Quinn - Crash override: how Gamergate (nearly) destroyed my life, and how we can win the fight against online hate

M ost relationships end in a breakup. Sometimes that breakup is so crazy that it becomes a horror story you tell your friends, family, and therapist. For the past three years, Ive watched my breakup story told and retold by everyone from the writers on Law and Order: SVU to President Trumps chief strategist. It has a Wikipedia page. It spawned in-jokes and internet slang and has dedicated community hubs. It has a cartoon mascot. My breakup required the intervention of the United Nations.

You might have heard stories about the darker side of the internethackers, hordes of anonymous people attacking an unlucky target, private nude photos made public by vengeful exesbut to you they remain just that: stories. Surely these things would never happen to you. Youre not famous. You dont go around picking fights with anyone online. Who would even think to mess with you?

I used to feel that way too. Im an independent game developer who makes weird little artsy video games about feelings and fartsMario Brothers and Call of Duty they aint. In the game world, my work was obscure enough that people could score serious hipster points by referencing it. I was a relatively low-profile internet citizen, living and working online like plenty of other people. But for all its awesomeness, the internet has become such a volatile place that anyone can become a target of devastating mob harassment in an instant. Including you. Including me.

It doesnt take much. Maybe youll express your opinion on a political issue and it will get noticed by the wrong person. Maybe youll wake up to find that a company you once bought shoes from online was careless with security, and now your personal information is in the hands of anyone who bothers to look. Maybe someone who has a grudge against you is relentless enough to post and promote bogus information about you onlinestuff that can never be erased. Maybe youre a member of a demographic that is constantly targetedyoure a woman, youre black, youre trans, or any combination of these or other marginalized groupsand someone who wants to get people like you off their internet decides to take it upon themselves to make your life hell. Online abusers target countless people every year for any number of arbitrary reasons.

In my case, it started with the aforementioned breakup.

After five months of a toxic on-again, off-again relationship, I finally cut all ties to my abusive ex in an attempt to heal and move on. But abusers hate nothing more than losing their ability to control you. If I no longer cared what he thought about me, hed have to attack the things I did care aboutmy friends, my career, and my art.

Shortly after I ended things, my ex posted a sprawling manifesto, just shy of 10,000 words, detailing the ways in which I was a whore on multiple websites dedicated to my industry, but not before workshopping it with friends in order to cause the most possible damage to my career and sanity. The post was immediately taken down for being wildly inappropriate, so he moved his masterpiece to the parts of the web populated by people who are recreational life-destroyers. It spread like wildfire. Thousands of people who had never heard of me before rallied around his banner and took up the crusade, latching on to me as a stand-in for any number of things they hated. The places where I sold my games, talked with friends, or even just looked at cute cat videos were suddenly awash in pictures of mutilated bodies, images of horrible violence, and threats to do these things and worse to me. My home address and phone number were discovered and distributed, leading to 5 a.m. phone calls from strangers detailing the ways they planned to rape me and people bragging about leaving dead animals in my mailbox. Nude photos of me were dug up, printed out, jizzed on by strangers, and mailed to colleagues, friends, and family.

So, why me? I was an unconventional game developer. Im a queer, feminine person in an industry still struggling to handle fictional women made of pixels let alone flesh-and-blood ones who can say no, and I was more interested in making games about depression and comedy than the more commercial ones that come to mind when you think of video games. I am outspoken and ambitious, and at the time, I was one of independent gamings rising stars during a time when the industry and geek culture at large were experiencing an identity crisis. There were more diverse players, developers, and games than ever before, and a loud, irrational minority saw this as an invasion and attacked anyone they saw as a witch to burn.

As it turned out, when I cut off my ex for good, I was basically sitting in a black robe and wide-brimmed, pointed hat on top of a pile of kindling.

The spark was an insinuation that I had slept with a game journalist for a positive review of my game. That accusation turned what would have been a few horrible weeks for me into a cascade that shook my entire industry before developing into a full-on culture war.

Somehow, the fact that the game reviewer had never actually reviewed my game didnt come up.

After the release of the manifesto, the witch hunt spread across every social media networking platform in a matter of hours and escalated from there. Using the same techniques that are used to spread hoaxes or viral in-jokes, the mob began running coordinated operations with the goal of destroying my life from every possible angle while rebranding their abuse as a crusade for ethics in games journalism to attract new members and obfuscate the repugnant behavior by disguising it as a consumer revolt.