Zoë Quinn

Early life

Quinn was born in 1987 and spent their childhood in a small town near the Adirondack Mountains in New York. Growing up, they often played video games. One of their 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; they were diagnosed with the condition at the age of 14. They have described receiving little sympathy or assistance from school district officials, who were, they say, "less than understanding about teens with depression and suicide issues".

Career

At the age of 24, Quinn moved to Canada, where they made their first forays into video game programming. Their first game was the result of a six-week course on video-game creation that they attended after seeing an advertisement in a newspaper. In a later interview for The New Yorker, they said of this experience, "I felt like I'd found my calling."

Depression Quest

Through their 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 the two write a new video game together 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.

Depression Quest details the troubled life of a person suffering from depression. 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

In addition to their 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. 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. They have additionally worked on Fez, Jazzpunk, and They Bleed Pixels.

Quinn was a narrative design consultant for Loveshack Entertainment's iOS game Framed. Quinn is also working on a full motion video game starring Greg Sestero.

Quinn contributed a chapter to Videogames for Humans, a book about games made using the Twine tool. They also contributed a chapter to the book The State of Play: Sixteen Voices on Video Games, detailing their experiences making Depression Quest and the subsequent harassment they faced. In 2015, they appeared in the documentary GTFO. They wrote a scenario for "Widow's Walk", an expansion for Betrayal at House on the Hill, released in 2016. They are currently working with erotica author Chuck Tingle on a full motion video game under the working title "Project Tingler".

Harassment and Gamergate

In August 2014 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 they were in a relationship. It was later shown that the journalist in question had only once briefly mentioned their work, and not while they were in a relationship. These accusations sparked the Gamergate controversy. Quinn has 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. They detailed their 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, they said the harassment had consumed their life, leading them to feel as if they were "surrounded by nothing but hate — it's virulent, it's everywhere" and that they were "just trying to survive". The attacks on them 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 they 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?" Quinn says their 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, Quinn spoke at the United Nations along with Anita Sarkeesian about online harassment. Quinn spoke about the need for technology companies to provide proper moderation and terms of service which protect marginalized groups. They also specifically raised concerns about providing better protections for transgender women and victims of domestic violence on the Internet.

Personal life

Quinn is interested in human enhancement, and has implanted an NTag216 chip in the back of their hand that can be programmed to perform various functions. Their first use of the chip was to load it with the download code for the game Deus Ex. Quinn also has a magnetic implant in their left ring finger.