#GamerGate 2.0: The Transnational Far-Right Targeting & Calling for Violence Against Video Game Companies Over Wokeness

Warning: This analysis contains highly offensive and potentially triggering language and imagery. Where possible, slur words are marked with asterisks, but in cases where that may make the content unclear, offensive language is cited.

https://globalextremism.org/post/gamergate-2-0-the-transnational-far-right-targeting-and-calling-for-violence-against-video-game-companies-over-wokeness/



Over the past week, a surge of targeted hateful and violent posts on fringe and mainstream platforms have ignited what some on the far-right are calling “GamerGate 2.0,” which, like its predecessor, includes virulent antisemitism, misogyny, racism, and calls for violence. Gamers across the web, including on fringe, mainstream, and gaming platforms, are taking part in this campaign. #GamerGate, which occurred in the 2010s, was a harassment campaign against women in gaming, with indie game developer Zoe Quinn and gaming critic Anita Sarkeesian being the first targets, the latter featured in a now-deplatformed video game designed so that players could “beat her up.” It also led to the FBI investigating a marked increase in online harassment, and helped extremists such as neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin build their audiences. Anglin continues to write antisemitic and misogynistic commentary on video games through his own website, The Daily Stormer. The online hatred against marginalized communities that was normalized during the 2010s remains prevalent today, including instances of violent misogyny. These include acts like the recent virtual sexual assault of a 16-year-old girl in the “Metaverse” investigated by the British police in January after her avatar was attacked by several other players. The “Metaverse” is a virtual world created by Mark Zuckerberg’s company Meta.

Whereas the first iteration of #GamerGate targeted criticism of video games, specifically women video game journalists and gamers, “#GamerGate 2.0” is aimed at consulting companies, namely Sweet Baby Inc., a narrative design company often hired by major gaming studios for input on upcoming games. Sweet Baby Inc. works to ensure that “a game’s plot points make logical sense and are satisfying to players, and that characters speak and behave in consistent ways,” such as writing in-game ads and audio logs for Rocksteady Studio’s Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. Once the far-right found similar companies involved in video game development, they claimed there was a sinister and well-organized campaign to force “wokeness” in the industry. Organizations such as TakeThis, which called for development companies to stand up against the “Gamergate mob,” have also fallen into the crosshairs of these gamers as another step in extremist pushback against the industry. The far-right has long been organizing to co-opt gaming to push their own bigoted ideologies.

Extremists Begin Their Campaign on the Fringe

Fringe platforms, such as 4chan, Kiwifarms, Communities, Odysse, and BitChute, which have all embraced being bastions of hateful content, were home to some of the most vile comments. Across these platforms, users were quick to blame “wokeness” on Jews, like referring to Sweet Baby Inc. co-founder Kim Belair as “(((Kim Belair))).” Parentheses surrounding someone’s name, referred to as “echoes,” are often used by antisemites to signal the names of Jewish people, Jewish organizations, or those thought to be Jewish. Several other users, primarily on 4chan, renewed their attacks against Zoe Quinn, calling her “a priestess of whatever satan cult jews [sic] do.” Another user wanted to expand on #GamerGate’s influence on the radicalization process, saying, “Gamergate proved Jews controlled the media. Let’s redpill a whole new generation too. Trump would have been impossible without Gamergate.” Disturbingly, the hatred towards Jews on 4chan culminated in claims that this iteration of #GamerGate will “kickstart the second Shoa [sic].” Shoah is the Hebrew word for “catastrophe,” and specifically denotes the genocide of six million Jews by Nazis during the Holocaust.


On the video-hosting platforms Odysee and Bitchute, several videos have been published discussing Sweet Baby Inc., including threats in a video thumbnail that “they will know pain,” claims that Sweet Baby Inc. are “gaslighting you about the evil they do,” “rewrit(ing) history,” an excuse used by far-right gamers to be racist, and that companies like Sweet Baby Inc. are pretending to be the “good boy that dindu nuffin,” a racist term against Black people originating on white supremacist online forums. In one video targeting TakeThis on Odysee, user “truthagon” commented that they were made up of “pedofaggot freemasons,” and that any organization defending Sweet Baby Inc. is akin to “faggot beer,” referring to Bud Light and their campaign with trans activist Dylan Mulvaney, and “faggot Disney,” referring to hatred targeting the company for including more diversity in their films. On Telegram, several extremist groups and organizations weighed in. The white supremacist White Lives Matter (WLM) Utah chat called Sweet Baby Inc. a “DEI consulting firm responsible for turning video games into political activism” and blamed them for the amount of “faggots” and “crazy stuff in media…nowadays.”


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