Zoe Quinn
| Zoë Quinn | |
|---|---|
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| Born | 1987 (age 29–30) United States |
| Occupation | Video game developer |
| Known for | Depression Quest |
| Website | www |
Zoë Tiberius Quinn (born 1987) is an Americanvideo game developer, programmer, writer, and artist. Quinn developed the interactive fiction Depression Quest, a Twine game released on Steam. In 2014, a blog post by an ex-boyfriend sparked the Gamergate controversy, in which Quinn was subject to extensive harassment.
Quinn was born in 1987 and grew up in a small town near the Adirondack Mountains in New York. Growing up, Quinn often played video games. A favorite was Commander Keen, an MS-DOS game featuring an eight-year-old protagonist who builds a spaceship with items found around his house and then travels the Galaxy defending the Earth. As a teenager, Quinn suffered from depression and was diagnosed with the condition at the age of 14. Quinn has described receiving little sympathy or assistance from school district officials and says they were "less than understanding about teens with depression and suicide issues".
At the age of 24, Quinn moved to Canada and made their first forays into video game programming. The first game was the result of a six-week course on video-game creation that Quinn attended after seeing an advertisement in a newspaper. In a later interview for The New Yorker, Quinn said, "I felt like I'd found my calling."
Through Quinn's early game-development work, Quinn met writer Patrick Lindsey. Like Quinn, Lindsey struggled with depression. He felt that existing video games that dealt with the subject did not adequately depict the real emotions associated with depression, instead utilizing metaphor and symbolism. He suggested that both write a new video game together to better help others understand Quinn's experience. Quinn thought a game would be a good way to depict depression, imposing a set of rules on players they might not experience in their day-to-day lives. The two teamed with Isaac Schankler for the game's music and released the final result of their collaboration, the text-based game Depression Quest, in February 2013.
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