Cecilia D'Anastasio is an American journalist who primarily covers the video game industry. From 2016 to 2020, D'Anastasio wrote for Kotaku , and she was recognized for a 2018 article reporting allegations of sexual harassment and gender discrimination at Riot Games. Subsequently, she wrote for Wired magazine and joined Bloomberg News in 2022 to cover the video game industry.
D'Anastasio studied at Reed College, where she received a degree in classics. [1] D'Anastasio did freelance work for several publications, including The Nation , [2] before joining Kotaku as a staff writer in June 2016. [3]
D'Anastasio focused on investigative stories as a staff writer for Kotaku. [4]
Her article "Inside The Culture Of Sexism At Riot Games", published in August 2018, details allegations of sexual harassment and gender discrimination at Riot Games according to the accounts of twenty-eight current and former employees. [5] [6] Following its publication, current and former employees also shared their own experiences regarding workplace harassment on social media. [7] [8] On the day of the publication, Riot Games released a statement generally addressing its workplace culture, hiring practices, and diversity and inclusion program in response to the allegations detailed in the article. [9] Later that month, the company released a statement outlining its "first steps" towards addressing the allegations. [8] [10]
At the 71st Writers Guild of America Awards, D'Anastasio was presented with the Digital News award for the article. [11] Variety described the article as "the most important piece of games reporting of the year, and maybe even years", naming D'Anastasio as one of the "Most Influential in Video Games" for the year of 2018. [12] In the following year, the New York Videogame Critics Circle presented her with their "Knickerbocker Award for Best Games Journalism". [13] [14] D'Anastasio also made an appearance on Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj , where she spoke about labor issues in the video game industry and her investigative work on Riot Games. [15]
D'Anastasio left the publication in December 2019. [4]
D'Anastasio was hired as a staff writer for Wired magazine in 2020. [16] In March, she received SXSW's inaugural Journalist of the Year award at the 2020 Gaming Awards for her "groundbreaking and influential" coverage of the video game industry. [17] In October, the magazine launched its Wired Games section, which covers the video game industry. The section features work written by various staff writers including D'Anastasio. [18] [19] Later that year, Forbes named her to its 30 Under 30 list in the media category. [20]
After two years writing for Wired magazine, at the beginning of 2022 D'Anastasio joined Bloomberg News to cover the video game industry. [21]
Esports, short for electronic sports, is a form of competition using video games. Esports often takes the form of organized, multiplayer video game competitions, particularly between professional players, played individually or as teams.
Kotaku is a video game website and blog that was originally launched in 2004 as part of the Gawker Media network. Notable former contributors to the site include Luke Smith, Cecilia D'Anastasio, Tim Rogers, and Jason Schreier.
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NeoGAF is an Internet forum primarily dedicated to the discussion of video games. Founded as an adjunct to a video game news site under the name Gaming-Age Forums, on April 4, 2006 it changed its name to NeoGAF and became independently hosted and administered.
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Robert A. Kotick is an American businessman who served as the chief executive officer (CEO) of Activision Blizzard and previously Activision from 1991 to 2023. He became the CEO of Activision after purchasing a company stake the previous year. Kotick engineered a merger between Activision and Vivendi Games during the late 2000s, which led to the creation of Activision Blizzard in 2008 and him being named the company's inaugural CEO. He has also served on several boards, including The Coca-Cola Company from 2012 to 2022, and Yahoo! from 2003 to 2008. Following the acquisition of Activision Blizzard by Microsoft, Kotick retired from the company on December 29, 2023.
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Riot Games, Inc. is an American video game developer, publisher, and esports tournament organizer based in Los Angeles, California. It was founded in September 2006 by Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill to develop League of Legends and went on to develop several spin-off games and the unrelated first-person shooter game Valorant. In 2011, Riot Games was acquired by Chinese conglomerate Tencent. Riot Games' publishing arm, Riot Forge, oversees the production of League of Legends spin-offs by other developers. The company worked with Fortiche to release Arcane, a television series based on the League of Legends universe.
Anita Sarkeesian is a Canadian-American feminist media critic. She is the founder of Feminist Frequency, a website that hosts videos and commentary analyzing portrayals of women in popular culture. Her video series Tropes vs. Women in Video Games, examines tropes in the depiction of female video game characters. Media scholar Soraya Murray calls Sarkeesian emblematic of "a burgeoning organized feminist critique" of stereotyped and objectified portrayals of women in video games.
Sexism in video gaming is prejudiced behavior or discrimination based on sex or gender as experienced by people who play and create video games, primarily women. This may manifest as sexual harassment or in the way genders are represented in games, such as when characters are presented according to gender-related tropes and stereotypes.
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The live streaming of video games is an activity where people broadcast themselves playing games to a live audience online. The practice became popular in the mid-2010s on the US-based site Twitch, before growing to YouTube, Facebook, China-based sites Huya Live, DouYu, and Bilibili, and other services. By 2014, Twitch streams had more traffic than HBO's online streaming service, HBO Go. Professional streamers often combine high-level play and entertaining commentary, and earn income from sponsors, subscriptions, ad revenue, and donations.
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Emma Kinema is an American labor organizer and the senior campaign lead of CODE-CWA, the Communication Workers of America's Campaign to Organize Digital Employees. In the late 2010s, while working as a quality assurance tester, Kinema volunteered as a games industry organizer and co-founder of Game Workers Unite. She was hired by the CWA union in 2020 to lead their initiative to organize video game and tech workers, the first American initiative of its kind in those sectors.
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California Department of Fair Employment and Housing v. Activision Blizzard is a current lawsuit filed by the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH), now the Civil Rights Department (CRD) against video game developer Activision Blizzard in July 2021. The lawsuit asserts that management of Activision Blizzard allowed and at times encouraged sexual misconduct towards female employees, that the company maintained a "frat boy" culture, and that the company's hiring and employment practices were discriminatory against women.
Meagan Marie is an American creative professional who is employed by video game developer Crystal Dynamics as an online community manager.
Cecilia graduated from Reed College with a degree in Classics...