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For a little more than a month, a firestorm over sexism and journalistic ethics has roiled the video game community, culminating in an orchestrated campaign to pressure companies into pulling their advertisements from game sites.

That campaign won a big victory in recent days with a decision by Intel, the chip maker, to pull ads from Gamasutra, a site for game developers.

Intel’s decision added to a controversy that has focused attention on the treatment of women in the games business and the power of online mobs. The debate intensified in August, partly because of the online posts of a spurned ex-boyfriend of a female game developer.

Gamasutra is one of several game sites that published essays and articles that have been critical of gamer culture and rampant sexism in it. Gamers hostile to that criticism began to unite on Twitter via the hashtag #gamergate and eventually created a more cohesive campaign on message boards on sites like 4chan, Reddit and GitHub.

That campaign was dubbed Operation Disrespectful Nod, and it encouraged people to complain to prominent advertisers on gaming sites, providing the names and contact information for representatives of those companies. The pressure worked on Intel, a ubiquitous advertiser on game sites.

On Wednesday, Gamasutra editors confirmed the validity of an email from an Intel customer support representative that said the chip maker had pulled its ads.

A tweet from Gamasutra said:

@BuckSexington Yes, our partners at @intel were flooded with complaints over a recent opinion piece, and they did pull an ad campaign. — Gamasutra (@gamasutra) 1 Oct 14

“We take feedback from customers very seriously, especially as it relates to relevant content and ad placements,” Bill Calder, an Intel spokesman, said in an interview on Thursday, confirming its decision to pull the ads.

The opinion piece Gamasutra referenced was written by a freelance writer, Leigh Alexander, and published on the site in late August. In it, Ms. Alexander criticized the shallowness of white- and male-dominated gamer culture, writing that it’s “kind of embarrassing — it’s not even culture. It’s buying things, spackling over memes and in-jokes repeatedly, and it’s getting mad on the Internet.”

In a phone interview, Ms. Alexander, who also consults for independent game makers, said that “Intel was fleeced by a hate mob.” She said she wrote her opinion piece because of the online treatment of Zoe Quinn, an independent game maker who was the subject of a strange, rambling attack written by a former boyfriend in August.

Among his accusations was that Ms. Quinn had a romantic relationship with a game journalist who wrote for the game site Kotaku. That disclosure galvanized a movement on Twitter among people who used the #gamergate hashtag to attack journalistic ethics in the video game press. Kotaku’s editor wrote in late August that the journalist involved with Ms. Quinn wrote one article about her before their relationship began and had never reviewed any game she made.

Ms. Quinn responded to her ex-boyfriend’s essay with a post of her own, saying he had inspired an online mob that had mobilized against her. She said that she had been subject to rape and death threats, and that nude photos of her were being spread online after his posts.

According to Ms. Alexander, Ms. Quinn was a target of hidebound gamers before the posts by her ex-boyfriend because she made games that stretched the medium in new directions. Her best-known creation is Depression Quest, in which players have to manage mental illness with therapy and medications.

Other critics of misogyny in games, including Anita Sarkeesian, have also been the targets of troubling threats recently.

“They think someone is coming to take their toys away,” Ms. Alexander said of the gamers leading the attacks.

In a brief online chat, conducted while she was on an airplane, Ms. Quinn said she now leads a nomadic existence because of the threats against her. She said she has spent two months “couch-surfing” because she fears she isn’t safe at her home.

“I’m not sure when it’s going to stop, either,” she wrote.