Updated on November 16, 6:30pm EST – See bottom of article for an update.

Gamasutra published an article by Katherine Cross today, titled ‘Why we won’t just log off’: Online harassment in the game industry (archive link). In this article she talks about the harassment that game designer Jennifer Scheurle suffered as a direct result of Markus “Notch” Persson using a gendered slur against her, seen by his large Twitter audience of nearly 4 million followers.Here is what Katherine Cross wrote:

She’d posted a funny image of a statue that she’d dubbed “Mansplaining: the statue.” As the tweet blew up, it caught the attention of Markus Persson, creator of Minecraft and, of late, Twitter edgelord. He attacked Scheurle to his 4 million followers and mocked her by saying she was “cuntsplaining.” This would sire a weeks-long flood of rape and death threats that left Scheurle frightened and adrift. She said she was continuing to “feel isolated and disconnected from the people I love.”

After dedicating her entire professional life to video game development — she teaches game design in Sydney, to boot — it felt like the industry had turned on her because of Persson’s bromide. It felt like “no one will stand up for you.”

It never happened.

When told of her error she corrected the article.. and she got it wrong in the correction. Here’s what really happened.

Jennifer Scheurle posted an image of a statue that she dubbed “Mansplaining, the statue.” That much is true. Persson disagrees with the word, “mansplaining”, for reasons he went into in my interview of him for The Escapist (the mansplaining controversy starts on Page 3). He disagreed with her tweet politely.

Later, Jennifer Scheurle even sent a tweet to him that would seem to indicate they remained on friendly terms.

Persson has used the term, “cuntfusing” before, but it does not appear that he has used “cuntsplaining”. When told of her error, Cross corrected the article to say that Persson mocked Scheurle with “cuntfusing”. Wrong again. He used that word in reference to someone else entirely, with no mention of Scheurle. There is no evidence of him mocking Scheurle. His tweet disagreeing with her was not in a “dot reply” which would have broadcasted the tweet to his millions of followers.

To be absolutely clear here: Katherine Cross attributed the harassment of a female game developer, who said she felt “isolated and disconnected from the people I love” to Markus Persson for using a gendered insult that he never sent to her.

Cross does not appear to be at all apologetic about her erroneous reporting. I did send her an email about the situation but she did not respond. Instead, she took to Twitter. She does not appear to yet understand her mistake.

After updating the article with her “correction”, she did not call attention to it in an update, which is standard journalistic practice.

I’ll update this article when she figures things out. It might take a while.

Disclaimers:

-After my interview with Markus Persson I have been on what I would call friendly terms with him, exchanging joking tweets occasionally and rarely a private message or two. I have, however, been critical of him from time to time.

-Katherine Cross and I are on what I would call unfriendly terms. She once called me old in a subtweet. She’s not entirely wrong on that point.

Update November 16, 6:30pm – Since this piece was published, the Gamasutra article has been updated at least twice. The first added an update note in brackets: “[Update: edited for clarity.]” The latest update now changes the wording to say that Persson “mocked the situation” instead of “mocked her” in reference to Scheurle. However, it leaves intact the part which states that Persson “attacked Scheurle to his 4 million followers”, which is still wrong, as you can see in the tweet above.

Katherine Cross appears to still be unapologetic about attributing harassment to an “attack” by Persson that did not exist.

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