I found out about it early on, after seeing a bunch of gamers I follow on Twitter talking about “that Zoe post.” Oooh, gossip? I’m at home on a Friday night wearing sweats and eating cheddar popcorn as usual. Juicy! I clicked over to read a long, rambling blog entry, scrolled down page after page to see IMs, emails, and other private information a guy had collected on his ex-girlfriend and published for the world to rummage through. Evidence of her cheating on him, peppered with implications of sexual favors traded for reviews of the game Depression Quest that she had designed (accusations that were later disproven. Repeat: disproven). It was creepy. I remember being horrified. Then judging her a little. Then feeling bad about it. And then thinking, What woman would ever date this creep again?!
Usually controversy, even this terrible, disappears pretty fast on the internet. The people whose hobby it is to hate things move on to rip apart a new game or make fun of a celebrity’s vacation cellulite. But this situation started, strangely, to gather more and more steam. More hatred and, most frightening: a strange sense of justice on the part of the attackers. I think the same viral effect that leads people to share a crazy Korean music video a billion times is the same kind of phenomenon that helped give rise to #GamerGate. You can FEEL the wave of emotion online when something is about to go viral, good or bad. A scientist I met once mathematically compared internet behavior to swarm behavior seen in starlings or locusts. Well, that weekend, the hate locusts started swarming.
Hackers leaked Zoe’s personal information. She received rape and death threats and was forced from her home. Videos of her nude photos were spread and Photoshopped across the internet to shame her, much to the amusement of the trolls. People even tracked down her father to call him and tell him what a “whore your daughter is.” (I mean, how sad do you have to be as a human to think THAT was a good use of your afternoon?)
As someone who has been an advocate in gaming for many years, especially as a woman, I watched all this happen from the sidelines and thought, This is disgusting! I wanted to step up and speak up against the bullying . . . but I didn’t. Why?
Because I was afraid. On a much smaller scale, I’d been on the receiving end of a slice of this hate myself. And I didn’t want to relive any part of it.
The roots of both incidents lie in 4chan, an anonymous website generally associated with hate speech and cartoon porn addiction, and the starting point for the attacks on Zoe Quinn. Basically, it’s the watercooler for some of the worst of the internet.
In 2012, after all my years on the web, I thought I’d developed some pretty tough troll armor until some people on 4chan decided to attack me en masse for a music video I did for my weekly Geek & Sundry web show, The Flog. My friend Jason Miller is a country music artist, and at the time I thought it would be fun to combine his style with my love of gaming and see what happened. Okay, SURE, nature probably didn’t want those two things mashed together EVER, but that was the point of the show: to throw things against the wall and see if they stuck. I wanted to sing and be creative and hoped the audience would enjoy the experience as much as I did!
Oh, you na?ve, dumb-ass girl.
We spent a few hundred dollars to make the video, borrowed someone’s house, and shot in the desert without a fire permit. We didn’t light any matches, so it was cool. The end result was cute. Not mind-blowing, but the song was well produced, and I got to dress up as Tomb Raider character Lara Croft, which was a bucket list item. (And proved to me that big boobs DO look better in tank tops. I stuffed HARD.)
I uploaded it like any other video, with the attitude, It’s free to watch! Don’t dig it? No harm, no foul, right? Er . . . not so much.
Contempt for women who call themselves “Gamer Girls” has existed for a while online. In fact, I’d been careful to avoid the label over the years for that very reason. But I decided to title the video “Gamer Girl, Country Boy” anyway. And that gave the people who hated me, and who hated the very concept of women having a voice in gaming, a reason to attack. And their feedback was awesome!
The video was shared on a 4chan forum and a tidal wave of bile hit the video. Hundreds and hundreds of comments, the depravity of which even jaded little me had never seen.
I was talentless. I was fake and hideous and ugly. (I’ll admit I’d made a bright yellow eye shadow choice that I’ll rue until the day I’m dead.) I was denigrated on every personal level, my work dismissed as the desperate and pathetic attempts of an “attention whore.” According to the comments, I got where I was by manipulating geeks with my looks, and at the same time, I was repulsively ugly and hard to masturbate to. As a crowning achievement, I was deemed responsible for the “downfall of gaming.”
A multibillion-dollar industry destroyed by little ol’ me? Aw, shucks!
Anyone who defended me online was called a “white knight neck-beard,” a term that describes a guy who defends a girl online solely in order to get laid. A lot of the time, it works. And if you were a woman defending me, pish, you weren’t even worth addressing. Hateful, bullying comments flooded the supportive community I was so proud of creating. Even my most hard-core fans were left reeling.
I certainly was.