OK, everyone who thinks GamerGate is its own separate topic: mind giving a quick summary of what it's about? Kind of pointless to have a thread to discuss a topic if apparently nobody can agree on what the topic is.
Well, it's really complicated, but here's the Cliffsnotes version. Resentment against corruption in gaming journalism had been building for quite some time. When Zoe Quinn was revealed to have slept with some Kotaku staff members who covered her game
Depression Quest, it seemed like just another run-of-the-mill scandal that the internet would forget about. The problem came from a lot of major gaming publications refusing to cover the issue, as well as outright censorship online. Then some of Zoe Quinn's friends, including the controversial
Fez developer Phil Fish began attacking her critics, adding still more fuel to the fire.
Things began to snowball out of control. Gamers began to do research on Zoe Quinn and the skeletons in her closet. She'd gotten into a dust-up with users from the Imageboard Wizardchan in 2014, who she claimed harassed her. More important, however, was her suppression of The Fine Young Capitalists, a game jam/charity. Quinn showed no remorse for accidentally DDOSing their website. Then Wolf Wozniak claimed he'd been sexually harassed, and was bullied on Twitter for what he said. Fish later claimed he was doxxed. After this, the TFYC IndieGoGo was hacked and disabled, and the hackers pretended it was an IndieGoGo takedown. Why? Because /v/ started helping to fund it. It has long been smeared as a gathering place for misogynists, when things are really much more complicated than that. Thankfully, it was later restored.
This was when shit really started to fly. Both Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian claimed to have been doxxed and threatened, but many found reason to doubt their stories. And a lot of gaming sites began publishing "gamers are over" articles, claiming that the attacks on corruption were really a smokescreen for misogyny. The fact that all these articles were being published at the same time started ringing alarm bells. This, naturally, only made gamers angrier. More breaches of trust being uncovered didn't help matters. It began moving far beyond what it began as. During this time, Adam Baldwin created the hashtag #GamerGate to refer to the movement. #NotYourShield was created by pro-GamerGate women and minorities angry at Social Justice Warriors claiming to speak for them.
There have been massive developments as more and more big names started getting involved. Everybody from feminist academic Christina Hoff Summers to conservative journalist Milo “Nero” Yiannopoulos has started helping GamerGate. The Escapist has changed its ethics policy. A secret gaming journalism mailing list was exposed. WikiLeaks got in on the act, revealing that Reddit mods were shadow-banning pro-GamerGate users. And then 4chan was taken over by SJWs, leading to the rise of 8chan.
And it's starting to look like the Social Justice Warriors have friends in still higher places. For example, the Wikipedia page on GamerGate considers Cracked's article written by Quinn herself to be a reliable source, a blatant violation of the wiki's policy. A more balanced Forbes article on the issue, however, was not considered valid. This is a problem, because this blatantly biased entry is the first thing most people will see if they Google "GamerGate".
This is
the flame war. A war against corruption, against SJWs, and against censorship.