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If you're unfamiliar with #gamergate count yourself lucky that you've avoided it this long. The easiest and most instructive way to explain this saga is to teach you how to identify the two main camps which are currently at war with each other over the serious business of either ethics in video game journalism or sexism among male gamers--depending on who you ask.

The name, and hashtag, gamergate was coined after the style of adding the suffix -gate to a word to denote some relation to controversy, scandal, and Richard Nixon's now 42-year-old war on the English language which he continues to wage from beyond the grave.

Like any good media fracas, there's something for everyone. For the fans of lowbrow gossip there's a lover's quarrel, infidelity, sex and intrigue; and for people above such tawdriness, or at least pretend to be above, there's the more dignified issues of journalistic integrity and professional ethics. Remember though that we're talking about video games here.

The really telling thing though, and really the only aspect you need to understand, is which side is putting out which narrative. Understanding the details, the play by play of the early events is a long slog through a lot of tedious material. It's really a turf war over video games, and the two sides are the indigenous denizens of gaming culture (men and women), and an outside group which seeks to bring a radical brand of misandric feminism into video games. In short: a female game developer used her personal relationship with a member of the gaming press to gain publicity (not a review, just a mention) for herself and her game. Gamers think that's wrong. The aforementioned anti-male bigots think it should be OK, as long as that woman is one of them--and she was. But that event was just the breaking point. The issue is larger and more widespread than that. We're passed talking about her.

You might expect that the video game press would be at the center of the discussion about journalism and ethics. How close should a reporter be to a story? What constitutes conflict of interest? When should a journalist recuse herself from a story about a close friend? Yet the mainstream press doesn't want to have that conversation. They really don't want to have that conversation. They want to talk about that other stuff. So we get articles about the "toxic" culture of online gaming. We are told that gaming has a problem and that problem is sexism; that all the allegations of corruption are just a smokescreen to hide the fact that bitter, virginal, male, nerds, are angry that women in the industry have sex.

You have to ask yourself, if there is no basis for the allegations of corruption, why is everyone who would be implicated running scared? Why has there been a media blitz to pump out the other side of the story, the sexism angle? Why is Jimmy fucking Wales having to take a break from begging for donations to step in and (at least threaten to) police the Wikipedia article about gamergate?

When you calmly, politely, and without a hint of sexism, suggest that you'd like to have a discussion about ethics in journalism, you are immediately pilloried as a misogynist, a bigot, a slut-shamer, and worse. And the people screaming these things at you the loudest, you'll notice, aren't even players of video games. They're riding in from tumblr and academia to save us from ourselves. They really believe that we need them. They really believe there's something wrong with our culture and our hobby that must be fixed. They really believe that in the end, we'll thank them for their efforts.

I am not a sexist, a bigot, a mysogynerd, or a slut-shamer. And I say, no thank you.

We do not need outsiders to come into our community and tell us that we are doing it wrong. And when they use women and minorities as a shield to justify their campaign, I find that more than a little annoying. It's demonstrative of the cynical hypocrisy of these people, that the harshest vitriol is directed at other women who happen to disagree with them. When a female gamer stands up to their bullying and says that she doesn't feel threatened by men, that trash talk rape jokes online aren't existential threats to her safety, that they feel insulted when they're told they've internalized misogyny, she'll be told to sit down and shut up. The heat death of the universe would arrive before I would finish cataloging all the examples of this, but here's a perfect and succinct example that gives the character of what we're up against.

If you're anti-Gamergate, if you think that's where you belong because you say to yourself, "Hey, I'm not a sexist. I'm down with women's rights. Feminism sounds OK most of the time. I guess I side with the people who use those terms to describe themselves." then know that those people (from the pic, the username on the bottom) are your allies, your leaders, and your spiritual guides.

If however, on reflection, you see their hypocrisy and their infantilization of women, their anger and their hatred, and decide that's not for you; then welcome, you're in good company.

#gamergate

Now can we just play video games, please?