With the recent release of the move Ready Player One, social justice warrior journalists have, once again, taken the opportunity to demonize and vilify the Gamergate movement, even though it hasn't really been a thing for a couple of years now. Apparently there's some extremely tenuous connection between the two things. Or no connection at all, necessarily; they just love to beat the dead horse. It seems that they just can't get over it. They need to get pounding on it and use it as a weapon.
If anything, that shows how effective the movement was. It shook them to the core, and they just can't get over it.
One thing I have noticed is that the social justice warriors don't seem to have a good definition of what they think "Gamergate" was.
If you ask a gamergater, the definition is relatively simple, straightforward, and unambiguous: It was a consumer revolt against corruption in gaming journalism, and against the anti-gamer sentiments prevalent in such journalism at the time. It can also be justly argued that an opposition to the social justice ideology that had permeated and invaded much of gaming journalism was also part of the movement.
However, if you ask social justice warriors what "Gamergate" was, you'll probably get a dozen different answers, all of them vague. Something to do with "sexism" and "misogyny", to "drive away women from gaming", or something.
They actually never give any explanation to how it would be possible to organize thousands, even tens of thousands, of people to jointly engage in some kind of harassment campaign against women, to drive them away from gaming. In their minds, they don't need to. They have this mental image of the average gamer being a sexist misogynist woman-hating nerd, who will immediately jump to the bandwagon of harassing women if they can.
In fact, many SJW journalists still think of gamers like that. And it was precisely one of the reasons why Gamergate was so necessary (although the major reason was the actual corruption in gaming journalism, eg. in the form of journalists taking bribes to write positive reviews of games.)
One expression you see a lot from many SJW women is that they were "targeted by gamergate". That's it. "Targeted by gamergate." No need to even explain what exactly that means.
What I think it actually means is that these women (and I'm assuming here they are women who have indeed been the victims of online harassment, rather than inventing or exaggerating) experienced some harassment during the Gamergate incident, and associated the harassment with the movement itself, for the mere reason that it happened at the same time period. Some trolls might even have directly messaged them mentioning "gamergate" explicitly, and thus these women making the conclusion that, thus, they have been "targeted by gamergate". Whatever that's supposed to mean.
Some of these women may be genuine in their belief that they were "targeted by gamergate". After all, when the social justice narrative has vilified the movement so much, and painted it as some kind of conspiracy by sexist gamers against women, wanting to harass and drive them away, these women are very likely to believe those claims, and thus when they experienced harassment, especially if it was in any way related to video gaming, they made the connection, regardless of whether it was warranted or not.
Of course when you think about it, the sentiment "targeted by gamergate" makes little sense. It would imply some kind of central organization, some kind of group meetings in this organization, where people decide to "target" a particular victim. Gamergate was not any sort of organization. At most, it had some prominent people who spoke in its favor, but that's about it.
Even the most charitable interpretation would be "targeted by people who claimed to do it in the name of gamergate" (assuming they indeed did that). Which is a rather different proposition. Just because somebody does something heinous in the name of something, that doesn't automatically mean that that something is to blame. (After all, if somebody commits a murder in the name of social justice, and explicitly expresses so, should that be interpreted as social justice advocating for murder, and the victim having been "targeted by social justice"?)
If anything, that shows how effective the movement was. It shook them to the core, and they just can't get over it.
One thing I have noticed is that the social justice warriors don't seem to have a good definition of what they think "Gamergate" was.
If you ask a gamergater, the definition is relatively simple, straightforward, and unambiguous: It was a consumer revolt against corruption in gaming journalism, and against the anti-gamer sentiments prevalent in such journalism at the time. It can also be justly argued that an opposition to the social justice ideology that had permeated and invaded much of gaming journalism was also part of the movement.
However, if you ask social justice warriors what "Gamergate" was, you'll probably get a dozen different answers, all of them vague. Something to do with "sexism" and "misogyny", to "drive away women from gaming", or something.
They actually never give any explanation to how it would be possible to organize thousands, even tens of thousands, of people to jointly engage in some kind of harassment campaign against women, to drive them away from gaming. In their minds, they don't need to. They have this mental image of the average gamer being a sexist misogynist woman-hating nerd, who will immediately jump to the bandwagon of harassing women if they can.
In fact, many SJW journalists still think of gamers like that. And it was precisely one of the reasons why Gamergate was so necessary (although the major reason was the actual corruption in gaming journalism, eg. in the form of journalists taking bribes to write positive reviews of games.)
One expression you see a lot from many SJW women is that they were "targeted by gamergate". That's it. "Targeted by gamergate." No need to even explain what exactly that means.
What I think it actually means is that these women (and I'm assuming here they are women who have indeed been the victims of online harassment, rather than inventing or exaggerating) experienced some harassment during the Gamergate incident, and associated the harassment with the movement itself, for the mere reason that it happened at the same time period. Some trolls might even have directly messaged them mentioning "gamergate" explicitly, and thus these women making the conclusion that, thus, they have been "targeted by gamergate". Whatever that's supposed to mean.
Some of these women may be genuine in their belief that they were "targeted by gamergate". After all, when the social justice narrative has vilified the movement so much, and painted it as some kind of conspiracy by sexist gamers against women, wanting to harass and drive them away, these women are very likely to believe those claims, and thus when they experienced harassment, especially if it was in any way related to video gaming, they made the connection, regardless of whether it was warranted or not.
Of course when you think about it, the sentiment "targeted by gamergate" makes little sense. It would imply some kind of central organization, some kind of group meetings in this organization, where people decide to "target" a particular victim. Gamergate was not any sort of organization. At most, it had some prominent people who spoke in its favor, but that's about it.
Even the most charitable interpretation would be "targeted by people who claimed to do it in the name of gamergate" (assuming they indeed did that). Which is a rather different proposition. Just because somebody does something heinous in the name of something, that doesn't automatically mean that that something is to blame. (After all, if somebody commits a murder in the name of social justice, and explicitly expresses so, should that be interpreted as social justice advocating for murder, and the victim having been "targeted by social justice"?)
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