When I sat down with her in January 2015, Zoe Quinn looked like she'd been through hell.

In the public eye, Quinn was a number of things: an independent video game developer; a withdrawn, idiosyncratic presence at recent game conferences; and a visible victim of—and advocate against—a rising tide of anonymous abuse and harassment. The Zoe Quinn I met at a restaurant in the Pacific Northwest on a brisk January afternoon was more troubled than I’d ever seen before. Fingers shaking, eyes shifting, posture sulking.

Only a few months earlier, the video game maker’s Twitter feed had become dominated by responses to, and stories about, the anonymous online harassment that she and her peers had received in the wake of the #GamerGate hashtag. GamerGate is hard to categorize—leaderless, amorphous, flitting from one issue to the next at a moment’s notice—but Quinn became involved early on due to allegations an ex-boyfriend made about her romantic relationship with a games writer.

Quinn’s own in-depth investigation revealed that some of those who first popularized "GamerGate" used ethics in game journalism as a smoke screen for hateful and even abusive speech. Since then, much of the movement centered on "social justice" and "politics" in video games. Quinn remained a top GamerGate target, and her frequent responses seemed equal parts angry and anxious.

Quinn, an admitted novice in the game development world, previously garnered attention after releasing a free, narrative-heavy game called Depression Quest. The 2013 title revolved around the fear and ennui typical of clinical depression, and as a game, it limited players’ available choices as a way to foster empathy for such disorders. Depression Quest wasn’t “fun”—and that was the point . “You spend a lot of time sleeping, hating yourself, and having very little energy or motivation,” the game told players.

Quinn had also become a presence at game conventions in recent years—visible at panels and parties, sometimes amiable and engaging but at other times acerbic and withdrawn. One consistent quality was a lack of salesmanship; she was at these events to make and learn about games, not shill for them.

Now, she was thrown into a limelight she never really wanted.

Quinn recapped the highlight—er, lowlight—reel of her past half-year. There were all-hours calls to her father's house in which people shouted words like "whore" and hung up; photos of her taken without her knowledge, then sent to her with violent threats attached; leaks of nude photos she'd sent to an ex long ago; online discussions about the best murder weapon to bring to her next public speaking event; countless posts encouraging her to commit suicide.

“This is my life now for the foreseeable future,” she added. “Investing any hope in the idea that this is going to end seems pointless.”

She listed other women in the game industry and the years-long streams of cruel and even violent messages they had faced, people like Anita Sarkeesian and Kathy Sierra. They had become Quinn's "case studies" in how her own story was likely to unfold.

Quinn contacted the Boston police department... "The shittiest feeling of it was that they remembered me. 'Oh, is that still going on?'”

"The only positive outcome of GamerGate, other than I guess Intel donating a shitload of money , is that at least people are talking about the fact that this happens, because GamerGate didn’t come out of nowhere," Quinn told Ars. "It has been happening to Anita [Sarkeesian] since 2012. The shit’s always been here. But now we are talking about it because there is critical mass. And that’s the most frustrating thing. That's one of the things we were dealing with when it first came out. So many good people didn’t want to speak out, so we end up with this situation where the only people controlling the narrative are the fucking psychos.

“Even if you vanish, or even if you stick around, no matter what, nothing changes. These [anonymous attackers] never stop. So, all right, accept that as a given. And then it’s like, who I was before all this, she's dead. That life is over. That’s just a fact.”

Quinn took another drink.

“I wasn’t making much money, but it was enough to not starve. That’s all I needed. I was making small things and putting them out there. I was happy in my niche. Things were going well. But that center is gone forever because I’ll never have that peace again.”

Then she collected herself and looked me square in the eyes.

“So it’s like, who am I? How do I operate in these new sets of circumstances? What do I do now?"

“The only other copy is backed up in my hand”

Quinn was clear: don't expect a reasoned, life-after-GamerGate tell-all in this conversation. She wasn't through this chapter of her life just yet—and, according to her public comments before press time, still isn’t—so she left her latest hiding spot alongside boyfriend Alex Lifschitz to remind the world that the meanest and weirdest parts of GamerGate weren’t nearly as “over” as the mainstream had begun to think.

Days before meeting me, Quinn had written a lengthy Tumblr post clarifying that the worst parts of the GamerGate movement were still negatively affecting her life and the lives of her peers. In her case, she was facing new scrutiny, this time over leaked court records regarding a restraining order she had filed against ex-boyfriend Eron Gjoni; his August 2014 blog post about their former relationship helped set the GamerGate movement in motion, and it included at least one accusation of journalistic impropriety that proved to be unfounded. Quinn's September data dump, meanwhile, alleged that Gjoni was an active member of the ongoing harassment campaign.

Because of that January court record leak, "some people were loudly declaring that they were going to involve themselves," Quinn said. Her hearing with Gjoni was taking place in Boston, so Quinn contacted the Boston Police Department to notify them about the malicious things she had seen GamerGate proponents post online.

"The shittiest feeling of it was that they remembered me," Quinn said. "'Oh, is that still going on?' Like, yeah."

Quinn and Lifschitz continue to actively monitor chat rooms, online forums, and other active GamerGate breeding grounds on a daily basis. Lifschitz described a period starting in August of "six weeks, 16-plus hours a day, monitoring people talking about killing my girlfriend or trying to drive us to suicide."

During that time, the two say they witnessed all manner of personal-info and photo doxes—their own, their family members', their friends'—along with attempts to hijack e-mail, Web, and Skype accounts of everyone involved. One of Quinn's first questions to Ars was whether we used two-step authentication on any protocol we were speaking on; she wouldn't contact us via e-mail until we'd confirmed that.

The surveillance consumes much of their lives, and it made our conversation confusing at times; any given sentence might be peppered with out-of-nowhere exclamations about active hacking attempts. At one point, Lifschitz was telling a story about his parents when Quinn interrupted—"Ha, fuckers!"—to tell us someone had fallen for a trap she'd set on her WordPress site. She had set up a notification request for any failed attempts to log in using the "admin" username (a name that doesn't exist in her WP install) that would forward identifying IP addresses her way due to suggestions she'd seen that someone might try to break into her site.

"Fucking shitbags. I got you," she said.

The duo showed me their major line of online-account defense: a pair of NFC chips, called YubiKeys, embedded in necklaces that they wore at all times.

"No one can get into our laptops without these," Quinn said. "Nobody can get into my passwords without these. No one can get into my server without this. We’ve gotten very good at security measures. The only other copy of this is backed up in the chip in my hand."

As proof, Quinn entered a PIN code into her smartphone, then held its screen up to her bare wrist. It unlocked.

Listing image by Sam Machkovech