The Kirkening Part 2: Forever Gamergate
After the response to the death of Charlie Kirk, it’s worth reflecting on the foundational mechanisms that contributed to the harassment campaigns included as part of right-wing mourning this past September.
This current slew of WXQT publications is focused on the recent proliferation of Charlie Kirk-related content online. Welcome to “The Kirkening,” part 2.
Two months past the initial outpouring of intensely emotive content around the death of conservative provocateur and media influencer Charlie Kirk, it’s worth reflecting on the foundational mechanisms that contributed to the actionability of right-wing mourning throughout this past September.
Robin and I have been writing a lot about the weird media aftershocks from Charlie Kirk’s murder, including how online psychics channeled his spirit from the afterlife and how his online detractors have photoshopped his likeness onto rap album covers. This article is part two of a three-part series on “The Kirkening,” where we attempt to articulate — from a few different angles — how Kirkified and Kirk-related content both descend from previous online trends and could spawn (or otherwise influence) future trends.
This post mostly concerns the tsunami of reaction to Kirk’s death — specifically responses that frame his murder as an instance of moral injury against the right — that, in turn, led to ripples of doxes, firings, networked harassment, and more against those who dared criticize Kirk or make jokes about his death. This outrage cycle included several iterations of right-wing-hosted sites that publicly gathered and posted the personal information of random people that the site creators felt had mocked Kirk’s death, no matter how tame the take. Some of the posts on these sites, while perhaps made in poor taste, were often (as many others have written) exponentially less incendiary than statements espoused by Kirk himself.
One such instance of Kirk-related firings struck me for its similarities to past instances of online harassment. Alyssa Mercante, writing for Aftermath, recounts the firing of Drew Harrison, a former employee of Sucker Punch, the game studio behind Ghost of Yotei. Harrison, who made a (bad) joke about Kirk’s death that also referenced Luigi Mangione, the alleged killer of the United Healthcare CEO, experienced a deluge of harassment and was eventually fired from the studio. Harrison claims that her targeting wasn’t rooted in any sense of morality, saying, “There’s no moral code they’re trying to uphold. There’s no cause they’re rallying for. They are just trying to make people suffer.”
Gamergate in Context
As someone who has tracked the weird parts of the Internet for over a decade (and has been a so-called ‘digital native’ my whole life), the recent wave of Kirk-related reactions, seemingly based on a sense of grave moral injury by right-wingers, reminds me of (and obviously built upon) Gamergate. This moral panic turned online crusade that kicked off over a decade ago over what its proponents lamented as a lack of “ethics in games journalism.”
For those blissfully unaware, Gamergate was an online harassment campaign in reaction to perceived feminist advances in video game spaces, initially targeting Anita Sarkeesian, Brianna Wu, and Zoë Quinn. It began with a blog post by Zoë Quinn’s ex-boyfriend, who heavily and falsely insinuated that Quinn had received a positive review of her game due to a sexual relationship she had with the reviewer. The post spread to 4chan, where a whole extended cinematic universe of rightist harassment campaigns exploded. Gamergate is critical to bear in mind with most anything that involves online campaigns furthered by the right, but especially ones that are both based on reaction to a particular event and target individuals through networked harassment tactics. Helen Lewis’s early 2015 explanation of Gamergate aptly describes the trend’s emergence.
To be clear, while Gamergate bears the descriptor “gamer” as its first two syllables, those who engage with its dynamics don’t have to play video games or be fans of gaming. Chaya Raichik, who uses the handle “LibsOfTikTok,” is a sort of 21st-century online witch hunt facilitator who has made a career of posting about non-celebrity people (often teachers, doctors, and librarians) and directing a deluge of hate against them. A report from Task Force Butler connected dozens of Raichik’s tweets to literal bomb threats against children’s hospitals in 2022, because she claimed those health centers were providing gender affirming care. Raichik struck gold with her format and lens, but really owes a deep debt to Gamergate content aggregators like r/KotakuInAction.
Charlie Warzel’s August 2019 piece describes Gamergate’s knock-on effects and how the incident has permeated so many facets of online culture. You should read Warzel’s piece, too:
The Forever (Gamer) Culture War
Where Warzel contended that “Everything is Gamergate,” I’d offer instead that we are locked in a ‘forever Gamergate.’ Rather than online culture wars having ties to networked harassment tactics (which they often do), each new battle (like the Kirk reaction) is just a continuation of a forever war begun over a decade ago by Zoë Quinn’s ex-boyfriend. This conflict is one where the weapons — willing networks, group chats and forums, and antisocial behaviors — have never really been dulled, much less eradicated. The only difference these days is that such campaigns, while still deriving much of their force from whatever the Internet analogy for “the grassroots” might be, are campaigns that can be (and often are) furthered by key influencers in the space. They don’t need the kind of comprehensive storytelling that early Gamergate campaigns required. These days, posters and their audiences share and consume directions for harassment memetically, usually with instructions that portray targets as self-evidently evil (and thus needing no narrative explanation).
Warzel helpfully outlines the playbook for online outrage content, but that downplays Gamergate to a deployable set of networked harassment tactics rather than the more ubiquitous and socially reproductive reality online we see today. This groove has been worn by countless deployments of the exact playbook Warzel identifies, to a point where the metaphor for a playbook no longer holds. Instead, the Gamergate methods of yesteryear (doxxing, networked harassment, etc.) are simply the easiest deployed tactics for all online campaigns today, often used without participants' and organizers’ awareness of their involvement in the broader war.
This devolution of management and agency in online harassment campaigns is deeply troubling, as it makes preventing such things even harder. Many of those (like myself) who have worked as practitioners trying to mitigate the impacts of networked harassment campaigns know we already have few tools with which to respond. Mostly, our toolbox simply holds methods to harden targets and put time between the start of an outrage cycle until the threat passes. To continue to add overlapping metaphors, we generally recommend weathering a hurricane by battening down the hatches and waiting for the all clear, responding to the air raid siren by hunkering down in a basement while bombs fall overhead, and seeking shelter under a desk during an all-too-common mass shooting. That’s not to say that all of these approaches aren’t advisable (they certainly are), but to instead say that our ability to stop these deeply antisocial campaigns hasn’t progressed much in over a decade of watching them happen. In part, this difficulty stems from the social nature of a harassment campaign, and, thus, the need for social responses akin to those against littering or smoking. Networked harassment campaigns are dispersed, decentralized, and connect with the neurotransmitters in ways that would probably make B.F. Skinner blush.
Last year, online rightists authored a bizarre conspiracy about a small video game studio called Sweet Baby Inc., claiming the studio’s ‘empathetic’ storytelling approach was being forced upon game developers by the capitalists that finance video game development. The campaign against Sweet Baby Inc. was deeply enmeshed with similar pushes against contemporary right-wing boogeymen, like ESG investing (environmental, social, and corporate governance), a campaign led in large part by the Heritage Foundation. While the campaign against Sweet Baby was sometimes described as “Gamergate 2.0,” that implies that Gamergate 1.0 actually ended — it didn’t, it just keeps rearing its head back up in times of crisis, facilitated by online outrage cycles. Even solely within the gaming space, online right-wing activists have extensively targeted game studios over the last decade for creating “woke” video game content. There are a handful of sites, Steam groups, Reddit threads, and more that categorize games as woke for having “pro-DEI,” “pro-LGBTQ+,” and “anti-Capitalism” themes. One such site even includes the Metal Slug franchise for daring to have female character options in a war game. Every time a right-wing content creator has an on-camera meltdown over pronouns in video games spirals over having to choose between “Body Type A and B” rather than male and female, or is otherwise unable to cope with continuing (but minor) efforts towards greater gender inclusion in games, Gamergate’s spirit persists.
Anatomy of a Forever Gamergate Campaign
Returning to the story of Drew Harrison, Alyssa Mercante provides a clear case study of the anatomy of a forever Gamergate campaign. I’d highly encourage you to read her piece if you haven’t already, especially since much of the information I include below is lifted from her reporting:
Alyssa Mercante
First, the campaign begins with personal harassment of the target, who receives threatening messages from online hordes intent on ensuring their target sees such threats. At the start of her ordeal, Harrison describes 12 hours of endless threatening calls and texts from anonymous numbers. Dozens of those replying to her Bluesky posts encouraged her to commit suicide. Harrison was largely targeted in this instance by prominent figures within the (cringiest side of the) online games content creation world. Streamer Zach “Asmongold” Hoyt and Mark “Grummz” Kern, both popular for their right-wing political takes and engagement with playing or developing Blizzard Entertainment properties (respectively), led the campaign against her.
Next, the campaign broadens the harassment, targeting the victim’s place of work, family, and friends, often concurrently resulting in harassment against the victim’s broader network. This is especially the case if the victim’s work involves the usual targets of culture war campaigns: video game-related fields, medical schools, and queer and/or women’s culture (often a combination of any of the above). Mercante describes a conversation she had with a Sucker Punch office manager, who was instructed to unplug their desk phones because of the sheer volume of harassing calls being made to the studio’s offices. Other coworkers, according to Harrison, told her that they, too, had been receiving harassing messages since her Kirk/Luigi social media post. Such targeting is often further intensified when the victim’s race, nationality, or religion figures into existing right-wing narratives.
Finally, these campaigns often result in (and indeed rely upon) repercussions beyond the ones directly associated with being the victim of online harassment. This could include the victim being fired or facing disciplinary action at a job. Other times, and in severe cases, a victim may be forced to relocate. Harrison tells Mercante that Sucker Punch lasted less than half a workday before throwing her under the bus in an office-wide message. Just hours after the harassment began, according to Harrison’s account, Sony’s human resources department invited Harrison to a video call where they promptly fired her (they also identified “the comments” in reply to her post as those that incited violence when Harrison asked for clarification on what part of her social media post was “celebrating and inciting violence”). A week later, Sucker Punch studio head Brian Fleming also threw Harrison under the bus, making her firing an example.
Every outcome of these campaigns has a repressive effect upon the victims, who are more likely to avoid engaging online for fear of future reprisal. These campaigns rely heavily on how our bodies and minds react to trauma by creating a temporally-succinct moment of heightened nervous system response that is both deeply traumatic and connected to the target’s online activity, thus associating such negative experiences with a specific behavior.
Of course, these repercussions have epilogues, rippling across future online behavior. Those who led and participated in successful harassment campaigns often gloat about their achievements, usually measured in the misery of their victims. This gloating often leads to another wave of harassment against the chosen victim. Streamer Asmongold, for example, gloated over Harrson’s firing from Sucker Punch, saying he would target her with similar campaigns if he ever learned she had been hired in a new role.
Placing Blame: Wait, It’s All Capitalism? Always Has Been
Sucker Punch’s decision to throw Drew Harrison under the bus, fire her, and then use her firing as an example of the company’s commitment to civil engagement is disingenuous and mercenary as hell. Harrison’s story would have looked very different had Sucker Punch prioritized solidarity and employee protection over angry online posts from people who were almost certainly not going to buy a samurai genre game with a female protagonist. Forever Gamergate relies upon this reality: one where workplaces (and the owners, who are sometimes but not always driven by corporate interests) treat their employees as infinitely expendable, where staff can be thrown off the sled as a sacrifice to briefly slow the chasing wolves.
We see this dynamic across society with increasing frequency and increasingly negative ramifications. I am reminded of a similar ongoing campaign against (and similar throwing-under-the-bus of) U.S. House Representative Ilhan Omar. Omar is a frequent victim of targeted harassment campaigns led by President Donald Trump. Omar, like Harrison, has received very little solidarity from her colleagues and workplace, in this case Democratic Party leadership. Omar, who is Somali by birth but a longtime American citizen serving Minnesota’s 5th Congressional District, frequently serves as the right’s scapegoat whenever they start bashing Somali immigrants, Muslim refugees, etc. It is deeply troubling that even Omar, who is well-known and well-liked by her constituents, doesn’t seem to be getting support from her colleagues in the Democratic Party and has instead been forced to weather numerous harassment campaigns on her own. This is not to say that Omar isn’t tough and can’t take it, but to complain that she shouldn’t have to endure this alone – the mechanism for spreading the threat and responding in a coalition of support is literally part of why party politics is often touted as beneficial to candidates.
In hindsight, the tsunami of reaction to Kirk’s death, specifically the framing of his murder as an act of moral injury against the right and the subsequent deluge of targeted online harassment, should not have surprised us. We are all trapped in a forever Gamergate death spiral, forever doomed to be targeted by online chuds for making jokes about shitty people, or daring to have female characters in video games. The thing is, acquiescence to the demands of these harassment campaigns is predicated on the assumption that their demands are worthy of interrogation and acknowledgement. Engaging with these people only affirms their beliefs that a video game developer who dares to have a female character lead their video game, or a college student making a joke about Charlie Kirk’s death, should be doxxed and harassed within an inch of their life. As long as we view these people as being on equal footing on the battlefield of ideas, and not self-interested actors keen on stamping out any ideological frameworks or beliefs they disagree with, we will never escape Gamergate.
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this post and want to read something similar, consider reading our first Kirkening piece, on social media users generating Charlie Kirk rap album faceswaps:
Robin