A moment that changed me – Gamergate

As a woman working in the male-dominated gaming industry, I realised that sexism is still rife. And it’s not just the trolls who are to blame

The terrible one-year anniversary of Gamergate is nearly here, and the women that make your games are war-weary, exhausted by a cultural battle that we never asked for. We are professionals trying to do our job, screamed at by children who don’t want girls in their clubhouse.

Elizabeth Sampat is one of these professionals. She’s a game designer at PopCap, one of the most successful studios in the world. In the aftermath of Gamergate, she’s struggling with an ethical dilemma. She’s uncomfortable asking girls to enter the game industry, knowing the abuse they will inevitably face. “I will no longer participate in encouraging young women and girls to become game industry professionals,” wrote Sampat in a popular Facebook post. “I will continue to fight tooth and nail for every woman who is currently here. But until the industry and gaming culture improves, it’s unethical.”


I understand where Sampat is coming from. Someone just emailed me their fantasy about mutilating my genitals, and murdering me by slicing my body in half. It’s something they clearly spent a lot of time writing. Reading it, I should probably feel something – fear, anger or even exhaustion. But these threats have happened so often, I just feel nothing. How could you support anyone’s daughter entering this environment?

What does this kind of abuse mean for women like myself that work in the industry? Well, it’s like the zombie apocalypse all day every day, but one hosted on social media and comment platforms. Imagining themselves as noble warriors and not angry misogynists, they bang on the doors and windows, moaning about the Social Justice Warriors (SJWs) that have taken over their video games. Inevitably, when this is published, the comments below this article will follow the same pattern.

This online warfare is the only weapon those involved in Gamergate have, because they can’t compete with their sexist ideas and incoherent philosophy. Their battle to scrub their Wikipedia entry exemplifies this, as they seek to whitewash the Gamergate page of its sexist roots while attempting to delete, edit, and vandalise my page and those of other high-profile women. You know you’ve lost when your only resort is a comment section.

And yet, Gamergate isn’t the real problem facing women in games. In software engineering, we have the term “technical debt”. When you don’t do a job correctly, unaddressed problems become harder and harder to solve. The videogame industry has massive “sexism debt”, interest accrued for problems unaddressed for the last 30 years.


The battle is shifting from Gamergate to the wider issues facing women in tech, the sexism debt that must be addressed

Gamergate isn’t the problem – it’s a symptom of an industry that is deeply sexist and unable to understand it.

One of the strangest events of the last year was having a Law and Order episodemade about Gamergate. The main character is a fictional composite of Anita Sarkeesian, Zoe Quinn and me. “Women in gaming. What did I expect?” she says darkly, just before she quits the industry.

I think of that scene every day. Just what did I expect, standing up to Gamergate and trying to raise awareness of gamedev’s inclusivity problem? A warm welcome? I got into the game industry to make games, not to be a feminist critic. My biggest fear is that in five years, I might still be talking about my gender and not the games I make. Recently, I spent an entire day reporting 17 separate death threats. The week before, my private number was shared online – a form of internet abuse known as doxing – and someone called my phone while masturbating. I just hung up and went back to work. I try to find the dark humour where I can.