GamerGate affected me profoundly, and I know there are others who were similarly affected. We were always right. We were right about the incestuous nature of game journalism. We witnessed how a rigid ideology of victimhood created massive blindspots not just in games journalism, but wider mainstream media, how the exact same handful of individuals would be quoted as gospel.
Such a huge range of people were mischaracterized to an extreme degree that it served to inform us on how untrustworthy establishment media is. The 'official' narrative is drastically wrong. Despite this, GamerGate became an effective information network to counter establishment narratives, shaping online discourse for years to come. GamerGate was a pivotal moment in the Great Meme Wars.
I was moved by the memes, the artwork, the pages of digging and archiving, hours upon hours of well reasoned discussion whether on forums or on video, all of which went ignored by media. Those first 6 months or so of GamerGate were something special, hundreds of thousands of people finding each other through the false-narrative, finding each other in the darkness. We were ahead of the curve of mainstream discourse because we knew that we were individuals acting towards common goals, and it didn't matter who was left wing or who was right wing, that the media's black and white view of politics only divides people rather than fostering much needed discussion. We recognized the identity politics moral panic for what it was, years before we saw it affect the mainstream in huge ways, like how we've seen with James Damore at Google. GamerGate is a part of history.
I was moved to create a video in an attempt to capture what I believed the heart of GamerGate to be. This video serves as not just information and summary, but as a love letter to the people of GamerGate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80fqrg0dmTU
Thank you to everyone who has supported GamerGate.
You're all diamonds.