Zoë Quinn, creator of punk games, knows more than most about the sharp end of online harassment. But she also knows what it takes to fight back, an important skill now that the same playbook used against her is wielded broadly by abusive reactionaries of all stripes. — Read the rest

Gamergate bogeywoman Zoe Quinn is making a new punk game, in collaboration with Amazon deep weird porn-writer (and table-turning, MRA-confounding Hugo nominee Chuck Tingle, and It. Looks. Awesome.

Zoe Quinn, sometime Boing Boing and Offworld contributor and object of pants-wetting apoplexy by Gamergate's jerk-squad, has sold a memoir telling her tale of being targeted for one of the Internet's most grotesque and cowardly pile-ons, and had the film-rights snapped up by Pascal Pictures, with rumors that Scarlett Johansson will play Quinn.

Zoe Quinn knows what it's like to be lied about, harassed and generally made a prop in other people's angry inner lives. But she also knows what it's like to have been one of the internet's useful idiots—and how to build something powerful in response to the online mob. — Read the rest

Twenty years ago today, Boing Boing became a blog. Mark Frauenfelder's first post linked to Street Tech, a now-dormant gadget blog. Now there are 160,000 more posts just like it and the impossible task of summarizing the best of them in yet another. — Read the rest

The latest turn in the Gamergate sage: Zoe Quinn (previously) outed their former partner, game dev Alec Holowka as a sexual and emotional abuser, which prompted others to come forward with their own stories of abuse at Holowka's hands, which led to Holowka being kicked out of his Night in the Woods game project — and shortly thereafter, Holowka committed suicide.

Jeremy Soule, composer of game soundtracks such as Morrowind and Total Annihilation, was named by developer Natalie Lawhead as having raped her when the two worked together in 2008. Following her post, other game developers spoke out about having been assaulted by their peers, with Alex Holowka (Night in the Woods) and Luc Shelton (Gears of War) among the accused. — Read the rest

The 2017 Hugo nominees were announced yesterday; attendees at this year's World Science Fiction Convention in San Jose, California will choose from among them to pick this year's Hugo Award winners.

Read Max Read's sharp précis of what happened to the internet over the last few years: the slow drifting of message-boards to the right as their inhabitants grew from sad kids to angry adults, then the sudden explosion of that pattern across social networks run by corporations with only an ambivalent interest in stopping it. — Read the rest

The Offworld Collection, presenting the very best features and essays from Offworld, is finally available to buy directly from Campo Santo for $40. I had the pleasure of designing and illustrating this splendid 250-page hardcover volume, but it's the excellent writing, edited by Leigh Alexander and Laura Hudson, that makes it an essential buy. — Read the rest

Technologists have a dismal pattern: when it comes to engineering challenges ("build a global-scale comms platform") they rub their hands together with excitement; when it comes to the social challenges implied by the engineering ones ("do something about trolls") they throw their hands up and declare the problem to be too hard to solve.

Zoe Quinn's awesome $21 "I'm the best graphic designer" tee has it all: linebreaks, Comic Sans, all caps, weird kerning… Just the thing to break the hearts of your designer pals!

For the second year in a row, a bunch of disgruntled "conservative" sf readers and writers are attempting to destroy science fiction's Hugo Awards by nominating slates of works that are, variously: rabid racist tracts; works by their ideological opponents; tepid military sf; works by bystanders; and weird porn by Chuck Tingle, a master of the form, who has nothing to do with any of this.

When I set out to research the out-of-control harassment problem in gamer culture, I never dreamed my mother would be caught up in the middle of it all.

Internet madness and the special happiness of farewells.

There's a new, great resource-gathering tool designed for folks new to game-making. Here's why you should check it out.

The game developer and Gamergate bogeywoman/survivor has furnished the authorities with the graphic death-threats she received for speaking out about online harassment of women, but they won't take action.

Its time to break down the walls between games and other creative fields.

Let these cool developers cheer you on

Zoe Quinn, a game developer frequently targeted by Gamergate and other internet trolls, launched Crash Override, an anti-harassment site that will help victims get in touch with law enforcement, legal/threat monitoring and counseling services.

Quinn and Lifschitz, who are currently funding the initiative themselves, hope that Crash Override will fill an important gap for people targeted by online abuse. — Read the rest