I love people that kind of have those life experiences that take them different places.
— Brianna Wu
A lot of people don't know this about me but actually I started in politics.
My mom bought a computer in the '80s to do accounting, and she was so smart at computers that we spent all our time with them. My childhood was sitting on the floor of her office and figuring out how to program with my mom.
The truth is, the game industry is a really incredibly difficult place for women to work.
Gamergate isn't the problem - it's a symptom of an industry that is deeply sexist and unable to understand it.
I don't want to be a hardware engineer. That seems like a terrible job.
The public will forgive you almost anything if you're honest about it.
I don't regret standing up to Gamergate at all.
I've rarely talked about Obama's share of the blame for the rise of the alt-right and Gamergate.
With my company, Giant Spacekat, I was very angry about the lack of games that portrayed women positively in the video game industry, so I launched my own studio, gave a lot of very talented women jobs, and we made some of the most awesome, empowering games in the business.
I think what a lot of women in the game industry saw with Gamergate is they saw if they came forward, help was not going to come.
There are some men that are very threatened by the fact that women play games nowadays.
Let's not glamorize abuse.
There's a real sense - that we have to get past on the left - that every person who voted for Trump is evil.
The main thing Twitter needs to focus on are implementing its rules more uniformly. If outing a transgender woman is against Twitter's rules, that needs to be implemented every time.
I am a programmer. If I write code, I don't evaluate the results by what I hope the code will be. I evaluate it by what happens when I compile it. I evaluate it by results.
I think there is a war on women in technology.
I'm a reasonably accomplished journalist. I've worked as an investigative journalist, I've done crime beat stuff.
If you run a website where people can congregate, you have a moral responsibility to make sure that community is not harassed.
My dad is in Mississippi. He exited the Navy and made a ton of money as an entrepreneur.
In some ways, the real damage of Gamergate is pushing the public's idea of sexism so far to the extreme, that changes in the professional sphere seem unimportant.
In software engineering, we have the term 'technical debt.' When you don't do a job correctly, unaddressed problems become harder and harder to solve.
What's the fundamental problem that VR solves better than anything? To me it's straightforward. It's story. VR tells stories better than any medium.
The real question is whether or not the communities that rule the Internet can make their spaces safer for users, especially women and minorities.
I look at my own party, and I see that we've taken this technocratic, academic, elitist liberal class philosophy as far as it can go, and we got our butts kicked - and I don't know what else to do other than get involved myself.
I still quite enjoy watching Fox News because I think it makes me think through my arguments and make sure I'm on the right side.
I grew up listening to Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, and it took me getting out into the real world and understanding what I faced as a woman in my career to really open up my eyes.
The video game industry traditionally has been a very male-dominated field. You know, with the advent of the iPhone, the number of women gamers exploded.
Gamergate is a criminal operation to harass women.
The cost of speaking out is so high for women, I understand why most decide not to.
It is not a secret that I am a feminist and I have more liberal views and a lot of these GamerGaters have more right-wing views.
The tech industry has a strong bias towards technical solutions to social problems.
Anyone can go to 8chan, a website entirely for Gamergaters. You can read what they post about me and other women. It's not just casual sexism, it's angry, violent sexism.
Obviously, whenever the government is getting involved with speech, it gives me a lot of pause. I have a background as a journalist, so that's something that I take very seriously.
I work in the tech industry and my husband works in biotech. He's head of IP for a company listed on the NASDAQ. And we have a lot of discussions in tech and biotech about the role of unionization in our industries.
Entrepreneurship is in my nature.
The first game I remember being ridiculously passionate about was Super Mario Bros. 2. It was the first game where you could play as Princess Peach. It wasn't just a game where the boys had their adventure. Peach was in the game and she was so powerful there.
The truth is, the sexist behaviour that really holds women in games back doesn't come from the moustache-twirling cartoon villains of Gamergate. It's the sexist hiring practices of our journalistic institutions. It's the consistently over-sexualised designs we see.
GamerGate has had an almost indescribable toll on my family.
Something that's hard for me, I remember being a child in the '80s and looking at this field. It was a field I wanted very much to go into, but I didn't see people who looked like me working in video games. You can't really be it if you can't see it.
The Internet has done so much for so many. It allows women and minorities to have access to education, training, and information that sometimes isn't available to them for whatever reason.
The Democratic Party tends to have this hypereducated ruling-class mentality, and we need to realize that's not making us connect with a lot of voters.
In politics, I am facing a lot of structural sexism.
I was adopted into an extremely right-wing religious family.
My big lesson from Gamergate is asking the men in charge to do the right thing does not work. So we need women, we need people of color in positions of power not just in the game industry but at social media and tech companies and in Congress.
Gamergate taught me that I was stronger than I knew that I was.
To stand up to GamerGate, that's my choice. I can't make that choice for the women I work with.
To its credit, Twitter is at least making an effort to curb hate speech towards transgender people, training its staff how to respond.
Unfortunately, I have the equivalent of 7 PhDs in harassment on Twitter. As one of the primary targets of Gamergate, I've had hundreds and hundreds of threats to my life on Twitter's platform.
It's not like I'm advocating that we ban 'Call of Duty' or anything silly like that, I'm asking is for companies to look at their hiring practices, to hire more women... and make sure they portray women in their games in a socially responsible way.
