Imagine how much less autistic this timeline would be if websites didn't run around banning gropergarble and spreading it to the most hardcore sperg corners. Maybe if people admitted game journalists were shit we wouldn't have put up with dozens of copies of Homer Beoulve running around emailing advertisers and making SJWs freak out, leading to further culture war shenanigans from all sides.
Sadly, I can tell you something from my research on it: Even if GG never happened, something like it going down was an inevitability, and the second it did, it would have been tamped down on just as hard. Ignore for a moment that the marching orders on GG were out before GG even happened (since the response was based on the
same fucking tactic Anita Sarkeesian mainlined), and that countless pre-existing links between the various "big names" in GG opposition were already well-entrenched; if during the initial outbreak, those involved had simply admitted wrongdoing and owned up to it, that probably would have forestalled a GG-type event for another few years.
Note I said "forestalled," and not "prevented."
GG as a whole was a gigantic pressure-release for something that had been building up online for over a decade. From Anita claiming to have been harassed and people responding by donating to her en masse (even as numerous journos with known ties to her sang her praises and described her as a problem gamers themselves created) to the explosion of pretentious e-hipster shit pushed by Polygon and Kotaku that they claimed that we, the plebs, just weren't smart enough to appreciate, there was dozens of cases of the people involved with this sort of shit overreaching, often badly, and then responding by attacking the customerbase.
Assuming GG never happened, things would have continued to build up over time, and another, likely more Autistic event, would have caused a similar incident to erupt instead. The difference is that we would have had several more years of echo-chambering and buildup, which meant it would have been much worse for all involved and probably would have taken three to four times longer to run its course (as opposed to GG, which burned out in a little over a year). All estimations are that the situation would have been way worse, those who caused GG would have been even more entrenched, and you'd have a lot more people imitating Homer. Which would mean more content for us, on balance, but also that things would have been that much more insufferable as a result.
Imagine GG with
even more Autism.
That prospect should fucking
terrify you, and is a reason that we should be thankful this panned out how it has.
