GamerGate

This article was published on 10/31/2014.

You know what I really hate about GamerGate? I'll tell you what I hate about it: the name. This name is stupid, lame, and dumb. It's obviously a reference to the Watergate scandal of the 1970s, except it's about video games, which automatically makes it way less important. It has gained popularity at an astounding rate and is currently the hottest topic in gaming. That greatly angers me, because it means I have to continuously read this name on every gaming website ever. I'm technically part of the problem now, as I'm going to be typing that name countless more times in this very article, further contributing to its usage. I've done absolutely no research on the subject, so I don't have any idea what the GamerGate controversy is even about. Boy, am I professional or what? All I know is that I hate the name with the passion of a million nukes. I'm going to go into greater detail on why that is below.

It's become a trend to append "gate" to a variety of nouns to denote different controversies now. Despite the Watergate scandal being eons ago, it's only now become popular to do this online. And every time an online user jokingly uses the "gate" suffix to describe something, they're not actually referencing Watergate, but are instead referencing GamerGate, the much stupider version. GamerGate is also an alliteration, which only adds insult to injury. I normally love alliterations, but this is one I can't love, no matter how much I look at it. I hate Internet trends and trends in general. The more popular the trend, the greater my hate for it, and this is a fairly popular trend. It took me a while to realize this was going on, so I'm late to the party on this one. To be perfectly honest, I wish I was more than late to the party. I would much rather have missed this party than be late, but it's too late for that. Perhaps it is fate my hate is late to the plate.

What the heck does dox even mean? All I know is, it sounds stupid, and I hate things that sound stupid. Could people please stop coming up with moronic terms to describe things? Why does everything have to have its own lingo now? Whenever I try reading up on GamerGate, I'm assaulted with all kinds of exclusive terms that make no sense to me. It reminded me of when I first tried learning programming and had to make sense of all the jargon, except this is way less productive. I don't want every controversy to require an up-to-date urban dictionary to comprehend. This is why I always immediately give up on understanding GamerGate, because I don't feel like enrolling in a couple of college courses to know the skinny on things. Besides, this being an Internet event, it's all going to become ancient history in a short period of time. There's no reason to bother with something that will become irrelevant in a few months. People will always remember Watergate, but the same can't be said about GamerGate.

Webcasts, podcasts, blogs, vlogs, trolls, bronies; the list goes on. I pretty much hate any terminology that originates from the Internet, with few exceptions. I'm trying to think of those exceptions, but I'm coming up empty, so I'll focus on the non-exceptions instead. First of all, Internet terms, or slang if you will, almost always sound dumb. Secondly, they almost always describe something dumb: vlogs are video logs people keep of their incredibly mundane lives, trolls are idiots that insult other idiots online, and bronies are grown men obsessed with cartoon ponies. These are all stupid things that have stupid names. I guess the names are doing a good job encapsulating the stupidity of what they're describing. I try to avoid terminology like this as much as possible. In fact, this article is the first time I've used some of these terms, and it'll probably be the last time. I don't want words like "brony" polluting my writing. I'll make sure to abstain from ever using them again. Add GamerGate to the growing list of genetically defective terms the Internet has given birth to.

My hatred isn't exclusive to words born on the Internet. There are normal words that gained notoriety online that I hate almost as much as Internet born terms. The Internet is like a toxin; it poisons whatever it touches. One of the biggest offenders on this list is memes. Prior to a few years ago, nobody knew what that word meant, and nobody cared. Suddenly, however, everyone online is now an expert on the word, and it gets used a billion times per second. This could have been a great word, but the Internet ruined it. If it weren't for the Internet, maybe, just maybe, I would use this word in regular conversations. Now, though, I go well out of my way to never use the word, or to even acknowledge its existence. There are countless other perfectly good words the Internet has hijacked and smashed into buildings. The Internet is ruining the English language, one word at a time. In the same vein, the Internet ruined the Watergate scandal by transforming it into a meme. Man, I hate that I just used that word in a sentence. Excuse me while I wash my mouth out with soap.

Acronyms and abbreviations are sometimes acceptable in real life, but always a nightmare online. Everything has to be an acronym or abbreviation nowadays, even trivial nonsense. It's never "by the way" or "in my opinion" anymore; now it's always BTW and IMO. Sure, I know what these mean, but that doesn't mean I approve of them. I'm still learning new ones, like I only recently learned that FTW is "for the win." What does that actually mean, anyway? At least the other ones were grammatically correct, but FTW isn't. How does GamerGate fit into all of this? Well, it has come to my attention that people are abbreviating GamerGate as GG. There are several big problems with this, the biggest of which is that this is an abbreviation shared by many other terms. GG could be a friendly thing to say after a good online chess match, meaning "good game," or it could refer to the greatest gaming controversy in history. Think of all the friendly chess matches that are now ending in heated arguments due to this debacle. The world of online chess will never be the same.

Technically, everything I talked about in this article had absolutely nothing to do with GamerGate. At the same time, though, the things mentioned here have everything to do with it. It's a stupid term that brings with it many other stupid terms and words, resulting in an endless vortex of stupidity. If people want me to take this controversy more seriously, then they should come up with better names and drop the cryptic lingo. Otherwise, I have better things to do with my time, like organize my personal wrench collection.

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