“No . . . then you’d have to get in my email, and I don’t know that password, either. Wait, maybe I can do it on my phone. I’ll call you back.”
I hung up and tried to load the Tumblr app, but discovered the interface was not easy to navigate when your hands are trembling in an aggressive way. The driver, a very kind older guy, offered to pull the car over.
“No . . . no, I don’t want to be . . . late for work.” My voice was as unsteady as my hands as I fumbled with the phone.
Within a few minutes I got my password reset. Only to discover that I couldn’t disable the comments plug-in from my phone. Crap.
At that point I started hyperventilating. All I could picture was awful people storming my house while I was out of town and killing my dog. Totally irrational, I know. But he was very old and friendly and the perfect target for malicious intent.
I knew the longer my address was up, the more it would be shared and stored and available to anyone forever, bad or good.
In my heart, I knew it was too late to prevent that anyway.
I finally contacted a friend who disabled the comments on the post. (Which I will never turn on again, forever and ever and ever, yay!) There were more than a thousand comments in the thread at that point, a lot of them vile and antagonistic and awful, exactly what you WOULDN’T expect as a reaction to an essay with the theme, Let’s hold hands and get through this, guys! But such was the level of vitriol at the time. Oh, and there were also four separate people who posted my address with malicious intent. A few were business addresses and a few were definitely NOT.
In the scene we filmed that night, my character, Charlie, murdered someone on-screen. The experience was more than a little cathartic.
I’ll leave the analysis of why #GamerGate happened, what drove it, and why it lasted as long as it did to someone’s kick-ass graduate thesis. (Hope you get an A!) But hostility to outside criticism has long been a weirdly accepted part of gaming culture. You don’t generally see hard-core knitters reply to someone who says, “Knitting is cool, but the needles could be made from more environmentally sustainable wood,” with “Oh no you don’t, idiot. My knitting is perfect the way it is, don’t you DARE try to change it. You’re obviously a fake. What’s the diameter of that yarn? Don’t know? Go die in a fire!”
The mainstream media was already publishing “What the hell is going on in the nerd world?” articles about #GamerGate and quickly picked up on my story. “Felicia Day’s Fears Come True” became the headline of the week, mostly emphasizing the violation of my personal information, because, you know, that was the sexy part. The Guardian, Time, the Washington Post—even the New York Times—all reported on my doxxing. Most of the gaming and online community showed an amazing amount of support. But, to me, the reaction of #GamerGate itself was the most fascinating.
In the initial comments section of my Tumblr post, which I disabled, there are hundreds of condescending, hateful comments attacking me as a woman, labeling me a weakling and a fake gamer.
One of the top discussion points in #GamerGate forums was about how I “wasn’t really doxxed.” Some claimed I did it myself for publicity (?!) or qualified it as inconsequential because the information wasn’t hard enough to obtain.
Just to clear the record, it is true to say I wasn’t doxxed in the exact way that the other victims of #GamerGate were. I was “lucky.” Because (and I’ve never said this publicly, but hell, let’s just tell-it-all, baby!) I’d been doxxed by 4chan already, the year before.
In 2013, a group on that forum tracked down a ton of personal information on me. They shared all that and pictures of the outside of my house and my license plate amongst themselves. A disturbed fan used that information and showed up at my front door, made his way INTO MY HOUSE, and afterward, proceeded to obsess over me online in an erratic and abusive way to the extent that I was terrified he would show up again and do something violent.
So that’s why so many haters were able to post my address so quickly a year later. Efficient, huh?
The savviest members of #GamerGate saw all the media coverage blowing up over my situation and decided that my doxxing was making them look bad, so they rushed to send me well wishes of support on Twitter. But the support was almost always accompanied with the caveat: “REAL #GamerGate doesn’t do stuff like this.”