Everything Wrong (And Right) With the #GamerGate 'Bill of Rights'

Impact

#GamerGate was right about one thing: The gaming industry is long overdue for a serious conversation about ethics, professionalism, sexism and the degree to which powerful game companies control the nature of games and shortchange their customers.

Unfortunately, gamers put their eggs in the wrong basket and ended up doing tremendous damage to their own movement. Thanks to vicious and prolonged online harassment campaigns directed at women in the video game industry and an inability to rally around concrete goals, the fading memory of #GamerGate will forever be tainted.

A proposed "Gamer Bill of Rights," penned by blogger Kelly Maxwell and circulated over the past month on Medium, was intended to summarize many of #GamerGate's goals. But instead the grandiose missive ended up being emblematic of many of the movement's excesses and miscalculations.

Below, Mic's Tom McKay and Jared Keller show just how and why using Genius annotation tools.

Read “The Gamer Bill of Rights” by Kelly Maxwell on Genius