What are #GamerGate and #NotYourShield? #GamerGate is a hashtag and quasi-"movement" of gamers around the world that began in August of 2014. #NotYourShield is a sister hashtag, created to lend a greater voice to female and minority gamers who supported #GamerGate and who were dismissed and ignored by the games media. The #GamerGate Twitter hashtag was originally coined by actor Adam Baldwin in response to the mass censorship of gaming sites occurring around the so-called "Burgers and Fries" scandal. This scandal concerned the public discovery that a little known indie game developer named Chelsea Van Valkenburg (nomme de plume Zoe Quinn) had cheated on her boyfriend with a journalist from the gaming site Kotaku and four other people in the games media industry. Gamers around the 'net took an immediate interest in the scandal, because Kotaku had already attracted some attention for giving Quinn's game, Depression Quest, unusually positive coverage. Suspicion of industry relationships and quid-pro-quo favors among the videogames industry and press had been going on for years, and it seemed that a smoking gun had finally been found. To the shock of the gaming communities however, a wave of censorship descended across the topic like an iron curtain. Every prominent games forum on the 'net banned discussion of the scandal, and just one single thread on Reddit saw over forty thousand comments deleted. Even 4chan, the once legendary site where you could discuss almost anything, banned people from discussing the issue. The games media declared that there was no scandal, and "nothing to see here." When this was challenged, the response came in the form of a nonsensical accusation that gamers interested in the topic were misogynists, and only interested because the subject of scrutiny was a woman's relationship. The public's concern about improprieties in the games media industry were not just dismissed - they were utterly silenced. In response, gamers created their own communities on Reddit and 8chan with a special emphasis on free speech and activism. The censorship campaign sparked even further public backlash, and the situation grew more heated until August 27th and 28th of 2014, when thirteen major games media sites released a series of articles now known colloquially the "Gamers Are Dead" articles. Beginning with author Leigh Alexander of Gamasutra, these articles all shared identical messaging and tone, and united to form a simple, political, and utterly untrue statement: "Gamers, as a demographic and hobby, are all sexist, misogynist, racist, horrible people and the games industry should discount them as an audience." The gamer community immediately recognized this as a deflection tactic. For so many competing publications to attack gamers with such a unified voice almost simultaneously, there had to exist exactly the sort of back-door collusion within the industry that gamers had long suspected. Indeed, months later a man named William Usher, owner of the gaming site One Angry Gamer, would work with Breitbart reporter Milo Yiannoupolis to expose the existence of the "GameJournoPros" mailing list to the world. Patterned off of "Journo-List" of mainstream media fame, this was a secret mailing list where major names in the games media colluded to craft narratives, blacklist industry people, support their industry friends, and decide what stories needed to be spread or buried at their whim. The united backlash by the global gamer community against this dishonest media campaign became the event known to the world as #GamerGate.