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Revision as of 22:30, 31 January 2015

Zoe Quinn
Zoe Quinn in 2014
Born	1987 (age 36–37) United States
Occupation	Video game developer
Known for	Depression Quest
Website	quinnspiracy.com

Zoe Quinn (born 1987) is an American independent video game developer and 2D artist. Quinn developed the interactive fiction Depression Quest, co-created with Patrick Lindsey and Isaac Schankler, a Twine game released on Steam. Following a blog post by her ex-boyfriend, Quinn was subject to widespread harassment, which sparked a controversy known widely as "Gamergate".

Early life

Zoe Quinn was born in 1987 and spent her childhood in a small town near the Adirondack Mountains in New York. Growing up, she often played video games. One of her favorites was Commander Keen, an MS-DOS game featuring an eight-year-old protagonist who builds a spaceship with items found around his house and then travels the galaxy defending the Earth. As a teenager, Quinn suffered from depression; she was diagnosed with the condition at the age of 14. She has described receiving little sympathy or assistance from school district officials, who were, she says, "less than understanding about teens with depression and suicide issues".

Career

At the age of 24, Quinn moved to Canada, where she made her first forays into video game programming. Her first game was the result of a six-week course on video-game creation that she attended after seeing an advertisement in a newspaper. In a later interview for The New Yorker, she said of this experience, "I felt like I'd found my calling."

Depression Quest

Main article: Depression Quest

Through her early game-development work, Quinn met Patrick Lindsey, a writer. Like Quinn, Lindsey struggled with depression. He felt that existing video games that dealt with the subject did not adequately depict the real emotions associated with depression, instead utilizing metaphor and symbolism. He suggested to Quinn that they write a new video game to better help others understand their experience. Quinn thought a game would be a good way to depict depression, imposing a set of rules on players they might not otherwise experience in their day-to-day lives. Quinn and Lindsey teamed with Isaac Schankler for the game's music, and released the final result of their collaboration, the text-based Depression Quest, in February 2013.

Depression Quest details the troubled life of a person suffering from depression. Quinn attempted to publish the game on Steam Greenlight service twice — in December 2013 and later in August 2014, when it was accepted and released by Steam. Depression Quest was featured in a Playboy article as one of several video games dealing with the subjective experience of depression.

Harassment and Gamergate

Main article: Gamergate controversy

With other women in the game industry, Quinn suffered through a long period of harassment including doxing, rape threats, and death threats. Gamergate was the culmination of these events and resulted in widespread recognition of misogyny in gaming.

At the height of the controversy, according to The New Yorker, the harassment escalated to the point where Quinn, "fearing for her safety, chose to leave her home" and began working with the authorities to identify those responsible for the harassment. She detailed her experience in an interview on MSNBC's Ronan Farrow Daily in late October, saying that Gamergate represented a rapidly-shrinking fringe among an increasingly-diverse gaming community and that those attacking her and other women in gaming needed "to just grow up." Speaking with BBC News, she said the harassment had consumed her life, leading her to feel as if she was "surrounded by nothing but hate — it's virulent, it's everywhere" and that she was "just trying to survive." She said the attacks on her boiled down to "the same accusation everybody makes toward every successful woman: she got to where she is because she had sex with someone" and that Gamergate had targeted "the people with the least power in the industry." After speaking at the annual GameCity event in Nottingham, she said she "used to go to games events and feel like I was going home... Now it's just like... are any of the people I'm currently in the room with, the ones that said they wanted to beat me to death?" She said her therapist remarked of the harassment, "I don’t even know what to tell you, this is so f-‍-‍-ing far outside anything I’m aware of."

Other projects

In addition to her own game development projects, Quinn is also known for creating the Game Developer Help List, designed to bring experienced game developers and novice developers into contact with one another. In 2014, Quinn was to be part of the cancelled YouTube reality television show codenamed "Game_Jam", which was intended to bring together a number of prominent indie game developers. She has additionally worked on Fez, Jazzpunk, They Bleed Pixels and several jam games.

Quinn has joined Loveshack Entertainment as narrative designer for the upcoming iOS game Framed. Quinn is also working on a full motion video game starring Greg Sestero.

In January 2015 Quinn co-founded Crash Override, a private network of experts to assist victims of online harassment.

Personal life

Quinn is interested in body modification, and has implanted a chip in the back of her hand that can be programmed to perform various functions. Her first use of the chip was to load it with the download code for the game Deus Ex. She also has a magnetic implant in her left ring finger.