Gamergate, an idiosyncratic consumer revolt of angry gamers against the video game industry and journalists that erupted in 2014, initially made Vávra and his Prague-based Warhorse Games folk heroes for not embracing DEI in their development of a game called Kingdom Come: Deliverance. But in the wake of Trump and Elon Musk’s political triumph, Vávra has been branded insufficiently anti-woke. Gamergate keeps waging new battles against every phantom of woke cultural depiction, no matter how minor, illustrating the sisyphean nature of the online culture wars — it’s a virtual game no one can ever truly win.

Vávra is not your typical blue-haired social justice warrior. The barrel-chested, bearded Czech looks like a character in his own medieval European action game and once led a street protest outside the Greek embassy in Prague to protest colleagues’ arrest. Yet, a decade ago, he became a pariah among many of the press and his peers. They hated that Vávra was sympathetic to Gamergate. In 2015, progressive activists accused Warhorse Games of racism for not including people of color from a game set in rural 15th-century Bohemia, which Vávra defended as part of a commitment to historical accuracy. The controversy prompted him to speak out against the wokeification of the games industry. “The future of our biz is at stake, and ‘progressive’ media are destroying it with their hateful narrative,” he said.

The keyboard jockeys of Gamergate applauded Vávra’s stance but the fallout of the controversy was ugly: Warhorse got hate mail from progressives, and news outlets such as Vice refused to cover Kingdom Come. Vávra likened the backlash to living in the USSR. “I had the ‘privilege’ of growing up in a totalitarian communist regime,” he told a games journalist in 2015, “so I have first-hand experience with censorship and… going to prison for your opinion or shitty propaganda on TV, in literature and even music.”

Explaining how reception to a video game gets compared to life in the last days of Soviet communism isn’t easy. What sparked it all was a laughably low-stakes morass involving the ex-boyfriend of a game developer who posted an angry rant about their relationship online. Each side of Gamergate insisted they had the moral high ground, with one claiming they were defending “ethics in videogame journalism” and the other side saying they were righteously fighting “misogynists lashing out at women in gaming”. More broadly, Gamergate was a kind of clash of online civilizations. In her 2017 book Kill All Normies, Angela Nagle described the dynamic as “hysterical liberal call-out culture produced a breeding ground for an online backlash of irreverent mockery and anti-PC”.

In other words, they were two sides of the same coin: shrieking online bubbles — one self-righteous and woke and the other conservative and/or trollish that worked out of the same terrible playbook: bad faith character assassination, public shaming, or getting someone fired. I say that from personal experience; keyboard warriors and even some of my colleagues tried to get me fired from my role writing about video games for The Onion because I was inaccurately perceived as a Gamergate foot soldier.

Gamergate might sound arcane now, but it was the perfect moral panic for the peak Twitter era, a funhouse mirror version of the scapegoating of video games of the Eighties and Nineties. Blaming games for society’s ills used to be a bipartisan effort: Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden have all tried to restrict them (Biden even once called game developers “little creeps” who make games that teach people how to kill). But instead of being blamed for inspiring school shooters, Gamergate became a useful liberal talking point among Democrats. They cited video games’ power to allegedly groom young white males and turn them into bitter incels and extreme Right-wingers.

For most of Gamergate’s lifespan, the movement looked like a lost cause. It became a reliable punching bag for the mainstream media, part of the founding myth of the alt-Right, which begat Q-Anon, which begat Trump’s presidency; indeed, Trump has even been called the “Gamergate” of Republican politicians. For instance, Vox argued that Gamergate was “a watershed moment and learning experience for many future Trump supporters”. For his part, Steve Bannon admits that he viewed Gamergate as an opportunity for recruiting what he labelled “rootless white males” into a standing Right-wing army online. “You can activate that army,” he told Joshua Green, the author of Devil’s Bargain. “They come in through Gamergate or whatever and then get turned onto politics and Trump.

Yet Gamergate had the opposite effect as intended: games got more identitarian — not less — since 2014. As Gamergate’s online forces fumed, new games increasingly incorporated more racially diverse characters and LGBTQ storylines. In Dragon Age: Veilguard, you can get a call-out for misgendering a non-binary character — an eye-roll-inducing HR lecture in a fantasy game about dragons.

But perhaps not for long. As others have noted, there’s been a noticeable vibe shift against progressive political correctness. Game journalists and activists failed miserably in their attempt at a reverse Gamergate — a boycott of Hogwarts Legacy due to J.K. Rowling’s “transphobia”. Now, the media says that Rowling may have just won the culture war.

Complaints about Assassin’s Creed: Shadows’ usage of a black samurai hero in a game about historical Japan led to the game being delayed three months until early 2025 to “better incorporate player feedback”. Wired is calling the controversy “Gamergate 2.0“, but what they don’t mention is that Japanese gamers have been the most vocal and got over 100,000 signatures for a petition to cancel the game, saying it’s “a serious insult to Japanese culture and history, and may also be linked to Asian racism”. In this case, the politics of “cultural appropriation” butted up against the “underrepresentation” of black characters and won.

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Then came Trump’s re-election in November, which signalled the ultimate triumph of the anti-woke regime, with outspoken Gamergater Elon Musk suddenly wielding incredible power. Some game developers have even started to pitch themselves as anti-DEI, while liberals’ attempts to invoke Gamergate as a rallying cry are falling on deaf ears. Lin Manuel Miranda recently released a DEI-inspired concept album based on of The Warriors, the 1979 cult movie about New York gangs, but this time with all-female protagonists and an incel villain that Miranda says was inspired by Gamergate. If you haven’t heard of the album, it’s probably because it’s hopelessly corny, an embarrassing relic from the Obama years that deservedly died on the Billboard charts.

Likewise, Dragon Age: Veilguard earned half the expected sales, and Concord, a target of Gamergate for its gender-fluid characters and awkward pronouns, got shut down by Sony after only two weeks due to a historically dismal performance.

No wonder there’s been a distinct tone of triumph amongst the extremely online denizens of “Kotaku In Action” — a subreddit that’s been the unofficial home to Gamergate for a decade. Some of the group’s 157,000 members have gone as far as to declare a victory in their decade-long battle against “Social Justice Warriors”. “Ten fucking years after the thing, we were proven to be right even though anyone not dishonest or mentally disabled knew we were right,” one poster proclaimed recently in a thread titled Gamergate Won. “Now that we’ve won, can games start being good again?”

However, there are no clear conditions for victory in the culture wars and little interest in calling for a truce. So, the crusade keeps expanding to absurd lengths until it begins to resemble the thing that progressives accused it of being — a Right-wing reactionary political force. “Gamergate went from [being] about games journalism to a wider culture war to what it is now — a last attempt to stop globalists from taking full authoritarian control of the West,” went a recent Gamergate Reddit post.

What does it mean to Reddit post your way to a populist Right-wing crusade against “globalists?” Not much, so it’s much easier to keep targeting video games for wokeness, no matter how petty the offense. Just ask Warhorse Games.

Vávra is being canceled once again, but this time, ironically, it’s by Gamergate. The just-released sequel to Kingdom Come includes an optional same-sex romance option and an added element of racial diversity because the game is set in the Czech city of Kuttenberg, which, like other cities in the Holy Roman Empire, was a hub of trade and cultural exchange. Vávra and Warhorse insisted that they were going once again for historical accuracy, such as the inclusion of a Jewish quarter. Still, Gamergaters accused them of “going woke” and began boycotting the game and spamming Metacritic with bad reviews like: “Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is a gay woke historically inaccurate DEI game.”

Now, Vávra is speaking out against his former comrades-in-arms: “[It] turns out that we are once again in the middle of a rather bizarre culture war, this time from the opposite side than usual.”. His colleague, Tobias Stolz-Zwilling, stated that Warhorse would rather not be connected to any political battle. “It seems like someone is always trying to brand us somehow, and we are just trying to make a cool video game,” he said.

Either way, Vávra may have the last laugh. Kingdom Come: Deliverance II has been a critical darling and sold over 2 million copies in its first two weeks. The growing sentiment in “Kotaku In Action” is that the Gamergate boycott of the game may have been an overreach. As one commentator noted, “It’s lame when anyone of any political or cultural stripe engages in a witch hunt or a purity test, especially when it isn’t even sincere.”

Who just wants to play some video games instead?

The early world of internet gaming was a kind of messy bachelor pad, and we button-pushing boy masterminds abounded. Each of us had independently discovered these games, as we might have done with Roger Corman films or post-punk music, and we manspread across this open frontier. A process of acculturation equated console gaming and computer technology with maladjusted “nerds”, meaning that they held scant appeal for women or any other normies. Ensconced in parents’ basements or rat-hole apartments, the most successful gamers could demonstrate mastery alone or against others: crushing foes in one of the various Super Smash Bros fighting games or extending the virtual empire in their grand strategy game to the limits of the known world. In lives otherwise without purpose, in an economy that had been rapidly deindustrialising for decades, video games offered an opportunity for the cultivation of arete, or “excellence”, here confined to the movement of a mouse.

As Clifford Geertz wrote of machine gambling, the conclusion of his famous 1973 interpretation of Balinese cockfighting, video games were portrayed for years in the mainstream media as shallow, unedifying activities that lacked depth of meaning, investment, or consequence. They had, most assumed, nothing to do with the fundamental concerns of culture; they could not properly be called a “sociological entity”. Gamers, in turn, were all too often classified the way Geertz characterised “the socially despised and personally idiosyncratic” Balinese men who played the mechanical gambling games on the periphery of cockfights.

Not only were games derided, they were demonised, often proving a useful vehicle for media outlets. Tales of violent games and their bloodthirsty players got clicks. The Columbine murderers Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, who played the first-person shooters Doom and Quake together, were villainous boy masterminds straight from central casting: a two-man “trenchcoat mafia” who used skills honed in these games to wreak vengeance on their better-adjusted high school classmates. After the 1999 Columbine massacre, the video game player became more than just a pitiable outcast; he was now a perpetual suspect, too.

But video games only grew in popularity, reaching ever-larger audiences and slowly raising “important questions”. Suddenly you had cultural critics, such as Tom Bissell, in a memorable 2011 essay for Grantland, expatiating about the literary merits and failings of big-budget games like the Elder Scrolls franchise. Where once all the video-gaming world had been the preserve of nerds, it was now supposed to be a welcoming place for everyone else. Stories about grandmothers fat-fingering mindless Candy Crush Saga games on their smartphones ceased to be novel; eventually they ceased to be stories at all.

Now, in the 2020s, video gaming has simply become culture. The fact that HBO’s big-budget, critically acclaimed new prestige television series, The Last of Us, is a faithful adaptation of a 10-year-old video game, offers compelling evidence. Mainstream pop-culture properties launched on the back of video-game success used to fail miserably, including the 1992 Super Mario Bros film or 2002 Resident Evil adaptation, reaffirming critic Roger Ebert’s point that “video games are not art”. Now nerdy video game culture is just plain old American monoculture. And the elites of this monoculture have elevated The Last of Us — a game beloved by many, but regarded by me as nothing more than an overwrought, ladder-moving simulator — to the level of middlebrow art: premium television status.

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The reason for this shift is crudely simple: video games are where the money is. Worldwide video game revenue exceeds filmed entertainment revenue. In fact, where the global film and television industry brings in $100 billion in revenue, and the global sports industry roughly $75 billion, the video game industry produces more revenue than those two industries combined. And the multinational entertainment corporations have figured out how to package and repackage profitable intellectual property in as many ways, to as many people, as possible. It is only a matter of time before all the significant video gaming franchises — like all the significant comic books — are cannibalised by the Hollywood complex.

This process is proceeding apace. Last year gave us Uncharted — based on a popular video game from the same company that developed The Last of Us. It brought us, too, a television adaptation of Xbox Game Studios’ Halo. Neither was a critical success. As was the case with comics, what was lost along the way was exclusivity. Previously, these properties had belonged to a specific category of people, the video gamers. Now, they could be consumed, without the cultivation of any sort of gaming mastery, by everyone.

The war for exclusive control of these properties, which once resided on the video-gaming frontier, was waged — and lost — by the players roughly a decade ago. What began in 2014 as a targeted harassment campaign against independent game developer Zoë Quinn, for various alleged crimes against the integrity of game reviewing, coalesced into the fully-fledged “GamerGate” social movement. The nerds behind it took aim at the seemingly unethical collusion of the gaming press and various progressive groups, as well as the “mission creep” of social-justice ideology into games that had once been very nearly the private fiefdoms of their players. GamerGate pitted many veteran video gamers, interested in protecting their unique “gamer” identity, against the incursion of not merely what they considered “political correctness” into their territory but the millions of casual new video game fans who either didn’t mind or notice these changes or were actively interested in seeing them made. (Far more new players were in the former category than the latter.)

Initially playing out within the world of video games and video game journalism, GamerGate metastasised into a full-on political struggle, with many veteran “gamer”-identifying individuals ending up aligned with emerging Right-wing influencers who earned their stripes during this conflict, such as provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos. Left-wing activists such as Anita Sarkeesian, backed by a new generation of video game players more closely aligned with the Left-liberal consensus of the Obama years, opposed them.

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Video gaming, which had once been an intense, albeit neutral and private, experience, was now a major battlefront in the ongoing culture wars. And the conflict field-tested many arguments and strategies that would later be deployed by alt-Right and dirtbag Left-identifying people in 2015 and 2016. Though it still sounds somewhat absurd to make this claim, an argument can be made that GamerGate was almost as important as the violent ideological clashes that defined the turbulent Sixties; it was roughly analogous, then, to the Free Speech Movement that took place on the University of California-Berkeley campus during the 1964-1965 academic year, a seemingly minor event in the scheme of things that in hindsight had extraordinary societal ramifications.

When the dust began to clear, the video gamers understood that they were losing their games, much as the comics nerds had ceded their fandom to the vanilla-bland, focus group-crafted Marvel Cinematic Universe that now mined their beloved, pulpy stories for middlebrow movie ticket sales. This is exactly what happened to Uncharted, Halo, and numerous other in-progress video game-based projects  — more than two dozen are slated for 2023 and beyond.)

My larger point is not whether GamerGate was “good” or “bad” — that issue was litigated to death at the time, a sort of Helen of Troy-grade topic capable of launching a thousand think pieces a day. My point is that it set in motion the politicisation of many whose identities depended entirely on being left alone on what had once been a vast, empty frontier. At the risk of overstating the claim — though it may not be possible to overstate it, given the declining fortunes of young men in the West — this development has contributed to the growth of a restive “reserve army” of incels, Neets(“not in education, employment, or training”). These forlorn boys have not only lost what they believe to be their rightful places in society but also the few pleasurable pastimes they had to themselves, which have been sanded down into something bland and digestible for the consumers of the monoculture.

Meanwhile, video games, like everything that gets too popular, have been absorbed by today’s dominant marketing methods. Much-hated microtransactions, subscriptions, and other bits of continuous re-selling are now built into games.

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There is no “return to monke” possible here, and those video-game primitivists must be left to rage on the margins of society or assimilate and disappear.  The final co-option of this community is the bitterest blackpill to swallow: both work and education have been video “gamified” by Human Resources managers trying to extract some cheap labour from all those Neets now idling on the sidelines of life itself. Where video gaming was once a private refuge from the workaday world, “gamification” is now a paradigm through which productivity is stocked. Neets can score points by reviewing digital documents, identifying images to be content-moderated, and other trivial but necessary tasks not yet amenable to full automation.

The true video gamers must face, to paraphrase Marx and Engels, their real conditions of life and their real relations with others. Capitalism, “the river in which we sink or swim”, has a swiftly-moving current that pulls them irresistibly into that future — which may contain even more ominous developments, such as the AI-fuelled redefinition of work. The loss is more tragic than many realise: a culture dependent on one of society’s last frontiers was destroyed and reshaped. And it is irreversible.

“We are proud to welcome Moses Ingram to the Star Wars family and excited for Reva’s story to unfold,” it read, alongside a photo of its newest cast member. “If anyone intends to make her feel in any way unwelcome, we have only one thing to say: we resist.”

And then, just in case you didn’t get the message, there was a follow-up tweet: “There are more than 20 million sentient species in the Star Wars galaxy, don’t choose to be a racist.”

Suggesting millions of Star Wars fans are a bunch of racists-in-waiting might seem like a peculiar PR strategy. But if you were to plot the marketing trajectory of Star Wars alongside the fall of traditional journalism, a pattern would begin to emerge.

Today’s predominant mode of cultural engagement began incubating on Tumblr around 2010, spread to mainstream media in the lead-up to America’s 2016 election, and now dominates the entire cultural apparatus up to and including Hollywood itself. It owes much to the 2008 recession, and the mass layoffs in media which fundamentally transformed how news was covered.

Imagine a horde of freshly unemployed veteran writers, alongside new journalism grads, desperately trying to claw out a livelihood in a world where writing had been completely devalued. (It was not unusual, at this time, to be told that the job you were applying for paid not in money but “exposure”.) Gone was the $2-per-word magazine staff writer position; gone was the local shoe-leather reporting job that might launch a lifelong career. Now, a writer’s best option was freelance blogging, churning out listicles and aggregated new stories at $15 a pop — and with a quota, which at some outlets ran as high as 20 posts per day.

The pressure to produce content on such an accelerated timeline spawned a lot of half-arsed, hastily-executed work (“10 Times Brad Pitt’s Butt Made Me Want To Die: A List In GIFs”) but also created a constant scramble for something, anything, to write about. Social media, then in its infancy, was a lifesaver: as a reporter at MTV News, I could curate a quick roundup of Twitter or Tumblr reactions to last night’s Game of Thrones episode in less than 20 minutes, which allowed me to meet my quota while also prioritising more interesting, time-consuming work (for instance, getting a trauma surgeon to assess whether it was actually, medically possible for The Mountain to crush Oberyn Martell’s skull like a grape).

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At the time, this interface between reporters and random posters was both friendly and fully symbiotic: the writers got free content, the posters increased their internet clout. And crucially, nobody took any of it all that seriously; even being cruel could earn you a coveted place in the Celebs Read Mean Tweets roundup on Jimmy Kimmel Live.

But, in 2014, as cash-strapped media outlets chose to prioritise opinion journalism (quick and cheap) over investigative reporting (time-consuming and expensive), the news cycle became increasingly outrage-driven, and our thinking about the type of post that was deemed worthy of coverage changed. The saga of Justine Sacco had recently introduced a hungry populace to the joys of playing hunt-the-racist on Twitter. The US was becoming more tribal, and art, in turn, more political. The ridiculous culture war known as Gamergate consumed the discourse for months on end, as did a massive controversy over the new, all-female Ghostbusters reboot. Liking this movie — even just liking the idea of it — meant you were one of the good guys. Disliking it, on the other hand, marked you as not just a critic, but a Bad Person.

The new Star Wars trilogy, then, was perfectly positioned to become a flashpoint in this newest culture war — a war that directly benefited a media economy in which controversy meant clicks. Its first piece of promotional material could not have been more perfectly designed to provoke the ire of the franchise’s less-enlightened fans: a teaser, released in November 2014, featuring the actor John Boyega dressed as a stormtrooper.

This is not to say that the Star Wars publicity department wanted racists to take aim at the trailer, but given the number of pieces about “racist Star Wars fans” which followed over the next 24 hours, they would also have had to be idiots not to realise they’d stumbled on marketing gold.

At the same time, celebrities had cottoned on to the value of clapping back on social media. Responding to a random dickhead was no longer undignified or beneath them, but the quickest, easiest way to get positive press. So when Boyega made an Instagram post addressing the black stormtrooper controversy, the internet went wild.

A representative post about Boyega’s clapback reveals how easy it was to map this new, slightly sanctimonious mode of media coverage onto the existing social media-based story model. All you needed was a vaguely clickbaity headline (“JOHN BOYEGA SHUT DOWN RACIST ‘STAR WARS’ HATERS WITH FOUR SIMPLE WORDS”), followed by 250 lightly editorialised words about the incident, followed by two embedded tweets showcasing the alleged racism, rounded off with Boyega’s post and a boilerplate link back to the Force Awakens teaser.

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But what it also reveals, in hindsight, is how this mode of coverage blurred the boundaries between identifying a trend and manufacturing one. The two embedded tweets in that piece had a total of 11 retweets between them, suggesting that the sentiment within them were anything but popular. If not for the existing practice of trawling Twitter for “people are saying” stories — and if not for the absurd expectation that journalists should post new material every hour — there would never have been any reason to dig them up. The racist haters would have simply languished in obscurity, their tweets lost to the sands of time.

This would have been a good time for culture writers to step back, both from the quota model of journalism and from its engagement with stupid social media controversies. But this was 2015, which was followed by the year in which progressives abandoned all pretence of being culture war noncombatants and went all-in on sneering contempt. The purest form of this shift is Molly Fitzpatrick’s article, “Angry baby-men hate the new Ghostbusters trailer”.

In hindsight, the “baby-men” article marked a point of no return. The ossified smugness of it, the right-side-of-history certainty, the way that books and movies and television and music now sorted automatically on political grounds into things one ought to be either for or against. By the time the new Ghostbusters was actually released, the criticism of it was not criticism so much as a celebration of its mere existence, so that any assessment of whether it was good or not became entirely irrelevant. (It was, for the record, not good.)

And Star Wars was an opportunity like no other to stick it to the baby-men. It was about strong female characters, and intergalactic diversity, and standing up against the fascist forces of the Trump admi… uh, I mean, the Empire. By the time The Last Jedi came out in December 2017, the American Left had so thoroughly fused its pop culture with its politics that it was no longer possible to discern if the “Resistance” movement people kept referring to was the one with the spaceships, or the one with those ludicrous pink hats. By 2020, every Star Wars news cycle included stories about how the franchise’s forays into diversity continued to infuriate its toxic fanbase.

This brings us back to Obi Wan Kenobi and Moses Ingram, a story whose trajectory is as good an example as any of how Hollywood has learned to leverage this aspect of the discourse. On 22 May, Ingram told The Independent that she’d been warned about racist Star Wars fans by none other than the execs at Lucasfilm, and took a light jab at the lack of diversity in the franchise: “If you’ve got talking droids and aliens but no people of colour, it doesn’t make sense.” The Independent led with that quote, and the interview was dutifully re-reported over the next few days by multiple outlets — under such provocative headlines as “Lucasfilm Warned ‘Obi-Wan’ Star Moses Ingram About Racist ‘Star Wars’ Trolls”. And within a week, Ingram began posting screenshots of abusive messages she’d received on Instagram, including one calling her a “diversity hire”.

From there, it was a short distance to the “don’t be racist” tweet from the official Star Wars account. As of this writing, it has been retweeted upwards of 30,000 times, and dozens of mainstream media outlets from NPR to the Daily Show have run at least one story about it.

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None of this is to say that racist Star Wars fans do not exist. They do; the question is whether they are emboldened, even incentivised, by this continued, bizarre symbiosis with an outrage-driven media that relies on them for content. Consider one of the top citations in these stories, a YouTube video titled “Obi-Wan Series Is Going To Be AWFUL Because It’s Hiding Behind Diversity AGAIN!”, apparently made in response to Ingram’s 22 May comments in the Independent. The video is objectively offensive (the word “darkies” appears in the thumbnail), and the creator, an account named MechaRandom42, seems to specialise in intentionally inflammatory content with an anti-woke bent. But it is content that people mostly don’t watch: within the past month, she has posted multiple videos per week, most of which have paltry view counts in the 1,000-2,000 range.

The official Obi Wan Kenobi trailer posted a month ago by Disney has been viewed 11 million times. The “hiding behind diversity” video, on the other hand, has 13,000 views — the bulk of which came after journalists started citing it in their coverage of the controversy.

Who benefits from this? The trolls do, of course. They’re getting exactly what they want, their status and influence growing with every indignant squawk, every angry celebrity video response. But they’re not the only ones. A media class that makes its living on outrage gets a story that does numbers. Moses Ingram gets an outpouring of support and waves of positive press coverage. The studio execs behind Obi Wan Kenobi get the warm, fuzzy feeling that comes from persuading a bunch of impressionable people that the best way to signal their moral correctness is by putting more money in Disney’s pocket. Everybody wins.

Except the art, of course. In a culture that cannot conceive of appreciating something you love unless it’s part of a righteous backlash against the angry baby-men you hate, art loses every time.