Felicia Day was doxxed for being afraid of GamerGate

I had a day off this weekend from shooting Supernatural, and I was walking around downtown Vancouver on Saturday, sampling all the artisan coffee I could get my throat around. At one point I saw a pair of guys walking towards me wearing gamer shirts. Black short-sleeved, one Halo and one Call of Duty.

Now in my life up until this point, that kind of outfit has meant one thing: Potential comrades. I love games, I love gaming. If it’s Friday night, I’m not out hanging at a club, I’m diving into a new game I downloaded on Steam. And I am blessed with the fact that my career is largely built upon that love, which I channeled into fiction so many years ago with “The Guild”. If there’s anything I’m proud of in this world, it’s the fact that I’ve had people come up to me on the street and at conventions over the years to tell me that they feel confident to call themselves a gamer because of my work, where before they were ashamed. Hearing that kind of stuff has kept me going, against the mainstream, against all odds.

So seeing another gamer on the street used to be an auto-smile opportunity, or an entry into a conversation starting with, “Hey, dude! I love that game too!” Me and that stranger automatically had something in common: A love for something unconventional. Outsiders in arms. We had an auto-stepping stone to hurtle over human-introduction-awkwardness, into talking about something we loved together. Instant connection!

But for the first time maybe in my life, on that Saturday afternoon, I walked towards that pair of gamers and I didn’t smile. I didn’t say hello. In fact, I crossed the street so I wouldn’t walk by them. Because after all the years of gamer love and inclusiveness, something had changed in me. A small voice of doubt in my brain now suspected that those guys and I might not be comrades after all. That they might not greet me with reflected friendliness, but contempt.

I went home and was totally, utterly depressed.

I have not said many public things about Gamer Gate. I have tried to leave it alone, aside from a few @ replies on Twitter that journalists have decided to use in their articles, siding me against the hashtag. Why have I remained mostly silent?

Self-protection and fear.

I have been through a lot in my years on the internet. I have encountered a small fraction of the attacks from people like the ones who currently represent the worst of this “movement”. In the past, I worked through it alone because I felt shining a light on their words gave them exactly what they wanted: Attention and credibility. To say that their attacks and contempt didn’t set me back creatively would be a lie, but overall I got through the twists and turns, emotionally battered, but alright. My philosophy has always been, “Exist and represent yourself the way you want to exist as a woman who loves games, not as a reflection of what other people think or want of you. You will change minds by BEING. Show, don’t tell.” The attacks I experienced over the years were NOTHING compared to people who are the victims of these attacks now, but I still thought early on during the Gamer Gate phenomenon, “These trolls will dissipate into the night like they always do, it will be fine.”

But they have not dissipated. And because of the frightening emotions and actions attached to what has happened over the last month, the events are sure to have a long-lasting affect on gaming as a culture. The fact that it has affected me, to the point where I decided to cross the street last weekend away from those gamers, was heartbreaking. Because I realized my silence on the issue was not motivated by some grand strategy, but out of fear that the issue has created about speaking out.

I have been terrified of inviting a deluge of abusive and condescending tweets into my timeline. I did one simple @ reply to one of the main victims several weeks back, and got a flood of things I simply couldn’t stand to read directed at me. I had to log offline for a few days until it went away. I have tried to retweet a few of the articles I’ve seen dissecting the issue in support, but personally I am terrified to be doxxed for even typing the words “Gamer Gate”. I have had stalkers and restraining orders issued in the past, I have had people show up on my doorstep when my personal information was HARD to get. To have my location revealed to the world would give a entry point for any mentally ill person who has fixated on me, and allow them to show up and make good on the kind of threats I’ve received that make me paranoid to walk around a convention alone. I haven’t been able to stomach the risk of being afraid to get out of my car in my own driveway because I’ve expressed an opinion that someone on the internet didn’t agree with.

HOW SICK IS THAT?

I have allowed a handful of anonymous people censor me. They have forced me, out of fear, into seeing myself a potential victim.

And that makes me loathe not THEM, but MYSELF.

So I write this to urge any person, male or female, who now has the impulse to do what I did, to walk away from something they loved before, to NOT.

Don’t let other people drive you away from gaming.

Games are beautiful, they are creative, they are worlds to immerse yourself in. They are art. And they are worth fighting for, even if the atmosphere is ugly right now. A small minority are putting up barbed wire walls between us who love games. And that is sad. Because odds are 99% certain that those guys on the street who I avoided would have been awesome to talk to. I realize that letting the actions of a few hateful people influence my behavior is the absolutely worst thing I could do in life. And not an example I want to set, ever.

So to myself and to everyone else who operates out of love not vengeance: Don’t abandon games. Don’t cross the street. Gaming needs you. To create, to play, to connect.

To represent.

I know this entry will probably draw contempt from people in the Gamer Gate movement. Something to scorn, something to rile them up against me and everything I’ve ever made. Especially, and most hurtfully, to mock my vulnerability. I just have one thing to say to you who do that: I’m genuinely sorry you are so angry.

I have lived a large part of my life ruled by negative emotions, mainly fear and anxiety. From my experience of working through those issues, I have this to say: Steeping yourself in the emotions that you’re surrounding yourself with, of hatred and bile and contempt, is ultimately not destructive to others like you want it to be. It’s destructive to yourself.

I know it feels good to belong to a group, to feel righteous in belonging to a cause, but causing fear and pushing people away from gaming is not the way to go about doing it. Think through the repercussions of your actions and the people you are aligning yourself with. And think honestly about whether your actions are genuinely going to change gaming life for the better. Or whether they’re just going to make someone cross the street away from you. And away from something, ironically, that we both love.

http://thisfeliciaday.tumblr.com/post/100700417809/the-only-thing-i-have-to-say-about-gamer-gate

edit: Thanks Milkman

Meanwhile, Chris Kluwe wrote the most aggressive, angry rant about GamerGate to date and remains unscathed. #It'sAboutEthics

She's a great writer.

Not sure how long this thread will stay open but I'd love to hear what someone who's pro-GamerGate actually thinks of the blog post. Doxxing and all that stuff aside.

You should add some commentary to the op.

@dallas_raines: I may have missed something, but nowhere in that wonderfully put, tragic plea does she say anything about actually being doxxed herself. Her message is powerful and convincing, but misrepresenting it in a sarcastic and divisive way isn't going to lead to any of the healing and unity that she is hoping for.

This only continues to prove to me that this isn't about any movement- no matter which side of righteousness you supposedly stand on.

Also, I flagged it. Give the mods a break already.

@joshwent: Was going to ask this as well.

It happened after the post.

threatening everyone woman in the industry will show that real life girl who hates you for being a creeper that she made a mistake probably, keep up the good fight gamergate fellows

@milkman: Thanks for the clarification, horrifyingly disappointing as it is. @dallas_raines you might want to put that info in your OP as it's what your thread is actually about.

I hope she's able to alert the proper authorities to that disgusting breach of privacy (and more so that they actually do anything about it). I can only hope that as this harassment and terrorism continues, it will just drive more people who once facilitated the hate to speak out against it. The bullies have already made international spokes women out of Anita and Zoe (and now Brianna Wu) to an extent that they never would have gotten close to with out this reprehensible behavior.

Even without the women doing anything themselves, every act of hate just strengthens them and their followers.

Yeah, this stuff has got to stop.

its sad but this really has nothing to do with GG as this stuff was happening before GG and it will happen after GG. There are two Twitch people I follow who were swatted while I watched them live. They also get doxxed and harassed online and they are dudes. All that's happened now is internet trolls looking for something to do have realized they can get away with anything now and its not blamed on them but some movement they are disjointed from. Heck, blaming GG means the "anti-GG" side is completely responsible for what trolls do too as many pro-GG personalities like TotalBiscuit (who is in treatment for cancer right now) and Boogie (both he and his wife received death threats, doxxes, and more) as well as others have received stuff.

You guys are doing what the trolls want by giving them attention. That's all they want and they keep getting. Not sure why people are so willing to comply.

Just fucking disgusting.

I know this probably isn't actually a good solution, but I've been deliberately omitting the fact that I play games in most social situations.

GG has pretty much ensured that this practice is going to continue indefinitely.

I'd agree with you if this behavior had anything to do with "trolling". Releasing a person's (especially a public figure's) private information on the internet is a crime, and very seriously dangerous.

I sincerely fear that it's going to take an actual real world assault or (I hate to even fucking type it), death, for folks to stop defending this behavior.

People typing random shit to get a rise of out someone, like the all to pathetically cliché "get back in the kitchen", shouldn't be ignored, but it may be a good idea to not make those jerks widely known and infamous. But when people's lives are put in danger like the situation above, I really, really hope you can see the difference there.

Indeed.

Probably because the idea that this is actually a clever conspiracy to besmirch the anti-GG side is super asinine. They do plenty of that on their own just by having a super archaic opinion, extra layers of filth aren't needed.

@sammo21: Here's the thing. Before all of this garbage, it was very easy to tell who the assholes were. Someone is threatened or harassed or doxxed or swatted or whatever and you can say "okay, that person sucks." But GG has given these people a shield to hide behind. Even if it's not being done BY GG, it's being done BECAUSE of GG. That goes for harassment of pro-GG people too.

I thought maybe this week all this crap would have calmed down a little bit. I am so fucking naive. I am so tired of all this crap and the defense of this whole thing being about "ethics". People will come to me and give me the defense of how "its only one person" and "don't judge the movement on person" but there have been multiple people who are doing this kind of crap.

Say what you will about Phil Fish but he did not deserve to have his site brought down and his financial records made public. Jenn Frank did not deserve the harassment over some Op-Ed. Brianna Wu did not deserve to be driven from her home. The same goes for Zoe Quinn and Felicia Day.

HOW MANY more people have to do this until I can start judging the entire movement as a hate campaign? There have already been the above examples I mentioned and a ton others who I did not mention. I am so fucking tired of hearing and quite frankly makes me ashamed and embarrassed I share a similar hobby (video games) as these gamergaters. Point is I am so fucking tired.

Edit: I would just like to add that my response is tame compared to how aggressive Chris Kluwe has been on this whole issue. For some real fun go check out his twitter account.

Same here. Either I omit the fact completely or, if the person seems somewhat receptive, go all the way and get into a conversation about gender issues.

I never identified myself as a gamer, but these days I don't really want to associate myself anything game-related for fear of being tarred with the same brush before I open my mouth. Ironically, GG is forcing away everyone who has a life outside of games i.e. the majority of us.

Honestly, I find the content of the her post sadder than the actual doxxing. That shit has gotten almost comical in its pure fucking ridiculousness lately. But man, if reading what she actually wrote there doesn't just eat you up inside, you're stronger than me. I go through phases of laughing it off, anger and depression when it comes to all this stuff lately. And this is definitely an instance of just fucking depression. Like, what are we even doing at this point? Why should anyone have to feel like that? About video games. VIDEO GAMES. I hope whatever comes from all this is worth it because jesus christ, this shit is beyond words.

Silence is precisely what these harassers are striving for. If we stop publicly sharing our own unique passion for games, we're letting the most deplorable people speak for us.

I will always readily proclaim my love for games, if nothing else than to show people that the stereotypes are wrong, however unfair they might be. People may be terrorizing others in the name of games, but they are not and never will be what games and the people who adore them are.

I respect your urges to distance yourselves from this despicable behavior towards others, but what we need most in the face of that is unity, not abandonment.

Actually, it's about ethics in the games industry.

Yeah, unfortunately it seems like this isn't going to go away unless something major occurs or every single women in games and games-related is punished for...I don't even know why anymore.

Feminism? Because women play games now and they're not supposed to (because they, collectively, made fun of nerds that one time in high school 15 years ago) even though a lot of them always have?

For real. This stuff really saddens me.

Last week I was replied to by the wikileaks account on twitter after I questioned them jumping on the 'gate hashtag. My timeline was unreadable for a good couple of days - not even with abuse (though there was some in there) but just so much goddamned NOISE. Just 'gaters talking slogans at each other and @mentioning me in their back-and-forths. It's impossible to reason with an attention-seeking stubborn hydra who has infinite spare time and nothing better to do.

I've started to feel shitty for sharing a lifelong hobby and passion with a bunch of assholes who seem to have no sense of empathy or compassion. Honestly, this whole thing is a black hole that is sucking up so much of people's time which would otherwise be spent on making / enjoying / critiquing games. It's heartening to see more and more reasonable people making their sentiments public, even though in the case of women it almost always means another round of threats, abuse and possible doxxing. My little twitter adventure is a blip compared to the amount of shit they must get, and it only makes me admire them more for speaking out about it.

You're right. But that doesn't make it any more comfortable to put yourself in that situation.

@sammo21 said:

Assuming that's true, the conundrum here is that they're doing it by scaring people into not talking about whatever things they want to say, so it's a lose/lose situation really. If we talk about it, they get attention like you said, if we don't, they succeed in their scare tactics. We should rather do something that would result in a greater good (which I don't know what, to be honest) than to just try to spite them because of this "us vs. them" mentality that has been talked about recently.

Flagged this, but not before saying this is fucking deplorable. And yeah correlation =/= causation, but this shit has just been on the rise and it seems GG has been wishy washy on distancing themselves from it. As poisoned as the well is, i hope they have sense enough to condemn this act without rushing to defend themselves first.

The solution to this is obvious

We'll send tweets to the GamerGate community, using nearby allies, and strategically doxx them. The enemy's so reviled a coalition of the willing will undoubtedly sign on and doxx them too. It's unlikely the UN will care, but then again, when have we ever needed them for anything?

Anyway, then we'll send our own premium members - but strictly in a support capacity. They'll train threatened devs and players; they can then form their own militias and finish the fight themselves. Our tweets, once we've achieved twitter superiority, can be used to drop said members the .gifs they need to match the insurggency on home turf. Combined with our doxxing, the extremists will have nowhere to run and face total destruction.

At that point, we'll personally supervise a new version of their build which will hopefully avoid further sectarian violence through better representation.

EDIT: Any GG'er we capture can be sent to our not-so-secret forum embedded in nearby communist website, where we'll use enhanced editing techniques to gather intel and then quietly ban them

That Chris Kluwe piece was pretty good.

Absolutely. And I'm certainly not saying if you don't yell from the mountain tops that you're a "gamer" then you're a bad person, or anything else like that. But the way this shit has gone, the public's impression of us has receded to far, far worse than any of the old trite "virgin neckbeard" stereotypes.

We, the folks who love games and don't want to terrorize others, are in an important and unique position to make ourselves known and to ensure that others know that we don't condone any of this violence. And if it can help perception as a whole (and through that, hasten some kind of resolution), I'd say feeling a bit uncomfortable is a pleasure compared to what the folks like Ms. Day have to go through.

People claim to do shitty things for all the right reasons all the time.

I'm sick of blaming GamerGate for this. We have to start blaming individuals who are doing this, instead. Shame the doxxers, shame the swatters, shame the generally shitty people of the world...not a group who wants a little journalistic integrity.

It's very tragic. The doxxing was, frankly, obvious. Of course she'd express fear and then people would back up that fear and make excuses about how Felicia Day "false flagged" herself. It's a joke at this point. A sad, twisted joke.

That her and others(myself-included) have to feel uneasy even mentioning the name "GamerGate" is sad. It has always been bad enough just mentioning "women" or "representation", but GamerGate has been even worse. Not just on Twitter or Reddit, but around here. The mods have helped clean up so much, but this has truly been an unfortunate period for the wider gaming community.

None of this has been necessary. Every day, I further regret ever holding any hope for some decent people turning it around to be something more positive than hurtful. Now it's just a chaotic storm continuing to muck things up while it slowly unravels.

She met her fear head-on, said nothing besides what was right and honest, and was punished for it.

Who are the humans we've raised? I cannot fathom them.

GG started off with harassment. As far as I'm concerned GG has little to do with journalistic integrity. Hell, I'd say it never did.

The answer is more decent people stopping associating with what has basically ended up acting like a misguided hate group. No one needs GamerGate to speak up on things they care about. It has never represented a worthwhile cause. It has only ever represented a mishmash of contradictory messages based on a nondescript anger in a subsection of the gaming community. That isn't anything to identify with. Why would anyone tie their good name to such a thing?

People should identify with "integrity" or "ethics", not a muddled, chaotic banner like "GamerGate".

But it's sunshine and smiles week :(

In the interests of long-term sunshine and smiles, it's important that we acknowledge and address what prevents so many from regularly enjoying sunshine and smiles in gaming. :)

You should be in politics.

What the fuck is "doxxed"? I have nothing negative against Felicia Day despite thinking her show "The Guild" is not for me. She seems like a sweet person who is genuinely into video games and nerdy stuff. Also how sweet was Dr. Horrible's Sing-A-Long Blog?

She's great, and i hope she wont get too much garbage sent her way. And that this BS, because that is what this has turned into stops...soon.

It means posting someone's personal information. Address, phone number, e-mail, all that.

Doxxing is the acquisition of someone's personal information (email address, home address, phone numbers, banking information etc) by hacking and then posting it online in a prominent place.

@bartok:

Doxxing is the public posting of a person't sensitive personal information like their address, domestic partners, information on family and their addresses, etc.

It's very dangerous, especially when a lot of these people are already getting death/rape threats to begin with.

Thanks... I think? ha.

I had two long conversations with GG folks today, and while they may be misguided, they're still fellow gamers and human beings. I've been misguided in my life before, too, and outside of the worst of the worst, folks can change. It just takes time.

I've seen progress over the years, and this bump in the road isn't going to stop it.

Just so you know, the normal way to react to this sort of story is "man it sucks to go through that and it sucks to live in fear and stuff". If your first inclination is to contrive a way to divorce these several individuals from the movement because you want to protect its 'integrity', that says a lot about you and none of it is good. That's like reading a story about a family of four burn to death when a Ford F-150 randomly explodes and instead of going "RIP pray for em" or something like that you go "hey not all Ford F-150s randomly explode don't unfairly cast aspersions on all Ford F-150s!!" Like that's some psycho thinking. Be a person yo.

The sick people doing this crap are so fired up at their deeds that there seems to be no end in sight. It's sad that they get off on harassment. Seems like pretty crappy motivation.

I'm sick of GamerGate, period. Why is GamerGate an actual "thing" anymore? Why do people defend it? Why on earth would any rational human being who actually has a legitimate gripe about ethics or anything else related to games want to associate with that hijacked, toxic, completely stupid hashtag? I honestly want to know; because I cannot reconcile it, and it seems completely illogical.

This sucks that it happened to her, but it's also an obvious false flag to anyone who isn't new to the internet. Not as bad as the 8chan "death threats" where all the posts have the same ID(which means they're all by the same person), but close. And I'm not claiming Anti-GG doxxed her or anything, but what people still don't seem to understand is that there are 3rd party trolls like FYAD who play both sides and I wouldn't be surprised if this was their work too. Pro-GG reports any harassment and doxxing as soon as they see it, even when it's against an Anti-GG. Felicia Day's doxxer was no exception and was reported by everyone as soon as someone mentioned it on the hashtag.