I've tried to type one in the past about a hundred times but I am unable to capture the entire thing down to a paragraph or two without missing something someone finds important. Gist is, girl develops game (relevant in a moment), cheats on boyfriend with, allegedly (but confirmed 3..?), five guys, is emotionally abusive towards boyfriend, boyfriend finds out about it and breaks up with her for the second, and final, time. Boyfriend writes out a blog post (originally a forum post before being removed from the two forums he posted it on) detailing how manipulative she was and what she's done. A few names were let out of the people girl cheated with, in particular Nathan Grayson). The blog post was posted onto 4chan, and people caught Grayson's name and realized that he positively mentioned the girl's game two or three times in articles he has written either during/after the affair. People wanted to talk about the scandal, which was expected because everyone on the internet is a drama hog, but instead, the websites the people were talking about them on started removing posts, entire threads, banning people, and banning any discussion about the scandal on their websites (4chan included). Streisand Effect, yadda yadda, more and more people found out about because these websites were preventing any talk about it, so that means it must be good. Something you see others say all the time is, "The whole thing would have blown over if the websites didn't censor any discussion. Flash in the pan.", but instead, it turned into the final straw that broke the camels back. People started digging more and more into everyone involved, revealing the overall incestuous relationships that is the indie game scene (which 'revelations' continue to this day), there were IRC channels created, videos on YouTube, quick-quick-post-before-the-mods-see threads on 4chan, trolls started coming out and messing with everyone for the lulz, Adam Baldwin saw some of the videos by YT guy Internet Aristocrat, and on 27 August 2014, tweeted out the two videos with the hashtag "#GamerGate". And then the next day, all the gamers in the world had died. 9 different competing websites claimed gamers were "over", "dead", "you don't want to be called a gamer", and an additional article from another website came out on 1 September. Five other articles were released on the 28th about how gamers were misogynists and harassers. And it all went downhill from there. People started digging into the games "journalists", incestuous of course, often with the subjects of their positive/promotional articles, there was a lot of biased news coverage from mainstream outlets which painted gamers, continuously, as harassers and women-hating basement dwellers, a "GameJournoPros" list and emails were leaked that showed some instances where journalists have colluded with each other, and an absurd amount of other stuff I can't begin to write all out, all while the tens and tens of thousands of people in support of GamerGate have been called every negative word in the book, conflated with ISIS, told they should be gassed to death, told they hate women and don't want them in/making/playing their "toys", have had the female and sexual/skin-color minorities get verbally abused and harassed online and told they were a gender/race traitor, sockpuppets, have internalized misogyny/racism, are being used and controlled by "the white man", all by people who "claim" to be "defenders" of women and minorities. People who have used the hashtag have harassed the anti-GamerGate side, and most of them can pretty obviously be written off as trolls, but that doesn't stop the ammo from flying from the antis. You can see what GamerGate has successfully done in this page on the wiki, which includes getting a few websites to update their ethics policy, get the FTC to clarify that websites like Kotaku need to disclose their affiliate links, and raise enough money to charity that could feed a small country (and a sea lion).