Was gamergate a turning point in your life, in your philosophy or in your worldview? From what to what?
I'm contemplating on how it has affected me (very significantly). Some of the friends I made during gamergate seem to have not changed so much. What was it like for you?
Share your stories.
I’d say Gamergate was what redpilled me. Before that I didn’t notice the activism in journalism. After that, it became so obvious they weren’t just in gaming.
Same. Though I noticed it in other places around the same time, because that was when it was really ramping up.
Similar thing, I was already aware that journalism around technology was pretty corrupt, with manipulated benchmarks and all. GamerGate showed me that this is true for all areas, if you are an expert it's obvious. It's just really hard to be expert in many different areas to see the media as the fake propaganda it is.
I wouldn’t say I didn’t notice it, because there just wasn't enough to notice back then. Before gamergate lots of journalists had political sentiments, but if they cared at all about video games, they kept those sentiments to themselves. Why talk politics when you can gush over the new Zelda?
People that just viewed games journalism as an easy stepping stone to a “real job” got us into this mess. That Bayonetta 2 review is still stuck in my craw.
Not a turning point, but a milestone.
When 2015-16 came around, before I started paying much attention to the election, I thought Trump was a racist ass. But he didn't burn out, he kept rising in the polls, then he started winning primaries. That didn't make sense to me, so I tried to find out why.
What I saw was that 95% of the "explanations" for Trump's rise and the criticisms of it exactly mirrored the lies and slander we saw during GamerGate. Everyone is racist. Entitled manbabies are crying about losing their privilege. Criticizing a woman equals misogyny. Targeted harassment. All coming from lefty full time media folks with their heads up their asses.
The nature of their attacks on Trump supporters, which I was primed to recognize as bullshit by GamerGate, made me realize that there had to be something else at play. I looked into it and realized Trump wasn't any of the things I thought he was or the media was slandering him as.
This, exactly. It's basically how I ended up as a card-carrying (not really, I asked for a card and they didn't have any) Republican. With a hard R. I saw how an article that took me under 15 minutes to read was illegible scrawlings from a "jilted lover." And the way the games journalists overreacted... well.
When they did it to Trump, the first thing I did was watch uninterrupted speeches- not editorialized, just in its totality- and realized oh fuck they're doing it again.
Thankfully, he won. Hopefully, he does again.
Nice format, Im-a copy.
Like you, shy and awkward growing up, kept my opinions to myself mostly.
Step 1 (2008) Joined Chanology to take down Scientology. This was the first time I really felt that "Fuck it, I have things to say and I'm gonna say them". I realised that being assertive and confident was actually part of my character if I just let go of my fear of being judged by others.
Step 2 (2014) GG happend and right away I saw parallels with Chanology: The same smear tactics, SJWs advocating cutting ties with problematic people etc. I wouldn't say it was any kind of turning point for me but I realised that a lot of people on the left (where I am, politically) were batshit crazy. One example that stood out to me was that I realised that all that time when we complained about Fox News being propaganda, I was pretty much alone in being opposed to it because journalism shouldn't be propaganda. All the others were just upset it wasn't propaganda for **their **cause.
Step 3 (2016) Trump vs Hillary and all the crazy shit that I noticed around 2014 and earlier have ramped up a lot. I see constant lies in the press, friends saying that anyone who supports Trump will be unfriended on social media. I was of the opinion that Trump was "not that bad" and had a lot of good suggestions like term limits and see him mainly as a center-right figure, whereas most people on the left and who just casually read news think he's Hitler incarnate. After he got elected, the left ramped up their BS even more, TDS is real. But the more they screech and lie and smear and threaten, the more people see through their BS.
Step1: For me I distinctly remember a moment in like 10th grade where I said, oh that guy is an idiot and agrees with me. It was the first moment I called into question my political beliefs as a liberal.
Step 2: Was asking questions about obvious hypocrisy over a few years. Namely stuff like why girls get math help when boys don't get writing help. This was important to me as I was still ashamed that I was bad at spelling. But all I ever saw was token lip service and uncomfortable answers.
Step 3: Gamergate. Where people I had agreed with politically had decided that the hypocrisy was exactly what they wanted. And I suddenly rejected the foundation of ideas they had.
Step 4: Trump's election. I called it like a year in advance. Not that I was happy about it. But I recognized the undercurrent that gamergate was with Trump. Where everyone that felt marginalized by the approved hypocrisy was left smolderingly angry. And that Hillary had alienated the Bernie supporters without even attempting to build community support. Now I see TDS, as a comicbook youtube suggested, as brain-damage. Because it proved the world did not run off what the propaganda says and that the foundation of their worldview was flawed. And the stress and fear from that made them double down on it.
So here I am now. A classical liberal that sees a complete lack of either party attempting to promote liberty.
this is pretty much what happened to me
This explains so much.
For me it was more of a confirmation of my observations. It was finding a community of people that saw what I was seeing and were able to actually put it into words what was wrong.
Gamergate, and it's predecessor, the Hold The Line movement from the Mass Effect 3 ending debacle, was an eye opener for me on just how crooked, corrupt, and incestuous the gaming media was. And later the mainstream media complex as a whole too. It honestly came as a big surprise initially, seeing gaming media turn on gamers like that, especially after the much earlier Jack Thompson mess, where the gaming media gleefully worked with gamers to lambast him.
My eye opener was the whole Atheism+ debacle. Then seeing that filthy cancer descend on my hobby was the back breaker. It only got worse from there, but at least I knew there were others that saw this shitshow same as me.
Yep I had been following mens rights groups for about a decade before and saw how feminists worked. Then saw the same shit evolve in atheism and occupy wall street. Gamergate was just yet another progression and I warned everyone that its gonna get way the hell worse. That it would spread to governments and be used to get your rights and voice taken away and very few listened at the time. Most thought I was crazy "oh its just a few gender studies teachers and kids on tumblr".
I wonder when tumblrinaction will get the bullet. Then again, tumblr was defanged a while ago. Still I wait.
As mentioned on the original KIA a few times, it was a serious redpill for me.
Back in the day I was a blogger for DailyKOS and Little Green Footballs. I moved away from DailyKOS to LGF because an IRL coworker and friend was on LGF. I was a pretty far left guy, even though I flinched away from the truly crazy Communist types. Or so I thought -- they actually were using overton manipulation and purity spirals to try and drag people like me off the Marxist Cliff, so... yeah.
LGF had early culture war stuff popping up here and there. I don't remember the timeframe, but Female Thor, for example, was announced and discussed as something important... when I pointed out it was just pandering and would be undone in a few issues, I was heavily downvoted until my replies vanished. It was at that point I discovered what "brigading" is, as people were going into the daily megathreads, linking my comments in other posts to get people to come over and attack me or downvote me. If you disagreed with the groupthink on LGF, you were attacked, relentlessly, until you agreed or were silent.
Anyway, when GamerGate started bubbling up, you started seeing your LE SMUGGY LEFTIST assholes popping up doing what I would later know was virtue signaling. One of them was "God, Gamers are such little fucking Shitstains." I didn't know this was because of GG pushing back against their "betters" on the left at that point. I replied something like "Hey, that's not fair, I'm a gamer."
"I meant what I said, you fucking little shitstain."
Which lead me to look up what GamerGate was. This was early on so the forced narrative meme wasn't in stone, and Google didn't know to fuck with the search results, so I found some timeline by an actual GGer, I read actual gamers instead of soycuck journalists, and realized what was going on. There was some article about how GamerGate was just "politics coming to Gaming" on a ... green on white styled website? Forget. That explained it very succinctly. Either way, I realized what was going on, but attributed it to accidental ignorance, not malice.
When I tried to correct people on LGF and Wikipedia, I was told in no uncertain terms that I was wrong, my lying eyes and "lived experience" was wrong, and that in fact Gamers were Neo-Nazis and the like. That I needed to understand that people like Zoe Quinn were victims, that diversity is our strength, that the gaming industry was going to change for the better and if the gamers didn't like it then they would just have to die, because their "betters" on the left were fixing things and they'd just have to accept it.
Well, ok.
That got me on the radar of some of the "alpha" users of the site, which I would later recognize as authoritarian SJW types. The NPC programmers. From then on out, if I ever disagreed with them, even slightly, they'd swarm and try and gaslight or emotionally manipulate me, all while some of the simpering newer users would try and attack me for goodboy points. It was a hugbox that was kept intact via social pressure, not software, and I was sand inside of it.
Worse, I noticed that a lot of the sites that I had taken for granted were "reputable" were blatantly lying about GamerGate. And in easily verifiable, repeatedly corrected ways. Which made me realize that the left's "actual news sites," like Salon or the Guardian, could be wrong. Worse, they could be intentionally lying for politics.
... What else had they lied about? A lot, actually.
Later on, they discovered my Twitter page, and did a deep dive of my following list. And they were not happy with what they saw. Roosh V. Cernovich. Milo. Tut, tut, tut, how dare I escape my programming? Don't they know they are unpersons? Enemies of the party!?
So they demanded I explain myself. More importantly, they demanded I give them the right to censor my following and followers list on Twitter. They demanded to have the right to decide who I associated with outside of their blog. I refused, which upset them further.
Eventually I got banned out of the blue. I don't recall the final reasoning, but I seem to remember it was around the time the LGF admin had tried to join a dogpile on Milo, and Milo had BTFO'd all comers, including the admin. Which, given I had retweeted or posted something in support of Milo, had gotten me on the shitlist. CJ couldn't beat the shit out of Milo, but he could ban me for my crimes against the party, so he did. Petulant little cunt.
For YEARS after this, I would occasionally post something on twitter and suddenly get a FLOOD of harassing stupidity. Every single time It happened, I'd go to the latest LGF megathread and find my tweet had been posted with some variant of "go get him" or "oh god look at the wrongthink!" It finally took me going through and blocking a bunch of "dead" accounts that were following me to get this to stop -- they were using a fake sock account to track me and share my posts with the hive.
Somewhere around this mess, I realized that I had been lied to by the left. A lot. That I had taken them at face value, that I had been socially conditioned to reject conservative views out of turn. So I turned to sites like KIA and /pol/, and mentioned the above in a briefer way.
I didn't get the hate I expected. Instead, I found understanding. "I know that feel." "Yeah, the left doesn't like it when you question things they can't defend." "Yup, they lied to you. Sorry man." That sort of stuff. Turns out that in their purity spiral, the nu-left had pushed a LOT of moderates and center-leftists out of the way, expecting them to follow them off the Marxist cliff.
Yeah I started out as a far left activist. Then one day I discovered that I was not supposed to point out that feminists might be wrong in claiming that rape was increasing. Helpfully I was called a bunch of names "MRA", "misogynist", etc. I looked up some "MRAs" to find out what they said and ended up finding many different perspectives outside the far left and better ways of understanding the world. Much nicer being outside an ideological bubble now.
Yeah, saw that a bunch too. A gaming forum I was moderating had one of the higher-up mods say something similar, like "When I think of gamers, I think of entitled piss-babies". And half the mod team liked the post. On a gaming forum.
I left shortly after.
Nope, I was already red pilled. Glad it red pilled others.
Yes.
It was the moment I realized that I would never be left alone and would have to fight back in some way.
Am I too paranoid thinking this is one of those commie website journalists trying to mine for "proof" that gamergate was some kind of alt-right recruitment drive?
I probably am.
It was the event that heavily changed my politics and worldview though. After watching an entire political spectrum on the left that I thought I belonged to outright lie as a coordinated group, it made me start being way more critical of them and made me start exploring that "meany right wing" stuff that I figured they were lying about now. They sure were.
Seeing that the right was for more tolerant of open expression and free speech, my core ideology got shook pretty hard and it was a rough short time of cognitive dissonance.
No, I would consider that paranoia healthy.
This username has a history on kotakuinaction, and one of the all time highest rated posts was made by me (realistic body sizes photoshop). You can message the username on reddit and I'll confirm it was me.
Personally I'm surprised how few people in gamergate became more right wing; that's what it did for me, but not for any of the handful of people I knew that were active in gamergate. That's what motivated me to ask the question.
I think there's definitely a thread linking GG and Trump but not in the way the journos say it is. It wasn't an alt-right recruitment drive or a Russian op. It's much simpler than that - there are obvious parallels between how the media and tech establishment approach both GG and Trump - constant, obvious lies and censorship. Even if many GGers were liberal left, they wouldn't go Hillary because she's the establishment.
But what most people on the right don't rly understand is that the establishment isn't "left" or "democrat". It just appears that way now because the establishment is anti-Trump and Trump is right wing. Had Jeb! won, the establishment would be solidly on his side right now. Because Jeb! would play ball. Hillary would play ball. Trump is different. And therefore, I think a lot of GGers can support Trump for that reason but also still maintain that Bernie would've been better for them.
Honestly I think Trump is barely right wing, but that's another discussion. The one thing that made him appear more right wing than the average republican leader is his stance on immigration and he didn't do much with that.
But I agree with the rest of your assessment.
I mean yeah, I'd say he's center-right but if we're to just say that he's either binary left or binary right, then he's right, which is how many Americans view their politicians.
Not at first because I thought was it just isolated to gaming journalism until the WSJ attacked Pewdiepie over a joke gone wrong (The Fiverr incident) that I slowly began rethinking everything I believed.
My actual beliefs didn't really change, I didn't somehow come to hold a different opinion on healthcare or taxes because I found out I can't trust the media.
But I sure had to give a rethink to who my actual allies and enemies are in achieving what I believe to be a better world.
Same here.
I think that most of my personal politics are relatively unchanged in the past ten years. It was moreso the revelation that the people that I thought were on my "team" actually don't believe in the things that I believe, even if they pay it lip service.
GG broke any faith I had in the SJW mentality. I could at least reason with their rhetoric in my mind before, all dressed up in the guise of rectifying inequality. Who can argue with that? Mind you I was aware of the SRS dwellers who took things too far on the regular, but I figured that crew as an extreme outlier of the movement.
Post ZoePost the scales fell off. I realized that indeed they run on a mentality of "rules for thee, not for me" and that their game was one of influence racketeering. I haven't looked back since.
It also made me keenly aware of the bias of the media I consumed. It's terrible to be woke to it now, but there's no putting the genie back in the bottle. Every piece I read now has to be passed through my own round of fact checking before I run with it.
Really? I love it. I just get to reject everything until I see it for myself. It makes my life simpler.
I don't think it was a turning point in my life or philosophy but it certainly was for my worldview. It was a giant, bitter red pill - once I knew what to look for in media it was like in "they live" when the guy puts his glasses on, sjw/feminist rot in one form or another on everything.
I've been following KiA since the whole thing blew up in 2014 and honestly it's fucking depressing how most of mainstream western entertainment and communities around it turned to shit in the last decade.
Yeah it has me thinking we need to rebuild like we are doing here, and just exclude the crazies. Over time, people will be drawn to the positive energy, and the rest will go nuts having to live with each other in the muck.
From democratic socialist to moderate democrat to currently right libertarian.
The turning point for me was actually comedy.
When people started saying you can't joke about this or that it turned for me. When I was younger it seemed like it was the church and the right trying to get things shut down for being offensive (e.g. piss christ, mum's alliance against whatever the fuck) but as I got older it was more and more the left trying to be the censorious ones. As time went on they became more dogmatic and you needed to conform to their ideology or you were one of the evil ones.
Then I noticed more and more lies in the media. George W Bush was cast as they bumbling incompetent moron who could barely string a sentence together yet here I was watching an off the cuff speech by a guy who knew his stuff. Then Obama came along. The guy got a Nobel peace prize before even doing anything then spent the next 8 years fighting wars around the world. Easily provable lies were getting broadcast by the media as proof.
Then Gamergate and Trayvon Martin happened. GG was getting slandered full tilt by the media and despite all the allegations of how evil this place was being constantly debunked they kept being repeated by media, Trayvon's case where MSNBC edited the 911 call to try and paint Zimmerman as a racist and incite outrage against him was the final straw. The Michael Brown follow up case just proved that truth no longer mattered to these people and they were more interested in creating outrage and incite the outrage mob.
Trump and the vitriolic and irrational response from the left was just another in the long line of insanity and delusional and hypocritical behaviour.
GG was the tipping point for me. I already knew access media was corrupt, just not to the extent that it is. Watching gg get smeared as a bunch of bigots/racists etc... instead of recognizing the actual complaints was further proof that we were on a dangerous path in our culture. I believe there were many people that became aware at that point. For me it solidified what i already suspected. Now that the issues have become so obvious and with gg having a history of exposing similar issues, I think our numbers will continue to grow.
Ironically, Sinfest was what was my turning point. Tat's insanity was the first breadcrum. Then I stumbled onto GirlWritesWhat and then GG happened. Also helped I lived through the Mortal Kombat And GTA scares.
WTF happened to Sinfest anyway?
Cuckery. That's what.
I'd noticed the trend of activism journalism rising in video games media for a while - bailed on Kotaku shortly after Heather "someone said they would rape me in an online video game once and it was as bad as being raped" Alexandra joined the crew, then Polygon shortly after that. I then turned to reddit for video game news/announcements, which led me to KiA after someone mentioned it in a /games thread I think. Been hooked ever since!
My family is filled with extremely hard-working, disgustingly intelligent people. Well, the elders anyway; us younger ones are all morons. So over my life, I've learned to be told "no, you're wrong; here's why" many, many times, to the point where I assume that anything I think is wrong, or not fully correct, and to seek clarification. My family and most places I've worked have also been staffed with hyper-competent people
The Mass Effect 3 ending debacle is what clued me in. Journalists and other online presences went after Jack Thompson, and it was funny because he was a backward old guy and edgy humour is funny. Suddenly, these same people turned on passionate fans, upset that a space epic ended with three colours. I honestly still get a little triggered when I see the word "entitled". Suddenly it wasn't so funny, and these people, who were supposed to represent us and speak for us, were definitely not our friends
I watched the Zoe Post stuff go down on GameFAQs. Every time it got nuked, some separate site was linked and I'd go there. It was a shitshow. Then wen things seemed to be setting, the Gamers Are Dead articles dropped and it was on again
I don't know how or when I discovered KiA; I actually didn't know about reddit before then. The earliest memory of KiA I have is when the Ghostbusters 2016 trailers dropped and everyone mocking it and the response to James Rolfe. I do know I had been lurking for quite some time at that point, so I likely found it in autumn 2015
I lurked because I had nothing to add to the conversation; I was there to learn. KiA, both of them (all five of them?) are filled with hideously brainy people, and were able to explain the feeling of wrongness of the internet, the creeping bullshit into gaming, the emotional traps regressives use in their writing, the behaviour and tactics they employ. I was finally able to have explained to me my thoughts on what was going on, and explain it to other people. A lot of the talking points regressives use when talking about GG I was already familiar with; I come from a farming background and am very used to the slander and smears farmers get from city folk and animal activists. Or even the general derision country people get about being backward; modern farming is (overly) computerised and mechanised these days! You can do six year courses at university about farming!
Then some guy asked about The Last Airbender/Korra and because I know more about those than real life, I jumped in to explain how Korra was a shit addition but good standalone product that wasn't necessarily woke within the show. And it's all been downhill from there. Haven't participated this much in an internet community since the ForumPlanet days
Yes, absolutely. Gamergate, and the treatment of TotalBiscuit by the outrage mob trying to cancel him over tweeting out a charity for disabled gamers to signal boost it was my definitive redpill moment.
I was never what I'd consider to be an SJW, but I was definitely very lefty and definitely had some proto-SJW characteristics. The term red-pilled is absolutely how I would describe what happened. It was like this whole other world was revealed to me and I discovered more and more that what I had believed was built on lies and misinformation.
Definitely a life changing movement for me, from a personal ideology standpoint.
I don't offer any more info about myself than is necessary, I used to be a lot more open about who I am; now, thanks to Anita and Zoe poisoning the well, I just sit back, shut up and shoot.
I was redpilled before GG, mainstream media being shit and all, GG just reinforced my belief.
I was already partial to anti-SJWism prior to Gamergate. Hell, modding TumblrInAction is what got me the job running KiA for its first year. So in regard to "redpilling," no, I was already there, and I had been studying up on the arguments of SJWs for some time already. If anything, Gamergate introduced me to a new set of ideologies that I could research, thereby affirming my own worldviews regarding progressivism.
I considered myself a moderate or a centrist prior to and during Gamergate, and I still like to say that now, though I've found myself leaning right more often than not, if only because the left wing has proven to be utterly incapable of reasonable debate. Granted, the right also appears mostly unwilling to move on their positions, but at least they will entertain opposing views, provided that they have a modicum of a defense to them beyond an appeal to emotion.
If anything changed in me, it was the willingness to educate myself and engage with ideological opposites in order to understand their views (however insane the logic behind them might be) and in turn, challenge myself to defend my own views. So far, things have pretty much held strong. Except maybe, in trying to learn how to speak SocJus, I fried a few brain cells.
It was what red pilled me. I was a passive moderate, I only entertained Republicans thanks to my Republican parents. Voted Gore, Bush Jr., Obama, McCain, Trump.
I loved memes and when trolling around knowyourmeme early 2020 I found the meme "the left can't meme" and in it they had a link to an article by Kukuruyo. After reading it and deciding to read his Gamergate comic all the author's notes and funny comics exposed the media for what it is and made me realize that I align super hard with Gamergate's values. From then on I started watching news (doing my own research to discern truth from lies) and have become an outspoken Trump supporter.
I also signed up for reddit and twitter because of it. What a time to do so eh?
Atheism+ and Gamergate happening at the same time alerted me to a very important fact, namely that the left is not a political standpoint. There are no normal left-wingters. The left, and everybody in it, is a global organization that wants only itself in unofficial power. It wants to have the world in its hands.
I also realised something else: We can't let that happen.