nation on moral panic in our time and how criteria for reality has changed of the years. >> i set up at the beginning of the book our biological wiring, and i wanted to show how we had evolved a culture that was designed to validate us, not contradict us. gave us the illusion that our realities were water tight when really they were riddled with weak spots and places that would crunch in. >> sunday night at 8:00 eastern on c-span's q & a. >> you're watching booktv on c-span2. it's television for serious readers. we're in new york city, at the publishers annual trade show and what we like to do is preview

some of the fall books coming out. next up we want to introduce you zoe quin. the author hoff this book "crash override: how gamergate nearly destroyed my life and how we can win the fight against online hate." what would you do for a living? >> guest: i usually -- ultimately my day job is in independent game develop are but i also help on a crisis resource center for people whoing targeted for harassment. >> host: late go to the gamer part of that. what exactly do you do? >> guest: a lot of stuff. since i'm an independent game developer i make most of the stuff on my own or a small team. i'm a programmer, writer, artist, work with the composer because nobody needs to hear my terrible music ever again but it's a little bit of everything and i try to make it for people who don't think that games are for them,s' subjects that aren't usually tackled.

>> host: what's a game you have developed that an audience that is not familiar with that know snooze i'm best known for the game -- about depression. >> host: describe what happens in this game? are you on a console, like a ps4 or something. >> guest: no. i tried to make my design as accessible as possible so it runs on a web site go to the web site and the control device is -- you're given a situation, like an everyday -- your partner calls you and asks you for toe go to a party and it presents the player with the choices and the normal healthy option is, just good out and have fun with your friends and that's crossed off in red you're given a bunch of other options like trying to to thethrough getting the flier do instead of show don't tell, it's like do don't show. it's a question that is not a bad mood that you can snap out

of. it's about taking things away. >> host: how did you get into this sunny learn from other independent game developers. the community is active and welcoming. a lot of us are either self-taught or we have studios that let us do or union thing, so a big community that makes research available to others to come in and learn how to make their own game. >> host: how big is the world of gaming? >> guest: pretty big. like, consider how many people on public transit and people are playing games on their phone. that's almost everybody plays games. and everything from board games to video games to phone games and people making cool art names and interactive experiences that took place in a building. >> host: something happened to you while your were a gamer. what happened?

what happened is particularly -- ex-boyfriend, decided that he couldn't control me himself anymore he would get the internet to do it. hut business blog post that he specifically engineered to cause as much harm as possible to myself and making me basically the perfect target for all the different -- this undercurrent of hatred towards people -- on the internet at large and just sort of gives -- wrapped me up in a nice little bow and give me to a target. actually has a workshop to make a post go viral like with marketing campaigns like trying to sell guns and it's trying to ruin your ex-golf's life. >> host: how close did he come. >> guest: worked quite well. still get death threats and my family gets death threats. they've circulated photos of me

and one person hired a p.i. to hang out and do research on me and dig through the trash. caught on outside of gaming with fringe right wing people who are now calling the atrise. i was the target because i refused to back down and called it what it was. and didn't just height. >> host: what does this have to do with politics. >> guest: one of the first people capitalize on this was -- breitbart has run numerous piece about me and my family. i think the first one was called pie lying greedy promick excuse maker of video games and that linked to nude photos of me and my dad's home address and stuff like that and they just sort of -- it's weirdly extremely personally and not personal as all at the same time because i was a convenient standin for the

anxiety from the gamings side and so many people from all different walks of life are making games and for people like them and they're that, this is mine you can't be here, and then there's just the entire online people who like yelling at anybody they perceive to be remotely feminist, even if your feminist amounts to please stop sending me death threats. so many axises of nice make trash that lined up. was in the wrong place at the wrong time. >> host: when you first found this blog post online, where were you and how did you find it? >> guest: it's on me. i was actually out with friends, with my new boyfriend, about to -- he accepted a job in france and i was going to stay with him for three months and crash on his floor and we were celebrating my birthday and my phone start buzzing and buzzing

and buzzing and its sort of like counting the time between thunder claps so see how far the storm is. the time between buzzes got shorter and shorter and my phone was blowing up with slurs, really sexually charged threats, and i sort of had to work backwards from that. all i knew is a friend of mine said, don't know if you know this but somebody just registered on these forums and posted this really far out there thread about you. it got deleted immediately. he shopped it on different forums until a place that didn't care picked it up and ran with it. just watched from the rest of the night and gotten used to screen shooting everything for harassment and it has been -- people don't believe you so i have a roared history of

everything -- a recorded history of eight. like gigabytes and gig go georgia bites of this unfolding. >> so your book, "crash override" where did that title come from. >> guest: came from what i think is more important to the story which is what we did bit. my boyfriend at the time, who has helped me -- we used to for a while call -- meet friends and call what we called prehappy drinks so the next few months that it was like if we left a computer for more than ten minutes we would come back to something being on fire. so we had laptops with us, battery charges, mobile hot spots so we could be online, and sure enough, another independent game developer had gotten hacked so he and i just sort of went into action while we were out with a friend him said you remind me of that movie "hack

"hackers" and we gave it that name and because the meaning of the overriding thing crashing down around you. felt like it had that double meaning. didn't want this back to just about about this terrible thing that happened. the entire second half is what can we do about it? what have we been doing about and it what works and what doesn't. that's the book i want fed write. >> host: when did you get involved in the gaming world. in your youth? >> guest: i grew up isolated so i was a gamer but kind of a weird one. i didn't have a nintendo or play station. my dad had a -- it died because it was not the best radio. like $700 at launch and a big push into fmb, which is using video instead of computer generated graphics. it's like you can't get better

graphics than real people, except that all of the acting is really terrible and most of the games are -- being kind of a weird kid about it. and it wasn't until later i got into mainstream consoles and computer gaming, and if i ran more than aol and manning and fire fox at the same time it would crash. i was ten years behind. my dad got an consolata garage sale in i think '97 or '99, way after it was -- nobody was making games for so it i had a limited thing, aside from a game boy i had. started to meet other gamers online and that's when i sort of entered the community and started to play some games competitively. wasn't until i was 23 that it even knew i could make a game myself. it sounds silly.

seemed like this magical thing that happened to somebody else. >> host: were you one of the few women. >> guest: it has hard to say. they don't get as much support or if they do they get attacked so it's a tradeoff. the number are smaller for sure but it's like definitely i think underestimated how many of us there are. so there's not a ton. >> host: from your book "crash override": we really need to interrogate the extra traditional witness dom that mostly white, male, decisionmakers have answers to downtown lar wasment and we need a truly diverse range of thinkers to be welcomed interest -- welcomed into the conversation. what's the background on that sunny think that statement come from going to a number of

silicon valley companies that established ten -- where someone comes up and having a crisis immediately, we can go to our tech partners and say we have built this relationship and we know what they are, we know this is something that you don't want to happen on your platform so you take action on this immediately. otherwise the reporting to some -- like significant volume of stuff that is just nothing. but the problem i was running into so much there is everybody that i was talking to in leadership positions were white men who -- or white women who thought that involving the police, example, was the best possible situation, which doesn't make sense if you're already a marlingallized person who is parring targeted by harassingment and the police can

we used like squadding or people get your home address and call in a fake bomb threat another your house, that a s.w.a.t. team goes to your house and you don't know and they shoot you dead. that's an institution that has numerous issues with violence towards marlingized people being a solution to marginalize el people is tone deaf and waiting for the law to catch up, and we just need better laws iranyone negligent. when i'm in these rooms and they were brought in to have the viewpoint alongside of ours had the same conversations over and over, having to tell these basic facts this is not relevant to my experience, or did you even think about, like, naming

policies, which is directed at transpeople and they find information and threaten or harass them. a lot of tech companies weren't thinking about that being a form of hard -- harassment. that's not threats. it's just a name. that's why more perspective is needed and silicon valley is very insular, the people making our laws are very -- there's not a ton of -- having everybody make these decisions and not have these perspectives is frustrating and i can't even give off ol' them bass i have my own limitations. ...