What exactly is #gamergate?
Not Gamersgate.com, the PC game digital store and competitor to Steam. The hashtag that’s been trending on Twitter and the internet for a couple months.
Well, as a indie developer, I’m still not exactly sure, but I tried to look it up. I looked up a few random youtube videos about it (which I post here), and encourage you to do your own research and make your own opinions.
From what I hear, here’s some ideas related to this movement:
– there have been reports and rumors that certain game journalists and developers have been “too friendly,” leading to more news with some bias being written, against how true journalism should be written.
– some indie-friendly groups are also corrupt according to rumors and reports.
– some journalists have supposedly called all gamers and readers of these sites disrespectful names.
– some game journalists are “in cahoots” with each other.
– most game news website have not and will not mention #gamergate.
– some gamers are frustrated for letting journalists decide what they want to hear and how they feel, and feel misrepresented when described what being a “gamer” means.
– this movement largely started with one or two specific developers who I won’t name here.
– some developers and bloggers are using #gamergate for more fame and attention, some aren’t, and it’s hard to tell who is who. I’ve seen many twitter people use #gamergate with posts that seemingly have nothing to do with anything people are arguing about.
– there’s a divide between journalists and gamers, causing them to feel like #gamergate is a war between the two groups.
– game journalism as it used to be may die out soon, if #gamergate works.
Personally, I still don’t know exactly what #gamergate is. It feels like a bunch of random issues that people are pointing out for the first time. I think game journalists have been “corrupt” for a long time. I don’t respect big game news websites in the same way I do newspapers and magazines. These are essentially giant blog websites that have gotten a lot of readers, nothing more. And of course they’re corrupt. They’re gamers too, they get excited about the news and people they cover even more so than we do, and their personal bias can’t be helped.
Right now, it feels like #gamergate is mostly made up of thousands of developers, mostly indie, trying to use all of this as an excuse to explain why they haven’t gotten the attention they feel they deserve. It’s grown to be a big angry group of people that bring up #gamergate online every single day. Why are they being silenced, blocked from Twitter and blogs and threads? Because they are talking about it too often in places that don’t have anything to do with it. Give it a break for a while, friends. Don’t just leave comments, but instead, pretend the site doesn’t exist and stop visiting it, that’ll be a silent bullet to sites you think are wrong.
I’m sure all of these point-of-views are right and that there are serious issues with “games journalism” as a whole. I am excited about how much steam #gamergate is getting. But I would be a lot more excited if I knew exactly what it stood for. Boy, I miss paper magazines…
