I'm still frustrated by that shit. There were actual instances of bad shit happening in gaming news media that got drowned the fuck out by all the culture war grifters and rampant fucking incels.

• Random "ok but not GOTY" indie games getting GOTY level reviews, then people finding that the dev and the journalist(s) had a history of bar crawl pictures on twitter together.
• Leaked industry email lists where journalists openly were asking other journalists to take it easy on their dev roommate's first release.
• A few big names in games journalism getting shit canned for writing honest reviews about how mediocre some AAA game was, when that game bought an ad on their site to the tune of a full site retheming around the game.
• Undisclosed referral links.
• Undisclosed sponsorship of good reviews.
• Some games trying to use the fact they had LGBTQIA+ representation to paint valid critiques as the same thing as bigoted harassment, when some of the critique was even coming from LGBTQIA+ folx.
• A few no name indie devs caught faking harassment and hate DMs.

It was a few big issues, a scatter of medium issues, a few minor things only noticable to obsessives, and then a massive clusterfuck of actual stalker/*phobe bullshit slopped on top.

I'm happy that shit like responsible disclosure started happening in the end, but what a fucking mess.

Yeah. I agree. I time it to 2014 and can see Gamergate, now in retrospect, as a clear part of the origin story of the current moment. And one of the clearest signals is how befuddling and practically impossible it is to actually understand what gamergate is/ was. I was there for it, in the sense that I saw it happened, but it was noise at the periphery of my vision. And even what I did right there, the swapping of a subject word to an action word; how language around this "gamergate" thing evolved, and how it became completely befuddling to those not already interior to this thing to understand.

And I still dont understand it. And I don't think others, even those deeply involved understand it either. But I want to be clear when I say "understand", I've done a fair bit of research. I've pulled every reddit forum post on the matter. I've read book chapters and deep articles. But with the Epstein files and Bannons involvement, which we only now understand: it sure was "something".

MY current working hypothesis; I think gamergate was the test run for Brexxit. And the test run for MAGA/J6. I think there is potentially also a Hungary and Orban, which preceded gamer gate.