Feminist Frequency video series since the day its Kickstarter raised more money ($150,000) than she had requested ($6,000). The amount of money raised incensed Sarkeesian's critics, and after her August 25 video, "Women as Background Decoration, Part 2," Sarkeesian received graphic rape and death threats, eventually leaving her home after one of her harassers tweeted her own address at her.

The Quinn and Sarkeesian events led several publications (Ars included) to discuss the notion of a "gamer." In this context, "gamer" does not mean "all people who play video games"—a group now broad enough to easily outgrow the term's narrow origins in '80s toy marketing. Instead, the term more narrowly refers to hard-core video game fans, who skew young and male. In the words of Leigh Alexander at Gamasutra, it was through catering to this group that video games came to overemphasize guns, women, and money. With the industry expanding its horizons, some "gamers" felt left behind in a world that has started to turn against aspects of their favorite pastime. Under this view, "gaming" itself is under threat.

Quinn and Sarkeesian became lightning rods for "gamers" of this sort, and thus was born "#GamerGate," a hashtag that became a breeding ground for all kinds of conspiracy theories surrounding the "corrupt" systems that allowed Quinn and Sarkeesian to figure in the industry as they do. As the hashtag spread, spectators got increasingly drawn into arguments about the ethics governing relationships between game developers and the gaming press.

#GamerGate spread through Twitter and reddit and eventually drew high profile support from actor Adam Baldwin. Eventually a second hashtag sprouted, #notyourshield, which was pitched as an "attempt by the worldwide gaming community to show that this isn’t just male gamers who are speaking about gamergate, and this isn’t an issue of hating feminism or not wanting women in the community."

Discussion logs, however, suggest that #notyourshield didn't begin as a broad movement but was a campaign manufactured and orchestrated by 4chan users via sockpuppet Twitter accounts. And, according to screenshots recently released by Quinn, so was the original #GamerGate.

"But seriously, I think we're doing pretty good on the #GamerGate front," wrote user OperationDunk in a "quinnspiracy" IRC channel. "Lot of support, and a ton of people are picking up the self-chastising when people start getting insulting. It took a few days of 4-5 of us doing it but it's taking off."

As for #notyourshield, its first reference appears on the /v/ video games board on 4chan as a suggestion for responding to "social justice warriors" who claimed the #GamerGate campaign was misogynistic. "Something like #NotYourShield and demand the SJWs stop using you as a shield to deflect genuine criticism," an anonymous user wrote on September 2.





As with the manufactured campaign #EndFathersDay, sockpuppet accounts appear to have figured heavily in getting the #GamerGate and #notyourshield campaigns going. The sockpuppets pushing the hashtags were easy to identify by their low post counts, the fact that they tweeted about little other than #GamerGate and #notyourshield, and reverse image searches of their avatars that showed the photos to belong to people who likely didn't own the accounts in question.

Another of the screenshots posted by Quinn shows IRC users referencing "sleeper cells" at a gaming conference. "I think all the sleeper cells are hard at work, there was a bit of organizing last night," wrote the user Prawnzilla. "If anything goes down at PAX [Penny Arcade Expo], and she approaches those folks, they better be diplomatic and let her bitch fit her way into humiliation." Quinn commented on the screenshot in a tweet: "SLEEPER CELLS. Probably the people who showed at my panel and took photos for 4chan." The logs also allegedly include at least two appearances by Eron Gjoni, the author of the original blog post about Quinn.

4chan members have denounced the logs to The Escapist, saying they are misinterpreted by Quinn. Both 4chan and Quinn provided copies of their logs to The Escapist; 4chan's copies do not include quotes about sleeper cells or the bit about 4-5 users said to have started #GamerGate, since they are from a different channel (#burgersandfries). They do include references to starting sleeper-cell Twitter accounts and "digging up dirt" on both Quinn and Sarkeesian.

The site We Hunted The Mammoth scoured the full transcript released by 4chan, turning up gems from some anons like, "i couldnt care less about vidya, i just want to see zoe receive her comeuppance." In another exchange, user Cyberserker says to another user, "You need a reason..." User Opfag responds, "Well I don't have a legitimate reason. I just want to see her die horribly."

After hours of reading the chat logs, David Futrelle of We Hunted the Mammoth summed them up:

The 4channers express their hatred and disgust towards [Quinn]; they express their glee at the thought of ruining her career; they fantasize about her being raped and killed. They wonder if all the harassment will drive her to suicide, and only the thought of 4chan getting bad publicity convinces some of them that this isn’t something they should hope for. They gleefully distribute nude pictures of her, posting links to online archives of them and emailing them directly both to Quinn’s supporters. They dig up all sorts of information about her and her family and do their best to track down anyone and everyone with even the most tenuous links to her. One industrious researcher even manages to find a picture of Quinn at age 13; while acknowledging that it had no relevance whatsoever to issues of gaming ethics, she posts a link to it anyway.

While the hashtag campaigns gained steam and was eventually sustained by a larger population, the the chat logs shed new light on the motivations and actions of those who did the most to push #GamerGate into the spotlight.

[Editors Note: For those focused on the kernel of actual valid issues of game journalism ethics somehow churned up during this whole mess, this post over on my personal blog may be of interest. For general questions over the tone or style or amount or timing of coverage of GameGate, Rock Paper Shotgun sums up our feelings nicely. -Kyle Orland]

Update: To clarify the above article, actor Adam Baldwin was the first to use the hashtag #GamerGate, according to results on the Twitter analytics website Topsy as noted by Cathode Debris. Baldwin used the hashtag when tweeting links to pre-existing misogynistic corruption conspiracy theory videos surrounding Quinn and Sarkeesian. The logs show that organizers quickly adopted the hashtag to further organize their efforts.