231
CHAPTER 14
Speaking to the Other: Digital Intimate
Publics and Gamergate
Amanda Elliot
IntroductIon
In 2014 Gamergate became synonymous with the intensification of
online harassment against women involved in the video game sector.
Women were targeted with threats of violence, doxing and swatting1
and debate raged about whether sexism and misogyny were rampant
amongst gamers. Largely lost within this maelstrom of discussion was
how Gamergate had begun and the broader structural and cultural con-
text in which it flourished. Gamergate began in fact with the publicising
of a female game developers’ private life by an ex-boyfriend. This exposé
© The Author(s) 2018
A. S. Dobson et al. (eds.), Digital Intimate Publics and Social Media,
Palgrave Studies in Communication for Social Change
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97607-5_14
A. Elliot (*)
Department of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Sydney,
Sydney, NSW, Australia
e-mail: amanda.elliot@sydney.edu.au
1 Doxing (or doxxing) involves collecting (either through research or hacking) and
publishing details about a person that would usually be considered private, such as home
addresses, phone numbers and personal email addresses. Swatting refers to the practice of
making a false emergency report to police with the intention of having heavily armed police
sent to the person’s home.
232 A. ELLIot
provided the catalyst for a broader attack that targeted those whose
labour and consumption was challenging the exclusive nature of the
‘gamer community’. The following chapter explores how one blog post
could spark such a phenomenon and argues that the answer lies not in
the post itself but rather in the interactions between the gendered experi-
ence of precarious entrepreneurial labour and the video game industries’
investment in the manufacturing and perpetuation of a masculine ‘inti-
mate public’ of gamers.
thE ZoEpost
Zoe Quinn, an independent games developer, released a game called
Depression Quest (DP). DP is an interactive fictional story that is largely
text based. In it players play as someone living with depression. It was
generally considered a poignant and genuine (non) fictional engage-
ment with what it is like to live with depression and negotiate the world
around you. DP received limited critical acclaim—winning awards and
largely positive reviews from professional critics. DP was not published
by a studio but independently by Quinn; initially as a web-based game
and eventually through the digital distribution system Steam.
In August 2014 Eron Gjoni published what he called the Zoepost
about his intimate relationship with Quinn that sparked an outpouring
of vicious, sexualised cyberhate against Quinn. The blog post is long, vit-
riolic, moralising and strayed in to self-justification. Gjoni accuses Quinn
of exchanging sex for positive reviews of Depression Quest, ‘cheating’ on
him and behaving unethically within her professional community. All the
claims relied on assertion rather than evidence and many proved to be
patently false (Golding and van Deventer 2016). The accusation that
Quinn had exchanged sex for reviews in particular was quickly and care-
fully refuted (such a review was never written or published) by the jour-
nalist and publisher named in the post, yet the allegations were widely
circulated and represented as ‘fact’ by Gjoni and his supporters. The
Zoepost was, undoubtedly, an act of violence against Quinn perpetrated
by someone who had been an intimate partner and was designed to dam-
age Quinn’s personal and professional reputation, whilst at the same time
represent the authors’ own behaviour as ethical and respectful. In a series
of interviews, Gjoni suggests that his motivation for writing and publi-
cising this post was to get back at Quinn for ending their relationship by
telling her professional and private communities that Quinn had behaved
14 SPEAKING TO THE OTHER: DIGITAL INTIMATE PUBLICS AND GAMERGATE 233
unethically toward him and that these private behaviours were dramat-
ically at odds with her public persona as an advocate for equality in the
independent games sector (Jayson 2015). This interview is illuminating
in that it highlights that Gjoni deliberately and methodically set out to
publicise the Zoepost on various sites frequented by gamers. The post
quickly led to the targeting of Quinn by a range of individuals who even-
tually organised under the Gamergate hashtag.
The focus on Quinn evolved into a broader targeting of women
across the sector alongside claims that video games journalists were
beholden to advocates of progressive politics. The online debate, hap-
pening on bulletin board sites like 4chan and 8chan, through Reddit
and Twitter, continued to intensify and expand. The key public targets,
initially Quinn and then fellow developer Brianna Wu and cultural critic
Anita Sarkeesian, were subjected to extensive online harassment and
what appeared to be a coordinated campaign to ruin their professional
careers.2 Wu and Quinn had to leave their homes after they were doxxed,
and Sarkeesian had to cancel a public appearance at a university after
death threats had been made. All received intensely violent, often sexu-
alised, online communications, chiefly in the form of anonymous posts,
emails and tweets (Golding and van Deventer 2016).
One of the more remarkable features of Gamergate was the extraor-
dinary silence of the mainstream video game industry whilst it was
unfolding. Many journalists defended games journalism and decried
the harassment and threats directed against women in the industry.
However, the core of the industry did not. The peak US body The
Electronic Software Association (ESA) reluctantly made the following
statement after pressure from journalists:
Threats of violence and harassment are wrong. They have to stop. There is
no place in the video game community-or our society-for personal attacks
and threats.
(Tsukayama 2014; Brightman 2014)
2 This isn’t to suggest that it was only these three women who were targeted by
Gamergate. Women and some men participating in online forums and on Twitter as well as
other developers and journalists were also targeted and subjected to significant harassment.
They were however the most public targets.
234 A. ELLIot
There was no attempt to engage with what was happening, and the
original statement failed to mention Gamergate or indeed women. The
CEO of ESA eventually elaborated with the following:
[Gamergate] was not an industry issue; it was two different constituencies
having a shouting match over the internet. … Intervening in that conver-
sation was not going to be productive.
(Nutt 2015)
I argue here that in fact Gamergate and the broader culture of sexualised
harassment experienced by women who work in and play video games,
are an industry issue. Moreover, by refusing to engage, the industry
helped contribute to an environment in which symbolic space was left
open for that harassment to continue (Parfitt 2014). The silence how-
ever is largely in keeping with the way the industry has ignored, and in
some instances facilitated, the growth of exclusionary practices (Consalvo
2012). It is the facilitating role of the video game industry that I explore
below, examining two important factors: firstly, the gendered experience
of labour processes which intensify the publicisation of private life for
women; and secondly, the industries’ active involvement in the construc-
tion of an exclusionary ‘intimate public’ from which organised attacks on
women could emerge.
pubLIcIsIng prIvAtE LIvEs: EntrEprEnEurIAL LAbour
And thE ‘ZoEpost’
Women make up approximately 25% of workers in the video games
industry (IGDA 2014, 2016). Like other areas in Science and
Technology, women’s employment lags men’s and the reasons for this
are complex, spanning the misogyny that appears rampant in the sector
and is directed both at women as workers and as consumers, as well as
labour processes. Women who work in the sector experience significant
and ongoing harassment and sexism from both inside their organisa-
tions and from consumers. As the #onereasonwhy campaign highlighted,
women experience constant pressure to work in feminised parts of the
industry, suffer from verbal and physical harassment at games con-
ventions, and experience misogyny and harassment in the workplace
(Plunkett 2012). These experiences mirror those mapped in the wider
14 SPEAKING TO THE OTHER: DIGITAL INTIMATE PUBLICS AND GAMERGATE 235
tech sector (Marwick 2013) and act as a significant barrier to women’s
participation.
These barriers are intensified by the conditions of precarity that charac-
terise employment in the video game industry. Entrepreneurial precarity
has come to dominate employment in the video game sector as well as the
broader tech sector (Dyer-Witheford and De Peuter 2009; Neff 2012).
Other sectors have not been immune to these changes, Deuze (2007) for
instance highlights the contingent and entrepreneurial nature of much
media work, whilst others have noted these characteristics in the creative
industries (see McRobbie 2010). More broadly, scholars such as Standing
(2011), McRobbie (2010), and Hardt and Negri (2004), amongst oth-
ers, have argued that precarity increasingly characterises all employment
in post-fordist societies and that such precarity requires that individuals
treat both employment and the self as an entrepreneurial activity. The life-
time employment contract of Fordism has given way to the post-Fordist
conditions of work in which workers increasingly bear market risks includ-
ing volatility in the availability of employment, the temporal and physical
dislocation of work and the intensification of labour processes (Marwick
2013; McRobbie 2010; Neff 2012).
High levels of self-employment, freelance and contract work pervade
the video game sector with ‘permanent’ employment often short-term,
and women are more likely to experience this insecurity than their male
counterparts (IGDA 2017). The demands of projects drive labour pro-
cesses rather than conditions of employment and often include long
hours and crunch time. Such practices act to preclude women, particu-
larly those with caring responsibilities. The high levels of horizontal
mobility amongst employees within the sector also disproportionately
disadvantage women precisely because they rely on reputation and net-
working (Stone 2004). Horizontal movements within labour markets
minimise the application of sexual discrimination and harassment legis-
lation and inhibit the development of robust internal practices that are
inclusionary. Such instruments were developed in the context of the sta-
ble employment that characterised Fordism in which the negotiation of
internal labour markets (the opportunities and barriers to promotion,
training and wages within an organisation) was considered the key to
promoting womens’ success in the workplace. Instruments such as sex
discrimination and anti-harassment legislation are least effective in mar-
kets with a high degree of horizontal mobility (Stone 2004).
236 A. ELLIot
Alongside being the primary targets of Gamergate, Quinn, Sarkeesian
and Wu also share analogous employment histories that are character-
ised by the conditions outlined above. Their working lives can be under-
stood as a form of precarious, yet entrepreneurial labour (McRobbie
2010; Larner and Molloy 2009). Their professional biographies incor-
porate a complex mix of contract and freelance work, self-employment
and short experiences of standard employment. They also embody the
self- investment, flexibility and risk-taking that characterise entrepreneurial
labour (Neff et al. 2005). They develop their own games, produce and
publish cultural critique and draw on new forms of crowd-sourced financ-
ing (such as Patreon and Kickstarter). All engage in economic activity
largely outside the constraints and protections of Fordist workplaces.
The precarious entrepreneurial labour that characterises the video
games sector also intensifies the need to develop extensive networks
and a cohesive public narrative about the self in order to maximise one’s
chances of gaining new employment, contracts and opportunities (Hearn
2008). For Quinn and others engaged in similar labour, these networks
and public presence are crucial to their capacity to earn an income,
reflecting the entwining of cognitive and affective labour under condi-
tions of post-Fordism (Hardt and Negri 2004; McRobbie 2010; Hearn
2008). The cognitive labour of games development is economically reli-
ant on the affective labour invested in promoting them throughout per-
sonal and professional networks.
For Quinn, this affective labour was associated with the exposure of a
mediated private self. Her own experiences of depression led her to cre-
ate DP, a game lauded for its authenticity because of her personal con-
nection to the illness. DP was marketed, at least in part, by highlighting
this personal connection with the content of the game. The interweaving
of her personal and work life in how she presents her public self extends
beyond the games she develops (although this is more guarded now than
prior to Gamergate [Golding and van Deventer 2016]). Her Patreon
site and Facebook and Twitter accounts offer insight into both her work
and private life: the times she works, the projects she has going, the area
she lives, the life of her cat, the video games she enjoys (or doesn’t),
her favourite drinks. These are all part of a biography that is mobilised,
alongside her professional competence, to build a sense of ‘affective
connectivity’ amongst her network (Redmond 2006, 36; see also Dean
2010).
14 SPEAKING TO THE OTHER: DIGITAL INTIMATE PUBLICS AND GAMERGATE 237
This kind of marketing of the self, or personal branding, is deeply
gendered in the video game industry as it is elsewhere (Marwick 2013;
Hearn 2008; see also Ogden et al. 2013). Men’s presentation of the self
in this sector is constructed around their ‘technical achievements’. In
contrast women’s presentation of the self is usually a mix of both tech-
nical achievement and exposure of their private life, reflecting broader
structural conditions and assumptions about gender (Marwick 2013).
Across numerous industries women’s private lives are linked to their
public achievements and provide a model for how to market or brand the
self under post-Fordist conditions (Marwick 2013; Hearn 2008). Van
Krieken (2012) traces this model of feminised public presence back to
women’s initial entry into the public life of art and theatre in the 1600s
in the UK. Women disrupted gender expectations with their involve-
ment in public performances and to smooth the hostility this provoked,
women actors (and the emergent media) publicised their private lives,
reconnecting them with traditional gender roles and expectations even as
they transgressed them. The publicisation of women’s private life helped
to minimise the challenge their participation in public life posed to the
gendered norms of the day, but it was also a double-edged sword. Such
publicity made their private lives available to the public for discussion,
critique and gossip and connected their success as much with publicity of
the private as professional competency. Women’s private lives could also
be mobilised for the purposes of exclusion, too great a breach of public
norms in their publicised private lives could ruin careers and too great an
incursion of domestic responsibility could (and still does) limit opportu-
nities in the public world of work for women. As Salter (2015, 4) notes,
these contradictions in women’s presentation of self have migrated to
the digital landscape. In the case of Gamergate, Quinn’s publicised self
was mobilised against her by Gjoni in his claims that such representations
were not authentic—that she was not ethical, that she was not a compe-
tent games designer and that she exchanged sex for professional success.
These (false) accusations coalesced with and reinforced long run-
ning stereotypes about women in the gaming and tech sector. Marwick
(2013) explores these stereotypes in her book Status Update, in which
she maps the complex and gendered narratives of success in Silicon
Valley. Women’s successes, she argues, are often represented as the result
of their sexual relationships with men. Their technical skills and compe-
tencies, hard work and dedication are ignored in favour of explanations
that they have ‘slept’ their way to the top. Such narratives revolve around
238 A. ELLIot
the idea that (at least some) women leverage their sexuality into an unfair
advantage in the sector. Gjoni mobilised this stereotype in the Zoepost,
claiming that sex with reviewers was the source of Quinn’s success. In
the context of Gamergate this narrative morphed into one of its core ral-
lying cries: that women and other ‘social justice warriors’ were corrupt-
ing video gaming by leveraging intimate relationships (both sexual and
non-sexual) with the media who reported on games.
The conditions of labour under post-Fordism erode the distinction
between work and non-work (Hardt and Negri 2004), but such con-
ditions also represent a rearticulation of the way the boundary between
public and private life has always been blurred for women (McRobbie
2010; Adkins and Dever 2016) and has been a prerequisite of publicity
about them (Van Krieken 2012). Within the video game industry the
weaving together of work and private life into a public self exposes wom-
en’s private lives, along with the games they develop, to critique and
gossip and in the context of Gamergate, harassment and cyberhate. The
instruments established under the Fordist regime to protect at least par-
tially against such blurring and its harmful consequences are unavailable
for those engaged in precarious entrepreneurial labour.
The doubled-edged sword of the publicity of private life is however
only part of the context in which Gamergate emerged. The other part
of the story also has its origins in the mainstream video game industry.
Here however, our attention turns away from the conditions of labour
and publicisation of the self, to the role the industry has played in
constructing a gamer identity that has consciously excluded women.
Whilst the initial unfolding of Gamergate revolved around Quinn, this
soon morphed into a broader set of concerns, namely that women and
other ‘social justice warriors’ (SJW) were ‘corrupting’ video gaming,
as noted above. These claims took on numerous forms, including that
the games media had been captured by the cultural critique offered by
‘social justice warriors’ and that cultural critique, particularly about gen-
der, race and sexuality, should not be applied to or influence video games
which were not ‘political’. All of this acted as a code or justification for
the violent targeting of women involved in video games (Golding and
van Deventer 2016). How is it, then, that the idea that video gaming
should be protected from both critique and women came to flourish in
the twenty-first century? Below I argue that this idea flourished because
of the marketing activities of the mainstream industry.
14 SPEAKING TO THE OTHER: DIGITAL INTIMATE PUBLICS AND GAMERGATE 239
crEAtIng ‘IntImAtE pubLIcs’ through ExcLusIon
Whilst women make up only a quarter of workers in the video game
sector (IGDA 2014, 2017), they currently make up around 40% of the
consumer market (ESA 2017). Gender breakdowns of who plays games
have only emerged in the past 15 years and in these surveys, women
have consistently made up between 30 and 40% of the market (see for
instance ISFE 2010; ESA 2017). Despite this, there is a strong narrative
that pervades both the industry and media that women do not play video
games. The following section explores the emergence and implications of
this myth, arguing that it was manufactured by the video game industry
as they attempted to construct a consumer base in the aftermath of the
‘video game crash’ of the early 1980s.
In the early days of the industry, video games were made for a broad
audience and their marketing had been generalised, targeting adult men
and women as well as boys and girls (see Juul 2010; Golding and van
Deventer 2016). A glut of poorly made games led to a loss of consumer
confidence in the early 1980s and brought the sector to the verge of
collapse. The subsequent rebuilding of the industry centred around the
development and application of innovative marketing strategies focused
on creating loyal consumers for video games. The industry set about
developing a market for games built around an ‘experience economy’ in
which consumer engagement with commodity, experience and knowl-
edge innovation is nurtured through investment in community building
that is centred around consumption (Thrift 2006, 287; Lury 2004, 62).
Facing the significant task of building a consumer base and transform-
ing video games from children’s ‘toys’ to an activity attractive to older
cohorts, the industry began to focus on one segment of their market
most likely to have disposable income—boys and young men—in the
hope of fostering a sense of community amongst players that would stim-
ulate ‘lifelong’ consumption (Kirkpatrick 2015). The broader marketing
strategies of the industry were designed to do more than sell a specific
game, they were designed to encourage player identification with the
idea of being a ‘gamer’ and part of a ‘gaming community’ so that they
would buy the next game. Console developers and studios began pro-
ducing magazines about their products, they held tournaments and
conventions to gather data about players, advertise their product and
connect consumers with producers (Harris 2014). These strategies
mapped alongside the marketing of home computers almost exclusively
240 A. ELLIot
to men. Boys and young men, encouraged to use new technology at
home and school, and with privileged access to public space, flocked to
these events. Studios and console makers didn’t just ignore other seg-
ments of the market—particularly girls and women—they employed
marketing practices and developed games that were actively exclusion-
ary. The industry consciously defined who could be imagined as a mem-
ber of this emergent community and the vocabularies of belonging and
thinking about games that circulated within it. Women were rendered
invisible (or at best marginalised) as both consumers and producers of
games and they began to be represented within games and marketing
materials as sexualised distractions, damsels to be saved or as imagined
rewards (Conslavo 2012; Golding and van Deventer 2016) in order
to exaggerate the idea of gaming as a distinctively masculine activity
and intensify its attraction to young men (Kirkpatrick 2015). It was in
this context that critique of games came to be focused on the technical
aspects of game play, with the aesthetic, political and cultural elements of
games eschewed in favour of instrumental discussions of game play and
difficulty.
These strategies of community building intensified and migrated
online throughout the 1990s and 2000s. With the advent of Web 2.0,
the industry was able to further draw consumers into processes of pro-
duction and marketing. A variety of media (games, magazines, news
sites, conventions, forums and blogs) created spaces that promoted
a shared understanding of gaming amongst consumers and produc-
ers and blurred the boundaries between the two, allowing consumers
and producers to understand themselves as part of a shared endeavour
and belonging to the same community. Consumers gave feedback on
beta versions of games, forums and news sites were developed to share
reviews, gaming strategies and knowledge with contributions from
both producers and consumers. New games emerged in which gam-
ers could come together online for co-operative and competitive play.
However, the sociality that these new developments evoked reproduced
and intensified the misogynist narratives used to define gaming culture
by the industry, with female gamers having to develop strategies to pro-
tect themselves from abuse and harassment (Cote 2015). The sociality
facilitated by new communicative technology (including co-operative
gaming and MMOs) meant the community evolved, taking on the con-
tours of what Berlant (2008) refers to as an ‘intimate public’, one that
was both commodified and operating in digital spaces. Here I use the
14 SPEAKING TO THE OTHER: DIGITAL INTIMATE PUBLICS AND GAMERGATE 241
term to denote the complex interplay between the intimate, and seem-
ingly organic, sociality fostered by the new communicative spaces that
emerged with Web 2.0, but that was also structured in and through
the image of the ‘community’ fostered by the video game industry.
The understanding of gamers as belonging to a digital intimate public
also reflects the idea of video games as interactive digital texts. Games
themselves were becoming capable of evoking emotional connections
(Bogust 2007) through the (largely male) fictional lives and landscapes
they enabled players to interact with or imagine themselves as occupy-
ing. These emotional connections bound gamers together with the text
and commodity (of the game), and with one another. To be a gamer was
to be a member of an ‘intimate public’ that offered a sense of belong-
ing, experience and identity beyond consumption or production and that
was based, at least in part, on the marginalisation and sexualisation of
women.
The exclusionary nature of this intimate public did not stop women
from playing video games. Women’s response was to construct their own
communities and find innovative and safe ways of managing their pres-
ence in games (Cote 2015). It did however mean that women’s gam-
ing experiences were more obviously and deeply politicised than their
male counterparts. Defined, in part, against the exclusionary nature of
the intimate public created by male gamers and the industry, women’s
gaming networks and individual mediating strategies have been both
protective and political ones, reminiscent of what Fraser calls subaltern
counter publics (1990, 81). Women’s networks protected women gam-
ers from interaction with male gamers and offered spaces in which cri-
tique could be developed about the exclusionary nature of the gamer
public. In this sense, women’s gaming publics and men’s have developed
in distinctive ways. The exclusionary public that evolved out of the mar-
keting strategies of the industry was able to imagine itself as the natu-
ral and legitimate consumer of games, whose needs would be privileged
and fulfilled by an industry that had courted them and in which they had
invested. Likewise, it was able to imagine itself as protected from a poli-
tics of inclusion. Politics requires ‘active antagonism’ (Berlant 2008, 11),
and whilst women’s counter publics may have understood themselves as
engaged in a political contest (Fraser 1990) the exclusionary gaming
public did not.
However, the symbiotic relationship between male gamers and the
video games industry began to slowly unravel from the mid-2000s.
242 A. ELLIot
The industry began to reorient around emerging markets, expanding the
kinds of games it developed and loosening its commitment to a targeted
market as it sought to gain a broader consumer base. The structure of
the industry became more diverse with the growth of the independent
games sector and subsequent variety in the kinds of games that were
developed, as well as opportunities for a new generation of female devel-
opers. The emergence of new media dedicated to gaming acted as a gate-
way to critical commentary and claims about the exclusive nature of the
‘gaming public’ and the games produced by the mainstream industry. As
these trends have gathered pace the comfortable exclusivity and homo-
geneity of the core community has been disrupted and challenged. It is
this disruption that helped create the conditions in which the misogyny
of Gamergate emerged, incited in large part by the perceived incursion of
women into areas imagined by the industry and by ‘gamers’ as an exclu-
sively male space.
concLusIons
The misogyny of Gamergate did not emerge spontaneously or organi-
cally, rather it was structured into the gaming public in two ways. Firstly,
through the precarious entrepreneurial labour that characterises wom-
en’s employment in the sector. This set of labour relations requires all
workers to construct a publicised self to successfully negotiate these
conditions. However, the experience of this is deeply gendered and
women have long been required to sooth male hostility to their presence
in public life by the folding in of their private lives. More than just a
strategy, this has become a model for the presentation of women’s pub-
lic selves. This is a double-edged sword for women whose private lives
then become available for comment and used as a focus for judgement
about professional competency and, in the context of Gamergate, harass-
ment and cyberhate. The broader labour practices within the video game
industry helped to structure a working environment where women’s pri-
vate lives were available for assessment and could be mobilised against
them to challenge the role of women in the sector.
Secondly, the voracity and viciousness with which this challenge
was made has its roots in the way the gaming community was formed
through the industry’s marketing strategy of marginalising and sexual-
ising women. This community evolved into a digital intimate public in
which meaning, affect and belonging revolved not just around gaming
14 SPEAKING TO THE OTHER: DIGITAL INTIMATE PUBLICS AND GAMERGATE 243
(which itself was constituted by engagements with texts that sexualised
and marginalised women), but also through the exclusion of women.
Seen in this context, the Zoepost can be understood as acting as a
flashpoint around which an intimate male public could mobilise resist-
ance against the challenge posed by women’s presence as gamers and
workers to its exclusive and protected status. It presented a narrative
that has been traditionally used against women’s participation in pub-
lic space, including employment, that was able to be mobilised around
the idea that the core public for video gaming should be protected from
both women and socio-cultural critique. Quinn’s personal life could be
used as a launching pad for a broader attack on the changing culture of
the ‘gamer community’ precisely because women’s work in this sector is
mediated by the interweaving of personal and public life, in part because
of the employment practices that dominate the industry. Likewise, the
challenges to the idea of an exclusionary masculine gamer community,
posed by Quinn and others targeted by Gamergate, were seen as incendi-
ary precisely because the industry had spent years fostering the idea that
only men were gamers.
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