There's some great news, everyone! We are now up to 409 signatures, up from 260+ two days ago. Way to go! Give yourselves a round of applause. One of the things that has really impressed me about those of you who've signed the petition is the many compassionate, thoughtful comments you've written. So, I thought I'd post some of my favourite comments here. (If your comment isn't here, I apologize. I don't want this to be a super long email.) "Ally Rapp is a friend of a friend. She graduated Augsburg College the year I started. I had the privilege to constantly hear about her adventures at Nintendo, which is exciting to vicariously live through. Many of Nintendo's loyal fans in her college state of Minnesota, also had that privilege. As a huge Nintendo fan, I am extremely disappointed with the company's choice to terminate Ally, who did great work for the company, but was burdened by online harassment that viciously dug into her personal life, and created immature petitions to terminate her on irrelevant grounds. It is enraging and ludicrous of Nintendo to ACTUALLY abide to a petition demanding her termination! Nintendo was given the opportunity to set a precedent, standing against online harassment on behalf of their team. Instead, they chose poorly and abided to the demands of online trolls, along with immature, dismissive and bigoted gamers with their desperate agenda to confirm an exaggerated narrative of misandry, within a culture they have, ironically, dominated in for too long. Nintendo, please get with the times. You have let us down." - Drew Hagen "To hell with the Gaters!" - Christopher Musgrave "I've been a loyal Nintendo fan for over 20 years, but this incident has me reluctant to give you one more red cent. Whether Ms. Rapp's firing was technically a result of the harassment or not is largely irrelevant (though for the record, I don't believe for a second that it was unrelated). The fact remains that the harassment was going on for months and Nintendo was silent despite repeated press inquiries, until you had to save face for firing her, and suddenly you issue a statement denying responsibility, blaming the victim, and making her out to be a liar. This is shameful, not only in Ms. Rapp's particular case, but because it sets a precedent that abusers can indeed get exactly what they want through harassment. This has to stop. You were in a position to do something about it, and you didn't. Instead, you found a reason (likely one delivered to you by her abusers) to fire her because she had become a liability. You took the coward's way out. I would expect this sort of behavior from most corporations, but somehow I thought Nintendo was better than that. Now I see that I was being naïve. Please prove me wrong." - Scott Hammack "I'm signing this because even though I'm seventeen-years old, I know sexism and bullying when I see it. Nintendo is a huge part of my childhood, and I don't want to see to remember the company as the one that set up for failure. The failure being that they ignored Allison Rapp's hurtful harassment experience from the hands of GamerGate. I've never suffered from GamerGate, and I do not want to see myself and anybody else get harassed from them. So, by signing this petition, I'm hoping Nintendo will recognize their faults and find themselves in a path of redemption. I don't want to leave them." - AJ Asuncion "Companies need to take a stand against the internet hate machine, not bow to it." - Micah Christensen "Capitulating to the Gamergate hate mob and firing Allison Rapp is cowardly and unconscionable. Nintendo makes beautiful games that are played by people of all genders, races, and other groups, and moves like this only make gaming less safe for people who aren't white men. (I say this as a non-white man). I'm a gamer, game developer, and event organizer, and this is definitely souring my thoughts towards Nintendo and my desire to use their products in the future. You can do better." - Christopher Algoo I started this petition, because when I heard the news of Alison's firing, I was furious. The InfoSec Institute did the same thing to me when I was targeted by Gamergate in February 2015. If any good can come from the trauma of what happened to me, it's my focus on trying to get justice for others who are similarly attacked. The best case scenario is that Nintendo of America publicly apologizes and changes their policy so what happened to Alison doesn't happen to any future Nintendo of America (NoA) employees. But failing that, we can accomplish a lot simply by embarrassing NoA publicly. They need to see that those of us who oppose Gamergate and other online hate mobs outnumber members of those mobs. If nothing is done when incidents like Alison's happen, the video game industry will think that bowing down to hate mobs is what must be done for commercial success and avoiding bad PR. If this petition is successful, it'll send a powerful message to NoA and the industry: "No, not defending your employees from hate mobs ATTRACTS bad PR and hurts sales, because gamers who are good people outnumber those who aren't." At the very least, this petition should be bad PR for NoA. But the power of this petition is dependent on the number of signatures! If the 409 of us share the petition on social media (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Reddit, etc.) again, each of us may be able to get three more signatures. 409 x 3 = 1,227. A few days pass... Then, 1,227 of us post on social media again, and let's say, hypothetically, we've now got 3,681 signatures. And so on and so forth... Then it won't be long until we have more than 10,000 signatures! That's the minimum amount of signatures I think this petition needs in order to leave a strong impression on NoA and NoA President Reggie Fils-Aime. I'm going to tweet this petition again, right now. Let's all post to social media again! I've added a link to my article about what happened to Alison. There are many new signers now, so many of you may not have read it yet. Thank you! And to whoever (I don't know who you are) paid Change.org $5 or so to promote the petition, thank you so much! I don't have a lot of money right now, but if some of you can afford to pitch in $5 to promote the petition on Change.org, that'd be great! (I don't receive a penny of that, it all goes to Change.org.) I'll message you all again in a few days. Hopefully by then, we'll be over 1,000 signatures... We can do it! Thanks, Kim