I don't think the full impact of GamerGate on our culture will ever be fully understood or recognized. It definitely had a snow ball effect, in no small part from the constant doubling down from the usual suspects.
How many people got redpilled, directly or indirectly, because of it?
All these retards had to do was to leave video games mostly alone, and let boys enjoy their hobby and escapism unperturbed. They would be too busy having fun to care about politics.
Resident chronicleer of the Autism Holy War here.
GG itself was almost irrelevant in the broader scheme of things. It barely accomplished that much (though Gawker does credit it with killing the company more than the Hulk Hogan lawsuit, which is pretty telling), with many of the grifters from back then still being grifters in the present day, and many of the involved parties learning absolutely nothing for the loss. It was a clear-cut victory for the Autists in GG, if only because they started at zero, but the real value of GG wasn't anything directly it accomplished: Instead, the true value of the Autism Holy War was forcing people to realize just the actual scope of problems like the incestuous circlejerk in the journo sphere actually was - and more importantly, just how much the numbers were always on the side of GG's Autists.
Before Twitter, under Jack Dorsey, completely changed how hashtag trending worked, GG, at he height of its popularity, could sieze hashtags with impunity, signal boost critical issues, and formed the very beginnings of the counterculture revolt against the ongoing bullshit within the industry. You could see just how massive the gulf in popularity between them was by looking at the size of the communities when both were active, with communities of GGers outnumbered their opposition by 20 times or more.
In short, it showed that the only reason GG's opposition had tracks at all was open corruption and money, and even with commanding advantages in both areas, they couldn't stop a gaggle of shitheaded autists with an axe to grind. Not even indirect control at the various social media platforms effectively ensuring that GG's hashtags couldn't trend on Twitter was not enough to keep the Autists from keeping focused on the issues like a fucking laser beam for over a fucking year.
All of this serves to highlight the real reason GG happened: The progs and commies chose to ignore video games as beneath their interests until mid-2010, when the video gaming industry grossly outperformed Hollywood to a hilarious, almost nonsensical degree. Suddenly, the hard left realized this was an area they didn't fully control the way they did television and movies, and they immediately sought to rectify this. The thing is: by the time they realized their mistake, it was far too late - the reason that the leftists have the control over television and movies the way they do is because of single points of failure in the publisher and creative sphere - influence they use to choke out dissenters. They arrived about a decade too late, and when it came to video games, they didn't have the infrastructure they'd need to put that entertainment medium under their thumb. Moreover, because gaming is a hobby where everyone can just buy what they want and enjoy what they want with a multitude of different genres, styles, and narrative techniques meant that the usual ways they'd use to force the issue weren't going to work.
So they tried to fake it. They took over research groups, they put out studies trying to argue for diversity and inclusion in video games, despite video games essentially being diverse by default since the 90s. The laughably biased study you've almost
certainly have heard of with over 50% of gamers being women (a number they got to by lumping mobile in with every other platform and selectively sampling from it) was one of the many attempts to argue that gaming had to change for a new demographic if they wanted to stay profitable. Anita Sarkeesian was essentially astroturfed by game journalists, many of whom were fucking paying for her, in an attempt to bulldoze a path into the industry by which they could assert indirect control, and, they hoped, introduce single points of failure into the system that would give them the de facto control they so sought.
The problem is that their machine got exposed long before it was ready for primetime. The gigantic meltdown over Zoe Quinn's ex, Eron Gjoni, airing his complaints about what a deceptive and abusive fuck Quinn herself was - complete with receipts - inadvertently allowed everyone else a peek behind the curtain when the entire fucking apparatus they had built - journalists, activists, etc - all went hot at once circling the wagons to protect one of their own. It didn't work, and this resulted in the self-feeding cycle
@AnOminous once colorfully likened to someone firing a grenade launcher at the ground to kill a rat, cutting their own legs off in the resulting shrapnel wave, then reloading and firing at the ground again. In this case, the actions they took to bury criticism led them to further exposure, and attempts to bury that criticism, in turn, led to further exposure.
In the end, it's all ancient history, but in many ways, what happened during the Autism Holy War was a dry run for shit that would go down in politics later on.
