In 2014, feminist discourse within the games community came under attack from the “anti-SJW” movement of #GamerGate. The movement brought with it new levels of understanding of the personal risk undertaken by progressive voices in conservative communities, with tactics including trolling, doxxing, swatting, and revenge porn all rising in popularity and visibility. I will examine #GamerGate’s rhetorical strategies and particularly their emphasis on owning language, encouraging a culture of silence through fear while using apparent marginalized voices (the #notyourshield campaign) as part of a fake news strategy for creating the illusion of a diverse coalition of support. With many of the same figures and news sources involved in GamerGate now continuing to rise as part of the so-called alt-right, these tactics and their impact demonstrate the consequences of visibility, particularly for women and nonbinary individuals engaging with the current discourse on social media.

1. Games Trolls Play
Anastasia Salter
MLA 2018
@anasalter

4. Zoe Quinn, Crash Override: How GamerGate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life... (2016)
In all my time as an activist, I've never seen a single instance where the
people instigating abuse, even in the worst possible cases, thought they
were the 'bad guys'. There is always a righteous undertone.
Dehumanization works its mental magic, and turning the target into a
'villain' provides the attacker with the chance to be a 'hero'. You can
rationalize doing all kinds of things to a symbol that you would never
do to a human. The campaign becomes a false battle between good
and evil, and tormenting someone is seen as a struggle over something
much larger than either of you. That's the key ingredient in the magic
trick that, in the abusers' minds, turns screaming at a game developer's
father through a telephone into defending an entire artistic medium
from censorship.

6. Andy Baio, “72 Hours of GamerGate,” October 27, 2014
https://medium.com/message/72-hours-of-gamergate-e00513f7cf5d

8. Adrienne Massanari, “#Gamergate and The Fappening: How Reddit’s algorithm,
governance, and culture support toxic technocultures.” New Media & Society
Volume: 19 Issue 3 (2017)
Toxic technocultures are unique in their leveraging of sociotechnical
platforms as both a channel of coordination and harassment and their
seemingly leaderless, amorphous quality. Members of these communities
often demonstrate technological prowess in engaging in ethically dubious
actions such as aggregating public and private content about the targets of
their actions (for potential doxxing purposes or simply their own enjoyment)
and exploiting platform policies that often value aggregating large audiences
while offering little protection from potential harassment victims. At the
same time, individuals affiliated with toxic technocultures both champion
the power of the community as a way to effect change or voice displeasure
with others they view as being adversaries, while still distancing themselves
from what they perceive as the more ethically dubious (and illegal) actions of
others, suggesting they are “not really part” of whatever toxic technoculture
under which they are acting.

14. https://medium.com/@ashleylynch/a-final-word-on-notyourshield-628ca5876cec

17. Miranda Ganzer, “In Bed with Trolls,” Feminist Media Studies 14.6. (2016)
One of the questions hashtag feminism and Operation: Lollipop in particular
raises is how to define ideological authenticity, which is part of the larger
question of how representation and the nature of virtual reality operate in
the twenty-first century. As an inherently malleable infrastructure, the
Internet affords its users opportunities for anonymity and manipulation,
which in this case enabled antagonists to subvert a woman of color feminist
movement by inhabiting the personas, spaces, and language of that very
movement. British journalist Laurie Penny humorously made this point when
she tweeted:
“Sudden moment of existential dread, wondering if I am myself a 4chan
creation.”
Penny’s tweet sums up the surreal sensation of a political identity insidiously
co-opted in a virtual realm.

20. Andrew Griffin (2015) https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/business/technology/gamergate-
tim-schafer-provokes-rage-with-not-your-shield-joke-about-online-gaming-activists-at-
industry-awards-31044871.html
While making a speech, Schafer used a sock to make a joke about the
movement. The sock is thought to be a representation of sockpuppets, a
term used on the internet to refer to fake accounts and identities set up to
give the impression that comments are coming from a third-party.
In the character of the sock, Schafer asks: “How many gamergaters does it
take to make a single piece of armor?” Schafer, as himself, says that he
doesn’t know.
The sock replies: “Fifty. One to do the modeling, one to do the materials, and
forty-eight to tweet that it’s not your shield.”

23. Kishonna Gray, “Blurring the boundaries: Using GamerGate to examine ‘real’ and
symbolic violence against women in contemporary game culture.” Sociology
Compass Volume 11.3 (2017).
The symbolic aspects of the social practice of violence against women have
had real ramifications for women in gaming. The concept of “symbolic
violence,” which was to inform Bourdieu’s wider theorizing on power and
domination, was developed to explain how social hierarchies and
inequalities are maintained less by physical force than by forms of symbolic
domination (Bourdieu, 2001, p. 2). The invisibility, isolation, and exclusion of
women constitute an effective tool of silent (masculine) domination and the
silencing of women (the dominated). Silence must be examined not in the
physical act of hushing or not allowing someone to speak; rather, silence is a
structural and systemic concern that renders groups powerless. Importantly,
symbolic violence, while mostly invisible and ignored, creates the conditions
of possibility for other more tangible and visible forms of violence (doxing,
bomb threats, and so on)..

27. Shira Chess and Adrienne Shaw, “A Conspiracy of Fishes, or, How We Learned to Stop
Worrying About #GamerGate and Embrace Hegemonic Masculinity,” Journal of
Broadcasting and Electronic Media 59.1 (2015).
Are we actually trying to dismantle hegemonic masculinity? If so what
might we mean by ‘‘dismantle’’—ridding the world entirely of
masculine gaming culture or simply making room for other gaming
cultures and increased diversity? We intend to mean (and hope we
mean) the latter. Yet, in writing this essay we have also found ourselves
wrapped up in the complexities of the conspiracy logic. It is impossible
to look at our own language sometimes without agreeing with the
conspiracy theorists. Perhaps we are the nefarious plotters they think
we are, rather than two tenure track academics just trying to make
sense of culture.

28. Thank you!
Anastasia Salter
@anasalter