After one year of #GamerGate

Allum Bokhari collects a round-up of statements from GGers, former aGGers, and neutrals:

ADAM BALDWIN
Actor

When I coined the GamerGate hashtag on Twitter, I had no idea what
would follow, but I’m very pleased with the result. For over a year,
gamers have been pushing back against a new wave of political
correctness, media spin, and cultural authoritarianism. Propagandists
tried to declare gamers “dead” — in response, gamers became their worst
nightmare.

Despite the atrocious things said about them in the mainstream media,
gamers have survived, thrived, and conquered. They detest censorship,
language-policing, and the prioritization of politics over good
storytelling. Everyone who believes in creative freedom should support
them.

NICK FLOR
Associate Professor, Anderson School of Management, University of New Mexico

I see GamerGate as the best modern example of how a false narrative can be socially engineered by coordinating the five C’s:

1. Confirmation Bias, leading to the cherry picking of only data that supports one’s position;

2. Composition Fallacy, arguing that a part defines the whole;

3. Clickbait Business Model, incentivizing sensational stories spread through social media;

4. Complicit Mass Media, pushing eagerly any War-Against-Women/harassment story;

5. Collectivism, justifying outrage and action for the “greater good.”

So what is GamerGate? From my one year of observation and interaction on Twitter, it’s simple: gamers pushing for free enterprise and free markets in the gaming industry; gamers asking for a competitive market free of collusion, free of corruption, and free of control of artistic creativity by authoritarians. In short, GamerGate is a freedom movement.

IAN MILES CHEONG
Editor-in-Chief, GameRanx

Ask any gamer or anyone within the game industry what GamerGate means to them and you might get a variety of answers, depending on who you ask.

Over the course of the year, my stance towards the GamerGate movement has shifted. Having initially bought into the “social justice”-approved narrative that all of GamerGate was about the harassment of women, I used to be violently opposed to the movement and engaged in demonizing its supporters, who consist mainly of gamers—including women.

Most gamers don’t much care for political correctness, and the way they speak has been deliberately misinterpreted as bigotry by social justice proponents whose biggest source of angst comes from microaggressions.

The narrative is false, and it’s one I see propped up time and time again to discredit anyone who dissents against what I’d call “social authoritarianism.”

I wasn’t asked my opinion, but had I been, this is what I would have said:

Vox Day
Game Designer

#GamerGate marks an important turning in the cultural war for the soul of the West. It was our cultural Stalingrad. It was our Midway. It marked the first time in decades that a group of individuals collectively stood up against the ongoing SJW onslaught and turned it back.