There’s a memorable line from The Dark Knight that sums up the curious trajectory of Czech video game developer Daniel Vávra: “You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”
Gamergate, an idiosyncratic consumer revolt of angry gamers against the video game industry and journalists that erupted in 2014, initially made Vávra and his Prague-based Warhorse Games folk heroes for not embracing DEI in their development of a game called Kingdom Come: Deliverance. But in the wake of Trump and Elon Musk’s political triumph, Vávra has been branded insufficiently anti-woke. Gamergate keeps waging new battles against every phantom of woke cultural depiction, no matter how minor, illustrating the sisyphean nature of the online culture wars — it’s a virtual game no one can ever truly win.
Vávra is not your typical blue-haired social justice warrior. The barrel-chested, bearded Czech looks like a character in his own medieval European action game and once led a street protest outside the Greek embassy in Prague to protest colleagues’ arrest. Yet, a decade ago, he became a pariah among many of the press and his peers. They hated that Vávra was sympathetic to Gamergate. In 2015, progressive activists accused Warhorse Games of racism for not including people of colour from a game set in rural 15th-century Bohemia, which Vávra defended as part of a commitment to historical accuracy. The controversy prompted him to speak out against the wokeification of the games industry. “The future of our biz is at stake, and ‘progressive’ media are destroying it with their hateful narrative,” he said.
The keyboard jockeys of Gamergate applauded Vávra’s stance but the fallout of the controversy was ugly: Warhorse got hate mail from progressives, and news outlets such as Vice refused to cover Kingdom Come. Vavra likened the backlash to living in the USSR. “I had the ‘privilege’ of growing up in a totalitarian communist regime,” he told a games journalist in 2015, “so I have first-hand experience with censorship and… going to prison for your opinion or shitty propaganda on TV, in literature and even music.”
Explaining how reception to a video game gets compared to life in the last days of Soviet communism isn’t easy. What sparked it all was a laughably low-stakes morass involving the ex-boyfriend of a game developer who posted an angry rant about their relationship online. Each side of Gamergate insisted they had the moral high ground, with one claiming they were defending “ethics in videogame journalism” and the other side saying they were righteously fighting “misogynists lashing out at women in gaming”. More broadly, Gamergate was a kind of clash of online civilizations. In her 2017 book Kill All Normies, Angela Nagle described the dynamic as “hysterical liberal call-out culture produced a breeding ground for an online backlash of irreverent mockery and anti-PC”.
“Explaining how reception to a video game gets compared to life in the last days of Soviet communism isn’t easy.”
In other words, they were two sides of the same coin: shrieking online bubbles — one self-righteous and woke and the other conservative and/or trollish that worked out of the same terrible playbook: bad faith character assassination, public shaming, or getting someone fired. I say that from personal experience; keyboard warriors and even some of my colleagues tried to get me fired from my role writing about video games for The Onion because I was inaccurately perceived as a Gamergate foot soldier.
Gamergate might sound arcane now, but it was the perfect moral panic for the peak Twitter era, a funhouse mirror version of the scapegoating of video games of the Eighties and Nineties. Blaming games for society’s ills used to be a bipartisan effort: Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden have all tried to restrict them (Biden even once called game developers “little creeps” who make games that teach people how to kill). But instead of being blamed for inspiring school shooters, Gamergate became a useful liberal talking point among Democrats. They cited video games’ power to allegedly groom young white males and turn them into bitter incels and extreme Right-wingers.
For most of Gamergate’s lifespan, the movement looked like a lost cause. It became a reliable punching bag for the mainstream media, part of the founding myth of the alt-Right, which begat Q-Anon, which begat Trump’s presidency; indeed, Trump has even been called the “Gamergate” of Republican politicians. For instance, Vox argued that Gamergate was “a watershed moment and learning experience for many future Trump supporters”. For his part, Steve Bannon admits that he viewed Gamergate as an opportunity for recruiting what he labelled “rootless white males” into a standing Right-wing army online. “You can activate that army,” he told Joshua Green, the author of Devil’s Bargain. “They come in through Gamergate or whatever and then get turned onto politics and Trump.”
Yet Gamergate had the opposite effect as intended: games got more identitarian — not less — since 2014. As Gamergate’s online forces fumed, new games increasingly incorporated more racially diverse characters and LGBTQ storylines. In Dragon Age: Veilguard, you can get a call-out for misgendering a non-binary character — an eye-roll-inducing HR lecture in a fantasy game about dragons.
But perhaps not for long. As others have noted, there’s been a noticeable vibe shift against progressive political correctness. Game journalists and activists failed miserably in their attempt at a reverse Gamergate — a boycott of Hogwarts Legacy due to J.K. Rowling’s “transphobia”. Now, the media says that Rowling may have just won the culture war.
Complaints about Assassin’s Creed: Shadows’ usage of a black samurai hero in a game about historical Japan led to the game being delayed three months until early 2025 to “better incorporate player feedback”. Wired is calling the controversy “Gamergate 2.0“, but what they don’t mention is that Japanese gamers have been the most vocal and got over 100,000 signatures for a petition to cancel the game, saying it’s “a serious insult to Japanese culture and history, and may also be linked to Asian racism”. In this case, the politics of “cultural appropriation” butted up against the “underrepresentation” of black characters and won.
Then came Trump’s re-election in November, which signalled the ultimate triumph of the anti-woke regime, with outspoken Gamergater Elon Musk suddenly wielding incredible power. Some game developers have even started to pitch themselves as anti-DEI, while liberals’ attempts to invoke Gamergate as a rallying cry are falling on deaf ears. Lin Manuel Miranda recently released a DEI-inspired concept album based on of The Warriors, the 1979 cult movie about New York gangs, but this time with all-female protagonists and an incel villain that Miranda says was inspired by Gamergate. If you haven’t heard of the album, it’s probably because it’s hopelessly corny, an embarrassing relic from the Obama years that deservedly died on the Billboard charts.
Likewise, Dragon Age: Veilguard earned half the expected sales, and Concord, a target of Gamergate for its gender-fluid characters and awkward pronouns, got shut down by Sony after only two weeks due to a historically dismal performance.
No wonder there’s been a distinct tone of triumph amongst the extremely online denizens of “Kotaku In Action” — a subreddit that’s been the unofficial home to Gamergate for a decade. Some of the group’s 157,000 members have gone as far as to declare a victory in their decade-long battle against “Social Justice Warriors”. “Ten fucking years after the thing, we were proven to be right even though anyone not dishonest or mentally disabled knew we were right,” one poster proclaimed recently in a thread titled Gamergate Won. “Now that we’ve won, can games start being good again?”
However, there are no clear conditions for victory in the culture wars and little interest in calling for a truce. So, the crusade keeps expanding to absurd lengths until it begins to resemble the thing that progressives accused it of being — a Right-wing reactionary political force. “Gamergate went from [being] about games journalism to a wider culture war to what it is now — a last attempt to stop globalists from taking full authoritarian control of the West,” went a recent Gamergate Reddit post.
What does it mean to Reddit post your way to a populist Right-wing crusade against “globalists?” Not much, so it’s much easier to keep targeting video games for wokeness, no matter how petty the offense. Just ask Warhorse Games.
Vávra is being cancelled once again, but this time, ironically, it’s by Gamergate. The just-released sequel to Kingdom Come includes an optional same-sex romance option and an added element of racial diversity because the game is set in the Czech city of Kuttenberg, which, like other cities in the Holy Roman Empire, was a hub of trade and cultural exchange. Vávra and Warhorse insisted that they were going once again for historical accuracy, such as the inclusion of a Jewish quarter. Still, Gamergaters accused them of “going woke” and began boycotting the game and spamming Metacritic with bad reviews like: “Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is a gay woke historically inaccurate DEI game.”
Now, Vávra is speaking out against his former comrades-in-arms: “[It] turns out that we are once again in the middle of a rather bizarre culture war, this time from the opposite side than usual.”. His colleague, Tobias Stolz-Zwilling, stated that Warhorse would rather not be connected to any political battle. “It seems like someone is always trying to brand us somehow, and we are just trying to make a cool video game,” he said.
Either way, Vávra may have the last laugh. Kingdom Come: Deliverance II has been a critical darling and sold over 2 million copies in its first two weeks. The growing sentiment in “Kotaku In Action” is that the Gamergate boycott of the game may have been an overreach. As one commentator noted, “It’s lame when anyone of any political or cultural stripe engages in a witch hunt or a purity test, especially when it isn’t even sincere.”
Who just wants to play some video games instead?
