Do you remember when #GamerGate was young? You know, back before #NotYourShield and Vivian James and bizarrely complicated conspiracy theories involving Gawker, Weird Twitter and some sort of international Jewish conspiracy?
Remember when #GamerGate was still called #BurgersAndFries, and the angry gamebro army was focused on the real enemy of all that is good and true – a young game designer by the name of Zoe Quinn?
If you’ve been feeling nostalgic for those good old days, you’re in luck. A sprawling blog post by a female friend of Quinn’s obsessive, accusatory ex-boyfriend Eron Gjoni takes us back to the dog days of August when his even more sprawling thezoepost was unleashed upon the world.
Rachel M, who describes herself as an “engineer, designer, accidental writer,” recalls the months she spent with Gjoni as he began to process his breakup with Quinn and marshal his arguments against her. She was there when he posted thezoepost, making her a sort of midwife of what became #GamerGate.
It’s no secret whose side of this controversy she’s on. Her depictions of Gjoni are written with affection and indulgence; her portrayal of Quinn is brutal and a step or two beyond unfair. When Rachel M pretends for a moment that she’s not “someone with an ax to grind against Zoe,” that’s because her little hatchet is already buried in Quinn’s back.
If there is a point to GamerGate Launched in My Apartment, and, Internet, I’m Sorry (Not that sorry) beyond making Gjoni look angelic and Quinn look like a demon, I’m not sure what it is.
After presenting us with a series of uninteresting and unnecessary details of her own life, Rachel M repeats a number of largely discredited myths about Quinn and even seems to have made up a new myth of her own, accusing Quinn of “telling Eron she believed I was lying about my PTSD” in an online chat.
Never mind that the chat log itself, which Gjoni pasted into his zoepost, and which Rachel M also pasted into an earlier post of her own, suggests that Quinn was dubious not about Rachel M’s medical diagnoses but about Rachel’s intentions towards her then-boyfriend.
As I searched through the screenshots on Eron’s site to see if Rachel M’s recollections of this exchange matched the evidence, I was struck again by the utter surreality of #BurgersAndFries and its successor #GamerGate.
Because, the thing is, I don’t want to be reading these chat logs. I shouldn’t be reading these chat logs. These are private moments between two people at a vulnerable moment in both of their lives. They shouldn’t have been posted on the internet in an act of petty revenge against an ex-girlfriend. They shouldnt’ be on the internet at all.
The fact that the details of Zoe Quinn and Eron Gjoni’s sex lives and their messy breakup are so central to the conflicts now roiling the video game world that I have to turn to these screenshots to fact check this post is weird and wrong and rather depressing. Zoe Quinn isn’t the president, caught pantsless in flagrante delicto with a Haliburton lobbyist. She’s a video game developer, and the details of her sexual history are none of our fucking business.
None of this matters much to Rachel M, who seems to have become trapped in Gjoni’s reality distortion field, borrowing some of his narcissism for herself. She describes Gjoni’s decision to “go public” with the ugly details of his breakup with Quinn and her various alleged infidelities and lies:
Eron talked about going public. He talked about panic, about awareness, about making sure that people knew what they were getting into, about taking a hit – there’d be a hit, for speaking publicly against a woman in any field, but especially against a woman with Zoe’s position and friends in progressive indie gaming – for the good of all, eventually.
This is so perverse and backwards and wrong it’s hard not to wonder if Gj himself wrote it.
He talked about evaluating the risk to his current job, his future jobs, his family, himself. You know, whether he’d get stalked or murdered for this. He talked about the danger to Zoe, about how he could minimize personal harm toward her, whether he could effectively defray harassment towards her.
Well, he did a bangup job of that, huh?
He settled on a few plans toward that end, and decided the risk to himself was worth it. Even the total loss cases for him still meant greater than zero public knowledge about Zoe’s manipulative behavior, her role as an abuser, and the number of lies she’d told. Anything was better than the way it was now.
Really? Because for a lot of people, not just Quinn, things have gotten a lot worse since Gjoni launched his attack against his ex.
Rachel M is actually quite aware of this; indeed, she notes explicitly that the movement that was born out of Gjoni’s long post has directed much of its fury towards women.
Zoe received floods of hate and threats within hours of the post going live. Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist media critic, was forced to cancel a speech at USU after receiving death threats referencing the École Polytechnique Massacre … Brianna Wu, Liana K, and anyone who identifies as a feminist within gaming — they’ve been getting smeared.
Women in games, creators and critics alike, are working through a tide of hate that’s reached the front page of the New York Times. Each new story makes me a little sicker.
Yet somehow she’s still “not that sorry” she helped Gjoni to launch the movement that caused all this. She thinks it’s all somehow … good for women. Because people now know what she thinks is the truth about Zoe Quinn. She ends her post with these bizarre assertions:
I want more women in tech and media, at all levels—in development, in journalism, in the games and books and comics themselves.
I want those women to be as safe, respected, creative, and supported as any man, and I do not want them unprepared in an industry with Zoe Quinn.
And this, I guess, is how someone who helped Gjoni to usher in a hateful, spiteful, reactionary “movement” that has left numerous women fearing for their lives convinces herself that she’s on the side of the angels after all.
EDIT: I corrected Rachel M’s name. No idea why my brain turned her name into Sarah.
I’d ask if the #Gits might realise that they’re putting way too much stock in Gjoni’s bullshit when Sarah M inevitably breaks it off with him and he even-more-inevitably goes after her in thezoepost 2.0 – but there’s no point, because they don’t care about reality, they just want some excuse to harass women. They’d have every woman with a video game console and an opinion diagnosed with hysteria and burned at the stake as a witch if they could.
He found an audience with the #Gits because they were already angry that women dared to demand inclusiveness from video games. Gjoni provided them with a handy rallying point to focus their hate on.
@Johanna:
Don’t even worry about it… I wrote like three comments trying to analyze the situation more, but kept deleting them because they’d just add fuel to the inferno. -_-
Eron basically framed the whole thing around his personal need for vengence… it’s really difficult to step away from that when our culture is so used to trying to find mitigating personal circumstances or justifications behind horrendous acts.
@Kirbywrap True that. He’s made himself very detestable and it makes it really hard not to make him a mustache twirling villain. I mean he’s a shitstain, but yeah.
I’ve been silently (for the most part) following this drama and the joke that is the MRM for some time now. I find it endlessly amusing except for the MRA terrorists that take shit way too far. But seriously, is this stupid female actually suggesting that alleged emotional abuse on the part of Quinn toward her ex is actually newsworthy or relevant to anything? Srsly?!
Heh. Thing is, at least mustache-twirling villains don’t try to act so damn human. They cackle wildly off into the sunset, taking pleasure in the doing of evil without ever seeming to care that the evil actually gets done. I have a feeling Snidely Whiplash would rescue Nell from the train himself if Dudley Do-Right didn’t show up in time.
The worst is the people who take a paladin-like conviction to their wrongness, justifying every act, no matter how extreme, by thinking their target is worse… From what Eron has said, he started this whole thing simply because he thought Zoe was the devil but she had friends and worked in an industry successfully.
Oh my gawd, the wrong is strong with this one.
First up, there is no depression-prone “type”. Anyone who’s got the genes linked to clinical depression stands a better than average chance of falling ill with it. It doesn’t matter if you’re “girls like that”. I played Depression Quest myself, and found that it rang true based on my own experiences with that beast. I’d say Zoe understands very well what it is.
“They don’t get rejected” is also codswallop. ANYONE can get rejected. It happens even to the prettiest of us. Sometimes a relationship just ain’t happening, and looks and popularity don’t matter worth a damn.
“Know what kind of woman Zoe is!!!”
Ignoring that there are men in the industry that threaten to kill and rape women–let’s put that aside–let’s assume every single accusation against her is true.
That would make Zoe not a good person to date, an irritant to work with, and a savvy manipulator of people and news for her small business. Like Steve Jobs. Or a million other fucking tech guys with messy marriages, tense coworkers, and a well-advertised product. I. Don’t. Get. It.
And is this about developers or gamers or journalists? If Zoe is a jerk in the industry that’s insider business and journalism and consumers have nothing to do with it.
None of it makes sense. At all.
@Karak:
The connection to “ethics in games journalism” was based on a lie that Zoe got someone to positively review her game by sleeping with them. That lie was disproved, mainly because no review actually exists, but by then the “games journalism” part had taken off on it’s own. 4channers intentionally spammed and pushed the “ethics in games journalism” message so that they could get some cover and pretend their harassment was actually justified.
@Karak
There has long been a small group of gamers who are het up about ethics in game journalism, namely that game “journalism” isn’t much like journalism in a lot of cases. I think most gamers couldn’t give the first shit about it, because it’s so clear that most game reviews are industry shilling and intelligent people will make their decisions accordingly. And it’s not like countries go to war based on inaccurate game intel. But, you know, there are people who get worked up about all kinds of things.
The #GGers co-opted this ethics thing as cover, using the idea that ZQ slept with a guy who worked for Kotaku to get Depression Quest a positive review as a way in. The review doesn’t even exist. The report who supposedly wrote the nonexistent review has not been harassed. It was just a cover story invented to pull a legitimizing cover over an ugly, hateful piledrive that would never get favorable media coverage without that cover.
It looks like her name is actually Rachel M, not Sarah M?
(I notice this because my own real first name is Sarah, and for reasons I haven’t ever been able to fully explain sometimes people call me Rachel instead. I hear this happens to other people named Sarah, and also the reverse to people named Rachel).
Maybe ’cause one’s the Biblical successor to the other? I don’t know how else you get Rachel and Sarah confused.
The fact is that these gamers who are actually worked up about game journalism ethics don’t seem to care when it’s pointed out to them that #GG is not about that and that they are being used. It’s a testament to how much misogyny is present in even “ordinary” gamers that being used as a cover for a misogynist attack job doesn’t bother them at all.
They aren’t angry at the people using them this way. They are angry at everyone who “lumps them in with the misogynists.” They aren’t angry at the misogynists in the slightest, even though they are only in this position of being lumped in because misogynists decided to use their pet cause for cover. Their very reaction, and non-reaction to the misogynists, shows that they are also misogynists and that the lumping-in is legit.
But nobody ever calls me Rebecca, and she was one generation closer to Sarah than Rachel. I don’t know; it’s just a weird thing.
“He once nearly collapsed in the middle of the street sometime after midnight, drunkenly wailing, “No, play with meeeee” at a local cat I was petting; the cat ignored Eron and he was crushed.”
cats can sense evil.
@Policy of Madness:
It’s like the newer gamergaters walked into a room where someone was punching another person.
“Why are you punching them?”
“It’s about ethics in games journalism.”
“Ooh, I agree that’s an issue as well!” *proceeds to join in with punching*
They don’t reflect at all on the actions they or their fellows in the movement are taking… the supposed cause is totally just, that’s all they need.
@grumpycatisagirl:
In the year 3017, the last remaining human was wiped out, ending the human race.
In the year 3016, five diplomats from the human race and five diplomats from the argathian race met on neutral territory to finalize a cease-fire. It was during this negotiation that the lead diplomat from Earth called the lead diplomat from Zenus-5 “Sarah.”
The lead diplomat from Zenus-5 was not named “Sarah,” her name was “Rachel.” In fact, the name “Sarah” had a long and sordid history in argathian culture, and was associated with some of the most foul and disgusting things imaginable.
Unfortunately, by strange coincidence, the human mind has a tragic flaw. The names “Sarah” and “Rachel” are both stored in the same set of neurons, with a regulatory neuron acting as a switch. This switch normally handles the two names quite adequately. However, if the human in question were, say, thinking about that ham sandwich he had yesterday and how the ham was most probably not real ham, the switch might malfunction and store the wrong name.
Negotiations broke down immediately, beginning a year-long war that ended in the annihilation of an entire species. All because of a mistaken name and a ham sandwich that most probably was not real ham.
I honestly don’t give two shits about Zoe Quinn’s relationship with that guy. I don’t give one hot damn about their dirty laundry. What I do know is that thus far nothing Quinn has done is severe enough to deserve the shitstorm that’s come her way. From the response, you’d think that she was a pedophile who devoured the hearts of young girls; but then the Channers would sing her praises.
The same name switching happens with Rose and Ruth. I suspect there are others as well.
Kirbywarp, did you just create that story? Very well-done. Quite realistic indeed.
@grumpycatisagirl:
Yeah. 😛 I loved hitchhiker’s guide and Douglas Adam’s style, so I tried to borrow a bit of it.
🙂 I thought it sounded like Hitchhiker’s, except I knew it wasn’t.
Huh. My name is Sara and I’ve never been called Rachel. Maybe the lack of an “h” makes the difference?
Dude literally cannot stop talking about her despite the GAG ORDER.
He belongs in jail
I have a friend named Sara and she gets called Rachel a lot too, but her sister is named Rachel, so in her case that might explain a lot. Meanwhile my sister is not named Rachel, and I don’t know if this Rachel M has a sister named Sarah or not.
It’s probably not the spelling though. Most people who call me Rachel also probably don’t know for sure which way I spell my name.