Congratulations, assholes! You did it! Your threats and harassment have driven game journalist/designer Jenn Frank and game designer/media critic Mattie Brice to leave the gaming world.

Frank, an award-winning writer and sometime game designer, came to the attention of the misogynist mob after writing a brief opinion piece for The Guardian decrying the widespread and vicious harassment of women in gaming. In addition to writing about the harassment she’s gotten — including someone trying to hack into her email account — she (as you might expect) also highlighted the misogynistic rage directed at feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian and indie game designer Zoe Quinn.

The new rule seems to be that any woman who writes about online harassment will herself be harassed, and in this case it didn’t take long.

The gamebro army, completely ignorant about how journalism works, decided that she had a “conflict of interest” — because, and I’m totally serious here, she had previously exchanged some tweets with Quinn and donated some money to her on Patreon. One critic, who put together a much-passed-around graphic outlining the charges against her, angrily denounced Frank for “vigorously defending [Quinn] while pretending to be impartial.”

There are a couple of giant problems with these accusations. First off, Frank never pretended to be impartial. She was not reporting on anything for the Guardian. She was writing an OPINION PIECE about a topic that obviously affected her. Editors don’t assign OPINION PIECES to writers who are, or who pretend to be, impartial. They assign these pieces to people WITH OPINIONS. You’re not going to get much of an OPINION PIECE from someone with no opinions.

Second of all, according to Frank (and I believe her), she had asked The Guardian to attach a brief statement to the end of her piece noting her — admittedly tenuous — connections with Quinn and Sarkeesian. The Guardian editors chose not to run it because they thought these connections were too trivial to merit a mention. They forgot that she was a woman writing about gaming, and that misogynistic assholes will seize on anything, literally anything, as an excuse for harassment.

After she started getting harassed for her alleged “conflict of interest,” Frank wrote a blog post dealing with the issue clearly and straightforwardly, and convinced the Guardian editors to append a version of her original disclosure statement to the piece:

Update: Jenn Frank has purchased and is a supporter of Zoë Quinn’s work, although this is the first article she has written on the developer. Frank has also briefly met Anita Sarkeesian.

As absurd as it is for a woman writer to have to publicly confess that she “has also briefly met Anita Sarkeesian,” as if this is some sort of crime, Frank thus answered her critics directly. And that should have been it. But of course the harassment — sorry, the perfectly legitimate criticism — continued, and on Wednesday night Frank announced that she’d had enough:

https://twitter.com/jennatar/status/507338379474649088

https://twitter.com/jennatar/status/507411937383022592

The only “conflict of interest” here was the “conflict of interest” that Frank wrote about originally in her Guardian piece. After describing her horror on discovering that someone had been trying to hack her email, she wrote:

My unabashed love for video games, my colleagues and my work have a conflict of interest with my own terror.

And, at least for now, the terror has won.

Meanwhile, game designer and media critic Mattie Brice was also extracting herself from an industry and a culture that has been grinding her down. I’ll let her tweets tell the story. (See her timeline for more.)

real talk is that people like me have been getting harassed and disregarded for a long time and patience's gone for things not being better — mattie (@thotxcouture) September 3, 2014

it feels like everyone is taking their merry ol' time to wise up and take action in a way that actually helps. don't have time for that — mattie (@thotxcouture) September 3, 2014

i need to get better and since that healing isn't coming from the outside i have to get it from the inside. shouldn't be how it is — mattie (@thotxcouture) September 3, 2014

see ya video games pic.twitter.com/0nnU6oAl7N — mattie (@thotxcouture) September 4, 2014

Congrats to all the people excising themselves from something horrible and looking to take care of yourself — mattie (@thotxcouture) September 4, 2014

If industry cared you would be properly supported. It wasn't ready for or deserving of you. Go shine elsewhere — mattie (@thotxcouture) September 4, 2014

It'll be nice not aspiring to be a part of an industry that makes me cry and hurt so often — mattie (@thotxcouture) September 4, 2014

I'm glad you all love video games a lot, these guys are tough company. — mattie (@thotxcouture) September 4, 2014

i decided i'm not spending time and energy on things that don't reciprocate. the games industry never budged to make room for me — mattie (@thotxcouture) September 5, 2014

it asked for volunteer work, it asked me to take harassment, it asked me to live in poor conditions. i won't anymore — mattie (@thotxcouture) September 5, 2014

until you figure out how to change that this industry will be a revolving door where people don't even get into the building — mattie (@thotxcouture) September 5, 2014

i won't spend any energy making you feel like your consumer products are art and deserving of critical attention — mattie (@thotxcouture) September 5, 2014

Elsewhere on Twitter, the bullies crowed over their victory:

https://twitter.com/AlrightAnon/status/507395891838590976

Another day, another couple of women ground down and spat out by the Great Internet Lady Harassment Machine, Gaming Division.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, the gamebros haven’t forgotten about Zoe Quinn either.

Here’s the screenshot; click for a larger and more readable version — if you’re not triggered by violent threats, that is.

What the fuck is wrong with these people?

Seriously, if you know, tell me, because I am fresh out of explanations for this level of blind hatred.

NOTE: This thread is a NO SHITHEAD thread. If you say anything that in any way even slightly excuses or justifies the harassment of these women, you can fuck right off to any of the eight zillion places on the internet where you can badmouth these women to your heart’s content. I and the other mods will be banning and deleting as necessary.

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