Zoë Quinn
Zoë Quinn (born 1987) is an American video game developer, writer, and artist. Quinn developed the interactive fiction Depression Quest, a Twine game released on Steam. In 2014, a blog post by her ex-boyfriend sparked the Gamergate controversy, in which Quinn was subject to extensive harassment.
Early life
Quinn was born in 1987 and spent her childhood in a small town near the Adirondack Mountains in New York. Growing up, she often played video games. One of her favorites was Commander Keen, an MS-DOS game featuring an eight-year-old protagonist who builds a spaceship with items found around his house and then travels the galaxy defending the Earth. As a teenager, Quinn suffered from depression; she was diagnosed with the condition at the age of 14. She has described receiving little sympathy or assistance from school district officials, who were, she says, "less than understanding about teens with depression and suicide issues".
Career
At the age of 24, Quinn moved to Canada, where she made her first forays into video game programming. Her first game was the result of a six-week course on video-game creation that she attended after seeing an advertisement in a newspaper. In a later interview for The New Yorker, she said of this experience, "I felt like I'd found my calling."