Growing up as a queer child in Mississippi, I got my Nintendo in 1985, and I've been lost in this world ever since. When I was scared because my church said people like me were going to burn in hell, 'Final Fantasy,' 'Dragon Warrior' and 'Super Mario' offered a lifeboat.
Brianna Wu
I have an unfortunate history with Ethan Ralph. Like many women in the game industry, I've been doxed by him multiple times.
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.
For any prosecutor, a decision to show leniency in sentencing must be weighed against multiple factors. Do they show remorse for their actions? Are they a threat to the public and law enforcement? Do they intend to contribute to society?
Even in the '80s and '90s, many white Southerners were still bitter about court decisions that required racial integration of the schools. It wasn't that they were outwardly opposed to white and black people attending school together, it was that the rulings threatened their proud identity as independent Southerners.
What's the fundamental problem that VR solves better than anything? To me it's straightforward. It's story. VR tells stories better than any medium.
If you don't know what Gamergate is, my God, do I envy you.
I think Gamergate is just a symptom of a disease: a $90 billion global industry that was built by men for men.
Gamergate should have been a time of reckoning for the gaming community, which had long been rife with sexism and misogyny. It wasn't.
The video game industry traditionally has been a very male-dominated field. You know, with the advent of the iPhone, the number of women gamers exploded.
Let's not glamorize abuse.
I am a software engineer, a popular public speaker, and an expert in the Unreal engine.
It's see no evil, hear no evil with toxic male gamers - whose every whim and adolescent fantasy has been catered to for decades.
I'm a reasonably accomplished journalist. I've worked as an investigative journalist, I've done crime beat stuff.
I am the head of development at Giant Spacekat, a Boston-based studio that's an industry leader in making games for women. We are passionate about creating narrative games for the avalanche of new consumers who don't fit the old gamer stereotype.
I love video games dearly.
Gamergate is ostensibly about journalistic ethics. Supporters say they want to address conflicts of interest between the people that make games and the people that support them. In reality, Gamergate is a group of gamers that are willing to destroy the women who have invaded their clubhouse.
It's not like I'm advocating that we ban 'Call of Duty' or anything silly like that, I'm asking is for companies to look at their hiring practices, to hire more women... and make sure they portray women in their games in a socially responsible way.
For most of 2016 and 2017, I would say probably 90% of my Twitter feed was automated bots sending repetitive messages at me. Someone would basically pay bots to send me messages over and over and over again. It made Twitter nearly unusable.
To its credit, Twitter is at least making an effort to curb hate speech towards transgender people, training its staff how to respond.
Sometimes I speak out on women in tech issues.
There's a common personality type to software developers - one I certainly fall into. We're more comfortable staring at a screen than staring into someone's eyes. Engineers can be brilliant in the workplace, and something less-than-brilliant everywhere else.
I've spent a career working in tech as a software engineer. And I believe regulated markets are the best way to build and deliver innovative products.
Gamergate isn't the problem - it's a symptom of an industry that is deeply sexist and unable to understand it.
The real question is whether or not the communities that rule the Internet can make their spaces safer for users, especially women and minorities.
Gamergate taught me that I was stronger than I knew that I was.
We need to introduce civil liability for companies that ship products with reckless security vulnerabilities.
The first game I remember being ridiculously passionate about was Super Mario Bros. 2. It was the first game where you could play as Princess Peach. It wasn't just a game where the boys had their adventure. Peach was in the game and she was so powerful there.
I've rarely talked about Obama's share of the blame for the rise of the alt-right and Gamergate.
Competition in the American tech sector is being gobbled up by the largest players, and it's threatening our entire industry.
I work in the tech industry and my husband works in biotech. He's head of IP for a company listed on the NASDAQ. And we have a lot of discussions in tech and biotech about the role of unionization in our industries.
Prosecuting Gamergate is not about justice for me or the women of Giant Spacekat. It's about introducing consequences into the equation for men that treat harassing women like a game.
In politics, I am facing a lot of structural sexism.
Crises like the Mirai botnet can't be prevented by vague calls to protect our cybernetworks or platitudes about working with private industry. We need to be able to force recalls on consumer devices with massive security vulnerabilities.
I am a programmer. If I write code, I don't evaluate the results by what I hope the code will be. I evaluate it by what happens when I compile it. I evaluate it by results.
Walking is great, I guess.
Unfortunately, I have the equivalent of 7 PhDs in harassment on Twitter. As one of the primary targets of Gamergate, I've had hundreds and hundreds of threats to my life on Twitter's platform.
I think what a lot of women in the game industry saw with Gamergate is they saw if they came forward, help was not going to come.
I was adopted into an extremely right-wing religious family.
Since Gamergate, many women I know are reluctant to speak publicly on gender issues, because they fear - rightly - that they will be targeted and harassed.
In 1999, I was running my first tech start-up and learning the Unreal Engine, the tool that would define my career as a game developer, when news of Columbine ground all work to a standstill.
Facebook, Apple, Tinder, Snapchat, and Google create our social realities - how we make friends, how we get jobs, and how mankind interacts. And the truth is, women don't truly have a seat at the table.
Obviously, whenever the government is getting involved with speech, it gives me a lot of pause. I have a background as a journalist, so that's something that I take very seriously.
The main lesson I took from Gamergate is that asking the status quo to do the right thing doesn't work.
To stand up to GamerGate, that's my choice. I can't make that choice for the women I work with.
Gamergate gave birth to a new kind of celebrity troll, men who made money and built their careers by destroying women's reputations.
There's a real sense - that we have to get past on the left - that every person who voted for Trump is evil.
With major films costing hundreds of millions of dollars to make, Hollywood is an industry that tends to repeat patterns when they make money.
The BBC called me 'defiant' in a caption. I plan to frame and put it on my wall.
Gamergate is a criminal operation to harass women.
