GamerGate, Wu in Washington Post

Writers for the Washington Post decided this was the day to catch up on GamerGate with two news items and a background piece.

Not that they didn’t take their sweet time getting around to it. The contributor of The only guide to Gamergate you will ever need to read says —

Here at the Intersect, we have ignored Gamergate for as long as humanly possible — in large part because it’s been covered in enormous, impressive depth elsewhere, and in smaller part because we’re exhausted by the senseless, never-ending onslaught of Internet misogyny, which really can’t be explained in a blog post — or, frankly, anywhere else.

But that said, the disturbing, violent threats sent to [Brianna] Wu, the co-founder of an indie game studio, makes it all too clear that Gamergate is less a one-off scandal (as the obnoxious -gate suffix would imply), and more a long-term, slow-burning campaign. In other words, Gamergate is not going away.

Also, there was a fresh development involving an even more well-known target — ‘Gamergate’: Feminist video game critic Anita Sarkeesian cancels Utah lecture after threat:

Sakeesian: “I didn’t cancel my USU talk because of terrorist threats. I canceled because I didn’t feel the security measures were adequate.”

Feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian was forced to cancel a talk that would have taken place tonight at Utah State University after the university received a terror threat from someone claiming they would commit “the deadliest school shooting in American history” if Sarkeesian gave her lecture….

The Utah State threat is just the latest one in the ongoing saga of Gamergate, an increasingly nasty culture war between video-game critics like Sarkeesian and a mob of gamers…. Sarkeesian isn’t the only woman who has received death threats in connection with Gamergate. On Friday, game developer Brianna Wu left her home after alerting police that she received a death threat that included her home address. Zoe Quinn, an independent developer who was the original target of Gamergate, was also forced to leave her home because of death threats. In August, the threats grew so severe that Sarkeesian was forced to flee her home too.

Sarkeesian’s decision not to speak at Utah State provided background for a second news story — The game industry’s top trade group just spoke out against Gamergate:

That prompted the nation’s top trade group for video game companies to speak out Wednesday. “Threats of violence and harassment are wrong,” said a spokesman for the Entertainment Software Association in a statement. “They have to stop. There is no place in the video game community—or our society—for personal attacks and threats.”

[Thanks to Martin Morse Wooster for the story.]