Harrasment in the Gaming Industry

The past couple weeks have been pretty horrific inside the gaming industry. Zoe Quinn, the creator of a text-based game called Depression Quest, was said to have been in affairs with five different games journalist. Not much later, she, along with Phil Fish, the creator of the game Fez, supposedly had some of their accounts hacked into. Not long after the controversy surrounding that, Anita Sarkeesian released a new video in her Tropes vs Women in Video games series. All three of these events lead to some pretty horrific harrrasment.

Firstly, I don't particularly care who Zoe Quinn is having affairs with as long as it doesn't affect any journalistic integrity. That's her personal life, it doesn't need to be flaunted all over the internet, unless it specifically lead to an article that wouldn't have been written otherwise, which from my understanding hasn't happened.

There are a bunch of people claiming that Fish set himself up to make it look like somebody hacked his account. I don't really have an opinion on this. I don't know enough about hacking, or the security protocols of the different companies that his accounts are associated with. What I do know, is that a lot of the people making the claim that it is all faked are doing more than just making claims. They are harrasing both Fish and Quinn about it, and thanks to the anonymity that the internet allows us to have they will get away with it.

Finally there's a new Sarkeesian video. These videos spark a ton of contreversy everytime a new one is released. I'm not saying that they're the best videos, I feel their could be better examples used, especially less examples that come from cultures outside America, however attacking the person behind the video just because she made a video you don't like is not okay.

Harrasment is never okay. Just because you don't like what we're saying, just because you're group of people have had the most say in the industry for the longest amount of time, does not mean that you get to treat people like they aren't people. Women are still people, and telling us to go back to the kitchen is a form of harrasment. Telling a woman you're going to rape her is harrasment. Just because she has different genitals than you doesn't meant that she is an object to be treated however you want. She is a HUMAN BEING. That means she deserves to be treated the same way you treat your buddies Joe and Fred, or whoever they may be. And yes, men in the industry get harrased too, that is a problem too. But to me it doesn't seem to be as prevalent an issue.

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