As an original GGer, and, of course, the Leader of GamerGate, I find it interesting that literally no one I know or with whom I am acquainted through GG has any involvement whatsoever with this show that is nominally supposed to be about GamerGate.
It is reasonable to say that the producers of this movie are a lot more interested in sending a message than making a comedy about GamerGate. Honestly, if they actually wanted to make a comedy, they should get our side’s input because that thing was one hell of a lot funnier from this side of the street. Being Woke, they can’t go into what really happened, so they have to settle for making shit up.
Five Guys, A Girl and Lies
Gamer Gate didn’t really start with Zoe Quinn.
GamerGate got its start in the 1990s. Gaming mags were taking off but had a major problem. A typical review usually read something like, “This is a good game. I like it very much.” There would follow two or three pages of technical prattle and that would be it.
A lot of the editors weren’t really into gaming themselves; they were just journalists who had landed a gig with a market segment that was just taking off. The problem they were presented with was that they could either teach gamers how to write or teach writers to play games. They made the wrong call.
Writers could learn to play games no problem, but it would never be their passion. Their lack of skill is so notorious that gamers frequently refer to the Easy setting as Journalist Mode.
Writers care about characters, plotting, and story structure. They find game mechanics dull and tedious. They liked good graphics though. They were super keen on those.
Oh and left-wing politics, so you had better have those too.
Consequently, they started reliably giving good reviews to games with a good storyline that leaned left and looked pretty. Game devs noticed and adjusted accordingly.
Steam’s massive success opened the door for the Indy Game Devs. Some of those early trailblazers made out like bandits. After the trailblazers, came the early adapters. They were the “me too” crowd back when that phrase had a different meaning.
One of these was Zoe Quinn, who was really just a writer trying to make a few bucks with a crude text adventure called Depression Quest. She was hardly the only one back then. What made her notorious was a reddit post by an angry ex-boyfriend, who alleged that she had slept with several gaming journalists to get good reviews for Depression Quest. And the post went viral.
Honestly, I can’t tell you if there was ever anything to his claims or not. What I can tell you is that everyone checked Depression Quest’s scores and discovered that it rated better than 9 out of 10 with gaming journalists and around 1 out of 10 with actual gamers.
This was taken as absolute proof of the corruption of the gaming press, by gamers. The gaming journos themselves clearly flew into a panic because if there was one thing they did NOT want; it was outsiders taking a close look at how their industry really operates. I rather suspect that a sex scandal with a rather unattractive women would have been the least of their troubles.
Of course it will be a disaster. The only surprise will be if it doesn’t turn out that the GamerGaters are Literally Nazis. This is the media’s attempt – again – to have the last word and rewrite history.