To stand up to GamerGate, that's my choice. I can't make that choice for the women I work with.
To its credit, Twitter is at least making an effort to curb hate speech towards transgender people, training its staff how to respond.
Unfortunately, I have the equivalent of 7 PhDs in harassment on Twitter. As one of the primary targets of Gamergate, I've had hundreds and hundreds of threats to my life on Twitter's platform.
With major films costing hundreds of millions of dollars to make, Hollywood is an industry that tends to repeat patterns when they make money.
Since Gamergate, many women I know are reluctant to speak publicly on gender issues, because they fear - rightly - that they will be targeted and harassed.
For most of 2016 and 2017, I would say probably 90% of my Twitter feed was automated bots sending repetitive messages at me. Someone would basically pay bots to send me messages over and over and over again. It made Twitter nearly unusable.
Facebook, Apple, Tinder, Snapchat, and Google create our social realities - how we make friends, how we get jobs, and how mankind interacts. And the truth is, women don't truly have a seat at the table.
In 1999, I was running my first tech start-up and learning the Unreal Engine, the tool that would define my career as a game developer, when news of Columbine ground all work to a standstill.
In software engineering, we have the term 'technical debt.' When you don't do a job correctly, unaddressed problems become harder and harder to solve.
Walking is great, I guess.
If you don't know what Gamergate is, my God, do I envy you.
Gamergate gave birth to a new kind of celebrity troll, men who made money and built their careers by destroying women's reputations.
I have an unfortunate history with Ethan Ralph. Like many women in the game industry, I've been doxed by him multiple times.
Even in the '80s and '90s, many white Southerners were still bitter about court decisions that required racial integration of the schools. It wasn't that they were outwardly opposed to white and black people attending school together, it was that the rulings threatened their proud identity as independent Southerners.
Gamergate is a criminal operation to harass women.
It's not like I'm advocating that we ban 'Call of Duty' or anything silly like that, I'm asking is for companies to look at their hiring practices, to hire more women... and make sure they portray women in their games in a socially responsible way.
When I was a teenager, the most valuable American companies were in finance and manufacturing.
Without competition, Silicon Valley will stop taking risks and will stop innovating.
I love video games dearly.
I say this as an engineer: We are profoundly bad at asking ourselves how the things we build could be misused.
