So. What is GamerGate all about? REALLY? It isn’t actually Misogyny.

It isn’t video games, either.

Let’s look at the most popular tweets on twitter with the hashtag, shall we?

That is the most retweeted tweet dealing with the GamerGate hashtag, at 1270 RTs as I write this. That’s really positive, I think. Fanart of the unofficially official GamerGate mascot, Vivian James. Creative endeavours are great, they prove that GamerGate is a community of gamers, and as we know from my previous writings and investigating the writing of others, gamers are growing —

— so that’s great!

What’s the next most retweeted tweet?

With 634 retweets, there’s this! I like that! It’s a fun, harmless practical joke which is actually pretty funny! (Plus it’s at the expense of this guy.)

The next three, at time of writing this, were retweeted 522 times, 519 times, and 518 times.

With 522, we have a meme type image, which I think is maybe trying to point out that there was more racial and gender diversity at an unknown fighting game tournament than at XOXO, which was apparently ‘An experimental festival celebrating independently-produced art and technology.’

I’m not sure why that’s significant to #GamerGate? All I know about the XOXO festival is that Anita Sarkeesian attended and according to an article on the Verge said this:

Anyone looking to support women suffering from harassment online has a surprisingly simple place to start, says Anita Sarkeesian, founder of the web video series Feminist Frequency. “One of the most radical things you can do is to actually believe women when they talk about their experiences,” Sarkeesian told the audience today at XOXO Festival in Portland. It’s radical in part because of misinformation campaigns organized against high-profile women that accuse them of making up the threats against them — and it’s an issue that Sarkeesian has recent experience dealing with.

and this

But while the threats have garnered the most attention, Sarkeesian says she is also plagued by two more subtle forms of harassment. There’s online impersonation, in which trolls create lookalike accounts for her on Facebook and Twitter and have her say things that play on the fears of her misogynist critics. And there are conspiracy theories that accuse her of making up the threats against her to garner attention. Both tactics serve to reinforce Sarkeesian’s most violent critics’ perceptions of her work, and have resulted in the escalation of threats against her, she says. “Falsehoods about me are initially pushed by detractors who use them to post to 4Chan and Reddit to rally more people to the cause,” Sarkeesian said. “It’s bouncing from Twitter to Tumblr to Facebook to YouTube and back again. Once the cascade reaches a critical mass, it no longer matters what the facts are. It becomes a viral meme.”

Huh! That’s really kind of weird! I mean. Why would GamerGate care about whether or not a talk like that had a diverse audience or not?

Huh. Weird.

Anyway, next up we have 519 retweets with:

… Oh. Oh, wait, what?

We have a tweet neatly encapsulating all the evils Leigh Alexander is responsible for. Like that article about ‘Gamers’ being over, which insulted all gamers everywhere. Except for like this one guy.

Leigh Alexander, a journalist for Gamasutra, is clearly the enemy here. And this ties in with something that GamerGate really achieved recently — getting Intel to pull their ads from Gamasutra with a campaign of e-mails and other messages sent to them.

I’m pretty sure that GamerGate has something to do with ethics in journalism, so Gamasutra must be the worst, right? Really corrupt. So corrupt they’d never cover issues like Pay for Play ethical minefields on YouTube (more on that in a bit), or the ethics of free to play games deliberately addicting their players. Hell no, all Gamasutra is good for is insulting consumers. They’re a hate site!

Congratulations, GamerGate. You got advertising pulled from a website because it published hate speech against gamers. Way to go! That’s the first thing you really achieved and tweeted about. This, Leigh Alexander, is apparently the first real GamerGate issue to show up in your top tweets, so I’m going to presume it matters a lot to you guys. Well done. We’ll discuss this more in a minute, but first we have to get to the next tweet, with 518 retweets.

Aw, another joke. That one’s pretty funny!

And, look. It’s by Internet Aristocrat, the guy who made the original Five Guys videos, which are about ‘LW’, or Literally Who. (That’s secret code for Zoe Quinn, if you haven’t been keeping up.) And the most important thing he’s ever done with the #GamerGate hashtag? It’s this: Joking about an article that’s talking about a recent game and its weird tutorial in which you press the ‘x’ button to kiss your wife, but in the rest of the game the ‘x’ button kills everybody with swords.

If you don’t know about the Five Guys videos, I’m pretty sure it’s this one:

Oh, wait! That’s not the Internet Aristocrat video. His is this one (which I’ve linked to at a part I found particularly important, just watch it for thirty seconds.)

If you don’t feel like watching it, here’s a rough transcription of the part of that video I’m linking you to:

Because now we get to see from the perspective of somebody who knows her personally, namely Eron, and their relationship. Now the interesting thing about the Zoepost blog is that it chronicles and has captures of interactions on social media, and we get to see what kind of person Zoe Quinn is. And we get to see how she’s a liar, and a manipulator, and how the people at Wizardchan who put together that album that’s linked in the description weren’t really bullshitting you when they said she’s fucking making it up!

Who’s Eron? Eron is Literally Who’s ex-boyfriend, who posted a distressed tell-all about the inner details of their relationship and sex life to the internet.

Literally Who? Oh, I’m sorry. Zoe Quinn — GamerGate calls her Literally Who or LW to make sure it’s not apparent at a glance that they’re talking about her.

Who’s Zoe Quinn?

She’s an independent developer who made like, one game. And Internet Aristocrat felt it was so important we know all the details about her infidelity to Eron, and her skeezy behaviour in independent game development circles, because her absolutely free videogame, Depression Quest, although you can pay what you want, got some good press!

But that doesn’t seem to matter nearly as much as the other stuff, because it’s not even in the top five retweeted #GamerGate tweets.

I said I would get back to this thing about YouTube Pay for Play issues. Well, it’s been an open secret for awhile now that gaming corporations, big gaming corporations, who spend millions and millions of dollars on development and marketing, who sell AAA games which are particularly expensive to millions of consumers, are fucking around with very popular YouTubers who play games, record it, and post it online.

One youtuber group, The Yogscast, which has seven million subscribers, started a program ‘YogDiscovery’, where developers can pay them to cover their games.

But GamerGate doesn’t seem to care. As I write this, these are the results searching on Twitter for #GamerGate and Yogscast:

That’s all of them. All five of them.

But hey! Wait! GamerGate’s winning, because Jim Sterling just did a reveal of these practices in relation to popular game ‘Shadow of Mordor’ —

Except Jim Sterling isn’t one of yours, GamerGate. In fact, you hate him.

In fact, according to TheRalph (who is apparently quite popular)

Lately, a lot of coalition members have been telling me to hold fire on The Escapist’s Jim Sterling. He’s been around for awhile, and a lot of people have literally grew up with the guy. So, it’s hard for them to accept that he’s not actually a friend to the GamerGate movement. It is true that, on one hand, he hasn’t been nearly as offensive as someone like Leigh Alexander, or Little Hitler Ian Miles Cheong. But think about the other hand. Alexander and Cheong are quite open with their hatred of us. They do not portray any sort of neutrality. When lies get spread by “friends” like Jim Sterling, they tend to carry a bit more weight. The sycophants on NeoGAF cite them, our enemies retweet them, and they’re used to discredit GamerGate. This might still be OK, if I ever heard anything positive from Sterling about us. But I never do.

But wait! Didn’t Total Biscuit really divulge the story? And Total Biscuit recently came out in support for #GamerGate, so isn’t this a GamerGate win?

Well, you’re conveniently forgetting that Gamasutra and RockPaperShotgun, both on the GamerGate hitlist of unethical journalism sites, covered elements of this story in July 2014. While it’s true that TotalBiscuit is one of the few YouTube personalities who’s been willing to go on the record about these issues, that doesn’t change the fact that many of those spearheading and doing the most to highlight the coverage are those GamerGate are fighting against.

So. Really. What has GamerGate achieved?

It’s attacked Leigh Alexander and Zoe Quinn, it’s tried to claim that because people at a fighting game tournament are more racially diverse than the audience at Anita Sarkeesian’s talk at XOXO she’s some kind of fraud, it pulled advertising from a website that is covering exactly the ethical issues GamerGate worries about.

All of these actions have been because these people have done things that throw GamerGate in a bad light. In fact, it pulled down Gamasutra’s ads because Leigh Alexander insulted ‘gamer’ culture. Everyone I’ve asked about it says you should ‘never insult consumers’ and they have the right to react to an insult by getting ad revenue pulled — nobody says anything about the quality of Gamasutra’s investigative journalism.

Based on that, GamerGate is all about defending itself from insults while everyone else around them make the changes they claim to want, and claim to highlight.

What they really promote, what they’ve done their most to give their voice to, is someone pranking their favourite journalist, and some fanart of their mascot.

I’ll be real, guys.

I think fan art and fan culture are really good things, and I think GamerGate can be real proud of what it’s done.

Applause all round.

(To be fair, here’s a list of things they claim they’ve done from: https://gitorious.org/gamergate/gamergate/source/dbade869df773a2ca0738ffda40c787b16e12340:Current%20Happenings

My favourites are bolded.

That’s a real motherlode of promoting integrity in gaming journalism, and hardly any lashing out at people you think are attacking you. You don’t seem to be concerned about personal slander at all, guys. Well done, I’m proud of you.)

(Oh, and just in case the tweets this references gets deleted? Here’s an archive.today link. You can use it to deny me clicks, too, as that’s something very popular among GamerGate supporters.)