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GDC Rescinds Award For Atari Founder Nolan Bushnell After Criticisms of Sexually Inappropriate Behavior (polygon.com)
The organizers of the Game Developers Choice Awards announced today that they have rescinded the Pioneer Award for Atari founder Nolan Bushnell, and announced the award will not be given this year entirely. "The decision follows a day of outcry after GDC organizers announced that Bushnell, 74, had been tapped for the GDCA's lifetime achievement honor," reports Polygon. "News accounts and histories over the past several years have documented a history of workplace misconduct and sexist behavior toward women by Bushnell, during Atari's early days." From the report: In a statement this morning, GDC said its awards committee "made the decision not to give out a Pioneer Award for this year's event, following additional feedback from the community. They believe their picks should reflect the values of today's game industry and will dedicate this year's award to honor the pioneering and unheard voices of the past." The Pioneer Award is for "individuals who developed a breakthrough technology, game concept, or gameplay design at a crucial juncture in video game history," according to its official site. Nine have been conferred since 2008, none of them women. Bushnell founded Atari in 1972 and installed the first coin-operated video game, Pong, shortly thereafter. He presided over the company's rise to dominate the early generation of home console gaming before selling it off and founding what is today the Chuck E. Cheese line of restaurants. Bushnell issued a statement on Twitter: "I applaud the GDC for ensuring that their institution reflects what is right, specifically with regards to how people should be treated in the workplace. And if that means an award is the price I have to pay personally so the whole industry may be more aware and sensitive to these issues, I applaud that, too. If my personal actions or the actions of anyone who ever worked with me offended or caused pain to anyone at our companies, then I apologize without reservation."
Right or wrong, this Politically Correct shaming is almost certainly going to backfire on women as fewer and fewer men in leadership positions risk bringing this kind of liability on board.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
In other news, Jesus H. Christ has been rescinded the son of god and lord savior awards to insufficiently progressive views toward women during 15 to 22 in the year of our lord.
No one can take away what Bushnell brought to the gaming world and his response to losing this award shows that whatever may or may not have happened in the past, the man is currently a beacon of class.
utter, total, bullshit.
So now, on account of gossip and innuendo, we're going to just strike people from history?
Not 20 years ago Christian fundamentalists were mocked and pilloried for ramming their morals down people's throats and following some stupid rule book. Now we have an entire zombie movement enforcing their morals views and attitudes on a public as a whole.
There's not ONE PERSON ALIVE who's not guilty of unsavory behavior of one kind or another and we've entered an age where "my unsavory behavior" is now considered untouchable but "your unsavory behavior" is damnable.
Fuck that. Make a law and make it a crime through the official processes. Did Bushnell actually commit a crime? Bring him up on charges. This condemning or people to non-existence without even a chance for defense is Orwellian, wrong and downright evil - just as it was 20 years ago.
Anyone care to explain how personal indiscretions affect his achievements in developing "a breakthrough technology, game concept, or gameplay design at a crucial juncture in video game history"?
I think we need to put a bit of perspective on this. While the behavior sounds reprehensible, it's not Harvey Weinstein-level and it sounds like this stuff was going on 35 years ago. Rape is rape, consent is consent, but we have a far more nuanced understanding these days about power imbalances and harassment in the workplace.
If this stuff was going on in the last decade, I think it's fair game.
We need to draw a line somewhere and say it's not reasonable to judge workplace behavior decades ago by the standards of the current era. This doesn't give these folks a pass on everything they did, but let's not crucify somebody who may very well have evolved since then, as many of us have on lots of social issues.
Guess it's time to vilify him too.
FC Closer
'white men'? Are they included in your little game? I bet not.
Because you could be next.
"Offensive behavior" and "sexual harassment" are very vaguely defined. Hell, you could ask a co-worker out right now, with the best intentions, fully respecting today's rules, and be called a "slimy asshole" 30 years down the line, simply because 30 years from now the rules will have changed to the extent your today's actions would be immoral, or, God forbid, illegal.
Their actions from the 70s are reproachable by today's standards, but they were standard behavior back then.
So watch out, they might come for you some time in the future. Are you sure you've done nothing wrong by 2040's standards?
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
I've been at my job 25 years. No problems whatsoever. It's not difficult to just be a normal guy.
I like to do a little game where I replace 'women' with another minority. Blacks, Hispanics, Muslims, Jews. Take your pick.
Women are not a minority.
He acknowledged the behavior and excused it with "It's was the late 60s / early 70s, that's just what we did".
The behavior was wrong then and it's wrong now. There can and should be consequences for these kinds of actions. As a parent I _want_ there to be consequences. I don't want people to think they can get away with this crap because nobody wants to talk badly about somebody who also happened to do good things. If we did that the Cosby Show would still be in syndication.
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with the way he treated his workers in China I'm all for this. He was also an absolute dick to Wozniak and while the Woz forgave him I wonder how that would have ended up if instead of Woz eventually getting rich he'd been completely ripped off and left penniless. There's no shortage of broke engineers who's designs were central to the development of computers after all.
Despite the famous RDF there's plenty of folks who don't like Jobs for plenty of reasons. So yeah, lets take him down a few pegs.
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> See subject: Your MASSIVE FAIL in this life is you're nothing more than a chattering little do-nothing "ne'er-do-well" online & you know it...
I have credits on several PC games and I think this nonsense is bullshit. The guy wasn't perfect but that doesn't erase his legacy. Political correctness has put us into 1984 territory where the Ministry of Truth is here to sanitize and erase the past.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
He's not stupid. He's genius. He's pointing out the clear double standard here. Under the intersectionality regime, EVERYONE can be a victim except "the man". Although it doesn't matter if "the man" is also as much a part of the underclass as anyone else.
The whole thing about "progress" is that you can live long enough to see standards and expectations change.
That means potentially harsh judgements for even the previous generation of people.
That doesn't mean you try to erase anyone from the last generation or older. You just need to get your panties untwisted and come to grips with the full implication that things have changed.
You simply can't handle the reality of the situation. You need a safe space.
Life is too complicated and disordered for you.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?!
You have some nerve claiming that it's just people longing for the "good ole days" and they're all conservatives.
As if Bill Clinton is a conservative.
As if Harvey Weinstein is a conservative.
As if Kevin Spacey is a conservative.
You have such a piss poor understanding of history that you fail to forget that it was progressivism and openness that led to the sexual revolution and the loosening of the "conservative" values that kept this sort of thing in check.
You have a piss poor understanding of history that when the moral absolutists of the 90s (that would be Christians) pilloried Bill Clinton for his sexual indiscretions and his rape they were mocked, pilloried and shouted down for their backwater moral beliefs and regressive attitudes towards women along with his #MeToo victims.
Still don't hear many calls to take Bill Clinton to task, not even from you.
Make no mistake, sexual harassment is wrong, demanding sexual favors for employment is far worse and rape tops them all - but so is attacking 75 year old men for their sexual attitudes 50 years ago when the sexual revolution and disco was still going strong for making passes at his secretary (not rape, not blackmail, not even having sex, just making a pass).
TL;DR - You're just as bad as any religious zealot.
A group of gamers decided not to honor one of the big wigs of the industry because of his past transgressions. Nobody's forgotten what he did, and that goes for the good and the bad.
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If we suggest the government step in and regulate folks say let the market decide. Well, the market just decided. People think Bushnell's behavior was worthy of being punished for; with punishment meaning getting deprived of some honors he would otherwise be due.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
There is no such thing as "white privilege" or "male privilege". There is, however, affluent privilege. Suggesting that white janitors and white CEO's enjoy the same level of "privilege" is absolutely deranged. Identity politics is the ruling-classes desperate attempt to keep the people from waking up and realizing that the primary bigotry of the last 40 years is class-based. It's still better to be a wealthy woman than a poor man. The former has more power. By an order of magnitude. Wringing our hands over the imperfect lives of priviledged women, when half the world still lives on less than $1/day, is the height of narcissism. Women make up nearly 80% of consumer spending? Think that would be reversed under the matriarchy? 90% of Titantic survirors were women, as men willingly went to their death so that women could live. Think under the matriarchy 90% of men would have survived. This entire thing is more divide-and-conquer by the ruling class. Given that "abstract thinking" begins at an IQ of ~110, and about 66% of Americans are below that, it's not hard to see how the majority of people got taken. The "War on Women" is a fraud, and so is the current moral panic. It's the preschool Satanic Sex scare all over again, only this time, the supposed victims are a coveted advertiser target, and the is much to be gained by seeing the emporer's fine new clothes. History will judge this as it's judged every other moral panic. When that happens, you'll all swear it was everyone else. Count on it.
We need to have a realistic, nuanced view of historical figures. At the moment we tend to paint them as either a saint or a monster.
Bushnell did play a really important part in early video game history, no doubt. But he also abused his money and power and acted like a complete arse, contributing to a culture that pushed women away from that new and exciting industry. It's not just women either, he treated male Atari employees badly too, refusing to allow credits in games etc.
I don't think it's asking too much for people to understand that, and look at his work in that light.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
There is no such thing as "white privilege" or "male privilege". There is, however, affluent privilege. Suggesting that white janitors and white CEO's enjoy the same level of "privilege" is absolutely deranged.
Of course it's deranged, but fortunately you have very fnudamentally misunderstood the notion.
The concept is that it's like an automatic level up in a given situation.
Take that janitor, and make every property of the janitor identical, i.e. socioeconomic situation, socionomic situation of parents, salary, company worked at and so on and so forth.
With all of those the same, switch the "white man" property for some other class.
The concept of privelege is that the new janitor would be a bit worse off in some respects.
Wringing our hands over the imperfect lives of priviledged women, when half the world still lives on less than $1/day, is the height of narcissism.
This is utter unmitigated crap, and I have no sympathy for this point of view. It is the height of laziness.
Not fixing the crap on your dorstep because there is worse crap elsewhere in the world is a lazy excuse for doing nothing. There is ALWAYS someewhere worse in the world so it serves as a generic excuse for never lifting a finger to improve anything.
And unless you're actually doing something about those people libing on a dollar a day, it's also the hheight of hipocracy. "I mean yeah I can't be arsed to do anything about anything but those people over there trying to fix something should fix something else I think is more important but am too lazy/selfish to bother with".
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Burn the witch! Burn the witch! BURN THE WITCH!!!
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This hysteria for persecution of heterosexuality, this pestilence of violent neo-Puritanism - this, oh my bothers, is one of the many reasons China is beating is at absolutely everything.
What the fuck are you talking about? The 1960s-1980s Feminists were "Second Wave", they were infamous for burning their boyfriend's porn magazines and holding demonstrations outside Red Light districts. Viz's "Millie Tant" rabid-Feminist character was one of their earliest, dating back to the late 1980s.
That was its epicenter, huh? Bull. Shit. There was no epi-center. Half the major names were in the UK. Greer was Australian. Dworkin was from New Jersey. Gloria Steinem lived in New York. Are you mixing up the Feminist movement with the Hippie Movement? Because those aren't remotely similar groups, and yeah, Hippies were about free love man, but they certainly weren't about female equality.
Cobblers.
My mother was involved with the movement in the 1980s in the UK, in a group that was so fucking anti-men that when they wanted to collate their magazine in my mother's house, questions were asked about my presence, because being a male I wasn't allowed to see that publication.
Meanwhile my dad used to go out to buy cigarettes during the evening, only to be literally harassed by gangs of roving feminists who demanded to know who he was and why he was outside, because there was, apparently, a rapist in the area, and they felt that if women couldn't walk around freely, neither should men be able to.
Those who laud second wave feminists as "pro-sex" or wanting equality with men have no idea what they were. I'm not saying all of them were like that, but they pretty much match the depiction of third wave by those pretending that third wavers are somehow extremists.
Meanwhile what is it exactly that's an example of "Today's retributive feminists"? Because from what I can figure out, it boils down to "Sarkeesian wants more positive female representation in vidja", which is somehow the worst thing ever.
Those of you who think Third Wave Feminists are somehow extreme have no idea whatsoever how bad the second wave was.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.