Yes, I think it was a lie. After several searches, I could find absolutely nothing even accusing her of misrepresenting her gaming experience. These are manosphere lies cooked up to justify the extreme levels of abuse that she suffered.
This is all very clearly retaliation for her calling gamers out on the blatant level of misogyny that still exists in many gaming communities in a book and making her pay for that.
The level of lying that took place in Gamergate in order to "justify" the horrendous levels of vicious hate is quite well documented.
"In August 2014, a programmer named Eron Gjoni wrote a revenge-fueled blog post about his former girlfriend, Zoë Quinn. Gjoni alleged that Quinn, an independent game developer, had cheated on him with Nathan Grayson, a video game reviewer for the website Kotaku. The implication picked up by readers, particularly male members of the online gaming community, was that Quinn had engaged in the relationship to win favorable reviews of her game, Depression Quest, which had been released in 2013, garnering positive responses from gaming media but a backlash from gamers, who saw it as overly concerned with politics and social justice (the game was primarily text based and encouraged players to explore the experience of depression). The episode should have been little more than the tiniest internet blip with a niche community. Kotaku investigated, finding no evidence of any wrongdoing—indeed, it transpired that Grayson had never even reviewed the game.
But the story was picked up on platforms on which trolls congregated, including 4chan, Reddit, and other websites. Suddenly, Quinn began to receive a barrage of threats as well as the circulation of her stolen nude photographs. Her friends and family were subjected to extreme abuse; she was harassed and encouraged to kill herself; her online accounts were hacked; and eventually, after people threatened to cripple, maim, rape, and kill her, she left her home in fear for her safety. The phenomenon swiftly began to spread. Shortly after the abuse of Quinn began, Anita Sarkeesian, a prominent feminist media critic and blogger, started to receive a similar wave of threats. Sarkeesian was already well acquainted with online abuse: after she launched a video series examining the often sexist depiction of women in video games in 2012, she was intensely harassed online by gamers, who saw her commentary as an attack on the industry and an unwelcome attempt to sanitize or “feminize” it. The abuse included hacking and rape and death threats, and men sent Sarkeesian illustrations of herself being raped by various video game characters. It culminated in the creation of an online “game” in which players could virtually “beat up” Sarkeesian by clicking on an image of her face, watching as welts, bruises, and wounds appeared.
When Sarkeesian released a new video in her Tropes vs. Women series, the mob, already attacking Quinn, connected the two women, seeing them as part of the same “threat,” and trolls began to abuse Sarkeesian as well.
One tactic was ideological: the abusers quickly realized that they could defend, and even promote, the Gamergate “movement” if they portrayed it as a noble, ethical stance, using this as a smokescreen for trolling. Proponents began telling the story that this had nothing to do with Sarkeesian or Quinn. Instead, they said, it was an ideological battle over “ethics” in video gaming. They focused on the alleged (albeit debunked) relationship between Quinn and Grayson, claiming to be gravely concerned about corruption in the industry and the closeness of relationships.
Next, they tapped into the classic manosphere strategy of presenting themselves as the true victims, even while engaging in mass coordinated sexual harassment. (emphasis mine) In order to achieve this, the real victims had to be presented as the oppressors. Trolls put out stories on social media and gaming websites suggesting that the women were inventing and exaggerating the harassment they had received to attract attention and make male gamers (who were just trying to protect their culture) look bad. Others claimed that feminists themselves had sent the death and bomb threats to escalate the story. A narrative of the progressive left as “snowflakes,” “social justice warriors,” “feminazis,” “professional victims,” and the “perpetually offended” emerged; these became labels and claims that would be used increasingly in manosphere and also alt-right attacks over the coming years, especially when attempting to justify abuse in the eyes of the mainstream observer. Thus, coordinated harassment became justified as a form of moral self-defense.
As one research paper into the subject concluded, “It is unsurprising that the men’s rights movement pioneered and engages in weaponized harassment, given the centrality of the victim narrative to their ideology.”
Bates, Laura. Men Who Hate Women (p. 175). Sourcebooks. Kindle Edition.
