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Browsing on social media. I feel like everyone's tryna make GamerGate 2.0 a thing. First it was the localization drama with JelloApocalypse and that one visual novel. Now it's the Sweet Baby Inc. thing. Shoot, I saw some people on Twitter name-dropping people from GamerGate back because they were mutuals with the guilty party?

w h a t ?

Granted, I am not innocent of this, I made comments about "GAMERGATE 2.0 HAPPENING" during the former drama, and I will admit those were not the smartest comments of mine, and probably were not funny. I am sorry.

So… what's going on?

Also friendly reminder this August will be the tenth anniversary of GamerGate :)

Remember that it all also depends on the social circle you're in. Maybe it's because I've been playing Helldivers 2 non-stop (when I have the free time), but I've heard of none of the things you mentioned from the groups I'm in.

I've only heard about it from searching for those KYM entries and nowhere else, so it's a good thing to keep in mind that this place has it's own microcosm.

You can engage in it if you want to, but remember that you don't have to.

As for why people care? Eh, someone else will have to answer that, but I'm guessing it's because "GAMERGATE 2.0" is something that interests a part of the user-base. How many of KYM's current users arrived because of that? How many other users were driven away?

A certain type of content attracts users who are interested in that content and repels those who don't, or makes those who stay engage in that content, so that type of content becomes more dominant. It's a kind of vicious or virtuous cycle for how a community changes.

To take an example of me, I argue politics on a meme-site (I'm aware how stupid that is), so I'm part of the political rot, although I'd argue that I became active in response to/provocation of other users, so I didn't start the fire. Looking at my activity I only really started 7 years ago on Brexit (and wow, lots of people were supporting Brexit back then).

The last thing that video game discourse needs right now is another "culture war" dumpster fire (which, even if a "gamergate 2.0" starts with good intentions, it will inexorably devolve into) that derails discussing the blatant problems with the industry.

How about instead of banging on about a bunch of mediocre-to-bad writer consultants (consultants!) because they're "The Woke"…
…we start banging on about how executives and shareholders who have little to no experience with gaming are supersaturating the market with "Live Service" slop, throwing their own workforces into the furnace to keep up the illusion of growth, creating games that feel exhaustingly bland in an attempt to chase the lowest common denominator, continuing to "innovate" in adding ever more egregious psychologically manipulative microtransaction systems, promoting horrendous work environments that would turn Upton Sinclair into a turbine, and have overall been enshittifying the medium which I love? That shit seems like a far bigger priority than a bunch of hacks.

Given that the Sweet Baby Inc drama was largely ignited by Asmongold then enflamed by other content creators like Critical Drinker and the starfield pronouns guy I think some folks literally just want another culture war in gaming media. A lot of channels and environments thrive on that sort of engagement, to be the one guiding people just tuning into a discussion into a right wing narrative on left wing politics ruining beloved nostalgic media. Gamergate is itself a nostalgic time too for some, likely happened in their teen or college years and may have been seen as a successful (?) outcry against online printed games journalism, so I think folks are tapping into that.

Basically content creators, upvote whores in forums/comments, and engagement farmers are fueling or tapping into whatever is the popular right-wing narrative in games media, and gamergate is a popular meme to draw upon to fuel that.

No one is really trying to bring it back, but rather, the current situation is threatening to recreate it.

I don't even know what the fuck GamerGate is about in the first place? I've witness the events, yes. but I couldn't remember jack of it.
The only thing I describe on top of my head is a whole bunch of he-said-she-said bullshit.

Yeah, I don't remember anything about. It was all a blur.

I don’t get the importance of having a shitty culture war over video games. I just wanna play video games for Christ sake. Not have to listen to angry middle aged men whining about how gaming has no soul in it anymore.

Why? Because Khorne has won, that's why. The age of peace may be over

A new era of bloodshed shall soon begin, the streets will run red with blood as the internet flame wars rage on until death becomes just a currency.

Blood for the blood god. Skulls for the skull throne.

anyway going back to my post break

Old archivist of GG here. Guess im being dragged out of retirement for this one.

I'm highlighting this quote to vastly explain the general attitude of those that were the gamers of gamergate. This quote is mostly the spirit of the entire movement summed up right there. The difference being gamers at the time being fed up with games journalism blaming the consumer for a failed product rather than the product itself. Which lead to a whole corruption scandal and expose… And people getting fatigued on every update that they just wanted it to stop.

As for the meat of this GG 2.0?

Sweet Baby Inc is going full Streisand effect.

Some guy on the internet noticed a particular writing studio being involved with several games that aren't performing well. So he made a Curated list on Steam of the games that writing company is involved in.

And Sweet Baby Inc didnt take kindly to that.

So as a result of internet drama there's now Internet Sleuths digging into SBI's toxic employees, practices, and origins and as the current information is going… Its linking back to the original GamerGate 1.0 drama. Specifically Zoe Quinn, the Unalliving of Alex Howolka (creator of night into the woods), his sister and the money generated as a result of donations due to the unaliving.

So this is like another book of the manga in an ongoing Shonen series. This'll probably go on for a week unless there's more doubling down, press defense and people grifting for cash over the event (again)

Talkie Toaster wrote:

How about… …we start banging on about how executives and shareholders who have little to no experience with gaming are supersaturating the market with "Live Service" slop, throwing their own workforces into the furnace to keep up the illusion of growth, creating games that feel exhaustingly bland in an attempt to chase the lowest common denominator, continuing to "innovate" in adding ever more egregious psychologically manipulative microtransaction systems, promoting horrendous work environments that would turn Upton Sinclair into a turbine, and have overall been enshittifying the medium which I love? That shit seems like a far bigger priority than a bunch of hacks.

Almost all of the problems I had with games have gotten significantly worse since Gamergate. Games being released in an incomplete state, being released in an unplayable state, riddled with ads, riddled with microtransactions, fewer single-player games, single-player games requiring online connections, higher prices, unable to enjoy the few multiplayer games I'd actually want to play online because of how teams are created. One of the only things that has gotten better is that it feels like fewer games are console-locked to Xbox or Playstation and unavailable on PC. As much as I'm glad it is possible to play Halo games on PC, I can't say that makes up for the rest of it.

Edgar Weebling wrote:

No one is really trying to bring it back, but rather, the current situation is threatening to recreate it.

So Gamers declared dead once more, cries of harrassment all over the place, followed by right-wing coopting? Same shit, nobody learns anything, people get angrier, and the rift grows ever wider? The situation is definitely threatening to recreate itself.

At least this time it feels like people are more willing to question the narrative of both sides and call out false information even if it being true would be convenient for them. This was sorely missing from the GG I saw which would often bury skepticism under downvotes, no matter how founded.

Garde wrote:

This quote is mostly the spirit of the entire movement summed up right there.

That may be what you see as "”the spirit”" but it doesn't match what lot of people here experienced.

The KYM community had a major collapse in the years following 2014 which it never recovered from. The site's top 100 leaderboard rankings are filled with people who haven't been active in over half a decade, many not regularly active for much longer. Several have explicitly stated that the change in the site's culture was the reason for this, which, as highlighted in some of the linked experiences, are often directed at GG.

Garde wrote:

the Unalliving of Alex Howolka… …donations due to the unaliving.

Please stop with this INSOC Newspeak bullshit. Say death. This isn't the place to be "cutesy". GamerGate claimed to fight the corruption of big companies, especially over what they deemed "politically correctness". Yet a self-proclaimed GG archivist immediately folds to self-censoring unfucking prompted. This is embarrassing. You assert the movement stands against arbitrary corporate decisions that are out of touch with real people.
Goddamn act like it.

Already we have people reposting stuff they saw and passing them off as true while failing every basic metic of critical thinking and actual documentation.

At least this time people are calling out shit that made GG fucking unbearable. Maybe this time the culture war grift won’t dominate the dialogue and the things that have been ruining gaming for me over the past decade will actually get some attention.

I am so glad you are an active mod here Jill

Just adding on to one part of what Jill said: this isn't YouTube, you can say words like "death," "suicide," and the like and not worry that corporate will take away your ability to make money.

You said a whole lot of nothing in that little tangent you went on.

Plus I said “why have a culture war over video games” and you had to do some “I’m coming out of retirement to circle jerk about shit from a decade ago”. Unironically there’s bigger issues with gaming currently and some of you weirdos are more interested in weird culture war shit instead of actual issues when it comes to gaming. Like the constant barrage of layoffs and studio closures, executives doing dumb fuck decisions while focusing more on live service games, Blizzard-Activision, games coming out unfinished, borderline broken or actually broken and other serious issues. If the only thing that gamer dude bros care about is culture war politics than actual issues, they deserve all the hate and vitriol they deserve.

Also why the fuck are you using NuSpeak? Just say “killed” or “committed suicide” and not any of this corpo safe speak people use for Christs sake.

Hindsight is 20/20 and all but I still feel like one of the major points where GG went downhill at is when people reached out to Milo Yiannopoulos. That, among other points, is when GG went from well-intentioned to the group of women-hating, "woke-fighting", group of degenerates the media had already painted gamers as.

Personally, I'd say it's a mixture of two major things:
One, game "journalists" are doing the same bullshit in 2024 that they were doing in 2014, because time is a flat circle. It's not like nothing has been learned in the interim, however; due to things largely unrelated to the original run of GamerGate, public trust in journalism is much lower now than it was then. Perhaps, then, a second run would be less vulnerable to coordinated misinformation efforts, and could even break the effects of those same efforts from ten years ago?

Two, nostalgia for "better" times. This is, of course, completely subjective; the GamerGate era and the following few years were periods of both rapid creation and destruction. Under which light you look back at this time depends on what you experienced. Personally, I think the internet of 2014 was better than the internet of today, but that reviving GamerGate won't undo the changes that have made it worse since then.

I glanced at the SBI page and the first 4 videos I saw were Critical Drinker, Hero Hei, Rev Says Desu and Yellowflash, so I do believe at least a group wants to bring back GG, and those are ragebait grifters that want easy money from dumb viewers.

Except these people have talked about loads of stuff regarding controversies over the years, and very few of them got such mainstream coverage as this. 

They are not causing it. Its entirely natural occurring. 

I have been paying attention to their "cover" of controversies, and its always garbage.

I never said they are causing it, but they would be happy if it happened because they can keep pumping out slop to people addicted to it

That's hardly relevant here.

Sorry, but this sounds a little too like those conspiracy theories that certain events are caused by some group simply so they can sell a product (for example, there are some people who claim COVID was engineered so that Corpos can sell hand sanitizer and masks). It sounds to me that your extreme hatred of them is causing you to see things, and one has to wonder why you are even watching them if you hate them so much.

I mean, we are discussing "Why is everyone tryna make GamerGate 2.0 a thing?" and I added my 2 cents, its not that complicated tbh, I dont think theres a conspiracy, that would be silly.

>It sounds to me that your extreme hatred of them is causing you to see things

Why extreme? It seems to me like you are pretending Im seething with hate just because Im not fond of grifters, thats not a healthy mindset, my man.

>and one has to wonder why you are even watching them if you hate them so much.

How do you build a proper opinion of someone without watching their content? Taking your opinion from others can be bad, so I engage with them once in a while so I can understand what they believe in.

Because we need a boogeyman to blame for things that are the result of an incestuous clusterfuck of politics and capitalism that no one group can control or fix.

Because the end of Gamergate 1.0 didn't conclude anything. None of the greivances were addressed, time has not healed all wounds and evidently the lessons havent been learned.

It was just a matter of time before the same breed of idiots that triggered the first one kicked the hornets nest, again.

I'm gonna post this here

Okay to address my rambling from earlier. Key term:

I said I was an ARCHIVIST not an activist. Mostly what I did during the KYM documentation phase was ARCHIVE the links and find contradictions in the narrative as the definition of what was categorized the movement would get redefined every month. Then pop it into the Comments/Discussion Thread that existed to keep a record that the GG event was still ongoing. During that time I had to make sure every post adhered to basic rule #2 keep it relevant. Any deviation or violation of the basic rules plus what was tacked on would get that thread locked, so it's an old habit that lead to my other "strange" behavior.

I can understand how my tie in with the previous poster's thread as a segway to try and answer the main topic as to why GG2.0 is trending was poorly executed though. As it was a bit of a stretch to sum up GG1.0 in a few sentences to get readers up to speed, then explain how it related to this new event. Mostly this was to satisfy basic rule #2, keep it relevant.

The reason for my intro was to clarify my perspective, reading this stuff and keeping record tends to activate pattern recognition and lots of "here we go again."

As for the NuSpeak? The mod put it best. Engagement on KYM went down in 2014 and GG is cited as the cause. Given that metric, it means KYM as a website has numbers to boost and rule #6 Behave defines that "young and old" can read these threads. So it was a better safe than sorry measure, as use of advertiser unfriendly responses could also get this particular thread locked, so Im taking no chances on my part. Everyone else can do what they want.

So now, to wheel things back because of Rule 2, keep it relevant.

More investigation into Sweet Baby Inc has come out with how they behave, their CEO going on record using DEI quotas to pressure businesses into using their services. Magic the Gathering players/influencers getting upset over SBI's involvement with the cards and phrasing. And further discovery into the origins of SBI.

So until this topic of discovery runs out, it's probably going to be trending for a while. Especially if there's articles being published about this. We're in the broadcasting phase now, so if there's more drama as result, it has a chance of flaring up bigger.

Edit: Typos

this is attempt 3 of making a post
I honestly give it a month for this drama to die down. I doubt they're ACTUALLY gonna make a harassment campaign à la GamerGate.
I hope I am not wrong with this prediction. Please…

has Sweet Baby Inc done anything actually bad to warrant one?

Unfortunately its looking like it.

For example this archive of the CEO using threats to bully companies into using SBI

And the link to the direct tweet with the video because videos don't play in the archive

Now, I know there's a chance of "but the source has a slant, therefore the report is biased" However, it's the only way I currently know of seeing the SBI's CEO on video, without much alteration, saying these things.

Trust but Verify.

I'll say from experience and what me and friends have seen: a culture war can ensure clicks from outrage bait for anyone that is able to run a Youtube channel. Imagine how much money one could try to make from a grift in complaining about a game having gay black women and rainbow flags on a building or a game cover having some white male or whatever other dumb things there are tied to the culture war from 10 years ago. We all want to play video games but some people really don't want to keep quiet, at least not when knowing of how you have someone like that guy complaining about pronouns in Starfield.

Only other reason I can imagine would be some trolls might want it for lulz since it means seeing idiots screaming. Honestly with the SBI thing, they could of just kept quiet while reporting the steam group to avoid the controversy though that itself probably would lead to some culture war rattling.

Modern politics is treated a team sport, and late-stage gamergate was the finals for people who really love cheering for a team.
The same kinda person would love to recreate that "magic".

Why is everyone tryna make GamerGate 2.0 a thing?

Dunno if there will be. The original just kinda fizzled out, and any of the identity politics sort of just evolved into completely different beasts.

I think the biggest difference is that the discussion is no longer mandated by random nerds and weirdos on the internet, but by actual organizations trying to engage user engagement, in a strange form of manufactured consent. I don't know if I believe in dead internet theory, but almost all of discussion feels kinda artificial, like something of a ghost that may have fit in 2014 but doesn't belong in the present. The mere fact is that most people have moved on from this, and the people who stay with it just want to be entertained.

I heard of SBI some months ago by chance and even pushing identity politics aside, the org felt very shady. People had only heard about the org recently despite being involved with a lot of popular western titles, and they intentionally tried to hide their involvement. The org just feels like it comes out of a conspiracy theory, even though its not.

It sort of reminded me of a video on the "global standard" video I saw some months ago. It's been some time since I had watched it so my memory is fuzzy, and I can't remember if it mentioned SBI but it did mention ESG investing and Blackrock.

> The KYM community had a major collapse in the years following 2014 which it never recovered from. The site's top 100 leaderboard rankings are filled with people who haven't been active in over half a decade, many not regularly active for much longer. Several have explicitly stated that the change in the site's culture was the reason for this, which, as highlighted in some of the linked experiences, are often directed at GG.

I don't buy blaming the collapse of KYM's community on GG. KYM doesn't exist in a vacuum, independent sites in general have been gradually dying off as more and more traffic gets captured by social media giants. If anything, it's surprising KYM is as active as it is, all things considered. Most "blogosphere" type sites have either disabled comments and forums or replaced them with a facebook or disqus embed.

None of KYM's community features are really accessible on mobile, to the smartphone generation we don't exist and are mostly just a place that people on tiktok and youtube can cite.

TL;DR we're getting old

While GamerGate itself would of had some division, it no doubt would not be what made this community collapse. A lot of us would no doubt move to greener pastures after having our spent our time on this site. Some of us would stay on this site no doubt but even those days can be numbered before one either leaves the site or gets banned or has their account deactivated.

Department of Homeland Security-funded Take This just put out a document demanding that game companies denounce "Gamergate 2".

Okay, now shit is going to hit the fan. pic.twitter.com/v0jWWV1mGb

— Lyle 🇹🇼👍 (@Lyde15) March 11, 2024

hmm. 🤔

Honestly, as much as I really don’t want to get in to these types of discussions since they’re becoming tiring for me but from what I could tell this is going to be a case of two sides shit stirring and trying to bring back what is essentially old asf discourse they haven’t let go of.

Other than that I mostly keep myself away from it, maybe hopefully this could stop trending and I go back to enjoying memes and fanart of stuff I like but given what this got attached to, I wouldn’t be surprised if this lasted as long as the Russia-Ukraine war entry if not more so.

Activity here is really going to suck.

Honestly my opinion might be too optimistic, but i think the reason it won't be like the original Gamergate is because in the last 10 years, a lot of shit has happened (Covid, wars, presidential elections, etc) that left a lot of people much more jaded and hardened than they were in 2014. What SBI did is super annoying, but still downright quaint compared to the stuff the US government did in recent years.