The topic is too big, there’s too many people who live with it, and too many moving pieces for anyone to do a definitive statement on what depression is like for everyone. ‘Depression Quest’s’ goal was to be a basic introduction to the concept and to get the conversation started.
Depression Quest’s’ tone is one of hope. Many players have told me they’ve tried to take steps in their life to get their illness under control. I tear up while reading my e-mail on subways a lot.
One joke coming from one person can land completely flat, while somebody else delivering it in a unique way can really elevate it.
If Gamergate had happened to somebody else, years earlier, I probably would’ve been on the wrong side.
My entire career is online – I create games on the web.
I’ve been trying to reassert myself as a human and not just a current events story. I should not be the face of online harassment.
Anyone can have depression. The illness doesn’t care how much you do or don’t have.
You don’t really see many games that stand as a pure comedy games.
There are few people I can talk to about the worst parts of what happened during Gamergate.
I would not have pretty much any of the good things in my life if it weren’t for the Internet.
Growing up in a small town in upstate New York, some of the first real friendships I had were in chat rooms.
The No. 1 thing I’ve seen actually help with online abuse is when the person has a good community or a strong support network that’s savvy and that can help them.
My family are so proud of me for standing up for marginalised people in nerd communities.
It’s so weird, like, it’s not like Gamergate is the only bad thing to happen to me. I’ve been homeless before, I’ve had to come through other stuff. A profoundly abusive childhood, but at least that stuff feels like I got to move on from it, that stuff is in the past.
I have countless fake accounts on social media sending me hate and it’s hard to discern how many people are actually involved.
I just wanted to make video games.
There have been a number of film, TV, and – actually – theater productions that have been based off of me. Pretty much none of them have ever actually spoken to me, and I die in most of them.
For me, I don’t think there’s anything more human than technology. That’s a big thing separating us from other animals: we make things, we build things, we create machines.
I was nerdy and awkward and didn’t know how to talk to people – except online.
I’m so tired of cyberpunk that says using machines to make your life better makes you less human.
I like the weather in England.
Game development combines all this disparate art stuff I’d been doing into one single thing that I could use to say very specific stuff.
The reason I namecheck restorative justice so much is because that, to me, is the utopia.
I was diagnosed with depression at fourteen, but I couldn’t find any medication that did anything for me other than making things worse.
It only makes sense that as our society becomes more and more integrated with technology, we’ll start to see more cyborgs, grinders, biohackers – whatever you want to call us – thriving at the intersection of tech and body modification.
When you really boil it down, what comedy does is you expect one thing, and you get a totally different thing that’s humorous, and we all laugh. That’s generally how, just mechanically – super-distilled – comedy works.
We need to discuss what our own standards are for games writing that falls outside of journalism, and support experimental formats and routes of production that may be more tailored to them than the status quo, because the public at large seems to still think that the only games writing that exists are reviews and news.
I always want to find meaning in stuff that sucks – I don’t want it to be the end of the sentence.
Mistakes, once owned, apologized for, and buried, need to be an accepted part of life.
I like the idea of using cool cyberpunk stuff to tell really stupid jokes.
The majority of my work in games, outside of ‘Depression Quest,’ has been experimental pushes into comedy games. I think there are a lot of intersections there.
I’ve lived my entire life online.
I think as an author every character ends up low-key being some kind of self-insert.
It sucks to not have any privacy.
Sailor Moon’ was the first time I could say I was a super-duper-fan of something. I remember watching before school, at like 6 A.M. along with ‘Dragonball Z’ or ‘Beast Wars,’ depending on the months.
Being able to work in comics at all – I know I came into it from a different medium, but I’d like to stay here. It’s not like a weird touristy thing for me.
A lot of people need technology to survive. And if you’re renting it and you don’t own it or have control over it, you’re at the mercy of whoever does.
I don’t want to tell a story about how technological advancement is bad.
A friend of the family gave me a Game Boy when I was very little, and it was amazing.
Our justice system is a punitive one that’s there to sort of deal with what happens after someone’s already offended.
Ultimately, I love everything about making games, but I’ve come to hate everything about conventional sustainability, and I know I’m not alone.
The bulk of my work is comedy and I wanted to use the gaming world as a vehicle to deliver comedy.
I used to be a part-time enthusiast press games writer when I was starting to get into making indie games.
Whether you need technology in your body for medical reasons, or just want it to augment your senses or for experimentation, there are numerous fronts that open-source advocates are working on to make implantable technology safer, cheaper, and available to everyone.
A cool thing about enthusiast press is the low barrier to entry. Anyone can decide they want to set out on this path and start publishing immediately.
The bigger your platform gets – it kind of feels like being Godzilla sometimes. You make a slight move and you can accidentally knock over a building. It’s a tough thing to navigate.
Games are awesome. Stop letting jerks hijack them.
I still love gaming and the gaming community.
I still strongly feel that a lot of people who participated in Gamergate, who participated in this sort of thing, are doing so because they go into it with – they’ll believe the version of events that fits their world view.
I really, really, really love writing comics.
In terms of client & press requests, I operate under the assumption that anything I say will be blasted out in public, so I measure my words incredibly carefully because of the scrutiny I’m under.
I used to go to games events and feel like I was going home.
I have to wonder if some part of the difficulty in dealing with the repercussions of your actions on the Internet is just that we were not ever really built for being able to conceive of a global community of anything.
I’m an independent game developer – there’s not exactly an offline version of that. This is where my community is; everybody I’m close to I know because of the Internet.
It’s very alienating to become a target, and it can be really difficult to try and explain to people, to family members.
I get apologies from Gamergaters pretty regularly saying: ‘I didn’t think you were a real person.’
Making accessible games opens up the world of digital play to people living with disability, or even simply people who lack the literacy of an intimidating twin-stick controller.
I spent my 21st birthday chatting with my online friends because my husband had little interest in celebrating with me, and there was no other group of people I’d rather spend time with, even if they weren’t there with me in person.
GamerGate-promoted outlets fail at grown-up journalistic ethics, and they also fail at the cheap knockoff brand of GamerGate brand ethics, too.
People look to me for guidance or responsibility. People put a lot of stuff on me as a symbol of something, which is nothing I opted into, but it’s a responsibility I take seriously regardless.
The first week of Gamergate, I didn’t sleep or eat at all.
Any kind of gender expression is performance for me, regardless of where it is on the spectrum.
I’m a weird goofy dork.
What people don’t realize is that when you start making things outside of the convention of what is normal or good or ‘best practices,’ you’re also shedding some of the baggage that comes with the concept of what a game ‘should’ be.
I know the first time I see a ‘Goddess Mode’ cosplayer I’m going to cry in such a loud, obnoxious way that it’ll be audible from space.
Vertigo’s always been a label that experiments with new stuff and forms of subversion.
Monster Hearts is pretty cool!
I still really love the Internet.
The thing about astroturfing is that it can be really believable.
GamerGate and what it’s been doing, is wrong.
It’s weird when you stop being a person to a lot of folks and just become a weird talking point. It’s like you become a meme, and you’re not a person anymore, and people don’t mind stealing your life.
There’s an idea that, ‘Oh, the more technology you have, or the more you modify your body, the less human you are.’ I think that’s super gross, and inaccurate, and also offensive to anybody who relies on technology to live.
I was the funny-looking one who wore a trench coat and played hacky sack with the other greasy kids.
I grew up in a super small town in upstate New York; my nearest neighbour was really far away.
It always makes me super nervous how many tech companies don’t have data ethicists.
Everyone who has felt alienated by the games industry, both would-be players and creators, needs to rally together and support one another as we create a space for those of us who don’t fit in traditional spaces.
A big barrier to people getting help with online harassment is the general attitude either that it’s not a real issue – that it’s ‘only’ online – or that it’s limited to someone saying they don’t like you, and all of that stems from a basic misunderstanding of what we mean when we say ‘online harassment.’
I know that if enough people shout a falsehood, people start to think it’s true and a lot of people don’t do independent verification of everything they hear.
I’m still an engineer at heart. So if I can automate conversations that I find myself keep having to have, it seems like a good opportunity for me.
