As someone who does think that diversity could be a good thing in games, I've been watching the whole Gamergate movement since it began, and I have to say that the whole subject this episode's trying to portray is so much more complex. This episode is the video game edition of the 1930s PSA Reefer Madness: sensationalist, barely accurate regarding the subject matter, and has no concept of how people actually behave aside from stereotypes.

I could go on with a whole essay about movement, but I'll just briefly put in my slightly-rambling view on this:

Gamergate does not hate women. Although they certainly deserve more recognition, women have made up the gaming and game dev community for decades. In fact, many of its supporters have been female gamers and devs who are against individuals such as Anita for misinforming the public about the nature of video games. Look up the hashtag #NotYourShield for some of these individuals.

Putting it even further, Gamergate's mascot is Vivian James: a regular ginger-haired female gamer with a cynical personality but a passion for games. They created the character after the group donated around $23,000 to a feminist charity game jam called 'The Fine Young Capitalists', which would give women with no experience in game development a chance to create and publish their own game. Said character would be put into the finished game as an in-game avatar.

Actually, there's an interesting story attached to that. Before members of 4chan's video game board came along, TFYC was nearly on the brink of failure because developer Zoe Quinn accused the group of discriminating against trans-women, and for financial exploiting the women whose game concepts would be nominated by the public. The first point was because the TFYC allowed only people identifying as female to take part in the game jam, but as it was a contest meant to help women enter the games industry it was a measure to keep men from secretly entering in their game ideas. The second point was moot as 8% profits would go to the person whose game concept gets chosen, a portion would go to the game's development, while the rest would go to a charity of the majority donor's choice.

In addition to slandering the group, Quinn and her supporters took down the TFYC website through a DDOS attack, and later also hacked its Patreon site. Quinn also had the gall to start funding her own game jam called 'Rebel Jam' despite having no stated information about it whatsoever, and was completely silent to any questions coming from TFYC's organizers.

Gamergate saved TFYC and picked a charity for Colon Cancer to donate most of the proceeds. Aside from being able to create their own female character for the winning project, they also asked the TFYC to produce a short video series on influential female video game developers.

Despite what the common media narrative has stated, harassment has been very present from the anti-Gamergate side, maybe even more so than from Gamergate. Gamergate supporters have been doxxed by the opposition, and some even lost their jobs from GG opponents calling their employers. Journalist Milo Yiannopoulos, who wrote in support of Gamergate in several articles, had a filled syringe sent to his home in an envelop, while attorney Mike Cernovich had harassing phone calls sent to his home and workplace. I don't deny that there has been bad members from the Gamergate crowd, but what I really dislike is the unfair portrayal of Gamergate's activities compared to those of its opposition.

And that all ties back to the very reason why Gamergate exists: to bring integrity to games journalism and stop corruption. Some say that the whole Gamergate movement was a response to the fact that Zoe Quinn slept with several developers in order to get favorable reviews for her games. I do think it played part of the creation of the movement, but the main catalyst was what happened immediately afterwards. Several articles from various different gaming news sites came out with the theme of 'Gamers are Dead', all on the exact day on August 28th, 2014. When people suspected that there was a media narrative being created behind the scenes, there was a mass censoring of any related discussion on these sites, including game sites that didn't publish such articles in the first place. All this did was confirmed their suspicions, leading to all this current drama.

In the past few months, there have been around five articles from gaming news sites stating that Gamergate was dead. It's not.

If I learned anything from this whole event, it's that once in awhile there will come a news topic that you can't rely on most news sources for, especially when it involves corruption in those very news sources.

This is far from a simple good vs. evil fight between a bunch of women-hating white male gamers and a group of innocent crusading feminists. If it were so simple, it wouldn't have lasted for so long to begin with, and it wouldn't have been so controversial.