"Gamers are over" - Gamasutra
"The death of the 'gamers'" - Ars Technica
"Death of an identity" - Kotaku
"killing the gamer identity" - Vice
and so on
I don't want to feel guilt for being a man who likes video games.
I recently had an identical complain in another thread [0]. It turns out I'm apparently an evil hypocritical misogynist.
There's no escape for us, we're collateral damage.
It is, I believe, a growing recognition of that messed-up-edness that's leading to the rise of articles about the "death of the gamer", because normal human beings (like yourself) who may have previously said "oh, I like to play video games; I guess that makes me a gamer" are now saying "oh no actually these people are all horrible and I like to play games but I am not like them; please do not get confused!".
Toward the end of the interview, the interviewer, seeming overwhelmed, asked, "Well that's great for you rich guys, but what about us ordinary folk?" (I'm paraphrasing both sides of the conversation here.) Begley said, "You think we started with solar panels in the 1970's? We didn't have any money. I started with rolls of insulation in my attic. Saved me thousands of dollars. Start with something small and inexpensive."
You don't have to be an activist, but if you don't like the way things are, pick one thing that can help. You're right that picking fights with strangers probably won't help. Maybe you have a friend who's a dick online. You and a couple friends can ask him to tone it down. Maybe decide to only offer helpful criticism to newbies for a week and reserving taunting for friends. Pick something small and make the world a little better.
Censorship and silence didn't work, as the Streisand effect snowballed this into something far larger than it would have been otherwise. Now this is an attempt to divert attention away.
It's a curious thing, gaming journalism. It is perhaps the most puerile form of "journalism" there is. It would be insulting to even call it journalism, it's blogging, plain and simple. Video game media is also the only one I know of that insults its target demographic so frequently, in an attempt to look socially progressive.
It would be a more interesting exposé if people focused on actual corruption going on in the review/journalism scene. Things like EA's early-access review policies that unofficially hinge access to future titles on what scores a magazine gives. Or the large mount of money going to certain widely watched podcasts without disclosure. There was an exposé of that issue ~2 months ago (written by gaming journalists, no less) but barely anyone cared: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-07-16-blurred-lines-a... Or the kind of wining-and-dining, travel reimbursements, etc. that goes on around E3 and other trade shows.
I think it's mostly a culture war that is about game journalism pretty secondarily. Nobody cares about Ubisoft wining-and-dining a writer from The Escapist at E3, because that doesn't play into any preexisting culture war, and none of Ubisoft/Escapist/E3 are seen as "outsiders" to gaming culture.
Actually, the Quinn scandal was instrumental in people opening their eyes about one thing. Namely, that it's not only large corporate media behind this. Even independent media isn't safe or trustworthy, and both is corrupted, but in different ways. Independent media is more likely to foster nepotism, cronyism and lying by omission/censorship, whereas the big shots, having major access to publishers and trade shows, can obviously go further.
It has also caused a lot of people to re-analyze these people's intentions and revisit previous incidents, which in light of new information, no longer seem as clear cut. Just because one is an underdog (and that's quite relatively speaking, anyway) does not make them righteous.
Actually, many people already knew that there's lots of corruption going on at major writers. This is why so many gamers went to indie media, but then they realized that nothing is safe. The outrage is that ultimately, all of it is the same: passive clickbait supposed to milk attention. But now there's nepotism, too. It's the outrage from now knowing that there's no one who represents your side in the media, and that people who are only interested in gaming from a surface level are holding major positions.
Finally at the risk of setting a fire, it wasn't a simple matter of a "blogger's personal sex life". The implications were wider reaching into the aforementioned nepotism.