Crash Override

1

Crash

This is me on the night of August 15, 2014, a few minutes before the life I had built for myself—after clawing my way out of poverty, homelessness, isolation, and mental illness—would be destroyed by someone I had once loved.

The guy next to me at the restaurant is Bill, and I'm waiting for him to turn to his right and see the weird face I'm making at him. Bill and a handful of local San Francisco friends had come out for one of the "I'm in town, let's hang out!" events that happen when you live and work online—suddenly a person from your long-distance network of friends and colleagues is in the area, and you drop everything to see them. This visit to the Bay Area was going to be my last chance to see these friends for a while, since I was about to move from the dingy Boston sublet I currently called home to the south of France for a few months with my boyfriend, Alex. He was starting a new job there, and since I had built a small but sustainable full-time career out of making niche games for the digital marketplace, I had the luxury of being able to work from anywhere.

Alex and I had been dating for only a week, though we'd been friends for a lot longer. Our friendship had turned into something more when he had shown me profound kindness while I was shaking off the remnants of my abusive relationship. He saw the good in me when I couldn't see it myself. It soon became apparent that we had accidentally fallen in love at the worst possible time. We decided to give it a shot anyway, even if it meant going from zero to living together for a few months. The worst-case scenario, we figured, was if it didn't work out, we'd remain friends and I'd spend the duration of my visitor's visa making games in France. It was risky, it was romantic, it was like the end of a bad romantic comedy—but I've never been one to turn down an adventure.

Back at the restaurant, I checked my phone just in time to see that dream die.

Internet-to-English translation: Someone had paid the $10 registration fee to get an account on Something Awful, a comedy website and message board that I'd participated in for about a decade, to post something long and unflattering about me. The friend tried to reassure me that the post was already gone, that it had been yanked by Something Awful's admins almost immediately for violating the bejesus out of the forum rules and was unavailable even in the archives. Unsure who would do something like this to me, or what the post even said, I emailed a moderator for details.

All this was happening on my phone while I was sitting with my friends outside a restaurant in San Francisco. I kept looking at my phone, only halfway paying attention to the people around me. I had no idea what had been posted, but I'd be the first to admit that over the course of my life, I've said and done a lot of things that I regret. My mind racing, I tried to mentally catalog a lifetime of fuckups and faux pas, assuming any or all of them could have been made public. I was glued to my phone, constantly refreshing whatever I could, as if mashing the buttons would magically summon the information faster and I could stop feeling so anxious and paranoid. I excused myself from the table and went to the bathroom.

Sitting in the bathroom, it hit me: this had to be my abusive ex. It had to be Eron.

I started hyperventilating in the cramped stall. The relationship with Eron had been brief, intermittent, and unhealthy. I had tried to end it several times before everything had finally blown up for good in a dingy hotel room, a month before I found myself trembling against this stall door. Even after we'd broken up, his control hadn't worn off—he continued to manipulate me for several weeks before Alex helped me finally escape his orbit. I didn't yet have enough time and distance from the situation to really realize how bad things had gotten, and I was still making excuses for every terrible thing he had done. I didn't want to believe it. I couldn't believe it. I subconsciously touched the place on my arm where he'd left bruises the last time I saw him, and a cold sense of horror began to overtake me.

I went back to my seat at the crowded table. Alex looked worried and squeezed my leg. I texted him my suspicions, since I didn't want to worry my friends by discussing it at the table. Especially not Bill—Bill, who had stayed up with me in that same dingy hotel the night of the breakup and had seen the bruises on my arm, and who'd been worried about me ever since.

I soon started seeing tweets referencing the now-deleted post:

The Something Awful moderator I had contacted finally got back to me, providing me with the email of the person who had made the post. Eron's college email. The moderator also told me the message had been posted in the section of the forums dedicated to video games, so the people reading it would have been my fans, friends, and colleagues. The mod promised to send me the contents of the post once they had time to look into it, and they apologized profusely for what I was now facing. It had to be bad if they were concerned for me—the people on Something Awful are all about being goofy and ironic at all times. When comedians are too worried about you to make jokes, you know you're in trouble.

At this point, I couldn't hide my clear distress from the table. I gave my friends a quick overview as Alex rubbed my shoulders and told me it was going to be all right. Bill slung an arm around me and made his "this sucks, and I don't know what to say, but I care about you" face, kindly holding back his contempt for The Ex, which he'd made plain since the first time he'd met him. I put my phone on vibrate and turned it facedown, hoping this would stop me from compulsively checking it. But it started to buzz. And buzz. And buzz. Even when something online is deleted, it's almost never really "gone." The post had been copied and pasted, had migrated. It was already going viral.

I tried to focus on the conversation at the table, but the agitated rattling of my phone was the only thing I could hear, the gaps between notification buzzes becoming shorter and shorter. It was like counting the seconds between thunderclaps to see how far away the storm is and knowing it's getting closer. Like a lot of people my age or younger, I have the nervous habit of constantly using my phone to distract myself from the gnawing social anxiety I feel in group settings. Feeling this anxious while trying to restrain myself from my usual coping mechanism was torture. I held out for a few minutes, then folded and checked my phone again.

Messages were flooding into my mentions on Twitter:

A lot of the messages contained links to a thread on 4chan, another forum, whose members are best known for two things: making pictures of cats go viral and using the power of anonymous mobs to devastate the lives of people they've deemed worthy of their hate. The same post that had been deleted from Something Awful had been posted in a subsection frequented by people who made a hobby of bitterly sneering at men and women with active sex lives. This community naturally latched on and started planning how to "ruin" me, as if I were a stand-in for every woman who had ever told any of them "no."

The thread included a link to an external WordPress site with my name on it. Even typing the title of it sets my teeth on edge, so going forward, I'll be referring to it as the Manifesto. The Manifesto was almost 9,000 words about me that could have been boiled down to just one: "slut." Accusations of infidelity were woven together with gross editorializing, private pictures, chats edited and chopped together with running commentary, and the self-congratulatory, contemptuous humor that I had once found charmingly quirky.

It might sound salacious, but honestly, it wasn't that exciting—unless you're the kind of person who enjoys strangers' relationship drama. His screed was about a woman few people had ever heard of supposedly doin' it with some other people they'd also never heard of.

The Manifesto was carefully crafted as a call to arms against both an adulterous whore and something allegedly more insidious. It was broken up into acts with charming, catchy titles, such as "The Cum Collage May Not Be Entirely Accurate." He'd even provided his readers with a catchphrase, "Five Guys Burgers and Fries," based on his chief accusation: that I had cheated on him with five people. One of the so-called Five Guys was a games journalist. To broaden The Ex's coalition of support, this imagined affair was painted as "evidence" that successful game developers like me were in cahoots with our reviewers, high-fiving in bed as we relegated everyone with integrity to a life on the sidelines of our industry.

It didn't seem to matter that the games journalist in question had never actually reviewed my work. This was a calculated move to pander to the worst elements of games culture. For years, gamers like me have been trying to make video games more inclusive as our medium has exploded out of a subculture and onto everyone's phones. As with all rapid expansions, there have been growing pains. There's been a lot of pushback from some gamers who see gaming as "theirs" and reject the industry's progress toward inclusion. Most people who love games know that they're an amazing medium with limitless potential. All these bullies know is that anyone who looks or sounds different from them is a threat, endlessly repeating the sad cycle of the bullied emulating their own monsters.

As you can probably guess, the Venn diagram of hostile posters in the 4chan thread and people who want to keep anyone different from them out of gaming is basically a circle.

The Ex knew this. He had been sitting in the audience when I had given a talk about this conflict in gaming, and when we'd first started dating, he had decried that kind of behavior. But now that I had finally walked away from him, he couldn't control me. So he gave a community that loves a witch hunt a woman on whom to take out their insecurities, gift wrapped to the stake with kindling at her feet.

I was patient zero of the cultural phenomenon that would come to be called GamerGate.

Months later, after this had blown up into an international incident, Zak Jason of Boston Magazine interviewed The Ex and detailed how he had "extracted details from her Facebook, text, and email accounts; how he tracked her movements and shadowed her conversations. The process he described… sounded as if he were gathering the pieces of a horrible machine, with each component designed to be as damaging to her as possible." He had even posted screenshots of conversations he had had with a friend, strategizing how best to make the post go viral and destroy me.

Even the parts of The Ex's manifesto that weren't pure vitriol painted a clear picture that he had never seen me as a human, only as an unspoiled moral goddess or a cartoon sociopath. I wasn't sure which one made my skin crawl more. My biggest professional success was a game about living with my mental illness—I'm far from perfect, and all of my work centers on trying to express that maybe we're all kind of screwed up, and maybe that's okay. Everything I make centers on the messy and beautiful nature of humanity and being open and vulnerable. Seeing how he saw me made it even more clear that he had only ever seen me as a "thing"—and he had flat-out told me as much right before the breakup. And now he was trying to convince other people to see me the same way.

His plan worked. The notifications kept pouring in. I knew I was in trouble, but I had no idea how bad things were about to get. My friends and I retreated to Fred's apartment after it became clear that this unfolding disaster wasn't slowing down or stopping. Fred was a good-natured friend of a friend whom I had just met that night, and he managed to walk the delicate line between supportive and pushy, wrangling my friends who were trying to distract and cheer me up while the more pragmatic members of the group got to work to push back against the tide of hate that was flooding in around me from all angles.

My Wikipedia page had been edited: it now included a time of death, coinciding with my next scheduled public appearance. My friends and I reverted it, only to find ourselves in a tug-of-war with numerous would-be vandals, removing anti-Semitic slurs, swastikas, and threats from my page all night. The comments sections on my blogs and games were targeted. All of the sites I used—to keep in touch with my global network of friends and loved ones, the places that are a fundamental part of my life—were now flooded with messages threatening to rape me and telling me to kill myself.

My struggles with depression and anxiety compounded the torment. After years of therapy and work to recognize and manage my illness, all of the self-destructive thoughts inside my head (that I refer to as "Trashbrain") were now externalized and repeated back to me, heavily seasoned with threats. That deep, dark part of me nodded along with every horrible accusation that flew at me, regardless of how divorced from reality it was. My worst fears and insecurities were being given voice: my work had never been good enough for anyone to really like it, and anyone who told me otherwise was just pretending out of pity. I was nothing more than a fat, ugly slut. The life I had worked so hard for and built up from so little was never really something I deserved or would be allowed to keep.

"Yes," Trashbrain told me, "the other shoe finally dropped. Everyone figured out I'm worthless; I was right all along."