#GamerGate was a harassment campaign organized on Twitter, 4chan, IRC and Reddit. It was an attack on women, feminism and diversity in video games under the guise of ethics in game journalism. #GamerGate initially started as an attack on game developer Zoë Quinn, who was trying to publish Depression Quest, a text-based game based on her struggles with depression. Many male gamers in the community discredited her work saying it was not “a real game”, but much of the subtext of the criticisms surrounding Quinn’s game was more to do with her being a woman. #GamerGate really exploded when Quinn’s ex-boyfriend published a blog post accusing her of cheating on him with men working in games journalism. Much of the gaming community accused her of having “unethical” relations with games journalists. The harassment also included other targets like game developer Brianna Wu and feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian. These women were doxxed (had their personal information, including home address, phone number, personal email, etc, hunted down and published publicly on the internet) and received rape & death threats.
With the role social media played in this controversy, it revealed already existing social dynamics in the gaming community. The gaming community is a subsection of the geek/nerd community which includes computer programming nerds, comic geeks, etc. These communities are rife with misogyny and prejudice. They were historically male-dominated spaces. Any women gamer had to face men discrediting their interest in games, with many accusing them of being “fake gamer girls”, which was something I saw a lot personally as a young girl gamer. Female gamers also had to deal with harassment from male gamers on multiplayer games. The role social media played was publishing these misogynist behaviours. It allowed for people to organize themselves to conduct harassment campaigns, that’s not really all that different from witch hunts of the past. Social media essentially provided new tools for misogynists of the world to harass women and commit violence against them. It was only natural that misogynists find each other on social media, as social media was only a means of communication and publication, what people do with it is up to them.