Your 1-sentence answer to understanding Gamergate has less to do with any of the people involved or a timeline of events. Gamergate, more than anything else, was an opportunity. A springboard to indoctrinate people into far right politics by playing to people’s fear of the Other, mistrust in media, and stoking anger at a perceived scandal.

If it never happened, if it wasn’t video games, it would just as well be something else. It would be music or sports or anything that people are passionate about. Right wingers were running out of steam with the Tea Party, and Gamergate was in the right place at the right time.

EDIT: Some contemporary discussion on GG actually, prophetically, supports this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/GamerGhazi/comments/2k0bpi/why_gamergate_is_a_rightwing_movement/

https://www.reddit.com/r/AgainstGamerGate/comments/2km45o/a_few_days_ago_i_said_that_gamergate_was_a_right/

As someone on another forum said, the GG movement is primed to be the next young Republican demographic, and all of the pieces have been put into place to subvert the Authoritarian revolt into a rabid conservative base. So next year when all of the GGers (who remain) go from moderate liberals to Tea Party advocates, you can say you were at ground zero.

https://www.reddit.com/r/QAnonCasualties/comments/l3fq6t/the_tea_party_and_gamergate_were_things_i_was/

That got me thinking about my Q/MAGA following father and how both being indoctrinated into Tea Party politics as a teenage boy on top of Evangelical Christianity as well as being sucked into Gamergate and Sargon of Akkad’s whole “classical liberalism” grift for a while. I see a lot of that same outrage and ingroup-outgroup clashing being taken advantage of by Q and MAGA.