The game received rave reviews. Ian Mahar from the influential game website Kotaku wrote that “content that addresses the complex and nuanced issues regarding mental illness and stigma, such as Depression Quest, should be lauded as providing something beneficial, in that users gain insight and understanding with stigma reduction as a consequence.” Whilst Mahar’s review reflected the consensus amongst gaming journalists, a portion of gamers themselves that were offended by Quinn’s outspoken feminism were not impressed. The fight back from this sector was scathing, and this group (mostly populating the Internet wastelands of 4chan and Reddit) launched into full scale personal attacks on Quinn.
In an interview with New Yorker magazine, Quinn said that the abuse lobbed at her for the game started “pretty much the same day” as it was released. She received a torrent of threats, abuse, and hatred, including but not limited to having her phone number released and having to endure people calling her while masturbating over the phone. Vitriolic comments online such as “all females are sluts and have no right to be depressed…they can just go onto the street, lie down with their hole open and have a man come and solve all of their problems…but they would still be depressed because they’re all just stupid whores”, were not uncommon.
But sadly for Quinn and other female members of the gaming community, they had no idea how bad things were going to get in August of this year. These early days would be comparatively peaceful compared to the hornet’s nest yet to fall on the female gaming community.
The Jilted Ex-Boyfriend. Eron Gjoni is a 24 year old fellow game enthusiast who was in a relationship with Quinn for a few months in early 2014. Their relationship didn’t work out and clearly this upset Gjoni very much. Whereas most 24 year old males might lock themselves in their room while they mainline whiskey and listen to Leonard Cohen, Gjoni took the more unconventional approach of writing a completely invasive and privacy shattering 10,000 word screed detailing all aspects of their relationship, complete with accusations of infidelity and every sin he felt Quinn was guilty of. The post was littered with screenshots of emails, messenger conversations, and text messages, painting a picture of a very emotionally raw situation that really should not have been made public.
But made public it was – across many message boards. Gjoni has boldly tried to justify his fairly juvenile and spiteful actions since then. He has claimed in an interview with Vice that “my ex is a prominent figure who presents herself as one of the only strong voices for equality in the video game world. She presents herself this way so that no one believes her to be capable of doing the selfish and harmful things she does to professional and interpersonal relations in order to advance through the ranks…I wrote a blog to warn those who will be romantically or professionally involved with her (usually both) that they should exercise caution around her, and to let her fans know that they should find a new voice to act as the spokesperson for equality in games.”
The Attacks Begin. The blog post naturally exploded considering that Quinn was already a target of abuse and derision, but the abuse and vitriol that arose was extraordinary even by internet standards. Along with Quinn, her extended family and friends were also victim to the hate campaign. In an article written with website Cracked.com, she wrote that “the angry mob engaged in a hacking spree, compromising a clutch of my friends’ Skype accounts and, following that, the accounts of people they had in their contacts list, sending baiting and horrific messages to everyone they knew. The friend who supported me the loudest fell the hardest: they posted everything down to his social security numbers and bank statements on his then-compromised site.”
Quinn also elaborated on her blog site about the extent of what she has suffered writing that there had been a “proliferation of nude pictures of me, death threats, vandalisation, doxxing of my trans friends for having the audacity to converse with me publicly, harassment of friends and family and my friends’ family in addition to TOTALLY UNRELATED PEOPLE, sending (of) my home address around, rape threats, memes about me being a whore, pressures to kill myself, slurs of every variety, fucking debates over what my genitals smell like, (and) vultures trying to make money off of YouTube videos about it.”
The intentions of the threats were to force Quinn to leave the business and intimidate her. They failed in regards to the first intention, but were successful in the second. After three weeks of constant harassment and threats, Quinn was forced to leave her home because of fears for her safety.
#Gamergate – The Conspiracy Theory. Despite the obviously personal and misogynist nature of these attacks, there is a whole movement online dedicated to claiming that this pathological harassment is actually all in the name of ‘journalistic integrity’. This campaign has been organised under the handle #GamerGate, considering the extremely personal nature of the attacks, seems inexplicable at best. But there is one telling line in Gjoni’s previous explanation, and one important name in his screed, that together appear to form the extremely shoddy foundations for this argument. The aforementioned line about Quinn “doing the selfish and harmful things…to advance through the ranks”, along with the name Nathan Grayson, seem to be the lynch pin of the whole #GamerGate phenomenon.
Grayson is a writer for the influential gaming website Kotaku and he and Quinn had begun a romantic relationship, allegedly while Gjoni and Quinn were on a hiatus. This romantic affair has led to allegations of professional conflicts of interest, and accusations that Grayson’s positive review of Depression Quest is emblematic of a massive underlying conspiratorial conflict of interest between the gaming press and the gaming industry. Those that already hated Quinn and had been threatening her and sending her abuse before Gjoni came public with his dirty laundry, felt they had caught Quinn in the ultimate ‘gotcha’ scenario. They felt that Quinn had done “selfish and harmful things…to advance through the ranks”, as Gjoni put it, and that her game would not have got the reviews it did if she didn’t sleep with multiple men in the gaming industry.
The Reality . The problem was however, that Grayson had never written a review for Depression Quest. As highlighted earlier in this article, it was written by another Kotaku journalist, Ian Maher. In response to the claims being made by the #GamerGate participants, Kotaku Editor-in-Chief Stephen Totilo pointed out that at “the time of the infidelity, (Grayson) was not even a full time employee of Kotaku…On March 31, Nathan published the only Kotaku article he’s written involving Zoe Quinn. It was about Game Jam, a failed reality show that Zoe and other developers were upset about being on…Shortly after that, in early April, Nathan and Zoe began a romantic relationship. He has not written about her since. Nathan never reviewed Zoe Quinn’s game Depression Quest, let alone gave it a favourable review.”
This glaring hole in the argument has not stopped people claiming that it is an issue of ethics. With an almost heroic lack of internal examination most of those involved in the #GamerGate campaign still claim that it has nothing to do with misogyny. In an interview with UK’s Telegraph newspaper, participant Javer G Reis Jr claimed “I am searching for answers and am going straight to the source…this is a matter of addressing corruption and hypocrisy, nothing more, nothing less.” This argument is impossible though as it doesn’t explain the deeply personal, violent, sexual, and misogynistic nature of the attacks launched. Neither does it explain the fact that there were orchestrated campaigns on the 4chan message boards to undermine Quinn personally, and use Gjoni’s writing as an excuse to further their already on-going attacks on her. The conspiracy theory about journalistic corruption is just that – a vacant conspiracy with zero substance that is being used to trick susceptible people into supporting a campaign of sustained abuse against those who threaten the status quo in gaming.
The Fallout. This exposure of the inequality and the extreme nature of the misogyny rampant in the gaming industry have understandably left a foul taste in the mouth of many and Quinn has not been an isolated casualty of this campaign. Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist critic of video gaming culture has also endured countless threats for her work, despite the fact that she has nothing to do with the alleged conflict of interest between journalists and those in the industry. Both Sarkeesian herself and her popular YouTube series Tropes vs. Women in Video Games have both been the targets of vicious attacks since they were launched. However, the #GamerGate controversy has increased the intensity of these attacks, and has forced Sarkeesian to vacate her house for fear of her life, just like Quinn.
Unsurprisingly, women are leaving the industry in droves. Fellow designer Elizabeth Sampat also wrote in her blog that “I could tell you stories about the voices we’ve lost, the women we’ve scarred, the people we’ve left behind. I want to, but I’m not sure you’d get it…The truth is sometimes I have survivor’s guilt, and sometimes I have panic attacks about being the only one left fighting, and sometimes despite all of my tough words and the fact I literally cannot imagine doing anything else with my life, the truth is that I can’t stop thinking about maybe leaving the industry. I don’t want to…But I wonder: is this surviving…can any woman escape this whole?”
To her credit, Quinn has been an immense tower of strength throughout the campaign to destroy her. In response to the idea that her private life has anything to do with perceived nepotism within a multi-billion dollar industry, Quinn has been devastating and heroic in her assessments and criticisms and has not stood idly by as a victim. Her stand has been defiant and she has written that “the idea that I am required to debunk a manifesto of my sexual past written by an openly malicious ex-boyfriend in order to continue participating in this industry is horrifying, and I won’t do it. It’s a personal matter that never should have been made public, and I don’t want to delve into personal shit, mine or anyone else’s, while saying that people’s love and sex lives are no one’s business. I’m not going to talk about it. I will never talk about it. It is not your goddamned business.”
Thanks to the exposés and work of Quinn and her supporters it seems that perhaps the true motives of #GamerGate have finally been exposed and the dialogue is moving. But regardless of this, the whole fiasco has shown how far the gaming subculture has to go in moving into the twenty first century socially – not just technically. #GamerGate has nothing to do with ethics in gaming. It is a systematic attack on outspoken feminists who are trying to change the industry. That’s all – any other description is just a diversion to take attention from this fact. Until this is remedied, gaming will never truly be accepted in the mainstream, because the perception will always be that it’s a bitter club full of bitter frat boys with rape fantasies.
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