Surviving the Media UpsideDown: Gamergate and Online Harassment

Full title: "Autoethnography as Survival Skill: Gamergate, Culture Wars, and Online Harassment" with Emma Vossen For over 12 years, Dr. Vossen has been tracking the culture war that is now known as “Gamergate” which was a critical moment in which the far-right to learned to weaponize social and popular media to redirect attention and anger from feminism and video games towards larger culture wars. A network of far-right influencers, including Steve Bannon, Nick Fuentes, Mike Cernovich, and Milo Yiannopoulos, along with websites such as 8chan and Breitbart News, facilitated this shift. The Far-right succeeded in using Gamergate as a Trojan horse to bring the formerly “apolitical” into their movement. As Bannon explained, “you can activate that army. They come in through Gamergate or whatever and then get turned onto politics and Trump” (Green, 2017). James David Hunter, who coined the term culture war, has argued that “culture wars always precede shooting wars, because culture provides the justification for violence.” In this talk Dr. Vossen will discuss the ongoing culture war, how it has evolved over the past decade, and how using autoethnography as a method became a critical survival skill for her when she started to face online harassment for conducting this research. LOCATED IN DANA PORTER LIBRARY ROOM 329 About the speaker: Dr. Emma Vossen is an Assistant Professor of Game Studies at Brock University and is the co-author and co-editor of Feminism in Play (2018) and Historiographies of Game Studies: What It Has Been, What It Could Be (2025). Her most recent article is Towards a Political Economy of Gamergate (2026), which is published in the 2026 proceedings of the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA).