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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."
Is anyone really surprised that identity politics only lead to more and broader generalized hatred?
Anything that is merely being said, and not experienced by my own senses, is not real life. All it does, is make you feel bad, about something that is so far out of your control, that you literally cannot even tell if it is real.
Then I noticed, how much of it actually completely does not exist in my world.
All those "wars"...
raging feminist vs neckbears or whatever
americans vs russians
refugees vs nazis
christians vs muslims
you name it.
They were just not happening in *real life*.
This is why the US military forced German civilians to bury bodies in concentration camps after WW2. So that they could experience it with their own senses. It seems that, prior to that, they were all big fans of your philosophy.
Just because you have a vagina doesn't mean you can be a jerk without retribution.
Could this thing be re-written so that it makes a bit more sense? Its like several disjointed story lines melded into an incoherent whole.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
No, the answer is 0): STOP USING TWITTER
How dumb is it to get in text based public flamefests limited to short sentences? The only thing profiting are companies like Twitter who call it "engagement", which drives up ad revenue. Just stop using Twitter for anything. If you really have to use it, use it for entertainment. So called "social media" is not a place for serious discussion - especially not Twitter! The fact that our President uses it is outrageous enough. Just stop using it. Nothing good comes out of it, unless you are a Twitter shareholder.
The topic of discussion and the depth and quality of the subsequent commentary gives me great hope for the future. My hope is that arthropods are back at the top of the food chain again. And the way this discussion and ecological changes are going, they have a good chance. I for one hail our new lobster overlords.
Just the washing instructions on life's rich tapestry
There are two distinct parts to this story. One is that Jessica Price verbally abused and denigrated a fan, for which she was fired (and a male colleague who doubled down on that went along for the ride, which no one seems to talk about). The second part of the story is the mob reaction and ugly, sexist bullshit that was triggered in reaction to her own behavior, and unfortunately spilled over onto other targets as well. There are a lot of idiots who glom onto events like these and use them to launch personal attacks against people. Women do seem especially likely targets for them, but make no mistake - anyone can be a target.
We have to keep in mind that it was Ms Price who was the instigator of this series of events through her own actions. Or rather, her over-reaction to a fan's innocent response to her piece. She somehow took that response and interpreted it in the worst possible way, and lashed out at him in public, multiple times. Did she deserve the overwhelming hate and bile that was spewed her way? No, of course not, but let's be clear: she absolutely fired the first shots in that nasty little exchange. She was not fired for "speaking out" on women's issues. She was fired for treating a fan like garbage in public.
Are women exempt from the rules other professional game developers are expected to follow? Had I lambasted a game's fan with which I was professionally associated and called him a "rando asshat" in a public forum, I'd absolutely expect to be fired. I don't believe for a minute that ArenaNet simply caved to mob pressure. And the notion that game development studios are going to suddenly start listening to and acting on random hate-mail complaints because ArenaNet fired Price for inappropriate comments feels beyond absurd to me. In fact, in the examples given, the studios took clear stands to protect their female devs from harassment, but concerns were expressed about "other studios", of course.
Let's certainly work to foster more civility between developers and fans as we can, and that includes standing up for women when they're harassed simply for being women in a public role. But this story has a bit more nuance to it than that, and I don't think it's helpful to pretend that nuance doesn't really exist and focus only on half the story.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
It was equally well documented back in the day that many actions pinned on GamerGate were suspicious or even outright faked, and that didn't stop the press from taking them at face value. Best example being the Felicia Day doxing, where an address was posted by an account with a misspelled name of a notable Youtuber, which was never confirmed to even be hers, but it was spread all over the news within 24 hours that GamerGaters had doxxed her.
These reporters are like a feminist Fox Mulder, they want to believe the misogyny is out there so badly, all you need is some cheap smoke and mirrors to lead them down whatever rabbit hole you want. Is it any surprise there are trolls eager to pull their strings for laughs? You can call them part of GamerGate too if that makes you feel better, but that doesn't change the fact that the press are being useful idiots and gullable fools.
It's great that you've managed to reduce massive numbers of humanity into broad caricatures which you can hate unreservedly. Such attitudes never turn out badly.
That's a very long post about Price, but she lost her job and bares no responsibly for the mob that used her firing to instigate an attack on other random women.
"Bears", and while she's not responsible for the mob's actions, certainly her actions (and not her being) turn out to have been the trigger for a mob of idiots to go on harassing other women. While I don't condone any of this, it's fairly clear why it happened: Someone threw oil on what turns out to have been a smoldering fire. And now it burns. Whoops.
It's a bit like dropping a smoldering cigarette butt in a dry forest. Many times it'll just go out. Sometimes, even if you stamp it out then walk away, might still cause the entire forest to burn down. If you know the forest is dry, even lighting up a ciggie there is criminally irresponsible. (Hard to grasp concept for some. How about you?)
The real problem here is not one person who was punished for some rude tweets,
For some identity politics-flavoured toxic tweets. It was well beyond mere rudeness. Which explains (but doesn't justify, thanks) the counter-trolling. But I see you mostly post to make your spin stick. Again, "oh, it's AmiMoJo again. Oh well."
it's we have a mob attacking people because of their gender.
That's actually not quite correct. The mob is trolling to see if they can get people fired, which happens to be aimed at females because the trigger happens to be female. If she'd been male then the barrage of bot-complaints would've been against male game designers. I know it's not on your agenda to admit this, but I'll point it out to you anyway.
It's important to publicize it and develop countermeasures so that there are not more victims.
Knowing what's going on ought to be enough. If your employer would fire you without first talking through the complaints then you're better off not working for that employer. In an internet age employers cannot afford to let their valuable human capital up and vanish because some random troll sent a truckload of automated complaints over, well, nothing. If they succumb, the company eventually succumbs.
It would also be great if we could understand the people behind this and their motivations. Some people want to write it off as general trolling, like it's some innate property of the internet that just happens spontaneously, but there is a years old pattern of attacks on women specifically with deeply misogynistic motivations.
Go hang out on 4chan and report your findings, there's a good little researcher.
To be clear: 4chan has "a years old pattern of attacks" against just about anyone, everyone, regardless of any single thing. They'll hate you just so they have an excuse to hate you, until their attention span runs out and then they'll hate something else for a while.
Again, not on your agenda to admit it, but 4chan's history is pretty clear to just about everyone else here.
These people are "the left" as much as the kkk is "the right".
Nobody likes these people and all her friends who also get harassment are fellow internet warriors.
Odds are they're posting AC because people like you would ramp up the harassment if given some idea where to go.
Honestly, I wouldn't be in the least bit surprised if a major factor in why men might have it worse is because of douchebags like you, who apparently believe that it's A-OK if men get harassed--which is the message you send when you dismiss their complaints casually, and yes, that can on its own make it worse. Harassment is bad, and if you believe your target and/or motives somehow justify it, you are part of the problem.
Seriously, this sort of thing is part of why I'm not at all comfortable with the anti-gamergate side. What is wrong with you people, that you can't even bring yourselves to say things like "Anybody can be harassed and harassment is wrong"? That shouldn't be controversial, yet it is getting treated like it not only is controversial but is offensive.
What is wrong with you people, that you can't even bring yourselves to say things like "Anybody can be harassed and harassment is wrong"?
... Well I'm not a fan of the anti-gamergaters either, but this question is pretty easy to answer: it's deflection. If someone says, "Look, this group in particular is being singled out and harassed." and you respond, "Hm, yes harassment is bad. Before we do anything else, let's all say that harassment is bad." then you are deflecting from their complaint by changing the topic to something which they hadn't really been discussing. The other person was not talking about harassment being bad, there was an implication that we all already agreed on that point, the other person was talking about this particular group being singled out.
It's very similar to the "all lives matter" deflection that some people use against the Black Lives Matter protestors. The point of the phrase "black lives matter" is not the concept that lives should matter or that black people have lives. The phrase assumes that we all agree on those points already and so is talking about something else.