Gamers Are Dead

Gamers Are Dead was a coordinated series of articles on "toxic" gamer culture by games journalists immediately following the start of Gamergate, posted starting August 28, 2014, and continuing through September, with around 13 articles in supposedly competing publications parroting the same message within the space of one week. The first article was "Gamers Don't Have to Be Your Audience, Gamers Are Over" by Leigh Alexander. The articles had a strong tendency to paraphrase and even directly quote each other, in particular quoting Alexander's original article. The articles talk about how the "gamer" identity and culture were manufactured via marketing (despite that actual studies show the influence of marketing on human behavior is pathetic) and rife with "sexism" and "misogyny." Essentially, they were trying to order the very companies they blamed for creating the "gamer identity" to ignore it and instead follow the much better "get woke, go broke" model.

This angered many gamers, who had already dealt with insults from the press over things like the boycott of DmC: Devil May Cry and the criticisms of Mass Effect 3's ending, and were now being shown the very collusion that games journalists claimed did not exist. Blaming the vast, diverse gaming culture for what some cuck on 4chan and a handful of trolls were doing with Zoë Quinn predictably caused an enormous swell in interest and support for Gamergate.