CONTENT WARNING: Sexual assault, harassment
A number of game developers have opened up about the abuse they have alleged to have suffered at the hands of other members of the industry.
This started with indie developer Nathalie Lawhead detailing the alleged abuse she suffered from composer Jeremy Soule - known for Skyrim - who has since been dropped from Materia Collective where he was working on a game called The Northerner.
That was before Depression Quest maker Zoe Quinn wrote her account of how Night in the Woods developer Alec Holowka had allegedly abused her while the two were in a relationship. Hours later, Adelaide Gardner alleged that Luc Shelton, a tools programmer at Splash Damage, had sexually assaulted her.
As pointed out by Rock Paper Shotgun, Gardner had previously made the same allegations naming Shelton twice before on Twitter - first in September 2018 and then in June 2019, both of which seem to have gone unnoticed.
This has prompted a number of members of the games industry to not only detail the abuse they have suffered, but also naming and shaming those who have wronged them. Feminist Frequency founder Anita Sarkeesian has said that this is the games industry having its #MeToo moment, in reference to the 2017 movement where abusers were outed in several industries.
In the wake of the three accounts detailed earlier, an anonymous Twitter user called @AbuseIndustry has been publicly shaming those allegedly guilty of sexual assault and harassment in the games industry.
Given that we don't know who is running the account or even what their motivations are, it's worth taking the allegations made there with a pinch of salt. Though for what it's worth, PCGamesInsider.biz has heard similar rumours about one of the developers named.
With regards to this story, some readers might be frustrated over the frequent use of 'allegedly' throughout; that isn't us saying that we don't believe the brave survivors who have come forward, but we haven't been able to check the allegations made.
Update - 10/20, 28/8/19 - The @AbuseIndustry Twitter account is no longer live
This story was originally published on PCGamesInsider.biz.
