1. If you want to understand why Gamergate has blown up, you could start with a recent study by Stanford University's Shanto Iyengar and Sean J. Westwood. They handed 1,000 people some sample student resumes and asked them to decide which deserved a scholarship. The resumes included clues to both the race and the political orientation of the applicant, as well as information about their grades.

2. Race mattered. But political orientation mattered even more. Democrats and Republicans chose the resumes that shared their politics roughly 80 percent of the time. Of course, it's the grades themselves that should have driven the decisions — but the activation of political identity made grades pretty much irrelevant. "We found no evidence that partisans took academic merit into account," the researchers wrote.

at least under certain conditions, our political identities now trump our racial identities

3. In another experiment, Iyengar and Westwood set up a game wherein player one received $10 and could give any amount they wanted to player two. Here, race didn't matter. But political affiliation did. People gave 24 percent more to their fellow partisans than they did when they didn't know anything about the other player.

4. Iyengar and Westwood's conclusion is stark. "Partisans discriminate against opposing partisans, and do so to a degree that exceeds discrimination based on race," they write. Think about that for a moment: at least under certain experimental conditions, our political identities now trump our racial identities.

5. In fact, our political identities are now so powerful that they structure our reactions to racial controversies, as this graph of poll results from Brown University's Michael Tesler shows:

6. This didn't used to be the case. Even a few decades ago, our political identities weren't strong enough to drive our reactions to racial controversies:

Michael Tesler/The Monkey Cage

7. This is the context for how #Gamergate has become so massive: we live in a world where politics leads to a 38-point gap on whether a movie about slavery should win an Oscar — an issue, for the record, that neither the Democratic nor Republican parties had any official, or even unofficial, position on. But partisans knew intuitively which side to take. They knew who their friends were, and they knew who their enemies were, and they knew which side would cheer if "12 Years A Slave" won the Oscar. Political identities aren't about tax cuts. They're about tribes.

Political identities aren't about tax cuts. They're about tribes.

8. This is the result of the incredible rise in political polarization in recent decades. It used to be that both the Republican and Democratic parties included both liberals and conservatives. Since parties contained ideological multitudes, it was hard for them to be the basis of strong, personal identities. A liberal Democrat in New Jersey didn't have a lot in common with a conservative Democrat in Alabama. But now that's changed. The parties are sharply sorted by ideology. What were once fractious coalitions have become unified tribes.

9. You can see the rise in political identity in the surveys on marriage. As Cass Sunstein writes, "in 1960, 5 percent of Republicans and 4 percent of Democrats said that they would feel 'displeased' if their son or daughter married outside their political party. By 2010, those numbers had reached 49 percent and 33 percent."

This is a world in which it was only a matter of time until video games were politicized

10. This isn't a world in which we should be surprised that video games have been politicized. This is a world in which it was only a matter of time until video games were politicized. This is a world in which, sooner or later, most everything will get politicized.

11. Though there are liberals within Gamergate and conservatives opposing it, the broad coalitions that have emerged around Gamergate are very clear. The conservative site Breitbart has been a leading source for Gamergaters convinced there's a media conspiracy against them. (Sample headline: "WHILE THE MEDIA SLANDERS GAMERS AS ‘TERRORISTS,' GAMERGATE IS HUNTING TROLLS AND ABUSERS.") Christina Hoff Sommers, a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, has become the movement's protector against claims that it's anti-woman.

12. On the other side, liberal opinion is in lockstep against Gamergate. Outlets ranging from Salon ("#Gamergate is really about terrorism: Why Bill Maher should be vilifying the gaming community, too") to Gawker ("#Gamergate Trolls Aren't Ethics Crusaders; They're a Hate Group") to the Colbert Report have slammed the movement. The last, in particular, has created something of a cultural crisis within Gamergate, as the kinds of mostly young, mostly male, reasonably webby people who like Gamergate also like Colbert, and his rejection of them stings.

13. What's telling about the constellation of forces here is that none of them actually care much about video games. Prior to Gamergate, Sommers did not traffic in critical analyses of video gaming. Prior to Gamergate, Salon did not spend a lot of time writing about video games. Prior to Gamergate, the Colbert Report did not regularly cover gaming news. Rather, these are outlets and players that specialize in political conflict. And Gamergate has become a political conflict. Video games, at this point, are an excuse for that conflict.

Gamergate has become a political conflict. Video games, at this point, are an excuse for that conflict.

14. It's worth stopping for a moment to say that Gamergate, as well as the reaction against it, isn't any one thing. It includes horrifying, probably criminal, harassment against pretty much any women who dare oppose it. It's partly an argument about what kinds of games the gaming press should cover — and, by extension, what kinds of games developers should make. It has members who want clearer disclosure policies in gaming journalism. It has a lot of people who joined because they hate feminism and internet "social justice" warriors. And it has many people, on both sides, who are far surer about who they're fighting than what they're fighting about.

15. One thing that comes clear when you spend much time reading inside the Gamergate community is the feeling of being misunderstood — and, for that matter, smeared — is very, very real. If you're reading about Gamergate on the left, virtually all you're reading about is the intense, horrifying harassment against women that's happening under Gamergate's banner. If you're reading about Gamergate from inside Gamergate, virtually all you're reading about is how the media is smearing Gamergate by equating it with harassers who don't represent the movement's real tactics or goals (some Gamergaters even believe the trolls are part of a false flag operation meant to discredit Gamergate). Gamergaters are furious that the media focuses on all the bullying happening under Gamergate rather than all the money Gamergaters are raising for anti-bullying efforts. Anti-Gamergaters are furious that Gamergate focuses more on bad jokes from Gawker than the monsters in its midst.

Within Gamergate, there's a deep sense of conspiracy

16. Within Gamergate, there's a deep sense of conspiracy — the belief is that the reaction to their campaign has been so unfair and so overwhelming that the only possible explanation is a wide-ranging conspiracy. Much of the subreddit Kotaku In Action is dedicated to try to untangle this sinister web. This has led to some...odd theories. People have reported that, as editor of Vox.com, I own or run Polygon.com, despite the fact that Polygon has been around a lot longer than Vox.com (the confusion here stems from the fact that both sites share the same corporate parent, Vox Media). They've suggested that "weird Twitter" is secretly controlled by Nick Denton, founder of Gawker Media. But the sense of siege is very real within Gamergate. "This is a gamers vs. the media issue," says the top-voted comment on the guide to Kotaku In Action.

If indeed Weird Twitter is Nick Denton's private troll army, the rabbit hole goes far deeper than any of us could have imagined. #GamerGate — Matt Forney (@realmattforney) October 25, 2014

17. All this, too, is common within political conflict in polarized times: the two sides segregate into completely separate information loops. Politicized media outlets and activist information sources have incentives to cover the worst of the other side, and to play to the fear, anger and even paranoia of their own side. Structurally, each side only becomes familiar with the most extreme members and interpretations of the other side — and so comes to loathe and fear them even more.

18. The point here is not that both sides are equal, or equivalent. It's not even obvious that there are two sides here, so much as there are two coalitions, each with multiple sides and competing interests. And no one should dismiss the very real, very dangerous harassment that's happening under Gamergate's banner. The point here is that the Gamergate fight is now being partly driven by forces that have nothing to do with the video gaming industry, or even with gamers. Forces that are very good at making these kinds of conflicts worse and deeper. Forces that will be around long after Gamergate dies down. Forces that will create the next Gamergate.

19. A lot of the people glomming onto Gamergate are doing so because they're angry at the way the "social justice left" has been able to set some of the terms of online discourse. In Gamergate, they saw a point of weakness — a way to make gains in a fight they've otherwise been losing. You can see this in a lot of Breitbart's coverage, which makes clear this isn't about video games so much as it's a new front in a larger battle:

It's easy to mock video gamers as dorky loners in yellowing underpants. Indeed, in previous columns, I've done it myself. Occasionally at length. But, the more you learn about the latest scandal in the games industry, the more you start to sympathise with the frustrated male stereotype. Because an army of sociopathic feminist programmers and campaigners, abetted by achingly politically correct American tech bloggers, are terrorising the entire community - lying, bullying and manipulating their way around the internet for profit and attention.

This resonates with a lot of Gamergaters, who though they see themselves as liberals, they feel dismissed and even hated by the social justice left — they're for equal pay and they voted for Barack Obama, so why are they being made the enemy just because the women in their games have skimpy outfits?

They're for equal pay and they voted for Barack Obama, so why are they being made the enemy?

20. On the left, the interest in Gamergate also isn't about games so much as it's about the widespread problem of women being harassed on the internet — a problem that existed, and was getting a lot of attention, well before Gamergate, but that Gamergate threw into particularly sharp relief. And every time someone from Gamergate tries to change the subject from women being driven from their homes by death threats to "ethics in game journalism," it looks like proof that they just don't take the problem of online sexual harassment seriously.

21. Broad media coverage of Gamergate doesn't focus on the debates about how video games should be reviewed and by whom because the media doesn't much care about video game reviews. They care, on the right, about political correctness and speech policing, and on the left, about sexism and online harassment. Gamergate happens to be about video games but it could be about anything. Video games are the excuse for this fight, not the cause of it.

22. Some of the tactics that Gamergaters have innovated are going to be turned around with even more force. I agree with Vox's Todd VanDerWerff, who thinks it's a chilling innovation to focus activism campaigns on the technology companies that run the ad platforms rather than the advertisers themselves. But Gamergate isn't going to convince Amazon or Google to yank web services from anyone. Gamergate doesn't have the cultural capital to do that; being against Gamergate isn't socially dangerous in San Francisco or Seattle.

Ruling beliefs culturally repugnant is a game that the left is better at playing these days

23. But being against, say, marriage equality really can be dangerous right now. Remember when the CEO of Mozilla was driven from his job because he donated, as a private citizen, to a campaign against gay marriage? It's easy to imagine a reverse Gamergate that's much more effective in tearing revenue from rightwing media outlets that place themselves on the wrong side of a social justice fight. In the long-run, that would be a disaster for the media as a whole. My hope — and my guess — is that advertisers and web services will quickly acclimate to this new climate and these new organizing tactics, just as they have in the past. But ugly stuff can happen in transition.

24. Gamergate is going to happen again. As polarization proceeds, our political identities become powerful enough to drive our other identities. As Washington locks up, the political outlets that normally spend their time covering fights in Congress need to find fights that will engage their audience elsewhere. As cultural mores change ever more rapidly, the battles over what's acceptable to say and do will become even fiercer. And as everyone becomes more and more dependent on web traffic, skirmishes with deep digital roots will become increasingly attractive to cover.

25. The result will be a cycle we'll soon come to recognize: glancingly political fights will attract coverage from professionally politicized outlets and quickly be turned into deeply politicized wars. Once political identities are activated, these fights will spread far beyond their natural constituencies — in the Gamergate case, people who care about video games — and become part of the ongoing conflict between the red and blue tribes. Expect more Gamergates.