Felicia Day, actress, gamer and geek-culture royalty, spoke out about GamerGate on her blog, and had public information leaked online soon after.

Day, star of The Guild and Dr. Horrible’s Sing-A-Long Blog, expressed her feelings on GamerGate for the first time publicly on Thursday, in a blog post. In her post, Day admits that she has been afraid of speaking out against GamerGate, and decided to finally address the online movement after realizing that the fear of GamerGate had affected her love of gaming. “I realize that letting the actions of a few hateful people influence my behavior is the absolutely worst thing I could do in life. And not an example I want to set, ever,” Day wrote, encouraging others not to let GamerGate scare them away from gaming.

#GamerGate

GamerGate – or #GamerGate – is an online movement which claims to stand up for journalistic ethics and what it means to be a true gamer. However, the movement has become aggressive after coming out against feminist critics, such as Anita Sarkeesian. Sarkeesian famously became a GamerGate target when she condemned the portrayal of women in many popular video games. She was recently forced to cancel a talk at Utah State University (USU) after a person who claimed to be affiliated with the GamerGate movement threatened to commit a mass shooting at the event.

Felicia Day Blogs About GamerGate

GamerGate’s bad reputation continues to grow, and Day, who had previously stayed silent on the hot-button topic, was finally compelled to comment on the movement after a recent interaction with gamers. In her post, Day recounts crossing the street to avoid a group of male gamers (they were wearing gamer t-shirts), and she realized it was because she feared they could prescribe to the GamerGate idea that female gamers are not ‘real’ gamers.

“[After] all the years of gamer love and inclusiveness, something had changed in me. A small voice of doubt in my brain now suspected that those guys and I might not be comrades after all. That they might not greet me with reflected friendliness, but contempt,” Day wrote.

As for why Day has remained quiet for so long, she said it was partly because she believed that the trolls, those doxxing and harassing feminist gamers online, would eventually be drowned out of the GamerGate movement. Day also admits that she was afraid to speak out against GamerGate because of how critics of the movement have been attacked online by hackers and trolls – more than one woman in the gaming world has been forced out of her home due to threats from GamerGate:

“…I am terrified to be doxxed for even typing the words ‘Gamer Gate.’…To have my location revealed to the world would give a entry point for a few mentally ill people who have fixated on me, and allow them to show up and make good on the kind of threats I’ve received that make me paranoid to walk around a convention alone. I haven’t been able to stomach the risk of being afraid to get out of my car in my own driveway because I’ve expressed an opinion that someone on the Internet didn’t agree with. HOW SICK IS THAT?”

Felicia Day Doxxed After Speaking Out

Day’s fear of doxxing, the act of publishing personal information of another person online against their wishes, was well founded. Doxxing has become a weapon of choice for certain GamerGate activists, used commonly in response to women who critique sexist gamer culture. While GamerGate advocates insist that they are not sexist, there has been a gender imbalance on how they react to their critics, with female critics eliciting much more violent and hateful responses than male critics.

Immediately following the publication of Day’s blog post, the actress was doxxed online. A user posted what he or she claimed was Day’s address and personal e-mail in the comments below the blog post. The comment has since been removed.

Article by Olivia Truffaut-Wong

Olivia Truffaut-Wong was born and raised in Berkeley, California, where she developed her love of all things entertainment. After moving to New York City to earn her degree in Film Studies, she stayed on the East Coast to follow her passion and become an entertainment writer. She lives on a diet of television, movies and food.