The Woman at the Center of #GamerGate Gives Zero Fucks About Her Haters
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“We don’t have to be tolerant of other people’s intolerance. That’s bullshit, frankly...”
That’s what Zoë Quinn, author of Crash Override, told me. For the unfamiliar, Quinn was the video game developer at the center of the 2014 Gamergate saga. It’s hard to sum up something as absurd as Gamergate, but here goes: In August 2014, Quinn became the victim of a sweeping online harassment campaign, which began after her ex-boyfriend Eron Gjoni posted a 10,000-word manifesto online accusing her of, among other things, sleeping with a video game reviewer in exchange for a favorable review of her game.
This occurred amid an ongoing debate within the gamer world about ethics in gaming journalism and the perception that a left-leaning gaming press was obsessing over feminism and the place of women in the industry.
Of course there’s no evidence that Quinn traded sex for a positive game review, and in fact, the positive review she is accused of soliciting doesn’t exist. But that’s no matter. Like most internet mob attacks, this wasn’t really about the thing it was supposed to be about. Gamergate shape-shifted into something else entirely: an online culture war about political correctness.
Quinn, who was known for speaking out about gender inequities in the gaming industry, became an avatar for everything the male-dominated gaming subculture detested or feared. “If I ever see you are doing a panel at an event I am going to, I will literally kill you,” said one of the early messages she received. “You are lower than shit and deserve to be hurt, maimed, killed, and finally, graced with my piss on your rotting corpse a thousand times over.”
I spoke to Quinn last week about why she chose to write a memoir right now and if she’s worried about exposing herself to more harassment. “I don’t know if you can do anything visible enough and still have teeth to it that doesn’t piss off somebody,” she told me. “At least the people who are pissed off at me are miserable, hateful little fuckers that I don’t want to like me anyway.”
We also talked about Silicon Valley’s “bro culture,” the role of Gamergate in popularizing the alt-right, and why we need to rethink how we use and regulate the internet.
Our full conversation, lightly edited for clarity, appears below.
Gamergate: What really happened
Sean Illing
A lot of people, even people who know what Gamergate is, still don’t understand it. What was it really about?
Zoë Quinn
Well, I had an abusive ex-boyfriend who I cut out of my life, and Gamergate started when he launched an online harassment campaign with me as the target. He posted this manifesto that was designed to go viral the way marketers would design an ad campaign — it included in-jokes and shareable images, and it was carefully posted in all of the places most likely to pick it up and turn it into a harassment campaign.
Later, it picked up steam when someone floated a rumor that I had slept with somebody for positive reviews of my game, even though the person in question had never reviewed my game and worked for a site that I had already written for and I would have needed a time machine to make this possible, but none of that ever really seemed to matter. It didn’t matter that the review never existed. People ran with it and used it as a convenient smoke screen to say that they cared about ethics in games journalism.
Sean Illing
And this picked up steam where? On gaming sites or obscure message boards?
Zoë Quinn
It came out of subterranean message board sites like 4chan [now a popular breeding ground for alt-right content], which are almost designed to engineer and perpetuate online hoaxes. Sites like 4chan were trafficking in “fake news” before fake news was a thing. Eventually, my drama was given the name Gamergate to help it go viral and make it appear bigger than it was. The whole thing sort of steamrolled from there.
Sean Illing
What made you such a soft target in this weird online gaming world?
Zoë Quinn
I don’t look like what a very vocal minority perceives as the default gamer, which is straight white guys that don’t really have a whole lot going on. I’m none of those things, other than white. I make weird games that don’t resemble closely mainstream stuff like Call of Duty or Mario, so I think it was easy for them to look at me and perceive me as an invader, which is really sad because I think a lot of us end up in games not only because we love them but because they’re something that helps with other chaos going on in our lives.
Sean Illing
So I confess to knowing almost nothing about this world. I have this caricatured image of the lonely, alienated male nesting in his parents’ basement in coffee-stained sweatpants. And when I think about that, it makes perfect sense that a non-controversy like this could spin into a resentment-fueled, half-ironic hate campaign against someone like you.
Zoë Quinn
No, I don’t think that’s an accurate characterization of the game world at all. The thing is, Gamergate wasn’t because of games. Games were really an afterthought. The fact is, there’s been campaigns like this across a bunch of different industries. It’s a symptom of this larger brewing negative sentiment toward anybody that could be perceived as other.
The further away you get from the 1950s sitcom dad, the more people there are out there that hate you. All of the bigotry and hatred and stuff that happens offline definitely translates online, so really this was just the game-flavored version of that rather than something that is unique to games.
Sean Illing
So you really don’t see what happened to you as a product of the underbelly of gaming culture?
Zoë Quinn
I really don’t. I mean, this is our world, the broader world — not simply the gaming world. Look at who’s running the country right now. It’s really not unique to games at all. There are people like this all over the place, and some of them happen to play games.
“I don’t really care about the people that want to hurt me, what they think about me. I care about people that might need something like this and not have it, and I feel a sense of obligation to them.”
When your breakup morphs into a culture war
Sean Illing
You talk about the surreality of watching yourself get turned into a meme, a kind of digital piñata. Can you describe what that was like?
Zoë Quinn
It was incredibly weird and disturbing. It’s simultaneously the most personal and least personal thing in the world because people are attacking you personally. In my case, people were sending me nude photos of myself that they had jerked off on, and then they started targeting my friends and family.
But at the same time, it wasn’t about me at all. At some point, I realized that I had become a convenient stand-in for whatever was bothering these people [who] participated in this craziness. I was basically just a witch to burn because their crops weren’t coming up. I was a scapegoat for a bunch of inaccurate bullshit about how they feel like women and people of color and trans people are trying to take their games away or something.
Sean llling
What was the scariest moment for you?
Zoë Quinn
I think it was as soon as they had found my home address and my dad’s address, and my phone number and my dad’s phone number, and I started getting flooded with calls and my dad started getting flooded with calls, and I had to talk to him about it. Hearing him have to say the same jokes that my ex had come up with to talk about what a whore I was, because he’s like, “What’s this Five Guys Burgers and Lies thing that people keep calling and screaming at me?” Hearing my dad say that out loud was horrifying.
I can deal with shit that comes my way all day long, but it’s different when someone you care about, someone who isn’t involved, is targeted because of their connection to you...
*Reader discretion is advised. As per laws surrounding victims who chose to share their stories publicly, all claims are “alleged”; however, relevant evidence that can be shared publicly is also being shown to assist others in forming their own conclusions about the reality of the story. This site shares a true story based on real events that are categorized by the date around which they happened as accurately as possible. It covers traumatic topics such as loverboy method grooming, sex trafficking, exploitation, severe and long-term mental abuse, public and private defamation, public exposures with tampered evidence, and sexual violence, mainly for intimidation and punishment for speaking out. It may trigger strong emotions and flashbacks in those with similar trauma; please prioritize your well-being before proceeding. Some details have been altered for privacy, clarity, and brevity, but the essential context remains intact.
