GamerGate Zoe Quinn rape story self-published, pulled from Amazon

I can’t say I ever expected to have an excuse to write about GamerGate here on TeleRead. The movement generally hasn’t had anything to do directly with e-books.

Until now.

TechCrunch carries the story of a 3,000 word e-book posted for sale on Amazon, in which five men rape a “controversial video game designer” named “Zada Quinby”—a very thinly-veiled Zoe Quinn, the game developer who has been the focus of many of GamerGate’s attacks. Lest there be any doubt, the book had “#GamerGape” (sic) in its title. The e-book has since been taken down, but the page can still be viewed on Google’s cache for a while.

This sort of antic is exactly why ridiculing “Actually, it’s about ethics in video game journalism” has become a popular meme lately. Every time GamerGate hits the news, it’s not because they’re taking the moral high ground and demanding journalistic reform. It’s invariably because one of them just lowered the bar even further. Small wonder they’re being investigated by the FBI.

Sure, when you see something like this happen, a few other GamerGaters will immediately disavow it. But it goes right on happening, because GamerGate is not so much an organization as it is a collection of people who share the same hatreds and get the same ideas from reading posts in the same places. There’s no real leadership to tell them, “Cut it out, you’re making us look bad.” So they just do what they feel like. Which is, in many of their cases, pulling this kind of crap, and making all of them look even worse.

And far too many of them seem to go in for it. Remember, these are the people who think it’s okay to post rape and death threats to anyone they don’t like. (Isn’t it funny? After Columbine, all the gamers hastened to argue that there was no connection between video games and school shootings…and now we have people threatening school shootings, because of video games.)

An anonymous poster on the KotakuInAction Reddit claims to have written it as a parody and not been a GGer. And that’s certainly possible, though it’s hard to take at face value anything someone says anonymously on a known GamerGate forum. You don’t write a story about gang-raping a barely-disguised real person as a joke. It smells strongly of a setup to give themselves plausible deniability. No matter who takes responsibility, either way Quinn ends up seeing herself smeared in public yet again.

But on the bright side, at least this serves as a demonstration of how easy e-book self-publishing has become, and perhaps how seriously people are starting to take it. It’s being seen as a legitimate means for hate groups to spread their vitriol. That’s got to be some kind of progress, right?

And, more seriously, Amazon taking it down as soon as they found out about it shows a lot more responsibility than their reaction to that pedophilia manual back in ‘10. When that e-book was brought to Amazon’s attention, Amazon first tried to defend the book on first-amendment grounds before someone with a bit more sense pulled it several hours later. No sign of that kind of thing here. Amazon is to be commended for its prompt response.