It’s a drunk post and he apologized immediately. There is no there there. What a story you paint.
If he workled for me and sent that text to a professional colleague or partner, the there is the streets, which I’d see he be escorted to ASAP. This isn’t college. ‘Drunken text lol’ doesn’t fly.
People are responsible for what they do when they’re drunk. They’re responsible for getting drunk. In a professional context like an industry convention, they are responsible for not putting themselves in situations where they might cross a line or blur a line. If they do cross a line and there are consequences, those consequences are on them, not someone else.
Telling someone you aren’t in an intimate relationship with that you are going to give them cunnilingus and they are going to enjoy it is abusive. There are much worse forms of abuse, but it’s abusive. Choosing to say that to someone who you have a professional relationship with can and should have consequences on your career. Not to punish you, but just because your actions make people uncomfortable.
The victim of that text has said she did forgive him, but she kind of wishes she hadn’t, because clearly the violation is still real, it’s not gone. It’s understandable for others who might be victims of the same thing to also feel like it’s not gone.
It’s a small act. We can even choose to believe it’s an isolated one (unlikely, but maybe). If the effects on his career are disproportional, that’s unfortunate. But it’s just the way the consequences fall. Women in the places he might work don’t deserve to have to put up with it.
Sure. But probably not in Japan. (oops)
Once a women straight up told me , a beer tender at my local brewery, women just want their pussies sucked. I lol’d and just drank my beer. She wasn’t even drunk.
I don’t think this is a big deal. Sticks and stones. Everything is just made to seem worse than it really is on the Internet, then people make these stories as if they were real, as added weight to crush people that make mistakes.
I don’t know what kind of professional environment some people work at, but that text to a co-worker or vendor partner would be immediate grounds for dismissal where I work.
I guess you could’ve gotten away with it in a couple of the warehouses/construction sites I’ve worked at when I was younger, but a white-collar job? No way. Even in the Army, that text shown to your commander would result in some punishment like extra duty for a few weekends or some pay getting docked.
This reminds me of the Mad Men episode where Don Draper discovers that Lane Pryce embezzled from the company, planning to pay back the funds with his bonus.
Don takes the hard line and forces him to resign. Lane ends up hanging himself.
From a human standpoint, Don was wrong. He was also right. Lane probably didn’t belong in that type of company anyway. Too much power and temptation for his personality type.
Rather than blacklisting Chris Avellone, perhaps the right approach is from an HR perspective. Drunk texts like that at his age strongly indicate substance abuse issues, especially with the apology right after. Would be nice if we could figure out a way not to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
I agree with this. Upthread, I mentioned ways I thought Avellone might be able to truly mitigate the effects of his behavior (although it’s not up to someone like me, it’s up to the people who actually have to worry about being victimized). It’s to his credit that he has apologized. That doesn’t mean nothing. But I can understand why it’s not enough, and why you certainly can’t tell someone they can’t be bothered by it today.
Tell me, would you feel the same way if he had drunk-texted a Black colleague in the industry, calling them the n-word and that sort of thing? He apologized, so it’s okay and everyone should forget about it after it became public because he apologized and well, he was drunk?
I’ve been drunk plenty of times. I’ve never gone on a racist tirade and I’ve never texted people in my industry about going down on them. And you can bet that if I had and it became public, I’d be shitcanned.
I don’t deal with hypothetical nonsense. It was never an excuse. Also that example is so…1858. Too dated.
Well, such a thing has derailed many a career.“Lol Mel Gibson was drunk, no big deal” didn’t really carry the day.
I’m just wondering why blasting a colleague with an offensive text message of a sexual nature is “no there there”.
EDIT: To clarify, I’m not saying the guy should be condemned to hellfire and damnation for eternity. But I can absolutely understand why his future hiring could raise a ton of red flags for employers. Not just the drunken text, but him lighting everything on fire with the departure from Obsidian as well. I just totally disagree that there’s no “there” to any of this.
Well, I agree being drunk isn’t an excuse, I just don’t think that text is as harmful as others make it out to be, especially with their added stories about women in the industry as a kind of…the full weight of all of our collective trauma is now upon you, since you sent a shitty text message while drunk that one time!
I think professionally, his Obsidian exit has way more fire and brimstone, (even epically so) but for him personally this might have much more weight. Not the text message but the larger idea that he is still tainted by the mere existence of the accusations regardless of the legal outcomes.
This thread has made that pretty clearly the case.
Tech startup in Tokyo. We have a bar always stocked with drinks at the office. Free drinking with co-workers every Wednesdays and Fridays after 6pm.
Nomikai, or drinking party after work is a very common “company culture” thing in Japan. They just decided to move it in-house after the pandemic.
I like this way of thinking about it. We have a lot more science and established procedure built up around rehabilitating substance abusers, and addressing concerns of people who will have to be around them. Same for hiring convicts.
The drunk sextee, Jacqui Collins, said she forgave Avellone for the drunken come-on and they continued to remain friendly afterwards, in her words. At the time, 2013, she was working as some sort of project manager for a non-gaming web development company. Her first gaming credit was in 2015. They didn’t seem to have been working together, and they had dated in the past.
This is why I consider it to be a non-issue professionally, if certainly evidence of poor judgment. It doesn’t imply he’s a drunkard. People drink, sometimes to excess, without being alcoholics. I can’t imagine myself sending a text like that even drunk off my ass (not that I’ve actually been drunk in the past 15 years), but is this sufficient evidence of a twisted manipulative abusive nature to blackball him forever? C’mon.
I do count his publicly bad-mouthing former colleagues as a real problem. That’s a separate issue entirely.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacquicollins/details/experience/
I, for one, do not act like an asshole and send awful messages like this when I’m drunk.
Being drunk does not make you say random things like this out of the blue which you would never say when sober.
Awesome - so why even bring this up? Did she work for you? Are you her boss?
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Be grateful you have never been that drunk or been around people who have. “In vino veritas” is maybe more absolute than you realize. No doubt he really wanted to go down on her.
I think it does. The fact that he apologized after is a big tell. After a certain age, most people learn their limits and don’t have the tolerance to be able to say shit like this. They get drunk, sure, but are passed out or puking long before they reach the do crazy shit like this stage.
And in the same sentence said she regretted doing so. The tweet’s visibility is limited now but you can see it upthread.
It’s weird the amount of internet sleuthing you’re doing to try and justify this as ok but missed her saying that she regret the apology. And reading between the lines - she probably accepted the apology because it’s “what you’re supposed to do” without reflecting on how she actually felt at the time, or did so out of self-preservation.
Yes, when she thought he abused her friend. Turns out, he probably didn’t.
That’s your judgment, I can see why you have come to it. But the real question is, if you put all this information in front of them, do women working in the game industry consider it a non-issue? And maybe they will. But if they don’t, what should we do about that?
Again, that’s the wrong framing. No one is actively trying to blackball him forever. If they’re not hiring him, they’re just trying to protect their employees and their studios. If that limits his opportunities, that’s a double effect, and maybe unfortunate, but also wholly a consequence of his actions.