Anger, fear and games: The Long Event of #GamerGate

The event known as #GamerGate emphasised the need to take the study of game culture seriously, and pursue it across several platforms. It demonstrated how the mediacity of seemingly ephemeral media created echochambers of anger, and how the outbursts of hypermasculine aggression seen in for instance the hooligans also can connect to games and play. Starting from how #GamerGate came to popular attention, this article describes and discusses the nature of #GamerGate, the relation to the victims, the sense of victimisation among the participants, and how it may have been provoked by the long-standing, general disregard of games as a culture and a cultural artefact of value. It discusses #GamerGate as a swarm, using this metaphor to describe it’s self-organising nature. Further comparing #GamerGate to hooligans, the article also introduces a class- and marginalisation aspect to understanding the event, opening up to discourses that complicates the image of game culture as mainly a culture of isolated consumption.