The event known as #GamerGate (GG) emphasized the need to take the study of game culture seriously and pursue it across several platforms. It demonstrated how seemingly ephemeral media created echo chambers of anger, and how the outbursts of hypermasculine aggression exemplified by hooligans also can connect to games and play. Starting from how GG gained popular attention, this article outlines and discusses the nature of GG, the relation to the victims, the sense of victimization among the participants, and how it may have been provoked by the long-standing, general disregard of games as a culture and a cultural artifact of value. It discusses GG as a swarm using this metaphor to describe its self-organizing nature. Further comparing GG to hooligans, this article also introduces a class and marginalization aspect to understanding the event, opening up for discourses that complicates the image of game culture as mainly a culture of isolated consumption.

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Digital game-players devote a large amount of their time to discovering rules hidden in the code and discoverable through empirical study, experiments, and developing or rediscovering the mathematical formulae governing the code. They do this through their own independent play as they test areas, gear and abilities, through data mining using 'add-ons', and through joint efforts outside of the game where they analyse and discuss the results from different gaming situations and create theories on how their game world works. This article shows how gamers are attracted to solving of the code puzzle and share their efforts in sites dedicated to efficient gaming, and also discusses the activity gamers call 'theory crafting' -'rule mining' -, in the light of gaming as a learning strategy.To play a game skilfully players need to understand the mechanics of games. This means to understand the rules, but also to understand how rules interconnect and work on each other. In a game like tic-tac-toe this is fairly easy; if you start; you can grab the middle slot and at least play to a draw. Most likely you will win if your opponent tries something clever, as you have more options than the opponent. In a game like chess the options you have for combining rules, restrictions and affordances have increased almost infinitely. Board games have in common that they are games where all the rules are visible and known to the players; only the combinations of them are unspoken and need to be explored and extrapolated through practice or abstract, logic deliberation. In digital games a large set of rules is hidden in the code and so not visible to the regular player. Hence these rules need to be discovered through empiric study, experiments, and the development or rediscovery of the mathematical formulae that govern the code.Digital game-players devote a large amount of their time to such activities, through their own independent play as they test areas, gear and abilities, and through data mining using 'add-ons', little programs that offers additional information about what happens below the regular user interface. They explore the coded rules of the games through joint efforts outside of the games where they analyse and discuss the results from different gaming situations and create theories on how their game world works.