Slashdot Mirror
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 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
Yeah, #metoo
Just because you have a vagina doesn't mean you can be a jerk without retribution.
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.
When I was a younger, in its early days, the whole reason the internet was great is because there were no gender, skin color or religion, we were all just nerds. No one knew or cared WHAT you were, just WHO you were. I remember when the idea of telling someone your real name on the internet was considered madness. I miss those days. It was just a lot simpler.
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.
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.
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.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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.