How do we explain the hostility displayed by so many gamers towards fairly mild comments about the depiction of women in some obviously backward video games? Jeff Sparrow writes.

If "gamergate" - the anger and controversy engulfing the gaming community about game reviewing and the role of women in the industry - seems incomprehensible to outsiders, that's less because the details are convoluted (though they are) and more because the visceral male rage on display is so strangely unfocused.

Except that, in the end, it all comes back to two women: game developer Zoe Quinn and game critic Anita Sarkeesian.

Part of it involves a blog written by an aggrieved ex-boyfriend of Quinn who wrote about his relationship with her, accusing her of affairs with other men, including some who worked in games journalism. Some gamers then said she once received a favourable review from a lover. She and her supporters became the target of vicious harassment, with hackers publishing the personal information of one of her friends, including his address, bank account and balance, and private passwords.

Meanwhile, a parallel campaign of abuse began against feminist activist Anita Sarkeesian, who had produced a video (part of a series) in which she documented how a casual violence against women, including rape and murder, served as a narrative background in many popular games.

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Subsequent threats against Sarkeesian escalated so much that she temporarily moved out of her home (warning: the tweets below contain graphic language):

Abusive #gamergate tweets

Since then, the anger has grown and mutated, on the social media website Reddit (nearly six million people subscribe to the gaming forum or subreddit), on Twitter (#gamergate), on YouTube and elsewhere. Gaming is now bigger than either Hollywood or the music industry, and so the debate went huge, very quickly.

A campaign to crowd fund a documentary entitled The Sarkeesian Effect provides a striking illustration of the diffuse male rage.

This is a project spearheaded by two YouTubers, Jordan Owen and Davis Aurini. Their film will, they explain, explore:

how gaming and tech culture have been hijacked by Social Justice Warriors as well as look into the background, ethics, and methodology of some the movement's most prominent voices. The title is a reference to Anita Sarkeesian, the primary figure in this new shift in gaming culture. Ms Sarkeesian's controversial videos and Kickstarter campaign laid the groundwork for the current atmosphere of politically correct fear, manipulation, and intimidation.

Their extraordinarily self-important YouTube clip is, as David Foster Wallace might say, so stupid it practically drools:

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Clearly, they're very angry at something - but it's far from clear what.

The gamergate hashtag leads down a rabbit hole of various sub-controversies generated by the ongoing flame wars.

"Moderators on Reddit shut down discussion."

"Moderators on Reddit shut down discussion." "Sarkeesian misrepresented the game Hitman."

"Sarkeesian misrepresented the game Hitman." "She raised more money on Kickstarter than she actually needed."

"She raised more money on Kickstarter than she actually needed." "She's not actually a real gamer."

And so on.

Ian Steadman at the New Statesman does a good job of rebutting most of this. But even if the claims were true, what follows? If, for instance, Sarkeesian doesn't love games as much as someone else does, how does that invalidate her arguments or make her someone whose life can be legitimately ruined?

Clearly, some of the leaders of the fight against those they call "Social Justice Warriors" (Imagine: fighting for social justice! The horror!) have their own agendas.

Davis Aurini, for example, thinks men should, as he puts it, "restore the virtue of women". He has a history on the far Right and on his Twitter bio calls himself a "reactionary monarchist", a label that irresistibly (and probably inadvertently) recalls Ignatius Reilly from A Confederacy of Dunces ("When my brain begins to reel from my labors on YouTube, I make an occasional cheese dip.")

But how to explain the almost elemental hostility displayed by so many Twitter users to Sarkeesian's fairly mild comments about some obviously backward games? Research has shown that percentage of female characters in video games remains at around 15 per cent, unchanged since the mid-nineties. When someone points this out, why does so much of the response exude a bile that's both sexist and sexualised?

No doubt the disinhibition of anonymity plays a part. Naturally, a debate about games will take place predominantly online, in forums where there's no particular penalty for over-the-top abuse. TS Eliot once quipped about "the braggadocio of the mild-mannered man safely entrenched behind his typewriter" - and that braggadocio becomes much worse when the keyboards are millions of miles apart and shielded by a proxy. The everyday sexism of the workplace tearoom can more easily mutate into nightmarish misogyny when the target appears exclusively as pixels on a screen. Couple that with the hacking skills that some gamers possess, and you've got a recipe for particularly vicious bullying.

But there's more than that going on.

There's an intense and unfocused belligerence here, a sense of being "got at" by unspecified plotters; there are calls for radical resistance to a peril that's never really made clear. It reminds me of the way US Tea Partiers responded to proposals to reform health insurance. The demographics are different (gamers skew young; the Tea Party, not so much) but the behaviour seems distinctly familiar.

Crikey's Bernard Keane notes how in both the American Tea Party and the Australian Convoy of No Confidence, social change has undermined the once-dominant status of older white heterosexual people, and males in particular, and, in the Australian context, economic changes have squeezed them.

This resentment of change and sense of persecution perhaps explains another commonality of such groups here and in the US: a conviction that they are being repressed and censored.

These are mobilisations of the privileged - but those involved don't think of themselves in that way. On the contrary, they feel distinctly oppressed, though in ways that they can't quite articulate.

The comparison to #gamergate isn't exact but it's interesting.

For many young men, gaming - or the geek world more generally - once provided a haven from a jock-ish and intolerant school culture. They might have been male but they didn't necessarily fit the narrow mould of traditional masculinity, and in gaming they found an identity more accepting of bright but socially awkward kids.

But as gaming conquered the mainstream (the latest iteration of Grand Theft Auto reached $US1 billion in sales after just three days), the gamer identity has come under challenge, just like other aspects of nerd culture.

If you're someone for whom gaming offered an escape from a world into which you didn't fit, the suggestion of complicity with male privilege in your own subculture no doubt seems confronting - especially since you've usually felt yourself the butt of jock-ish males rather than their ally. It's easier to lash out - to embrace the male victimhood narrative offered by Men's Rights Activists - than to listen to what you're being told.

Fairly obviously, the culture will change, if only because so many women play games now - and they're not going to put up with the misogyny Sarkeesian documents. But that doesn't mean that there won't be resistance from those we might call the sexist dead-enders. And lots of people can get hurt along the way.

Jeff Sparrow is the editor of Overland literary journal and the author of Killing: Misadventures in Violence. On Twitter, he is @Jeff_Sparrow. View his full profile here.