# Swell AI Transcript: Zoë Quinn SPEAKER_01: It's the latest development in what has become known as Gamergate, an online culture war. Tig: Hello and welcome to another episode of Neutral Good, the show that dives into politics in video games. I'm your host, Tig. The whole first season of Neutral Good is about hashtag Gamergate. If you haven't gone back and listened to the earlier episodes, I highly recommend them. I am a little bit biased, though. In the previous episode, we heard a lot of talk about Zoe Quinn and the Zoe Post, a blog post that chronicled a messy breakup between Zoe and their ex-boyfriend Aaron Joni. It famously makes mention of Washington Post and ex-Kotaku reporter Nathan Grayson, alleging conflicts of interest that arose while Joni claims Zoe and Nathan were in a relationship and Nathan was working for Kotaku. We established that there was no conflict of interest based on timelines and that Zoe's game was free and that it received no positive press from Kotaku or Nathan Grayson. So with that out of the way, I would much rather this episode didn't focus on the unfounded claims in the Zoe post. Honestly, the whole thing disgusts me. When I was a teenager, I too wrote long-winded, emotionally charged blog posts that rambled on like a stream of consciousness, and I published them on the internet at the time because I was young and stupid. The idea that a similar post blew up so much as to be featured in mainstream news now for almost 10 years, it's equal parts ridiculous and fascinating to me. It was also an especially terrible harbinger of things to come. There's a direct line from Gamergate to Donald Trump's successful election campaign. Yikes. So instead, let's hear about Zoe from Zoe. This is from a presentation that Zoe did at the XOXO conference in 2015, and I will leave a link in the show notes. Zoe Quinn: I am Zoe Quinn, an independent game developer, artist, and most recently co-founder of Crash Override Network. We are, as far as I know, the only organization that works directly with people who are dealing with online abuse and harassment to sort of unfuck their situation, help them talk to people, and ideally advocate so that there's less of people like me in the future. And unfortunately, you're probably a little bit less familiar with that, more familiar with what happened to lead me to co-found Crash Override. But yeah, in August of 2014, my vengeful ex-boyfriend harnessed the ugly, sexist background radiation of the web, united them under a single banner against me in particular, and made me patient zero of what would later be called Gamergate. SPEAKER_06: Let's start with the basics. Gamergate started as a hashtag on Twitter, a banner under which people could collectively argue, vent, or attack an idea for an individual. In Gamergate's case, that individual was Zoe Quinn. Zoe Quinn: I'm Zoe Quinn, and I'm an independent game developer and community organizer. SPEAKER_06: Quinn has been actively involved in the video game industry for a while, and she's part of a growing demographic in that industry—developers and designers who aren't making the next Call of Duty or big-budget role-playing game. Zoe Quinn: I basically make weird little games that are about feelings, so not the traditional sort of game where people usually think of when you say video game. SPEAKER_06: Quinn's most notable game is called Depression Quest, a game that simulates the experience of having depression through multiple choice text. And Quinn unwillingly sparked the Gamergate debate. SPEAKER_04: The whole explosive story started as something we've seen a million times, a disgruntled ex-boyfriend posting a sexist diatribe against a young woman, an indie game developer named Zoe Quinn. That diatribe included unfounded allegations that Quinn was sleeping with a game journalist to gain favorable reviews. That led to online harassment, including threats of death and of sexual violence, first against Zoe, and then against countless other women connected with the games business. Joining us now is the woman at the center of this controversy, Zoe Quinn. Tig: What I've gathered after listening to countless hours of interviews and presentations is that Zoe Quinn is, shocker, a human being. They have flaws, sure, but they also have some pretty impressive ideas about how games and gaming are evolving. In the previous episode, we touched upon the gamer moniker and how some folks who identified under that label were pretty outspoken. about feeling threatened by the growing trends among gaming, trends like increasing inclusivity and diversity. Zoe is obviously keenly aware of the ulterior motives of the Gamergate crowd, and they speak to it here. SPEAKER_04: The bigger debate it seems to have triggered is this. Is this just a few bad apples, as you'd see in any industry, or does this pull back a curtain on a bigger culture of misogyny in the games industry? Which is it? Zoe Quinn: Well, it's complicated, right? So we're currently at a time in the industry that is very exciting. It's one of the reasons that I've gravitated so hard to this and sort of found my calling in making games here, because we're at a point in the industry where it's now easier than it's ever been before for anybody to make a game. The game tools have started to become more and more accessible. They've become free. A lot of open source stuff is happening. That's really kind of amazing. So what you're starting to see is a lot of people entering the industry that are not from a traditional background that are starting to make new and interesting things and really push those limits. And now you don't need a computer science degree or to be part of a studio of hundreds of people to make a game about something. Like in my case, I can make most of my games in one, two, three people teams. I can make whatever I want since I don't have a boss, I don't have stockholders. And as such, now that we're starting to see so many people entering and we're seeing more diversity in the player base as well, you're starting to see this explosion of creativity and these backgrounds and these subjects being covered by games that you've never seen before. SPEAKER_04: And Zoe, we're actually showing footage of Gone Home, which is a lesbian coming-of-age story. We have footage of a couple of games we'll show the audience that are female-centric, female-led. There's Alien Isolation, which has a very strong female protagonist that's just out now. This industry has gotten more and more diverse in the ways you're talking about. It's home to more and more diverse content. For the 40% of Americans who are just being acquainted with the gaming industry now, because they don't play games, What would you tell them to think of this business when all they know of it is these hateful threats against women? Zoe Quinn: It's troubling because I feel like GamerGate has given a lot of bad PR to the people that care about games and the people making them. Just because it's named GamerGate doesn't mean that this has something to do with everybody who's here. There's been so many strides and so much progress made in the last 20 years towards making games more inclusive and making them more for everybody. And games fully belong to everybody. If you play Candy Crush, you're a gamer. If you play Call of Duty, you're a gamer. If you play weird games about depression and feelings, you're just as much of a gamer as anybody else. The unfortunate thing is that these people who are sort of extreme voices have undone so much of that work. So the medium itself is quite powerful and is something that I love more than anything. But unfortunately, there are people who don't want games to be inclusive. There are people that want to keep, people like me, people like the people who play Candy Crush, they want to keep it marginalized into this tiny, narrowly defined definition of what they think a real gamer is. But that's not reflective of the people who play games, the people who make games, SPEAKER_04: But it's certainly not reflective. And we're showing some of the stats, Zoe, of just how not reflective that is. Actually, male gamers between 10 and 25 years old are only 15% of gamers right now. So there's a lot of reason to question these stereotypes. But certainly what is real is the hatred from these men sending threats. Tig: Now, I'm going to warn you that the next few clips get pretty dark. With the hate and vitriol directed towards Zoe and other targets of Gamergate, you'd think they were evil villains poised to take over the world. The truth is that these folks were artificially raised up to celebrity status for the sole purpose of harassing them and causing real harm. Zoe Quinn: Gamergates impacted my life in pretty much every conceivable way. You know, there's enough people that might not want to work with me as a result. Alex, my producer, lost his job during Gamergate. I have to have a very serious chat with anybody that agrees to jump on this project because of that. It does severely limit my options. You gotta joke about it, otherwise the despair gets in. There's been a lot of people who've been hacked, myself included. There's been doxing, which is when people find your personal information and post it online. Pictures of yourself that have been printed out and have someone else's semen on them will be sent to you. People telling me the ways that they want to rape and kill and burn my body. You name it. It's anything you can do to a person online has been done to the targets of Gamergate. SPEAKER_05: In August of 2014, independent game developer Zoe Quinn was the target of an intense coordinated campaign of online harassment. Her ex-boyfriend, Aaron Jani, authored a blog post claiming she had cheated on him multiple times, including with a video game critic. Zoe Quinn: It was like a very calculated attack and piggybacked off of years of harassment of women and marginalized people in the games industry, while claiming it's about ethics in games journalism as a smokescreen to sort of try to cover up what's actually going on. SPEAKER_01: I think that one point that you have been really great at making is pushing back against so many people who say to women, why don't you just log off? Why are you online so much? Can you talk about the extent to which this extends into real life and why real life versus virtual life, as if there is really a divide, and really how important that is to realize also. Zoe Quinn: Right, I mean, so, in my case work with Crash River, it became really apparent that so many cases of online abuse started offline. And, you know, GamerGate started with domestic violence in my case, and similarly, like, my dad doesn't, he types with two fingers, he doesn't, you know, any time I go home and visit him, he's like, how do I take my phone off mute? Does not do anything like that. But that doesn't, like, stop him from getting calls at, like, three in the morning from neo-Nazis, like, yelling at him. But I mean, at least he's like, you know what, if someone calls up and they use my full name, I know they're either one of those Gamergaters or a bill collector and I hang up. SPEAKER_00: We've asked lots of people what they think Gamergate is and you get completely different answers on different issues. To you, what does it mean? What does Gamergate mean? Zoe Quinn: To me, Gamergate will always be glorified revenge porn by my angry ex. Before it had a name, it was nothing but trying to get me to kill myself, trying to get people to hurt me, going after my family. Gamergate will always be that to me. There is no mention of ethics in journalism at all outside of making the same accusation everybody makes towards any successful woman that clearly she got to where she is because she had sex with someone. Tig: The irony of all this is that Zoe's insight isn't just great intuition, they've lived the other side. If Gamergate had occurred 10 years earlier, I could have easily been swept up in the movement. Joining a call to arms for gamers to rise up and point a spotlight on something quote-unquote plaguing our industry, I would have surely justified my actions in the same way. I was young, I'm white, I play video games. In this next excerpt from their presentation from the XOXO conference, Zoe admits that they too could have been a Gamergator. Zoe Quinn: You may have known someone like me in high school. I was the funny looking one who wore a trench coat and played hacky sack outside the cafeteria with the other greasy kids. I was the girl a cool kid had to ask on a date once because he lost a bet. I was nerdy and awkward, and I didn't know how to talk to people except online. The internet was my world, and it's the place where I say that I'm from, and it's always been true. It was the only place I had any kind of friends or any control over my life. No one knew I looked funny. Nobody knew I was poor. I was just able to play the game and talk shit with the best of them. and, you know, earned that sort of social status in these weird little kind of nerd circles I ran in, and it was the only place that I ever felt like I fit in. I never sent threats or anything like that, but I did think it was funny when I'd hear somebody freaking out about one, because it's just the internet, who cares? And, you know, a lot of those people were women, but I was also in such a hurry to tell everybody in high school that I wasn't like other girls. I was a cool girl. What that means is I essentially bought into the carefully packaged concept of what I thought being a woman meant, being flighty, frivolous, over-emotional, and anti-intellectual. I demonized all things girly to my friends in the chat rooms that I got most of my socialization in, partially because that behavior was rewarded and reinforced by my nerdy compatriots who agreed that I was totally not like those other girls. I used the phrase, attention whore, the way telegrams say stop, and took pride in my ability to take the mocking, disrespectful, tits-or-get-the-fuck-out of my male friends and turn it back around on them, usually using awful homophobic slurs because I was dealing with the fact that I was queer, couldn't tell anybody, and didn't understand that about myself. But, you know, I would just hit back harder because I wasn't like those other girls. I was a cool girl. And cool girls don't show weakness. Weakness is for other girls. And if I just told myself that enough, I was hoping it would be true someday. I'm pretty sure there's a word for that. Anyway. The reason I'm telling you this is that because if Gamergate had happened several years ago and to somebody else, I would have been on that side. I wouldn't have been the ones making the threats, engaging in weird culture wars, or making weird MS Pain conspiracy threads about who made out with who once. But I fully believe that most online mobs are made up of enough useful jerks like I was that hear their internet buddies saying someone sucks and fully believe them and join in on it. I was the same sort of person you see make up the bulk of online hate mobs and these dogpiles. And there's some important things to know from that perspective. Because how often we talk about these issues, it doesn't really get into the structure of online harassment or the systems of how it perpetuates. And again, game designer, systems, patterns, kind of my home turf. I might be one of the people who best understands and sheds some light on the useful idiots of Gamergate and all the other hate mobs. Or at least can tell you some things you might have heard before, and, you know, G.I. Joe knowing is half the battle. And from there, maybe we can gain some understanding of why this happens, and more importantly, how to reduce the amount of harm it causes. Another thing is, and this is the thing that I think a lot of people don't understand, is that most people participating in online harassment think they're the good guys. Don't get me wrong, you do get the chaotic neutrals. But most people participating in things like Gamergate or other mob abuse think they're totally doing the right thing, like some kind of crappy internet Batman. One rather telling way to highlight this in particular is how often when I meet somebody who's been targeted in a similar manner as I have, hey, do they have a weird conspiracy theory about you secretly being rich? Every freaking time the answer is yes. This little mental trick of assuming, because you can always find someone with the same last name that traces back to whoever, and they'd be like, oh, this happened with Justine Sacco. It's happened with every Gamergate target, pretty much. It's this thought that if what they're going after is so powerful and so corrupt that they still get to be the underdog, they still get to be the good guys. I mean, just look at what happened when Ellen and Ashley Madison recently got hacked. The same people, and if you're unfamiliar with Ashley Madison, it's a site for having extramarital affairs, which turned out to be mostly robots. The same people that were standing up and fighting for me saw that and were like, oh good, this is justice. Never mind the fact that a few days later, at least two suicides had been linked to that data leak and that hacking and that doxing. Just two days later, people were dying. There's a lot of things to be found in a mob, but justice is not one of them. The reality of it is that there's no such thing as good guys and bad guys. There's just people. Sometimes we do good stuff. Sometimes we do bad stuff. We don't get let off the hook if we think we're going after a good target by doing the same sort of thing. When I was still a teenager, Thank you. And I mean, when I was still kind of an internet ass when I was a teenager, every single time I thought I was in the right, they deserved it because they had more than me, or they deserved it because they were doing something that I wished that they could. Or in the particular case of women, they lived up to a feminine ideal I never thought I could, because I was fat and sad and poor. And I had, like, crappy 90s jeans hand me down 20 times, and I could never be that. So of course, that resentment, that sadness just got to me, so it's like, oh, well, they're powerful. They have what I want. It's fine to go after them. This feeling of self-righteousness becomes even more true and pervasive when you are surrounded by people that are telling you that you're in the right. Tig: I remember once when I was a kid, I was out for a walk with my dad, and for some reason I was arguing with him. I can't remember what it was about. It doesn't really matter. What matters is what he said to me. He said, do you want to be right or do you want to be happy? And obviously I said I wanted to be right. Young me had a fixation on being correct about everything, having an explanation for everything. When I was wrong, I simply wouldn't admit it. I'd avoid the topic or I'd lie. I don't really know why I was so intent on being right about everything and why I was so averse to being wrong. I'm sitting here telling you this right now, thinking back, and I still don't really know why I was like that. But I can tell you that I grew out of it. At some point, I applied what my dad said and I realized I wasn't happy. So I started admitting my mistakes. I started asking for help. And most important, I got comfortable saying I don't know. This didn't happen overnight, it didn't happen without support from friends and from family, but it's my new normal and it has been for many years. I'm a lot happier. It's only after putting in this work that I can look back upon the GamerGators and see just how much I used to relate. Zoe Quinn: I talked about 300 former trolls. You know, what made you stop? What made you grow out of it? And almost every single time, more often than not, they expressed that someone they were close to, respected or looked up to, said that wasn't cool. That the social network supporting this kind of feeding frenzy was no longer reinforced. That's one thing that changed for me, too. As I drifted away from the circle of people who shit on people for kicks and started taking care of myself and got the help from my depression that I needed, I started making friends that were different. And they would be like, hey, what the hell are you doing, kid? And that sense of shame disrupted this mechanism of a bad habit that had built up in myself and for me to go, oh wait, what am I doing? Furthermore, for myself and a lot of other reformed internet jerks that I've spoken with, another thing that got a lot of people to wake up and back off of this gross harassing behavior was that same tiny humanizing of their targets. It stopped being this theory of a person. And this was really exemplified when after I got doxed and people started calling my phone en masse, I answered all the time. And they'd be like, is this Zoe Quinn? And I'm like, do you not know who you call when you? And they're like, oh, you know your number's all over the internet? And I'm like, yeah, I'm aware. And they're like, oh. And you could almost hear the wheels turning. And I had the same conversation at least 10 times with Randolph. And they were like, I'm sorry. Anybody who didn't double down on the garbage immediately apologized because it didn't go the way that they thought it would. I suddenly had a voice. It wasn't just words on a screen. And when you're in this sort of place, when I was in this sort of place, it was like a game, you know? And that's the thing, it's not really about the target. It's a basic empathy failure. Drawing on the dehumanization, people aren't really, they're just symbols to people attacking them. They're weird goals, like a performative thing, like a game to see who can do the best burn. This is how things often quickly escalate too. And for me, it was partially about belonging to something somewhere. I was part of the Chanology things back in the day, where everybody wore the dumb V for Vendetta mask and were like, Scientology is bad. And while I started, because I did think that everything I was reading was messed up, I stayed because I made friends and I wasn't alone. And there's that weird sense of bonding, and I'm not proud to admit it. And sure enough, they turned on me as soon as they found out I was a girl, but you know. Can't say I don't deserve that. These people also tend to make artifacts and in-jokes the same way any kind of community would. YouTube is especially bad for this. I think any time that I do anything related to a video, I'm sure in this video, if you look over, viewer at home, wherever the camera is, you'll probably see like 20 links being like, she's evil, boobs, in the side. I'm paraphrasing. But that's the thing, they create these things and they pass it around, and what I've been referring to as the treehouse, like they found nudie mags in the woods, because it's a community. At its core, these harassment mobs are a community. And sometimes, when it's not about the target, it's about just lashing out at a concept. Like I said, I shit on so many women when I was younger that represented the ideals I was never able to meet, and had nothing to do with them, and everything to do with the fact that I was an insecure teenager. Tig: Imagine if the Zoe post had simply read, it has nothing to do with them and everything to do with me being an insecure teenager. But then I'd have no story to tell here. So. Zoe's ability to remain compassionate and grounded delivering these interviews and presentations while constantly facing death threats is impressive, especially considering people are still making hit pieces about them to this day. But that's a story for another episode. Getting back to some of the lessons Zoe's taught us, the reality, the simple truth is that with a massive increase in accessibility and free access to better game making tools, more and more people will begin creating their dream games. I, for one, can't wait. Thank you so much for listening to this very special episode on Zoe Quinn. In the next episode, we'll take a look at the Internet's favorite cesspool, 4chan. Don't worry, I'll do my best to make it tasteful. I'm your host, Tig, and this has been Neutral Good.