I am someone largely sympathetic to gamergate so take this as an attempt at an even handed summary from someone from that perspective.

• Some loser guy got dumped by a shady girl with a lot of contacts in the Indy game scene and game journalist scene.

• Given the kind of guy he was, he wrote an overly long pity piece about how he was cheated on by this woman, including a sexual encounter she had with a Kotaku journalist who gave her favourable coverage in the past.

• Some people start basically overreacting and it reaches r/all.

• Mass censorship on most aggressors begins. Mass censorship continues on all gaming forums basically everywhere on the internet, including places like 4chan.

• The Streisand effect kicks in and now everyone is talking about it. The censorship had the appearance of being coordinated making people imagine there was some dirt being hidden.

• Gaming journalism doubles down, calling gamers horrible people and telling game devs that gamers shouldn't be their target audience.

• Gamers start getting angry and Gamergate is born. Its particularly notable on Twitter where the Gamergate hash tag was trending for some time.

• Previously unknown game developers started claiming they were being harassed and the hash tag was being used to harass women. Analysis of the tweets showed this was essentially untrue ( the tweets were overwhelming not abusive ) but some people were undoubtedly sent mean messages even if this was not representative.

• For their part, journalists continued telling gamers how they were horrible people and cherry picked tweets to back this up.

• Meanwhile the gamers started a coordinated campaign, emailing the advertisers of gaming journalists.

• Some people got rich and some people got famous for supporting extreme positions on both sides. Breitbart was pro gamergate for instance and there was similar cynicism on the anti gamergate side.

• Over time the gamergate "movement" became increasingly sympathetic to various right wing causes.