Rob Gallagher, Lecturer in Culture, Media and Creative Industries at King’s College London and author of Artgames after GamerGate, explores how independent art games responded to Gamergate and cultural backlash. He discusses reusing classic game assets for critique. He links 1990s nostalgia to wider social decline and shows how autobiographical play reshapes who counts as a gamer.
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Gamergate As Backlash To Maturation
Gamergate acted as a backlash against attempts to broaden who games are for and what they can be about.
It made the prospect of games 'growing up' harder by retrenching a retrograde gaming identity.
insights INSIGHT
Reuse As Claiming And Critique
Artgame designers often reuse classic assets to claim those games as part of their own histories.
Reuse lets artists critique mainstream gaming by recontextualizing familiar characters, mechanics, and files.
question_answer ANECDOTE
Affection And Anger In Revisiting Classics
Cassie McQuater foregrounds sexist 1990s fighting-game character designs in her art to show how problematic the past can be.
Her approach mixes affection for older games with anger about their retrograde elements.
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Videogame culture is obsessed with development. But gaming is still widely associated with wasted time, squandered potential and backwards attitudes. Even as the average gamer grows older, the medium remains dogged by the same old question: when will videogames grow up? The Gamergate movement lent this question renewed urgency, launching attacks on feminists and “social justice warriors” that have come to be seen as a catalyst for the emergence of the alt-right and election of Donald Trump. Artgames after GamerGate (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) explores how makers of independent and experimental videogames responded to Gamergate and its aftermath. Analysing key titles released between 2015 and 2018, it shows how artgame designers used assets, characters and mechanics scavenged from classic franchises like Zelda, Street Fighter and Sonic the Hedgehog to review gaming's history, reframe their own biographies and link gaming’s growing pains to a broader sense of disorientation, disillusionment and decline in American culture.
Rudolf Thomas Inderst (*1978) enjoys video games since 1985. He received a master’s degree in political science, American cultural studies as well as contemporary and recent history from Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich and holds two PhDs in game studies (LMU & University of Passau). Currently, he's teaching as a professor for game design and game studies at the HNU University of Applied Sciences Neu-Ulm, Germany, has submitted his third dissertation at the University of Vechta, holds the position as lead editor at the online journal TITEL kulturmagazin for the game section, and is editor of the weekly cost-free game research newsletter Game Studies Watchlist.
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