You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost) (31 page)

“No . . . no, I don’t want to be . . . late for work.” My voice was as unsteady as my hands as I fumbled with the phone.

Within a few minutes I got my password reset. Only to discover that I couldn’t disable the comments plug-in from my phone. Crap.

At that point I started hyperventilating. All I could picture was awful people storming my house while I was out of town and killing
my dog. Totally irrational, I know. But he was very old and friendly and the perfect target for malicious intent.

I knew the longer my address was up, the more it would be shared and stored and available to anyone forever, bad or good.

In my heart, I knew it was too late to prevent that anyway.

I finally contacted a friend who disabled the comments on the post. (Which I will never turn on again, forever and ever and ever, yay!) There were more than a thousand comments in the thread at that point, a lot of them vile and antagonistic and awful, exactly what you WOULDN’T expect as a reaction to an essay with the theme,
Let’s hold hands and get through this, guys!
But such was the level of vitriol at the time. Oh, and there were also four separate people who posted my address with malicious intent. A few were business addresses and a few were definitely NOT.

In the scene we filmed that night, my character, Charlie, murdered someone on-screen. The experience was more than a little cathartic.

I’ll leave the analysis of why #GamerGate happened, what drove it, and why it lasted as long as it did to someone’s kick-ass graduate thesis. (Hope you get an A!) But hostility to outside criticism has long been a weirdly accepted part of gaming culture. You don’t generally see hard-core knitters reply to someone who says, “Knitting is cool, but the needles could be made from more environmentally sustainable wood,” with “Oh no you don’t, idiot. My knitting is
perfect the way it is, don’t you DARE try to change it. You’re obviously a fake. What’s the diameter of that yarn? Don’t know? Go die in a fire!”

The mainstream media was already publishing “What the hell is going on in the nerd world?” articles about #GamerGate and quickly picked up on my story. “Felicia Day’s Fears Come True” became the headline of the week, mostly emphasizing the violation of my personal information, because, you know, that was the sexy part. The
Guardian
,
Time
, the
Washington Post
—even the
New York Times
—all reported on my doxxing. Most of the gaming and online community showed an amazing amount of support. But, to me, the reaction of #GamerGate itself was the most fascinating.

In the initial comments section of my Tumblr post, which I disabled, there are hundreds of condescending, hateful comments attacking me as a woman, labeling me a weakling and a fake gamer.

One of the top discussion points in #GamerGate forums was about how I “wasn’t really doxxed.” Some claimed I did it myself for publicity (?!) or qualified it as inconsequential because the information wasn’t hard enough to obtain.

Just to clear the record, it is true to say I wasn’t doxxed in the exact way that the other victims of #GamerGate were. I was “lucky.” Because (and I’ve never said this publicly, but hell, let’s just tell-it-all, baby!) I’d been doxxed by 4chan already, the year before.

In 2013, a group on that forum tracked down a ton of personal information on me. They shared all that and pictures of the outside of my house and my license plate amongst themselves. A disturbed fan used that information and showed up at my front door, made his way INTO MY HOUSE, and afterward, proceeded to obsess over me online in an erratic and abusive way to the extent that I was terrified he would show up again and do something violent.

So that’s why so many haters were able to post my address so quickly a year later. Efficient, huh?

The savviest members of #GamerGate saw all the media coverage
blowing up over my situation and decided that my doxxing was making them look bad, so they rushed to send me well wishes of support on Twitter. But the support was almost always accompanied with the caveat: “REAL #GamerGate doesn’t do stuff like this.”

This was the part that was the hardest for me to understand. Because whether the people who did the actual act were in the group or not was beside the point.

#GamerGate as a movement created an environment for attacks to flourish. Hell, it
ORIGINATED
with them. A great quote from a video series called
Folding Ideas
put it best: “The use of fear tactics, even if only by a minority, creates an environment of fear that all members enjoy the privilege of, whether they engage in them or not.” This was the very reason I felt afraid to speak up in the first place. And what I feared most? Yeah, it happened. In light of that fact, the qualified apologies felt hollow at best. Especially when, for every nice comment from #GamerGate, I saw dozens of comments like the following.

It took six months for me to become comfortable with walking my dog at night (
Let’s be crazy tonight, Cubby, and not carry mace!
),
and I will never feel 100 percent safe in my own home again. I have had people sitting in cars outside my window, certified letters sent to my address just to say “I know where you live,” and phone calls from strange area codes at all hours of the night. Now that I know how easy it is for anyone with an agenda to track me down, feeling safe is a cute, nostalgic feeling.

What frightened me the most about my #GamerGate experience was the possibility that this could be the future of the internet. That the utopia I thought the online world created, where people don’t have to be ashamed of what they love and could connect with each other regardless of what they looked like, was really a place where people could steep themselves in their own worldview until they became willfully blind to everyone else’s.

I guess the internet can be both things. Good and bad. And I have been “lucky” enough to experience the crazy extremes of both.

I had to think long and hard about writing this chapter, and I know there’s a good chance I will have more of my privacy violated as a result. There will certainly be another flood of online attacks because of it.

So after all that, would I speak up again?

Absolutely.

Because shame is a very good barometer. The very reason I felt guilty about NOT speaking up is WHY I should have spoken up in the first place.

I recently got a message from a mother who said, “I asked my fourteen-year-old what #GamerGate was and he said, ‘It’s because women are trying to ruin video games.’ ” I was so upset. Unless people are speaking out to counteract that idea, how will that kid ever think differently?

Over the years, I’ve heard many times that
The Guild
and what I do online got them into gaming and web video. I’m proud to be able to represent something, however small, to some people. Because, in my own experience, sometimes a little representation is all it takes to inspire people to follow a path they never would have considered.

As a middle-school-aged kid, I fell in love with the fact that Nora Ephron, a woman, wrote and directed
Sleepless in Seattle
. It was my absolute favorite movie, and I watched it enough times to destroy the copy I had on VHS. (I don’t know how many times that is, but typing that just now made me feel old, like someone in the 1960s waxing nostalgic about their Victrola.)

Everything about that movie was amazing. The romance, the miscommunications, the idea that I was destined to have baby-making times with Tom Hanks. And while I watched, time and time again, I had this vague sense of a puppeteer figure behind the scenes. A person who was responsible for building a world I wanted to be a part of SO BADLY. She was unseen, but her hand was in every detail. Emphasis on
HER
.

I cried when Nora Ephron died in 2012, which was bizarre to me at the time. Usually when a celebrity dies I think,
Oh, that’s sad
, then get irritated when their name trends on Twitter (because sometimes they AREN’T dead, and then I feel like a jerk for assuming anyone over forty is ready to swan dive into a crematorium). I never met her in person. I never had a poster of her on my wall or sent letters to her fan club (like I
did with Richard Grieco; YES, that happened), but with her death, a little bit of my childhood inspiration disappeared. She had made it possible
for me to imagine my own future in the world of film. Her very existence showed me it could be done and allowed me to dream about following the path she laid behind her. Without her work, I doubt it would have ever occurred to me that such a path existed.

Now, I certainly am not saying that I consider myself an icon like Nora Ephron or that I should be held up as the world’s ultimate example of “GAMER FEMALE!” but the idea of representation is important. And I think the world of gaming needs people from all walks of life to speak up and represent the positive side of what we love. Because, let’s be real: gaming’s reputation is NOT good in that area right now. Currently, if it were a restaurant, it would get a VERY bad Yelp review.