GamerGate is growing from a battle inside gaming to a larger culture war.

In case you're one of the millions who don't know what this term means — first of all, don't feel bad, because it's a complex movement with shifting goals. But here's a quick primer.

GamerGate kicked off when an independent game developer's ex-boyfriend wrote a 9,000-word screed about their relationship, accusing her of trading sex for favorable press coverage and other career boosts. This was false. But the rage around it coalesced into a hashtag, created by actor and conservative commentator Adam Baldwin. That hashtag attracted a brigade who felt — they said — that the media was using its power to promote progressive agendas in video games coverage.

Here's the problem, though. Critics who speak out against the movement, especially if they are female, have a lot to worry about. On Wednesday, actress, geek icon and passionate gamer Felicia Day wrote on her own personal blog to say the movement was hurting the gaming community. She also said she'd been afraid to speak out before because of her own safety, not wanting her personal details leaked online. An hour later, Day was "doxxed" — Internet slang for publishing personal information such as an address or phone number — in her own comments.

"I have allowed a handful of anonymous people to censor me," Day wrote. "They have forced me, out of fear, into seeing myself a potential victim."

This kind of interaction shows why GamerGate, in its current form, is facing insurmountable obstacles. A movement composed of online bullies cannot be accepted as a legitimate voice at the table. If its moderate members are so passionate about reform, they will have to find another banner to march under. Here's why.

1. An anonymous, headless mob isn't good at pushing an agenda.

GamerGate suffers from a mob mentality. Members crowd on message boards such as 8chan and the subreddit KotakuInAction, both places where individuals can become anonymous. Many use Twitter accounts not associated with a real identity.

That means the left hand rarely knows what the right hand is doing, not to mention what the feet, elbows and knees are up to.

It's easy for the movement to get upset at suggestions that it is responsible for stopping feminist game critic Anita Sarkeesian's talk last week, after Utah State University received a threat against her life and the lives of the audience. GamerGate members point out that there was nothing to connect that threat to the movement — as if anyone would sign a letter promising "the most deadly school shooting in American history" with a hashtag.

The media can easily paint a picture of GamerGate based on violent actions it inspired, because most of its members have no real public persona. Its opponents can easily turn the hashtag into a negative epithet:

I went into the back yard to pick up all the GamerGate, and I stepped in a huge pile of GamerGate and now my shoe smells like GamerGate. — Wil SCREAMton (@wilw) October 23, 2014

Anonymity also leads, ironically, to more in-fighting between members. Anonymous posters are called "shills" (or worse) who secretly support the other side if their view doesn't match the perceived view of the mob. Nobody inside GamerGate seems to agree on many key issues, which makes intrepid reporters frustrated when trying to suss out the movement's demands.

2. The hashtag is associated with death threats, and female developers fleeing their homes.

Really, it doesn't matter if only one person acting on their own made death threats. Death threats were made, period. The GamerGate movement has expended more energy denying a connection than it has condemning the threats.

Plenty of gaming-focused news outlets have penned editorials in the last few days condemning GamerGate. Some, like Giant Bomb and Game Informer were assumed by some GamerGate members to be neutral on the issue because they had previously been silent on it.

It's unfortunate for the few who actually want to talk about journalism ethics, but they'll need to find some other way to do it. The hashtag is toxic.

3. "Ethics" is often code for "things we don't agree with."

There are certainly ethical issues in journalism — but the only ones that seem to ignite GamerGate fury have to do with progressive, pro-feminist viewpoints. Last week provided us with a perfect example.

The Platinum Games title Bayonetta 2 comes to Wii U Friday; reviews for the game went up on Oct. 13. The titular character Bayonetta is a witch who uses a variety of attacks to bring down her foes. Some of those special attacks require the player to remove her clothes, because her clothes are made out of her hair, and her hair is the thing doing the attacking. Here's a video that might explain better:

The consensus among outlets that reviewed Bayonetta 2: The game is amazing. It received a slew of perfect scores from sites including GameSpot, Giant Bomb, Destructoid and Joystiq. But Polygon, the gaming arm of Vox Media, gave the game a 7.5 out of 10, docking points for the sexualized main character.

"On one side of the knife is a character action game that refines the incredible combat foundations of the original Bayonetta and avoids the lack of variety that dragged it down in the last third," reviewer Arthur Gies wrote. "On the other, the deliberate sexualization and objectification on display serves as a jarring distraction from the creativity and design smarts elsewhere."

GamerGaters were inflamed by Gies statements. They claimed feminist terminology had been inserted into a review as a way to lower the score.

"This kind of thing shouldn't be in a objective review," said Jemma Morgan, a GamerGate supporter speaking on HuffPost Live. "If you want to talk about feminism in gaming, you need to do it in another platform. If you're going to give a review of a game, you need to be objective. We don't want to know what your personal ideology is. We just want to know if the game is good."

A fair point. But the trouble is, not all reviews that talk about a character through the lens of feminism draw GamerGate's ire. Kill Screen, a far smaller site than Polygon, but one that still ranks on Metacritic, had quite a bit to say on the topic — albeit giving it a more positive spin.

"The sexuality of a work like Bayonetta 2 is part-and-parcel of its creative statement, and deserves the same close reading as its massively dope mechanics, not dismissal," wrote critic Zach Budgor, who gave the game an 86. "Perhaps for the first time, we have a female character who consents to, and sketches the boundaries of, her sexualization. The rub with Bayonetta’s design is that it feels authentically fetishistic ... arcing toward a distinct abstraction of sexuality."

Why didn't that review rankle detractors like Morgan? The review was not based entirely on mechanics or graphics. It was not objective. It was, however, positive about the sexually explicit nature of the character.

GamerGate, in short, likes to cherry pick its arguments.

All reviews are inherently subjective, and should be treated as such. A greater ethical concern would be if games were reviewed favorably or poorly simply to reward or punish a third party — or because large game development companies had wined and dined the journalists that cover them, as often happens. But on this subject, GamerGate is silent.

4. The vitriol is hurting the thing you love.

In the early 2000s, a lawyer named Jack Thompson made stopping video game violence his personal vendetta. He was completely hell-bent on the idea that games caused aggressive behavior, and he managed to get on enough news shows that many gamers feared he could do real harm to something they loved.

Even now, when a mass shooting happens, video games are often seen as a culprit. After the tragedy in Sandy Hook, when some outlets misidentified the shooter, those who went to the incorrect man's Facebook page saw he was a fan of the Mass Effect series. Concerned citizens targeted Mass Effect's Facebook Page, even hours after the error had been corrected.

I mention these examples because gamers are used to being mischaracterized by the media. This helps to explain why the threats against Sarkeesian were seen as some as a continuation of that trend. Gamers are used to digging in their heels. The media has been painting them incorrectly for so long that some moderates on the GamerGate side are ready to chalk up a shooting threat story to a media that doesn't understand them.

Many of the complaints about gaming websites, about Sarkeesian's "Tropes vs. Women in Video Games" series, or anything else GamerGate might stand for, have been around for years. It just managed to coalesce all at once after a summer of conflict around various issues.

But the rhetoric has gotten so heated that it's hard to remember the side you aren't on is made of human beings. The worst that could come of all this is that people who may have been interested in gaming in the past — especially women or minorities — may now be scared off by an apparently toxic community. For anyone who has built their life around this community, to see it stagnate would be a tragedy.

As Day said in that blog post: "Games are beautiful, they are creative, they are worlds to immerse yourself in. They are art. And they are worth fighting for, even if the atmosphere is ugly right now. So to myself and to everyone else who operates out of love not vengeance: Don’t abandon games. Don’t cross the street. Gaming needs you. To create, to play, to connect."

Hopefully, the conclusion to all these growing pains will be more games, more people playing them, and more games that can be viewed through a variety of lenses. We want games that are fun as well as games that are art, games that distract us as well as games that make us think.

There is, hopefully, space for all of the above in the gaming community. But just as hopefully, there is no space for threats of real-world violence, for ignorance, for misogyny, and for a hashtag that has long since become poisoned by all of the above.