He once wrote half a sentence about the game, before his relationship with Quinn ever started, but that's it. They started with Kotaku writer Nathan Grayson, one of the alleged "five guys," who stood accused of writing positively about Quinn while engaged in a sexual relationship with her.īut Grayson never reviewed Depression Quest. They quickly pivoted to focus on corruption in games journalism. Gamers came to a consensus that publicly harassing a woman over her sex life was a bad look. In September, the attacks on Quinn coalesced into an organized campaign, coordinated on 4chan, Reddit, YouTube and in various IRC channels. So Intel pulled its ads from Gamasutra because of a bunch of people attacking a woman after her boyfriend claimed she'd cheated on him? Last week, the New York Times reported she hasn't been back since. Quinn's address and phone number were made public shortly afterward, and the threats against her became so intense that she left her house and started couch-surfing. In gamer social media circles, a conspiracy immediately took root: Quinn had definitely fucked those five guys, gamers decided (they even turned it into a joke about the burger chain) and she'd done it to get publicity for her games. The harassment against her reached a fever pitch in August after an ex-boyfriend, Eron Gjoni, wrote a series of blog posts alleging that Quinn had cheated on him with five other men, some of whom worked in games or games journalism. Last month, the New Yorker attempted to explain why Quinn and her game inspire such outrage among gamers - Depression Quest is not a "real game," it's "just words," its portrayal of depression is too personal to be relatable-but it's hard not to look at the last several weeks of chatter in the gaming community and not come to the conclusion that it's about the fact that she's a woman. Quinn has been the victim of death threats and harassment since she began trying to publish Depression Quest, a text-based game partially based on her own experience with depression, in 2013. #Gamergate actually began in August as a pernicious attack on one female game developer, Zoe Quinn, and her sex life. That article is over a month old, though. Intel removed its ads last week from Gamasutra, a niche website for video game developers, at the behest of #Gamergate, which took particular offense to an article by journalist Leigh Alexander arguing that "gamers," in the traditional sense, are becoming irrelevant as "angry young men" grow up and the medium evolves to include new audiences. But there are a lot of reasons not to regard the movement generously. "#GamerGate" is an online movement ostensibly concerned with ethics in game journalism and with protecting the "gamer" identity.Įven regarded generously, Gamergate isn't much more than a tone-deaf rabble of angry obsessives with a misguided understanding of journalistic ethics. Now that major companies are taking sides, it's time to figure it out. But last week, computing giant Intel pulled its ads from an independent game-development site thanks to the gaming lobby. Until recently, you might have lived a life blissfully unaware of the online #Gamergate movement.
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