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Interviews: Brianna Wu Answers Your Questions
Last week you had a chance to ask the head of development at Giant Spacekat Brianna Wu about Gamergate, starting a company, and women-in-tech issues. Below you'll find her answers to your questions.
Penalties and Online Harrassment
by Anonymous Coward
I read all the time about the experiences of online harassment victims. As pointed out in your Patreon, most all of this is obviously criminal activity, and it takes lots of time to document it for police. Why have I virtually never read about someone getting arrested? I've even looked around. I was sure at the height of Gamergate, a flood of news about arrests was coming, and now it seems like that's never coming.
I can only think of two cases: One was in Canada, where a very mentally ill young man, no older than 20 I think, was arrested for SWATting people repeatedly, among other things. The other was in the UK where again a very young man was arrested for threatening a politician over twitter. Just googling "twitter arrest" brings up lots of cases where people who pulled various stunts had their anonymity removed and were arrested, but none of them for the kinds of harassment you've discussed reporting to the police. The first hit is several Huffington Post articles about it. Is it not reported in the media? Do the police just not care, or not know how to investigate it? Are the people doing the harassment just that crafty? Do you believe increased enforcement will reduce harassment online, and particularly if so, what needs to happen between then and now?
Brianna: So, starting this conversation - I should say that the FBI has asked me not to comment on the specifics of ongoing cases. But, I can talk about the situation in general terms.
Working with law enforcement has been one of the most exasperating experiences of my life. The amount of media attention to my case has been extreme. There was a Law and Order episode based on my experiences and those of other victims of harassment. I’ve been in most major media around the world. I’ve been on Nightline and John Oliver, and there still have not been any prosecutions in my case.
As bad as it’s been for me, the women I worry about are ones that don’t get media attention. The truth is, if you are a woman, and someone threatens to murder you online, it's overwhelmingly likely that no help is coming, and you're on your own.
I don’t think the people working on my case don’t care. I think most people go into law enforcement because they want to help people like me. It does seem like a question of training and resources, particularly with local police, that the need has far outpaced the tools.
It greatly troubled me when, after sending the FBI leads for months, they asked me to mail them a hard drive with my evidence. They said, because of their systems, they were unable to read email attachments or access shared Dropbox folders. It’s hard to imagine how any law enforcement agency can operate in 2015 with those constraints.
The FBI employs over 15,000 people. As best as I can tell, none of them are specifically tasked with prosecuting cases like mine. In June, Representative Katherine Clark submitted a proposal to congress that would allocate 10 operatives and an attorney to prosecute online threats. I hope we can make that happen.
Questions:
by juanfgs
I never heard much about game developers, but it seems like GamerGate has put many of them in the spotlight, specially women. Has the Gamergate movement somehow boosted your popularity and of other game developers and benefited you in any way? Do you regret that a big part your popularity didn't stem from the work you've made all these years in your professional life and rather from a political counter-movement?
Brianna: One of the biggest misconceptions about me is that, professionally, I was unknown before Gamergate. I had more conference invites than I could accept before Gamergate. I had a show on 5by5 before Gamergate, which was a very prestigious network. I had been speaking up on women in tech for years before Gamergate. In fact, the month before I was dragged into the mess, I had a two-hour talk with my team about their need for me to be in the office more. It's been a struggle for years, balancing my role as head of development with the responsibility of being an increasingly public figure for the company.
I do think it’s accurate that Gamergate has made me better known to the general public, rather than just industry insiders. It frustrates me to no end that the public doesn’t recognize my work as an entrepreneur, as a software engineer, or as a leader of an ambitious company - but rather as a feminist figure and a victim of Gamergate.
My career goal has never been to be a feminist media critic like Anita Sarkeesian. To be honest, the thought of my career still being about this five years from now is incredibly depressing.
I want to make games, and I want to provide jobs to the many talented women I know in the industry. I don’t want to be known as a victim. I want to be known as someone solving engineering problems about emotion the rest of the industry isn’t interested in.
One the key parts of my personality is I am extremely pragmatic. Maybe it’s the developer part of my brain - but I work with the system I have and not the system I want. And, if standing up to the horrific abuse of Gamergate has opened doors for me? Yeah, you'd better believe I’m going to walk through them.
Capital
by HellYeahAutomaton
How did you secure the capital to start Giant Spacekat? How did you do it in 3 months, and what obstacles did you face?
Brianna: So, I can’t talk specifically about all of our funding. But I can say how we started Giant Spacekat and made our "minimal viable product." I quit my job when I married my husband, and followed him to Boston. I was trying to figure out what to do with my life. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to pursue a graduate degree or start my own company.
A family relative offered us the chance to live in Frank’s grandmother’s house for free if we renovated it. That would free up capital for us, so I jumped at the chance. I spent half a year renovating the house. Then, we moved in - took our rent money, and used it to hire our first employee.
The part of this story that’s key is, I saw an opportunity - and I went all in. Renovating this house was disgusting and backbreaking. My husband and I spent hundreds of hours removing this horrible wallpaper from the 40s. I had to wear a hazmat suit and a respirator to encapsulate asbestos in the basement. We had to redo the entire electrical system of the house. But I sucked it up, got to work - and I launched my company.
As for obstacles faced, something that a lot of people don’t know about are the criminal efforts to harm our company financially. We’ve had multiple attempts to hack into our company’s dev account, to the point where we have had to work with Apple to put additional safeguards into place. We’ve also had to deal with repeated identity theft and credit card fraud.
egalitarian?
by johncandale
Why are you a feminist instead of a egalitarian?
Brianna: Egalitarianism is about equal rights for all people, but this is assuming that everyone starts in an equal situation, which is not the case.Feminism is advocating equal social, political, legal, and economic rights for women - and we are at a huge deficit with those rights.
I think this question is really telling about the incredible amount of unconscious privilege men have in technology. Anyone outside the industry can see it - this is a place built by men for men. It’s so built to serve them that women can’t even have a movement to address our systematic exclusion without some men insisting it should be about them too.
I am a feminist because my focus is, correctly, on making technology more equal for women.
The absence of privilege is not oppression. But, I think it often seems like that to some men. It distresses me greatly that when I talk about problems like exclusionary hiring practices - just how quickly men turn the conversation to what is fairest for them. You’re essentially asking for your privilege to be baked into the language of our fight for equality.
Game Design
by deltatype0
I am a "neutral" in the Gamergate debacle, preferring to observe more than directly interact, but in one case I watched the somewhat-infamous interview between Wu and Reddit KotakuInAction mod TheHat2. In it, they discussed the points of her iOS game "Revolution 60" and game design in general. One of the questions asked there was why she decided to work with iOS first versus the popular PC platform Steam. I don't remember the exact answer, but I think it revolved around developing for a platform that more women were likely to use, being the mobile market, and maybe some development-specific answers.
My question is this: Given what you've learned about programming in iOS, would you have developed for a PC platform like Steam first and ported to mobile later? Given female trends towards mobile platforms like the Nintendo DS/3DS, would it make more sense for your studio to explore developing games there? Or was your goal all along to produce a more 3D-visual action title for mobile phones?
For context, my wife is not as big of a gamer as myself, but I find she enjoys playing a lot of mobile puzzle games. I think the mobile market has a lot of potential for bigger things, and I think having the input of the majority player base on that platform makes sense, but I often don't understand why, as a mobile developer, you would be overly concerned with "the core gamer" demographic in the console platform. It seems to me that they aren't likely to crossover into the mobile market often, so there is little reason to "attack" that demographic as we've seen a few people, including Brianna, do through the last year.
Brianna: First of all, if you are “neutral” on the horrific abuse many women have suffered at the hands of Gamergate, you are a part of the problem. Being able to lean back in a chair and talk about Gamergate as if it’s a fun controversy isn’t a privilege I have, and it’s not a privilege women in the game industry have. This is about being able to continue working in the field I love.
Being neutral about threats to murder, rape and intimidate women with opinions is a character defect.
As far as your question - we’ve certainly thought about working with Nintendo. I have good connections with Nintendo of America - but Unreal is barely supported on Wii-U and 3DS. Often, these versions of Unreal are custom variants that are not supported by Epic. It’s a shame, because I think the touch interfaces would make us a natural fit for both - though the vert decimation it would take to get our skeletal meshes to work on 3DS makes me cringe to think about.
My proudest accomplishment with Revolution 60 is that anyone can pick it up and play it, regardless if they are a gamer or not. I don’t think that you should have to be a hardcore gamer to enjoy a story. That didn’t happen serendipitously, it happened through game design constraints and a lot of playtesting. I think that design philosophy is extremely compatible with Nintendo.
Are custom engines dead for 'normal' developers?
by MBCook
More and more developers seem to be using the existing engines (i know you used Unreal 3 for Rev 60, Unity, UbiArt, etc) which makes sense given the huge number of features they provide with little initial development cost and common tool sets/plugins used by other developers. Do you think there is much future in developers using custom engines for games (both indie and non-AAA) or do you think it will continue to become more uncommon for common genre games as you start at a larger and larger feature 'deficit' by having to redevelop the features on your custom engine, let alone porting issues, leaving only vert large/profitable houses (Naughty Dog, Insomniac, EA, etc) to be able to bear the time/$ costs?
Brianna: When you are an indie studio, you have to be absolutely ruthless about what you spend resources on. To me, getting into OpenGL and coding custom engines is a suicide mission for small teams. It’s worth noting that Apple’s 3D frameworks just don’t measure up to Unity or Unreal.
If someone has solved an engineering problem already, I see no point in reinventing the wheel.
I think indie teams get a little bit of a break - but you still have to do one or two things better than anyone else, including AAA. For us, we concentrated on characterization and animation. I would put the quality of Revolution 60s animation against anything on any platform. We wouldn’t have been able to do that if we’d wasted resources writing a custom engine.
"Developer" or "Journalist"?
by Rick in China
I'm interested in what development languages you excel in and how you mastered them - as head of development for a gaming company, I think that's my first question. Follow-up side-points would be when you transitioned from journalist to game developer, and why game development? Was it related to some of the 'sparks' and 'movements' by some other females 'in the gaming community' - and seen as an easy way to jump on a bandwagon that was clearly going to make waves? Journalist to developer just seems like a very strange transition to me, so I'm curious about the particulars. Do you have a github account where you publish some of your code?
Brianna: I’ve had many jobs over the course of my life. I’ve worked in politics and well as media. Both have been very helpful backgrounds for me in running a studio, which is a very political job. One of my greatest frustrations as a developer is that I don’t get to spend as much time doing gamedev as I used to. The truth is, I can hire another engineer - but I can’t hire someone to replace me.
I feel like my entire life has prepared me for this moment. There’s very little I would change about the choices that brought me to this point.
I can’t help but read your question and feel like you might not have the best of intentions. I read it as you are feel that I need to prove to you that I’m a legit developer. I think my record as someone whose first game won several game of the year awards speaks for itself. I think my two popular shows on Relay.FM where I am an industry analyst on technical issues speaks for itself.
I do have code up on Github, but like many women developers - it’s under a gender-neutral pseudonym, because I know it will be torn to pieces if it’s not. I once wrote a joke on Twitter with pseudocode, written to be readable for non-developers - and received a litany of sexist accusations and code critique.
There is an unconscious bias that men are assumed competent until proven otherwise, and women are assumed incompetent until proven otherwise. My track record of success speaks for itself.
Customization / Modification of Unreal Engine
by Anonymous Coward
Hi Brianna. No idea if this will bubble near enough to the surface for you to see it, but I'm curious how much, if any, work you and your team had to do in the "guts" of the Unreal Engine to get your game out the door, or if all of your work was done at the Unreal Script / editor level.
Brianna: One of the great things about Unreal is that there are certain game types that are coded into the engine already. If you want a top-down Diablo game, they’ve done that work already. If you want to make an FPS, they’ve done that work already. But it doesn't cover everything so we ended up having to do a lot more work than other game types.
It’s hard to stress just how much work we had to do to get Revolution 60 to run on older Apple devices. You start out with 512 megs of RAM, and a good chunk of that is taken up with Springboard. Then, iOS 7 came out midway through development and we found ourself suddenly with 134 megs less RAM to work with. We lost over four months solving that problem.
Revolution 60 got a lot of critique for our textures - which has always felt unfair to me. Low resolution textures were a deliberate tradeoff. Infinity Blade looks amazing, but they only have 2 characters on screen at a time. Cyrus has 22 mesh influencing bones, with a level 2 joint influence. Holiday has over 75 mesh influencing bones - requiring a second draw call with level 3 joint influence. We have up to five characters on screen at once, all with a 2k diffuse and a 2k normal. On top of that, there is a ton of custom animsets and sound that isn't hardware decoded. This is very ambitious to ask all of this to run on the iPhone 4S.
I would guess that about 1/4th of our development was spent working around these hardware limitations in Unreal. Holiday doesn’t run because we are loading and unloading every section you walk through from memory. I was handed sections to texture, and I had four 1k maps for many of them. Given those constraints, the game looks AMAZING. I could write a textbook on extremely efficient texture stacking.
A lot of people think beautiful textures are the test of a good materials artist, and it's true. But - I think working under memory constraints is an even greater challenge.
There are a lot of gamers out there that like to play armchair developer because they don’t understand these engineering tradeoffs. None of them could have made a game as ambitious as Revolution 60. I made the choice to emphasize characters over graphics, and I’d absolutely do it again.
Virtual Reality?
by Anonymous Coward
You hinted a bit in an episode of Rocket that you're playing with the idea of making a game for VR. Can you go into any detail on that, or talk about the future of VR gaming (if there is one)?
Brianna: As much as I would love to, I am unable to comment on that right now. I will say, if you thought I shook up the industry last year? Trust me, our best is yet to come.
by Anonymous Coward
I read all the time about the experiences of online harassment victims. As pointed out in your Patreon, most all of this is obviously criminal activity, and it takes lots of time to document it for police. Why have I virtually never read about someone getting arrested? I've even looked around. I was sure at the height of Gamergate, a flood of news about arrests was coming, and now it seems like that's never coming.
I can only think of two cases: One was in Canada, where a very mentally ill young man, no older than 20 I think, was arrested for SWATting people repeatedly, among other things. The other was in the UK where again a very young man was arrested for threatening a politician over twitter. Just googling "twitter arrest" brings up lots of cases where people who pulled various stunts had their anonymity removed and were arrested, but none of them for the kinds of harassment you've discussed reporting to the police. The first hit is several Huffington Post articles about it. Is it not reported in the media? Do the police just not care, or not know how to investigate it? Are the people doing the harassment just that crafty? Do you believe increased enforcement will reduce harassment online, and particularly if so, what needs to happen between then and now?
Brianna: So, starting this conversation - I should say that the FBI has asked me not to comment on the specifics of ongoing cases. But, I can talk about the situation in general terms.
Working with law enforcement has been one of the most exasperating experiences of my life. The amount of media attention to my case has been extreme. There was a Law and Order episode based on my experiences and those of other victims of harassment. I’ve been in most major media around the world. I’ve been on Nightline and John Oliver, and there still have not been any prosecutions in my case.
As bad as it’s been for me, the women I worry about are ones that don’t get media attention. The truth is, if you are a woman, and someone threatens to murder you online, it's overwhelmingly likely that no help is coming, and you're on your own.
I don’t think the people working on my case don’t care. I think most people go into law enforcement because they want to help people like me. It does seem like a question of training and resources, particularly with local police, that the need has far outpaced the tools.
It greatly troubled me when, after sending the FBI leads for months, they asked me to mail them a hard drive with my evidence. They said, because of their systems, they were unable to read email attachments or access shared Dropbox folders. It’s hard to imagine how any law enforcement agency can operate in 2015 with those constraints.
The FBI employs over 15,000 people. As best as I can tell, none of them are specifically tasked with prosecuting cases like mine. In June, Representative Katherine Clark submitted a proposal to congress that would allocate 10 operatives and an attorney to prosecute online threats. I hope we can make that happen.
Questions:
by juanfgs
I never heard much about game developers, but it seems like GamerGate has put many of them in the spotlight, specially women. Has the Gamergate movement somehow boosted your popularity and of other game developers and benefited you in any way? Do you regret that a big part your popularity didn't stem from the work you've made all these years in your professional life and rather from a political counter-movement?
Brianna: One of the biggest misconceptions about me is that, professionally, I was unknown before Gamergate. I had more conference invites than I could accept before Gamergate. I had a show on 5by5 before Gamergate, which was a very prestigious network. I had been speaking up on women in tech for years before Gamergate. In fact, the month before I was dragged into the mess, I had a two-hour talk with my team about their need for me to be in the office more. It's been a struggle for years, balancing my role as head of development with the responsibility of being an increasingly public figure for the company.
I do think it’s accurate that Gamergate has made me better known to the general public, rather than just industry insiders. It frustrates me to no end that the public doesn’t recognize my work as an entrepreneur, as a software engineer, or as a leader of an ambitious company - but rather as a feminist figure and a victim of Gamergate.
My career goal has never been to be a feminist media critic like Anita Sarkeesian. To be honest, the thought of my career still being about this five years from now is incredibly depressing.
I want to make games, and I want to provide jobs to the many talented women I know in the industry. I don’t want to be known as a victim. I want to be known as someone solving engineering problems about emotion the rest of the industry isn’t interested in.
One the key parts of my personality is I am extremely pragmatic. Maybe it’s the developer part of my brain - but I work with the system I have and not the system I want. And, if standing up to the horrific abuse of Gamergate has opened doors for me? Yeah, you'd better believe I’m going to walk through them.
Capital
by HellYeahAutomaton
How did you secure the capital to start Giant Spacekat? How did you do it in 3 months, and what obstacles did you face?
Brianna: So, I can’t talk specifically about all of our funding. But I can say how we started Giant Spacekat and made our "minimal viable product." I quit my job when I married my husband, and followed him to Boston. I was trying to figure out what to do with my life. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to pursue a graduate degree or start my own company.
A family relative offered us the chance to live in Frank’s grandmother’s house for free if we renovated it. That would free up capital for us, so I jumped at the chance. I spent half a year renovating the house. Then, we moved in - took our rent money, and used it to hire our first employee.
The part of this story that’s key is, I saw an opportunity - and I went all in. Renovating this house was disgusting and backbreaking. My husband and I spent hundreds of hours removing this horrible wallpaper from the 40s. I had to wear a hazmat suit and a respirator to encapsulate asbestos in the basement. We had to redo the entire electrical system of the house. But I sucked it up, got to work - and I launched my company.
As for obstacles faced, something that a lot of people don’t know about are the criminal efforts to harm our company financially. We’ve had multiple attempts to hack into our company’s dev account, to the point where we have had to work with Apple to put additional safeguards into place. We’ve also had to deal with repeated identity theft and credit card fraud.
egalitarian?
by johncandale
Why are you a feminist instead of a egalitarian?
Brianna: Egalitarianism is about equal rights for all people, but this is assuming that everyone starts in an equal situation, which is not the case.Feminism is advocating equal social, political, legal, and economic rights for women - and we are at a huge deficit with those rights.
I think this question is really telling about the incredible amount of unconscious privilege men have in technology. Anyone outside the industry can see it - this is a place built by men for men. It’s so built to serve them that women can’t even have a movement to address our systematic exclusion without some men insisting it should be about them too.
I am a feminist because my focus is, correctly, on making technology more equal for women.
The absence of privilege is not oppression. But, I think it often seems like that to some men. It distresses me greatly that when I talk about problems like exclusionary hiring practices - just how quickly men turn the conversation to what is fairest for them. You’re essentially asking for your privilege to be baked into the language of our fight for equality.
Game Design
by deltatype0
I am a "neutral" in the Gamergate debacle, preferring to observe more than directly interact, but in one case I watched the somewhat-infamous interview between Wu and Reddit KotakuInAction mod TheHat2. In it, they discussed the points of her iOS game "Revolution 60" and game design in general. One of the questions asked there was why she decided to work with iOS first versus the popular PC platform Steam. I don't remember the exact answer, but I think it revolved around developing for a platform that more women were likely to use, being the mobile market, and maybe some development-specific answers.
My question is this: Given what you've learned about programming in iOS, would you have developed for a PC platform like Steam first and ported to mobile later? Given female trends towards mobile platforms like the Nintendo DS/3DS, would it make more sense for your studio to explore developing games there? Or was your goal all along to produce a more 3D-visual action title for mobile phones?
For context, my wife is not as big of a gamer as myself, but I find she enjoys playing a lot of mobile puzzle games. I think the mobile market has a lot of potential for bigger things, and I think having the input of the majority player base on that platform makes sense, but I often don't understand why, as a mobile developer, you would be overly concerned with "the core gamer" demographic in the console platform. It seems to me that they aren't likely to crossover into the mobile market often, so there is little reason to "attack" that demographic as we've seen a few people, including Brianna, do through the last year.
Brianna: First of all, if you are “neutral” on the horrific abuse many women have suffered at the hands of Gamergate, you are a part of the problem. Being able to lean back in a chair and talk about Gamergate as if it’s a fun controversy isn’t a privilege I have, and it’s not a privilege women in the game industry have. This is about being able to continue working in the field I love.
Being neutral about threats to murder, rape and intimidate women with opinions is a character defect.
As far as your question - we’ve certainly thought about working with Nintendo. I have good connections with Nintendo of America - but Unreal is barely supported on Wii-U and 3DS. Often, these versions of Unreal are custom variants that are not supported by Epic. It’s a shame, because I think the touch interfaces would make us a natural fit for both - though the vert decimation it would take to get our skeletal meshes to work on 3DS makes me cringe to think about.
My proudest accomplishment with Revolution 60 is that anyone can pick it up and play it, regardless if they are a gamer or not. I don’t think that you should have to be a hardcore gamer to enjoy a story. That didn’t happen serendipitously, it happened through game design constraints and a lot of playtesting. I think that design philosophy is extremely compatible with Nintendo.
Are custom engines dead for 'normal' developers?
by MBCook
More and more developers seem to be using the existing engines (i know you used Unreal 3 for Rev 60, Unity, UbiArt, etc) which makes sense given the huge number of features they provide with little initial development cost and common tool sets/plugins used by other developers. Do you think there is much future in developers using custom engines for games (both indie and non-AAA) or do you think it will continue to become more uncommon for common genre games as you start at a larger and larger feature 'deficit' by having to redevelop the features on your custom engine, let alone porting issues, leaving only vert large/profitable houses (Naughty Dog, Insomniac, EA, etc) to be able to bear the time/$ costs?
Brianna: When you are an indie studio, you have to be absolutely ruthless about what you spend resources on. To me, getting into OpenGL and coding custom engines is a suicide mission for small teams. It’s worth noting that Apple’s 3D frameworks just don’t measure up to Unity or Unreal.
If someone has solved an engineering problem already, I see no point in reinventing the wheel.
I think indie teams get a little bit of a break - but you still have to do one or two things better than anyone else, including AAA. For us, we concentrated on characterization and animation. I would put the quality of Revolution 60s animation against anything on any platform. We wouldn’t have been able to do that if we’d wasted resources writing a custom engine.
"Developer" or "Journalist"?
by Rick in China
I'm interested in what development languages you excel in and how you mastered them - as head of development for a gaming company, I think that's my first question. Follow-up side-points would be when you transitioned from journalist to game developer, and why game development? Was it related to some of the 'sparks' and 'movements' by some other females 'in the gaming community' - and seen as an easy way to jump on a bandwagon that was clearly going to make waves? Journalist to developer just seems like a very strange transition to me, so I'm curious about the particulars. Do you have a github account where you publish some of your code?
Brianna: I’ve had many jobs over the course of my life. I’ve worked in politics and well as media. Both have been very helpful backgrounds for me in running a studio, which is a very political job. One of my greatest frustrations as a developer is that I don’t get to spend as much time doing gamedev as I used to. The truth is, I can hire another engineer - but I can’t hire someone to replace me.
I feel like my entire life has prepared me for this moment. There’s very little I would change about the choices that brought me to this point.
I can’t help but read your question and feel like you might not have the best of intentions. I read it as you are feel that I need to prove to you that I’m a legit developer. I think my record as someone whose first game won several game of the year awards speaks for itself. I think my two popular shows on Relay.FM where I am an industry analyst on technical issues speaks for itself.
I do have code up on Github, but like many women developers - it’s under a gender-neutral pseudonym, because I know it will be torn to pieces if it’s not. I once wrote a joke on Twitter with pseudocode, written to be readable for non-developers - and received a litany of sexist accusations and code critique.
There is an unconscious bias that men are assumed competent until proven otherwise, and women are assumed incompetent until proven otherwise. My track record of success speaks for itself.
Customization / Modification of Unreal Engine
by Anonymous Coward
Hi Brianna. No idea if this will bubble near enough to the surface for you to see it, but I'm curious how much, if any, work you and your team had to do in the "guts" of the Unreal Engine to get your game out the door, or if all of your work was done at the Unreal Script / editor level.
Brianna: One of the great things about Unreal is that there are certain game types that are coded into the engine already. If you want a top-down Diablo game, they’ve done that work already. If you want to make an FPS, they’ve done that work already. But it doesn't cover everything so we ended up having to do a lot more work than other game types.
It’s hard to stress just how much work we had to do to get Revolution 60 to run on older Apple devices. You start out with 512 megs of RAM, and a good chunk of that is taken up with Springboard. Then, iOS 7 came out midway through development and we found ourself suddenly with 134 megs less RAM to work with. We lost over four months solving that problem.
Revolution 60 got a lot of critique for our textures - which has always felt unfair to me. Low resolution textures were a deliberate tradeoff. Infinity Blade looks amazing, but they only have 2 characters on screen at a time. Cyrus has 22 mesh influencing bones, with a level 2 joint influence. Holiday has over 75 mesh influencing bones - requiring a second draw call with level 3 joint influence. We have up to five characters on screen at once, all with a 2k diffuse and a 2k normal. On top of that, there is a ton of custom animsets and sound that isn't hardware decoded. This is very ambitious to ask all of this to run on the iPhone 4S.
I would guess that about 1/4th of our development was spent working around these hardware limitations in Unreal. Holiday doesn’t run because we are loading and unloading every section you walk through from memory. I was handed sections to texture, and I had four 1k maps for many of them. Given those constraints, the game looks AMAZING. I could write a textbook on extremely efficient texture stacking.
A lot of people think beautiful textures are the test of a good materials artist, and it's true. But - I think working under memory constraints is an even greater challenge.
There are a lot of gamers out there that like to play armchair developer because they don’t understand these engineering tradeoffs. None of them could have made a game as ambitious as Revolution 60. I made the choice to emphasize characters over graphics, and I’d absolutely do it again.
Virtual Reality?
by Anonymous Coward
You hinted a bit in an episode of Rocket that you're playing with the idea of making a game for VR. Can you go into any detail on that, or talk about the future of VR gaming (if there is one)?
Brianna: As much as I would love to, I am unable to comment on that right now. I will say, if you thought I shook up the industry last year? Trust me, our best is yet to come.
For the interesting response.
Just like many people predicted in the submission for asking the questions, it looks like the good, hard-hitting questions were totally ignored.
What's the point of having these /. interviews, regardless of who they're with, if all we get are answers to lame, uninteresting questions?
This isn't the only case where this has happened, of course. The same thing happened with the Linus Torvalds interview a few weeks ago. The best questions remained ignored, or if answered indirectly, the answers were pretty half-arsed.
If the best and most relevant questions aren't going to get answered, then /. should stop with these shitty interviews. Each one takes up two front page slots that could instead have been filled with relevant, useful stories.
"The truth is, I can hire another engineer - but I can’t hire someone to replace me."
Impressive.
"I read it as you are feel that I need to prove to you that I’m a legit developer. I think my record as someone whose first game won several game of the year awards speaks for itself. I think my two popular shows on Relay.FM where I am an industry analyst on technical issues speaks for itself."
Neither speaks to being a developer at all, unless you wrote the game yourself, which you didn't. And being an analyst doesn't make you a developer.
Incredible.
If it happens, you can thank /. in part for that.
"Brianna: First of all, if you are “neutral” on the horrific abuse many women have suffered at the hands of Gamergate, you are a part of the problem."
no, anyone who attacks a neutral party is a part of the problem. not everyone knows all of the details, and neither side seems to be entirely trustworthy.
carry your argument out a bit further - you are suggesting that portugal,in part, caused the holocaust.
roflcopter captcha: partly.
Of all the good questions actually upvoted in the original thread, why the hell did you decide to respond to not only the most soulless of the bunch, but ones that also require the disclaimer "I can't talk about this, but here's my opinion about a tangentially related issue"?
You say that you don't want to play the victim or the token IT female or the feminist propagandist... And then proceed to focus on literally nothing else, even at the expense of answering the damned questions asked. Seriously, why bother?
Stopped reading after the second question after Wu said she was well known before GamerGate. No, no she wasn't. She's taken full advantage of the GamerGate situation for her own shameless self promotion, even going as far as trying to incite abuse against herself on Steam. She just forgot to log out of her developer account.
http://theralphretort.com/wp-content/uploads/Selection_999023.png
"Being neutral about threats to murder, rape and intimidate women with opinions is a character defect."
Once again, the narrative is that the entire controversy was "evil misogynistic gamers" vs "poor innocent woman".
Both sides have done fuck up things. Trying to pretend it was a completely black and white, good vs evil conflict does not get you any respect, neither does being a professional victim.
"Feminism is advocating equal social, political, legal, and economic rights for women - and we are at a huge deficit with those rights." ...What rights do men have that woman do not?
The internet! Where EVERYONE actually gets the 'equality' they all claimed they wanted!
Nobody knows who or what you are! Everyone is treated the same!
So whats the first thing most people do?
Out themselves to try and get special treatment. 'i'm a woman you cant say that to me! you must hate my game because i'm a woman!'
Shut the fuck up and keep that shit to yourself. Nobody cares what color you are, if you have tits or not, or who you like to fuck.
And they won't even know UNLESS YOU TELL THEM!
So shut the fuck up and enjoy actual equality in all it's brutality.
Or stop pretending it was ever about being 'equal' and was really all about getting special treatment. But only when you agree with it or approve of it.
First of all, if you are “neutral” on the horrific abuse many women have suffered at the hands of Gamergate, you are a part of the problem.
And this is why we can't have grown-up conversations. Even the mere thought that there might be anything of merit on the GG side is tantamount to a rape threat. It's intolerant and childish.
Why are you a feminist instead of a egalitarian?
Brianna: Egalitarianism is about equal rights for all people, but this is assuming that everyone starts in an equal situation, which is not the case.Feminism is advocating equal social, political, legal, and economic rights for women - and we are at a huge deficit with those rights.
I don't understand this answer; how is advocating for equal rights for women not egalitarian?
Q: "I'm interested in what development languages you excel in and how you mastered them"
A: "My track record of success speaks for itself."
Hmmm...
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
"First of all, if you are “neutral” on the horrific abuse many women have suffered at the hands of Gamergate, you are a part of the problem"
If you don't agree with everything we say then you're the problem and have issues. Modern feminism is such a fucking tragedy. How could such a once noble forward thinking movement be so co-opted by so many fucking mentalists
Anytime you say "feminazi" with a straight face, your credibility flies out the window.
Learned a bit more about Brianna today, cool (I guess).
Unfortunately, her logic:
(Neutral in the Gamergate argument) == (You Support Rape and Death Threats etc..)
Doesn't sit well for my respect of her and became a bit of a stigma.
Seconded.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
That's what it is though. It's not feminism for the sake of equal opportunity. It's feminism for the sake of misguided personal gain at the expense of everyone else.
Modern feminism has become about being equal+ rather than just equal.
I see you didn't get the memo.
Feminism WAS about equal rights, then when they got them they realized some things actually require hard work and talent. Thus feminism is now about equal outcome, regardless of merit or ability.
Remember when Brianna Wu did this: http://i.imgur.com/zlEkMPQ.png She's only known because of GamerGate, despite what she says.
I can't make sense of that sentence. If it assumes everyone starts in an equal situation, then equal rights are already obtained.
I quit my job when I married my husband, and followed him to Boston. I was trying to figure out what to do with my life. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to pursue a graduate degree or start my own company.
Ms. Wu, right there you already have vastly more privilege than many trans women I know and a lot of guys I know, too. How dare you speak of privilege? How dare you take these things for granted?
I do hope you gender lunatics one day learn how to think critically. How many trans women are unable to get bottom surgery? How many trans women are uncertain how they'll afford their next prescription refill? How many trans women are unable to work as their mental gender? Switching gears, how many men are out of work and about to lose their homes? How many men with degrees are homeless or working 2 shit service jobs 80 hours a week with no hope to even save more than $500 before the next disaster saps their savings entirely?
Do you even know one single thing about privilege? No, it appears that you've never had those problems. You would never understand what it's like to have nothing in the world and to lose even what you have when you come out. You have the privilege of being unaware of your privilege!
How many trans women get married and rely on a man for income? Hell, how many people who aren't cisgendered women get those advantages and privileges?
You've made your choices, Ms. Wu, as have a good number of gender lunatics. I will never understand your worldviews. I will never understand why you rely on men to provide for you and then ask for pity under the delusion that somebody's denied you some ephemeral privilege instead of following the way of the Amazon feminist/woman.
"It is a man's world, not because it should be, but because we let them have it. The man's world is based on a woman's weakness. The Amazon world is based on truth and a woman's individual strength."
Fare thee well, Slashdot. I'm afraid it's time to uncomment your line in my hosts file one final time. If anybody wants to debate me on these points, look me up over on Soylent.
-- kurenai.tsubasa
Captcha: discord
I don't think it's fair to say men can't talk about women's issues because they're men. That just creates a closed loop where any outside argument can be shut down by saying "well you're not a woman, so anything you say is invalid". That's the sort of thing you see a lot from hard line feminism - the idea that nobody but them can truly understand the argument, and we just have to take their word for it. Other SJW groups tend to do the same things. Any time you hear something like "check your privilege" or statements which point in that direction, it's a sign that the person you're talking to probably has no reasonable rebuttal to an argument.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
A man can speak from a position of sympathy, but never a position of experience. This is the difference. Just as an Indy developer cannot speak from a position of experience compared to all women developers.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
This line shows it all for me:
"The truth is, if you are a woman, and someone threatens to murder you online, it's overwhelmingly likely that no help is coming, and you're on your own."
Why is she making this a gender-specific issue?
Does anyone else see the inherent sexism and wrongness of her thinking here?
Unfortunately this is just another perfect example of a massive problem in society now from many women and most PeeCee media outlets blatantly promoting the idea that a politically correct society just automatically understands that a women's life and rights are somehow intrinsically more valuable/important than a man's, so women should get extra special protection just because vagina.
I agree, the amount of sexism from the interview was amazing. Wu really should clean up that attitude, it hurts her cause far more than helps.
Oh...you meant the comments asking valid questions about Wu's harassment and doxing of others and the questions of what sex Wu was born, as that relates pretty heavily on her positions. Sorry, continue on.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Ms. Wu, you don't know me, but I'm a woman in tech.
I admit that I have been harassed in my career. Sexually, by men. But by women also, where the weapon of choice was rumor and innuendo.
So you see, men and women are equal, in that they are perfectly capable of cruelty towards others.
All that having been said, you will not, during the course of a normal workday, ever hear me talk about being a woman.
Know why?
Because my job is not dependent upon being a woman. It depends upon me being able to do my job, and last I checked, being able to communicate, use a computer, or design a test does not automatically somehow reject me from the process of doing my job or make it harder.
Yes, there is sexism, I will not deny this, but it isn't pervasive, it isn't everywhere, and you'll never find me pointing at shadows demanding everyone within the sound of my voice do something about some formless terror that in the course of damn near a year hasn't become as corporeal as, say, Ferguson, or Charleston, or the Bill Cosby controversy.
Because it doesn't help anyone.
YOU are the one creating a hostile environment by stirring up this imagined "terror" of Gamergate, and demanding this wild snipe hunt be enacted to purge no one in particular, and scare everyone to varying degrees.
YOU are the one saying that the environment hates women so much that you need to create a "safe space" for women around you to the exclusion of men, and yet somehow find yourself "qualified" to decry sexism.
YOU are the one reacting defensively to questions by even the most neutral of submitters.
People actually like me because I'm not all about gender politics, at least not until women like YOU show up and demand to be taken seriously and I have to tread carefully, so people don't think I want to be part of your crusade...because, fuck, I just want to do my job and get along with my coworkers.
So, here's a proposition for you: if you want it to stop being about sexism, how about you stop talking about sexism?
If you want people to take you seriously, don't sidetrack the discussion into other subjects.
If you want people not to question your credibility, avoid questions about the things you don't want to talk about and answer questions about the things you do, and DO NOT WAVER. Give people the impression that the only subjects you'll entertain are the ones that make you credible in the field. Make sure they know you don't have time for the bullshit that ISN'T about game development.
That is how I am successful, Ms. Wu, and Slashdot. That is how many women I know, peers and mentors, have been successful. Not by being a woman first and a developer/engineer/career whatever second.
I'll not be cynical for the moment and ask you to emulate those women. Not the ones whose valuable time is spent glossing over the few individuals who have wronged you because I guarantee, there weren't that many.
I hope you take this advice, Ms. Wu, because I think that's what a good feminist would do.
Some people don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in The Patriarchy.
Will the real Brianna Wu ever show up and actually answer questions? I did thoroughly enjoy reading these obviously fake, asinine question/answer pairs though, so thanks for the laugh!
The corner of a round room
..to run on older Apple devices. You start out with 512 megs of RAM...
Yikes... Must be an age difference... When I think of "older Apple devices" I'm thinking of like 64 KB... And I know people with older ones still...
>> obviously, the tech world has a problem with sexism.
Sorry but its very not obvious to me.
I've worked as a software developer for 35 years, for many different employers in several different fields and countries, and haven't yet seen anything other than environments that encourage women developers, treat and pay them equally, and mostly actually cut them more slack than the guys get.
The girls were obviously getting an easier time than guys during my CS degree at university too.
There's a great deal of irony in that statement. Do you think men never suffer harassment, or discrimination? Are these things which are exclusive to women?
Do you not see how hypocritical it is to shut someone out of an argument based on gender?
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
That's the sort of thing you see a lot from hard line feminism
An interesting perspective. I've never seen a feminist, hard-line or not, espouse such a thing. That argument seems to exist exclusively withing groups like GG and AVFM, who apparently have inside information in to the secret feminist cabal that's out to destroy the world.
Sorry about that last bit. I just can't take you conspiracy nuts seriously. Particularly when you spend so much time and energy arguing against your own imagination.
Required reading for internet skeptics
i don't see the problem
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Thank you for this.
Not if reasonable, SJW resistant, individuals (Cernovich comes to mind) have the financial clout to reclaim ground lost to harassers such as her, Chelsea van Valkenberg, and their enablers. It'd be interesting to wake up and see them lose editorial control of places, courtesy new owners firing them for harassment. That is, harassment of the kind that they accuse of others but commit themselves.
"Forget the engineers." -Carly Fiorina, briber of MIT Technology Review.
See here. Context: Github adds a code of conduct to its own repositories, and advocates other repos doing the same. Some are complaining that it striped some language from the coc it's partly based on, which explicitly says some forms of racism/sexism/prejudice are okay. The implemented code of conduct (as it stands, minus some iffy language that could potentially be abused to force people to accept bad commits) could be considered feminism. The issues some raise, the code of conduct they want to see implemented, is feminazism.
I can't say I, as a man in tech, have any clue as to the harassment my female coworkers go through. I can be sympathetic of it, but I cannot speak from experience of being sexually harassed, or harassed because of my gender. Do you not see the difference here?
I also don't claim to be an expert on the harassment that women in tech go through. Even if I were to transition to female (as Wu allegedly did), I would not claim to be an expert on the harassment that women suffer in tech.
On the other point I was trying to make, claiming to be an expert on the discrimination that women face in development, while only ever working as an indy developer, itself only a very small subset of the group developers, makes little sense. Do you not see what I am trying to say there?
I have heard some of my female coworkers complain about the amount of money they make, but when delving deeper into it, they make MORE than a male with the same amount of experience. This is unfortunately so much in the media of late that it is just expected that women make less than men when it just isn't as true anymore.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Is it hypocritical to shut white people out of discussions of racism and ignore the effects of racial bias they experience on an hourly basis... on another issue, why does no one promote the fair treatment of unicorns and dragons!
Well said!
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
Well, there are 2 angles to this thing:
1. The angle of fulfilling narcissism, egoism, self-validation, and messiah complex (savior complex).
Basically, rather than tackle real tangible problems that actually require willpower, education, and effort; like tackling the economy, war, poverty, infrastructure repair, and development; you instead tackle perpetual issues that require no effort beyond vocal diarrhea. They are perpetual because human individualism constantly creates them, and human individualism is a core part of human nature. More importantly, those "issues" are relative and subjective. Meaning that the core cause of those "issues" is dynamic and constantly changing due to the variables of human individualism, and you can't solve them without generalizing people, creating slippery slope arguments, and inconveniencing innocent people in the name of a minority justifying a higher ideal (like saying sexualization of video game characters inherently leads to objectification in real life, or that the media has an absolute mind control coverage over society). In order to "fix" these intangible social "issues", you need to destroy human individualism. For instance: You can't eliminate homosexuality or heterosexuality due to the fact that human individualism, as a core component of human nature, demands that all babies grow up differently. Some babies cry at birth, some don't; some will continue crying as they grow up, some will grow a steady personality; some will be bad, some good, some inbetween in a complex web; some engineers, some artists, some athletes, some will prefer books over boxing, some stone sculpting over painting; some attracted to asian people more than blacks and vice versa etc. etc. etc. etc. This unique set of preferences,
It's a way to feel accomplished as an individual, without actually accomplishing anything, and getting that ego feed and backpats from it.
2. Reduction and/or elimination of standards and self-responsibility. There are those individuals who wish to create an environment where they can easily go up the ladder, and achieve, without having to go through the physical and mental effort.
When you study and come to face a barrier, you push through it. When you train and come to face a barrier, you push through it. This requires willpower and INDIVIDUAL ACTION TAKING RESPONSIBILITY FOR ONES OWN GOALS/IDEALS/AMBITIONS WITH ONES OWN HANDS, and pushing through proves that you have the ambition and personal strength for the job.
A group is only as strong as the people consisting it are on a personal individual level. Like a bunch of wooden arrows grouped are harder to break than 1 arrow, the equal group of metal arrows are harder to break than the wooden ones (or even half that group and more). If you can't push through a barrier; be it a written test, job risks, physical limitation; and easily give up, you pose a liability and risk.
All in all, it is quite a sight to see an increase in women like Hirsi Ali denouncing feminism as a collective that has gone down the crapper, including that giant Twitter debacle with Women Against Feminism. Mind you, we are talking both the Hirsi Ali who once stated all men should be castrated, and who still despite that is actually accomplished as an individual and whose worth is backed up by tangible accomplishments affecting the real world and saving lives, unlike feminists like Anita.
To finish with a popular sentence and retort to Wu's answer on Feminism over Egalitarianism: Feminism is to Egalitarianism what Westboro Baptist Church is to Christianity, and Al-Qaeda is to Islam.
It made perfect sense. If you have a set of scales, and one side has 6kg on it and the other has only 500 grams on it, which course of actions results in both sides measuring equal amounts: (1) Adding 5.5kg to both sides, or (2) adding 5.5kg to only the disadvantaged side?
you have the social observational abilities of a clod of earth if you don't see the language that guys engage in about and around women
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I would love to have this conversation, but everywhere I try either bans me for asking or gives the "educate yourself!" cop-out answer.
So, the topic is social, political, legal, and economic rights.
Now, a quick google search gives this as the definition of social rights:
"Social rights include at least the right to education and the right to found and maintain a family but also many of the rights often regarded as civil’ rights: for example, the rights to recreation, health care, privacy and freedom from discrimination."
As far as I can tell, woman (In the United States) have all of these rights. They can go to public schools, have a family, get a job, have health care and it is illegal to discriminate against them in any of these areas.
Political rights:
"Civil and political rights are a class of rights that protect individuals' freedom from infringement by governments, social organizations and private individuals, and which ensure one's ability to participate in the civil and political life of the society and state without discrimination or repression."
Again, seems like woman have all of these rights. You could argue that private individuals can discriminate as they are entitled to their own opinion, but in this definition their freedom is not being restricted by that.
Legal rights:
"Legal rights are those bestowed onto a person by a given legal system."
I can't think of any laws that discriminate against woman. In fact, if anything I believe I could make an argument that the law favors woman, but that isn't the topic at hand.
Economic rights:
"Economic, social and cultural rights are socio-economic human rights, such as the right to education, right to housing, right to adequate standard of living, right to health and the right to science and culture."
Can't think of anything discriminatory here either. Everyone in the United States has the right to education and housing. Adequate standards of living is debatable but doesn't discriminate.
What am I missing here? Are we using different definitions?
how am i suddenly a racist asshole?
can i call you a pedophile if we're just going to smear people without any proof or purpose now?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
last news I heard related to Star Citizen is that there's some type of petty fight between the developers and Derek smart, and E3 was about a month ago
i think my description of people who engage in sexism is pretty objectively accurate. stupidity is actually something that exists in this world and actually forms the source of some people's low grade opinions. this is objectively true. someone who doesn't believe in climate change, for example, is a low information person fed propaganda rather than proof. they are therefore, objectively, low iq, stupid people. these are opinions and people you do not respect. not because i am disrespectful by default, but because such people have earned disrespect by having ignorance as their primary motivation. we don't live in a world where you don't get judged by having ignorant and stupid opinions. if you say something ignorant and stupid, is that really the same thing as ignorance and hate itself? if you say some thing stupid, i will call you stupid. you don't have to like that, but it doesn't make me the same as a stupid person
meanwhile, you seem pretty angry at me, a warrior almost, out to seek justice against me on this social network. and who lacks self awareness?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
This assumes that, in all areas, one is greater than the other. It isn't as black and white as that. There are many issues at hand, it isn't as simple as taking away from one side and adding to the other.
i don't know who you are, you came and found me and sought me out here. you hide your identity, a coward. you accuse me based on a supposed longstanding awareness of my past (really just smearmongering insults). so are clearly a bully and a stalker
you are the warpath against me, a *warrior*, out to seek *justice* against my behavior on this *social* network
you're such a blind loser
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I've seen far more hostility on slashdot than in my workplace
In that case, you add x kg to the lighter side. But that's not at all what gets advocated. They advocate adding x kg to the X group or the Y group or whatever, rather than helping all disadvantaged people equally. If we always help those who are disadvantaged equally--regardless of whatever traits they were born with--the scales will tend towards balancing and the group interests will tend to be more aligned, as we're not deciding which groups are worthy or not worthy of society's support.
If we're always trying to figure out which group is or isn't disadvantaged based simply on group membership, rather than any observable facts, we trend towards a world where the group interests are in perpetual conflict. This is why equality cannot be achieved by perpetuating inequality against future generations. As shown, there's a way to address past inequality without creating new injustices that's stable over time.
I don't know about you, but I don't want to live in a world where society decides that you have less rights than someone else because of how you were born. Anyone who advocates treating others as lesser due to how they were born is some kind of KKK-level scumbag in my book.
The truth is, if you are a woman, and someone threatens to murder you online, it's overwhelmingly likely that no help is coming, and you're on your own.
First, it's not because you're a woman. If you're a man, woman, or other and someone threatens to murder you online, it is overwhemingly likely that no help is coming because no one is actually coming to murder you. There is no actual threat. Some 14 year old is saying nasty things to you to get a rise out of you.
And yet you claim this is a serious threat and somebody needs to come protect you. You were not "driven from your home" by angry gamergate neckbeards. You'd have a point if you left because an actual crowd of cheeto dust-encrusted blobs had their mothers drop them off at your house so they could come do horrible things to you. But there was no one there. You chose to leave.
And since, clearly, there is no actual threat (no one is really going to hurt you), and you chose to leave anyway, there are two possibilities:
1) You fell for the ploys of 14-year-old online trolls.
2) You knew there was no serious threat, but figured "if I pretend like I'm scared everybody will pay attention to me and I milk this!"
So, are you simply dim-witted, or sociopathic? You don't seem dumb.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
No, that's bullshit. If you're going to shut down an argument, shut it down by attacking the failings of the argument. Not the gender of the person making the point. All arguments should arrive at a weight of 0 until valid points are made to either support, or debunk it.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Mansplaining. The practice is so common, it has its own word. "I don't see it" is no more an argument than when it's applied to sexism in the workplace; it just means you're ignorant.
Doesn't seem to stop feminists from spouting off what it's like to be a guy, generalizing and stereotyping men as they go. The real catch is that their spouting often becomes state and institutional policy everywhere. That's quite a privilege, so perhaps feminists should check it.
you accuse me of racism which is completely random and unfounded. i am not a racist and i never said a racist thing. show me where i ever said anything racist
should i just go around now calling you a pedophile? same thing
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
However, with or without direct experience, anyone can speak to feminists from reason, fact, and observation to tear down their arguments. They just don't like it when men do that so they use shaming language that claims it as victimization.
you know this has been an awesome review of my character and my behavior by a random stalking nutcase using this social network to seek justice against me. you are truly a brave warrior
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
slashdot does have problems. such an anonymous stalking cowards
and who here is hiding and hating on whom?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Because it is good advice for actual progress. Wu isn't a feminist, she's a professional victim. I mean that literally: She makes her money by whining about being victimized and guilting people in to donating to her pateron to fund her life. She's a developer in only the most basic sense. She has one product ever, a mobile game that is very poor quality. She has no track record for actually working to advance women's rights or gender equality. Her profession is literally being a victim.
So she has no interest in advice from actual successful women developers because she's not. Her issue isn't having lots of skill but being kept down because of gender, it is having minimal skills and then playing pretend about the source of her problems.
That's why she agreed to the Ask Slashdot. She wanted the "mean" questions she refused to answer because she can point to those as examples of "harassment" to further her cause. She's not stupid, she knew what she was doing.
However while she won't take your advice, hopefully other women will, because it is excellent.
Harassment and discrimination are not created equal. There's different varieties. I can be harassed, and I have been discriminated against, but it was not because of sex or race. I have no good idea of what it would be like to face prejudice routinely. What I can do is listen to the experience of others and draw my own conclusions.
I am inherently excluded from parts of arguments based on other people's experiences. I can make observations, ask questions, try to draw conclusions, even question the thinking of other people, but I'm not a primary source.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Brianna Wu was born a man. I'm honestly not sure if, despite being transsexual, Brianna Wu can actually speak to the problems women face.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
I don't experience racial bias at all. (I may be a victim of it in some sense, but not to the level that I notice it.) If I did notice racial bias against me, and didn't dismiss it as someone else's problem, it would almost certainly be rare and intermittent. (The color of my skin does have something to do with this lack of racial discrimination against me.)
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
And anyone, with or without direct experience, can dump a lot of people into a certain classification and badmouth that classification. I've known women who considered themselves feminists, and listened to them.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
"The truth is, if you are a woman, and someone threatens to murder you online, it's overwhelmingly likely that no help is coming, and you're on your own."
And as a woman, that's her view, but in reality if you're anyone (who isn't rich and famous, but even then) getting threatened online... it's going to take a *lot* before the police step in. There are many reasons for this, including
a) People say stupid shit online, there's lots of noise, and it's not easy to decipher intent. Similarly, if somebody threats you on the street it may not get much action, unless it's a public action with something backing it.
b) If your neighbour threatens you, the police can go over to his/her house and deal with it. When it's online, that person isn't likely using a real-name, and may not be anywhere in your jurisdiction or even country/continent
c) There's often a prevaling lack of understanding of technology in the justice system
d) Laziness or resourcing... due to (c) and (b)... it's work and resources to actually catch somebody and then sometimes even harder to convict. Again, hard to condone, but unless we want to wiretap everyone (well, they tried) or spend a month of work of three officers in order to track it down... sometimes things need a critical mass before they'll dedicate the effort.
None of the above are excusing the aholes that post terrible crap online, especially death threats, but saying that it's exclusively a problem of a certain group - whether it be based on gender, ethnicity, or other - is not particular accurate.
Of course, society is wonderfully unbalanced about such things. Sometimes nailing somebody for what is obviously a joke, particularly if the target is a rich scientologist like Tom Cruise
And answers.
Since I know what comments tend to be, I'm not going to read the rest of the responses however.
But having had an ex-wife who was in IT and a roommate who was a female gamer and programmer, and working with a lot of women at a professional level in STEM fields, I know it's sadly true how poisonous things are.
Some days I miss when USE*NET was real people's accounts, before we let you trolls in. The good old days of the flame wars.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I think your definition of right and Wu's aren't the same, and I generally agree with you.
There are real sexism problems out there, but in the US they have nothing to do with rights. Women have all the political rights of men, but the top levels of government are male-dominated. Women and men have the same rights to health care (pretty dismal, in this country), but as far as I can tell women's health issues tend to be taken less seriously than men's in several ways.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Being neutral that people (mostly women) are being repeatedly doxed is definitely a character flaw... There is definitely one side to the GG controversy that is intolerant and childish, but it isn't the women game developers.
I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but Briana Wu, along with other "SJWs," is accused of doxxing and harassing GGers... Exactly what she accuses them of doing. She's also accused of posting threats to herself under "anonymous" screen names, then claiming that the treats came from GGers. I'm sure if I look hard enough, I can find SJWs accusing GG of false flag harassment too.
Obviously, real harassment is bad. False flag harassment is bad for a different readon. But to a dispassionate observer, both "sides" are doing the exact same thing. It's ridiculous to claim that one side is the side of the angels. That's why "neutral on gamergate" is a reasonable position.
It's a shame that your criticism is targeted at GG exclusively, because both sides could stand to follow your advice.
You haven't actually rebutted anything he said. Matter of fact your whole defense is an ad hominem attack.
...which might even be halfway to funny if it wasn't for Dice sucking up to this fucking victim-all-its-life, self-obsessed dillbag. Where were the hard questions? Why won't s/he answer why she doesn't consider actual talent rather than the location of the genitals?
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
You are rather rife with logical fallacies aren't you.
Why didn't you just simplify that comment to
If you don't agree with me you're an idiot
The problem is, how do you determine who's disadvantaged? In some cases it looks easy. In my school district, if a student's family is below a certain income level, said student gets lunch for a reduced price or for free. This theoretically equalizes the availability of lunch, but when you start to look at it carefully there's all sorts of possible issues. Some families are better at budgeting than others, so a family with lower income might have more money available for the kids than a family with higher income (it's not normally the kids who do the budgeting, but it's the kids who can get too hungry to learn). Having sharp demarcations means that it's better to have the family income slightly below the demarcation line than slightly above it.
It's a lot easier to tell if somebody is from X or Y group than to determine their level of disadvantage and what's necessary to help equalize their opportunities.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
this imagined "terror" of Gamergate,
Basically what you're saying is:
"I don't like what you have to say so I'm going to claim you imagined it all".
You are literally claiming that none of the threats she got were real.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I think they've got a secret backdoor network where they communicate with themselves. The outside world is baffled when they talk to each other in code yet they seem to understand each other. They say "SJW" and agree upon the meaning of it and agree on the concept that it's somehow bad; they agree that "gamergate" was not about women or doxxing at all but only about the miniscule problem of some journalists in game websites being biased; the instantly show up whenever certain names are mentioned like those names are on a master hit-list somewhere. It really is like a group of conspiracy theory nuts.
People have been accusing feminism of things it isn't since the word was first invented. Using things like feminazi just brands them as lunatics (a Rush Limbaugh classic trolling joke that some people took seriously).
And anyone, with or without direct experience, can dump a lot of people into a certain classification and badmouth that classification
Exactly. Feminists do this to men all the time. It's their standard modus operandi. Men who speak up are shouted down with cries of "It's a women's issue! You're not a woman, you don't understand!" Then they go right back to pushing for law and cultural change based on their own generalizations and stereotypes of men. It's quite hypocritical.
'Considering' yourself something and being something are two different things. There are lots of feminists who, when put on the spot to justify some sexist position taken in the name of feminism, claim the 'no true feminist would' fallacy as a response. "Oh that isn't really feminism, my own brand of it is." This doesn't change the basic fact that the de facto feminism exists, manipulating law and culture in hypocritically sexist and harmful ways. One, two, or 100 women claims of being feminists, and your choice to listen to them is irrelevant as far as this is concerned.
obligatory: http://www.penny-arcade.com/co...
I'm pretty sure Wu would PROBABLY say you have Internalized misogyny, and your brain was warped by the patriarchy to believe these lies.
And in doing so, she would be stereotyping you as a helpless, dimwitted woman who cannot think for herself even with all your experience and education.
They don't want you to be able to handle yourself, they want you to submit. They want you to be oppressed, like most of them think/pretend they are.
And most of all, they want you to please donate to their Patreon :)
It's "noticing" and "remembering".
...with some help from the Internet Archive.
FTFY.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Are you saying if a I'm on "BUS" and it comes to "STOP" I'm riding a bus stop?
Right well, if the person defines these 'subjective' experiences, then holding others responsible for them is oppressive, and really how can men be expected to modify their behavior accordingly if they can't understand? Conversely, how could women be expected to? It would be best if everyone's civil liberties were returned to them, allowing individuals to set up their lives as they see fit.
I'll say it again: threats to life and limb are criminal offences, even on the internet. WHY has nobody been prosecuted over these alleged threats? Could it be because she sent them to herself, if they even exist? And if they do exist, records should exists on a server log somewhere. Why aren't those servers being examined?
I think it's because Ms. Wu isn't being entirely truthful.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Well said. I also completely agree that in order to be a good engineer/developer/scientist, you need to be that first (at least when you work) and anything else second. You cannot claim to be "good" or "experienced" in order to make that happen, you have to be these things. Nothing can substitute.
The problem Ms. Wu has is that she claims these things, but does not deliver on the claims. That produces an understandable counter-reaction. There is also a hate-reaction by some people that attack anything they do not like, but that does not cover the majority to the reaction to the claims Ms. Wu has made. It is a side issue. Of course she tries to focus on that, because she cannot actually deliver on her claims. This is merely classical misdirection.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
You might not be a primary source TODAY, but we have the technology to fix that ;-)
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Many of us can - but I wouldn't want Wu to be one such. Too many lies, and too many transsexuals go to extreme feminism as a way to help deny their past even to themselves.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
If you claim anything on the Internet today with high enough visibility, you are going to get threats. There is a small sub-species of the human rage that cannot abide others getting attention. Hence these threats do not mean anything, except that she had visibility. Making these threats the core of the discussion is exceptionally unprofessional and misses the point of the discussion entirely. It is a tried-and-true strategy for styling oneself as a victim though, because these threats will always come.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
That's because you read Slashdot all day while you're at work.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Janelle Asselin @gimpnelly: @Spacekatgal @slashdot do you have your bingo card ready?
Marcy-Not a Vampire @marcyjcook: @gimpnelly @Spacekatgal @slashdot That would take 30 secs to complete! It's going to be a mess. I think I need lunch before reading /.
Carfolio.com @Carfolio: @Spacekatgal @slashdot Is there an equivalent term to SJW for these privileged white male offence dispensers?
Kirby Carav @MumaKirby: @Carfolio @Spacekatgal @Slashdot Jackasses?
Carfolio.com @Carfolio: @MumaKirby @Spacekatgal @slashdot Nothing catchier? We need branding here ;-)
LaurieC @MsLaurieC 3h3 hours ago: @Spacekatgal @slashdot Yeah, because you know, there's nothing worse than hearing about how badly people who aren't me are treated!
Laura Genn @Reason2Write: @Spacekatgal @slashdot That word. Ugh. -_- Nazis were real and horrible. Their legacy remains. Don't call things that aren't Nazis "Nazis"!
Devyn Rodriguez @DevynRodriguez: @Spacekatgal @slashdot That comment section is a depressing example of people not getting it.
Swift Studies @Swift_Studies: @Spacekatgal well I think you are awesome
Ryan Robinson @Ryan_LR: @Spacekatgal It's a tough life being a man in a nanny state that won't even allow rape and murder whenever I feel like it.
Jens Scholz @jensscholz: @Spacekatgal @slashdot When i'm Godwined i'm usually pretend to argue a bit forth and after some time post this. "No, You hang up first"
Lindsay Felt @ArayaNexus: @Spacekatgal @slashdot Whelp. That didn't take long. You don't happen to have an estimated time it took to get to feminazi, do you?
Steve Paulo @StevePaulo: @Spacekatgal Gotta love the "I'll give you something to complain about!"-style threat at the end.
ToxicAudri @ToxicAudri: @Spacekatgal https://www.youtube.com/watch?... Many see you have an internal problem with your group and supporters.
Erik Montoya @emontoya42: @Spacekatgal @slashdot does the feminazi party provide awesome boots with the uniform? Cause really they should. #hottakes
Greg Downing @MightyGregDoge: @Spacekatgal @slashdot "I'm sorry, what? I stopped reading after you said feminazi. You kept writing, so I assume you apologized."
Jarred @smilingmerle: @Spacekatgal Does Frank know you treat him like the enemy?
Norah Williams @LikeIronLies: @Spacekatgal Feminazi stole my ice cream! https://vimeo.com/64941331
THE LORD HUMUNGUS @ChristopherRasa Brooklyn, NY: @Spacekatgal @slashdot Not being allowed to threaten to kill people every day: A forced nanny state.
Phoebe Washington @Feministphoebe: @Spacekatgal @slashdot just ignore the haters. You're an incredible woman.
Consider these people defenders of harassment, especially given that they've threatened more than they've actually been threatened (aside from staged incidents, nil). Such defense is not maintaining civility, but to defend a logically indefensible narrative from criticism. Shutting it up or blocking it won't make the painful truth any less true.
Archived at: https://archive.is/bBvN7
"Forget the engineers." -Carly Fiorina, briber of MIT Technology Review.
About the only message worth sending: Harden The Fuck Up (his words, not mine). They're from another well-known Australian that had more guts as a criminal than the entirety of the SJW population.
One could probably add the following:
Chopper: ..and this is Brianna Wu, a professional victim!
[Imitation Wu]: I'm transgender and that makes me special. Facts don't matter, since I can have my friends on Twitter call you a bigot!
Chopper: Here's a reply from the Abuse Department: Harden the fuck up.
"Forget the engineers." -Carly Fiorina, briber of MIT Technology Review.
Whoosh!
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Thank you, but I'm happy in my male identity. It's good that the technology exists, but I'd rather not use it myself. :-)
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
You're gleaning a lot.
Basically, what I'm saying is not that she imagined the threats; in fact I believe that she has received them - part and parcel for being a public figure, you see.
No, what I am saying is that she used the few threats she got and "inflated" it into what she characterizes as a "terror movement" for which she can call out a snipe hunt.
And think what you want of Gamergate*, but I have zero belief that it is an organized threat aimed at hounding women out of videogames. It's been around nearly a year, and if it truly were a movement that intended to carry out such awful plans, it's either extremely terrible at it, or (and this is more likely) isn't even doing that in the first place.
The media's in the tank for women. If women were being hounded out in droves, the media would make no hesitation to blow it up into a newsworthy thread. As it stands, no credible threat has surfaced on any supposed Gamergate "targets". I wonder why that is.
As for Ms. Wu herself, had she any compunction towards personal responsibility, she wouldn't be blaming Gamergate. She'd be looking for the precise people who were sending the threats. Not blaming a whole (leaderless and shapeless, might I add) group, which doubtlessly only a few of the really, really socially disordered ones are sending threats in the first place.
So no, I'm not saying that she's faking anything. Though her tack in combatting it is a trifle too optimistic for my tastes, particularly as she claims she's a feminist, and is thus a member of a group that's all too quick to lay blame on a different shapeless and leaderless group ("The Patriarchy"**).
*Point of order: Gamergate is a strange entity that isn't terribly honest with itself, but isn't as bad as people like Ms. Wu would make it out to be. That's why I take neither side of that particular skirmish.
**If you're going to ask me to believe in "The Patriarchy", you may just as well ask me to believe in pink bunnies on the moon.
Some people don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in The Patriarchy.
> The problem is, how do you determine who's disadvantaged?
Money, as it can be used to obtain pretty much all other advantages.
> but when you start to look at it carefully there's all sorts of possible issues. Some families are better at budgeting than others, so a family with lower income might have more money available for the kids than a family with higher income
This is not an inequality that we can (or should) correct for. People who work harder have a natural advantage. It's not right to take that away, as doing so hurts everyone. It was by gaining enough advantages to live lives where people could spend their time studying things like science that we obtained what we have now. We would all be worse off without this.
> It's a lot easier to tell if somebody is from X or Y group than to determine their level of disadvantage and what's necessary to help equalize their opportunities.
I disagree both with the idea that it's easier and the idea that it advances any sort of good for society.
Sorry, not "optimistic" but "opportunistic".
Some people don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in The Patriarchy.
If you're an entrepreneur of any sort, you find that you've got to be a manager, and a CFO, and an HR department, and the Engineering VP, and the engineer, and the janitor, and the dishwasher, and the sales rep, and the marketing department, and hunt for funding, and a dozen other roles until your company's big enough to hire other people to do them. Every techie I know who's started a company, either by themselves or with a small group of other people, complains about this, but it's the reality of running a business - you're responsible for all the work getting done, not just the fun engineering you started the company to do. If you get big enough to get VC money, sometimes you can hire a CEO to do some of those things for you, but basically it's not your company once you've done that.
Some games can be done by one person, some are much larger projects needing lots of workers. (I'm not a gamer, so I don't know the scale of Wu's games, but it sounds like they're a lot bigger than Depression Quest and probably smaller than EA's FIFA-thing-2015.)
Authors have to deal with similar issues - they also have to put up with people saying "Why don't you self-publish? I'm sure you'll make LOTS more money than working with an old-style dead-tree publishing house!" (The usual answer from successful writers like Charlie Stross is that publishing books is a lot of work, and it's much more productive for him to spend 100% of his time writing, which he's good at, instead of 30% of his time writing and 70% of his time doing marketing and sales and typesetting and financial management and negotiating with Amazon and Apple, none of which he enjoys nor is especially good at, even though he'd get a bigger fraction of the cash, plus the way you get to be a good writer is to do a lot of writing, and the way you build a stable audience is to put out books as often as you can do it well, and being a publisher takes time away from both of those.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I'm not a moderator this week.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Women worry that men are going to rape and kill them. It's not a neutral Fair-and-Balanced(tm) thing.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Narcc is right on point.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
you seem pretty angry at me
Do us a favor next time and just put "u mad bro?" so I know to glance over your comments and know when you don't have a valid point to make.
I would like to say that majority of both sides are not even arguing the same topics here. GG is mostly about ethics in journalism and fighting the SJW plague that has taken over games journalism (that has been acting extremely anti-consumer lately). aGG is more about pushing for more diversity at the expense of everything in the industry. Both sides have people harassing eachother, but they are outliers, not the core group... the only thing is that there are a few high profile people on the aGG side that have publically doxxed people, where as its all been just random nobodies that have published doxx on the GG side.
I used to think that too. Things that made me realize it wasn't really pro-women, although we're certainly not the worst industry out there:
1. I kept concentrating on how my employers generally employed a small number of really talented female software engineers. Of course, this is the wrong way to look at it: the question is how many women equal in incompetence to our worst male engineers were we employing? If we're only employing the most talented women, and an average bunch of men, then we're requiring women adhere to higher standards than men, and raising the bar accordingly.
I've actually met a grand total of one godawful would-rather-write-the-same-stupid-code-ten-times-than-use-a-loop type female developer in my entire career. Every female dev I've known other than her was far, far, above average for the team male and female as a whole. I've lost count of the number of male developers who are that abysmal.
2. Developers rarely think in terms of management, so it's easy to forget such career paths exist, but men generally were having an easier time of getting into management at every place I've worked compared to women. Women could get to low level positions, but would be immediately labeled "difficult" even if they did exactly the same thing as male equivalents. Rarely would they rise any further. This may afflict other fields, but it's definitely a major problem in tech for some reason, and I'm not seeing it so much in non-tech departments.
3. Sexism, when it happens, tends to get... not ignored, so much as not dealt with. It's assumed that if the woman victimized by it is smiling, dealing with it, and getting her work done, that it's being handled. I've seen a very talented female Oracle specialist treated abusively by her team leader who seemed - in both his work and personal life - to have real problems with women. I noticed. Friends of his that were friends of mine noticed. Our boss noticed. Was anything done? Well, y'know, she's great, look at how she doesn't take shit from him (like we'd know), and that guy's unfireable, he's the only one who knows how the MAJOR_CLIENT database works...
4. You never notice systematic discrimination, frequently because it's entirely unintentional and done for the best reasons. I've interviewed normally for precisely one job in my life, my first. Word of mouth got me my other jobs. The word of mouth circuit seems harmless and perhaps even positive, after all, education and experience written on paper is rarely as informative as an actual "Yeah, I've worked with this guy, he's a miracle worker", "Nah, this one writes spaghetti you'll be maintaining for years afterwards."
The problem is the word-of-mouth network is actually a negative to any group that isn't part of the dominant social group in a particular industry. People recommend the people they know who'll do a good job, but they think first of people in that category that are friends, that they've had a chance to get to know on every level.
In conclusion, TL;DR and all that, determining whether an industry is women friendly or not takes rather more than a general feeling about the general attitude. Oh I know you don't personally intend to harm the career of any woman simply because she is one. But the system you're a part of might mean her career faces more hurdles than yours anyway.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Have you ever tried making an argument without using an ad hominem?
Saying "talk to women" and "lol grow up" isn't a valid answer to a question, it's nothing but a meme to avoid the issue.
Still awaiting an answer. What social, political, legal, and economic rights do men have that women do not?
I was a neutral party, too, who couldn't make sense of it. Most published evidence supported the claims of the feminists but strangely didn't mention much about the other side. Not objective at all. Least that was some kind of evidence. So, I challenged a bunch of pro-GamerGate people with that evidence and demanded they do more than troll or ask for us to take it on faith. One sent me this vid that shows feminist hypocrisy with evidence from her own game, points out these are entertainment products based on demand (which includes women!), and has other rational points supporting GamerGate's position:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXZY6D2hFdo&app=desktop
(Really makes the feminists opposing look like BS pushers esp as a commenter here pointed out Brianna also breaks their own rules in games.)
Another link I received was from the "Factual Feminist:"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MxqSwzFy5w
(She actually backed her claims with evidence that contradicts the claims of the feminists opposing gamergate. She also showed that their own studies cooked the books a bit.)
On top of it, out of millions of gamers, they've only got a relatively tiny number of people making threats. That means vast majority of gamers are *not* making threats. Yet, they talk like rape and death threats over right to abuse females is the only thing going on here. If anything, what I see here is a group of people (i.e. Brianna & co) calling out a whole segment of society (including women!) as evil, claiming to eliminate their market, making provably false statements, and being hated as a result. Who wouldn't have seen that response coming.... Ignoring the claims I see here like faking stuff, the basic analysis of anti-GamerGate's own claims and games *they* make show these women are deceitful, hypocritical pricks who deserve whatever *verbal* hate they get. It's called Internet Justice. Best to just not do the crime and especially against what's allegedly your own customers/demographic.
For something to be a true threat, an objectively reasonable person would need to believe the threat would seriously be carried out.
No objectively reasonable person can possibly believe a death threat from an anonymous stranger on the Internet in any discussion about video games is genuine.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
this imagined "terror" of Gamergate,
Basically what you're saying is:
"I don't like what you have to say so I'm going to claim you imagined it all".
You are literally claiming that none of the threats she got were real.
Or perhaps she's claiming that the threats were so non-credible that no cause for investigation could be found. Cops *wanted* to investigate but apparently there wasn't anything of substance *to* investigate. It's easier to investigate when there is, you know, actual evidence of a credible threat.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
Let's pool our money and buy slashdot so it can return to its former glory.
That is not Brianna Wu and not funny!
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
I have read enough of your posts. You and I are getting married in my imagination. Then we are going to set the world on fire and giggle as it burns.
Sorry, I could not help myself. Well spoken. As a mixed-race person I find it really disturbing when people try to give me a "leg up." No thanks... That is just telling me that you think I can not do it on my own. There will always be bigots. No legislation, cultural changes, or anything is going to fix that. Hell, I am bigoted, I just acknowledge it and work around it by forcing myself to remember my biases. However, all you can do is work to minimize it or, maybe - just maybe, do your "job" (it is not always work related) well enough so that it is exceptional and change the minds of a single bigot. Even if you do not then you have the satisfaction of being excellent.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Your entire argument is based on the premise that law enforcement is both swift and effective!
Out of interest which panet do you live on and how do I emmigrate there?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
So you a are literally claiming that she's flat-out telling lies about the FBI investigating right now?
Be plain. Vague insinuations are a scoundrel's game.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Basically, what I'm saying is not that she imagined the threats; in fact I believe that she has received them - part and parcel for being a public figure, you see.
I don't even know where to begin to go with that. She wasn't public figure otuside the game-dev community. She only time she's been a fublic figure is when she got in the corsshairs of the internet hate machine.
No, what I am saying is that she used the few threats she got and "inflated" it into what she characterizes as a "terror movement" for which she can call out a snipe hunt.
The "few" threats: your choice of words, not mine. On what do you base that claim?
And think what you want of Gamergate*, but I have zero belief that it is an organized threat aimed at hounding women out of videogames.
Say what *you* want about gamergate, but here's how it got started:
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/...
http://wehuntedthemammoth.com/...
SJW n. One who posts facts.
And you know the details of the cases reported to the police and being currently invistegated by the FBI how exactly?
Out of interest if the current FBI investigation bears fruit and leads to prosecutions are you going to recant your position?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
So you a are literally claiming that she's flat-out telling lies about the FBI investigating right now?
Yes. She is *literally* lying now, like she *literally* *lied* all those other times. This is the official response from law enforcement
A police report or investigation as to Brianna Wu has not been filed or referred to this office. That is the normal method to report a crime, cause an investigation or seek a prosecution. Brianna Wu has had no contact with anyone in this office or the cyber stalking unit of the city prosecutors office. Brianna Wu has not provided any evidence to this office, including any tapes of phone calls allegedly received.
... from the same link ...
Wu claims the latest anonymous phone call also came from from #GamerGate, but the voice recording she uploaded contains no mention of the gamers’ movement. Archived threads from the 8ch.net discussion forum reveal that Wu’s phone number had in fact been targeted by /baphomet/, a community that is explicitly hostile to #GamerGate. As well as revealing the personal information of high-profile supporters of #GamerGate, baphomet posters have also been known known to pose as ‘members’ of the movement in order to discredit it. In further evidence that the latest ‘threat’ is an online hoax in the vein of Jace Connors, the recording also makes reference to “you laugh you lose threads” being “f**king retarded”, a reference to a popular in-joke on the anonymous imageboards frequented by web pranksters.
... and yet, it seems the only credible danger was *to* GG *from* anti-GG ...
So far, the only threat deemed “credible” by the authorities has been an anonymous bomb threat made against a gathering of #GamerGate supporters in Washington D.C. earlier this month.
Be plain. Vague insinuations are a scoundrel's game.
Plainly? The only credible aggression is from the ideological crusade side. Hell, even on /. the only non-AC aggression is from SJW who are the first to post aggressive, name-calling, verbal abuse and (in cases involving poperatso) actual threats. Not that I find the threats credible, but that's *your* side that needs to learn how to communicate like adults. Maybe you should deal with the aggression coming from your ideological partners before asking the rest of the world to do so first.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
Wow that breitbart article. It's like Fox news in print.
I like the smooth moving between different views to make it seem like various things are conflated.
I like how you selectively snipped to ignore the bit that the police report is, in fact filed. Sound like she filed it and the police fouled up (something which seems to happen a lot) then did nothing, then got caught on the back foot by a media storm.
IOW you managed to post an incredibly biased article that upon careful reading completely goes against your point.
*high five*
At this point your precious feels will be seeting over. The world doesn't care by the way.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Wow that breitbart article. It's like Fox news in print.
I like the smooth moving between different views to make it seem like various things are conflated.
I like how you selectively snipped to ignore the bit that the police report is, in fact filed. Sound like she filed it and the police fouled up (something which seems to happen a lot) then did nothing, then got caught on the back foot by a media storm.
You can interpret it that way, certainly - the fact is that the official line from LEO is that she made no report. We can't really blame LEO for not investigating if she refused to make a report, now can we?
IOW you managed to post an incredibly biased article that upon careful reading completely goes against your point.
You asked if I claimed that she was lying. I posted the actual law enforcements report on the matter which indicate that yes, she is lying.
*high five*
At this point your precious feels will be seeting over. The world doesn't care by the way.
How my feels sit, sith, or seet (whatever the hell your mangled spelling was supposed to mean) is irrelevant because this is not my ideology nor my faith. The world is not supposed to care how I feel, just like it doesn't care how you feel. What eventually matters are the facts, and the facts are that Ms Wu did not report the "horrific harrassment" she supposedly endured, and then she lied about reporting it.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
You seem to have malformedyour formatting.
For someone who claims it isn't his ideology or religion, you argue very tirelessly and in great volume. With emotion loaded writing too. Nonetheless, I'll allow you your little self deceptions and ignore that.
Sounds like from the article that something went wrong with the report and it is now in fact with the police.
Are you now going to claim that the police never foul up and "lose" hard to prosecute crimes that take a lot of work and ruin the department statistics?
It's hilarious. Whenever something related to law enforcement comes up, the prevailing opinion is all over their incompetence especially with regard to tech. But now everyone's insisting that she must be lying because law enforcement could never do a bad job.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
You seem to have malformedyour formatting.
For someone who claims it isn't his ideology or religion, you argue very tirelessly and in great volume.
Well, that just it, isn't it? Absence of an ideology is the same as absence of a religion - just because I contradict your ideologically-driven claims doesn't mean that I have an ideology of my own, in much the same way that just because I contradict claims of a god doesn't mean I have a god-based claim of my own - "baldness is not a hair colour".
With emotion loaded writing too.
Nope. You send your little insults my way and, like the way I deal with all theists, I stick to what facts are known.
Nonetheless, I'll allow you your little self deceptions and ignore that.
Sounds like from the article that something went wrong with the report and it is now in fact with the police.
Doesn't sound like that at all - there is no ambiguity from LEO's statement - no report was filed. They did not say a report was *lost*, or *miscommunicated*, or anything. Not only did they say that no report was filed, they go further and say that there was no contact from Ms Wu either. She neither contacted them nor filed a report. By her own accounts, she never had a case number either (meaning, it was never filed with the police).
Are you now going to claim that the police never foul up and "lose" hard to prosecute crimes that take a lot of work and ruin the department statistics?
That's a god-of-the-gaps argument if I ever saw one - "If there is no evidence connecting $X and $Z, then it *MUST* be this thing-that-can't-be-proven $Y. Our evidence exists in the gaps between the steps." Face it - if she at least had a case number, or the name of the officer who took down the report, hell... even the *date* she claims she made the report she might be believable. She has no record of ever approaching the police, no case number nor a name or description of the officer who helped her. The LEO's are standing firm on this as well - they have no record.
It's hilarious. Whenever something related to law enforcement comes up, the prevailing opinion is all over their incompetence especially with regard to tech. But now everyone's insisting that she must be lying because law enforcement could never do a bad job.
Where did we claim that? I personally claimed that, according to all the evidence that we have, there is no record of her approaching the police - none that she can provide and certainly none that the police can provide. If she wanted her claim to be taken seriously she should have at least kept the case number you get for filing an incident with the cops.
In this case at least, there is little doubt that she lied.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
But to a dispassionate observer, both "sides" are doing the exact same thing.
No, that's a lazy observer. Anyone can make any accusation they like, but it won't be credible unless they provide some credible evidence. If you believe every random accusation you hear, or assign equal weight to every random accusation without bothering to investigate the evidence (or at least go to a trusted source for an opinion, and you will find that all mainstream media and websites come down on one side of this) then the problem is with you.
You might as well argue that to a dispassionate observer both sides of the holocaust were equally bad, because the Nazi propaganda about Jews was pretty damning too and you are applying equal weight to both sides. Sorry, ignorance is no excuse if you want to as questions about the effect of GamerGate on one of its most high profile victims.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
You already lose credibility by citing "We Hunted the Mammoth", a hatefully biased source in and of itself.
And yes, I did my research. As far as I can tell, the whole Zoe Post thing was just a breaking point in a long drawn-out consumer unrest that should have begun and ended with "we're not clicking your pages anymore, sorry".
As for Brianna Wu, I'd never heard of her before Gamergate. The first I'd ever heard of her was that she'd been harassed. That was it. Her game was nothing special. And I follow gaming enough to not be totally ignorant about what goes on in the community, even though I'm not a big gamer anymore.
And I cannot condone the idea of blaming many for the actions of a few. Threats happened, sure, but by a stark minority. They should be singled out and punished accordingly, but to blame a group using a hashtag? That's nonsense and antithetical to true justice.
My point still stands, though. She wants to be taken seriously as a developer before a feminist champion, then that's the face she should show to the community. If she wants to be a pundit, that's fine, but she can't whine and pout that she's not being taken seriously as a developer when in her public persona it takes a back seat to being a victim of a movement whose crimes can barely be addressed by little more than stereotypes.
Some people don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in The Patriarchy.
Born on Mars where everybody is equal and lives to 203. I heard there was good beer here, so I sold up and moved to Earth.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Thank you. I am also mixed race and I feel the same as you do, in that, I don't need extra help, and I don't need to point out that I am a woman every time I goof up at things (I goof up because I'm not perfect).
It's nice to know I have a fantasy-world husband now. Our babies will be steampunk parkour ninjas. No baby-sized fedoras for our little sprouts!
Some people don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in The Patriarchy.
YOU are the one creating a hostile environment by stirring up this imagined "terror" of Gamergate, and demanding this wild snipe hunt be enacted to purge no one in particular, and scare everyone to varying degrees.
So she imagined the death and rape threats? And the people behind those accounts are "no in particular", they are just communal accounts or something?
There is an on-going FBI investigation. As she pointed out, they don't really have the resources or skill, but it seems like on hell of a dangerous game to play if she really did send the threats to herself.
The more interesting question is why you are so desperate to believe that it's all lies.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
They keep repeating it because they need useful idiots to believe it and join their cause. Then those useful idiots give them credibility, a mass of people that they can point to as grass routes support and proof that their cause is legitimate.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Wow, arguing with you is like dealing "debating" with creationists and denialists. You are so wrapped up in your religion that you can't even tell that it is your ideology that is guiding your entire thought process and not rational thought.
Nope. You send your little insults my way and, like the way I deal with all theists, I stick to what facts are known.
facts
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Doesn't sound like that at all - there is no ambiguity from LEO's statement - no report was filed.
How would he know? All he really knows is there was nothing on record. Good job police are super compenent and never mess things up!
That's a god-of-the-gaps argument if I ever saw one
Except the news is full of reports of police incompetence.
Where did we claim that?
Try popping on to slashdot whenever a police-in-tech article comes up. It's easy to get an impression of the prevailing feeling.
And "we"?
Ooooh I see it's because you are self-identifying with some grand cause as part of your belief system.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Well, the threats were made publicly over twitter. Brianna screen shotted them and tweeted them. Is there any claim that "no, there are other, privately delivered threats that are of a different nature than these?"
So, we've seen the threats. "I, anonymous person on the internet likely several states away from you am going to drop everything, drive to your house and commit murder because I hate feminist opinions on video games!"
Really? Because that happens? People do that?
There is a difference between protected free speech (even though vile and repugnant as this) and a "true threat," which is actually a crime. There is no hard and fast formula for what a true threat is, and it varies by jurisdiction. It's a "preponderance of circumstances" kind of thing. Lots of little boxes you can check off that, taken together, can add up to a true threat.
Are the speaker and the victim acquainted in any way? I'll take a threat from a jilted ex or a business partner far more seriously than a random stranger.
How serious is the nature of their dispute? Personal grievances, like a messy divorce, or political power issues, like threats against a politician or judge I'll take more seriously than those against a random person with no power or authority over a general and nebulous issue like "gender politics in video games."
Does the threatener have any ability to carry out the threat? In what proximity to the victim are they? While we don't know the location of the threatener, given that the vast majority of people on the internet are nowhere near you, it's unlikely the threatener had any ability to carry out the threat.
Does the threatener have any kind of history of violence? I'd take a threat from ISIS over depictions of Muhammad seriously, or threats by skinheads against federal judges trying a racially sensitive case. People in or associated with their groups have actually done these things in the past. But gamers? They do nothing. I mean, literally, they do nothing. They sit on the couch and mash buttons and do nothing constructive or destructive at all. They are inert masses. But they sure do talk! If .00001% of the threats of rape and murder communicated over XBox Live were carried out, the streets would be ankle deep in blood.
So, here you've got a random stranger, unknown to Wu, not personally jilted but politically motivated, who is likely states away from her and completely unable to act, publicly announcing that they are going to commit rape and murder over gender politics in video games, as a representative of a group of people who say 12 horrific things to strangers every day before breakfast and never actually do a damn thing.
On what planet would any reasonable person take that seriously?
In investigating, you also have to ask "cui bono?" Who benefits? Making such a threat advances exactly whose agenda? The FBI is doing nothing because they believe in all likelihood she made the thing up herself, creating a throwaway twitter account that did nothing but spew a single scripted set of death threats. But they can't prove it was her so they're not going to prosecute her for making a false claim, but can't say "we think it was her" and embarrass somebody, discouraging actual victims from reporting crimes, without proof. They'll find "the real threatener" right about the time O.J. finds "the real killers." Why would she do that? Well, she has a history of histrionics on a transgender forum, so she's not exactly the most stable of people, and sure has benefited monetarily from the attention.
And absolutely no one, not a single person, is coming to hurt her.
If when the entire facade completely collapses (they always do eventually...I've seen this same kind of manufactured persona and outrage in another industry), will you recant your position?
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
I note that you aren't addressing the fact that Ms Wu herself has no record of filing a case. You can claim police incompetent all you want, but you have no actual fact to back up the claim of police incompetence. Rather than claim a grand conspiracy, I'd prefer to stick with the known facts instead of who claims what. The only fact that remains is that Ms Wu has no record associated with filing a case.
FWIW, now that the case presumably *is* filed, there is apparently not enough credibility in her claims to pursue, which makes you whole argument about whether she is lying moot.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
As far as I've paid attention (I read gamergate.community articles occasionally), one thing I've noticed is that GamerGate itself is very much about self-policing, and harrassment of *anyone* is roundly discouraged.
BTW great post up above (the one that got the +5, I'd give it +10).
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
...or maybe you're just mixing with the wrong guys.
Last I checked, we have at least 2 presidential candidates that are female, perhaps there is an issue where not many women want to make the sacrifices needed for positions like this?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Interesting. I haven't seen quite the same in terms of female developers usually being better than average, but I've definitely seen that female developers are very rarely average. I worked as a contractor for a while so saw a lot of different cube farms and the pattern of female developers I kept seeing almost exclusively, is either "good to very good" (but never the best) or more often "very bad but the boss has a blind spot and/or keeps giving her free passes apparently just because she's female".
I'm talking here about the educational opportunities for the child, which are significantly affected by whether the child gets a decent lunch. If the parents suffer because they're bad at budgeting, well, that's unfortunate, and I hope they can get help learning to budget, but it isn't really my responsibility. It isn't the child's, either, but the child is getting a worse education because of it.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I am thinking they might like to wear a fez... They should also drive a motorcycle and attract lots of people from their sexual preference. They should be able to do all of that while wearing the fez - as well as steampunk, parkour, and ninja-ing.
They would probably just be geeks and end up living in your basement after a horrible divorce warped them mentally. Then again, we'd produce the next generation of /.ers in good fashion.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
I think that things are getting better, but I don't think they're all the way there yet. A few more decades and I think women will have caught up politically. We've made tremendous advances in sexual equality in my lifetime, but we're not quite there yet.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Here Here, Commenting because you can't get modded up any higher. But this a million times this
Read my responses to serviscope_minor above, in which I state in no uncertain terms that I believe she did receive threats.
And my post hardly reads as "desperate". Your characterization as such is projection, since I have at no time presented a case that seems tenuous.
Some people don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in The Patriarchy.
most software devs were not the popular kids in HS
as such most software devs understand what its like to be bullied and abused
if anyone gets it, its us
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
A family relative offered us the chance to live in Frank’s grandmother’s house for free if we renovated it. That would free up capital for us, so I jumped at the chance. I spent half a year renovating the house. Then, we moved in - took our rent money, and used it to hire our first employee.//
What a crock. Wu even tweeted about this - mommy and daddy gave the thing $200,000.
smilies are for reetards