Gaming Journalism Exposed-Indy Developer Sleeps Her Way To Better Reviews

shinquickman · August 21, 2014, 3:00am

The only Dominican burgers I trust are chimis. If it’s not flat ground pork topped with chopped lettuce and pink sauce in a “pan de agua” roll, it ain’t Dominican.

Hecatom · August 21, 2014, 3:05am

Nigga, if you are going to post a goddamn link to a goddamn feminist site at least put the content on a quote so we don’t give them views

Hawkingbird · August 21, 2014, 3:10am

A Smash Burger opened recently around the shopping center around here. Their fries are fucking godly. The extra cost for the extra shit they put on their fries are totally worth it. I like their burgers definitely great too.

manbehindthewires · August 21, 2014, 3:11am

Sorry, it’s late here. Edited, and requoted here, to save you from clicking back a page.

Spoiler

The gaming community has unleashed a stream of vitriol and harassment against feminist gamer Zoe Quinn thanks to a tell-all blog post made by a jilted ex-boyfriend.

Allegations made by Quinn’s ex have brought about an Internet maelstrom, a sustained campaign of harassment—again—against Quinn and her family, and widespread accusations by gamers that Quinn’s alleged personal relationships are a sign of corruption in the gaming industry.

Thing is, there are no publicly known facts to support this theory. There is, however, a lot of hot air.

On Saturday, gamer and coder Eron Gjoni, who dated Quinn during the time she created Depression Quest, detailed his alleged history as Quinn’s then-boyfriend in an extensive blog post.

“[T]his is written almost entirely in shitty metaphors and bitter snark,” he wrote. “It’s a post about an ex.” Gjoni then goes on to allege that Quinn slept with other professionals in the gaming industry while they were dating.

Despite its length, Gjoni’s post amounts to little more than the kind of nasty, post-breakup gripes spurned partners lament about with close friends. But thanks to a number of key factors, his allegations have turned into a hot-button issue for a certain sector of the gaming community, which has twisted Gjoni’s dirty laundry into a narrative of industry corruption—a tale that is not based on provable fact.

While Gjoni does not directly accuse Quinn of using sex to advance her career, he implies that her relationships with the man for whom she later worked and a gaming journalist may have been ethically murky.

Mostly, however, Gjoni’s blog post portrays Quinn as dishonest. Gjoni ultimately concludes that Quinn was attempting to keep him from going public about her alleged indiscretions—with what seems in retrospect to have been good reason, given the number of gamers who have subsequently harassed her ever since the post went up.

All week, gamers have accused Quinn of trading sexual favors for career advancement from industry professionals and positive reviews from gaming journalists. Despite the lack of evidence for either of these claims—again, Gjoni’s post never makes either allegation, and the gaming journalist he names never reviewed Quinn’s game, Depression Quest—the idea has taken firm hold within the gaming community.

As Youtuber Triox points out in his response video, part of the reason gamers are so angry about Quinn’s alleged ties to industry journalism is that many of them seem to hold industry journalism responsible for making Depression Quest unfairly popular to begin with.

Depression Quest is an award-winning text-based choose-your-own-adventure game. But while it received nearly universal positive reviews from professional critics who praised it for immersing players in the difficult experience of depression, many gamers saw it differently.

“The few mechanics used are simple yet effective, but it’s apparent Quinn has never been to a creative writing workshop,” wrote one gamer in April. With its rudimentary graphics and simplistic mechanics, many gamers felt that Quinn’s success was illegitimate. They agreed with Triox that Quinn’s game only shot to prominence after Quinn claimed to have been harassed during the game’s development. Gaming outlets rushed to publicize Quinn’s allegations—she claimed to have had to change her phone number due to harassment—which helped to eventually secure Depression Quest a place on Steam.

It appears that in the eyes of these gamers, the journalists who supported Quinn or her game are somehow helping to rig the system for feminist members of the gaming community. One Escapist forum thread on the subject was entitled, “Zoe Quinn, or how video game media may have been exposed as a pro-feminist hugbox” before being renamed.

“She was supported by the gaming press and by other certain indie developers … against these hordes of horrible, horrible trolls that were apparently trying to keep her down,” stated YouTube user InternetAristocrat in a video uploaded Monday. Quinn seems to have rapidly become a symbol for gamers about the perceived hypocrisy in gaming towards women who herald concepts of social justice. On Tumblr, user alexxdz offered this comparison:

image is a side-by-side comparison of gaming community developer Josh Mattingly and Quinn, attempting to draw a parallel between Mattingly’s Facebook sexual harassment of a female developer which led to his resignation, and the lack of press surrounding Quinn’s sexual exploits.

When Josh Mattingly said some awkward and innapropriate shit to a female developer everyone was talking about it, if you google his name the first page will have articles by Kotaku and Rock Paper Shotgun.

Now that some dirt about Zoe Quinn and a Kotaku staff member showed up suddenly privacy is a big deal.

Of course, there’s an obvious difference. Mattingly exploited a massive gender divide between industry pros while sexually harassing a female game developer, and he did it in public on social media. Quinn’s greatest sin appears to be having alleged private relationships with other men in the industry.

Another obvious difference is that while these women may get support from members of the industry and the media, they often have to endure extreme harassment from gamers simply for being women within the community. MundaneMatt’s video claimed that feminists within the gaming community were “put on pedestals,” and that Quinn’s relationships revealed the “incestuous” nature of the indie gaming community. He named Quinn and the much-maligned Anita Sarkeesian as examples. But Quinn and Sarkeesian could be poster children for the harassment women in the industry are forced to regularly endure. Sarkeesian especially is an example of a feminist within the community who has endured an intense amount of backlash from the gaming community, including death threats and real-life harassment, because of her work.

Trolling, sustained campaigns of harassment, intense vitriol, and a rhetoric on the part of the harassers of being conspired against by mainstream media—these are all familiar parts of the misogyny that various women in the gaming community have endured in recent years. From the sidelines, it’s hard to see that the current controversy over Quinn is any different from the previous controversies that have hounded women who attempt to maneuver within the culture.

Adding to the chaos is that Quinn allegedly tried to suppress some of the responses about her private life from being made public. Quinn allegedly issued a copyright claim against a video made by a YouTuber named MundaneMatt; however, mirrored copies of it are making the rounds. Another website, Games Nosh, was temporarily taken offline altogether after its domain host asked it to take down a blog post, screengrabbed here, about the Quinn scandal:

Though the site the site is now back online, Quinn’s supporters have done her no favors by attempting to suppress the conversation around her sexual exploits.

Many male gamers viewed Quinn’s alleged takedowns as continuing her alleged pattern of suppressing information about her private sexual activities in order to boost her career.

But even Quinn’s own alleged use of copyright to have content taken offline is itself a tactic that redditors and other gamers themselves used to briefly silence Anita Sarkeesian—a tactic seen as useful, rather than deplorable, when it was in the hands of angry male gamers instead of women who challenged them.

And the gamers are angry. 4Chan’s /v/ imageboard allegedly briefly hacked Quinn’s Tumblr in an attempt to get her real-life contact details, along with stealing alleged nude photos of Quinn from a private server. They’ve also flocked to Metacritic to bombard her game with negative reviews. (Reviews for the game are currently removed from Steam.)

In a Tumblr post, originally deleted during the hack and then reposted, Quinn detailed the litany of harassment she and her relatives had been subjected to as a result of the latest wave of harassment. After asking that members of the gaming press “be respectful of what IS a personal matter, and not news,” she elaborated:

The idea that I am required to debunk a manifesto of my sexual past written by an openly malicious ex-boyfriend in order to continue participating in this industry is horrifying, and I won’t do it. It’s a personal matter that never should have been made public, and I don’t want to delve into personal shit, mine or anyone else’s, while saying that people’s love and sex lives are no one’s business. I’m not going to talk about it. I will never talk about it. It is not your goddamned business.

…

This is another example of gendered violence, whereby my personal life becomes a means to punish my professional credentials and to try to shame me into giving up my work. I’m still committed to doing my small part to create a world where no woman is at risk of experiencing this. That said, I am thankful that even boards with a reputation for being the most hostile places online have been able to tell the intent behind these threads and banned them outright, seeing the hate speech for what it is, and not-news for what it is.

Among the “boards with a reputation” to which Quinn refers are 4chan’s /r9k/ board and Reddit, both of which have seen moderators deleting threads devoted to doxing Quinn’s information, in some cases incorrectly. Reddit has subsequently exploded into chaos over accusations that moderators of r/Gaming have allegedly deleted thousands of comments about the Quinn scandal, and turned the forum onto auto-delete in order to clear out the rest.

Redditors have further accused the subreddit r/PCgaming of similarly blocking discussion of the thread.

In response, redditors have flooded the r/gaming thread, spamming it with over 20,000 comments within seven hours after it was created. After realizing that one of the r/Gaming mods had spoken to Quinn directly on Twitter, redditors screamed for his removal, only to get back a frosty response.

Meanwhile, other industry professionals are emerging to speak out, both on behalf of Quinn and in condemnation. Gaming commenter John Bain, known to the Internet as TotalBiscuit, took to Twitter for a lengthy take on the subject, simultaneously castigating the hearsay and rumor surrounding the issue, and criticizing Quinn’s alleged use of DMCA takedowns to censor discussion.

Others were more blunt:

Ultimately, the outcry over Quinn seems to bear out her initial fear, expressed to Gjoni months ago: “A woman’s sexuality at all being public can sink that fucking ship.”

Gjoni’s initial post may give evidence that Quinn is a bad girlfriend, but it doesn’t prove that Quinn had any intention to sleep her way into a job at Framed. Nor does it prove that Quinn traded sexual favors for positive reviews.

Instead, Zoe Quinn’s private sex life has gotten caught in the crossfire of the ongoing tensions over gender inequality in gaming culture. And while Quinn’s alleged attempts to suppress conversation about her sex life may have drawn that conversation further out into the public, the harassment she’s received in response has overshadowed anything she might have done to try to pre-emptively ward it off.

Ultimately, it seems likely that the noise surrounding this incident will serve as yet another example of the ways in which gaming culture continues to be a threatening place for women.

Ouroborus · August 21, 2014, 3:11am

Lord_Raptor:

Ouroborus:

Lord_Raptor:

Just a note none of the men she slept with gave reviews or really pushed for her games during the affairs, they remained professional on that at least. Everyone involved in this situation si an idiot Zoe for cheating, the guys for doing it, adn her Ex for leaking this shit.

And with that bowing out the thread, congratulations for feeding into Rik’s awful misogyny more you idiots. We know this is Rik and he’s not welcomed here, the fact this thread exist is a pretty bad look.

this is the same guy that makes a big fuckin deal when females complain about the misogynistic treatment in the gaming world.

open your eyes idiot, stop white knighting these whores.

I actually think Zoe is pretty fucking horrible & Phil Fish needs to be put on blast for shaming someone who claimed to be sexually assaulted by Zoe into silence, don’t see how I’m white knighting anyone.

then why are you on this thread shitting on everyone with that holier than thou attitude?

Misogynistic or not, that whore Zoe deserves everything to whats happening to her now.

Again, lets not forget you have a habit for standing up for tramps and whores. You’re the first one to call people misogynistic and sexist despite the fact you have no idea whats the issue on hand. That’s pretty much white knighting.

crucades · August 21, 2014, 3:19am

@PlaceofEagles slash Serrin slash whoever

/thread

DANZAN · August 21, 2014, 3:25am

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…Soooo what happens now?

system · August 21, 2014, 3:30am

Nothing…business as usual but at least now people know how shitty gaming journalism really is.

BB_Hoody · August 21, 2014, 3:32am

Her private and sex life is her own buisness, none of ours. If she wants to cheat on her boyfriend and/or have multiple sex partners that’s her buisness. And if she was just a random chick doing this for pleasure then that’d be the case and none would care. But it’s not. She’s having sex with men that are in a position of influence within her profession and is using said sexual relationships to advance her career.

The 5 guys who slept with her and did her favors prove why gaming journalism was never something to be taken seriously. They can no longer be trusted to do their job honestly and should be fired and or blacklisted. And Ms. Zoe has pretty much set woman in this industry back and underminded those who truly work hard to prove themselves. Like why work hard when you can just fuck your way to the top?

Spirit_Juice · August 21, 2014, 3:34am

Defending her? Your reading comprehension must be shit because all I said is that her sleeping with multiple dudes is irrelevant and dudes getting butthurt over it is stupid. I haven’t posted in this thread in a while because it’s become even stupider than ever.

Nigga, fuck you. Keep my name outta yo mouth. Favorite burger? This dick burger because you can’t seem to keep me out of your mouth. We all know it’s you, Sennin. You denying it isn’t fooling anyone. You live a pretty sad life with your confused boners for women you hate. You claim you even fucked a girl that looked like Zoe. Your extreme hate for her is more than likely due to your shame and self hatred for fucking something you hate: women. Ever try fucking dudes? I hear they don’t have vaginas and therefore aren’t evil incarnate, so that might work out better for you. At least after you’re done getting your ass reamed you won’t need to go into fetal position and cry yourself to sleep because you didn’t fuck something with a vagina.

It’s a damn shame SRK is your last bastion to spew your hate since the mods are too damn lazy to reban you after you made a new account. You can’t even troll on Twitter right because after making real life threats to rape people and calling transgender people freaks of nature gets you reported so fast that your account gets shut down. Maybe you should try tumblr since they don’t seem to care about spewing hate on there, I mean just look at all men hating feminists on there! You’ll fit right in and could even FIGHT THE GOOD FIGHT directly at their doorsteps!

So yeah, tl;dr: fuck you, Sennin. Keep my name outta mouth. Eat burger dicks. I’m out.

axi · August 21, 2014, 3:35am

BB_Hoody:

Her private and sex life is her own buisness, none of ours. If she wants to cheat on her boyfriend and/or have multiple sex partners that’s her buisness. And if she was just a random chick doing this for pleasure then that’d be the case and none would care. But it’s not. She’s having sex with men that are in a position of influence within her profession and is using said sexual relationships to advance her career.

The 5 guys who slept with her and did her favors prove why gaming journalism was never something to be taken seriously. They can no longer be trusted to do their job honestly and should be fired and or blacklisted. And Ms. Zoe has pretty much set woman in this industry back and underminded those who truly work hard to prove themselves. Like why work hard when you can just fuck your way to the top?

This guy gets it. Her cuckold is her property and none of our concern, let us celebrate the exposure of a corrupt industry.

axi · August 21, 2014, 3:39am

But isn’t *hammering *the *point *of the story?

SoVi3t · August 21, 2014, 3:42am

well fuck you all, now i need to go get burgers

Spirit_Juice · August 21, 2014, 3:43am

Smashburger is pretty legit though. Some people say Five Guys and Fries are better than In N Out but those people are freedom hating terrorists.

axi · August 21, 2014, 3:45am

Fellow Californian confirmed.

system · August 21, 2014, 3:48am

Spirit_Juice:

PlaceOfEagles:

You could call me something more original if we are just gonna throw around random nicknames but meh…also I lost decisively to what exactly?

I see 3-4 guys all hammering the same point that she’s blameless and any criticism against her is inherently sexist and misdirected. The people defending her like fish,spirit and zero have yet to actually address any of the points people have brought up…it’s sort of why I posted those vids so that people could know what’s going on. Although maybe your right I probably did lose to irrelevant arguments I never made…

Defending her? Your reading comprehension must be shit because all I said is that her sleeping with multiple dudes is irrelevant and dudes getting butthurt over it is stupid. I haven’t posted in this thread in a while because it’s become even stupider than ever.

Nigga, fuck you. Keep my name outta yo mouth. Favorite burger? This dick burger because you can’t seem to keep me out of your mouth. We all know it’s you, Sennin. You denying it isn’t fooling anyone. You live a pretty sad life with your confused boners for women you hate. You claim you even fucked a girl that looked like Zoe. Your extreme hate for her is more than likely due to your shame and self hatred for fucking something you hate: women. Ever try fucking dudes? I hear they don’t have vaginas and therefore aren’t evil incarnate, so that might work out better for you. At least after you’re done getting your ass reamed you won’t need to go into fetal position and cry yourself to sleep because you didn’t fuck something with a vagina.

It’s a damn shame SRK is your last bastion to spew your hate since the mods are too damn lazy to reban you after you made a new account. You can’t even troll on Twitter right because after making real life threats to rape people and calling transgender people freaks of nature gets you reported so fast that your account gets shut down. Maybe you should try tumblr since they don’t seem to care about spewing hate on there, I mean just look at all men hating feminists on there! You’ll fit right in and could even FIGHT THE GOOD FIGHT directly at their doorsteps!

So yeah, tl;dr: fuck you, Sennin. Keep my name outta mouth. Eat burger dicks. I’m out.

If you’re salty over some dude called sennin then find his FB and take it up with him because I have no clue what you’re tantrum is in reference.

Anyways it’s funny how you equate hate to simple criticism. My OP and every post I’ve made since then have all said the same thing, yet because the person in question is a woman you can’t handle the idea that maybe a woman did something bad and as such is facing the consequences of it. A quick search through your posting history reveals that you always come to any gendered topic defending women, no matter the crime or accusation you always find some way to make women victims. I don’t know why you have such a hard time seeing women as flawed human beings that sometimes make mistakes but clearly you prefer to think of them as flawless beings who can do no wrong. You get upset that I call her a whore…a woman who cheated on her BF with 5 men in exchange for favours…I think that in itself speaks volumes about your bias.

Women are flawed just like men, but unfortunately people like you and communities like kotaku or tumblr feminist choose to believe women are superior to men and that it’s impossible that they can make any mistakes. I call out people for stupid shit they do regardless of the gender. The dudes in this story are fucking idiots and Zoe is a dumb whore…if holding women accountable for their actions is too much for you then I suggest you stick to Jezebel. You can’t seem to comprehend the idea that woman can be shitty people too so I’ll be honest in saying I don’t know how to handle such a sexist and bigoted person…I’m just shocked you didn’t try to defend Zoe by claiming she was raped by all 5 men.

kedawa · August 21, 2014, 3:51am

I’ve never heard of this disgusting slab of hog meat or her shitty game until now.
If nothing else, this situation is a masterful publicity stunt.

Spirit_Juice · August 21, 2014, 3:52am

axi:

Spirit_Juice:
Smashburger is pretty legit though. Some people say Five Guys and Fries are better than ***[s]
In N Out
[/s]*** but those people are freedom hating terrorists.
Fellow Californian confirmed.

Well considering In N Out is mostly a west coast thing, of course. The debate seems to come up a lot though.

CanadianDstryr · August 21, 2014, 3:55am

So is Fuddruckers a regional thing or is SRK just sleeping on them?
The topping buffet is a bit of a gimmick, but the kettles of melted cheese is too stronk. Their fries are solid as well, and with the aforementioned cheese kettles, an upgrade to cheese fries costs nothing.

axi · August 21, 2014, 4:00am

Spirit_Juice:

axi:
Spirit_Juice:
Smashburger is pretty legit though. Some people say Five Guys and Fries are better than ***[s]
In N Out
[/s]*** but those people are freedom hating terrorists.
Fellow Californian confirmed.
Well considering In N Out is mostly a west coast thing, of course. The debate seems to come up a lot though.

The more u know. I didn’t know InNOut left Cali at all.