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Though the heat around #GamerGate has died down some in the mainstream press, it's still raging on Twitter and in gaming publications.
But the longer this fight rages, the harder it gets to figure out what the combatants would count as a win — or who they think can give it to them. Game designer and writer David Hill perfectly summarized the confusion in a post on Google+:
On our side, a lot of journalists hate the nepotism, and most importantly, they hate the relationship the industry has with journalism. Because a while back ago, "games journalism" was essentially coopted as a marketing arm for certain AAA publishers. At that point, AAA publishers became gatekeepers for success in games journalism. It's awful, because we want to be talking critically. We want to be looking at games in different lights. We want to approach these works of art as works of art, and not just as the next success or flop. But that can't happen on any large scale, because of that corruption, because of the commercialism of it all.
The way a lot of the Gamergate stuff looks to us really looks like some strange bizarro world where the games industry works completely different than it really does.
The biggest targets of Gamergate have been people who are frankly powerless in the games industry. People like Zoe Quinn and Phil Fish, they are not gatekeepers. They are not able to enact any real, significant influence on the industry.
There's much more at the link. Hill really does sympathize with some of the stated aims of #GamerGate. He just thinks the participants are turned toward the wrong targets.
