Well, this is sick and disturbing. Harassment and threat of violence isn't the way to go when you don't like something, I agree. However, while I feel Hepler deserves to be defended on the level of people threatening her life, and harassing her, I need to put something out there:
I didn't like the writing on projects/portions of projects she was associated with. I didn't like the writing in her book. And, as to her daring to be creative, I don't agree that she was. The actual writing she produced was on the same level as the generic romance nonsense my mother reads, and admits to only reading because it's brainless, stupid and [bad] - her 'junkfood' that's not good for her brain, but she likes it now and then anyways while wholly considering it bad at the same time. I view Hepler's writing in very much the same way. I suppose you can still consider it creative, on a certain level, so maybe I'm alone in finding it absurd to defend her 'creativity' . . . which I suppose it fine. Again, she deserves the full force of the law in defense of her safety, and her children's safety. She deserves our support for sticking it out, and for continuing to work for some time despite the negative feedback, but I'd still never defend her creativity and I don't care who we're talking about. I won't defend bad work. I will defend a person against harassment whose work I don't like.
I also didn't like her commentary on wanting to skip gameplay. It's not that the idea is bad, it's that there's an entire genre of games that already do it (visual novels with choose your own adventure aspects) that she could have gotten involved with instead. My issue was as simple as that, "if you want to skip gameplay, there's an entire genre that already does that." It really did just sound like she wanted to be working on another kind of game entirely, and that's fine. She should have been working on another type of game entirely, I can't help but think that would have made her and many of her critics happier. Visual novels, from what she described as her preference, would be a format of game she'd enjoy writing for, and there's definitely an audience out there for visual novels (many of whom seem to enjoy writing styles very similar to hers, writing style I don't personally like, but hey . . . there's an audience for that in the visual novel genre).