"GamerGate anger at women all too real for game maker" by Beth Teitell and Callum Borchers | Globe Staff October 30, 2014
Brianna Wu, a software engineer so absorbed in her work that she considers eating a waste of time, did not want to be a cultural figure.
“I got into video games,” she said recently, “to make video games.”
But Wu was thrust into the spotlight on Oct. 9, when she tweeted what she intended as a joke. It mocked members of a shadowy and threatening gaming movement called GamerGate, ridiculing them for, among other things, “fighting an apocalyptic future where women are 8 percent of programmers and not 3 percent.”
That’s when the harassment began — a frightening online campaign threatening rape and death that forced Wu to flee her Arlington home.
At least the NSA collected all that.
In the process, she became the latest of several female targets across the country — the second in the Boston area — as well as a symbol of the sexism that some say is roiling the $21.25 billion gaming industry in the United States.
“Guess what [vulgar name]?” read one tweet from “Death to Brianna.” “I now know where you live.” Her home address was posted.
Who would want to destroy the Internet, anonymity, and all the information it provides, considering the agenda-pushing source I'm reading?
The mostly unknown participants behind GamerGate — named for its Twitter hashtag — contend that they are fighting against what they see as favoritism and a lack of ethics in gaming journalism. They’re also unhappy about what they see as an increasingly liberal agenda in video games. Critics say that GamerGaters are brutish bullies trying to drive women out of a field that men have long dominated, using tactics that include online harassment and “doxxing,” slang for posting personal information, such as a home address, bank information, and Social Security number.
Many fear that the online harassment of female game developers — in addition to the hyper-sexualized depiction of women in many videogames — will dissuade girls and young women from entering a creative and growing field.
Ignore the horrible misogyny and militarism.
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Although the battle for the soul of video games is raging online, one of the real-world fronts may be Boston, which has a robust indie game scene. Locally produced games — made by women with uncommon frequency — are among the leading examples of the increasingly diverse audiences and subjects that dot today’s gaming landscape....
What did I just.... never mind.
At this point in her ordeal, Wu is regularly forwarding incoming rape and death threats to the local police, and said she has been in communication with the FBI, the Arlington Police, Twitter, and Apple. She and her husband, Frank Wu, have been forced to pack their dogs, Crash and Kablam!, barky Bichon Frise, into their crates and escape to a safe house or hotel.
Slender, 6-foot, 2-inches, and in her mid-30s, Wu has started taking private self-defense lessons, and stopped telling even friends her schedule.
“I don’t know who I can trust,” she said last week, speaking, at her request, from an undisclosed suburban location. “The slow paranoia is exhausting.”
Still, Wu says she’s more bothered that young women might steer clear of gaming development than by the intimidation she is experiencing. Women represent 47 percent of gamers but only about 12 percent of game developers, according to a 2014 report by the Women’s Media Center.
The report also notes that at least since the mid-1980s, “men have become a larger and larger share of college graduates in information technology and computer science” — key fields in the current job market.
“Death and rape threats I can deal with emotionally,” said Wu, the founder of Giant Spacekat, a company that makes games with female protagonists, and the host of a popular podcast. “What takes the biggest toll is when young girls write me and tell me they’re too scared to go into this field.”
The gaming industry culture war kicked into high gear two years ago, when feminist and media critic Anita Sarkeesian launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund something called the Tropes vs. Women in Video Games series. Her online harassment started almost immediately, and escalated to the point where, just last month, Sarkeesian was forced to cancel a talk at Utah State University because of anonymous threats promising a massacre.
I'm sorry, folks, but I'm just sick of the agenda-pushing psyops promoting division whatever it is.
GamerGate took off after the jilted boyfriend of a Boston area independent game developer, Zoe Quinn, blogged about her alleged infidelity with a gaming journalist. The ex-boyfriend claimed the relationship led to positive reviews of her game, Depression Quest. The claim was never proven. GamerGaters maintain that their campaign is about ethics in gaming journalism.
As the controversy began to spill from the gaming world into the mainstream in recent weeks, the Entertainment Software Association , an industry trade group, issued a statement....
Woah! Console just went dark. Waaaaaa!
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Oh, now I see why she is kinda resentful.
I rarely play Boston Globe video games anymore. Sorry.
What do you think I am, some sort of terrorist?
