8chan was another imageboard where users could create their own boards. It had a minimal amount of global rules, where only illegal activities were banned. There was a mass exodus to 8chan after GamerGate due to moot deleting GamerGate discussion on 4chan. It got shut down after the Christchurch shooting and rebranded to 8kun. A different imageboard called 8chan.moe split off and is being run by the former owner of 8/v/ Mark Mann.

GamerGate was a consumer revolt against corruption in gaming journalism and censorship in discussion and art, which happened in 2014. It was found out that 5 game journalists were giving positive reviews to game developer Zoe Quinn's HTML game Depression Quest in exchange for sexual favors. This was exposed in a famous blog post by one of Zoe's ex-boyfriends called The Zoe Post.

Internet Aristrocat (now known as Mister Metokur) created a series called Quinnspiracy Theory on YouTube, exposing the conflicts of interest between Zoe Quinn and game journalists. As GamerGate became more popular, discussion of it became highly censored in gaming boards on forums like Reddit and 4chan.

The GameJournoPros mailing list exposed the collusion of game journalists and coordinated efforts to censor GamerGate on different sites. If a journalist, like the Escapist's Greg Tito disagreed with the ideas of censoring anything relating to Zoe Quinn or omitting from talking about her in a negative light, then they would get bombarded with hate messages in the mailing list.

Instead of addressing this massive scandal, the gaming media colluded to slander gamers by calling an end to the gamer identity, stereotyping them as angry sexist, racist, white men, while ignoring the ethical issues with Zoe Quinn by blaming gamers for harassing her. This can be best seen in the GamersAreDead articles, where the gaming media dropped a hit piece on gamers on the same date, with the same message, across multiple outlets. (Click here to download the full-resolution image).

In response to Anti-GamerGate and the gaming media using women and non-white people as a reason to oppose GamerGate, #NotYourShield on Twitter was created, full of posts from women and non-white people showing support for GamerGate, disproving the narrative of the sexist white angry gamer.

In 2013, feminist critic Anita Sarkeesian, uploaded a series on her YouTube channel Feminist Frequency called Tropes vs Women in Video Games to YouTube, funded by a Kickstarter beginning in 2012. In this series she critically analyzes videogames through a modern feminist lens. For example, she explains her opinion that the damsel-in-distress trope shows women as weak, unintelligent objects because in games, such as Mario and Zelda, the female protagonist is kidnapped and is expected to be saved by the male protagonist. When the male protagonist - which the player controls - is put in the same situation, he is able to get out of it by solving puzzles or other ways of getting out, clearly demonstrating male superiority. She explains this sexist representation of women, the beauty of female characters and the empowerment of men in videogames contributes to sexism in the real world.

However, Anita Sarkeesian has been lying about her history as a gamer and only started using videogames as a way to push her feminist agenda in 2012 to profit off it with donation money. It was exposed that the footage she would use in the series would come from uncredited Let's Players on YouTube. Her lack of understanding of videogames also shows in the series. For example, she explains that Hitman is sexist because it allows you to beat up female strippers, even though the footage she uses shows that the game penalizes you for it.

Gaming journalism would use Anita Sarkeesian's arguments as a way to attack gamers by calling them mysogynists for playing these sexist games. They also genuinely hold the same feminist beliefs, as exposed in the GamingJournoPros mailing list.

On June 26th 2013, orogion posted a journal entry onto DeviantArt called Save the Boob-plate! In this entry, he points out his fustration when dealing with offended-by-design opinionators when working on the cover art for the videogame Divinity: Original Sin. A bare-belly on a female character was enough to be declared sexist and forced to self-censor his art. He also points out the double standards of male characters, like Kratos, being exposed and not being declared sexist for objectifying men.

Christina Hoff Summers, also known as Based Mom on the internet, was a second wave feminist who created a series on YouTube called Factual Feminist, which was focused on refuting common feminist arguments such as videogames causing sexism according to academic studies, propagated by figures such as Anita Sarkeesian, using logic and statistics.

- GamerGate Wiki

- KnowYourMeme article