BioWare - Of Jennifer Hepler, Trolls and Hate mail

If you've been around for a (long) while, you might vaguely remember a gaming site centred on female gamers called Killer Betties and a 2006 interview with BioWare writer, Jennifer Hepler. I recall the article raised a few eyebrows - and we moved on. An example:

What is your least favorite thing about working in the industry?

Playing the games. This is probably a terrible thing to admit, but it has definitely been the single most difficult thing for me. I came into the job out of a love of writing, not a love of playing games. While I enjoy the interactive aspects of gaming, if a game doesn't have a good story, it's very hard for me to get interested in playing it. Similarly, I'm really terrible at so many things which most games use incessantly -- I have awful hand-eye coordination, I don't like tactics, I don't like fighting, I don't like keeping track of inventory, and I can't read a game map to save my life. This makes it very difficult for me to play to the myriad games I really should be keeping up on as our competition.

It seems someone dredged up the interview and the slightly controversial comments from Hepler and used it to troll Reddit - and from there, the internet took over and personally maligning Hepler became a sport. From Kotaku's article on the story:

The original screencap posted on Reddit included the words: Cancer, Infection, Sewage, Plague. These are not light comments. Reddit's ohemeffgee also said that Hepler has been harassed with phone calls and emails from people echoing the statements made by Reddit user corporateswine, who uploaded the first Reddit post that spurred the witchhunt.

Thanks, Razvan.