#Gamergate is an online movement ostensibly dedicated to reforming ethics in video games journalism. In practice, it is characterized by viciously sexual and sexist attacks on women in and around gaming communities. #Gamergate is also a site for articulating “Gamergater” as a form of geek masculinity. #Gamergate discussions across social media platforms illustrate how Gamergaters produce and reproduce this gendered identity. Gamergaters perceive themselves as crusaders, under siege from critics they pejoratively refer to as SJWs (social justice warriors). By leveraging social media for concern-trolling about gaming as an innocuous masculine pastime, Gamergaters situate the heterosexual White male as both the typical gamer and the real victim of #Gamergate. #Gamergate is a specific and virulent online node in broader discussions of privilege, difference, and identity politics. Gamergaters are an instructive example of how social media operate as vectors for public discourses about gender, sexual identity, and equality, as well as safe spaces for aggressive and violent misogyny.

Everyday gendered experiences provide an affective framework for understanding participation in massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) and their community forums. Debates on the World of Warcraft online forums about changes to an upcoming in-game character named Ji Firepaw, who initially greeted characters with gendered and sexist dialogue, demonstrates how games and game communities are embedded in larger cultural contexts. Themes like the feminist as killjoy, anxious masculinity and player agency recur across official and unofficial WoW forums regarding Ji Firepaw. These concerns rely upon and aim to reinforce gendered power dynamics, illustrating how the digital and the virtual are not independent spaces. Rather, MMOGs and their associated online environments are experienced as part of the everyday, such that feminists and feminism are treated as threats to these virtual spaces and, by extension, to the enjoyment and sociability of an implicitly broader set of shared values about gender and sex roles.

World of Warcraft (WoW) is one of the most successful and longest running multiplayer online games in gaming. Over time, Blizzard Entertainment's approach to multiplayer activities in WoW has changed. During the past decade, in-game world events, group matchmaking systems, and phasing technologies have been used to increasingly emphasize individual achievement rather than collaborative effort. The game is shifting away from sociable activities in favor of ones that situate players as powerful, atomized characters. WoW's governmentality now encourages players to see each other as obstacles to success and to see themselves as entrepreneurial subjects. These neoliberal strategies have the potential to impact our ability to collectively imagine and create alternative forms of social interaction and organization.

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