From the perspective of someone who was there and watched it go down, and was even hoodwinked, there were a number of infographics that appeared to connect with a number of reviewers. However, any rudimentary digging revealed that these were coincidences and fabrications, but you know about that saying, "say it long enough and it turns into the truth?" That effect started to shape what became the largest part of gamergate, mere morons with a failure to realize they've been lied to, most with more than a passing amount of misplaced misogyny from a failure to change themselves when they were found deficient.
From there, it evolved into a crusade of sorts. It was "Zoe Quinn did this, so let's fuck with Zoe Quinn," coupled with strategy, "Zoe Quinn bashed this blog and got it taken down because it wasn't feminist enough, let's give money to them," or "gawker is the real problem behind all of this, fuck gawker up." And from there is started spreading to anyone who defended any of this, which, as a matter of course, included women in particular.
Imagine, a meme made real. The ultimate, purest form of mob rule. At every step, there were those who started it, lied with seeming authority, leading people further and further into the rabbit hole. It's not about Zoe Quinn or even women anymore -- they're just in the way. It's about an attack on gaming, on comics, on everything we enjoy, everything they want to trample into dust.
At this juncture, they were brutal in their efficiency. They would lead the harassed into the answers they wanted, post them everywhere out of context to back up their own biases. There are too many posts to go through to simply check the source, and even if they weren't, Twitter was already deleting them, if the harassed women hadn't already started.
It was beautiful in its sincere horribleness. This, I reasoned, must be what the Nazis acted like, how they spread. No longer about the movement itself, just BEING the movement. It started to die on 4chan as a few of us report spammed their threads and posts, and they ran off to 8chan. Many of them did just that, and are still on 8chan, still doing their nasty bullshit. The rest of them settled back into 4chan and, absent the commands from the leadership, always anonymous, but you could always tell it was them by the way they posted, they appeared to stay dormant.
Every once in a while you see them pop up on a thread in /co/ or /k/ or /vg/ and they're mostly laughed out of there. The last vestiges of it were anti-gawker threads on /pol/, but even those were self-policed, somewhat.
For my own part, I was mostly hoodwinked for a little while. "What? Why are women attacking gaming? I don't understand," to which they would reply with some tumblr post about cishet white males needing to be annihilated(I found out later that it was in fact posted by a channer to inflame the conflict), and so DISGUST ruled. It was only due to a friend of mine interfering that I was able to see the truth for what it was. Being a disassociated guy still confused from a "but I'm a nice guy" tangent years prior, and only then starting to come into adulthood proper(with the wisdom of introspection), it was as if everything there was targeted at me specifically, for ME, specifically.
So I started digging, happy I at least had done nothing wrong except get fooled by conspiracy bullshit, and started blasting the truth in every thread I saw. Just me because three, then over dozen, and with out combined efforts, I'd LIKE to think we managed to get rid of it.
Anyway, the takeaway here is that it targeted vulnerable men with a thin stroke that just so happened to coincide with early adult angst with a personal twist, and it was used to serve some misogynistic end, helped by an already misplaced misogynistic streak from people who really should've just grown up.
You can see that today, by the way, in how Trump operates. His dialogue, his campaign, his followers, marching lockstep, just like Gamergate did. They must be stopped.
