[mort96]

I remember the start of GamerGate well, it was all people screaming about "ethics in games journalism". But you're obviously right that that it wasn't really about ethics in games journalism, your description is probably a better reflection of the actual psychology of the people involved.

[hnuser123456]

And then there are people, gamers, who were actually just dismayed with the conflicts of interest that ran rampant in the orthodox "games journalism" space and didn't give two shits about the personal drama side of the story, although that's mostly solved by finding your favorite youtube reviewer. And those who were genuinely focused on improving discovery of good indie games were subjected to some pretty horrible commentary that completely missed the point. Now there are smaller dedicated publications or channels that actually do regularly (weekly/monthly) review a decent volume of new promising indie games to help discover standouts, but that turned out to be a niche that the existing publications didn't want to keep up with, and a niche that suddenly many people denied even existed, for some reason? People who can't contemplate that there are amazing passion projects out there to be discovered, I suppose because those people can't imagine actually working hard on something people would enjoy, because they would rather spend their time raining on others' parades instead.

But it was too close of a tangent towards criticism of establishment journalism in general, so of course establishment journalism countered back with the only weapon it has, and suddenly the vast majority of people forgot any of it had to do with reviewing and promoting good indie video games.

People who make indie games are not losers. People who want good games to be promoted are not losers. It is an art. It's not for everyone. People who just want to play the latest AAA sequel can stick to those. But if you've ever tried a niche indie game and been more impressed than you expected, you know it's art, and you'd want other people discovering and promoting the good ones, and talking about what makes them special.

[mort96]

I am not going to re-litigate GamerGate here. There were people who were genuinely concerned about ethics in games journalism, sure. But it did not become the defining event in the online-political sphere of the mid/late '10s simply due to genuine concerns about ethics in games journalism.

[hnuser123456]

Correct, because a large portion of the public has no idea what indie games are, or how the software industry works, but they know that angry nerds are funny.

[mort96]

That's not how it went down. Sorry. It wasn't "the big bad left laughing at some video game nerds whose feelings were hurt".

[astrange]

What I remember is that there were a subset of people I was acquainted with online who when this started all /immediately/ started posting things exactly like the comment this is a reply to; "these people just don't respect women, you all need to sit down and listen to women and center women" kinds of things. They were all men; mostly straight men although some were bi, and all generally thought to be fine although known for being a little performative and mildly, as they say, horny on main a little too often.

Every single one of them later turned out to be a sexual predator. This is now known as the "softboi" or "male feminist". This kind of person is still out there and is dangerous as ever, so it's important to keep an eye out.

(None of these people were in tech; instead all my tech coworkers who were men and lived in SF also heard "we need to respect women", but being kind of autistic engineers took it too literally and didn't seem to know any women, so they seemed to think the right thing to do was go out and find a woman and literally just start respecting them. This didn't work out for them and they mostly ended up getting scammed by scammers who happened to be women.)