Born: 13 August 1987, United States
Died: NA
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
Zoë Tiberius Quinn is an American video game developer, programmer, and writer who developed the game Depression Quest, released in 2013. In 2014, a blog post by Quinn’s ex-boyfriend sparked the Gamergate controversy, in which Quinn was harassed extensively (including doxxing, rape threats, and death threats), along with other non-male professionals in the gaming industry. The following year, Quinn co-founded Crash Override, a crisis hotline and resource center for victims of online harassment, which joined forces in with Randi Harper’s Online Abuse Prevention Initiative in March 2015.
Quinn moved to Canada at age 24 and made their first foray into video game programming, attending a six-week course on video game creation after seeing an advertisement in a newspaper. They later told The New Yorker, “I felt like I’d found my calling.”
One of their earliest works, Depression Quest was conceived as a “choose-your-own path” adventure following the troubled life of a person suffering from depression, where many of the “correct” paths were blocked due to the protagonists’ struggle with mental self-care.
Quinn created the Game Developer Help List to connect experienced game developers and novice developers.
In 2015, Quinn served as a narrative design consultant for Loveshack Entertainment’s iOS game Framed, appeared in the documentary GTFO and wrote a chapter for the book Videogames for Humans. Quinn also contributed a chapter to the book The State of Play: Sixteen Voices on Video Games, detailing their experiences creating Depression Quest and the subsequent harassment. They also wrote a scenario for “Widow’s Walk”, an expansion for Betrayal at House on the Hill, released in 2016. Quinn has also worked on Fez, Jazzpunk,and They Bleed Pixels.
In January 2018, Quinn’s role as Narrative Designer at Heart Machine’s upcoming game Solar Ash Kingdom was announced. Later that year, their career as a comic book writer began with their work with illustrator Robbi Rodriguez on DC Vertigo’s Goddess Mode. Their participation in the upcoming issues of IDW Publishing’s The Addams Family: The Bodies Issue and Marvel’s Fearless was announced in July 2019.
During Gamergate, the harassment Quinn faced escalated to the point where they left their home and began working with the authorities to identify those responsible. Quinn told BBC News the harassment had consumed their life, causing them to feel as if “surrounded by nothing but hate – it’s virulent, it’s everywhere” and that they were “just trying to survive”. The attacks 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 Quinn also noted that Gamergate had targeted “the people with the least power in the industry”. “[I] 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?”
On September 24, 2015, Quinn and fellow Gamergate target Anita Sarkeesian spoke at the United Nations about online harassment. In their speech, Quinn spoke about the need for tech companies to provide proper moderation and terms of service that protect marginalized groups, as well as providing better protections for transgender women and victims of domestic violence on the Internet. Quinn publicly identified as non-cisgender in January 2017.
In September 2017, Quinn published the memoir Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate, which was nominated for the 2018 Hugo Award for Best Related Work (i.e., non-fiction work related to science fiction or fantasy).