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Game Company Receives Complaints About Bad Example Set By '%FEMALENAME' (kotaku.com)
ArenaNet narrative designer Jessica Price was fired last week after she accused a Twitter user of "mansplaining", and adding later "Don't expect me to pretend to like you here." (Her employer characterized this as "attacks on the community.")
So what happened in the week that followed? An anonymous reader writes: A Reddit user indicated he'd been speaking satirically when he posted that "We can probably fire anyone on the GW2 dev team as long we make a big enough stink," and expressed surprise later that no one had disagreed with him. But another female developer told Kotaku she saw a real call to action on 4chan, and that it was followed by angry letters to the game studio she freelances for calling for her firing too, complaining their games had declined since she was hired (along with another woman). The letters also complained her Twitter account set "a bad example for the letter-writer's children, who supposedly play this game." The company's CEO received "a three-digit number's" worth of angry letters -- though "Fifty or so of them glitched out with a lot of variables exposed, including %FEMALENAME."
"A deeper look at the names and emails associated with the letters went to Facebook bot profiles and people whose profiles indicated associations with Gamergate or 4chan," reports Kotaku -- and Brianna Wu made a similar charge on Twitter last week, citing research by a team of volunteers. "The overwhelming majority of people harassing Jessica Price today on Twitter are bots and sock puppets. These are throwaway accounts that are used as toys. Almost no one claiming to be upset is an established, normal Twitter user." The Verge reports that Wu monitored Jessica Price's account, and found harassment "as bad as she's ever seen," blocking at least 600 different accounts.
Another female narrative designer at Arkane Studios says her employer was messaged with a complaint that she'd "verbally abused" a Twitter user -- and discovered a (since-deleted) online petition calling for her firing. And an angry message was also sent to Opaque Space (collaborating with NASA on VR games and training), complaining the company should take responsibility for the "man hating ideals...spread through social media accounts" by their game design lead. "I know MANY people like me, especially women, who have frequent experience with people calling for their employers to fire them for speaking up, speaking out," she posted on Twitter.
The latest furor began with an accusation of mansplaining which a YouTube streamer defended as "my obvious attempt at creating dialogue and discussion", calling it "disheartening" that Jessica Price didn't "correct me in my false assumptions."
So what happened in the week that followed? An anonymous reader writes: A Reddit user indicated he'd been speaking satirically when he posted that "We can probably fire anyone on the GW2 dev team as long we make a big enough stink," and expressed surprise later that no one had disagreed with him. But another female developer told Kotaku she saw a real call to action on 4chan, and that it was followed by angry letters to the game studio she freelances for calling for her firing too, complaining their games had declined since she was hired (along with another woman). The letters also complained her Twitter account set "a bad example for the letter-writer's children, who supposedly play this game." The company's CEO received "a three-digit number's" worth of angry letters -- though "Fifty or so of them glitched out with a lot of variables exposed, including %FEMALENAME."
"A deeper look at the names and emails associated with the letters went to Facebook bot profiles and people whose profiles indicated associations with Gamergate or 4chan," reports Kotaku -- and Brianna Wu made a similar charge on Twitter last week, citing research by a team of volunteers. "The overwhelming majority of people harassing Jessica Price today on Twitter are bots and sock puppets. These are throwaway accounts that are used as toys. Almost no one claiming to be upset is an established, normal Twitter user." The Verge reports that Wu monitored Jessica Price's account, and found harassment "as bad as she's ever seen," blocking at least 600 different accounts.
Another female narrative designer at Arkane Studios says her employer was messaged with a complaint that she'd "verbally abused" a Twitter user -- and discovered a (since-deleted) online petition calling for her firing. And an angry message was also sent to Opaque Space (collaborating with NASA on VR games and training), complaining the company should take responsibility for the "man hating ideals...spread through social media accounts" by their game design lead. "I know MANY people like me, especially women, who have frequent experience with people calling for their employers to fire them for speaking up, speaking out," she posted on Twitter.
The latest furor began with an accusation of mansplaining which a YouTube streamer defended as "my obvious attempt at creating dialogue and discussion", calling it "disheartening" that Jessica Price didn't "correct me in my false assumptions."
I own a game company.
We get this constantly from players, and it has nothing to do with the sex of the developers. If anything the men get it worse.
I know that's an uncomfortable truth for you, but it's not anecdotal. It's industry-wide.
The identity politics happen on both sides or all sides to be precisely. Creating a cycle of hatred.
But since you single out the "being a woman and working in video the video game industry" part, look at Jessica Price twitter. She reacted on that criticism with:
Source: https://twitter.com/Delafina777/status/1014554296107483136
In the criticism she replied to there was no mention of her sexual identity (gender) or biological sex. It was a gender neutral opinion piece that did not attack her as a person at all. You can read it yourself using that link above. But she reacted with "Today in being a female game dev" as if the criticism was leveraged at her entire gender or sex or both, I'm not sure which one applies. That is a strong call for identity politics. Then in another tweet (https://twitter.com/Delafina777/status/1014581433937981445) she used that "manfeels" expression, again using a broad sweeping generalization implying that those who disagree with there are male, in gender or sex or whatever. Maybe she was right, and it was only or mostly males that disagreed with her, but that is also how you put oil into the identity politics fire and reinforce it as women vs men. The result being a self fulfilling prophecy because they aggravated it (of course that doesn't justify the reaction from the other side).
Just imagine if I answered to your reply under the label of "Romanians on the internet" and then going on about Americans wanting to explain to me how I should write in my tertiary language - English - on the internet. In that case you may think: "What does that have to do with anything?" And you would be right.
Looking at the other side I have also no doubts that there's plenty of people who overreacted to her tweets and called for a virtual lynch mob. A mob that isn't very selective when it comes to their targets, because if you're not with them, you're against them (unless there's an even bigger enemy around). That is identity politics. And from my perspective it only tends to make the situation worse.
You're completely missing the point. I never said, or even suggested, people should have to hide who they are to avoid harassment or discrimination. Twenty plus years ago, we hid our real identities for privacy and safety. The idea of a parent letting a child post their real name on the internet in 1996 would have been abhorrent. The side effect of that was that no one COULD discriminate based on age, gender, race, etc., even if they wanted.
Bit rude? Understatement of the fucking year.
I have been following this since it started. I have yet to see any evidence whatsoever of the '%FEMALENAME' letters that are being referenced in blogs, social media, etc. Until I see a pastebin, photocopy, or something published by an actual company who received it, I'm filing that under "shit-that-never-happened".
The facts in this that we KNOW to be true are as follows. 1: Price received some feedback she didn't like. 2: She got offended over nothing and reacted badly. 3: She and a colleague were fired.
In the real world, a business' bread-and-butter are its customers. (This is doubly true for entertainment related businesses) Treat them badly, and your business suffers. Treat them badly a lot and do it publicly, it suffers seriously. GW2 was hemorrhaging players already and Ms. Price's writing was likely playing a part. I uninstalled it about 6 months ago myself after playing for years.
Why can't we go back to using jumpers to configure slot adapter cards? Why? I say!
'Jessica Price was fired last week after she accused a Twitter user of "mansplaining"' No she wasn't forced for "mansplaining": ref:
'After a long AMA on the Guild Wars 2 Reddit, Jessica Price; a writer for ArenaNet, went on to Twitter to post a 25-part essay on how she comes up with stories, and what is relevant as far as stories in todays MMO's. (Very rough synopsis, quite a good read.)
After posting the essay, many community members chimed in to thank Price on sharing her views, and how insightful the read was, with one very popular community member; who has his own NPC inside of Guild Wars 2, commenting on the essay hoping to be able to start a civil and polite conversation with, one of his favorite writers. (He denotes this in his Twitch stream before the Twitter debacle)
The attempt however at starting a polite and civil conversation with the ArenaNet Writer, ended in Price slandering and defaming the community member as a sexist who is trying to mans-plain the job to her, even after the community member apologized for trying to start a civil conversation. (Community member posted a total of 2 Replys to Price, the first being the initial polite conversation starter, the second the apology for attempting communication.)
The next day on July 5th (This all occurred on July 4th), ArenaNet's CEO Mike O' Brian released a statement on a Guild Wars 2 Reddit post stating that Jessica Price and another ArenaNet member have been fired for harassment of an community member, when no such harassment was necessary.'
I'm assuming you're in your 40s. Maybe 50s or 60s. The reason why there was no gender was it was 99% white guys. The reason for that is, well, there weren't a lot of minorities in technology because especially 20-30 years ago (especially if you're old enough to remember BBS) minorities were in even worse shape than they were today and they didn't have a lot of access to tech, especially the expensive tech from the 90s (anyone remember building a 486 DX100 in 1995 for $400+ and being amazed at how "cheap" it was?). As for women, well, the places I hung out weren't exactly friendly to them. Lots of "Locker room" talk; which to be blunt was mostly thinly veiled misogyny from nerds (which I'm embarrassed to say my younger self took part in).
/.) are full of bitter old coots like me and, well, we're just not as much fun to be around.
Tech got cheap. Really cheap. Like, I can get a laptop online for about $100. $250 if I want a nice new one. $50 if I'll settle for a desktop. Also, the internet became a global communication tool and software was written to get non-nerds online. Finally, the old nerd caves (like
On the plus side you've got a _lot_ more folks online. A lot of those folks are helpful and good folks. I've been able to do tons of projects thanks to them.
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