Summary Of Wingfield's Essay 'Gamergate Campaign'

#GamerGate Elicits Endangering Situations for Female Critics Nick Wingfield’s essay, “Feminist Critics of Video Games Facing Threats in ‘GamerGate Campaign” discusses the danger that women are subjected to after criticizing the gaming industry. This essay was published on October 15th, 2014 in the technology section of the New York Times. Wingfield’s essay explicitly discusses Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist critic and the #Gamergate campaign – “a term adopted by those who see ethical problems among the game journalist and political correctness in their coverage” but was instead utilized to intimidate female critics (Wingfield 4). Wingfield uses a cause and effect organizational structure to convey his message by first, including an anecdote

The main female critic exposed to numerous dangerous situations that Wingfield references in his essay is Anita Sarkeesian. Due to expressing her opinion on the stereotypes of women in video games, Anita has been receiving rape and death threats from people who disagree with her arguments (Wingfield 1). Wingfield included Sarkeesian’s experience to show an example of the things that women go through when they express themselves in the gaming industry (Winfield 4). The #GamerGate campaign, a twitter hashtag dedicated to intimidating female critics, is one of the factors that is promoting this negative behavior toward women. Wingfield claims that ever since this campaign has initiated, the threats against women have become more intense. Although this behavior seems to have started to occur recently, the harassment is stemming from “larger changes in the video game business that have redefined the audience for its product, expanding it well beyond the traditional young male demographic” (Wingfield 5). This shows that gamers are not only reacting negatively to gaming criticism done by women, but it also shows that their reaction is occurring because of the changes that have been applied to