Jonathan’s actions were irrefutable: Over the course of nearly a decade, while working at a video game developer, he sexually assaulted industry colleagues. One victim came forward, posting their story to social media; others followed with stories of their own. The consequences were swift. Colleagues, friends, and peers disavowed him. He stepped away from his job and retreated from the public eye.
Jonathan, who asked that WIRED not reveal his identity, no longer works in the video game industry. His decision to remain apart from the community, he says, is the direct result of his actions. ”I made the choices I did, and I needed to hold the burden of those consequences,” he says. Had he remained in games, he felt he would be placing an unfair burden on his colleagues, as well as making the lives of those he abused more difficult.
“I didn’t feel like it was right to stay involved and continue my journey in gaming when the harm I caused prevented them from doing the same,” he says.
In video game development, actions like Jonathan’s are alarmingly familiar. What’s less common are solutions for how to repair the damage done. For decades, the industry has faced calls to weed out people accused of sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, abuse of power, harassment, assault, and much more. At companies like Activision Blizzard, which paid out millions to victims who alleged a widespread sexual harassment scandal, bad actors have lost their jobs or faced discipline following harassment investigations, but what then? It’s taken the video game industry so long to even respond to the problems in its ranks, little work has been done to figure out what can and should happen next.
ReSpec wants to be part of the solution. Founded in 2022 as an offshoot of a hotline for people experiencing harassment and abuse in the gaming industry, the nonprofit works with people who want to change. For Jonathan, that meant facing his actions and taking accountability. In other cases, it means recognizing misuses of power, harassment, or manipulation. ReSpec’s work pushes the conversation further, but also raises new questions about whether abusers can be reformed—or if they should ever be allowed to return to the places they made unsafe.
In 2020, Jae Lin was working at the Games and Online Harassment Hotline. It was a text-based service that allowed anyone who reached out to talk anonymously about issues from crunch to depression. Launched by Feminist Frequency’s Anita Sarkeesian, herself the target of a Gamergate harassment campaign, the idea was to create the survivor-centered, trauma-informed assistance the game industry so desperately needed.
When confessions coming from industry abusers began rolling in, Lin was surprised. They were working for a hotline that was created to support victims. Unwittingly, it was also becoming a lifeline for people who’d done the harm in the first place. “Really from the beginning, we had folks texting us about harm and harassment that they had caused or been a part of,” Lin says. “It just kept happening.”
Eventually, Lin says, they realized this was “not a one-off thing,” but something the industry wasn’t addressing. There were not many resources, even outside of the games space, for people who “were feeling remorseful and regretful for what they had done and wanted to change,” Lin says. No one knew who to ask for help.
In reporting on this piece, WIRED reached out to survivor-focused groups like the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network to better contextualize ReSpec’s work. A representative for RAINN declined to comment, saying that the organization doesn’t have an expert who could speak on the subject.
Lin would officially found ReSpec—a nod to rebuilding attributes in role-playing games—with the goal of providing virtual meetings that could be attended by anyone in the world. Because counseling offenders is different from working with survivors, they consulted with therapists who had experience working with incarcerated people and people on the sex offender registry. They also spoke with facilitators of batterer’s intervention groups, members and leaders of men’s support groups, and many more experts with experience in sexual violence prevention.
At ReSpec, facilitators have backgrounds that span hotline counseling and trauma-informed care to sexual violence prevention and “men’s roles in interrupting cycles of gender-based violence,” Lin says.
Part of ReSpec’s work is about acknowledging that harassing behavior in the video game development world doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The industry is still overwhelmingly male—69 percent of devs identify as cis men—and at times hostile to anyone who doesn’t fit that mold. People drug developers at industry parties; conversations about alcohol’s presence and the culture it communicates in professional spaces are a constant. Whisper networks, more powerful than they’ve ever been thanks to online forums, work overtime. It does not matter what size a company is, or even the industry it serves. The MeToo movement existed for over a decade before the allegations against film producer Harvey Weinstein published in The New Yorker and The New York Times in 2017 catalyzed a global reckoning.
“So much of what we heard about from folks was rarely about a single, egregious instance of harassment or abuse or violence,” Lin says. “This is something that they’re facing every time they play a game, every job they work at—it was everywhere.”
Harassment rarely impacts only those directly involved. It is a pernicious act, one that can ripple out and inform work culture. It can drive people out of industries they work in, or discourage others from joining at all.
In the last few years alone, games industry powerhouses such as Riot, Activision Blizzard, and Ubisoft have been the subject of allegations of workplace harassment and abuse. However it’s labeled—as a callout, a cancellation—bringing attention to abusive individuals is part of a greater push for justice and accountability. Victims have used social media spaces like X to tell their stories in their own words. It is an imperfect system, one that opens survivors up to widespread abuse online and off, that many turn to when they feel they have no other options.
“If you think about some of the other mechanisms that the legal system provides, they don’t necessarily provide the kind of remedies that people might want,” says Jennifer Robbennolt, a University of Illinois law professor whose research focuses on integrating psychology into the study of law. Criminal cases deal with fines or prison; the civil system is about monetary damages. “In certain kinds of cases, those outcomes might be appropriate,“ Robbennolt says. “But a lot of times what people who are harmed or people in those communities will want is changed behavior.”
In the criminal system, advocates for restorative justice work with offenders and victims together in an attempt to reconcile. The goal is to move forward, and sometimes reintegrate the perpetrator back into a community or workplace, albeit often in a different role. “In some ways, that’s both a benefit and the challenge of restorative justice,” Robbennolt says. “It’s a collaborative process that creates room for there to be nuance to the consequences to the harm, and to tailor the solution to that particular circumstance.” However, she adds, it’s important to not minimize “the more severe end of the spectrum.”
Aside from the nature of the harm done, there’s also the matter of how remorseful a perpetrator is—a difference between someone who either cannot or will not admit to wrongdoing and someone who can potentially learn. Not all offenders should be treated the same, even when their behaviors are similar, Robbennolt says.
While other programs may align with restorative justice, Lin says ReSpec’s focus is on a different model known as transformative justice. “Our focus is really working to address the roots of how harm happens,” Lin says. That means examining behavior, history, and practicing new ways to build relationships.
A key element of a program like ReSpec, says Lin, is time. They’re betting on long-term change. “Change that happens overnight can be undone overnight,” they say. “We really believe that this change towards accountability takes years—years of commitment and unlearning and active engagement.”
Getting those outcomes starts with wanting to change, which means showing up.
Here’s where things get tricky: Most people, understandably, do not feel bad for abusers. Nor do they want to support or help someone who’s actively been harmful in their community. What often follows is ostracization.
This was Jonathan’s experience after his abusive actions were brought to light. “It was a very isolating experience,” he says. “It felt like I suddenly went from having a really strong community to having no one.” Paralyzed by his own negative feelings, Jonathan says it took him a long time to “begin moving toward a place of productive emotion.”
There is no one-size-fits-all verdict, punishment, or solution for what to do with abusers, no universal rule or law that can cover it all. There are, at best, degrees to it, a fraught, subjective concept that deems some actions more or less forgivable.
These are difficult conversations to even have. While a request for anonymity may seem at odds with accountability, Jonathan—whose identity WIRED has verified—says his motivations aren’t self-serving. “I’m hypersensitive to the impact that I have on the folks I have harmed,” he says. “I recognize that by speaking out publicly or engaging in this, it can bring up triggering things for them. And I’m at the point where I don’t want to risk any further harm.”
Accountability, as ReSpec has found, is a hard road to walk alone. “We’ve had so many of these conversations: These people want to change but just don’t know if that’s possible or how,” says Lin. “It really seemed like they were missing some key pieces of understanding to actually change their behavior, move forward, and grow.”
Outing even a single abuser can be difficult enough for victims, who sometimes don’t come forward for a variety of reasons, including safety, legal concerns, and the sheer difficulty of the process. And removing one person does not defeat the culture, systems, or choices that got them there. It doesn’t even always keep those individuals responsible for abuse from just continuing to go do it elsewhere.
Part of ReSpec’s program hinges on community, monthly virtual meetings where people can show up to talk and share their experiences, much like other support groups. It is not restricted to one country or continent; anyone in the program can join, though the program currently only has English speakers. “We mainly just facilitate the space for them to connect with each other and offer guidance around how harassment and abuse happen,” Lin says.
The point is not to enable or dismiss what they’ve done. “That’s a really careful balance to strike,” Lin adds. “What you’re experiencing matters. We believe in you. What you did was not OK, and if that’s something you believe too, we’re here to talk through how you might want that to change.”
The group is not a method to connect abusers with their victims, force apologies, or otherwise offer some proof of “rehabilitation” to the greater public. It’s not a formal program, either; there is no six-month plan where everybody gets a badge at the end.
Lin understands that to some, ReSpec’s mission may seem contradictory or even controversial: a survivor-centered hotline that shifted to support abusers. They consider it the same sort of community work that focuses on violence prevention. ReSpec hasn’t outright turned anyone away, but the act of opting into its community still requires effort on the behalf of whoever shows up. Since starting, the nonprofit has held 25 group sessions. Lin says that, between them and their cofacilitator Carl Murray Olsen, they’ve held 57 one-on-one meetings.
Jonathan previously knew Lin from gaming circles, and they initially approached him about ReSpec around the time it launched. He’s been working with the program since, yet feels his goals will be lifelong. “It’s a really hard thing,” he says. “It’s not something that you can just pay lip service to. You have to put in the hard work to truly understand yourself, understand your actions, understand your motivations, understand how you came to a place where your behaviors don’t align with your values, and truly reconcile to the point where you can evolve beyond that.“
He doesn’t have a strong idea of who should be able to return to work in the space, or what that could mean. “I think it’s more about doing the hard work on yourself to improve,” he says. Harm is not just about someone’s actions, but how people continue to show up in the spaces where they’ve caused damage. “It’s not worth it for you to potentially harm those people again by being in a similar space or by being vocal,” he says. “I think that’s part of owning your actions and holding yourself accountable for the things that you’ve done. You have to accept those consequences.”
ReSpec is not a gold star to stick on a resume, nor a guarantee for change. It is a step in the process to make the games industry safer. “I’ve heard so many survivors say, ‘I just don’t want this person to hurt anyone else,’” Lin says. It’s one reason why they believe survivors choose to come forward or write callouts. But for what follows after—education, explanation, all the work people ask survivors to do—“we are hoping to offload some of that work,” Lin says. “No survivors should be asked to have to explain patiently.”
