Post Gamergate Gamers: Online Responses to Minority Representations in Videogames

Gamergate has been formative for the discourse around inclusion and representation of marginalized identities in video games. The major goal of this study was to examine and analyze how players (self-identified gamers and players that do not share the identity) responded to minority and marginalized groups’ representations in video games online in relation to the discourses constructed around the Gamergate controversy. Since the main wave of the controversy had died down, multiple pieces have been written by bloggers, game journalists, and regular social media users both regarding Gamergate itself and newly published games featuring characters and themes of marginalized and/or minority groups. Using discourse analysis, this paper found prominent discourse strands around representation in video games, such as: positioning video game industry as the perpetrator, the importance of narrative value in representation, bad writing criticism, the wrong ways to do representation.