The capital-G Gamer "identity" was forged much earlier, at least as early as the PS2/Xbox/Gamecube generation when the X-ennials who grew up on Atari, NES, etc. were entering adulthood. It emerged partly from proto gamer-bro marketing tracing back to the mid-1990s, and as a sort of defensive response to the (arguably manufactured) moral panic surrounding violent games from that period including Doom, Mortal Kombat, Night Trap, and Grand Theft Auto.
Gamergate is more like the apotheosis of this cultural trend, refined through another ~15 years of toxic online gaming culture: teabagging, shouting racist/sexist/homophobic slurs and toothless death threats at people over the mic, chan culture/gaming forums, shitty "gamer" comics like Ctrl+Alt+Del, etc. This process was of course accelerated by exogenous economic trends: cheaper high-selling consoles like Wii which launched before the 2007 housing market crashed were trashed as "casual", and everyone but the "hardcore" gamers started getting priced out of AAA gaming as the economy went to shit.
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The capital-G Gamer "identity" was forged much earlier, at least as early as the PS2/Xbox/Gamecube generation when the X-ennials who grew up on Atari, NES, etc. were entering adulthood. It emerged partly from proto gamer-bro marketing tracing back to the mid-1990s, and as a sort of defensive response to the (arguably manufactured) moral panic surrounding violent games from that period including Doom, Mortal Kombat, Night Trap, and Grand Theft Auto.
Gamergate is more like the apotheosis of this cultural trend, refined through another ~15 years of toxic online gaming culture: teabagging, shouting racist/sexist/homophobic slurs and toothless death threats at people over the mic, chan culture/gaming forums, shitty "gamer" comics like Ctrl+Alt+Del, etc. This process was of course accelerated by exogenous economic trends: cheaper high-selling consoles like Wii which launched before the 2007 housing market crashed were trashed as "casual", and everyone but the "hardcore" gamers started getting priced out of AAA gaming as the economy went to shit.