Quinn and several other women have since had to flee their homes after death and rape threats – mostly for pointing out that the games industry has a problem with representing women.
When I speak to her, Quinn has been in the UK for four days. She’s been staying on friends’ couches, at hotels. “How could I go back to my home?” she asks. “I have people online bragging about putting dead animals through my mailbox. What am I going to do – go home and just wait until someone makes good on their threats? I’m scared that what it’s going to take to stop this is the death of one of the women who’s been targeted.” I’ve got some asshole in California who I’ve never talked to hiring a private investigator to stalk me. She is teary and shaking as she talks, but through it all she’s also funny and engaging. Zoe Quinn: ‘I’m scared that it’s going to take the death of a woman to stop this’ Photograph: BBC Despite the trauma she has been through, she still loves games. “I grew up in a super small town in upstate New York my nearest neighbour was really far away,” she says.
I used to run around the woods pretending to be Samus Aran, using sticks as swords, imagining I was beating up aliens.” “A friend of the family gave me a Game Boy when I was very little, and it was amazing. When Quinn was 12, her dad bought her a 3DO console at a garage sale and she discovered games such as Night Trap and Star Control 2. “Dad knew I was a little nerd,” she says. I just loved those long screenshots of a whole level, where you could see all the items and everything – I was so vividly in love with those games.” “I’d been stealing Nintendo Power magazines from the library. Through her teens, she knew she wanted to do something creative, but didn’t know what.
She wrote “terrible” science fiction stories (“in gel-pen!”) and later started taking photographs. She was offered a photography job in Toronto, but when she got there, the position fell through. She stuck around and met a few people from the city’s indie game development scene.
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