This article was quite disjointed, dragged on and its rhetoric grounded in pseudo-evolutionary theory wasn't too good. Nonetheless, it is still one of the more

This article was quite disjointed, dragged on and its rhetoric grounded in pseudo-evolutionary theory wasn't too good. Nonetheless, it is still one of the more interesting takes on GamerGate, as a person who has almost no social media presence and is not involved in it. The author makes a good point in that the commonly presented narrative of well-meaning feminist cultural critics being targeted by misogynistic dudebro gamers, is a rather exaggerated one. The more realistic explanation is that we're watching, as the author states, a cultural war which is vested in past alliances. There's a few differences, though. First of all, GamerGate is far more: a) inconsequential and b) obnoxious, than the historical examples in this article. Let's be perfectly clear: GamerGate doesn't matter. It is about as a noteworthy as a Usenet flame war from the 1980s, and I'd argue the latter has much more substance and enlightening content than most of GamerGate. I support neither side, but sympathize with both to small extents. I sympathize with the feminists' desires to inject more discourse as to gaming on a meta level, and I just as well sympathize with gamers' desires to keep gaming outlets apolitical. That said, I condemn the misogynistic attacks. But I also condemn the knee-jerk reaction from the feminists when they all began writing "Gamers are dead. Gamers should not be your audience." articles in unison. Can you imagine if all tech bloggers suddenly started writing "Programmers are dead." articles over some drama going on at Silicon Valley? I bet people wouldn't be too pleased to be lumped in with subcultures they have nothing in common with. Where the gamers lose my support are in one thing, mostly: their inability to organize. They have no idea what they're doing. They did score some victories, like making The Escapist harden its policy on journalistic integrity, but those were really side effects of all the shit being thrown around, rather than a result of any concerted effort to take a stance. It used to be about Zoe Quinn, then about some vague notion of "journalistic integrity", now it's about war for the sake of it. All with a lot of hatred, vitriol and threats thrown in between. That said, the "gamer" contingent is far broader demographically than the feminist one, which is significantly more narrow. Where the feminists lose my support, is not that they want to encourage debate, but they're absolutely awful at it. "Video game journalism" is an oxymoron, in my opinion. It is some of the lowest quality clickbait you'll see that advertises itself as journalism (at least Buzzfeed doesn't claim to be that... or does it, I don't know?). Really, it's blogging. Plain and simple. There are no grand insights on oppression or disadvantage to be gained from the feminist diatribes. Instead, you largely either have the same hostile anti-gamer sentiment that tries to attack, instead of discuss, and all the articles that cherry pick scenes from video games and conclude that the whole game is "sexist", "racist" or whatever. It's nothing but bottom-of-the-barrel clickbait that masquerades itself as some gripping social commentary, but is really garbage. And then they're notoriously bad at taking any criticism. In this regard, GamerGate is nothing but a blip on the radar that really looks notable, but isn't. It's mostly confined to flaming on social media (particularly Twitter) and nothing will come out of it. It will die out soon, and the new conflict will start again just as quickly.