Since late August Zoe Quinn, the developer of indie gaming’s critical hit Depression Quest, has been the target of a campaign that saw her Tumblr hacked, address posted online and terrifyingly plausible plans to cripple her laid out with cold-blooded straightforwardness.

In public the rationale for this was the allegation that Quinn lay at the centre of a network of corruption in videogaming that saw personal favours traded to elevate a network of her friends with controversial ideas about gaming above “true” gamers.

In private the rationale was simpler. Quinn was an example of a “social justice warrior”: a critic of games culture interested in opening the medium to audiences including women, queer people and people of colour. Her persecutors discussed how best to fulfil the aim of driving “SJWs” from gaming while maintaining the pretence that the campaign was about corruption.

One of the problems with using an anonymous platform to orchestrate your hate campaign is that you can never quite be sure who is listening. On 6 September, the inhabitants of a chatroom called #Burgersandfries learned this themselves.

The site was where a small collection of gamers linked to /v/, the videogame subforum of notorious image board 4chan, met to organise their “raids” on Quinn.

What they didn’t know was that Quinn was watching.

Using screenshots and video, she caught the members of the chatroom discussing how to hack her email, where to go to stalk her in person and how they hoped to destroy her career.

The “raids” were the toxic core of something that filtered out into the wider world as #GamerGate, which at first sight appears to be a social media campaign alleging corruption among games journalists and game developers. But it concealed something far more unpleasant.

Quinn was not surprised to find proof that the campaign was a smokescreen. “It was pretty clear they were out for blood from day one,” she says.

As the hashtag has grown beyond its origin, there are supporters of the campaign who are unaware of – or unconcerned about – its roots in a bitter blogpost by an ex-boyfriend of Quinn, accusing her of cheating on him with a writer for Kotaku, a gaming news site.

After publication of the post, which showed up on 4chan minutes later (Quinn accuses her ex-boyfriend of posting it there himself), Quinn wrote a response, headlined “Once again, I will not negotiate with terrorists”. Shortly afterwards, her blog was hacked, with personal information, including her home address, posted online – a practice known as “doxxing”.

Even as the doxxing gained a post-hoc justification, focusing on Quinn’s relationship with the games journalist who had written about her once (before they had slept together), the information was still being circulated in its original form. Days later, Quinn woke up to find that a right-wing Hollywood actor with 200,000 twitter followers, Adam Baldwin, had linked to videos that she said “help circulate my doxx and nude photos and contribute to me being unable to fucking GO HOME”.

By that point, Quinn had been forced to leave her home for a safer location, where she describes watching the chatrooms and seeing “my ex pop in for a Q&A, coaching them to slow down the harassment – not because of the massive damage it’s done to totally unrelated parties, but because it undermines their hate mob”.

As the harassment turned from a specific campaign against Quinn to a wider attack on feminism in gaming – or “social justice warriors” – other women were involved. Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist critic of games and pop culture, and no stranger to online abuse herself, was sucked in; so too was Jenn Frank, an award-winning games writer who covered the story for the Guardian.

Much of the campaign hinges on anonymity and the use of pseudonyms on the platforms where it is arranged. Yet ironically they are also what allowed Quinn easy access to the room where the attacks were being organised and made it possible for others to warn her of plans to “give her a crippling injury that’s never going to fully heal and remind her of her fuckup for life”.

But it also makes the size of the campaign unclear, and obscures who is genuinely passionate about ethics in gaming and who is putting up a smokescreen to hide harassment (including endless accusations of “false flag” attacks).

“The weird thing is that at the epicentre of this, I have no sense of scope,” Quinn says. “I have countless fake accounts on social media sending me hate and it’s hard to discern how many people are actually involved.”

When she released the chatroom logs, Quinn hoped that moderate proponents of the campaign would realise they were part of a movement that was being stage-managed by a group focused on harassment.

But Quinn says that hope is fading fast.

“I want to give people the benefit of the doubt,” she told the Guardian. “I know that if enough people shout a falsehood, people start to think it’s true and a lot of people don’t do independent verification of everything they hear. The thing about astroturfing is that it can be really believable.”

But, she added, “I think right now the well is incredibly poisoned: it’s likely a losing battle and that’s incredibly disappointing. I also feel like discussing ethics and fairness is antithetical to a campaign originated in and motivated by a fair bit of misogyny and harassment.

“What I’d really like to see is more discussion around how to handle these kinds of hate mobs and astroturfing tactics, considering that it happened to other feminist groups three times this year already.”

Does she feel things can get better? “I have no idea. At least these conversations are starting to happen and that’s important. I feel like we’re likely moving in a more progressive direction – or at least I hope so – but it can be hard to notice a glacier moving when you’re too busy trying to keep your head above water.”

• Gamergate: the community is eating itself but there should be room for all