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Timeline of Gamergate

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The main page for this topic is Gamergate. In case of wild gator or sea lion, use our list of Gamergate claims to correct their fragile interpretations of reality.

Gamergate is what happened when the reactionary wastes of flesh rejects of 4chan teamed up to be the personal army of an abuser and attack women who make and write about video games with a molecule-thin veneer of being a consumer movement for "free speech" and "ethics in video game journalism". These are their stories.

2014[edit]

August 2014[edit]

September 2014[edit]

October 2014[edit]

November 2014[edit]

December 2014[edit]

2015[edit]

January 2015[edit]

February 2015[edit]

March 2015[edit]

April 2015[edit]

  • April 1: Zoe Quinn and Alex Lifschitz meet with U.S. Representative Katherine Clark to discuss Gamergate. Gamergaters attack all three by bombarding Rep. Clark with messages on Twitter and beginning an 8chan thread to discuss how the Crash Override Network—which is free and not asking for donations—is a scam.
  • April 2:
  • April 4: The Hugo AwardsWikipedia nominees are announced and a group of politically conservative sci-fi writers come out on top, revealed to be the result of gaming the vote by pushing Brad R. Torgersen and Larry Correia's "Sad Puppies" slate for the third year in a row and Gamergate supporter Theodore Beale's (Vox Day) "Rabid Puppies" slate (which actually gets more votes); [Gawker.com: archive.is, web.archive.org Gamergate supporter "Daddy Warpig" actively recruits people in Gamergate] to "humble SJW in Sci-Fi, too". The following week, George R. R. MartinWikipedia opines that "the Sad Puppies [and Beale] have broken the Hugo Awards" beyond redemption; he also writes how he fears the groups "are beyond the pale, raging and ranting about SJWs and cliques and secret conspiracies."
  • April 6: For some reason /r/KotakuInAction decides Reddit's interim CEO Ellen PaoWikipedia has to do with their goals of "ethics in video game journalism" after all of the news concerning her pro-diversity hiring practices and her loss in her lawsuit against former employer Kleiner PerkinsWikipedia goes around. For this reason, they decide to organize a boycott of buying Reddit Gold memberships for themselves or others. The original post and several subsequent posts by the proposer are gilded in response. Later, /r/EllenPaoInAction is formed by this set.
  • April 12: Anita Sarkeesian goes to a board game parlor in Columbus, Ohio, and later discovers that a collaborator of TheAmazingAtheist known as Ben took her photograph without her permission and posted it. Gamergate comes out to support Ben, for obvious reasons.
  • April 14: Running With Scissors' Postal 2Wikipedia receives downloadable content 12 years after its initial release. Milo Yiannopoulos has been included, with his blessing as an Easter Egg that turns all NPCs into him, and he can of course be killed.
  • April 15: Zoe Quinn speaks at a congressional briefing on cyberstalking. The panel decides to start the #StopWebH8 hashtag to begin discussion on the dangers of cyberstalking and harassment over the Internet. Gamergate supporters disrupt it in their usual ways.
  • April 17: It is discovered that contributors to A Voice For Men's official feMRA podcast Honey Badger Radio had operated a vendor's booth at the Calgary Comic & Entertainment Expo, selling Gamergate posters, and had disrupted a panel on women in comics the night before. The group, who entered under the false name "Honey Badger Brigade", are asked to leave the convention center and not participate in future events. It is also discovered that they had crowdfunded their entrance fees into the event for the sole purpose of disrupting it. The group appeals to Gamergate with cries of censorship and misogyny (because they are women [well two of them are]) and #ExpoGate is born. The group begins to crowdfund a "legal fund" to sue Calgary Expo for damages.
  • April 21: The documentary GameLoading: Rise of the Indies is released on Steam. Gamergate goes after it when they learn Zoe Quinn was interviewed for it.
  • April 24: Brianna Wu speaks at RavenCon in Richmond, Virginia, and Ethan "TheRalphRetort" Ralph states his intention to attend and "interview" her. RavenCon announces they will step up security in response to his essential threat. He shows up anyway at her panel to raise shit and be kicked out. Wu and event security fulfill his wish. Gamergate does things in response, as usual.
  • April 25: Denver Comic Con states the Gamergate logo falls under its "no hateful symbols" rule when asked on Twitter. They later reverse that position after Gamergaters get angry.
  • April 28: Boston Magazine publishes "Game of Fear", describing the genesis of Gamergate. It features interviews with Zoe Quinn and Eron Gjoni, among others, with both telling the events that led up to Gjoni's post and the initial wave of harassment against Quinn. As a result of the article, Michael Dorn of Star Trek fame comes out in support of Quinn.
  • April 29: Someone in Gamergate decides that their boycott should extend to The New York Times due to its negative coverage of the mob.
  • April 30: S. Rachel Martin updates her blog post "GamerGate Launched in My Apartment, and, Internet, I’m Sorry. (Not that sorry.)" in response to the Boston Magazine story to say, "I regret what I’ve done and left undone contributing to attacks on those affected by the events following the publication of [The Zoe Post]. I maintain my hopes that women in games and all fields are able to keep doing what they love and that the actions against them STOP." (emphasis hers).

May 2015[edit]

  • May 1: A group of D.C. area Gamergaters, apparently organized by Milo Yiannopoulos and Christina Hoff Sommers, go to a local restaurant for what is dubbed #GGinDC; also in attendance is Lizzy "lizzyf620" Finnegan. Arthur Chu contacts the bar on Twitter, warning it that Gamergate is a hate mob and is organizing there, leading to predictable indignation. Sometime after this, a bomb threat is called into the bar, leading to an evacuation, although the DC police do not confirm anything to Kotaku reporters. Gamergaters predictably blame SJWs/feminists without evidence, while Slade "RogueStar" Villena decides to implicate Chu. Meanwhile, Mark Kern makes a tasteless joke about "professional victimhood".
    (Side note: Months later, Arthur Chu remarks that he had heard the threat to this meet up was planned on 8chan.)
  • May 2: The German antinazi website Netz Gegen Nazis (Internet against Nazis) publishes an article which refers to gamergate as an example of a far-right hate group. To this very day the site takes interest in publicizing pieces where German people express interest to fight against the harassment present in gaming culture.
  • May 4:
    • Joss WhedonWikipedia closes his Twitter account after the new Avengers movie opens in theaters. Gamergaters believe it is because he was "bullied" off Twitter by feminists who criticized the portrayal of the character Black Widow. Whedon attempts to set the record straight in a BuzzFeed interview by saying he left Twitter to focus on his writing. He adds that blaming "militant feminists" is "horseshit". The Gamergaters on Reddit go full tinfoil hat.
    • Society of Professional Journalists regional director Michael Koretzky gives Gamergate the time of day after their disruption of the #SPJEthicsWeek hashtag, apparently believing in their claims about being about "ethics in video game journalism". Gamergate seemingly ignores his own issues with ethics in journalism and his background. He plans to hold a debate for both sides dubbed "AirPlay".
  • May 8: After soliciting advice from /r/KotakuInAction when his previous pro-bono attorney went missing, Eron Gjoni has determined that he will appeal the restraining order placed against him. Unfortunately for him, $10,000 is required to retain the necessary legal counsel. A further appeal is made to /r/KotakuInAction for funding.
  • May 11:
    • Michael Koretzky announces his committee for choosing representatives for the "AirPlay" debate, currently scheduled for August 15, 2015. The committee members are Allum Bokhari, a Breitbart contributor and Gamergate supporter; Dave Rickey, a game designer who supports Gamergate; "John Smith", a 19-year-old 4channer (admin of a rival site 38chan) who describes the "SJW Wars" in his bio; and William Usher, the man responsible for leaking the GameJournoPros list. Koretzky apparently reached out to a woman to be on the committee, but she unsurprisingly declined the offer. Jay Allen heavily critiques Koretzky's ethics, saying that journalists are supposed to minimize harm. This leads to Usher asking him if he wants to be on the panel and revealing his shortlist. Allen points out that the people on the "anti-Gamergate" list wouldn't want to be within 300 miles of a Gator let alone the same room, and the "neutrals"—Allistair Pinsof, Erik Kain (wrote several blog posts about the mob for Forbes), Derek Smart (a game dev known for causing one of the largest flame wars in Usenet history), and Alexander Macris (The Escapist)—all lean in Gamergate's favor.
    • Gamergate loses the support of Japanese game developers Roninworks due to harassment by Slade "RogueStar" Villena and Margaret "@_icze4r" Gel, a member of the so-called "Gamergate Harassment Patrol".
  • May 12: Brianna Wu's personal cellphone number is posted to 8chan's /baphomet/, /r/KotakuInAction, Twitter, and Japanese image board 2chan, resulting in several threatening phone calls. Additionally, she finds that several hundred dollars of fraudulent purchases were made with her credit card on the Steam video game platform; Randi Harper also reports having a fraudulent purchase made with one of her credit cards through Steam.
  • May 13: Gamergate gains the support of Denis Dyack, another video game developer with a sordid past in the industry and an axe to grind for Kotaku.
  • May 15: The Gamergaters at /r/KotakuInAction grasp at the biggest straw ever by accusing that /r/GamerGhazi "is named after an event where a gamer was murdered by terrorists. The real kind." Somehow instead of associating their name with the conservative conspiracy theories that came about as a result of the 2012 Benghazi attack, they chose to associate it with Sean Smith,Wikipedia an American diplomat killed in the attack who just happened to be a well-known player of Eve Online and a Goon at Something Awful.
  • May 16: Michael Koretzky's AirPlay panelists are chosen, and what a great crop of people: Milo Yiannopoulos, Brad Wardell, Cathy Young of Reason, Christina Hoff Sommers, Oliver Campbell, illustrator Mark Ceb, William Usher, and indie game dev Jennifer Dawe. Still no word on "neutrals" or "anti-Gamergate" representatives, obviously.
  • May 18: Eron Gjoni is banned from all of Reddit, as he has violated the site's self-promotion rules in posting links to his donation fund to fight against the restraining order. After furore from Gamergaters, Gjoni is able to get the ban overturned. Throughout the ordeal, Gjoni has been given $15k, all for the sole purpose of being allowed to harass Zoe Quinn, again; meanwhile, his personal Patreon account earns him less than $50 a month.
  • May 20: Brianna Wu releases a threatening phone call she received after her phone number was doxxed, mentioning Ron O'Brien, the prosecuting attorney for Franklin County, Ohio, in her op-ed for The Mary Sue as someone who could solve her problem with the threatening calls from Columbus, Ohio. However, there was a mix-up with how the case was handled by Wu's staff, as she later clarified in talking to the Columbus Biz Insider; her information had been sent to the Columbus City Attorney's office rather than the Franklin County Attorney's office, and she apologized for the mix-up from her end, and later had a conversation with O'Brien on the matter. However, Breitbart London still published an article saying she had lied about the situation without bothering to include any of the actual facts while citing Columbus Biz Insider in the hitpiece.
  • May 24: Charles C. Johnson, an extremely right wing "journalist" [Gawker.com: archive.is, web.archive.org who was so thoroughly hated by his college classmates that they spread a rumor that he took a shit on the floor in their dormitory], is banned from Twitter after he threatens Ferguson and Baltimore activist DeRay McKesson. This makes it the sixth time he's been banned from the service. Because of his shining record of journalistic excellence (and at one point supporting Gamergate), Gamergate figureheads try to rally the group behind him.

June 2015[edit]

  • June 1: Gamergate rallies behind novelist Anne RiceWikipedia and the blog Stop the Goodreads Bullies after STGRB posts Randi Harper's Amazon.com review where she calls out Vivek Wadhwa, a dispute that predates Gamergate. The followup post on STGRB is full of Gamergate-related screenshots and tweets. Harper reports receiving threatening emails from Anne Rice fans dogpiling her on top of Gamergaters.
  • June 3-6: The Canadian Game Studies Association's 2015 conference has extensive efforts put in place to prevent Gamergate from disrupting online discussion of the event, as has happened over and over in the past. Attendee Natalie Zina (Zed) Walschots who expressed displeasure with how events unfolded decides to come up with the joke hashtag #DeathEaters, referencing the Harry Potter novels, to allow attendees to discuss a Gamergate panel and Gamergate in general. This works until the final day when one attendee uses "Gamergate" in a tweet, and is public for 10 minutes until it is taken down. By June 6, Walschots is Gamergate's newest target, as they tracked down the use of #DeathEaters to her, and they begin to assail her university to disqualify her planned PhD on Gamergate under the usual baseless conjecture.
  • June 9: The Australian Communications and Media Authority announces its findings with regards to complaints about ABC's 7:30 news feature on Gamergate. There were no breaches of ethics on behalf of the broadcaster, throwing out the complaints of a lack of due impartiality and a lack of diversity of perspectives. The ACMA specifically stated, "Impartiality does not require that every perspective receives equal time, or that every facet of every issue is presented," and also pointed out the program said other facets existed, and the production team went above and beyond in their attempts to find someone "pro-Gamergate" to speak with and found no one.
  • June 10: Reddit announces the banning of several subreddits that were used for harassment only. While /r/TumblrInAction and /r/KotakuInAction are unscathed, somehow the shuttering of /r/FatPeopleHate brings out the usual Gamergate related crowd.
  • June 11: Reddit competitor/clone Voat begins to buckle under the increased server strain as a result of the exodus from Reddit, with the new user base trying to rally for Bitcoin payment to help. Voat is now favored by Gamergaters, pedophiles, and neo-Nazis for some reason.
  • June 12: Gamergate decides to rally behind Hulk HoganWikipedia because of his pending lawsuit against Gawker Media for having hosted his sex tape. This again has nothing to do with ethics in video game journalism but simply Gamergate's irrational hatred of Kotaku.
  • June 16: A memorandum (page 18) from the Society of Professional Journalists' president Dana Neuts discusses #SPJEthicsWeek and Gamergate's disruption of the hashtag, and the statement that they chose no to engage with the Gamergaters. The memo also brings up the SPJ's decision to ban Michael Koretzky from using the SPJ logo for his AirPlay website, where a nearly unanimous vote (one member voted in favor of use, and that member was not Koretzky) decided to keep the ban in place.
  • June 17:
  • June 18: Multiple people report seeing posters featuring attacks on Anita Sarkeesian, Jonathan McIntosh, Kotaku with "Gamergate" repeatedly printed on them outside the Los Angeles Convention Center as E3 is underway. This is more proof that Gamergate (despite its claim that it has nothing with feminists) has all to do with anti-feminism, with "Gamergate" as an imprinted watermark for Anita Sarkeesian's posters [1]. They also twist famous memes such as the "All Your Base Are Belong To Us" into the anti-Sarkeesian poster reads "All your tropes are belong to us". A so-called "right-wing graffiti artist collective" that apparently has no ties to Gamergate is fingered as responsible.
  • June 19: Voat announces their German hosting service, Host Europe, has shut down their servers due to "political incorrect" content, and you should send donations. Their website goes down for several days.
  • June 21: The week's Last Week Tonight with John Oliver focuses on Internet harassment. Clips of Anita Sarkeesian and Brianna Wu speaking on Nightline are used, before Oliver discusses the issues regarding the ineptitude of the legal system with regards to the Internet as well as revenge porn, with the latter being the main focus. Despite never mentioning Gamergate once and only focusing on Sarkeesian and Wu for about 17 seconds, threads on /r/KotakuInAction spring up trying to either spin Oliver's words in their favor or declaring they are cancelling their HBO subscriptions.
  • June 22: Host Europe releases a statement regarding their shutdown of Voat's server, although they do not mention Voat by name. They deny that the server shutdown was over "politically incorrect content", and instead state that they draw the line when laws are broken and when they have a moral obligation for the safety of others. They described Voat as such: "The site in questions was publicizing incitement of people, as well as abusive, insulting and youth-endangering content." Or in German as the English is a bit wonky, "Im angesprochenen Forum wurden offensichtlich volksverhetzende, beleidigende, bloßstellende und jugendgefährdende Inhalte zur Verfügung gestellt, von denen wir uns explizit distanzieren möchten." Basically, everything /r/FatPeopleHate and /r/Jailbait were shut down for.
  • June 23:
  • June 25: Several tech and gaming websites (International Business Times, Polygon, MCV, Destructoid) discuss the discovery of a joke at Gamergate's expense in Batman: Arkham Knight:Wikipedia
“”"Y do u attack B@tman? He is BASED! U r a fa-"

Riddler deleted the email, and all the others like it, as prickly hot anger and shame squired through his insides. No point denying it: #CrusaderGate had been a disastrous social media campaign.

He couldn’t understand it. It seemed the internet's idiotic and easily roused rabble could froth itself into a full-fat cappuccino of frenzy over 'white knights'. But offer it up a Dark one - on a plate! - and you get a soy latte's worth of indignation at best! Didn't they understand what Batman had done?
  • June 26:
  • June 28: Jason "@j_millerworks" Miller releases several Gamergate-themed books onto Amazon.com. He has priced his 50 page e-book Beyond GamerGate: a PR Crisis Strategy Guide at US$10, while Sh* t SJWs Say: The picturebook of the perpetually offended (a collection of Twitter and Tumblr screencaps no doubt) is a much more affordable US$3.

July 2015[edit]

August 2015[edit]

  • August 1:
    • Jesse Singal, writing for The Boston Globe, discusses his latest foray into /r/KotakuInAction, where he hypothesized that Gamergate had lost steam since Sam Biddle's tweets. They disagreed. He reiterates his stance from October where he states Gamergate's decentralized nature will be its undoing, with regards to long-term relevance at least, and refutes that this is because of unfair coverage in journalism when capital A Anonymous, which is structured in practically the same way, seems to maintain mainstream relevance.
    • Gamergaters on /r/KotakuInAction celebrate the retirement of Independent Games Festival chairman Brandon Boyer; they forget to mention he's retiring because he is undergoing treatment for cancer.
  • August 2: Christina Hoff Sommers is interviewed by William Kristol. Gamergate is discussed. Before the interview is posted, /r/KotakuInAction is mixed as to whether or not having one of the most well-known neocons and the man known in right wing circles as "The Guy Who's Wrong About Everything" in on Gamergate is a good thing; most know this proves their detractors right about them being a right-wing hate mob, while others think this will be beneficial for their campaign on Wikipedia for whatever reason and ignore those who say that Kristol is one of the worst journalists ever.
  • August 3: Eron Gjoni informs /r/KotakuInAction that he is appealing his restraining order to the Massachusetts State Supreme Court. Aaron Caplan, a professor of law at Loyola, and Eugene VolokhWikipedia of The Volokh ConspiracyWikipedia fame have both filed amici curiae in Gjoni's favor.
  • August 4:
    • Daryush "Roosh V" Valizadeh's "gaming news" website Reaxxion closes due to lack of interest.
    • Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian summarise events.
  • August 6: /r/KotakuInAction has a thread about alleged "collusion" between Cory Doctorow and John Scalzi. Scalzi responds.
  • August 8: Siobhan Thompson, a writer at College Humor posts two tweets mocking Gamergate. /r/KotakuInAction has a conniption, goes digging for undisclosed affiliate links and decides to collectively report College Humor to the FTC. Anticipated results:
Two tumbleweeds rolling across the screen, from left to right.
  • August 10: Michael Koretzky claims that there have been attempts to stop AirPlay; he also claims that "a former international boxing champion" will be part of the event's security detail.
    (Side note: One of the so-called attempts to stop AirPlay was Margaret Pless trying to write a story about him.)
  • August 11:
    • Al Jazeera America publishes an op-ed by Megan Condis in which she denounces Gamergate's various instances of hypocrisy when it comes to attacking progressive voices. She cites their defense of a "free market" to decide what goes in video games while decrying how Anita Sarkeesian's Kickstarter was successful enough that she should be allowed to create what she wants without their interference as well as their claims they stand for game creators' freedom of expression while attacking game creators who they don't like, such as Zoe Quinn and Depression Quest.
    • Felicia Day's memoir You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost) is released, and she discusses what happened to her with regards to Gamergate. In 2013, a group of posters on 4chan doxxed her, which led to a stalker make his way into her own home. She includes a tweet[note 2] from when she spoke up against Gamergate in October. Gamergaters bombard her book's Amazon.com page with bogus bad reviews. Someone better tell Anne Rice and the STGRB crowd.
    • Gamergate turns on Margaret "@_icze4r" Gel when she criticizes how she has been treated from within the mob, in particular how Gamergaters wanted to use her being SWATed to suit their narrative.
  • August 12: Google delists 8chan from its search engines for "suspected child abuse content". 8chan blames /r/GamerGhazi; /r/KotakuInAction blames Dan Olson and Sarah Nyberg. There remains no evidence the child porn on 8chan was put there by anyone other than its regular users.
  • August 13:
    • /r/KotakuInAction cries censorship over a moderator of /r/books deleting a thread they started about Anne Rice, leading to moderators being threatened.
    • The Seattle Times profiles Zoe Quinn one year after Gamergate began, and speaks to Kate Edwards, executive director of the International Games Developer Association and former game developer for Microsoft where she worked on Halo; Alyssa Jones, game producer at Microsoft and organizer of GeekGirlCon; Kim Swift, game designer at Amazon Game Studios who previously worked on Portal; and students at the DigiPen Institute of Technology.
  • August 14: The originally planned release date for Afterlife Empire, the game funded by 4channers-cum-Gamergaters through The Fine Young Capitalists to give themselves good PR for superficially supporting a so-called "feminist" cause. However, hours before its intended release, TFYC says they're delaying it to work on bugs reported to them by their early-access key backers.
  • August 15:
    • The SPJ AirPlay event is held in Miami, organized by Society of Professional Journalists Regional Director Michael Koretzky. Unlike the premiere of The Sarkeesian Effect, the attending audience is in the double digits.
      • The morning panel, featuring Allum Bokhari, Mark Ceb, and Ashe Schow, discusses five instances of unethical video game journalism within the past 5 years. The first two both concern Patricia Hernandez, a woman discovered to be friends with Zoe Quinn through Gamergate's digging; the first so-called lapse is an opinion piece she wrote, and the second is not disclosing her friendships with Anna Anthropy, Christine Love, or Zoe Quinn when writing articles that mentioned them or their work (even when those articles resembled nothing like a review). The third is about Jeff Gerstmann's firing from GameSpot for writing a negative review of a video game heavily advertised on the website. It's too bad that all of these happened before Gamergate was ever a thing and were only discovered because of Gamergate's hatred for Quinn, or fell way outside Gamergate's 5-year historical limit. They run out of time before getting to the next two points.
      • While this goes on, the YouTube live stream's comment section is flooded with ASCII swastikas, racial epithets, and at some point Koretzky and other panelists are doxxed.
      • Derek Smart, who is supposed to represent a "neutral" stance, is reported as saying this is a victory against SJWs.
      • After lunch, the afternoon panel featuring Milo Yiannopoulos, Christina Hoff Sommers, and Cathy Young is set to start and discuss how the media should cover Gamergate and controversies like it, but Yiannopoulos and Hoff Sommers derail it into an attack on feminism, with Koretzky doing his best to get things back on topic. Before anything else can happen, two bomb threats are called in to the Miami Police Department and The Miami Herald, forcing the venue and nearby homes to evacuate; Koretzky had previously said that bomb threats would not have been an issue. When the event is restarted, Koretzky allegedly uses a homophobic slur to start things off well. Oliver Campbell apparently also shows up despite his dramatic departure weeks earlier.
      • An individual claiming to be the same person who threatened Brianna Wu when one of her dogs had died and the one who attempted to SWAT @pixelgoth claims responsibility for the threat on AirPlay; the 8chan thread containing posts by the individual is later scrubbed of all evidence.
    • Zoe Quinn writes a retrospective blog post.
    • Erik Kain pens a brief blog entry on AirPlay.
    • Rise Miami News, a small "millennial" oriented blog, covers the bomb threat at AirPlay. They then open their inbox to accept editorials; as of writing, only one editorial critical of Gamergate has been submitted, and that's after they had to ask Gamergaters to stop sending them puff-pieces editorials featuring pro-Gamergate opinions.
  • August 16:
    • Daniel Nye Griffiths, another blogger on Forbes, writes a much more in depth entry on AirPlay, noting:
      • The poor attendance.
      • Lynn Walsh's "I hope you get to work with a good journalist" comment to Milo Yiannopoulos that may or may not be intentionally a sick burn.
      • How much Gamergate doesn't really matter if they're at best a few thousand people on the Internet.
      • How incredibly uncontroversial actual better ethics in video game journalism is.
      • How the actual journalists asked to appear already know how shitty a baseline Gawker is.
      • How Yiannopoulos, Christina Hoff Sommers, and Cathy Young are more appropriate for a panel on opposition to feminism rather than how to best discuss video game journalism, considering Yiannopoulos and Sommers tried to hijack the panel into being one on being anti-feminists.
      • How Gamergaters praise any sort of mainstream media message about them to use as tools in their war on Wikipedia.
      • And how anyone trying to discuss Gamergate a year after it started is at best 10 months late and people can see what Gamergate really stands for in their behavior rather than trying to interrogate them directly.
    • Donald Clarke at The Irish Times is more or less coerced by Gamergaters into covering AirPlay on his blog (having done so in October), and he deduces that it accurately shows Gamergate supporters' stance on things when 5 out of the 6 people chosen to represent them are all right-wingers, when Gamergaters continue to assert that they are apolitical.
  • August 17:
    • Michael Koretzky pens his thoughts on AirPlay, coming to the conclusion that Gamergate has both the people who believe in improving ethics in journalism on video game websites and people like Milo Yiannopoulos and Christina Hoff Sommers who only want to preach to the anti-feminism crowd, despite his attempts to steer the conversation back to being about ethics in video game journalism. He described the afternoon's bomb threat as a "mercy killing".
    • Voting on panels begins for the 2016 SXSW. Brianna Wu and Arthur Chu team up for a panel on harassent of women on the Internet; Randi Harper, Caroline Sinders, and Katherine Cross (who has extensively written about Gamergate with regards to feminist and transgender issues) have a similar panel on harassment; while Wu also has a panel on virtual reality. All three are linked on /r/KotakuInAction for vote brigading.
    • Livio De La Cruz, a program manager at Microsoft who also serves as a software engineer and does game design for fun publishes an extensive research report that shows that people who support Gamergate are vastly outnumbered by people who do not, despite their own internal claims of being representative of all gamers. He debunks their claim that the mainstream media ran with a narrative against them when many news outlets (including gaming websites) covered both sides of the story and determined that Gamergate was not what its supporters claim it is. And it highlights the fact that Breitbart is the only major website that has consistently pushed any pro-Gamergate material, while several others did not make the cutoff at an Alexa ranking of 11,000, arguing that they were far too obscure to have any significant impact. He also casts doubt on things "Xbro" has said.
  • August 20:
  • August 21:
    • Brianna Wu writes an editorial for The Guardian discussing how Gamergate's only power exists in comment sections and how Gamergate is only a part of how the tech industry is deeply affected by sexism.
    • The Fine Young Capitalists' Afterlife Empire, crowdfunded by Gamergaters and featuring waifu Vivian James, is released. Reception is non-existent outside of Gamergate websites.
  • August 22: The Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies comprehensively lose at the Hugos despite careful application of, per Theodore Beale (Vox Day), Gamergate methods. Beale, of course, considers everyone hating him and his slate voters and telling them to go away a moral victory. (George R. R. Martin hosts an afterparty where he gives out his own awards to the potential nominees that got bumped out of competition due to the Puppies' slates.)
  • August 23:
  • August 24:
  • August 25:
    • Eugene Volokh posts his amicus brief to his blog The Volokh Conspiracy on The Washington Post. His opinion is that Eron Gjoni's right to free speech was unfairly restricted by the restraining order preventing him from posting information about Zoe Quinn on the Internet. His argument rests on his insistence that "The Zoe Post" is protected speech despite having incited others to criminal activity because it lacked an imminent direction to readers. This argument is somewhat weakened because Gjoni has been on record as saying he wrote and shared "The Zoe Post" to cause the most damage to Quinn as possible and has actively participated in and conducted the mob to accomplish his goals, though the imminence of the acts he intended to incite is debatable, and is unfortunately potentially relevant from a legal standpoint. Not to mention that the incentive he gave to the Gamergaters funding his legal battle is a sequel to "The Zoe Post".
      (The link to Volokh's blog is not included here as he uses a name Quinn has ceased using publicly and has been used to harass them throughout Gamergate.)
    • HuffPost Live broadcasts the first of a week's worth of interviews concerning Gamergate. The first topic is "What the Internet Got Right & Wrong in #GamerGate", and features guests Andrew Eisen (GamePolitics), Caroline Sinders (digital anthropologist and computer scientist for IBM Watson), and David Rudin (Kill Screen Daily). All point out that Gamergate is what its participants want it to be at any particular time, and there is infighting within Gamergate as to what Gamergate is even about, Gamergate's tendency to dogpile and sealion, gatekeeping, and how the panelists will be "investigated" for participating in the panel and being critical of Gamergate.
    • Theodore Beale (Vox Day) releases his magnum opus SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police. "It analyzes well-known SJW attacks as well as the two most successful examples of resistance to the SJW Narrative, #GamerGate and Sad Puppies." Somehow he gets 200 pages out of this. It also features two Chapter 5s. For those who don't remember, Beale nominated himself for Best Editor in his Rabid Puppies slate at the 2015 Hugo Awards.
    • A group of programmers makes Free Reddit Check, an application that shows how many times someone has posted on various reactionary subreddits. /r/KotakuInAction is not pleased and also enthusiastic that they score so high.
  • August 26: The second HuffPost Live broadcast on the one year anniversary of Gamergate discusses "#GamerGate & The Ethics In Gaming Journalism", featuring panelists Georgina Young (TechRaptor), Cathy Young (Reason), and Jesse Singal (New York magazine, The Boston Globe). The two Ms. Youngs claim Gamergate was unfairly covered and that the liberal-leaning gaming publications led to this unfair coverage. Singal points out that Gamergate has yet to admit that it is political and conservative and that most of their complaints center around alleged progressive totalitarianism, which is the only way Cathy Young at Reason fits into Gamergate's Venn diagram of "ethics". The issue of harassment is raised, and Georgina Young mentions that it should just be expected of being someone on the Internet with some form of celebrity, brushing it off, shortly after Singal points out that Gamergaters seem to lack any and all empathy for those who say that they've been subject to the harassment she thinks is no problem to her personally.
  • August 27:
    • The third HuffPost Live segment discusses "#GamerGate: Gender Violence & Online Threats", featuring guests Brianna Wu, Shannon Sun-Higginson (director of documentary GTFOWikipedia), and Jenny Haniver (Not in the Kitchen Anymore). As in her editorial in The Guardian the week before, Wu says how Gamergate isn't itself the problem but rather a symptom of the larger problem of sexism in the video game and tech industries, and how when women say anything, they're harassed and they are not welcome in the gaming industry. Haniver discusses sexist comments and threats she has received simply by playing video games, and says that it's "horseshit" to believe Gamergate has nothing to do with sexist harassment in video games and the tech industry. Sun-Higginson mentions how her film GTFO was based on the toxicity within the video game scene long before Gamergate happened and how it only enforced what her film covered. Wu mentions how no one in Gamergate seems to have empathy for the people who are attacked, and how they attack the character of herself, Zoe Quinn, and Anita Sarkeesian in order to justify the other attacks they make on them, and they fight so they can't be held accountable for things done by the whole. Moderator Caroline Modarressy-Tehrani brings up what Georgina Young said the previous day with regards to threats being just something that happens on the Internet, and Wu responds that all harassment is reprehensible but Gamergate is indeed involved in what has happened to her and others. Haniver says that just because the threats are online doesn't make them any less serious. Sun-Higginson states that if it's about ethics in journalism, then it makes no sense that the majority of the women attacked are not journalists, and no one has denounced the trolls operating within Gamergate but rather relied on the No true Scotsman fallacy to deny culpability.
    • Gamergaters go after Ice-T after resurrecting their hate boner for the Law & Order: SVU episode "Intimidation Game", prompting this response from him. After sealioning him for hours, Ice-T says he is "pro-gamer" and tells them to ignore what the press says about gamers, which Gamergate takes as support for their side. Despite the fact Ice-T told one of them to "Eat A Dick".
    • Theophilus Pratt (author Alexandra Erin) releases John Scalzi Is Not A Very Popular Author And I Myself Am Quite Popular: How SJWs Always Lie About Our Comparative Popularity Levels. Not to be outdone by Theodore Beale (Vox Day), it features three Chapter 5s. It rapidly reaches number two in Amazon's political philosophy section, producing some truly beautiful screenshots. John Scalzi hopes to do the audiobook edition.
  • August 28:
    • HuffPost Live broadcasts its fourth and final discussion on Gamergate "#GamerGate: Authorship In The Online Space", featuring Jennie Bharaj (BasedGamer, a perennially failed Gamergate start-up), Elissa Shevinsky (author of Lean Out), Michael Koretzky, and of all people Oliver Campbell. Shevinsky, who claims "neutrality" on Gamergate, says "there's trolls on both sides" and "there needs to be proper investigative journalism into Gamergate" (there has been a ton of investigative journalism, but Gamergaters never like the results showing that they're a bunch of misogynistic assholes). Bharaj talks about the "love" she receives from Gamergate, tries to advertise her website and plenty of other pro-Gamergate websites, and goes into a nice victim blaming and "professional victim" downward spiral by saying people who get harassed online shouldn't talk about it or else they're just opening themselves up for more harassment. Koretzky blames the "biased" coverage on "lazy journalism" stemming from young journalists not reporting original content and old editors not knowing what Gamergate even is. Campbell parrots Koretzky's talking points, pats himself on the back for getting screencapped and posted on Imgur, compares Gamergate to Black Lives Matter (after Koretzky already said it was a poor example because BLM and Occupy Wall Street have representatives and Gamergate doesn't), calls himself the best person to talk to about Gamergate, gets called out by a commentor that his Twitter feed seems to be filled with anti-feminist and anti-SJW rhetoric, and somehow tries to generalize all gamers' opinions on politics in games after Caroline Modaressey-Tehrani tried to press him for his own personal opinion on the matter.
    • Reddit user "The_YoungWolf" posts his research regarding Gamergate's origins, showing extensive logs of both original 4chan posts on the "politically incorrect" board /pol/ that shows they were the ones to push Gamergate and attacks on Zoe Quinn onto other websites, and it wasn't necessarily the video games board /v/, proving Gamergate's origins in misogyny and reactionary voices rather than a concerted effort to push for better "ethics in video game journalism". He also cites #BurgersAndFries IRC channel logs showing the early decision to rope in attacks against Anita Sarkeesian into "The Quinnspiracy" by appealing to Phil "thunderf00t" Mason, coordination of #NotYourShield, the movement's obsession with "Cultural Marxism", its concerted efforts to defend 8chan from the accusations of hosting pedophiles and child pornography, and its direct connections to the /baphomet/ board. He concludes that Gamergate doesn't actually want to hold a proper conversation with anyone because they can't win, and they don't want to organize in any way because the harassment they perpetuate would be incredibly easy to trace back to them instead of when they pretend it's not from Gamergaters.
      • Commenters in the thread realize that he is right that Gamergaters do not want to have a conversation. They simply want to win in an argument and validate Gamergate as a result.
    • A Gamergater falsely claims to have communicated with the murderer of Alison Parker and Adam Ward,Wikipedia claiming he supported Gamergate. Gamergaters get mad that the lie has been circulated because people and the local news affiliate actually believed it. A completely separate Gamergater decides to be an asshole and changes their Steam profile information to that of the shooter.
    • Jordan Owen releases an update on The Sarkeesian Effect (actual information from 1:19 on): the film is finished, it's 2 hours 35 minutes, he has a distributor, and it will have some sort of release in the next few weeks and backers will get their promised swag. His next project will apply everything he's learnt on this one. "EVERYTHING." The update itself suggests he's been spending a bit much time watching David Lynch.
  • August 29:
    • Anita Sarkeesian speaks to Jessica Valenti for The Guardian about how her life has changed due to the attacks as a result of her project, as well as from Gamergate. She says that the media has actually ignored the facet of Gamergate that it was started as domestic abuse against Zoe Quinn by Eron Gjoni and that if it truly is about ethics in video game journalism then it makes no sense that no journalists were victimized to the extent Quinn, themself, and other women were. Sarkeesian also directly connects Gamergate to the harassment that surrounded her Kickstarter in 2012.
    • Free Reddit Check is taken down due to personal threats directed at its creators. One of them posts on /r/GamerGhazi, revealing that Sam Smith (a.k.a "Matthew Hopkins", a.k.a. "Vordrak") was behind the continued legal threats that led to the app's shuttering.
  • August 30: A Gamergate meetup in Birmingham decides that Five Guys is the perfect location. It definitely took some effort for this meme to be revived, considering there are only around 30 Five Guys restaurants in all of the UK.
    • Gamergaters on /r/KotakuInAction relish the response while continually mocking a third bomb threat that was sent to a meetup in Melbourne.
  • August 31:
    • Gamergater "TheLeoPirate" doubles down on Gamergate's baseless attacks on Sarah Nyberg by publishing a video accusing her of being a pedophile, accompanying it with the hashthag "#FreeEncyclopediaDramatica". The evidence used against her is gleaned from nearly 10-year-old IRC chatlogs obtained from when Gamergaters hacked her personal websites wherein, and here's the kicker, she is explicitly expressing disgust with having found pedophilic roleplaying on LiveJournal that she was not engaging in herself. Gamergate has for months been accusing her of pedophilia because of she had copied and pasted the content and they removed the context that showed she was clearly against it. The fact that this information has been available for 7 months at this point, alongside debunked accusations that Nyberg is the "Sarah Butts" who wrote for The Mary Sue that they have other context-less chatlogs that may not even be from Nyberg, shows the ethical standards of people who align with Breitbart in action.
    • Chelsea Clinton tweets out support for Anita Sarkeesian with regards to the article in The Guardian. Gamergaters don't react until about a week later.

September 2015[edit]

October 2015[edit]

  • October 1:
    • Zoe Quinn and Randi Harper speak to Motherboard about how bad the UN Broadband Commission's report was, such as the LaRouche supporter citation, as well as the inclusion of sex trafficking, sex work, and pornography which had no place in the discussion. Quinn and Harper both feel that the writers of the report had an agenda concerning pornography and anonymity on the Internet.
    • Chris Roberts, lead developer of Star Citizen, responds to an article on The Escapist which repeats all of Derek Smart's attacks on his game while claiming the comments come from former employees. He points out that the author is Lizzy Finnegan and may be pursuing her own agenda with the article considering the lack of ethics in her reporting.
    • In response to news and general chatter that the suspect in the Umpqua Community College shootingWikipedia had posted his intent to massacre on 4chan's /r9k/ board, Zoe Quinn notes that /r9k/ is where Gamergate began and where people also said they wanted to murder her. Gamergaters go apeshit, saying she's making it about her (she isn't) and that they shouldn't discuss gun control (totally not a conservative mob guys).
  • October 2: The Escapist hastily releases a response to Chris Roberts saying that their sources are legitimate and totally not Derek Smart. Posters on the Star Citizen subreddit discover that several of the statements in Lizzy Finnegan's original article appear verbatim on Glassdoor reviews for Star Citizen's development studio and they were all posted within the same week.
    • Chris Roberts updates his post from the previous day to include a formal response to The Escapist's edits. These include points that Roberts' wife and RSI's head of marketing Sandi Gardiner was never contacted to give her side of the claims against her despite The Escapist insisting they did, the "anonymous sources" were a group of former employees who all knew each other and acted in concert to sell the story, that there was no way to even contact the people who posted the shit reviews on Glassdoor because there's no messaging system there, The Escapist's claim that one of the sources was vetted because he had shown his company ID card is false because RSI doesn't give out ID cards, that The Escapist was not the only website sold the story and other websites had been contacted to publish the attacks but The Escapist was the only one to bite, Derek Smart called Roberts personally to tell him the story was going out hours before it went up, and that Lizzy Finnegan has zero background in journalism to be trusted with a story like this, particularly because she extensively talks to Derek Smart on Twitter (more than any Gamergater can point out that someone who said "Gamergate is bad" follows Zoe Quinn and tweeted at her once). Derek Smart claims inside knowledge.
  • October 3:
    • FUNimation issues a non-statement with regards to the email campaigning Gamergate did in response to the line in the Prison School episode.
    • Gamergaters start a petition to get Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian arrested under...the Logan Act?Wikipedia Apparently the UN Broadband Commission and UN Women count as a foreign government with which the U.S. is at war and Quinn and Sarkeesian are supposed to be arrested because they are attempting to use a foreign government to stifle American constitutional protections to free speech. So not only is Gamergate totally not about these two women, Gamergaters are experts at applying an esoteric law favored by xenophobic conspiracy theorists that in 200 years has only resulted in one indictment.
    • Milo Yiannopoulos, along with fellow reactionary Lauren Southern, attends a slut walk in his own special way and is appalled when he and Southern are removed from the event for "telling" the women their "opinions" on rape culture. Gamergate gets angry for them.
  • October 5: Zoe Quinn responds to the petition to have them tried for treason under the Logan Act.
  • October 6: The Honey Badger Radio Brigade reveals more of their plans for their lawsuit against Calgary Expo. Their requested damages? $50 grand. The amount they raised to hire their disbarred lawyer? $40 grand.
  • October 7: A representative for the UN International Telecommunication Union apologizes for the inaccuracies and poor sourcing in the Broadband Commission's report, saying the original version was rushed. An updated set of highlights from a new version of the report is released, omitting many of the problematic and irrelevant topics found in the original report.
  • October 9:
  • October 10: Randi Harper reveals that Gamergaters have used the hacked Patreon data to dox her patrons and intimidate them to stop funding, as well as send the information off to Milo Yiannopoulos.
  • October 11: Eron Gjoni does "research" to prove the Quartz article from the other day wrong by asking Gamergaters to RT his question asking if they're pro-choice. Ethics ensues.
  • October 12:
  • October 13:
    • In a stopped clock moment, posters on /r/KotakuInAction call out Sam Smith (a.k.a "Matthew Hopkins", a.k.a. "Vordrak") for the bullshit he pulled.
    • It turns out Gamergaters are actually trying to conspire against the United Nations for having Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian speak during a panel on violence against women online. Gamergaters are currently fighting people who have been active for years in trying to ensure human rights offline apply to online, while believing that their right to free speech is somehow going to be suppressed by intergovernmental cooperation to end online harassment.
  • October 17: Gamergaters on /r/KotakuInAction have a grand old time when Sam Harris uses a mention of Gamergate to verbally criticize western feminism.
  • October 20:
  • October 23: Motherboard criticizes SXSW for failing to acknowledge safety concerns with regards to The Open Gaming Society's panel which is transparently about Gamergate, considering two prior Gamergate-oriented events were subject to bomb threats. The Open Gaming Society's founder Perry Jones says his group keeps a "neutral stance" on Gamergate, despite the obvious links all of the panel's proposed speakers have with it.
  • October 26:
    • Caroline Sinders and Randi Harper both say that their SXSW panel with Katherine Cross on preventing harassment online has been cancelled because of violent threats. Ashe Schow reports that the Gamergate panel (which she actually refers to as such) has also been cancelled, while equivocating the others' panel as "anti-Gamergate".
    • SXSW releases a statement on their decision to cancel both the Gamergate panel and the anti-harassment panel after having announced their inclusion the week before. Their explanation also plays into a balance fallacy.
    • Zoe Quinn reveals details they know about Gamergate's intended SXSW panel.
      • The panel was planned openly on Reddit, like previous attempts at falsely presenting a legitimate face.
      • Mercedes Carrera was herself involved in Gamergate's last attempt at trying to have a legitimate face when it came to the AbleGamers charity stream debacle.
      • Nick Robalik has sent her several dozen harassing messages on Twitter and even stalked her at a convention he had spoken at, and took a photo to prove it to Gamergate.
      • "The Open Gaming Society" has only been around since March 2015 because it is solely an attempt for Gamergate to have a public face while still repeating all of their debunked talking points.
      • The final speaker on the panel would have been Lynn Walsh, one of the speakers at AirPlay who was supposed to represent the uninvolved Society of Professional Journalists.
      • And Quinn had sent SXSW their concerns about the panel and its members' prior actions but received no response other than a confirmation that their email had been received.
    • Perry Jones announces that host the panel somewhere else with their own money. Sounds like another fundraising campaign.
    • Sarah Nyberg reveals that a founding member of The Open Gaming Society was a Gamergater who doxxed her earlier in the year.
  • October 27:
    • In the wake of the SXSW panel cancellations, people uncover The Open Gaming Society's "Doctrine of Gaming" and have a field day with how this was supposed to be Gamergate's Trojan Horse into legitimacy. And also Mark Kern signed it twice. And not even in two separate parts of the document. There are only 6 signatories, and he's two of them.
    • BuzzFeed and Vox Media withdraw from participation in SXSW unless the cancelled panels are reinstated.
    • The Mary Sue reports on the SXSW cancellations, and notes that The Open Gaming Society's founder Perry Jones revealed that the issues with hosting their panel was with regards to event resources, and not at all the threats levied at the other panels. The response he received from SXSW also shows how much the event organizers are applying a balance fallacy to Gamergate those victimized by the mob.
    • Arthur Chu writes about his experience in dealing with SXSW, including his attempts to have festival organizers prevent and remove harassing comments left on the brigaded panel voting pages as well as how he was misled into believing Gamergate's "Open Gaming Society" panel would not have been approved at all, considering it was never put up to public vote and it never went past the panel advisory committee, meaning SXSW staff approved it without any oversight. He calls bullshit on how Randi Harper's anti-harassment panel as being cancelled to serve as some sort of "anti-Gamergate" panel to appease Gamergaters, when Chris Kluwe somehow managed to evade Gamergate's attention altogether in the voting process with his anti-harassment panel which explicitly mentioned Gamergate in its description.
    • Brianna Wu speaks to The Frame and says that this could have all been avoided, because she and others have been to smaller venues where security issues were handled much better, but Gamergate had set a precedent that if they threaten violence no one gets free speech.
    • Re/code is told by sources that SXSW is attempting damage control by dedicating an all-day event on panels to combat online harassment. The panel hosted by Randi Harper, Caroline Sinders, and Katherine Cross has been reinstated, but there is no information on the panel by The Open Gaming Society.
  • October 28:
    • The American Civil Liberties Union releases a statement on SXSW's mishandling of the panel cancellations and how their actions have effectively made them succumb to the Heckler's veto.
    • Former Texas State Senator and gubernatorial candidate Wendy DavisWikipedia condemns SXSW for empowering misogynist harassers.
    • Leigh Alexander writes in Wired how she had been contacted after SXSW 2015 for her input on a panel discussing Gamergate at the 2016 event. She had advised the SXSW representative to avoid focusing on harassers and also avoid having the victims come in and talk about their experiences, but rather have a forum to discuss anti-harassment and community-building as well as discussions on the creations and perspectives of women and other marginalized voices in tech. Alexander recognizes that SXSW wants to have diversity of opinions at their event, but they refused to acknowledge one group's concerns as a result.
    • Chris Kluwe writes on the blunder by SXSW in his own way, particularly how none of the events cancelled had anything to do with Gamergate other than the panelists being harassed nonstop for a year by Gamergaters, as well as criticize them for allowing the obvious Gamergater panel through without any outside insight.
    • Milo Yiannopoulos's use of Gamergate to boost his readership on Breitbart leads his editors to place him in charge of their new technology section. Questions posed to him by Gamergaters and his answer of not knowing how to answer instead shows how little he actually knows about technology (which is apparently nothing at all).
  • October 30:
    • SXSW officially announces the reinstatement of Randi Harper et al.'s panel "Level Up: Overcoming Harassment in Games" as well as The Open Gaming Society's Gamergate Trojan Horse "SavePoint: A Discussion on the Gaming Community" and that they will be part of an Online Harassment Summit at SXSW on March 12, 2016. Others who will speak as part of the summit include Brianna Wu, Rep. Katherine Clark (D-Mass.), Wendy Davis, Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, amongst several professors of law and civil rights advocates.
    • Randi Harper, Caroline Sinders, and Katherine Cross all announce their intentions not to participate in SXSW's anti-harassment summit so long as The Open Gaming Society's Gamergate smokescreen panel is included as part of this event. Brianna Wu and Sarah Jeong (Motherboard) also announce they will not be participating in the event so long as the Gamergate panel is considered part of the anti-harassment summit. Harper says she is trying to work with SXSW to solve the problems they keep getting themselves into. Earlier in the day, she revealed Mercedes Carrera was directing her followers to harass her; Milo Yiannopoulos felt left out after Harper said her panel wouldn't participate if he showed up at SXSW, so he joined in the dogpiling as well.
  • October 31: Australian Greens Senator Scott Ludlam speaks to Mashable at PAX Australia on how a government would not be able to solve a problem like Gamergate directly. Making a law wouldn't solve Gamergate, but understanding the issues of gender and diversity that caused it would help understand how to address the concerns on a larger scale.

November 2015[edit]

  • November 3: Arthur Chu writes about how much SXSW fucked up by including The Open Gaming Society's panel as part of the "anti-harassment summit" when they were told multiple times that Gamergaters on that panel are responsible for the harassment directed at the women on the other panel, as well as the speakers they had asked to participate in the talk.
  • November 5: Another Gamergate sockpuppet came to light when "Alison Prime" attempted to raise money to assist their family in recovering from a housefire. "Alison Prime" had previously been held up by Christina Hoff Sommers at AirPlay as "a lesbian gamer who apparently enjoys gazing at images of busty women," which proved that Gamergate was not just a bunch of anti-social losers living in their parents' basements. "Alison Prime" also reported that they were driven to tears when Tim Schafer made jokes using a sockpuppet at the GDC Awards. And on top of all of that, "Alison Prime" denied that transwomen could truly understand the plight of women like "her" - because they never had a uterus, claiming hers was removed while making a transphobic attack on Brianna Wu. All of this came crashing down when "Alison Prime" was called out by the person whose photos they were using to pose as a woman. Nacho shield.
  • November 6: Zoe Quinn is writing a memoir titled Crash Override: How to Save the Internet From Itself, to be published by Simon & Schuster's Touchstone imprint in September 2016. The film rights to the memoir have been acquired by Amy Pascal, the result of a bidding war by several movie and TV studios, and Scarlett Johansson is one of many actresses interested in starring.
  • November 13: SXSW announces more speakers for their anti-harassment summit. Randi Harper, Caroline Sinders, and Katherine Cross will be holding their anti-harassment panel as part of the summit, as Gamergate's the Open Gaming Society's panel will not be part of the summit but be held on a completely different day.
  • November 14: Veerender Jubbal discovers that Gamergaters had photoshopped one of his selfies into framing him as one of the terrorists responsible for the attacks in Paris (and also adding a dildo in the background). Sky News Italy uses the photo in a story on the attacks. Gamergaters gloat that they've created unethical journalism and Milo Yiannopoulos openly mocks and threatens to write an article on Jubbal; he follows through with it the next day and fills it full of tweets Jubbal made mocking white people but titles it in a way that makes it seem he's sympathetic.
  • November 17:
  • November 22: Gamergaters have rallied behind Gregory Alan Eliott, a Canadian man facing criminal harassment charges for cyberstalking and threatening two feminists over Twitter, after all of their figureheads and general right wing rag writers in Canada willingly misinterpret the case against him as one of freedom of his speech and feminists arguing with him and calling it harassment when he responded back (all while the complainants cannot respond in public until the sentencing in January 2016). To date, he has received over US$40k.
  • November 23: The Columbia Journalism Review examines why Gamergate and the Society of Professional Journalists have become entwined, highlighting how Gamergate sees endorsement by the SPJ as a means to have the media relabel them away from being a hate mob and how the SPJ may be seeking to revitalize itself by courting video game reviewers. Others that spoke to CJR were more critical, with some saying that there's pressure against the media to write a factual record of what has happened and others who believe that Gamergate shouldn't be approached by the media in this way as they are nothing more than trolls or rather they are not a group with a fringe movement but the fringe movement itself and it sets up a false equivalence between Gamergate supporters and their critics.
  • November 24: Japanese video game developer Team Ninja reveals that Koei Tecmo's Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 won't be released in the west allegedly over the issues surrounding the depiction of women in video games in western countries. The manager of the Twitter account for import website Play-Asia blames it on SJWs and promises to sell the Asian editions of the games which come with English subtitles. This is all despite the fact no one in the west ever gave a shit about DOAX3 to petition it not be released.
  • November 30: The Honey Badger Radio Brigade reveals that the disbarred lawyer they hired with Gamergater money told them to sue the wrong legal entity to get back at Calgary Expo for kicking them out. They seem to ignore Calgary Expo's explanation that there was never a contractual obligation between the event organizers and Honey Badger Alison Tieman, and even if there was a contract, Tieman and her associates violated it and therefore they had the right to kick them out. But no, it's Harry Kopyto's fault for picking the wrong target and not a complete waste of a bunch of Canadian taxpayer and reactionary idiot money.

December 2015[edit]

2016[edit]

January 2016[edit]

February 2016[edit]

March 2016[edit]

April 2016[edit]

May 2016[edit]

June 2016[edit]

July 2016[edit]

  • July 20: Milo Yiannopoulos is banned from Twitter on the grounds that he was inciting his followers into sending GhostbustersWikipedia actress Leslie JonesWikipedia a deluge of racist harassment by repeatedly tweeting insults at her and sharing fake tweets of her making bigoted remarks. As usual, multiple people fake Tweets after the fact implying it was a false flag or falsely accuse several Gamergate targets as perpetrators. Because it's actually about ethics in how busting makes you feel good.
  • July 21: Zoe Quinn announces that Eron Gjoni had tried to appeal his restraining order, which Quinn had initially placed on him but since vacated, to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court after being rejected at a lower appeals court. The SJC also rejected his appeal, ensuring that Commonwealth of Massachusetts law allows domestic violence victims to modify their restraining orders should the original restrictions cause more harm than good. Quinn then assures their followers that they will return to work on "the finest vampire night bus smut fanfic game ever made".

August 2016[edit]

  • August 15: Cathy Young commemorates the second anniversary of Gamergate by posting a link on Twitter to an interview with Eron Gjoni she wrote for Heat Street, in which she gets Gjoni to admit that if he had to do the Zoe post all over again, he would. [2]
  • August 19: Max Read, the former editor-in-chief of Gawker, publishes his piece "Did I Kill Gawker?" where he names a total of six parties that he argues to have played a role in the later demise of Gawker — listing GamerGate as one of them. Regarding the fatal inaccuracy of GamerGate's initial premises (Zoe Quinn's alleged "sex-bought game review"), he stated;

That no such review ever actually appeared on [Kotaku] should tell you a lot about Gamergate’s relationship to the truth; that Gamergaters believe this is how sex works should tell you a lot about the Gamergate demographic. But none of the specifics of the story really mattered, because ultimately Kotaku was being targeted less for specific ethical violations than for its critical coverage of the portrayal of women and minorities in video games and the sexism of the gaming community.

September 2016[edit]

December 2016[edit]

  • December 6: A Freedom of Information act request to the FBI is fulfilled, resulting in pages of investigatory notes regarding Gamergater harassment and threats. Many pages are redacted per court orders. There are multiple instances where people parroting gamergate and anti-feminist talking points engage in targeted harassment, including someone who discussed Gamergate on 4chan, and mocked one of the targets he considered a "professional victim." To draw attention to false victimhood, this person sent them threats. Another gator admitted to the FBI that they made 40-50 phone calls with threats.
  • December 20: Brianna Wu announces her run for a Massachusetts Congress seat in 2018. "She fought the Alt.Right and won. Now she's fighting for all of us. Fearless leadership for 2018."

2017 onwards[edit]

2017[edit]

  • July: Lane Davis, a.k.a. seattle4truth, an integral gamergate "digger," who allegedly uncovered nefarious connections between the gaming press and DARPA, is accused of murdering his father, with court documents saying he said the victim was a "leftist pedophile."
  • September 6: Zoe Quinn's book Crash Override, on their Gamergate experience and how to deal with online harassment, is released.
  • October 21: Game developer site NeoGAF, one of the first gaming communities to take a firm stance against GamerGate, goes up in flames after accusations of sexual harrasment are made against site administrator Tyler "EvilLore" Malka. In response to this, a large part of the moderation staff resigned and most site regulars requested to be banned. A few days later, several prominent former NeoGAF members & former moderators launched a new forum named ResetEra.
  • November 4: Techraptor announces a change in focus to mark many of their old stories as "Not up to current editorial standards" and remove four stories due to them being unsupported attack pieces. They state that they were always neutral on gamergate but now are even more apolitical.

2018[edit]

2019[edit]

  • February 6: Prominent Gamergate supporter and right-wing activist Mercedes Carrera is arrested for eight counts of sexually abusing a girl under the age of 10. Gamergaters pretend they never knew her.
  • August 27: Elder Scrolls composer Jeremy Soule is accused of sexual assault. This inspires Zoe Quinn to reveal accusations of Night in the Woods programmer and designer Alec Holowka involving sexual abuse. Meanwhile, other people within the indie gaming scene also expose developers, in a moment compared to the #MeToo movement.
  • August 29: The other developers of Night in the Woods, Scott Benson and Bethany Hockenberry, cut ties with Alec Holowka, following other accusers revealing similar stories about him.
  • September 1: Alec Holowka's sister, Eileen, reveals that Holowka passed away that day, following years of struggle with mental illness. In the post, she implies that the accusations against Holowka are true, clarifying that she discourages abuse against Quinn, while still mourning the loss of her brother. Due to the resulting furore, she is forced to close her account, with many Gamergaters blaming her and Zoe Quinn for Holowka's death.
  • September 3: Following Alec Holowka's death, Scott Benson published an article on Medium about Alec's passing and his past relationship with Alec.
  • September 3-10 Right-wing news outlet The Post Millennial publishes hit-pieces claiming that Zoey Quinn lied about their accusations about Alec.[3] [4] [5]

2020[edit]

  • November: Buzzfeed Studios announces the film 1up a comedy movie about an underdog all-female Esports team that is said will cover gamergate in the film. [6] Wu and Quinn both come out against the film saying that it was wrong to make a comedy over the controversy. [7]

2021[edit]

  • January: Brianna Wu states in the aftermath of the 2021 United States Capitol attack that “everything I tried to get the FBI to act on in the aftermath of GamerGate has now come true...We told people that if social media companies like Facebook and Reddit did not tighten their policies about these communities of organized hate, that we were going to see violent insurrection in the United States … We told people that these communities were organizing online for violence and extremism. That, unfortunately, has proven to be true.” Wu also states that while Big Tech recent changes were a step in the right direction, she worries it may be "too little, too late." [8]
  • May 25: TechRaptor announces a complete removal of all Gamergate articles, citing that they violated the journalistic ethic of "do no harm" by writing the articles in the first place.
  • July 26: The review editor of TechRaptor describes Gamergate as an "insane alt-right hate group" on /r/games.
  • October 4: Mind Riot Entertainment announces a fictionalised TV series on Gamergate, working with Brianna Wu.

2022[edit]

  • October 28: Right-wing conspiracy theorist David Depape attacks Paul Pelosi, husband of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, with a hammer. Depape describes himself as radicalised by Gamergate: "How did I get into all this. Gamer gate it was gamer gate."

Notes[edit]

  1. ↑ Quinn uses they/them pronouns.
  2. ↑ The tweet was as follows: @feliciaday Felicia could have supported #gamergate and became a hero. But she took the SJW shill route and paid the price.

See also[edit]

External links[edit]

References[edit]

  1. ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_mp7P87WFQ
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