Paper short abstract:

Online harassment orchestrated by the #GamerGate campaign uses multiple rhetorical, algorithmic, demographic, and legal infrastructures to target feminist game developers, critics, scholars, and fans of independent gaming with very intense campaigns of online harassment.

Paper long abstract:

Online harassment is facilitated by a wide variety of material, human, informational, and rhetorical infrastructures. Carefully orchestrated recent campaigns to punish, shame, threaten, and terrorize female or feminist game designers, critics, fans, and players have benefited from specific infrastructural conditions. For example, GamerGate borrows from the tactics of hashtag activism around metadata naming conventions, the standards of legal equality trumpeted by the men's rights movement, the doctrines of the "magic circle" in gaming culture, and the architectures of distribution, replication, optimization, and reciprocity built into the Internet itself. GamerGaters have capitalized on rules for registering domain names, standards for IP addresses, upvoting procedures in online communities, and the protocols of crowdfunding and customer service mechanisms to align their interests and coordinate their hostile and exclusionary affective labor. They have even appropriated the infrastructural advantages of certain feminist topoi, such as level playing fields or safe spaces.

This paper examines the larger discursive context of #GamerGate and why hard-core gamers who are fans of AAA videogames with military storylines and first-person shooter game mechanics have constructed a seemingly illogical and paranoid explanatory theory about so-called "social justice warriors" pursuing unfair advantage. As they deny the materiality, embodiment, labor, and situatedness of digital culture, they also affirm positive notions about the exceptionalism of a realm defined - in Nicholas Negroponte's terms - by bits rather than atoms. This rhetorical infrastructure, which emphasizes transparency, neutrality, and universality, is also a key feature of the GamerGate campaign.