The Hivemind Swarmed: Conversations on Gamergate

“Out of the transient and ephemeral effluvia of the internet comes something ivied, revelatory, permanent. Bravo.” —Ken Burns, filmmaker
The Hivemind Swarmed: Conversations on Gamergate
“The Hivemind Swarmed is a cubist study of a car crash, where the conflicting stories of Gamergate’s victims, bystanders, and accomplices build atop each other—or collide and annihilate. What we're left with is the most complete portrait yet painted of the movement that birthed the modern internet.” —Lily Alexandre, writer and filmmaker. “The American socio-political landscape isn’t like a videogame. It is a videogame. David Wolinsky’s accessible oral history of how we came to live inside the Gamergate phenomenon is perhaps the truest rendering yet of our digital society and what we might do about it.” —Douglas Rushkoff, author of Team Human. “David Wolinsky doesn’t just contend with where the internet has been and where it’s going; he wades into the hell-swamps of Gamergate to do it, guided by sharp analysis from dozens of lively and thoughtful experts... Remarkably timely... An essential document.” — StephenThompson, co-host of NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour. “Brings together a who’s who of game designers, journalists, industry insiders, academics, and players to constitute a modern-day Greek chorus for a sprawling, complexly layered, always engaging conversation about contemporary games culture. Essential reading.” — Henry Jenkins, author of Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. “David Wolinsky assembles a conversation which situates Gamergate within a nuanced, complex societal framework temporally spanning the dawn of personal computing to the present. . . . His volume is incredibly powerful, and a holistic and much-needed perspective on the impact of internet culture on all facets of our society.” — Jacob McMurray, Museum of Pop Culture Director of Curatorial, Collections, and Exhibits. “If you, like me, blinked and missed Gamergate, Wolinsky’s oral history work is a refreshing window into a quickly moving and yet already historical target... How do online adversarial narratives shape or reflect life, culture, and politics? Multiple viewpoints, vivid longitudinal context, and poignant reflections leave us pondering the impact of digital discourse on our past, present, and future.” —Jen Cramer, Director, LSU Libraries Williams Center for Oral History. “Interviewing is an artform, and Wolinsky’s prodigious skill draws out a never-before-seen web of complex personal truths surrounding events in the secretive and insular world of videogames that predict massive cultural events that follow, from Brexit to the 2016 US election and the global acceleration of nationalism. In these perspectives could be the keys to understanding survival in our radically interconnected society - humanity 3.0.” —Erin Drake Kajioka, “EA Spouse” blogger author and, Head of Applied Game Design, for Google Research. “An indispensable oral history of a crucial moment. . . . A fascinating kaleidoscope of opinions that will be incredibly valuable to anyone looking back on these troubled times.” — Raph Koster, author of A Theory of Fun for Game Design. “David Wolinsky has here gathered a diverse range of voices from witnesses and participants on the frontlines; when taken together, their testimonies form a compelling snapshot of a moment whose effects continue to affect an entire industry and its zealous fandoms.” — Simon Parkin, author of A Game of Birds and Wolves: The Ingenious Young Women Whose Secret Board Game Helped Win World War II. “With great agility, David Wolinsky provides critical conversations and insight from a rich cross-section of people. . . . This is a wonderfully rare distillation of opinion, perspective, and comment on some of the most relevant forces shaping our society today.” —Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, author of Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap. “Drawing on a prodigious number of interviews with industry leaders, David Wolinsky stitches together an essential, weighty, yet deeply readable analysis of life in the digital age. What emerges is a complex account of human nature in some of its most refractory aspects, one that every person who cares about contemporary culture, gamer or not, would be wise to take on board. Because if these contributors are right and this one corner of the internet represents anything about the rest of it, then we have a deeply troubling reality on our hands. The Hivemind Swarmed is an unblinking and urgent record of our time.” —David Zahl, author of Seculosity and editor of The Mockingbird Blog. “A riveting conversation... constructed from excerpts from a series of recorded interviews, now archived at Stanford University. More than an oral history, David Wolinsky’s selection of opinions and insights in the voices of a diverse cast of speakers compels us to think beyond the well-worn debate about how media affect kids. This book tells us that we need to talk more about blame, responsibility, and behavior as issues for the adults who make, play, and write about games." —Henry Lowood, Curator for History of Science & Technology Collections

Ten years ago I started interviewing people in the wake of Gamergate. If you've never heard that word before, the gist is: It was an important event that traumatized the videogame industry and its surrounding fandoms in 2014, going on to etch out the foundational tactics for online culture wars everywhere else since. Gamergate walked so QAnon and Donald Trump and the alt-right could run, so the story goes.

Watching an institution crumble in real-time, as Gamergate allowed with the social internet, is something we've all had experience with in the years since. The pandemic revealed flaws in healthcare, government, education, the economy, and our social safety nets. #MeToo exposed widespread lack of accountability in the power dynamics in entertainment industries, the legal system, media, and higher education. These things happened, and no one's ever sure if they ever are really resolved—we just move on as new headlines take their place.

But when Gamergate violently erupted, no one had ever seen anything like it. If you have heard of Gamergate before, you know that how it got started is somewhat irrelevant to the thorny force multipliers it later took on. It is horrifying that an ugly and public break-up between a videogame and software developer became a breeding ground for devious internet trolls who, driven by hateful whims, exploited online echo chambers, targeted and harassed marginalized voices in the gaming community, and took advantage of the internet's lack of meaningful moderation. But it was always that second part, how Gamergate revealed tragic flaws in the internet while also exposing that no one was sure who should or could do anything about it that kept me up at night most.

That's why I started interviewing people a decade ago—to take conversations about these really heavy, swimmy topics away from 140-character Twitter threads and onto the telephone for unguarded conversations that flowed until I either ran out of questions or the person speaking with me had to rest their voice. Now, over 500 people all over the world have sat and talked with me for hundreds of hours about this devastating internet crisis and what it means. I've stopped counting and don't like laying out these numbers because that glosses over the fact that every person is a complicated individual with their own point of view.

The Hivemind Swarmed is an oral history of Gamergate's aftermath. It is not a retelling of the inciting incidents, but instead a patchwork quilt of conversations with a variety of people who were in and outside of Gamergate's first detonation. It’s them talking about its effects and implications, about the time since and the road ahead. It's them still trying to make sense of it. Many speak of redemption for the internet and for videogames as an industry and culture—they wonder whether that’s still a possibility, something that's moment has passed, or maybe just a myth.

Everyone's still trying to figure out how to make peace with, and endure, the internet we're seemingly stuck with. But just because I got the opportunity to put a book out filled with my questions posed to all kinds of people doesn't mean I have any of the answers, myself. But my hope is this book helps us all start to figure them out.

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