text: #GamerGate and Meeeeee!
  
  That one time when having a vagina and a love of video games was not such a great combo.
  
  I have a folder labeled "Hate Folder" that sits in the middle of my desktop. It's where I save screenshots of the worst things people have said to me online. ("Fifty Shades of Felicia!") For some reason, it takes the sting away to herd all the toxic comments into a corner of my hard drive, aggregating the losers I'd like to hunt down in real life and run over with a dump truck.
  
  Then back up, and run over again! (Too far?)
  
  If it's too disgusting to say to another human being, I guarantee someone has said it to me online. The internet is amazing because it connects us with one another. But it's also horrific because... it connects us with one another. Whether we want the connection or not. The only real-life analogy I can think of is if a random person were allowed to walk into your home, punch you in the face while you're eating your oatmeal, then walk out again with no fear of consequences. After one incident you'd be looking for a new zip code, huh?
  
  Here are some fun examples of the human awfulness I've collected over the years.
  
  Once someone posts that you're "So ugly I wouldn't have sex with your corpse," that's when you know you've arrived online!
  
  And sure, everyone says the best approach to negative comments is "Don't feed the trolls," that ignoring negativity is the best policy. This approach is great in theory, but emotionally, it's HUMANLY IMPOSSIBLE.
  
  Biology backs me up. It's proven that our brains give more attention to negative experiences than positive ones. (I read it in a study. Reference: internet.) Every online creator jokes about how you can read a thousand great comments about your work, but it's always a single terrible one that makes you think, They're right. I should be ejected into the vacuum of space. It would be a public service. REASON: One of the brain's main jobs is to alert us to environmental threats. That's probably why I have a "Hate Folder" rather than a "You're Awesome" folder. (Note from inner therapist: start one of those.) Over the years, I thought I'd seen it all. I thought I'd experienced every rotten thing the internet could fling at people.
  
  And then #GamerGate happened. A perfect, hateful, digital gumbo that gave the gaming world, and me, a black eye not soon to be healed.
  
  I'll summarize the history briefly for anyone out of the loop. From my point of view. Because it's my book. If you illegally downloaded this chapter just to parse and argue with my interpretation of events line by line (and I know it will happen, yay!), well, you're probably the kind of person I'm not very nice to in this section anyway.
  
  Hello! Not a pleasure to meet you!
  
  The whole #GamerGate thing started in August 2014, with a guy getting revenge over a really bad breakup by publishing every excruciatingly and maniacally specific detail online.
  
  I found out about it early on, after seeing a bunch of gamers I follow on Twitter talking about "that Zoe post." Oooh, gossip? I'm at home on a Friday night wearing sweats and eating cheddar popcorn as usual. Juicy! I clicked over to read a long, rambling blog entry, scrolled down page after page to see IMs, emails, and other private information a guy had collected on his ex-girlfriend and published for the world to rummage through. Evidence of her cheating on him, peppered with implications of sexual favors traded for reviews of the game Depression Quest that she had designed (accusations that were later disproven. Repeat: disproven). It was creepy. I remember being horrified. Then judging her a little. Then feeling bad about it. And then thinking, What woman would ever date this creep again?!
  
  Usually controversy, even this terrible, disappears pretty fast on the internet. The people whose hobby it is to hate things move on to rip apart a new game or make fun of a celebrity's vacation cellulite. But this situation started, strangely, to gather more and more steam. More hatred and, most frightening: a strange sense of justice on the part of the attackers. I think the same viral effect that leads people to share a crazy Korean music video a billion times is the same kind of phenomenon that helped give rise to #GamerGate. You can FEEL the wave of emotion online when something is about to go viral, good or bad. A scientist I met once mathematically compared internet behavior to swarm behavior seen in starlings or locusts. Well, that weekend, the hate locusts started swarming.
  
  Hackers leaked Zoe's personal information. She received rape and death threats and was forced from her home. Videos of her nude photos were spread and Photoshopped across the internet to shame her, much to the amusement of the trolls. People even tracked down her father to call him and tell him what a "whore your daughter is." (I mean, how sad do you have to be as a human to think THAT was a good use of your afternoon?)
  
  As someone who has been an advocate in gaming for many years, especially as a woman, I watched all this happen from the sidelines and thought, This is disgusting! I wanted to step up and speak up against the bullying... but I didn't. Why?
  
  Because I was afraid. On a much smaller scale, I'd been on the receiving end of a slice of this hate myself. And I didn't want to relive any part of it.
  
  The roots of both incidents lie in 4chan, an anonymous website generally associated with hate speech and cartoon porn addiction, and the starting point for the attacks on Zoe Quinn. Basically, it's the watercooler for some of the worst of the internet.
  
  In 2012, after all my years on the web, I thought I'd developed some pretty tough troll armor until some people on 4chan decided to attack me en masse for a music video I did for my weekly Geek & Sundry web show, The Flog. My friend Jason Miller is a country music artist, and at the time I thought it would be fun to combine his style with my love of gaming and see what happened. Okay, SURE, nature probably didn't want those two things mashed together EVER, but that was the point of the show: to throw things against the wall and see if they stuck. I wanted to sing and be creative and hoped the audience would enjoy the experience as much as I did!
  
  Oh, you naïve, dumb-ass girl.
  
  We spent a few hundred dollars to make the video, borrowed someone's house, and shot in the desert without a fire permit. We didn't light any matches, so it was cool. The end result was cute. Not mind-blowing, but the song was well produced, and I got to dress up as Tomb Raider character Lara Croft, which was a bucket list item. (And proved to me that big boobs DO look better in tank tops. I stuffed HARD.)
  
  I uploaded it like any other video, with the attitude, It's free to watch! Don't dig it? No harm, no foul, right? Er... not so much.
  
  Contempt for women who call themselves "Gamer Girls" has existed for a while online. In fact, I'd been careful to avoid the label over the years for that very reason. But I decided to title the video "Gamer Girl, Country Boy" anyway. And that gave the people who hated me, and who hated the very concept of women having a voice in gaming, a reason to attack. And their feedback was awesome!
  
  The video was shared on a 4chan forum and a tidal wave of bile hit the video. Hundreds and hundreds of comments, the depravity of which even jaded little me had never seen.
  
  I was talentless. I was fake and hideous and ugly. (I'll admit I'd made a bright yellow eye shadow choice that I'll rue until the day I'm dead.) I was denigrated on every personal level, my work dismissed as the desperate and pathetic attempts of an "attention whore." According to the comments, I got where I was by manipulating geeks with my looks, and at the same time, I was repulsively ugly and hard to masturbate to. As a crowning achievement, I was deemed responsible for the "downfall of gaming."
  
  A multibillion-dollar industry destroyed by little ol' me? Aw, shucks!
  
  Anyone who defended me online was called a "white knight neck-beard," a term that describes a guy who defends a girl online solely in order to get laid. A lot of the time, it works. And if you were a woman defending me, pish, you weren't even worth addressing. Hateful, bullying comments flooded the supportive community I was so proud of creating. Even my most hard-core fans were left reeling.
  
  I certainly was.
  
  After about ten thousand misogynistic and a ton of FACTUALLY INACCURATE comments (trash me if you will, but do a little research first), they finally got to me. I'd been making videos for five years at that point. I've seen animated GIFs of myself doing... you don't wanna know. Some involving very forward dolphins.
  
  The comments spread like a fungus across my self-confidence. It devastated me to see people dismiss my career because of one four-minute video. I felt ashamed for creating it and everything else I'd ever made. I thought, Is this what people have been thinking for years? How stupid was I to think I could sing? I don't want to be SEEN ever again.
  
  For months I stopped putting my heart into the things I made. It was one of the reasons I couldn't write the last Guild season without feeling crippling self-doubt on every page.
  
  Sad but true, I did what I have told so many people over and over not to do:
  
  I let the trolls get to me.
  
  I didn't realize at the time how much that incident affected me, but I stepped away from gaming in a lot of subtle ways. I still considered myself part of the world, but I turned down a ton of jobs and event appearances. And those changes in my behavior all led me to stifle myself when I felt the urge to speak up about #GamerGate.
  
  The timing was particularly bad, personally, because a few weeks into the uproar, at the end of August 2014, the infamous "Celebrity Hacking Scandal" happened, where dozens of prominent actresses and performers had private nude pictures stolen and exposed to the world. (Wow, jerks were really busy that fall ruining lives online! Also: the stolen pictures were first posted on 4chan. So much great stuff originates there, huh?)
  
  As someone nowhere NEAR the victims on the celebrity-importance ladder, imagine my surprise when I was contacted by several hackers via my HACKED phone number warning me that I was a future target. My name was on a request list for compromising photos, and people were supposedly offering big dollars to back it up. I counted myself lucky that I had fans in the hacker world. (How cool, right?) But being hunted for boobies? Slightly terrifying.
  
  So, while Zoe and other people were being ripped apart online, I was holding my tongue, trying to erase anything from my online accounts that I didn't want made public for the world to see. Any picture, Is that too much side boob? I'll erase it. Any email, OMG why would I think that was funny?! Delete. I spent a week ripping out pieces of my digital life that I didn't want people poking around. I'm sure I missed a lot. When you examine your underwear close enough, EVERYTHING looks a little bit suspect.
  
  I knew sharing my thoughts about the situation would burn me. So I stayed out. And with other prominent people, men and women, jumping in to take a stand against the bullying and hatred, I honestly thought the whole thing would go away soon. I think everyone sane in the gaming world did.
  
  But it didn't. It got worse. Because the issue somehow morphed from attacking a single woman over a messed-up revenge post to a quasi-conservative movement striving for "ethics in game journalism." A large segment of the newly anointed "#GamerGate movement" decided that as a result of "the Zoe post" there was corruption running rampant in the game journalism world. And THEY were the people to fix it.
  
  They focused a large amount of their wrath on people trying to add dialogue about feminism and diversity in gaming, condemning them as "Social Justice Warriors." (That label was always so weird to me, because how is that an insult? "Social Justice Warrior" actually sounds pretty badass.) It turned into a mob. One that was disjointed, with lots of differing agendas, but all surfing the wave of vengeful emotion together. Like the French Revolution over that cake thing.
  
  The attacks grew way beyond Zoe. Friends in the indie games industry who stepped up to defend her started receiving the same treatment. Verbally harassed. Doxxed (where someone hacks personal information like phone number, address, credit cards, social security number and posts it online for the whole world to see and misuse, super awesome experience). At the same time, a prominent vlogger named Anita Sarkeesian released an installment of her video series examining feminist issues in gaming. Hatred of her in a certain demographic of the internet, I'm pretty sure a one-to-one with the worst of the attackers, only fed the "You're trying to ruin my gaming!" frenzy. More and more people in gaming who started speaking up, especially women, were mobbed for it. A journalist named Jenn Frank wrote a piece about the attacks on Zoe and was so badly swarmed with hate that she decided to quit the industry. I dipped my toe in the water once and sent one subtle @ tweet to Jenn in support and received so many hateful comments I had to log offline for two days. Great "ethical" achievements there, guys!
  
  Ironically, the #GamerGate movement never focused on some of the big game companies who actually ARE unethical, bribing vloggers and censoring bad reviews on their products. The movement tended to target smaller journalists and independent gaming sites. Mostly the ones who were criticizing THEM. It was mind-boggling, but at the same time, they did create the biggest movement in gaming history. And it seemed like it would never stop growing.
  
  At the end of October, I flew to Vancouver to work on the TV show Supernatural. It was more than two months after the initial blog post (a decade in real-life time), and the gaming world was STILL drowning in #GamerGate. I was walking down the street on one of my days off and saw two gamer guys walking toward me in classic, black crew-neck gaming T-shirts. One Call of Duty, the other Halo.
  
  Now, in the past, whenever I saw another gamer in public, I would feel heartened, because we belonged no matter if we stopped to chat or not. I would go out of my way to exchange a knowing glance, a supportive smile signaling, Yeah, dude. It's cool that you game. I do, too! We were automatically compatriots in our love for something we both knew was awesome.
  
  But as those two gamers walked toward me, for the first time in my life I didn't have the impulse to say hello. Or smile. For some reason as I approached the corner... I crossed the street instead.
  
  I sat down a few blocks later, because I couldn't understand what I'd just done. Then I realized that because of the recent situation with #GamerGate, subconsciously I no longer assumed that a random gamer and I would be on the same page, or would connect just because of our love of gaming. There was a wedge in my world where there had been none before.
  
  And for the first time in months... I got angry. I WANTED TO WRITE SOME SHIT DOWN, SON!
  
  I pounded five espresso shots, ran back to my hotel room, and wrote a Tumblr post about my experience titled, "Crossing the Street." And I tried to make it different from the tone of other writing on the subject. I tried to frame my argument in an empathetic way. Not condemn, but make people understand what I was feeling. How I was upset and ashamed at my impulse to avoid those anonymous gamers. How sad I was that the actions of #GamerGate had created that feeling in me, to separate myself from people whom I would have assumed were comrades before. And how the whole situation was creating the outside impression of a culture driven by misogyny and hatred, which I KNEW wasn't true. I appealed to our mutual love of gaming, on both sides, to bring us back together, for the sake of what we all loved. (The essay was eloquent, promise. Legal drugs fuel good words!)
  
  I emphasized my fear of speaking out, because of the possibility that someone would doxx me. I had taken out too many restraining orders against stalkers to not be concerned about my home address leaking. I thought sharing that fear would be the "Relatable!" part to both sides. I mean, anyone would be afraid if it was easy for a whackadoodle to pull up into their driveway when they got angry at one of your tweets, right? "I'm the owner of that taco place you just dissed. WATCH OUT, I'M ON YOUR DOORSTEP, BITCH!"
  
  I posted my essay on Tumblr minutes before I had to hop in the car to go to the movie studio that night, and as I hit Send, I felt dizzy with hubris. I'm not brave in general—mousey doesn't just describe my real hair color—but speaking out felt RIGHT. It was something that I should have done weeks before. By overcoming my fear, I had finally redeemed myself TO myself. No matter if anyone paid attention or not.
  
  I got in the car to be driven to set for work (they do that on TV shows, so fancy). Twenty minutes later I got a call. I looked at the caller ID. "Wil Wheaton." That was weird. We're super-close friends, we've acted together, we produce a web show together, but it was odd he was calling me. Email/text/IM/Twitter/Snapchat? Yes. Primitive old-school telephoning? Nope.
  
  "Hello?"
  
  "Dude, you need to disable comments on your Tumblr post." He sounded panicked.
  
  "What?"
  
  "Several people have posted your home address in the comments. You need to disable comments right now."
  
  "Oh my God."
  
  I was silent for a second. Then I learned that "bathed in horror" is an actual feeling, not a colorful writing metaphor.
  
  "But... I... don't know... I don't know my password."
  
  I had just changed everything to forty-character twelve-step identification the week before because of the celebrity hacking thing, and I hadn't reentered any of my passwords onto my phone yet. It was one of those "That sucks!" coincidences.
  
  "Do you want me to reset it for you? I'm not home but I can find some Wi-Fi."
  
  "No... then you'd have to get in my email, and I don't know that password, either. Wait, maybe I can do it on my phone. I'll call you back."
  
  I hung up and tried to load the Tumblr app, but discovered the interface was not easy to navigate when your hands are trembling in an aggressive way. The driver, a very kind older guy, offered to pull the car over.
  
  "No... no, I don't want to be... late for work." My voice was as unsteady as my hands as I fumbled with the phone.
  
  Within a few minutes I got my password reset. Only to discover that I couldn't disable the comments plug-in from my phone. Crap.
  
  At that point I started hyperventilating. All I could picture was awful people storming my house while I was out of town and killing my dog. Totally irrational, I know. But he was very old and friendly and the perfect target for malicious intent.
  
  I knew the longer my address was up, the more it would be shared and stored and available to anyone forever, bad or good.
  
  In my heart, I knew it was too late to prevent that anyway.
  
  I finally contacted a friend who disabled the comments on the post. (Which I will never turn on again, forever and ever and ever, yay!) There were more than a thousand comments in the thread at that point, a lot of them vile and antagonistic and awful, exactly what you WOULDN'T expect as a reaction to an essay with the theme, Let's hold hands and get through this, guys! But such was the level of vitriol at the time. Oh, and there were also four separate people who posted my address with malicious intent. A few were business addresses and a few were definitely NOT.
  
  In the scene we filmed that night, my character, Charlie, murdered someone on-screen. The experience was more than a little cathartic.
  
  I'll leave the analysis of why #GamerGate happened, what drove it, and why it lasted as long as it did to someone's kick-ass graduate thesis. (Hope you get an A!) But hostility to outside criticism has long been a weirdly accepted part of gaming culture. You don't generally see hard-core knitters reply to someone who says, "Knitting is cool, but the needles could be made from more environmentally sustainable wood," with "Oh no you don't, idiot. My knitting is perfect the way it is, don't you DARE try to change it. You're obviously a fake. What's the diameter of that yarn? Don't know? Go die in a fire!"
  
  The mainstream media was already publishing "What the hell is going on in the nerd world?" articles about #GamerGate and quickly picked up on my story. "Felicia Day's Fears Come True" became the headline of the week, mostly emphasizing the violation of my personal information, because, you know, that was the sexy part. The Guardian, Time, the Washington Post—even the New York Times—all reported on my doxxing. Most of the gaming and online community showed an amazing amount of support. But, to me, the reaction of #GamerGate itself was the most fascinating.
  
  In the initial comments section of my Tumblr post, which I disabled, there are hundreds of condescending, hateful comments attacking me as a woman, labeling me a weakling and a fake gamer.
  
  One of the top discussion points in #GamerGate forums was about how I "wasn't really doxxed." Some claimed I did it myself for publicity (?!) or qualified it as inconsequential because the information wasn't hard enough to obtain.
  
  Just to clear the record, it is true to say I wasn't doxxed in the exact way that the other victims of #GamerGate were. I was "lucky." Because (and I've never said this publicly, but hell, let's just tell-it-all, baby!) I'd been doxxed by 4chan already, the year before.
  
  In 2013, a group on that forum tracked down a ton of personal information on me. They shared all that and pictures of the outside of my house and my license plate amongst themselves. A disturbed fan used that information and showed up at my front door, made his way INTO MY HOUSE, and afterward, proceeded to obsess over me online in an erratic and abusive way to the extent that I was terrified he would show up again and do something violent.
  
  So that's why so many haters were able to post my address so quickly a year later. Efficient, huh?
  
  The savviest members of #GamerGate saw all the media coverage blowing up over my situation and decided that my doxxing was making them look bad, so they rushed to send me well wishes of support on Twitter. But the support was almost always accompanied with the caveat: "REAL #GamerGate doesn't do stuff like this."
  
  This was the part that was the hardest for me to understand. Because whether the people who did the actual act were in the group or not was beside the point.
  
  #GamerGate as a movement created an environment for attacks to flourish. Hell, it ORIGINATED with them. A great quote from a video series called Folding Ideas put it best: "The use of fear tactics, even if only by a minority, creates an environment of fear that all members enjoy the privilege of, whether they engage in them or not." This was the very reason I felt afraid to speak up in the first place. And what I feared most? Yeah, it happened. In light of that fact, the qualified apologies felt hollow at best. Especially when, for every nice comment from #GamerGate, I saw dozens of comments like the following.
  
  It took six months for me to become comfortable with walking my dog at night (Let's be crazy tonight, Cubby, and not carry mace!), and I will never feel 100 percent safe in my own home again. I have had people sitting in cars outside my window, certified letters sent to my address just to say "I know where you live," and phone calls from strange area codes at all hours of the night. Now that I know how easy it is for anyone with an agenda to track me down, feeling safe is a cute, nostalgic feeling.
  
  What frightened me the most about my #GamerGate experience was the possibility that this could be the future of the internet. That the utopia I thought the online world created, where people don't have to be ashamed of what they love and could connect with each other regardless of what they looked like, was really a place where people could steep themselves in their own worldview until they became willfully blind to everyone else's.
  
  I guess the internet can be both things. Good and bad. And I have been "lucky" enough to experience the crazy extremes of both.
  
  I had to think long and hard about writing this chapter, and I know there's a good chance I will have more of my privacy violated as a result. There will certainly be another flood of online attacks because of it.
  
  So after all that, would I speak up again?
  
  Absolutely.
  
  Because shame is a very good barometer. The very reason I felt guilty about NOT speaking up is WHY I should have spoken up in the first place.
  
  I recently got a message from a mother who said, "I asked my fourteen-year-old what #GamerGate was and he said, 'It's because women are trying to ruin video games.'" I was so upset. Unless people are speaking out to counteract that idea, how will that kid ever think differently?
  
  Over the years, I've heard many times that The Guild and what I do online got them into gaming and web video. I'm proud to be able to represent something, however small, to some people. Because, in my own experience, sometimes a little representation is all it takes to inspire people to follow a path they never would have considered.
  
  As a middle-school-aged kid, I fell in love with the fact that Nora Ephron, a woman, wrote and directed Sleepless in Seattle. It was my absolute favorite movie, and I watched it enough times to destroy the copy I had on VHS. (I don't know how many times that is, but typing that just now made me feel old, like someone in the 1960s waxing nostalgic about their Victrola.)
  
  Everything about that movie was amazing. The romance, the miscommunications, the idea that I was destined to have baby-making times with Tom Hanks. And while I watched, time and time again, I had this vague sense of a puppeteer figure behind the scenes. A person who was responsible for building a world I wanted to be a part of SO BADLY. She was unseen, but her hand was in every detail. Emphasis on HER.
  
  I cried when Nora Ephron died in 2012, which was bizarre to me at the time. Usually when a celebrity dies I think, Oh, that's sad, then get irritated when their name trends on Twitter (because sometimes they AREN'T dead, and then I feel like a jerk for assuming anyone over forty is ready to swan dive into a crematorium). I never met her in person. I never had a poster of her on my wall or sent letters to her fan club (like I did with Richard Grieco; YES, that happened), but with her death, a little bit of my childhood inspiration disappeared. She had made it possible for me to imagine my own future in the world of film. Her very existence showed me it could be done and allowed me to dream about following the path she laid behind her. Without her work, I doubt it would have ever occurred to me that such a path existed.
  
  Now, I certainly am not saying that I consider myself an icon like Nora Ephron or that I should be held up as the world's ultimate example of "GAMER FEMALE!" but the idea of representation is important. And I think the world of gaming needs people from all walks of life to speak up and represent the positive side of what we love. Because, let's be real: gaming's reputation is NOT good in that area right now. Currently, if it were a restaurant, it would get a VERY bad Yelp review.
  
  I joined the world of gaming as a little girl. It was where I first discovered my voice and felt accepted. I found a community through the Ultima Dragons that I didn't have anywhere else in my life. During all that time I spent online I was never shamed for my enthusiasms. Never made to feel that I didn't deserve to be heard because of my gender. And I wouldn't be who I am without that community.
  
  It's hard for me to imagine how that same fourteen-year-old girl might find a place to belong in the gaming world that exists today, with strong voices pushing her back, harassing her, questioning her authenticity with the unspoken threat: Fit in the way we want you to or get out. I don't know if I could handle that kind of environment. Perhaps I would hide my gender. Or just quit games entirely.
  
  But I don't think those choices are acceptable for anyone. So if my speaking up made one person feel like they belong or prevented one person from stifling their own voice, then it was absolutely worth it.
  
  Because if you can't be your own weird self on the internet, where can you be? And what would be the point?