Female video game developers and critics in Australia say they have been threatened with rape and murder as part of a vicious dispute that has gripped the global gaming community.

The saga centres on an online movement known as "GamerGate".

Depending on who you ask, its members are either crusaders for higher ethical standards in the video games press, or a menacing group of misogynists trying to silence feminist criticism of the games they love.

Sydney-based independent video game developer and critic 'Sarah' said she had received threats as a part of the movement after she voiced her opinion on an online gaming forum.

"I was engaging in conversation about Anita Sarkeesian, who is a famous critic," she said.

"I challenged someone on their opinions of her because I thought her arguments are actually pretty reasonable and ... they ran to friends of theirs, got them together ... and started tweeting threats at me.

"They were saying that they were going to rape me, they were going to kill me. Very nasty kind of stuff."

Sarah said she believed the perpetrators had set up a system that sent multiple threats to her account automatically.

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"They set up ... multiple accounts which was terrifying at the time because you'd wake up and your feed would just be full of all these threats," she said.

"One person had posted a picture that allowed me to figure out their name, because they'd screen capped [captured] it with their Facebook account in the background so I was able to find out his name, and ... get a sense of who the other guys were.

"They were all guys and they were all quite young ... there were some adults but they were from all over the US and Canada.

"That was almost a bit more terrifying - that they were this loose group of people that one of them could call up the others and they would attack."

Because the accounts were based in the US, Sarah said she did not take up the matter with Australian police.

#Gamergate difficult to define

It is difficult to define the GamerGate debate, and the eponymous online movement it has spawned.

Much of the debate takes place on Twitter, where users use the hashtag #gamergate to contribute their views.

Some people who claim to be among the movement's members say they are fighting bias and loose ethics in the video game press.

Others say the debate has simply given a name to anti-feminist culture that has been fermenting in the global gaming community for years.

The movement originated from a debate about whether video game journalists were too close to the industry, but then took a more threatening turn.

Earlier this month American feminist critic Anita Sarkeesian was attacked by people claiming to be from the GamerGate movement shortly after posting an online video about the portrayal of women in games.

She was reportedly then forced to cancel a speech at the University of Utah, after an anonymous threat from somebody who said they were planning to carry out a mass shooting at the event.

Jessamy Gleeson, a PhD student focusing on online culture at Swinburne University, said the debate began with legitimate concerns, but had changed.

"The original debate was to do with ethics in journalism and particularly gaming journalism, and that was perfectly fine and it's hard to lump all gamergates together," she said.

"Certain sectors of the gaming community have been threatened, or their idea of what games are have been threatened or critiqued by people that they don't see as belonging to their community.

"So women or people of different colours or genders have been standing up and saying we want more diversity in games, or we want women to take more of an active role in games, or we see sexism in games, and they see that as threatening what they view to be as their form of games."