The 30-day lag on news is long gone and all facets of news and media now has to be online to stay relevant. This was emphasized by Ziff-Davis, an American publisher and Internet company, when they bought GameSpot. The print cycle of physical magazines was their death. It was always about cover stories and exclusives, but what is that worth when you’re 30 days late with the content people are buying it for? So, the “news” part transitioned immediately to the digital realm and what was left in printed magazines was depth, analysis, and commentary by writers known and loved. In the 90s, the blog was pioneered, and in the late 90s, the podcast followed suit. Those words exist because mainstream money came to that space and made buzzwords to market it. Print magazines were fighting for readers with exclusive content, special access to developers, and cover story scoops and whoever got to the newsstand, digital or literal, with the big story first got readers. So now that digital games media has skyrocketed into a fantastically new industry; of course, a scandal has broken out.
Gamergate is a controversy regarding sexism in video game culture. It reaped momentous publicity in August 2014 when several women within the video game industry, including game developers Zoe Quinn and Brianna Wu and feminist cultural critic Anita Sarkeesian, were subjected to a sustained campaign of misogynistic attacks. These attacks, initially performed under the Twitter hashtag #gamergate, were later variously coordinated in the online forums of Reddit, 4chan, and 8chan in an anonymous and unstructured movement. These attacks included doxing, publically broadcasting a person’s personal and private information, and escalated to threats of rape and death threats including the threat of a mass shooting at a university speaking event. It has now publicly been acknowledged that these actions were performed by extremists angered by the unethical actions of these women.
In February 2013, independent game developer, Zoe Quinn, released Depression Quest, an interactive fiction browser game, through the game’s website. Shortly after the Steam release of Depression Quest, Quinn’s former boyfriend, Eron Gjoni, wrote a blog post asserting, among other things, that Quinn had an affair with Kotaku journalist Nathan Grayson. Quinn’s hecklers falsely alleged that the relationship had prompted Grayson to publish an unfairly favorable review of her game. Kotaku’s editor-in-chief, Stephen Totilo, affirmed the existence of a relationship but clarified that Grayson had not written anything about Quinn after the relationship had commenced and had never reviewed her games, with the exception of a piece written before the two began their relationship. Although scandalous, these actions didn’t warrant any of the numerous threats Ms. Quinn received upon exposition of the affair.
Many gamers and non-gamers alike are outraged by the threats directed toward these women, but so far, very little commentary has been delivered to the men like Nathan Grayson who were also involved. This sparked heat from online feminists everywhere declaring that games media is a sick misogynistic industry in which women are repeatedly affronted. It is clear that Gamergate has gone far beyond these women and their mistakes and affects the entire industry as a whole. Games journals, such as Kotaku, are treading very lightly and keeping a much more watchful eye on the social activities between developers and their writers. New scandals are the only thing that have kept the hashtag alive for so long, but it finally seems to be fading out, and women in the industry are feeling a lot safer as a result.