Yet these games, and the praise they receive, confound and infuriate some players. In a way, this backlash is similar to the irritation that people who like Michael Bay movies experience when film critics prefer something quieter or more difficult. But there’s something about the newness of video games that exacerbates this feeling. Perhaps the medium’s interactive nature gives players a greater feeling of possession over it, or maybe its relative invisibility in the wider culture has given some players the wrongheaded impression that it’s their private preserve.

These players are so concerned about the fragility of big-budget video games in the face of cultural analysis and criticism that they circulated an online petition last year calling for the website GameSpot to fire a critic, Carolyn Petit, for daring to complain that Grand Theft Auto V “has little room for women except to portray them as strippers, prostitutes, long-suffering wives, humorless girlfriends and goofy, new-age feminists that we’re meant to laugh at.” (There were no such demands for the heads of male critics — including me, writing in The New York Times — who said pretty much the same thing.)

To me, these anti-intellectual players, who want games to be “just games” and want criticism of them to be devoid of things like political and social context, are almost as worrisome as the horrifying, and criminal, actions of the harassers.

True, telling a stranger that you will rape and murder her, after reciting the stranger’s home address — as a Twitter user did last week to the game developer Brianna Wu — is worse than asking for a journalist to be fired. But there’s no real debate around these threats and others like them. No one defends them.

“The abuse is not the hard part for me,” Leigh Alexander, who wrote the column that led Intel to pull its advertising from Gamasutra, said to me in an email. She’s more discouraged by her peers at websites that took two months to denounce GamerGate. Others have yet to make a statement at all. Some of the participants in the community of intelligent writers and designers who think and talk about video games in print and online, on websites and social media networks and podcasts, are being cowed into silence.

In particular, if the large companies that make video games remain quiet, they risk allowing GamerGate to win the debate over whether diversity — of people, of ideas, of games themselves — has a place in their culture.

Ms. Alexander foresees a schism between the culture that surrounds blockbusters and the indie scene. And sure, I concede that we live in a world that contains “Boyhood” as well as “Transformers,” James Wood along with James Patterson, “The Americans” and also “America’s Got Talent.” So will it be — so it already is — with video games.

But not all that long ago, I was hoping, even predicting, that something better was not just on the horizon, but imminent. Eric Zimmerman of New York University has called that vision, adopting the Latin word for play, “the ludic century.” To that dream, and to the notion that a cultured person ought to have an informed opinion on Gone Home or Grand Theft Auto as much as on “The Death of Klinghoffer” or “Game of Thrones,” GamerGate has dealt a grievous if not yet mortal blow.