Borrowing effective dirty tricks from the same playbooks that the worst mainstream politicians have followed for decades they have been very effective at hiding their real agenda behind a cloud of loosely similar but completely unrelated issues. They whine constantly about "corruption in game journalism" but the specifics they offer inevitably ignore real issues in favor of slandering political enemies, mostly female, with irrelevant or unsubstantiated personal attacks.
For days the mainstream media has been duped into believing these troglodytes somehow represent the larger nerd subculture when they are, in fact, nothing more than a loudmouth minority.
Any major party politician will tell you that winning a publicity war is about shaping the dialog to support your position, and #Gamergate has excelled at this. They have even effectively created new words and phrases that have been adopted into general use in nerd culture.
My personal favorite is "SJW". SJW is an abbreviation of the phrase "social justice warrior" and it's use speaks volumes about #Gamergate.
You might expect that a "social justice warrior" would be someone to look up to, but according to the twisted world-view of #Gamergate the term is entirely derogatory. The term is used to dehumanize critics and dismiss criticism without debate. A social justice warrior is someone who loudly and frequently defends inclusiveness and diversity as one might expect, but the context of the term presumes an ulterior motive for doing so. A social justice warrior doesn't promote diversity because he believes in diversity. A social justice warrior promotes diversity because "it makes him look good". Widespread use of this term allows #Gamergate to brush off criticism without having to engage it, and successful injection of the concept into the dialog has created a presumption that NOBODY could SINCERELY want to make nerd culture more inclusive.
It's a clever strategy, and it has worked for quite a while, but it's not going to last because it doesn't bear up under close examination. In the end it only compounds of the absurdity of treating social justice as a pejorative by highlighting the juvenile mindset that drives the entire #Gamergate campaign.
As children we believe motives matter. What we think, or what we feel, or what we mean when we say or do something is relevant. Sure, we made a mistake, but our motives were pure and that makes it okay. We didn't MEAN to make someone cry. We didn't MEAN to hurt someone. We didn't MEAN to break something.
As adults we learn that motives don't really matter.
One of the hardest epiphanies every adult must face is the fact that nobody really cares what you feel. It's not that people are cruel or that empathy does not exist, but in the end everyone views your feelings through their own life-lens. Nobody can entirely understand or know what you feel because they can't climb into your head and feel it with you.
Nobody will ever know with any real certainty you love them.
From this epiphany springs a score of important truths, but among them is one that applies specifically to the SJW construct.
Motives don't matter. A person can't be defined by their feelings, or their thoughts, or their motives because we can't KNOW those things with any real certainty. What defines a person is what they do; the footprints they leave behind. Everything else is bullshit. People using the term have pretty much invalidated the entire SJW concept by imposing a motive on Social Justice Warriors, dubious or otherwise.
The entire SJW concept is, like #Gamergate itself, the product of a juvenile mindset.
For the record. I am a gamer, and #Gamergate does NOT speak for me.
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