The blog post is a part of it in that it raised awareness about how these people operate.
Honestly though, it's really just TMZ level gossip that would have run it's course in a week or two.
What really kicked it off was the high level of coordinated censorship of discussion instantly thereafter
not only on dedicated gaming forums, but also on general duscussion sites like reddit and 4-chan.
Once people began questioning how a relatively unknown gaming personality was able to achieve
such large scale censorship, gaming and social justice blogs like kotaku, rock paper shotgun, polygon,
vice, the verge, and the huffington post decided to go into damage control by declairing gamers to be
mysogonysts, sexists, pissbabies, shitlords, rapists, homophobes, and neckbeard nerds.
Thus, gamergate was born.
Once all of the blogs and articles were published, links were traced between game journalists, feminist,
and social justice groups showing that they were using their combined clout to push games with a social
justice agenda or promote games made by members of their clique, and bury those which don't fit the mold.
Tumblr has the largest group of social justice warriors of any social media site, so by observing their
group, you can get an accurate picture of who these people are and what they want gaming to turn into.