Ctrl-Alt-Del: GamerGate as a precursor to the rise of the alt-right

Abstract

Videogames and the gaming industry in the 21st-century generate more employment and revenue than either the professional music industry or the Hollywood film industry, making videogames both highly lucrative and extremely influential on a cultural level. When we consider the significance of cultural artifacts-like videogames, or television, films, or books-on the development of cultural mores and our understanding of society, leadership, and followership, it is therefore important that we consider the influence of an industry as large and widespread as the games industry. In this article, I examine the particular influence of an online movement known as "GamerGate," how it connects to the history and origins of the internet and videogames, how it connects to the subsequent rise of the alt-right, and what we can learn about the altright as a small but significant portion of contemporary Western culture-including what we need to do to dismantle it.

An assemblage of avatars: Digital organization as affective intensification in the GamerGate controversy

“…These features are not unique to GamerGate, but have been observed in the rise of the alt-right (Nagle, 2017) as well as in efforts to resist it (Just and Muhr, 2019), indicating more general tendencies of how affective intensification works to constitute digital organization. In fact, the events of GamerGate have been linked directly to the rise of the alt-right and, by extension, the election of Donald Trump (Bezio, 2018; Lees, 2016; Massanari and Chess, 2018). What is at stake here may be the detrimental entry into mainstream digital publics of socio-cultural norms and organizational practices that have hitherto been confined to the extremes of online subculture ((Massanari, 2017; Mortensen, 2016; Nagle, 2017).…”

Violência contra as mulheres nos games:

“…Entre os argumentos mais comuns estava que as feministas queriam mudar o foco dos videogames para as relações de gênero e utilizar os jogos para manipular a próxima geração de homens, além de lucrar com suas causas por meio da divulgação delas no contexto dos videogames (Bezio, 2018). Milo Yiannopoulos, jornalista e ativista de extrema-direita, utilizou a ocasião do GG para impulsionar a divulgação de suas ideias.…”

PewDiePie, racism and Youtube’s neoliberalist interpretation of freedom of speech

“…‘Gamergate’ was an escalation of this kind of exclusion and harassment, and even though it made the seriousness of the problem more known outside the gaming community, it also gave force to the reactionary core narrative of culture war in which the ‘progressives’ are trying to destroy the Internet culture as an area of freedom and White ‘geek’ masculinity. Unfortunately, Gamergate helped the alt-right movement to raise their popularity when some of alt-right’s main figures, such as Milo Yiannoupoulos, encouraged harassers through Twitter and YouTube (Bezio, 2018; Salter, 2018).…”