"Oh, Anita, you're so beautiful and sexy, you know that?" was the nicest terrible thing a random Twitter user said to Anita Sarkeesian, creator of the Tropes vs.Women in Video Games series, as he peppered her with threats of rape, death, and the address of her home and that of her parents following the posting of her latest video on Monday. The video, which would be right at home on PBS in tone if not content, suggested that many mainstream games represent women as accessories and shorthand rather than as humans, a viewpoint that generated swift and unrelenting rage.

The attack on Sarkeesian was among a number of incidents in the last few weeks that exposed some of the ugly (yet familiar) attitudes and prejudices that remain deeply ingrained in the gaming culture. This time, those sentiments have gotten tied up in ethical arguments in an attempt to highlight the toxic behavior.

A lie gets halfway around the world

The tide of abuse first surged over Zoe Quinn, creator of the game Depression Quest, who got a deluge of negative attention, abuse, threats, and harassment over a blog post written about her by an ex-boyfriend that was published August 16. The post, composed of narcissistic analysis mixed in with screenshots of several online conversations, exposed many personal details about Quinn irrelevant to her profession or professional conduct.

Details from the post were quickly spun into a conspiracy. Based on the lone fact of Quinn's relationship with one Kotaku writer, Nathan Grayson, who quoted her once in an article and never covered or reviewed her game, rumors circulated that Quinn had "alleged affairs with video game journalists" which influenced coverage of her game. There is no evidence to support this assertion, and the only fact that it's based on—that Quinn began a relationship with Grayson some time after he quoted her in an article and never published anything about her again—disproves it. The other two people named in the post are a sound designer and Quinn's boss, who do not work in gaming journalism.

Yet the accusations went on, along with doxxing and hacking of Quinn's information and accounts. The onslaught continued with assertions that Quinn made up the harassment, that she used devious womanly wiles to get her (free) game some coverage, and that she portrayed herself as a victim to receive donations. Around August 17, Phil Fish, the creator of Fez, tried to step in and defend Quinn. After he received pushback, Fish threatened to cancel unnamed projects.

Fish then said he had his Twitter and Dropbox accounts hacked and e-mail accounts, passwords, and banking information published in response to his defense. Fish shamed those who were attacking Quinn on his Twitter account: "All you people attacking Zoe are cowards. Attacking a woman the easiest way you can. Despicable cowards, all of you." Fish followed by announcing his Fez IP was for sale because he "want[ed] out" of the gaming industry.

Women as background decoration

Then came the vicious attacks on Sarkeesian and her video series, which looks at how women are portrayed and used in everything from AAA titles to indies. Sarkeesian published an installment Monday that was the second of two parts studying "women as background decoration" in games. The video includes examples from games like Watch Dogs, where the main character watches multiple instances of violent domestic abuse and, rather than take even a second look at the woman who suffers it, is required to amble off and track down the man who did it.

Sarkeesian's videos, which are extremely well-researched and insightful, always draw a measure of harassment and abuse from the stereotypical gamers, who are typically vitriolic toward issues of diversity. This time, the video reached all the way to the likes of Joss Whedon and Tim Schafer. The amplified message earned Sarkeesian an avalanche of threats, including rape, death, and harm to her family. Sarkeesian ultimately left her home and reported the threats to the police. "I’m safe. Authorities have been notified. Staying with friends tonight," she wrote on Twitter early Wednesday.

Enough outlets have, by now, highlighted the profound irony that one woman who dared point out some of the misogyny in video games was so deluged by misogynistic threats over how there is no misogyny in video games that she was driven into hiding. Quinn's story lacked entirely in irony; instead it was just a good old-fashioned example of a woman's personal life used to inflict professional damage, despite the fact that those two things are not related at all.

Many of the people slagging off Sarkeesian and Quinn bind their arguments up in bigger issues, saying that Quinn's situation shines light on ethical quandaries in games and gaming journalism, and Sarkeesian's illuminates crowd-funded "scams" where "social justice warriors" "cherry-pick" evidence to undermine the massive business and culture of video games, rightfully owned by a particular kind of white man.

All of the tertiary accusations against Quinn (that she invented attacks or abuse) are aimed to discredit her. The same goes for Sarkeesian: the structure and content of her videos are extremely common to critical analysis, as the New Statesman points out. But when that style of criticism gets applied to video games, it feels like a threat to a certain insular, and extremely vocal, community for whom, as Leigh Alexander writes for Gamasutra, their "identity depends on the aging cultural signposts of a rapidly-evolving, increasingly broad and complex medium."

For gaming to be taken seriously as an art form, it needs to be able to stand up to cultural critiques, and gamers need to be able to separate a developer's personal life from her work. But it especially holds the medium back when these situations not only fail to play out in a civilized way, but become opportunistic embroiling of women in the "problems" of gaming culture, creation, and coverage.

It is, on a sad meta level, a real-life version of what Sarkeesian discusses in "Women As Background Decoration Part 2": women being treated as less-than, harassed and harangued out of the conversation, in service to a different, "bigger" problem. And every time it happens, it advances the goals of the most poisonous "gamers," while regressing everything else.