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At the behest of the some of those in the live stream chat and LRR crew I created this thread to discuss Depression quest and publicity that it's creator Zoe Quinn have come under. So talk it out. Let your opinions be heard, and create civil discourse.

I haven't heard anything about the controversy other than what's in the other thread in the Gaming forum. However, I downloaded it on the day it was free. I want to play it, but I've been having trouble running it on Linux. It seems to close just after it opens.

For those who haven't seen it, here is Zoe Quinn on the matter.
https://twitter.com/TheQuinnspiracy/sta ... 8451961856

Let's respect her request for not discussing her private life in public!

Right now this situation seems to be an angry ex boyfriend, who could be spouting tons of lies, stirring up a shit storm. He started this situation on 4chan, which we all know is widely known for their respect for truth and the level maturity they bring to the internet. That is sarcasm at power level 9000.

First, there is a thread going on at the escapist forums:

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/ ... ontroversy

That has a lot of "information", which is currently being called "fact" despite not having anything other than he said she said/twitter posts. I have no opinion on what is or is not the truth of the matter. This is just "information".

This is my take on the situation.

Angry Ex Boyfriend posted on 4chan. Rage ensued.

Then the internet being the all wise entity it is, demanded to have all the facts given to them instantly and magically. When that didn't happen(what a surprise!), they took all the twitter/4chan information as pure fact and decided to have a witch hunt and claim conspiracy to anything that wasn't taking twitter/4chan/doxxing information as fact.

Then Reddit had a huge thread on the subject, which then was auto-moderated. The mods claimed that people were banding together to dox/hack/attack Zoe Quinn and her friends and family. I have no doubt that this is the truth. Reddit, from my point of view, is basically another 4chan.

I repeat: I have no doubt people were seriously trying to band together to get a witch hunt going. I have no doublt this could endager the well being of Zoe Quinn and/or her friends and family. I have no problem with the auto-deleting of posts about this topic until the boiling rage has cooled down a good bit, and some actual information comes out about this topic.

Then, just a a day(if not just hours) later, everyone is claiming a cover up conspiracy about any/all gaming websites that didn't post articles or responses about this situation.

With little to no posts about it on gaming media outlets a day and a half later makes me feel like the media outlets are actually more intelligent than I gave them credit for. When the facts actually come out about this situation, any media outlet that took the wrong information as fact would be ridiculed, if not in tons of trouble.

I.E. : "The Escapist idiots jumped the gun and believed twitter/4chan about _____! Can you believe how stupid they are? They fed the flames and turned the situation into an even worse shit storm. Then they fired the person who didn't even sleep with Zoe. Talk about crazy lawsuits."

The posts that Zoe's ex wrote were not to 4chan, they were to [url]thezoepost.wordpress.com[/url], they include a lot of chat logs and images to back up the story. They could be fakes, but it would take a lot of time to do this, beyond the writing up.

At no point in the posts does he indicate Zoe has done this for gain related to her work, but she does lie to him and sleep with others because she is angry, selfish and emotionally abusive. Again, this is going purely from the posts the ex has made.

The witch hunt has been pretty bad, and is definitely not okay. Totally unreasonable to harass her and threaten her and her family. But I feel it is totally reasonable for a victim of abuse to publicly release the story of their abuse, it helps the victim handle the stress and more importantly it also helps others suffering from abuse knowing that they are not alone.

Zoey has framed this as an attack on her because she is a strong female figure in gaming, and certainly there is an element of that in the hateful ugly backlash, but I don't think that she is right in saying that this is entirely private business and thus please don't discuss it.

This is entirely separate from Zoey's work as a game developer, I see Depression Quest as a very valuable game and teaching tool regarding depression.

Of course, if this turns out to be a hoax then I will feel pretty foolish and very irritated with those who perpetrated it.

AdmiralMemo wrote:I haven't heard anything about the controversy other than what's in the other thread in the Gaming forum. However, I downloaded it on the day it was free. I want to play it, but I've been having trouble running it on Linux. It seems to close just after it opens.

It was a web based game before it was on steam, so you shouldn't have any problems on Linux: http://www.depressionquest.com/

I really liked it, and I've heard of people using it as a tool to explain depression to others, so I think it's a positive thing.

As for the rest, her private life is her business. The only claim that might warrant further discussion is her possibly having a relationship with someone who reviewed her game, but no-one seems to be able to find any trace of that review, so that discussion is over as far as I'm concerned.

map wrote:Let's respect her request for not discussing her private life in public!

Second.

I have a rule for stuff like this. If the way the information was leaked would make it inadmissible in a court of law, I disavow it.

Even if I remember it, even if it's crucial information, even if it is to reveal abuse rather than to commit it (like the Mel Gibson rants that I think were surreptitiously recorded)... pretty much no matter what it is. I try not to let it affect what I might think of them.

I'm so sad they ended blacklisting Mel like that

Ranneko wrote:The posts that Zoe's ex wrote were not to 4chan, they were to [url]thezoepost.wordpress.com[/url], they include a lot of chat logs and images to back up the story. They could be fakes, but it would take a lot of time to do this, beyond the writing up.

At no point in the posts does he indicate Zoe has done this for gain related to her work, but she does lie to him and sleep with others because she is angry, selfish and emotionally abusive. Again, this is going purely from the posts the ex has made.

The witch hunt has been pretty bad, and is definitely not okay. Totally unreasonable to harass her and threaten her and her family. But I feel it is totally reasonable for a victim of abuse to publicly release the story of their abuse, it helps the victim handle the stress and more importantly it also helps others suffering from abuse knowing that they are not alone.

Zoey has framed this as an attack on her because she is a strong female figure in gaming, and certainly there is an element of that in the hateful ugly backlash, but I don't think that she is right in saying that this is entirely private business and thus please don't discuss it.

This is entirely separate from Zoey's work as a game developer, I see Depression Quest as a very valuable game and teaching tool regarding depression.

Of course, if this turns out to be a hoax then I will feel pretty foolish and very irritated with those who perpetrated it.

There are better ways to open up about past abuse than doing so on the internet and naming names. Privately to people that you trust, yeah, I get that, but not in a goddamn post on the internet. I call bullshit on that.

Odd that so many (not here of course, but many of the people that blew this up into the story it is now) that were of the message , when it comes to the scummy (usually sexist) behavior of male Dev's and industry people, "hey, can we just focus on the game and stop bringing in this outside PC garbage" are now "OMG look at this (allegedly) shitty personal thing! Let's focus on it entirely and speak nothing of the game!" Odd how that works.

If you people haven't figured out that video gamers and nerds are, hyperbolically, the worst demographic to create for these days...

Having absolutely no idea what's going on (I've seen lots of shouting and fallout, but haven't really payed attention to what started this all), would it be fair to sum this up as "Douchnuggets become an angry harassing mob over something that has absolutely nothing to do with them."?

Yes, entirely. But with a side helping of entitlement.

Deedles wrote:There are better ways to open up about past abuse than doing so on the internet and naming names. Privately to people that you trust, yeah, I get that, but not in a goddamn post on the internet. I call bullshit on that.

Completely agree. If he has legitimate issues, that's fine, and he has a right to work that out. Doing it this way isn't about working things out and getting over it, it's just about hurting her.

Metcarfre wrote:If you people haven't figured out that video gamers and nerds are, hyperbolically, the worst demographic to create for these days...

I'm sure it's times like this that developers of like, item finding games, look at the market they don't have to bother appealing to and smile and smile and smile

My two cents on this matter: I really don't care anymore about what Quinn did or did not do. Once people start harassing the person like this and even their father WHO HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS you are doing something horrible. That is never excusable. EVER!!

I might go into this in more depth later, but now I will sleep.

plummeting_sloth wrote:I'm sure it's times like this that developers of like, item finding games, look at the market they don't have to bother appealing to and smile and smile and smile

"But they're not real games"
"Thank God they're not!!"

Exactly

I just wish the internet would shut up about it already.
Every other post I see on twitter is some more inane crap about this by people who have absolutely nothing to do with it.

At best we could talk about the sorry state of the gaming press if any of this turns out to be true. Then again I assume everyone's known for years that most games "journalists" are nothing of the sort and this whole thing doesn't change much.

Other than that, I really don't understand why anyone gives half a shit about Zoe Quinn or her personal life.

Are people so amazed that women can be shitty people too that they need to turn it into major internet drama and escalate the thing to ludicrous levels?

Sometimes I feel a lot of these men on those forums are amazed to realise that women have the ability to think, even for themselves. So the fact women could be capable of doing something men can also do maybe scary for them.


No joke, I remember around 8 years ago I was talking to this guy on an MMO I used to play on that I was going to talk to some of my female friends. And he was amazed that I had friends that were female.

So yeah, I genuinely believe that a lot of these people who fanned the flames of this story know very little about women aside from what they've seen in explicit content.

Didn't know who she was 24hrs ago, still don't care except she is like the doppelganger of the girl I have had a crush on for the last 2yrs, which is kinda freaky...

I made this point on twitter yesterday, but it seems to me that situations like this are an inevitable consequence of an industry and culture that habitually reinforces the notion that women lack (and men possess) sexual agency.

-m

Not sure if this helps or hinders matters, I've been passively picking up info so this kind of gave me some coherent details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gi6ga7N ... -A&index=2

In the first 10 seconds: "This is not an attack ... she is a terrible, terrible person"

Yeah, I don't see any reason to waste my time on that.