Zoe Quinn

Zoe Quinn was born on January 11, 1987 in New York and was raised in a small town near the Adirondack Mountains. As a little girl she developed a love for video games. Her favorite game was ‘Commander Keen,’ a series of side-scrolling platform video games. Her early love for video games later led her to a career in video game development. As a teenager she suffered from depression.

Quinn believes in “Human enhancement” and has implanted an NTag216 chip in the back of the hand and also has a magnetic implant in the left ring finger. Coming to her love life, she was once in a relationship with Eron Gjoni. The liaison ended in a very ugly manner.

Zoe Quinn ventured into video game development quite by chance. Even though she loved to play video games from a young age, it was only in her mid-20s did she seriously consider making a career out of it. She attended a six-week course on video-game creation and then started developing her own. Having suffered from depression as a teenager, she designed the game ‘Depression Quest,’ an interactive fiction game dealing with the subject of depression.

She wanted to create greater understanding about depression through this game which received praise from critics for its portrayal of depression and its educational value. She later created the Game Developer Help List as a means of bringing experienced game developers and novice developers into contact with one another. She is also a writer and has contributed chapters to the books ‘The State of Play: Sixteen Voices on Video Games’ and ‘Videogames for Humans,’ among other literary pursuits.

In 2014, Zoe Quinn became the target of a malicious online harassment campaign following a lengthy blog post on her which her ex-boyfriend had published. In the post he had accused Zoe of cheating on him with several men and also had made several other allegations. These led to a certain section of netizens angrily targeting Zoe Quinn and bombarding her with abuses and threats. These incidents sparked the Gamergate controversy and brought to wide attention the harassment and sexism faced by female gamers in the predominantly male oriented gaming world. In order to help others facing similar issues, Quinn co-founded Crash Override, a private network of experts to assist victims of online harassment, in January 2015. The network joined forces with Randi Harper's Online Abuse Prevention Initiative in March 2015.