Adam Orth: Internet toxicity’s effect on the game industry is ‘very real and very dangerous’

SAN FRANCISCO — Adam Orth knows that he made a terrible mistake last April when he tweeted that he didn’t understand the controversy about always-online game consoles. But having rebuilt his career to some extent after the firestorm that followed, he’s rallying the industry against what he terms “Internet toxicity.”

At his Game Developers Conference 2014 talk “Mob Rules,” Orth described the chilling effect of Internet toxicity as “very real and very dangerous,” citing examples such as the attacks on Dong Nyugen following the removal of his game Flappy Bird from the iTunes App Store. He worried aloud that such attacks would continue to escalate into something “awful,” possibly even suicide.