After the panel

Today I attended a panel about women in the special effects industry. At some point one of the panelists talked about Gamergate. Most of the people in the room — not being from a game dev background — hadn’t known about it.

She described the general level of polarization and acrimony that resulted from the conflict, and how a general tone of negativity and mutual accusation came to pervade much of the discussion. Among the sad outcomes of that sequence of events, she said, was a general feeling of disheartenment throughout the community.

This was particularly unfortunate because in the years leading up to Gamergate, there had been a sense among game developers of possibilities opening up, of new and innovative genres being created, and of an expansion of the audience for computer games. But in the wake of Gamergate, she said, that feeling of optimism largely gave way to a general sense of depression. Instead of being joyful and hopeful, many people in the community found themselves feeling sad.

After the panel, I told her that I really liked what she had said. I also suggested she might try to work through that lingering feeling of sadness by playing Zoe Quinn’s Depression Quest.

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