Zoe Quinn

Zoe Quinn

Zoe Quinn in 2014
Born 1987 (age 27–28)
United States
Occupation Video game developer
Known for Depression Quest
Website
quinnspiracy.com

Zoe Quinn (born 1987) is an American independent video game developer and 2D artist. Quinn developed the interactive fiction Depression Quest, co-created with Patrick Lindsey and Isaac Schankler, a Twine game released on Steam. In 2014, a blog post by her ex-boyfriend sparked the Gamergate controversy, in which Quinn was subject to widespread harassment.

Early life

Zoe Quinn was born in 1987[1] and spent her childhood in a small town near the Adirondack Mountains in New York. Growing up, she often played video games. One of her favorites 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, Quinn suffered from depression; she was diagnosed with the condition at the age of 14. She has described receiving little sympathy or assistance from school district officials, who were, she says, "less than understanding about teens with depression and suicide issues".[2]

Career

At the age of 24, Quinn moved to Canada, where she made her first forays 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 of this experience, "I felt like I'd found my calling."[2]

Depression Quest

Main article: Depression Quest

Through her early game-development work, Quinn met Patrick Lindsey, a writer. Like Quinn, Lindsey struggled with depression. He felt that existing video games that dealt with the subject did not adequately depict the real emotions associated with depression, instead utilizing metaphor and symbolism. He suggested to Quinn that they write a new video game to better help others understand their experience. Quinn thought a game would be a good way to depict depression, imposing a set of rules on players they might not otherwise experience in their day-to-day lives. Quinn and Lindsey teamed with Isaac Schankler for the game's music, and released the final result of their collaboration, the text-based Depression Quest, in February 2013.[2][3]

Depression Quest details the troubled life of a person suffering from depression.[4] 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.[5] Depression Quest was featured in a Playboy article as one of several video games dealing with the subjective experience of depression.[6]

Other projects

In addition to her own game development projects, Quinn is also known for creating the Game Developer Help List, designed to bring experienced game developers and novice developers into contact with one another.[7] In 2014, Quinn was to be part of the cancelled YouTube reality television show codenamed "Game_Jam", which was intended to bring together a number of prominent indie game developers.[8] She has additionally worked on Fez, Jazzpunk, They Bleed Pixels and several jam games.

Quinn has joined Loveshack Entertainment as narrative designer for the upcoming iOS game Framed.[9] Quinn is also working on a full motion video game starring Greg Sestero.[10]

Harassment and Gamergate

Main article: Gamergate controversy

With other women in the game industry,[11] Quinn has suffered a long period of harassment including doxing, rape threats, and death threats.[11] Harassment associated with Gamergate resulted in widespread recognition of misogyny in gaming.[12] Quinn was one of the targets of Gamergate, with others including Anita Sarkeesian and Brianna Wu.[13]

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.[2] She detailed her 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 that those attacking her and other women in gaming needed "to just grow up."[14] Speaking with BBC News, she said the harassment had consumed her life, leading her to feel as if she was "surrounded by nothing but hate — it's virulent, it's everywhere" and that she was "just trying to survive." The attacks on her 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 said 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?"[15] 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."[16]

In January 2015, Quinn co-founded Crash Override, a private network of experts to assist victims of online harassment[17][18] which in March 2015 joined forces with Randi Harper's Online Abuse Prevention Initiative.[19][20][21]

In 2015 she appeared in the documentary GTFO.[22]

Personal life

Quinn is interested in body modification, and has implanted a 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.[23] She also has a magnetic implant in her left ring finger.[23][24]

See also

References

  1. ↑ Zoe Quinn [TheQuinnSpiracy] (13 October 2014). "@JonatanGlad @Wikipedia 1987 is my birth year. I am 27." (Tweet). Retrieved 13 October 2014.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 Parkin, Simon (9 September 2014). "Zoe Quinn's Depression Quest". The New Yorker. Retrieved 15 September 2014.
  3. ↑ "'Depression Quest' Now Available on Steam". Game Politics. 13 August 2014. Retrieved 23 August 2014.
  4. ↑ "Why the co-creator of Depression Quest is fighting back against Internet trolls". Edge. 23 January 2014. Archived from the original on 28 October 2014. Retrieved 30 May 2014.
  5. ↑ "Depression Quest Now Available on Steam for Free". AusGamers. Retrieved 18 August 2014.
  6. ↑ Rougeau, Mike (25 November 2014). "Resistance is Futile: The New Wave of Video Games about Depression". Playboy.com. Retrieved 27 November 2014.
  7. ↑ Wawro, Alex (18 December 2013). "Game Developer Help List rallies industry vets to aid rookie devs". Gamasutra. Retrieved 17 September 2014.
  8. ↑ Matulef, Jeffrey (1 April 2014). "Game jam reality show cancelled as indies wouldn't put up with its s***". Eurogamer. Retrieved 17 September 2014.
  9. ↑ Griffiths, Daniel Nye (30 April 2014). "Quest Love – 'Depression Quest' Creator Zoe Quinn Joins Hot Indie 'Framed'". Retrieved 17 September 2014.
  10. ↑ Donaldson, Ricky (18 April 2014). "Zoe Quinn's Follow Up To Depression Quest is a FMV Game". Retrieved 17 September 2014.
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 Heron, Michael James; Belford, Pauline; Goker, Ayse (2014). "Sexism in the circuitry". ACM SIGCAS Computers and Society (Association for Computing Machinery) 44 (4): 18–29. doi:10.1145/2695577.2695582. ISSN 0095-2737.
  12. ↑ Levy, Karyne (2 September 2014). "Game Developers Are Finally Stepping Up To Change Their Hate-Filled Industry". Business Insider. Retrieved 7 September 2014. The game industry has been in the spotlight for the past week, with several incidents of harassment and sexism making headlines.
  13. ↑ Wingfield, Nick (15 October 2014). "Feminist Critics of Video Games Facing Threats in ‘GamerGate’ Campaign". The New York Times. Retrieved 24 October 2014.
  14. ↑ "Exclusive: Woman who sparked Gamergate". Ronan Farrow Daily. 20 October 2014. MSNBC.com. Retrieved 27 November 2014.
  15. ↑ Lee, Dave (29 October 2014). "Zoe Quinn: GamerGate must be condemned". BBC News. Retrieved 27 November 2014.
  16. ↑ Sheelah Kolhatkar (26 November 2014). "The Gaming Industry's Greatest Adversary Is Just Getting Started". Bloomberg Businessweek. Retrieved 26 November 2014.
  17. ↑ Mendoza, Jessica (20 January 2015). "Online harassment targets strike back against abusers. Will it work?". The Christian Science Monitor. Retrieved 21 January 2015.
  18. ↑ Hudson, Laura (20 January 2015). "Gamergate Target Zoe Quinn Launches Anti-Harassment Support Network". Wired. Retrieved 22 January 2015.
  19. ↑ Takahashi, Dean (3 March 2015). "Zoe Quinn and other female game developers speak out against harassment". VentureBeat. Retrieved 5 March 2015.
  20. ↑ Weunberger, Matt (4 March 2015). "Zoe Quinn, Gamergate developer: How to protect yourself - Business Insider". Business Insider. Retrieved 5 March 2015.
  21. ↑ Needleman, Sarah E. (4 March 2015). "Game Developer: The Gaming Industry Is Not Doing Enough to Combat Misogyny". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 6 March 2015.
  22. ↑ Ito, Robert (6 March 2015). "In the Documentary ‘GTFO,’ Female Video Gamers Fight Back". The New York Times. Retrieved 9 March 2015.
  23. ↑ 23.0 23.1 Hernandez, Patricia (7 May 2014). "Woman puts Deus Ex on computer chip in her hand". Kotaku. Retrieved 17 September 2014.
  24. ↑ Kleppek, Patrick (7 May 2014). "Zoe Quinn has embraced our cybernetic future". Giant Bomb. Retrieved 8 May 2014.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Zoe Quinn.