Milo reports on one of the biggest freaks to ever orbit the game industry (which is not at all a low bar to hurdle), John Flynt aka “Brianna Wu”:
The gender history of game developer and pathological attention-seeker Brianna Wu would not ordinarily be the subject of public interest, but Wu’s critique of the GamerGate movement has relied heavily on identity politics and her insistence that she represents women in the video games industry. (We are using “she” and “her” as a polite courtesy in this report.)
Yet Wu was not until relatively recently a woman at all, and her legitimacy as a speaker even for the transgender community is in doubt since, as we can also today reveal, she was banned from a transgender forum after less than a year for unacceptable behaviour–not an easy thing to accomplish in a community well-known for its aggressive online conversations.
Wu was permanently stripped of her moderator status for abusing her position, according to another moderator, in a sign of what was to come in a long internet career of dissembling, bullying, smearing and panicky deletions as Wu has lurched from self-induced digital crisis to self-induced digital crisis over a period of more than a decade.
Wu, who has been engaged in an exhaustive press tour in recent months writing op-eds in a handful of online outlets, claiming that her life is in danger and that she is standing up for women in the games industry, is in fact, we can reveal, merely an unstable internet troll with a long history of mendacity and emotionally disturbed online outbursts.
Perhaps the funniest thing about Wu’s erratic behavior is his insistence that anyone in the game industry gives a damn about his game. We see them come and we see them go. It’s not necessary to pay any attention to it at all; we know it’s going to sink out of sight no matter what hystrionics he attempts to throw in order to get someone, somewhere, to play it.
And Nero didn’t cover the half of it. Such as this spectacularly inept attempt to attack himself; Wu forgot that he was logged in on his own account, Spacekatgal, then posted a weirdly specific question. Notice that my point about using style to detect frauds is fully applicable here. It would be obvious that he had written it even if he hadn’t been dumb enough to sign his own name to it.