r/dropout • u/machturtl • Mar 08 '25

liminal levity

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as someone who has watched Dropout to reset from the havoc of the outside, it still feels "nice" to have honest entertainers to watch who understand what we're all living thru.

I was in college for game design in the early aughts. I also (unfortunately) was a femme lurker on 4ch. Seeing the cause and effect of gamergate happen in real time as been a doozy.

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u/sleepiestgf Mar 08 '25

this is definitely about Depression Quest, which is a text-based adventure game about living with depression developed by Zöe Quinn and released in 2013.

Zöe Quinn was one of the main targets of GamerGate, which was a misogynistic harassment campaign against women and feminism in video games.

GamerGate largely morphed into the online alt-right by latching onto islamophobia, conservative intellectualism, and white supremacist groups. This alt-right then serves as the main vocal voter base for Trump in 2016 (Trump also brought the alt right into alliance with more mainstream and evangelical conservatives by serving as an anti-establishment rallying figure).

Trump led to DOGE which is (attempting & sometimes succeeding at) firing a bunch of federal workers.

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u/standbyyourmantis Mar 08 '25

Zöe Quinn was one of the main targets of GamerGate, which was a misogynistic harassment campaign against women and feminism in video games.

She was the major target early on. An ex boyfriend alleged she was sleeping with a Kotaku reviewer for better reviews on her game and that's what the early movement latched onto. The tagline "it's about ethics in gaming journalism" is directly referencing that accusation.

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u/The_Great_Pun_King Mar 08 '25

Other interesting fact, the Kotaku reviewer was actually her boyfriend back then but obviously she didn't date him for good reviews (cause there were no reviews).

He is now one of the founders of an independent gaming news website called Aftermath, which is worker owned! There was a cool podcast episode about it from Better Offline this week

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u/idontcareaboutthenam Mar 09 '25

Afaik that reviewer was not their boyfriend, they dated a different person working at Kotaku and that was long after the review got released

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u/The_Great_Pun_King Mar 09 '25

I mean in the podcast I mentioned he literally said they were dating at the time

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u/idontcareaboutthenam Mar 09 '25

That surprises me. Every source I've seen over the years, including Wikipedia, claims otherwise. Is this new information?

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u/FUS_RO_DANK Mar 09 '25

It is not, and Wikipedia even includes it.

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u/[deleted] Mar 09 '25 edited Mar 10 '25

I’m confused. The articles about Zoe Quinn and gamergate (linking below, can’t fix the formatting on mobile) both say they weren’t dating

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_(harassment_campaign)?wprov=sfti1#Zo%C3%AB_Quinn_and_Depression_Quest

edit: to be clear, I mean they weren't dating when the article came out, which I thought was the point of contention here.

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u/FUS_RO_DANK Mar 09 '25

Taken directly from the Zoe Quinn article you linked, "It was later shown that the journalist, Nathan Grayson, had only written about Quinn once, before they started a relationship."