As someone who's extensively looked into both sides of GamerGate, you are incredibly wrong about it lmao.
GamerGate is what I said it was.
Corruption in gaming journalism and competitions, lead to a demand for disclosure and ethics reform, what sparked the fire?
A game developer slept with a journalist who then gave her game very favorable reviews. She also got a gaming fundraiser shut down just before starting her own gaming fundraiser.
Then, a PR agent slept with the head judge of a game festival and her clients' games won.
Outrage spread among online forums.
The two women above, as well as others related to the industry jumped into the heated discussion online. A few receive death threats. All sides condemn harassment and threats.
Gaming journalists published articles declaring "gamers are dead" and painted them as "cis white male misogynists who hate women in their previously-male-dominated industry." The allegations of corruption were not addressed.
Gamers were outraged at the "anti-gamer" sites who ran the articles stereotyping and shaming their own fan bases.
10+ sites all ran similar talking-points on the same day, revealing an industry-wide issue. People dug deeper into the web of industry relationships and uncovered more conflicts of interest, but also a suspicion that radical, anti-male feminists were driving the narrative in the press.
Gamers were upset that leftists were deflecting the issue of corruption and turning it into one of misogyny and harassment of females in the industry. Articles that emerged in the BBC and Guardian do not mention the original issue of corruption, but focused on the few death threats.
The female author of the Guardian article was shown to be financially supportive of the women she defended in her article. She was called out on it publicly.
Gamers were convinced this was proof of the corruption.
Leftists are still convinced this is proof of the misogyny.
In response to Leftists accusing the #GamerGate movement as being driven by mostly "cis white males," minority gamers who supported the movement tweeted with #NotYourShield to tell the Leftists they don't need anyone speaking for them.
It surfaced recently that Zoe Quinn, had been generally an unethical person. According to her exboyfriend, she slept with five different guys in the indie game and games journalism areas while they were still in a relationship.
Quinn also, allegedly, wanted one of the people in charge of GAME_JAM's "head on a stick" after the failure of the event. Following this event, Quinn set up her own game jam called Rebel Jam with a donation link that goes straight to her own PayPal account. She also did not have any information on the page relating to when the event will be held and what it will contain.
In the midst of this, a group called The Fine Young Capitalists started up a rival game jam to Quinn's for which they received a lot of backlash for from Quinn and her supporters.
It is important to note that Quinn's supporters did this under the flag of "they're an oppressive group" despite the fact that TFYCs are predominantly a female-oriented group.
4chan's /v/ message board, up in arms over the corruption in games journalism that had surfaced already as a result of this scandal, decided to flood TFYC's indiegogo campaign with donations that would go to colon cancer research.
4chan eventually raised enough money to get the highest perk available from TFYC's indiegogo, the option to create a character. So 4chan took this opportunity to rub it in the world's face, and created a character called Vivian James.
Concurrently to all of this, there was essentially a media blackout concerning the Zoe Quinn scandals. Quinn, through this, became a face of feminism in the indie games world, much like Anita Sarkeesian, who has also had a lot of questions surrounding her kickstarter to fund Tropes vs. Women in Video Games, a webseries that breaks down tropes that are harmful to women in video games. Despite having finished her kickstarter in June of 2012, she's only released 6 videos.
There's a fear imposed on indie games developers who disagree with these faces of feminism because then they are seen as misogynistic or bad people.
Along this timeline, people started looking more closely at games "journalists" and found that the very people who were reporting on these games had a vested interest in the games as they had put money into the dev's pockets through donations. Not only was there this, but the tight-knit world that is indie game development led to this web stretching far and wide.
Oh, and a lot of these games "journalists" came out and said that gamers, the very people they are supposed to have an interest in, are "the worst" and "a dying indentity" and other harsh words, considering their demographic.
