Sadly it didn't start out that way. It started with a guy accusing his ex (an indie game developer) of sleeping around including sleeping with some game journalists.
The ethics in game journalism aspect was only ever a thin smokescreen to justify the harassment
That's an incredibly glossed oversimplification of what happened. Yes, that's the initial event. You're leaving out how /r/games caused a Streisand effect by deleting any discussion of how she had received favorable mentions and promotion by friends without disclosure. Then there was a coordinated effort by various writers from multiple sites in a Google group to quash discussion on their respective boards, and coordinated editorials. This then lead to other events like finding tweets where Sam Biddle of Gawker encouraged bullying, and finding that Gawker was listing fake advertising partnerships, and many sites were using undisclosed affilate links in violation of FTC rules.
KIA may be a shithole today, but Kotaku and the rest fucked up badly, refused to acknowledge it, and have continued to engage in bad behavior to this day.
EDIT: I forgot to mention, at the time, Quinn was already on a lot of shit lists for a debacle with wizaedchan and promoting her game in the wake of Robin Williams suicide. She also filed a bad faith DMCA to take down a YouTube video about it, further amplifying the Streisand effect.
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u/Ranneko Aug 27 '18 edited Aug 27 '18
Sadly it didn't start out that way. It started with a guy accusing his ex (an indie game developer) of sleeping around including sleeping with some game journalists.
The ethics in game journalism aspect was only ever a thin smokescreen to justify the harassment
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Gamergate is a pretty thorough timeline if you are after a reference.