Police: If you keep getting these threats for your work why don’t you stop? - Me (incredulous): Um... because I believe it’s important.

— Feminist Frequency (@femfreq) September 2, 2014

The past few months have been a difficult time for gamers, all centred around some very shocking language, rape and death threats, dirty-laundry washing, and more misogyny than an episode of Mad Men.

The movement has been a prolonged and co-ordinated attack on women in the gaming world, journalists in the gaming world, and the problem inherent in a billion-dollar industry that doesn’t quite know what to do with itself. Not to mention the generation of angry gamers who buy into it.

The long and the short of it is that everybody is blaming everybody else, but when it comes to you getting to grips with ‘#gamergate’, here’s the five things you need to know…

1: Who is Zoe Quinn?

A well-respected indie game developer, a creative force behind Depression Quest­, an online game in which you play as a person suffering from depression. The game is well regarded by critics, not especially with gamers, and herein lies the rub; Zoe Quinn has frequently been on the receiving end of vitriolic comments from certain members of the gaming community, and they in turn claim she only gets positive press because of this.

Then, her ex-boyfriend wrote a detailed exposé blog outlining how Quinn had been having affairs with gaming journalists in order to gain positive reviews. One of the journalists he cited had never even written a review of her game.

2: Why did it become an online movement?

The Internet quickly jumped onto the story, with countless posts on message forums claiming that the media’s coverage of gaming and its subcultures is dogged by incompetency and serious ethical issues, and that the gaming community is being lambasted for its handling of the controversy as a way to drive readership figures. Meanwhile, countless editorial pieces were written about the dangerously violent language and attitudes held by a vocal minority of gamers, whose actions threaten to undercut the entire industry.

The hashtag was actually first attributed to the actor Adam Baldwin, who tweeted a video when the Quinn blog broke:

#GamerGate: pt. 1: https://t.co/VMIwtoFlhD pt. 2: https://t.co/bLrgB8JGwQ

— Adam Baldwin (@AdamBaldwin) August 28, 2014

3: Who else is involved?

Two other women have become embroiled in Gamergate: Anita Sarkeesian and Brianna Wu. The former is a cultural critic, whose web-series Feminist Frequency discusses the way women are depicted in pop culture. The latter is a gaming developer.

I wish these people would spend more energy on their alleged goal of ethics, and less time trying to personally destroy me and my friends.

— Brianna Wu (@Spacekatgal) October 19, 2014

Both women have long been the targets of death and rape threats, and have had to leave their homes and go into hiding after their addresses were posted online. Sarkeesian recently had to cancel a lecture she was due to give after the venue received an email claiming there would be a mass shooting if she took to the stage.

Gamergate has also gone after journalists and other well-known figures like YouTube stars and actors.

4: What’s being done to stop the threats?

The US police services are taking the threats of violence and rape seriously, but are struggling to cope a massive jurisdictional headache. The threats are issued online, from all over the world, making it difficult for investigations to be properly followed through.

The sites where the abuse is taking place are equally slow to react; Twitter has not made any statement, beyond referring to its terms of service, but has deleted several profiles. The main problem is that when sites do react, the movement simply moves on to another one.

5: What does this mean for journalism?

The whole affair has been a wake-up call for online journalism in general, and the gaming media in particular; many ethical op-eds have been posted on gaming review sites, and Kotaku, a popular site which employs a journalist who was named in the Zoeblog, is now banning its employees from supporting independent game developers on crowd-sourcing websites.

Earlier this week, supporters of the Gamergate movement convinced both Mercedes Benz and Adobe to withdraw their advertising campaigns from Gawker, after an email campaign jumped on a poorly-worded tweet by a Gawker journalist. In it, the journalist joked that the “nerds” deserved to be bullied, and the car and software giants were convinced to pull their adverts as a show of solidarity against bullying.

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So where does the movement go from here? Well, so far many high-profile women in the gaming milieu, be they developers or players, have spoken up about the threats and online abuse they’ve received. Their critics are quick to discount these complaints as attention grabbing and designed to fuel articles like the very one you’re reading now.

In the battle between both sides to get 1Up on the other, one thing is for sure: rape and death threats aren’t doing either side any good.