page_title: Gamergate controversy
section_title: Zoë Quinn and Depression Quest
hierarchical_section_title: Gamergate controversy / History / Zoë Quinn and Depression Quest
caption_attribution_description: English: Zoë Quinn speaks at XOXO Festival 2015 in Portland, Oregon.
context_page_description: The Gamergate controversy stemmed from a harassment campaign conducted primarily through the use of the hashtag #GamerGate. The controversy centered on issues of sexism and progressivism in video game culture. Gamergate is used as a blanket term for the controversy as well as for the harassment campaign and actions of those participating in it.
  Beginning in August 2014, a harassment campaign targeted several women in the video game industry; notably game developers Zoë Quinn and Brianna Wu, as well as feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian. After Eron Gjoni, Quinn's former boyfriend, wrote a disparaging blog post about Quinn, #gamergate hashtag users falsely accused Quinn of an unethical relationship with journalist Nathan Grayson. Harassment campaigns against Quinn and others included doxing, threats of rape, and death threats.
  Gamergate proponents have stated that they were a movement, but had no official leaders or manifesto. Gamergate supporters organized anonymously or pseudonymously on online platforms such as 4chan, Internet Relay Chat, Twitter, and Reddit.
context_section_description: In 2013, Zoë Quinn, an independent game developer, released Depression Quest, a text-focused game designed to convey the experience of depression though a series of fictional scenarios, based in part on Quinn's own experience with the illness. The game received positive reviews in the gaming media, but faced backlash online from gamers who disliked its departure from typical game formats emphasizing violence and skill and who opposed "political" intrusions into gamer culture. Quinn was subjected to several months of harassment after its release, including rape and death threats. Quinn documented the harassment received and spoke openly to the media about it, which led to an even greater intensity of abuse against them, including the posting of their home address online. They ultimately fled their house out of fear for their safety.
  The controversies and events that would come to be known as Gamergate began in 2014 as a personal attack on Quinn, incited by a blog post by Quinn's former boyfriend Eron Gjoni. Called the "Zoe Post", it was a lengthy, detailed account of their relationship and breakup that included copies of personal chat logs, emails, and text messages. The blog falsely implied that Quinn had slept with Nathan Grayson, a reporter for the website Kotaku, in exchange for favorable coverage of Quinn's game Depression Quest. Grayson never actually reviewed Quinn's games, and Grayson's only article mentioning them was published before their relationship began. Gjoni later updated his blog post to acknowledge this, saying that a typographical error was to blame. Nonetheless, a link to the blog posted on 4chan, where many participants had previously been highly critical of Depression Quest, led to renewed attacks on Quinn.
  After Gjoni's blog post, Quinn and their family were subjected to a virulent and often misogynistic harassment campaign. Online attackers of Quinn at first used the label "Quinnspiracy", later adopting the hashtag "#Gamergate" after it was coined by the actor Adam Baldwin, whose nearly 190,000 Twitter followers helped the spread of the hashtag. Harassment of Gamergate targets was coordinated via Internet Relay Chat (IRC), spreading rapidly over imageboards and forums like 4chan and Reddit.
  Less than four months after Gamergate began, Quinn's record of threats they had received had grown 1,000-fold. At a conference Quinn said, "I used to go to game events and feel like I was going home [...] Now it's just like... are any of the people I'm currently in the room with ones that said they wanted to beat me to death?". One anonymous 4chan user threatened to "give her a crippling injury that's never going to fully heal". Commentators both inside and outside the video game industry condemned the attacks against Quinn. The attacks included doxing (researching and broadcasting personally identifiable information about an individual) and hacking of their Tumblr, Dropbox, and Skype accounts; they were again subjected to rape and death threats. Quinn again fled their home to stay with friends. Quinn wrote that "the Internet spent the last month spreading my personal information around, sending me threats, hacking anyone suspected of being friends with me, calling my dad and telling him I'm a whore, sending nude photos of me to colleagues, and basically giving me the 'burn the witch' treatment".
caption: Game developer Zoë Quinn was the initial target of the harassment campaign
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CC (Macintosh)", "Image DateTime": "2019:01:02 15:55:13", "Image ExifOffset": "168", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "306", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "5568", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "1000", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "1000"}