twitter apple tv or instagram@book_tv or posted to our facebook page, facebook.com. /book tv. tv on c-span2, television for serious readers. .. >> host: let's go to a game

are part of that. what exactly do you do? >> guest: a lot of stuff. since i'm an independent game development that means i make most of the stuff on my own or a small team. i do some design. usually work with a composer, but it's all bit of everything. i tried to make people who think the games are for them. , what's one of the game should help that may be an audience is familiar with that? >> guest: probably best known for my game about living with depression. >> host: describe what happens in the skin. are you on a console like a ps for something? >> guest: i tried to make my design as accessible as possible to his minipill as possible so you go to the website and the controls are very simple.

you given a situation like an everyday thing like a partner calls you, as you go to a party. it presents choices and the normal option is about and have fun with your friends. you are given a bunch of other options that try to show to getting the players to actually do instead of show don't tell. what it's like to live with depression. it's not bad news you can snap out of. it's a game about taking away and removing agencies. >> host: how did you get into this work? >> guest: i learn from other independent game developers. the community is active in welcoming. a lot of us are self-taught art we have left larger studios to do her own thing. it's this big spirit of committed in giving back to make research available to other people to come in and tryin tryo learn how to make the own games. >> host: how big is this world of games? >> guest: pretty big.

consider how many people have been on public transit and playing games on the phones. that's almost a buddy plays games. it's enormous. it encompasses everything. board games, video games, people make a really cool art installation games like interactive expresses that take place in a set building. >> host: something happened to you while you are a gamer. that's what your book is about. what happened? >> guest: what happened is particularly -- my boyfriend, i cut them out of my life. i decided he couldn't control the anymore. he try to get the internet to do it. he posted extremely long rambling blog post that is specifically engineered to cause as much harm as possible to myself to make me basic with a perfect for all the different tabloids, the undercurrent hatred towards possessive people in games.

on the internet at large answer gives, wrapped me up in a nicely bow and give them a target. he workshop to make the post go viral. instead of trying to sell, it's trying to ruin your ex girlfriends life trauma how close did he come treasure it worked quite well. i still get constant death threats. my family still gets death threats. they found a where i live. one person sent upwards of -- spent upwards of five figures to either an investigator. it caught on outside of gaming with french right-wing. all of them just sort of, i was the target du jour because i refuse to back down and called it what it was. >> host: what does this have to do with politics?

>> guest: one of the first people to capitalize on this was breitbart, new birth pieces about me and my family pic i think the first one was called lying greeting promiscuous. that link to nude photos of me and my dads home address and things like that. they just sort of, it's weirdly extremely personal and not personal at all at the same time because all this anxiety from the gaming side with the fact so many new people from all to the likes of life are making games. there's that this is mine, you can't be here out of it of there's this entire element of people who like yelling anybody they proceed to be remotely feminist even if your offended amounts to please stop sending me death threats online. there are so many nightmares that lined up perfectly. i was in the wrong place at the

wrong time i guess. >> host: zoe quinn, when you first on this blog post online where were you, how did you find it? >> guest: it found me. i was actually out with friends with my new boyfriend. we were about come he was about to accept a job in france and is going to go stay with them for three months, crash on his horse like a do what i do from anywhere in the world. we were so direct my birthday and my phone started buzzing and buzzing and buzzing and buzzing. it's sort of like counting the time between thunderclaps t two cfr the storm is. like the time between buses got shorter and shorter. my phone was filling up with all liflike slurs, really, really sexually charged threats and assert that to work backwards from that. all i knew was a friend of mine had said i don't know if you know this but somebody just registered these forums and posted this like really far out

there thread about you. i got deleted immediately but he shopped around to different forms a pilot a place that didn't care picked it up and ran with it. i just watched for the rest of the night because already got used to screenshot everything from women in games has been an issue for quite some time. one of the biggest things people don't believe you. i have ever record history of everything, like gigabytes and gigabytes of people of this unfolding. it's a weird sort of excavation effort in making this book. >> host: so your book "crash override" where did that title come from? >> guest: 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 helped me cofound crash override we used to meet friends for will

recall pre-hacking tricks because the attacks are so frequent picked the next few months it was like if we let the computer for more than ten minutes would come back to something. we had laptops with us, battery chargers and mobile hotspots but no matter where we were we could get online. sure enough another independent game developer had gotten hacked so he and i went into action while we're out with a friend. you guys remind me of that movie hackers. so crash override is one of the handles in that and i love cinema like it so we give that name. also because the meaning was like overwriting 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 look at this terrible thing that happened. the entire second half is what did i do, what can we do? what works and what doesn't and that'actually the book i wantedo write. >> host: when did you get involved in the gaming world?

was this in your youth? >> guest: i grew up pretty isolated site was a gamer a kind of a weird one. i didn't have a nintendo or playstation going up. my dad had gotten this console which had shipped in 1983 any metering died because is not the best idea. it was like $700 at launch and a big push using video factors instead of computer-generated graphics like you can't get a better graphics than like real people accept all of the acting is really terrible and most of the games are not that good. i grew up playing that. being a weird kid about it, and it wasn't until later i got into the mainstream computer gaming because i had a garbage computer i cobbled together from spare parts. it took me a while to actually get into mainstream gaming. i was always about ten years behind. my dad had gotten the consul at

a garage sale and i think 97 or 99 i forget, when after everyone was making games sort so i had a limited thing for quite some time aside from a game boy that i had. bubut i started to meet other gamers online and that's really when i sort of injured the community and started playing some games competitively. it wasn't until i was 23 even knew i could make a game myself. this 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 at that point? >> guest: i mean, it's hard to say because it's like there's always been a lot of people who are not men and games, like they don't get as much support. or if they do they get attacked. it's like 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. >> 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 the silicon valley companies to establish channels where if someone comes often having a crisis easily, you can go to our tech partners and say we have built this relationship, you trained is on your terms of service. we know what they are, we know this is some you don't want to happen on your platform, can you take action? otherwise the report in systems are delighted significant bottom of stuff that does nothing.

the problem i would run into so much, 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 are already and marginalized person, and we live in a country where the police can be used for stuff like squatting with people get home address, call in a fake bomb threat happening at your house, opening a swat team go to house, you think someone will break in and you will resist and it was you today. think that institution is numerous issues with the violins towards marginalized people being the solution to a problem disproportionally face is tone deaf. waiting for the law to catch up and push out responsibilities

onto we just need better laws or we just in better arrest is negligence. it's like every time in these rooms usually with other people who were brought in to have a viewpoint alongside ours, have the same conversations over and over and having to tell these basic facts of no, this is not relevant of my own experience, or did you even think about policies directed at trè trans people with a find information and threaten or harass them with it, about tech companies were thinking about that being a form of harassment. it's just like a game to them. how could that be harassment? so that's one of the reasons why more is needed. silicon valley, people making our laws are very, there's not a ton of diversity there either. so having everybody make these

decisions and not have these perspectives is frustrating. i can't even get all of them because i might 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. >> every year look even asks members of commerce what you're reading this summer. here's a look at some of the books house speaker paul ryan has on his summer list. >> booktv wants to know what you are reading. send us your summer reading list

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