Zoë Tiberius Quinn (born 1987) is an American video game developer, programmer, writer, and artist. She developed the interactive fiction Depression Quest, a Twine game released on Steam. In 2014, a blog post by her ex-boyfriend sparked the Gamergate controversy, in which Quinn was subjected to extensive harassment.
Video Zoë Quinn
Early life
Quinn was born in 1987 and grew up in a small town near the Adirondack Mountains in New York. Growing up, she often played video games. A favorite of hers was Commander Keen, an MS-DOS game featuring an eight-year-old protagonist who builds a spaceship with items found around his house and then travels the Galaxy defending the Earth. As a teenager, she suffered from depression and was diagnosed with the condition at the age of 14. She has described receiving little sympathy or assistance from school district officials and says they were "less than understanding about teens with depression and suicide issues".
Maps Zoë Quinn
Career
At the age of 24, Quinn moved to Canada and made her first foray into video game programming. Her first game was the result of a six-week course on video-game creation that she attended after seeing an advertisement in a newspaper. In a later interview for The New Yorker, she said, "I felt like I'd found my calling."
Depression Quest
One of Quinn's earliest creative works, Depression Quest, was conceived as a "choose-your-own path" adventure detailing the troubled life of a person suffering from depression, with many of the "correct" paths blocked due to the protagonists' struggle with mental self-care. Quinn thought this sort of game narrative would be a good way to depict depression, imposing a set of rules on players they might not experience in their day-to-day lives. Depression Quest was released in February 2013.
Quinn attempted to publish the game on Steam Greenlight service twice -- in December 2013 and later in August 2014, when it was accepted and released by Steam. Depression Quest was featured in a Playboy article as one of several video games dealing with the subjective experience of depression.
Other projects
Quinn created the Game Developer Help List, designed to bring experienced game developers and novice developers into contact with one another. In 2014, she was intended to be part of the cancelled YouTube reality television show codenamed "Game_Jam", which was meant to bring together a number of prominent indie game developers. She has additionally worked on Fez, Jazzpunk, and They Bleed Pixels.
In 2015, she served as a narrative design consultant for Loveshack Entertainment's iOS game Framed. As of 2014 she was also working on a full motion video game starring Greg Sestero.
In 2015, Quinn wrote a chapter for Videogames for Humans, a book about games made using the Twine tool. She also contributed a chapter to the book The State of Play: Sixteen Voices on Video Games, detailing her experiences making Depression Quest and the subsequent harassment she faced. In 2015, she appeared in the documentary GTFO. She also wrote a scenario for "Widow's Walk", an expansion for Betrayal at House on the Hill, released in 2016.
Quinn is currently working with erotica author Chuck Tingle on a full motion dating sim under the working title "Project Tingler". In January 2018, her role as Narrative Designer at Heart Machine on a new, unannounced project was also announced.
Harassment and Gamergate
In August 2014 Eron Gjoni, a former boyfriend, posted a lengthy blog post detailing his relationship with Quinn. Based on the contents of the post, Quinn was falsely accused of receiving positive coverage from a journalist with whom she was in a relationship. It was later shown that the journalist in question had only once briefly mentioned Quinn's work, and not while they were in a relationship. These accusations sparked the Gamergate controversy. Quinn suffered a long period of harassment including doxing, rape threats, and death threats. Harassment associated with Gamergate resulted in widespread recognition of sexism in gaming.
According to The New Yorker, the harassment escalated to the point where Quinn, "fearing for her safety, chose to leave her home" and began working with the authorities to identify those responsible for the harassment. She detailed the experience in an interview on MSNBC's Ronan Farrow Daily, saying that Gamergate represented a rapidly shrinking fringe among an increasingly diverse gaming community and those attacking Quinn and other women in gaming needed "to just grow up". Speaking with BBC News, Quinn said the harassment had consumed her life, leading her to feel as if "surrounded by nothing but hate -- it's virulent, it's everywhere" and that she was "just trying to survive". The attacks boiled down to "the same accusation everybody makes toward every successful woman: she got to where she is because she had sex with someone" and she also pointed out that Gamergate had targeted "the people with the least power in the industry". "[I] used to go to games events and feel like I was going home... Now it's just like... are any of the people I'm currently in the room with, the ones that said they wanted to beat me to death?" Quinn says her therapist remarked of the harassment, "I don't even know what to tell you, this is so f-?-?-ing far outside anything I'm aware of."
In January 2015, Quinn co-founded Crash Override, a private network of experts to assist victims of online harassment which in March 2015 joined forces with Randi Harper's Online Abuse Prevention Initiative.
On September 24, 2015, she spoke at the United Nations along with Anita Sarkeesian about online harassment. In her speech, Quinn spoke about the need for technology companies to provide proper moderation and terms of service which protect marginalized groups. She also raised concerns about providing better protections for transgender women and victims of domestic violence on the Internet.
In September 2017, she published the memoir Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate. The book has received generally positive reviews, with critics praising Quinn's thoughtful, nuanced portrayal of her harassers, but lamenting the book's "scattered" narrative flow. The book was nominated for the 2018 Hugo Award for Best Related Work (i.e., non-fiction work related to science fiction or fantasy).
Personal life
Quinn is interested in human enhancement, and has implanted an NTag216 chip in the back of her hand that can be programmed to perform various functions. Her first use of the chip was to load it with the download code for the game Deus Ex. She also has a magnetic implant in her left ring finger.
Bibliography
- Quinn, Zoe (2017). Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate. New York City, NY: PublicAffairs. ISBN 978-1610398084.
References
Further reading
External links
- Official website
- Zoë Quinn on Patreon
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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