1633

Well it’s the “everything is everything is everything” world view on social media.

She sees this from a certain point of view, and ArenaNet from another. They see this guy acting in good faith, she doesn’t. It’s like a short-form version of why we can’t have nice things in the world of social media today, because people can’t even agree on what a statement means or the context in which it should be looked at.

But i do agree with the IGDA outline that what needs to be set out and made clear as policy within in a company are the expectations and requirements that both employers and employees should follow. OTOH, gaming in general is less mature by everyone involved from top to bottom, so this will probably only be relevant for the largest publicly traded companies.

1634

If I have a company and one of my employees treats a customer of mine like dirt publicly without provocation, particularly customer who is polite and an official partner of my company, who brought me a lot of business, and the employee refuses to apologise for the uncalled for behavior, what else is there to do than to show the employee the door? There is no alternative.

Not getting involved at all is not acceptable - the moment my customers notice this behavior and the fact that I let it go without any action on my part, I take a huge hit to my reputation. Why would I want to do that?

(If O’Brien never gave her a possibility to apologise and move on, that would be a mistake on his part)

1635

I can’t believe this is as close as Price gets to even considering she misread the situation and reacted poorly:

Price said she has no regrets about her response to Deroir, although she said she might have moderated her language a little. “Given that the term ‘asshat’ was apparently a sticking point for ArenaNet, I’d maybe use ‘condescending jerk’ instead,” she said. “Men pop up in my mentions to tell me how to do my job all the time. They pop up to explain my female colleagues’ own jokes to them.

She’s absolutely convinced she was fired for “speaking up about sexism”, she seems blinded by that perspective. I hate that her experience has brought her to that point, but it doesn’t make her reaction okay.

1636

Ah, well. To be honest, I have no desire to hit the barricades for such a person.

1637

Once the boss gets involved, it’s too late for a sincere apology anyway.

1638

Man. I certainly aspire to be a staunch ally of the many women who are treated poorly in the game industry, but that’s bonkers.

1639

This really sucks because the idea of people mansplaining women’s jobs for them is rampant on twitter, and a really shitty thing that women in professions have to deal with. While I don’t think this guy’s intention his discussion was that, it obviously felt like that to her. As you can see, deroir didn’t blow up over this, and backed out and apologized and stopped posting, and that should have been that.

I really liked Austin Walker’s discussion on Waypoint Radio on Monday.

1640

Mansplaining is toxic. I mean that both ways. It’s toxic when someone does it all the time, and it’s toxic when someone percieves all comments as mansplaining.

1641

#notalldebates?

But I get what you are saying, in online debate it is very bad to assume negative intent all of the time, as it is also bad to assume you always know better.

1642

I don’t read Twitter, but gamers telling developers how to make games better by doing X Y and Z happens all the time on forums and elsewhere. It’s not something that just happens to women devs.

1643

It can be, however, part of a larger and more pervasive pattern of disrespecting and belittling women.

The tricky bit is sussing out the guy bitching at you because you’re a woman who he doesn’t think of capable of being a real game dev and he’s pissed from the guy who is bitching at you because his favorite storyline NPC that he has a very well-soiled daikamura of got killed off in the last x-pack and he’s pissed.

1644

I want to expand on this. My thoughts, let me tell you them!

I don’t think Price owes anyone anything as far as explaining or justifying how deroir’s comments made her feel, regardless of his intentions or later actions. I can’t understand on a primal level how exhausting being a woman in gaming (or tech in general, or any number of sectors) must get, because I’m not one. But I can intellectually understand it, and on that level I totally get it.

Get frustrated. Get mad. Whatever. That’s her business, and they are absolutely legitimate feelings that she should not be chided or shamed about. That’s ridiculous, and sadly where a lot of “yeah she totally should have been fired!” people seem to be at.

Where it gang agley, however, is twofold.

One, holy shit what a massive overreaction. Don’t respond, or take a breath and e.g. explain that you are indeed well aware of branching dialogue design patterns, since you’ve been doing this professionally for whatever, and they’re not a magic bullet here for reasons you don’t feel like going into. But ridiculous over-the-top oblique personal attacks that assume ill intent? Yeah, that’s shitty if you’re talking about your own personal project. But in the context of your day job…

…y’all. What she did gonna get you fired all day every day, in every industry. Going off on somebody on social media who came flaming at you? Sure, okay, provided you don’t cross whatever reasonable cultural lines for your business. Going off on someone who is clearly being polite, who your company has an existing business relationship with, specifically in the context of your role at the company, because of something unrelated to that interaction? Yeah, no.

I am super unimpressed by her going back to the well over and over about how ArenaNet assured her that being an outspoken feminist was okay, that she “wouldn’t have to check her identity at the door,” etc, and how that makes this a betrayal of all she holds dear? Hah, nope. Take any combination (or lack thereof) of the participants’ genders out of this, and she’s still way out of line. If “being civil in a professional context” is too much for you, then maybe this professional context is too much for you.

Maybe I’m reading it entirely wrong and if she wrote an angry tweetstorm about how bullshit gender dynamics are in video game writing and how everyone needs to step back and realize that women get talked over and railroaded and devalued all the time and she’s damn sick of it, without blowing up at someone during an otherwise civil conversation about her work at her employer, she would have been fired anyway. But somehow I doubt it.

There are plenty of worthy hills to die on in terms of gender equality in tech, business, or anywhere else. This is a real, real dumb one, and that Polygon piece might be the Polygonniest piece of 2018 so far. Woooooof.

1645

If I had to explain to my descendants how the liberal/progressive mindset ceded so much ground in the early 21st century, I’m pretty sure I would attribute it to an inability to wisely choose battles. Professional women are belittled all the time. This was so obviously not a good example of that, but here we are with another atrocious case that we either get to defend or ‘abandon’.

1646

Women cannot be perfect… all the time. And she’s already fired so it’s not as if expressing her regrets would do a thing for her other than make the toxic part of gaming even happier.

She reacted emotionally; it happens, and this is not even close to the worse of it coming from the dev. ArenaNet… also overreacted, and their explanation does not support the whole… there must be more to the story that was mentioned earlier. They fired her for losing her temper, in a pretty mild way compared to what others in the same field in similar situations.

1647

Totally get it. But there’s room between “{group} can’t be perfect all the time” and “{group} can never be criticized for making mistakes,” and this seems to be pretty clearly over the line from my perspective.

1648

I think most are criticizing her but also explaining how she might have go to the place, the place where she was reactionary to that. As someone said above, ArenaNet and Price can be wrong. And what the hell… Fries? He just seems to be sacked because the one guy was mad at her and was just… there.

1649

Exactly. She made a mistake and took out her anger on the wrong guy. It is a mistake, we have all made mistakes like this. But Man did Arenanet double down on the over-reaction by firing her (and some co-worker who defended her).

1650

And yet Price snapped at someone who was doing neither. There was nothing “tricky” about deciding how to respond to Deroir. If she was feeling charitable and talkative, engage with him and take it at face value. If she suspected otherwise, simply don’t respond. There was no “bitching” in his tweets, he wasn’t “pissed”.

Maybe he was winding her up with a sneaky plan to start off as pleasant and then try to drag her into some mansplaining or sexist commentary or whatever, but that was not there in the tweets he made, so if she had any inclination that it was headed in that direction, she should’ve just completely ignored it. Then either it goes away, or Deroir escalates, not her.

1651

You say she made a mistake. Do you think she would agree with you? I think if you told her that, chances are she would tell you to go fuck yourself. No offense.

1652

You’re fired.

Now I’ll stick a mic in your face and ask you a bunch of personal questions… or we can give her time to reflect and then ask. She is currently under a few harassment campaigns too, ongoing.