Gamers, as a w👍hole, are a pretty uncontroversial bunch. We like our games, and so long as the world doesn’t intrude on them too much, 'the world' can do whatever it damn well pleases.

At least, that’s how gaming used to be.ღ That all changed with 🔯Gamergate. 

Some backgr꧅ound. Zoë Quinn was an independent developer making a browser-based game, Depression Quest, which was met with some generally positive reviews from gaming media. Despite the fact that the game was intended to educate a wider gamin𝔉g audience on the social stigma of mental health (something I think we can all agree is a laudable cause), a subset of gamers took umbrage with its devel🐷opment. The creator of Depression Quest, Quinn, started receiving prank calls, hate mail, and even death threats. One letter even 💃went into graphic detail how the writer would attack and butcher her.

It didn’t make any sense, bu🃏t —as many women can attest— the internet doesn't always seem grounded in reas🌺on. A lof of women have to deal with these kinds of issues online every day. Zoë blocked her number, changed her email, and carried on with life.

Then things got worse. In August 2014 a former boyfriend posted a long, rambling blog post entry attacking Zoë for breaking up with him. Filled with personal chats and email logs, it went into excruciating det�ꦍ�ail about her personal life. It also hurtfully suggested that Zoë had entered into a relationship with game journalist Nathan Grayson in order to get her game a good review.

It wasn’t true, of course - Grayson had never even reviewed her game. But those that had been hounding Quinn found the blog and posted it to 4chan. From that deep, seething colon of the internet, a torrent of hate and vitriol would spring forth, lasting for months, and sparking ⛦a wider debate on gaming that went way beyond a few prank phone calls.

It became a campaign of hate. It became Gamergate. Here’s 🥃why.

15 🌌 🐼 4chan Is Awful

This may come as no surprise to many of you, but a lot of the worst things that happen on the internet are born in 4chan. Well, parts of it anyway. There’s quite a bitꦓ of evidence to suggest that the campaign that initially targeted Zoë Quinn got its s✱tart on 4chan, and there’s cold-hard-proof that much of Gamergate’s organization took place there.

After the ex-boyfriend blog had been posted to 4chan, thosཧe who were pursuing Quinn latched on to an erroneous comment that likened her brief relationship with Grayson to gold digging. Those same people played up this notion that somehow game journalism —as well as the video games industry as a whole— were being compromised by women and social issues. This roused more 4chan users to take part in attacks on Quinn. Anyone who came to Quinn’s defense, or even if they generally expressed disap♊proval for their methods, would meet the same sort of harassment.

4chan would eventually put an end to this when site founder Chri🌃stopher Poole banned all discussion of Gamergate, but by then it was too late. The movement had begun, and once again, it was about to get worse.

14 It Got A Fancy Hashtag From Adam Baldwin🤡 🐎

You may remember Aꦰdam Baldwin from such classic films as Independence Day, Full Metal Jacket, and Predator 2. What? You don’t? That might be because he had b♒it parts in all of them. I think his greatest role w𓃲as Jayne Cobb in Firefly. ꦛAdmittedly a fantastic role, but﷽ not exactly A-list.

Anyway, initially the campaign against Quinn had the imaginative nickname “The Quinnspiracy,” but then Mr. Baldwin threw his hat into the ring by calling the whole thing #Gamergate. In reference to the Watergate scandal that took down President Nixon. Sympathetic to the supposed cause that Gamergate championed —the removal of political correctness and social issues f♎rom games as a whole— he wittingly (or unwittingly) provided the rallying cry for the Gamergate movement.

13 Social 𒁏Media Went Insane

Armed with its new banner, #G🐼amergate swept💧 social media by storm. 

By September of 2014, there had been over 1 million tweets with the hashtag #gamergate. Between September and October, that number would climb to 2 million. Reddit posts wading into the topic, as well as Tumblr post and facebook status' were everywhere. Gamers from al🥃l over took sides in a polarizing debate which y൩ou were either for or against, with no in-between.

While the larger debate erupted on social media, the attacks on women in gaming continued. There are even some 4chan discussion logs that suggest creating false Twitter acc🎀ounts in order to keep the debate raging and keep attention away from their assaults.

And it worked.

12 ⭕ Until It Eventually Became Real News 🅠

The Gamergate hashtag eventually became so large that major news ꦕoutlets picked up on the story. Many started the same way: that Gamergate was a debate on social issues and feminism in gaming amongst passionate gamers. However, that story started to break down once actual reporters began to scratch the surface.

Speaking to Gamergate supporters, reporters would get a broad swath of motives and goals, many of them inconsistent and sometimes self-contradictory. One blogger would say that Gamergate is about retaining the purity of gaming wi🎐thout the influx of larger issues like societal inequality or sexism. Another would say it was about games being part of a larger medium and designers should be free to say and do whatever they want. Still, more would say it was about freedom of speech and having the right to say or do whatever they want.

After the first few months news outlets began to abandon the conflic🍌ting stories and focused more on the recurring theme of Gamergate. There was a large group of monstrous individuals coordinating attacks on anyone who disagreed with them, and especially on women.

The writing was on the wall.

11 It Even Rea꧑ched The White House

A year and a half later during Women’s History Month in March of 2016, even President Obama would address the le🎐gacy of Gamergate. During a speech at the White House, he said, "We know that women gamers face harassment and stalking and threats of violence from other players. When they speak out about their experiences, they're attacked on Twitter and other social media outlets, even threatened in their homes."

The President then went on to praise the courage of women to speak out against the oppression of Gamergate. "Every day, women of all ages and all backgrounds and w🌺alks of life are speaking out. And by telling their stories, by you telling your stories, women are lifting others out of the shadows and raising our collective consciousness about a problem that affects all of us."

10 The Peꦕrfect Storm 🌳

This all begs the question: if internet trolls and 4chan have ✃engaged in online harassment campaigns before, why did Gamergate become as large as it did?

It was quite simply the perfect storm of events. First, you had the initial catalyst, a young female game developer who dared to try and make games about anything other than testosterone-fueled fantasies. Then you had the anonymity of the internet making it easy for young men to feed off each other’s misogyny and꧃ plan vicious attacks. Then there was social media, making it easy for anyone to talk about Gamergate, allowing the story to morph and change with each new telling, and just as easily making anyone who spoke out a target.

Gamergate would focus on other women that came to Quinn’s defense, such as feminist speaker Anita Sarkeesian and game developer Brianna Wu. With each new personality, the cycle of attack would begin anew, and Gamergate would continue to grow and g🐷row and gro﷽w.

9 Anonymous ꧑Swarm

The most important thing to remember is that the attacks that Gamergate perpetrated would never have been possible without the anonymity afforded by the internet. Everyo💦ne who participated in Gamergate’s attacks were anonymous, and this allowed it to create an environment where anyone who criticized it was at risk, while allowing them to avoid individual responsibility for harassment.

There's no 'free pass' for anyone whoꦆ supported Gamergate, but it was a core group who were responsible for the organized the attacks. In October of 2014, the website Deadspin estimated that Gamergate had 10,000 supporters based on the number of users discussing Gamergate on Reddit. Even at the time it was well known that Gamergate supporters would create fake “sock-puppet” accounts in order to perpetuate the discussion and d🎃eflect attention from the people they were attacking, thus inspecting for recently created Reddit accounts gave them a pretty good estimate.

8 Gaming Evolved ꧃

Gamergate brought to the fore the brewing culture war between gaming’s established audience and its 🦩more recent adherents.

Since the late 1980s, video games had generally been marketed toward young men, and gaming’s core audience remained young men for a very long time. Over the course of decades, gaming began to broaden its appeal. In the 2010s even PC gaming began to reach a larger audience, and to Gam🌺ergate supporters, it seemed like an attack on all they held dear.

As such, Gamergate was a giant backlash by insecure men against the direction to which gaming as a medium was evolving, and naturally, they🌸 retaliated against the perceived opposite: female game developers who were making games that did not cater to their world𒁃view.

They were wrong to do so. Gaming as a culture isn’t some rigid thing that must pick and choose what genres it caters ༺to at the expense of all others. Gaming can grow, it can evolve, and it can contain both wildly violent and explicit games as well as artistic and fanciful explorations of the human condition.

7 It Wasn't Just Anti-Feminism ꦯ

Lest we forget, it 💦wasn’t just women that were the target of Gamergate. It had violent sentiments of homophobia, transphobia, anti-Semitism, racism, and neo-Nazism, just to name a few.

As the movement progressed, it started showing ugly tendencies reminiscent of a white supremacist movement. It became clear: this was never about ethics in jour♛nalism. When the Gamergate movement started becoming too extreme, Reddit began to cut down on email campaigns by having moderators censor or outright remove posts. The notorious 4chan would also expunge the movement, forcing Gamergate supporters to move to 8chan, a site whose founder was known to write for the neo-Nazi website, The Daily Stormer. There it would mingle with the kind of alt-right thinking that would take disenfranchised young men and lead them to ceaselessly attack minorities from the shadows.

6 The Authorities𒁏 Were Powerless

Many women did more than just speak out against the evils of Gamergate - they 🎶also called the cops.

Quinn would make numerous overtures to law enforcement over the years after receiving multiple death threats. However, each time𓆉 the police were powerless to find and prosecute the offenders. Brianne Wu would even keep an extensive database of threats against her, however, the FBI would largely ignore the evidence stating online harassment was a low priority for the agency.

Complicating things for law enforcement further, in June 2015, the US Supreme Court ruled in Elonis v. United State🐽s that harassing messages sent online are not necessarily true threats that would be prosecutable under criminal law.

Makes me glad to💧 live in Canada, where credible death threats are definitely prﷺosecutable.