It is said by its proponents that GamerGate is against ideology. This is countered with the fact that everyone has their own worldview and biases, and that neutrality is always relative to what spectra of idea-space you consider “legitimate”. Or in other words; objectivity is impossible.

The objection is thechnically valid, but misses what is really meant by “ideology”.

Courtesy of Wesley Morganston, aka nydwracu, we get some concepts to explain that which GamerGaters fail to put clearly in words.

http://theden.tv/2013/08/12/thedes-and-exosemantic-gang-signs/

Some selected quotes:

”What is a thede? Definitions of the prerationally grasped can only be imperfect, but to begin, a thede is a superindividual grouping that its constituent individuals feel affiliation with and (therefore?) positive estimates of.”

”Thedes can form along multiple lines: one can simultaneously be thedishly from western Tennessee (and then Tennessee, the South, America…), thedishly an analytic philosopher (and then a philosopher, an academic, a Brahmin…), thedishly a fan of black metal (and then metal, non-mainstream music…), and so on.”

”Thede identity can be reinforced in many ways: important examples include participating in thedish activities, bashing elthedes and their members, throwing exosemantic gang signs, and attacking the use of elthedish exosemantic gang signs”

”Exosemantic gang signs? Exosemantic gang signs! Words used not—at least not only—for their strict semantic content, but for signaling thede membership. Take as an example the word “praxis”: its meaning is no different from that of “practice”, but where the latter is common, a word used on the street, the former implies familiarity with—association with—the academic tradition that uses the word “praxis”.”

The SJW people are clearly a thede, and they have their ideology as an exosemantic gangsign (a more common word for the same thing is “shibboleth”).

This is why their worldview seems so incoherent, because they mainly just use it to test group loyalty. It’s also why they take over organizations (like DiGRA) - because of what I would call “ideological nepotism”; they look after their own while everyone else is just acting as a free agent.

Of course, this is also why it is such a toxic environment; they constantly test each other for ideological purity and bully people who fail to fall in line.

Of course, “Gamer” is also a thede. 

One thing I noticed when I first came across TFYC was that they were absolutely certain of who their audience was, and it showed in the language.

>Operation Butthurt

They wanted to actually convince gamers that women can make great games.

Contrast this to Anita Sarkeesian (and her kind). She is definitely not talking to gamers. Instead, she is talking to an audience that is likely to find gamers “elthedic”.

First, watch this clip to get a grasp of how Reality TV works https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBwepkVurCI

In Sweden, we have started to call reality TV “humiliation TV”. The main selling point of most reality TV is to make the audience feel superior, by painting the people portrayed as especially unclassy people. This effect is something that largely achieved by cherry picking a large amount of filmed material.

Back to Sarkeesian, you probably see the similarity: Cherry picking to paint a picture something scary, yucky and alien, in order to make her audience feel like morally superior people. It works, because the Puritan reflex runs deep.

Now, lets examine the cause of gamergate. Consensus within GamerGate is that it’s about corruption in games journalism. However, the movement get much of it’s steam from being slandered by the journalists and having their voices shut down in a great many places. There is also a fair bit of complaining about “Ideologues” and “Social Justice Warriors”, both of which can be interpreted as basically “Feminists”.

There is quite a few personal accounts from within radical feminist movements, that talk about how they are always on edge about the risk of anyone disagreeing. This of course creates an environment where people are afraid to speak up, out of fear of being ostracized from their social circle.

A quite recent example in my dear Sweden, is a transsexual being excommunicated from the youth organization of the Feminists Initiative party. This happening, which was due to him using “insensitive language”, was accompanied by a great deal of public slander about how horrible this person was. People took it as an example of internet harassment from the left, but since this was from what used to be his friends, it is much better described as a classic case of bullying

Shortly thereafter, this poor guy took his life.

For reasons that seem like pure randomness to me, I’m going to bring up another transsexual. This one is a game-dev, who was somewhat sympathetic to the GamerGate movement when it started out. She talked about how she had started out in the scene and made connections with “important people” on twitter, but then suddenly got shunned by them all at once for some kind of thought-crime. I don’t remember the exact details, and they are not what is important here. What is important, is that after she had been supporting #GamerGate for a while, she discovered Milo Yiannopoulos views on transgenderism.

http://yiannopoulos.net/2014/08/15/transgenderism-is-a-psychiatric-disorder-its-sufferers-need-therapy-not-surgery/

The post by Milo basically boils down to the question whether the transsexual disconnect between body and mind should be fixed by trying to adjust the body or trying to adjust the mind. Milo argues for the latter. Our unnamed game-dev took this as an example of transphobia and demanded that GamerGate condemn Yiannopoulos to show that they were really against harassment. She got the cold shoulder, because most of GamerGate seems to be aware that disagreement and hostility are two separate things.

Another recurring theme in GamerGate is references to autism. I’m thinking specifically of the “weaponized autism” meme, that often is taken to refer to obsessiveness. I believe there is a bit more to this; a well know trait of autism is a lack of social intuitions. This means that the exosemantic gangsigns have less of an effect.

Contemporary American politics has the Blue and Red tribes, who are said to differ in their instinctive disgust reactions. GamerGate holds both these archetypes, but it also seems like the popular awakening of a weaponized Gray tribe.

http://theviewfromhell.blogspot.se/2012/09/trying-to-see-through-unified-theory-of.html