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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."
How many troll armies have been unleashed on the United States, trying to stir up dissent and unrest using tactics like these?
10 years ago, there were just developers. ... and now it just backfires.
now there are developers and female developers.
They tried to make "being a woman" a political statement and a political stance... and they succeeded.
they made "dongle jokes" a harassment... and fired developers for that.
they made games their echo chambers for their political views... and they succeeded.
do you know why? because when you deal with someone who doesn't care about politics, e.g. gamers, and they mess with their lives, e.g. games, they are going to use every method to attack you, e.g. politically incorrect practices.
I can't say that I don't like it. I am loving it.
The dude was perfectly polite in his question. She just went off on him because she obviously knows better as SHE is the dev and he's just a player, that she's doesn't have to explain why he's so wrong that warrants her going off on him and basically called him sexist for bringing her gender into the mix(which he NEVER did, she assumed it herself, it was NEVER a gender issue yet she keeps on repeating it was.)
This whole thing is ridiculous and all stemmed from that one awful dev, the same one who said she was glad Totalbiscuit was dead (you may not like him, but ffs, that's not something you say about someone that died of cancer and wasn't a criminal).
It was never a mansplaining or a gender issue, the gender of the dev was never bought into this other than by herself to "justify" her actions.
She deserved to be fired, this is no way to conduct yourself. A dev online is like a clerk in a store, you represent your company regardless of whether or not you put a disclaimer saying "the views expressed here are your own and bla bla bla".
Don't like it? Don't respond, simple as that. No one forced her to reply to him in such a manner.
There has to be a level of tolerance. I guess the level depends on the employer, but it's probably somewhere between "literal Nazi marching proudly" and "voted for the other candidate".
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I regularly see %FEMALENAME in spam Subject and From lines. Obviously a better lure than %MALENAME. So it's possibly an edit of a spam template.
Worse, he gave *positive* encouraging feedback. Exactly the type companies want. I say, "He" but the name doesn't indicate male or female. Perhaps she ranted at a women for all I know. Either way it was bad. Then she double down on it publicly on Reddit, and it became a much much worse, a big problem for the company, to the extent they couldn't ignore it.
And she got fired, the CEO explained to her personally why, and she took that even badly, suggesting he sacked her personally to gloat. When I read it, that he thought highly enough to sack her personally, and explain why.
Serious personality issues.
As to the rest of this shit:
"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)."
A targetted letter aimed at a particular woman, yet supposidly a generic template with %FEMALENAME in the template as if its a generic letter sent about all women to every studio?
And %FEMALENAME, not just %NAME?? The word 'FEMALE" in there to back up the agenda claim. That doesn't ring true, and a google search does nothing to back it.
So I think this is just bullshit.
Jessica Price could be *Jeffry* Price for all it matters, he would still need to be sacked for that behavior.
"Was only speaking Satirically" = "It's just a joke, lighten up". The classic capper to a round of bullying, trying to delegitimize the grievances of the bullied.
This claim is untrue.
Her own pictures show that she never left her house when she said she did.
I remember racism on Usenet and email lists based on the time people posted or the message path headers being used to infer what their nationality was.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I think you need to go back and re-read my original comment. I never made any reference to my personal experiences.
Aside from that, I'm always puzzled by women's tendency to focus on personal anecdotes. What exactly could my personal story tell you which a link to others like it could not? Does the slight degree of closeness make it more emotionally appealing? Do you equate that with somehow being more persuasive?
I'm just as puzzled that you'd use the #metoo hashtag and think that anyone would interpret it any other way. The whole point of the hashtag is to share your own experiences.
Other engineers constantly over explain shit to each other, we're rehashing it in our minds so we don't forget, we're educating each other, we're puffing up our egos.
No. We rehash stuff, we don't explain the utter basics to someone we consider a peer. I've never had utter basics of my field explained to me, especially by some young'un at a conference (I ain't a young any more).
And yet every one of my female friends in tech areas and collegues with whom I've had conversations about the topic[*] have mentoned it happens repeatedly.
I'm not talking (say) going all motor mouth and over explaining two-phase lookup while chattng about C++20, I'm talking about explaining what a pointer is. To an industry veteran with 10 years experience. That kind of level of patronising.
[*] You have to be in a strong position of trust to have such conversations, mostly, because far too many guys react badly when they're told life isn't all roses and candy for women in tech.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
No one knew or cared WHAT you were, just WHO you were.
Actually, I always got the sense that nobody cared who you were, just that your ideas were good ones. In the early days of Slashdot, there were a lot of really smart people commenting on the stories with a lot of interesting insight to add. Now, every third post seems to be by an AC with a IQ of 80 who feels a need to share their opinion with the world. Articles about quantum computing end up degenerating into Hillary and Trump mud slinging fights. Oh, Intranets.....
The Internet really went downhill in the 90s when companies like AoL were trying to get everyone in the world online for $14.95 a month. Now the Internet is a pretty good reflection of humanity in general, and it shows.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Don't misunderstand me. I don't discredit your experience.
Personally, I think the vast majority of the time these online petitions to get people fired are nothing more than bullying, coercive harassment.
But I perceive a problem in the Jessica Price case.
Jessica's problem was that she was using Twitter basically as an extension of her work life. She -- apparently constantly -- tweeted to people she knew to be gamers about her work designing games.
In a case like that, yeah, I can see that a backlash on Twitter could lash all the way back to her employer.
But as I said, most cases aren't like that. Generally speaking, unless someone is tweeting about their own criminal behavior or things that are really, grossly unethical, I don't think social media should have any impact on one's work or professional life.
You'd probably make better arguments if you actually knew what you're talking about.
The Nazi party never got more than just shy of 44% of the votes, many of which gave them their vote for about the same reason that people voted for Trump; "democracy is a failure, the elite is robbing us", yadda, yadda.
"But I've seen the documentaries" I hear you say. Sure buddy, but filming or taking photos in Germany under Nazi rule without authorisation would land you in hot water in record time. Verboten, indeed. So, those "documentaries" you've seen, who took the pictures you've seen in the documentaries? The Nazis. You've been watching Nazi propaganda, with a modern day narrator.
Especially interesting is that, even despite it over time getting increasingly obvious that membership of the party would be highly socially and professionally beneficial, sometimes even necessary, the Nazi party never had more than 8 million members. Only two of those joining before 1933.
Germany being full of hardcore Nazis is a myth and your "argument" does nothing but illustrate your own ignorance and willingness to accept propaganda as truth.