For a source to be “about GamerGate,” it had to satisfy at least one of the following criteria: The source had to be explicitly about GamerGate or significantly related to it.This number is essentially arbitrary, preferred over 10,000 so that I could include Gamasutra, since it’s perhaps the top game developer-focused publication. It had to be from a website with an Alexa Global Ranking lower than 11,000.The source had to be written in English.Below is a rough summary of the rules that I used to determine whether or not to include a particular source in the data set: I also visited certain websites directly, which was necessary in order to make sure that the most popular game publications were represented in the data, such as Gamespot, IGN, and others. This was done by using a mix of Google searches, in-site searches, and by following links between sources. My process for gathering the data sources revolved around finding websites and publications that covered GamerGate, and then for each website, I would gather every single thing that they published on the subject. It’s also worth noting that for many of these popular sites, a significant amount of their incoming traffic comes from social media. The most significant stuff inevitably bubbled up out of social media and into the essays, news articles, and wikis that covered GamerGate. This isn’t to say that social media was entirely ignored. The drawback to using Alexa rankings is that this metric isn’t useful for analyzing platforms such as Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, etc., and so I couldn’t directly analyze social media content with this approach. I was also working off of the assumption that all of the smaller, more obscure leftovers wouldn’t end up making a significant difference to the results. I reasoned that I would be able to get a pretty solid estimate of popular opinion by looking at the most significant artifacts that were produced by the public. With that in mind, I chose to gather as much of the “popular stuff” that I could find about GamerGate. For instance, an obscure forum post almost definitely wouldn’t have had as much of an impact on “what most people think” as a popular and widely-distributed news article. I also had to accept that not all of that content had equal weight to it. However, since it is impossibly difficult to analyze all of that content (much less gather it), I inevitably had to decide how I was going to narrow things down into something more manageable.

Since the whole event produced a ton of discussion, most of which seems to have taken place online, I chose to focus on analyzing the tons of online content that were produced since the birth of GamerGate. There are several methodologies that one might consider when tackling this research question. Patterns in How People Remember GamerGate.Why Does GamerGate Think Everyone Likes Them?.Patterns in How People Reacted to GamerGate.What Exactly is All of this GamerGate Stuff?.Patterns in How Publications Started Covering GamerGate.Things get particularly heavy in the section titled Patterns in How People Reacted to GamerGate. There’s a strong TRIGGER WARNING for anyone who was deeply affected by last year’s events and similar forms of harassment. This paper also reads like a historical analysis of the previous year by uncovering patterns in the ways that different people reacted to GamerGate. The following paper goes into great detail about how I conducted this research and why I reached those conclusions. More people see GamerGate as a toxic mob rather than a legitimate movement worthy of respect. The results of this project suggest that the vast majority of people do in fact equate GamerGate with online harassment, sexism, and/or misogyny. So I decided to start a little research project to settle the question: What did most people think about GamerGate? How is it that our perceptions of “what most people think” are so different? Could it be that we all live inside some social-media echo chamber that makes us oblivious to other points of view? I’ve had GamerGaters tell me that most people don’t equate GamerGate with online harassment and that most people (or at least, most gamers) are actually on GamerGate’s side. Lately I’ve been troubled by the fact that GamerGate’s supporters and I seem to have completely opposite perceptions about what most people think of their movement.

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