>> we've got books up at the front counter, deepak will be up here signing. thank you all. >> booktv recently visited capitol hill to ask members of congress what they're reading this summer. >> congressman, what are you reading this summer? >> it's the life and times of robert kennedy. first of all, robert kennedy was a new york senator, and i'm a representative from new york. schlessinger wrote an incredible book about bobby kennedy's life, his political life, the history of his family, and it's certainly an enjoyable read. >> booktv wants know what you're -- wants to know what you're reading. end us your summer reading list

@booktv or instagram at book underscore tv or post it to our facebook page, facebook.com/booktv. booktv on c-span2, television for serious readers. >> and 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 during the summer is preview some of the fall books that are coming out. next up we want to introduce you to zoe quinn the author of "crash override: how gamergate nearly destroyed my life and how we can win the fight against online hate." zoe quinn, what do you do for a living? >> guest: i usually make weird art, but ultimately i guess my day job is an independent game developer. but i also help run a crisis resource center for people being targeted by online harassment. >> host: we'll get to that, but

let's go to the gamer part of that. what exactly do you do? [laughter] >> guest: a lot of stuff. since i'm an independent game developer, that means i make most of the stuff on my own or with small teams. i usually work with a composer because nobody needs to hear my terrible music ever again. but it's a little bit of everything. and i try to make them for people who normally don't think games are for them with subjects that aren't usually tackled. >> host: what's one of the games that you've developed that maybe an audience that's familiar with that knows? >> guest: i think i probably am best known for an interactive game about living with depression. >> host: and describe what happens in this game. are you on a console like a ps4 or something? >> guest: no, i try to make my design as accessible as possible to as many people as possible, so it my ones on -- simply runs on a web site. you're given control of a situation. like an everyday thing, your

partner calls you and asks you to go to a party, and what it presents the player is with some choices x it's the normal, healthy option is, oh, yeah, go out and have fun with your friends. that's always crossed off in red. and you're sort of given a bunch of other options that try to show through getting the player to actually do instead of show, don't tell. it's like do, don't show what it's like living with depression that it's not simply a bad mood that you can snap out of. it's about taking things away and removing urgency. >> host: how did you get into this work? >> guest: i actually learned from other independent game developers. the community's really active and really welcoming. we, a lot of us are either self-taught or we have left larger studios to sort of do our own thing. so there's this big spirit of community and giving back and making research available to other people to come in and try to learn how to make their own games. >> host: how big is this world of gaming? >> guest: pretty big. it's, i mean, like, just consider how many times you've

been on public transit and people are playing games on their phone. that's like, almost everybody plays games now, so it's e enormous. and it encompasses everything, board games, phone games, there's people making really cool art installation games and sewer active experiences -- interactive experiences that take place in a building. >> host: something happened to you while you were a gamer, and that's what your book is about. what happened? >> guest: what happened is particularly spiteful on abuse of an ex-boyfriend after i finally cut him out of my life. decidedded if he couldn't control me anymore, he'd try to get the internet to do it for him. he posted in this extremely long, rambling blog post, but he specifically engineered it to cause as much harm as possible to myself and make me a target for this undercurrent of hatred towards progressive people, march ginnallized people in games -- marginalized people in

games and on the internet at large. he actually workshopped how to sort of make his posts go viral with marketing campaigns instead of trying to sell gum, it's trying to ruin your ex-girlfriend's life. >> host: how close did he come? >> >> guest: it worked quite well. i still get constant death threats, my family, they've circulated nude photos of me, found out where i live. one person spent upwards of five figures in hiring a p.i. to hang out and do research into me and dig through my trash. it caught on outside of gaming with a fringe, right-wing what people are now calling the alt-right, but back then they didn't have a word for it. all of them just sort of -- i was the target du jour, especially because i refused to back down and called it what it was and didn't just hide. >> host: what does this have to do with politics? why is this an alt-right thing? >> guest: well, i mean, one of the first people the capitalize

on this was -- [inaudible] breitbart has run numerous pieces about me, about my family. i think the first one was called lying, greedy, promiscuous -- [inaudible] video games, and that linked to, like, it linked to nude photos of me, and my dad's home address and stuff like that. and they just sort of -- i was -- it's weirdly, extremely personal and not personal at all at the same time because i was a convenient stand-in for all this anxiety from the gaming side of with the fact that so many new people from all different walks of life are making games themselves. and people like them, and they're sort of like, oh, no, this is mine, you can't be here element of it. and then there's the entire element of people who like yelling at anybody they perceive to be remotely feminism even if it amounts to please stop sending me death threats online. so really, there's so many axes of nightmare trash that lined up. and i was in the wrong place at the wrong time, i guess. >> host: o -- zoe quinn, when

you first found this blog post online, how did you find it? >> guest: it found me. i was actually out with friends with my new boyfriend. we were about to -- he was about to accept a job in france, and i was going to go stay with him for three months since i can do what i do, and then we were celebrating my birthday, and my phone just started buzzing and buzzing and buzzing. it's sort of like counting the time between thunder claps to see how far the storm is. the time between buzzes got shorter and shorter, and my phone was just filling up with all of, like, slurs, really, really sexually-charged threats, and i sort of had to work backwards from that. all i knew was a friend of mine had said, oh, hey, i don't know if you know this, but somebody just registered on these forums and posted this, like, really far out there threat about you.

it got deleted immediately, so he had, like, shopped it around to different forums until finally a place that didn't care picked it up and ran with it. and i just watched from, for the rest of the night because i e had already gotten used to screen shotting everything because harassmenting against women in games has been an issue for quite some time. one of the biggest things is people don't believe you. so i have a recorded history of everything, like, gigabytes and gigabytes of people, of this unfolding. so it's a very weird sort of excavation effort in making this book. >> host: so your book, "crash override," where did that title come from? >> guest: so it came from what i think is more important to the story which is what we did about it. my boyfriend at the time who's helped me co-found crash override, we used to for a while call, meet friends for what we would call pre-hacking drinks because the attacks were so frequent.

for the next few months, it was like if we left the computer for more than ten minutes, we'd come back to something being on fire. so we had laptops with us, battery chargers, mobile hot spots so that no matter where we were, we could get online. and sure enough, another independent game developer had gotten hacked, so he and i sort of went into action while we were out with a friend, and he was like, oh, you guys remind me of that movie, "hackers." i love campy cinema like that, and also because of the meaning of, like, overriding this thing crashing down around you felt like it had that double meaning that was really important to me because i didn't want this book to just be about, oh, look at this terrible thing that happened. the entire second half is, well, what did i do about, what can we do about it, what have we been doing about it and what works and what doesn't. and that's really the book i wanted to write. >> host: when did you get involved in the gaming world? was this in your youth? >> guest: i grew up pretty

isolated, so i was a gamer, but kind of a weird one. like, i didn't have a nintendo or a playstation growing up. my dad had gotten this thing called a 3-d, 0 which had shipped in 1993 and immediately died. it was $700 at launch, and this was this big push into using videos of actors instead of computer-generated graphickings. you can't get better graphics, except all of the acting's really terrible, and most of the games aren't that good. so i grew up playing that and being kind of a weird kid about it. and it wasn't until later that i got into the mainstream console computer gaming. i had a garbage computer that i cobbled to together, but if it ran more than instant messenger and fire fox at the same time, it would crash. so it took me a while to get into mainstream gaming. i was always about ten years behind. my dad had gotten a console at a garage sale in, i think, '97 or

'99, so, like, way after it was dead, nobody was making games for it, so i had a very limited thing to play aside from a gameboy that i had. but i started to meet other gamers online, and that's really when i sort of enteredded the community, started playing some games competitively. it wasn't until i was 23 that i even knew i could make a game myself. it sounds silly. it seemed like this magical thing that happened with hundreds of people somewhere else, not something i could do myself. >> host: were you one of the few women? >> guest: yeah -- >> host: at that point? >> guest: i mean, it's hard to say because there's definitely always been a lot of people who aren't men in games, but, like, they don't get as much visibility and support, or if they do, they get attacked. so so it's a trade-off. the numbers are smaller, for sure. but it's like definitely, i think, underestimated how many of us there are. but still there's not a ton. [laughter]

>> host: from your book, "crash override," we really need to interrogate the traditional wisdom that mostly white, mostly male, mostly western decision makers have touted as answers to online harassment, and we need a truly diverse range of thinkers to be actively welcomed into the conversation. what's the background on that? >> guest: i think that statement largely came from going to a number of those silicon valley companies that crash override works with to establish, like, a channel where if someone comes to us and they're having a crisis immediately, we can then go to our tech partners and say, hey, we've built this relationship, you've trained us on your terms of service, we know what they are, we know this is something you don't want to happen on your platform, can you take action on this immediately. otherwise the reporting systems are dealing with, like, a significant volume of stuff that's just nothing, right? but the problem i would run into

so much there is that, you know, everybody that i was talking to in leadership positions were white men who, or white women who thought that involving the police, for example, was the best possible situation. which doesn't make sense if, you know, if you're already a marginalized person who's dis proportionately targeted by harassment, and we use in a country where people get your home address, call in a fake bomb threat if that's happening at your house, hoping that a s.w.a.t. team will go to your house, that you'll think someone's breaking in and resist and they'll shoot you dead. saying that institution that has, you know, had numerous issues with violence towards marginalized people being the solution to a problem that marginalized people disproportionately face is tone deaf. and waiting for a law to catch up and pushing off all the responsibility onto, oh, we just need better laws or more arrests

is negligent. it's like every time i would be in these rooms, usually with other people who, you know, were brought in to have that viewpoint aa longside ours was, had the same conversations over and over having to tell these basic facts of, no, this is not relevant to my experience as a marginalized person or did you even think about, like, detonating policies which a specific sort of violence usually directed at trans people where they find information and threaten or harass them with it. it's like most -- a lot of tech companies weren't even thinking about that being a form of harassment. it just looks like a name to to them. so it's colleague how could that -- like how could that be harassment? it's not a threat. so that's one of the reasons why more perspective is needed. silicon valley is a major issue where it's very insular. people making our laws are very, there's not a ton of diversity there either. so having it, having everybody sort of making these decisions

and not have these perspectives is frustrating, and i can't even give all of them because i have my own limitations and stuff like that. >> host: here's the book. it's called "crash override: how gamergate nearly destroyed my life and how we can win the fight against online hate." it publishes in september. the author, zoe quinn. >> guest: thank you. >> booktv recently visited capitol hill to ask members of congress what they're reading this summer. >> next on my reading list is hill billy elegy. it's a fantastic book, and everything i've heard about it is wonderful. it talks about associational life in america, an issue i've been looking into on the joint economic committee. and it talks about some of the struggles of people not only in appalachia, but throughout the country. >> booktv wants to know what you're reading. send us your summer reading list via twitter @booktv or

instagram, at book underscore tv or post it to our facebook page, facebook.com/booktv. booktv on c-span2, television for serious readers. [inaudible conversations] >> good evening, everyone! if you'll all take your seats, we'll get this show on the road. my name is robert, i am the cofounder of the institute for america's future and currently senior adviser to people's action which is a national organization with 30 grassroots affiliates in 20 states. and it's my pleasure tonight to be here to introduce to you many