Targets of Gamergate Launch Anti-Harassment Support Site

“So, is Gamergate over?” someone asked me at a bar recently.

I gave them a detailed but incomplete answer: Intel has pledged a ton of money to promote diversity in the workplace after inadvertently aiding the sexist harassment campaign last year; meanwhile, game companies shrank from addressing the core of the controversy, the place of women in gaming (though credit where due — many individuals within the industry spoke out, and Blizzard vaguely denounced the movement more than most).

What this answer excludes is rather big: The people who were actually attacked and threatened in the name of videogames. Now two of the individuals who fall into that group are trying to help their peers.

Zoe Quinn, the game developer whose ex-lover sparked the first wave of the online movement in August, and her boyfriend, Alex Lifschitz, have launched an “online anti-harassment task force” called Crash Override. Staffed by a group of anonymous “online abuse survivors,” the site says it aims to both stop cyber abuse before it starts and help those who have been attacked “rebuild” their online lives after, for example, being doxed.

Pre-empting a common pro-Gamergate claim, the site says it does not “take retaliatory action against abusers.”

I’ve reached out to Quinn twice with some questions about Crash Override and will update if I hear back.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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