GG's Franz Ferdinand moment:Eron Gjoni and The Zoe Post
In August,a guy called Eron Gjoni wrote a long and detailed revenge blog about his ex girlfriend and her apparent sexual indiscretions with a number of other guys in the gaming scene,complete with photographs,pages upon pages of chat logs,videos and a selection of uncensored names.
Eron Gjoni.Credit:Twitter
It's a rambling,confused diatribe by someone coming to terms with a relationship that went sour and wanting to convince himself and anyone else who'll listen that it's the other person's fault. It's pretty clear reading it that we're getting one side of a complicated story,and that it's a side he should probably be telling a therapist in private with the objective of healing up,not airing to the entire internet with the objective of getting revenge.
But with revenge as its aim,the blog was highly effective. Following Gjoni's post (humiliating enough in itself) his ex became the target of systematic,sustained abuse by a growing community of gamers who took it upon themselves to harass and threaten her,and hack and publicise her personal information so others can join in the game in an increasingly terrifying way.
Zoe Quinn's Depression Quest
The subject of Eron Gjoni's revenge blog is Zoe Quinn,an independent game developer who createdDepression Quest - more of an interactive fictional choose-your-own-adventure story than what you'd normally recognise as a game - with the aim of raising awareness about what it's like to live with depression. The irony of GamerGate blowing up around Zoe Quinn over the entangling of her personal relationships with promotion of her work seems to be lost on most people.