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Gamergate has grown into a hate group that threatens the stability of the $60 billion a year game industry.
Brianna Wu
I say this as an engineer: We are profoundly bad at asking ourselves how the things we build could be misused.
If you run a website where people can congregate, you have a moral responsibility to make sure that community is not harassed.
I was adopted into an extremely right-wing religious family.
The first game I remember being ridiculously passionate about was Super Mario Bros. 2. It was the first game where you could play as Princess Peach. It wasn't just a game where the boys had their adventure. Peach was in the game and she was so powerful there.
I have an unfortunate history with Ethan Ralph. Like many women in the game industry, I've been doxed by him multiple times.
If you're fortunate enough not to know, Gamergate is the misogynist hate group of the video game world.
For me, especially running for office, being on Twitter is a fundamental part of my job.
To its credit, Twitter is at least making an effort to curb hate speech towards transgender people, training its staff how to respond.
The main lesson I took from Gamergate is that asking the status quo to do the right thing doesn't work.
I think what a lot of women in the game industry saw with Gamergate is they saw if they came forward, help was not going to come.
Growing up as a queer child in Mississippi, I got my Nintendo in 1985, and I've been lost in this world ever since. When I was scared because my church said people like me were going to burn in hell, 'Final Fantasy', 'Dragon Warrior' and 'Super Mario' offered a lifeboat.
I think Gamergate is just a symptom of a disease: a $90 billion global industry that was built by men for men.
For most of 2016 and 2017, I would say probably 90% of my Twitter feed was automated bots sending repetitive messages at me. Someone would basically pay bots to send me messages over and over and over again. It made Twitter nearly unusable.
The video game industry traditionally has been a very male-dominated field. You know, with the advent of the iPhone, the number of women gamers exploded.
I grew up listening to Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, and it took me getting out into the real world and understanding what I faced as a woman in my career to really open up my eyes.
I love people that kind of have those life experiences that take them different places.
Something that's hard for me, I remember being a child in the '80s and looking at this field. It was a field I wanted very much to go into, but I didn't see people who looked like me working in video games. You can't really be it if you can't see it.
I look at my own party, and I see that we've taken this technocratic, academic, elitist liberal class philosophy as far as it can go, and we got our butts kicked - and I don't know what else to do other than get involved myself.
The main thing Twitter needs to focus on are implementing its rules more uniformly. If outing a transgender woman is against Twitter's rules, that needs to be implemented every time.
Walking is great, I guess.
The Internet has done so much for so many. It allows women and minorities to have access to education, training, and information that sometimes isn't available to them for whatever reason.
Entrepreneurship is in my nature.
Even when the nation's leaders acknowledge tech issues, details are lacking.
When I was a teenager, the most valuable American companies were in finance and manufacturing.
My capacity to feel fear has worn out, as if it's a muscle that can do no more.
Gamergate is ostensibly about journalistic ethics. Supporters say they want to address conflicts of interest between the people that make games and the people that support them. In reality, Gamergate is a group of gamers that are willing to destroy the women who have invaded their clubhouse.
Gamergate isn't the problem - it's a symptom of an industry that is deeply sexist and unable to understand it.
Gamergate should have been a time of reckoning for the gaming community, which had long been rife with sexism and misogyny. It wasn't.
In some ways, the real damage of Gamergate is pushing the public's idea of sexism so far to the extreme, that changes in the professional sphere seem unimportant.
Gamergate gave birth to a new kind of celebrity troll, men who made money and built their careers by destroying women's reputations.
I am a software engineer, a popular public speaker, and an expert in the Unreal engine.
The real question is whether or not the communities that rule the Internet can make their spaces safer for users, especially women and minorities.
In 1999, I was running my first tech start-up and learning the Unreal Engine, the tool that would define my career as a game developer, when news of Columbine ground all work to a standstill.
I love video games dearly.
Even in the '80s and '90s, many white Southerners were still bitter about court decisions that required racial integration of the schools. It wasn't that they were outwardly opposed to white and black people attending school together, it was that the rulings threatened their proud identity as independent Southerners.
Unfortunately, I have the equivalent of 7 PhDs in harassment on Twitter. As one of the primary targets of Gamergate, I've had hundreds and hundreds of threats to my life on Twitter's platform.
My dad is in Mississippi. He exited the Navy and made a ton of money as an entrepreneur.
Gamergate is a criminal operation to harass women.
Most members of Gamergate, the alt-right movement best known for harassing women in the game industry, operate under a veil of anonymity.
There are some men that are very threatened by the fact that women play games nowadays.
The truth is, the sexist behaviour that really holds women in games back doesn't come from the moustache-twirling cartoon villains of Gamergate. It's the sexist hiring practices of our journalistic institutions. It's the consistently over-sexualised designs we see.
To stand up to GamerGate, that's my choice. I can't make that choice for the women I work with.
I've spent a career working in tech as a software engineer. And I believe regulated markets are the best way to build and deliver innovative products.
I don't want to be a hardware engineer. That seems like a terrible job.
Since Gamergate, many women I know are reluctant to speak publicly on gender issues, because they fear - rightly - that they will be targeted and harassed.
The truth is, the game industry is a really incredibly difficult place for women to work.
In software engineering, we have the term 'technical debt.' When you don't do a job correctly, unaddressed problems become harder and harder to solve.
I am a programmer. If I write code, I don't evaluate the results by what I hope the code will be. I evaluate it by what happens when I compile it. I evaluate it by results.
It's see no evil, hear no evil with toxic male gamers - whose every whim and adolescent fantasy has been catered to for decades.
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