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GamerGate: Gaming's Angry Summer
ET on the Atari 2600, one of the greatest games of all time! It easily makes my top 10 games ever made! The question is can you trust that review? Of course not! The game was so bad they buried millions of copies in the desert (but we've already discussed this)! Maybe I was paid to say that (although I don't think any company would pay anyone to review a 33 year old game) and that, in essence, is what GamerGate is all about, or at least was. The controversy explodedfrom one game getting a positive review to calling gameing culture into question, severe threats to life and mass shootings! Because one game got a good review? Yes but the controversy exploded and opened up cans of worms that have lingered over the industry since video games first came around! But we'll get there, first of all let's cast our minds back to February 2013 to the game that started it all...
Indie developer Zoe Quinn made a game known as Depression Quest and the game got fairly positive reviews across the video game media. However, some believed that the game recieved undue attention and as soon as the game was was released on steam Zoe received hate mail as did video game advertisers who these people didn't like. So how do we get from hate mail to the threat of mass shootings? It seems quite a jump doesn't it? let's skip forward 18 months to August 2014 when Quinn's former boyfriend Eron Gjoni made what has been dubbed the Zoe Post: it was a 9,425 word blog post (that makes my 818 for Mystic heroes seem a bit short now, but we have a lot to cover so you never know and we are already at 298 words so maybe this post will beat that) in which he quoted personal conversations between himself and Quinn which exposed her alleged relationship with Nathan Grayson, a gaming journalist for the website Kotaku. Many people believed that this is why Depression Quest received good reviews and this is where everything kicks off!
Gjoni wanted to cause as much harm to Quinn as possible but in doing so he also brought about a terrible moment in the industries history, but also one that has changed things for the good (but we have a lot of horrible events to get through before we get there!). After Gjoni's blog post was seen Zoe and her family were on the receiving end of seemingly endless abuse as things moved from email to Twitter and Facebook with the hashtag #GamerGate (a phrase coined by Adam Baldwin [the actor]) where Zoe and her family received death threats. Facebook responded immeadiately but twitter did next to nothing, what they started to do to stop it came much too late. It then spread to Reddit and 4chan where people discussed and coordinated their protests and hate mail at Quinn. It soon led to hacking (this went much beyond using a Celluar Repeater to win a Pikachu plushie) as her social media acounts fell to the GamerGate supporters and even her home address was leaked to the internet. Quinn had to flee her home saying that she couldn't go back there as people threatened her, her family and her home!
Zoe stated that she used to feel at home at gaming conventions and now she was lucky if one person at these conventions wouldn't beat her to death. People even openly admitted they wanted to give Quinn permanent injuries such as paralysing blows and giving her brain damage. People also claimed they wanted her beaten to the point that she is too "retarded" to fear the GamerGaters. Now you can see that this goes beyond a few hateful messages about a moderately successful indie game on steam. But this is only the beginning of the Angry Summer. With GamerGaters lashing out against Zoe who's next? Which other groups will join this war? And will these groups truly be helping the video game industry by defending Zoe? We'll be going to some pretty dark places in the coming posts about GamerGate as we look at why it affects you, me and the industry as a whole!
