I don't know much about Zoe, other than that she apparently made an overrated game, but the same goes for her.
I am in awe of someone who chases drama on the internet as much as you seem to and you doesn't know the skinny about Gamergate.
This is my totally not skeptical face!
It's more that I can't bring myself to care. There are far more interesting and impactful things to worry about, even by the standards of internet drama. As far as I'm concerned, it's just another case of inconsequential bullshit getting overblown by the media.
Consider how tactically Lana chose to badmouth Quinn despite most of the news about her being how she has been harassed.
If I said that all I know about Obama is that he may or may not be secretly a Kenyan would you consider that likely to be the only bit I have learned about him?
Well, pardon me for not caring about an overhyped flame war. And honestly, it seems kind of hypocritical that you're so concerned about online harassment (that, AFAIK, hasn't resulted in any serious long-term consequences) when you don't show nearly as much concern about people getting physically assaulted by a certain faction of left-wing extremists.
Besides, what I said was a judgment of her game, not her. There's a difference between saying "Avatar is overrated" and saying "James Cameron is a prima donna".
Also, while I'm here, I'd like to talk about the Damore case and why it upsets me.
I'm willing to concede that Damore's memo may have been flawed. Maybe his data were faulty, maybe his conclusions were wrong, maybe his recommendations wouldn't work.
But you know what? That doesn't justify what's happened to him.
Nowhere in his memo did he claim that women were inferior to men, just different. He never said that we couldn't handle pressure, or that we shouldn't work in tech, or anything else you'd expect to find on RoK. All he said was that Google's approach was counterproductive and that there were better ways to accommodate female employees. And the media raked him over the coals for it.
You know what I saw precious little of during the media crusade against him? Scientific criticism. What I saw was, by and large, hysterical screaming about his alleged sexism. He didn't deserve the hitpieces against him, and he certainly didn't deserve to be fired. I'm definitely not against his memo being discussed from a scientific point of view, even negatively. However, I am against emotionally-based criticism of him. Because that's essentially what this amounts to.
Besides, aren't you afraid that this might have a chilling effect on scientific inquiry? If you can't question prevailing ideas without getting fired from your job, do you think people will be willing to challenge predominant theories?
And in any case, firing him didn't prove him wrong. It didn't change his mind. All it did was make him into a victim. Even if he was completely wrong, firing him was not the right course of action.
Let me tell you a story. When I was a teenager, I found a website claiming the moon landings were faked. I thought what they had to say was interesting, so I checked to see if there were rebuttals. There were, and I found them satisfactory. On the other hand, if anybody who questioned the moon landings ended up hit with a media smear campaign and fired from their job, all while hardly anybody gave actual scientific criticism of their ideas, I'd be a little suspicious. Wouldn't you?