You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost) (30 page)

Because I was afraid. On a much smaller scale, I’d been on the receiving end of a slice of this hate myself. And I didn’t want to relive any part of it.

The roots of both incidents lie in 4chan, an anonymous website generally associated with hate speech and cartoon porn addiction, and the starting point for the attacks on Zoe Quinn. Basically, it’s the watercooler for some of the worst of the internet.

In 2012, after all my years on the web, I thought I’d developed some pretty tough troll armor until some people on 4chan decided to attack me en masse for a music video I did for my weekly Geek & Sundry web show,
The Flog
. My friend Jason Miller is a country music artist, and at the time I thought it would be fun to combine his style
with my love of gaming and see what happened. Okay, SURE, nature probably didn’t want those two things mashed together EVER, but that was the point of the show: to throw things against the wall and see if they stuck. I wanted to sing and be creative and hoped the audience would enjoy the experience as much as I did!

Oh, you naïve, dumb-ass girl.

We spent a few hundred dollars to make the video, borrowed someone’s house, and shot in the desert without a fire permit. We didn’t light any matches, so it was cool. The end result was cute. Not mind-blowing, but the song was well produced, and I got to dress up as
Tomb Raider
character Lara Croft, which was a bucket list item. (And proved to me that big boobs DO look better in tank tops. I stuffed HARD.)

I uploaded it like any other video, with the attitude,
It’s free to watch! Don’t dig it? No harm, no foul, right?
Er . . . not so much.

Contempt for women who call themselves “Gamer Girls” has existed for a while online. In fact, I’d been careful to avoid the label over the years for that very reason. But I decided to title the video “Gamer Girl, Country Boy” anyway. And that gave the people who hated me, and who hated the very concept of women having a voice in gaming, a reason to attack. And their feedback was awesome!

The video was shared on a 4chan forum and a tidal wave of bile hit the video. Hundreds and hundreds of comments, the depravity of which even jaded little me had never seen.

I was talentless. I was fake and hideous and ugly. (I’ll admit I’d made a bright yellow eye shadow choice that I’ll rue until the day I’m dead.) I was denigrated on every personal level, my work dismissed as the desperate and pathetic attempts of an “attention whore.” According to the comments, I got where I was by manipulating geeks with my looks, and at the same time, I was repulsively ugly and hard to masturbate to. As a crowning achievement, I was deemed responsible for the “downfall of gaming.”

A multibillion-dollar industry destroyed by little ol’ me? Aw, shucks!

Anyone who defended me online was called a “white knight neck-beard,” a term that describes a guy who defends a girl online solely in order to get laid. A lot of the time, it works. And if you were a
woman
defending me, pish, you weren’t even worth addressing. Hateful, bullying comments flooded the supportive community I was so proud of creating. Even my most hard-core fans were left reeling.

I certainly was.

After about ten thousand misogynistic and a ton of FACTUALLY INACCURATE comments (trash me if you will, but do a little research first), they finally got to me. I’d been making videos for five years at that point. I’ve seen animated GIFs of myself doing . . . you don’t wanna know. Some involving very forward dolphins.

The comments spread like a fungus across my self-confidence. It devastated me to see people dismiss my career because of one four-minute video. I felt ashamed for creating it and everything else I’d ever
made. I thought,
Is this what people have been thinking for years? How stupid was I to think I could sing? I don’t want to be SEEN ever again.

For months I stopped putting my heart into the things I made. It was one of the reasons I couldn’t write the last
Guild
season without feeling crippling self-doubt on every page.

Sad but true, I did what I have told so many people over and over not to do:

I let the trolls get to me.

I didn’t realize at the time how much that incident affected me, but I stepped away from gaming in a lot of subtle ways. I still considered myself part of the world, but I turned down a ton of jobs and event appearances. And those changes in my behavior all led me to stifle myself when I felt the urge to speak up about #GamerGate.

The timing was particularly bad, personally, because a few weeks into the uproar, at the end of August 2014, the infamous “Celebrity Hacking Scandal” happened, where dozens of prominent actresses and performers had private nude pictures stolen and exposed to the world. (Wow, jerks were really busy that fall ruining lives online! Also: the stolen pictures were first posted on 4chan. So much great stuff originates there, huh?)

As someone nowhere NEAR the victims on the celebrity-importance ladder, imagine my surprise when I was contacted by several hackers via my HACKED phone number warning me that I was a future target. My name was on a request list for compromising photos, and people were supposedly offering big dollars to back it up. I counted myself lucky that I had fans in the hacker world. (How cool, right?) But being hunted for boobies? Slightly terrifying.

So, while Zoe and other people were being ripped apart online,
I was holding my tongue, trying to erase anything from my online accounts that I didn’t want made public for the world to see. Any picture,
Is that too much side boob? I’ll erase it
. Any email,
OMG why would I think that was funny?! Delete.
I spent a week ripping out pieces of my digital life that I didn’t want people poking around. I’m sure I missed a lot. When you examine your underwear close enough, EVERYTHING looks a little bit suspect.

I knew sharing my thoughts about the situation would burn me. So I stayed out. And with other prominent people, men and women, jumping in to take a stand against the bullying and hatred, I honestly thought the whole thing would go away soon. I think everyone sane in the gaming world did.

But it didn’t. It got worse. Because the issue somehow morphed from attacking a single woman over a messed-up revenge post to a quasi-conservative movement striving for “ethics in game journalism.” A large segment of the newly anointed “#GamerGate movement” decided that as a result of “the Zoe post” there was corruption running rampant in the game journalism world. And THEY were the people to fix it.

They focused a large amount of their wrath on people trying to add dialogue about feminism and diversity in gaming, condemning them as “Social Justice Warriors.” (That label was always so weird to me, because how is that an insult? “Social Justice Warrior” actually sounds pretty badass.) It turned into a mob. One that was disjointed, with lots of differing agendas, but all surfing the wave of vengeful emotion together. Like the French Revolution over that cake thing.

The attacks grew way beyond Zoe. Friends in the indie games
industry who stepped up to defend her started receiving the same treatment. Verbally harassed. Doxxed (where someone hacks personal information like phone number, address, credit cards, social security number and posts it online for the whole world to see and misuse, super awesome experience). At the same time, a prominent vlogger named Anita Sarkeesian released an installment of her video series examining feminist issues in gaming. Hatred of her in a certain demographic of the internet, I’m pretty sure a one-to-one with the worst of the attackers, only fed the “You’re trying to ruin my gaming!” frenzy. More and more people in gaming who started speaking up, especially women, were mobbed for it. A journalist named Jenn Frank wrote a piece about the attacks on Zoe and was so badly swarmed with hate that she decided to quit the industry. I dipped my toe in the water once and sent one subtle @ tweet to Jenn in support and received so many hateful comments I had to log offline for two days. Great “ethical” achievements there, guys!

Ironically, the #GamerGate movement never focused on some of the big game companies who actually ARE unethical, bribing vloggers and censoring bad reviews on their products. The movement tended to target smaller journalists and independent gaming sites. Mostly the ones who were criticizing THEM. It was mind-boggling, but at the same time, they did create the biggest movement in gaming history. And it seemed like it would never stop growing.

At the end of October, I flew to Vancouver to work on the TV show
Supernatural
. It was more than two months after the initial blog post (a decade in real-life time), and the gaming world was STILL drowning in #GamerGate. I was walking down the street on one of my days off and saw two gamer guys walking toward me
in classic, black crew-neck gaming T-shirts. One Call of Duty, the other Halo.

Now, in the past, whenever I saw another gamer in public, I would feel heartened, because we
belonged
no matter if we stopped to chat or not. I would go out of my way to exchange a knowing glance, a supportive smile signaling,
Yeah, dude. It’s cool that you game. I do, too!
We were automatically compatriots in our love for something we both knew was awesome.

But as those two gamers walked toward me, for the first time in my life I didn’t have the impulse to say hello. Or smile. For some reason as I approached the corner . . . I crossed the street instead.

I sat down a few blocks later, because I couldn’t understand what I’d just done. Then I realized that because of the recent situation with #GamerGate, subconsciously I no longer assumed that a random gamer and I would be on the same page, or would connect just because of our love of gaming. There was a wedge in my world where there had been none before.

And for the first time in months . . . I got angry. I WANTED TO WRITE SOME SHIT DOWN, SON!

I pounded five espresso shots, ran back to my hotel room, and wrote a Tumblr post about my experience titled, “Crossing the Street.” And I tried to make it different from the tone of other writing on the subject. I tried to frame my argument in an empathetic way. Not condemn, but make people understand what I was feeling. How I was upset and ashamed at my impulse to avoid those anonymous gamers. How sad I was that the actions of #GamerGate had created that feeling in me, to separate myself from people whom I would have assumed were comrades before. And how the whole situation
was creating the outside impression of a culture driven by misogyny and hatred, which I KNEW wasn’t true. I appealed to our mutual love of gaming, on both sides, to bring us back together, for the sake of what we all loved. (The essay was eloquent, promise. Legal drugs fuel good words!)

I emphasized my fear of speaking out, because of the possibility that someone would doxx me. I had taken out too many restraining orders against stalkers to not be concerned about my home address leaking. I thought sharing that fear would be the “Relatable!” part to both sides. I mean, anyone would be afraid if it was easy for a whackadoodle to pull up into their driveway when they got angry at one of your tweets, right? “I’m the owner of that taco place you just dissed. WATCH OUT, I’M ON YOUR DOORSTEP, BITCH!”

I posted my essay on Tumblr minutes before I had to hop in the car to go to the movie studio that night, and as I hit Send, I felt dizzy with hubris. I’m not brave in general—
mousey
doesn’t just describe my real hair color—but speaking out felt RIGHT. It was something that I should have done weeks before. By overcoming my fear, I had finally redeemed myself TO myself. No matter if anyone paid attention or not.

I got in the car to be driven to set for work (they do that on TV shows, so fancy). Twenty minutes later I got a call. I looked at the caller ID. “Wil Wheaton.” That was weird. We’re super-close friends, we’ve acted together, we produce a web show together, but it was odd he was calling me. Email/text/IM/Twitter/Snapchat? Yes. Primitive old-school telephoning? Nope.

“Hello?”

“Dude, you need to disable comments on your Tumblr post.” He sounded panicked.

“What?”

“Several people have posted your home address in the comments. You need to disable comments right now.”

“Oh my God.”

I was silent for a second. Then I learned that “bathed in horror” is an actual feeling, not a colorful writing metaphor.

“But . . . I . . . don’t know . . . I don’t know my password.”

I had just changed everything to forty-character twelve-step identification the week before because of the celebrity hacking thing, and I hadn’t reentered any of my passwords onto my phone yet. It was one of those “That sucks!” coincidences.

“Do you want me to reset it for you? I’m not home but I can find some Wi-Fi.”

“No . . . then you’d have to get in my email, and I don’t know that password, either. Wait, maybe I can do it on my phone. I’ll call you back.”

I hung up and tried to load the Tumblr app, but discovered the interface was not easy to navigate when your hands are trembling in an aggressive way. The driver, a very kind older guy, offered to pull the car over.