Good comment under gameindustry.biz article, particularly last two paragraphs
I realize in the current social climate, this communication strategy might actually work in her favor, at least in the short term. Creating elaborate alternative narratives and throwing dirt in all directions seems to be working splendidly for the current US government, so why wouldn’t it work for her. But in a sane world, it seems like someone should try to tell her she’s really not doing herself any favors with the whole follow-up on this and give her a chance to stop digging in a spiral, take a breath, think it over and move forward.
I don’t know Price, I’m sure she can be a nice person offline and wish her all the best getting a fresh start, but everything she’s said on twitter and in the following interviews gives off the impression of someone who is completely incapable of engaging in some self-reflection, realizing when she screwed up, taking responsibility for it and have the decency to apologize. It’s ok, we all screw up sometimes (the way american corporate culture is so quick to fire people when mistakes happen is quite ugly). But when you then go on to explain how you were only doing The Right Thing, try to portray being mean and sexist as heroics and suggest every man’s interaction with her is secretly motivated by sexism, it just becomes sad and hurts the feminism that she’s abusing as a tool to cover for her apparently deficient social skills.
I’m pessimistic anything good will come of the way this is being handled. There were some opinions about how ArenaNet was sending a fatal signal to the troll brigades and emboldening them. I would agree that those guys are going to come out of this all emboldened, but it will have been the subpar reporting on the issue that actually will have sent the most fatal signal to those people and, more importantly, to decent people.
That signal is: “We’re all in tribes now, and protecting our tribe matters more than having a good hard look at facts, employing some critical thinking and accepting the possibility one of our own may have screwed up.”
It’s always the reporters or someone that isn’t the gamers. That’s for sure.
Two things can be simultaneously true - there are some shitty people who happen to play videogames, and journalists sometimes put their agendas before the facts.
I guess after years of this, and knowing some of these people, that it’s hard for me to imagine some manner of actual agenda involved. I can promise you that most of the people writing these stories are deeply involved and care about games. I don’t know of any previous ArenaNet drama that would make some sort of crusade or attack by a group of journalists that would make any sense. This was already a big story on twitter and Price was willing to talk.
As a personal anecdote, I wrote news stories for GigaOm for a while, years back. The daily grind of being a news writer involves finding stuff people want to read. Stuff like this is very juicy to the public - one side hates her and reads the article and links it to all their friends. One side loves her and reads the article and links it to all their friends. (as a side note, it reminds me of Howard Stern - the people that hated him listened to him longer to find things to complain about) To that end, it’s business.
I guess what I’m saying is I don’t think there’s some weird left-leaning media conspiracy at work here. It’s like ArenaNet took a bad, but manageable situation and poured gas on it, and that is going to be interesting to people.
It doesn’t help that Jessica Price isn’t the easiest sale in the emotional identification circle. Personally, I think she over-reacted. I also kind of understand. I have a few friends who LOVE to debate game reviews with me. I don’t particularly like it because it always goes to this place where they tell me how I think about games is wrong. If I don’t think the game they like is the best, it goes to “YOU AREN’T BEING OBJECTIVE!” After about a dozen or so occasions of this happening, I snapped. Now, this is just with a couple of personal friends. In her case, I imagine it’s like this a lot, lot more. I get shit from people on twitter and I only have 800 followers, for Christ’s sake. I can’t imagine 11k.
Anyway, just wanted to clarify a bit and not just drop a one-liner. Though, as you all happen to know, I do love a one-liner.
Nihm
1698
You should follow @Wendy’s.
That account is super funny. I was kind of shocked.
Wendys Twitter is on point. Level 9000 social media shade.
RickH
1701
I wonder how much of it is non-Americans recoiling at how easy it is to lose a job in this country. That’s what seemed to horrify Eurogamer.
That’s an interesting point. It is super easy to lose a job with no recourse here.
From the article you quoted:
Welcome to 10 years ago! (Or earlier, but you get the point.)
Didn’t we determine screeching was a sexually charged misogynistic word? Or was it shrill?
Might have to look this up so I’m properly equipped for my tweetstorm to those bosses of hers probably just looking for an excuse anyway.
Her pretending there’s literally any way Arenanet could handle this situation that wouldn’t “embolden” the bad actors is not helping anything. What are they supposed to do? Never fire or discipline a female employee for fear some asshat is going to think he’s responsible and try to be more so?
Qt3 is also a social media site.
It’s just not a particularly well known one.
There have been comments that Game Developers who choose not to make their posts private are asking for people to respond, and are therefore responsible for any results.The obvious conclusion is that Game Developers should leave every public forum (including this one), and confine their discussions about their craft to private industry only forums and mailing lists. Those, after all, do exist, and have for years. Is that what people really want?
That seems a little disingenuous. Why are you posting on public social media if you aren’t willing to engage the other members? If you only want to hear from and engage with other game developers, then yes, you should be in a private group.
More directly: if you are posting on social media (even here) in the context of your job and identifying yourself as an employee of your company, keep your comments civil and professional. Is that really such a hard thing to do?
Nihm
1709
While I can’t get on board with the rationale of Price’s defenders, I very much can agree that our differences pale in comparison to those we (or I at least) have with the Gamergate crowd. Our attention should be focused on the barbarians at the gates, not Price. The news story here is that a developer guilty of a simple gaffe stirs up a maelstrom of hatred.
As far as ArenaNet is concerned, I believe they should have delayed any disciplinary action until the spotlight was off Price. The fact that they aren’t responsible for Gamergate does little to mitigate the fact that they threw her to the wolves.
I mean, they should if they don’t want anyone to engage with them on that site. If you are posting on social media, you can’t expect people to not respond, and why would you? That is the reason you are posting publicly right?
Either that or do the increasingly common twitter thing of posting “Not looking for any replies here” on your post, I see people do that a lot, especially people looking to vent publicly.
I also think it is unfair for companies like arenanet to not expect their employees to act like human beings on social media. There is a difference between getting into a public argument with a fan, and posting disparaging remarks on behalf of the company, this is why most people’s social media accounts say “opinions here are my own, and not representative of my employer” and typically that is good enough. Likely you would get a stern talking to from HR about public image and responsibility, but firing someone over this is outrageous.
LMN8R
1711
Um. It’s not an uncommon practice to discipline employees privately without firing them. It’s absurd to think that firing people is the only possible punishment here or even that it’s the most effective punishment.
Maybe outrageous in game dev, but really not in other industries. Now, if you want to argue that most other industries don’t engage with their customers in the same way and thus employees don’t have the same level of private/professional overlap, I’d agree with that.
Again, if I insulted an important customer on social media, I’d be fired. Do I have an opportunity to engage with important customers on social media? Not nearly to the same extent as game developers. That probably is a good reason to cut game developers more slack, certainly.
Repeatedly we see on social media that an expert on a subject talks about what they know, only to have people who are not particularly knowledgeable in that field parachute into the discussion. The notion that someone has chosen to allow you to view what they say must also be happy to have any and all responses would result in no chance for people to learn in an informal discussion.
Figuring out who people work for is trivial. There is no reason to think that “well, they didn’t SAY they worked for company X” would be a protection, and in fact there are some companies which require employees to identify their employer just so that the company doesn’t get accused of astroturfing.
Again, this is a requirement “if you talk about anything related to what you do for a living, you must be perfect in all your responses”. If that becomes the requirement, then assume that the opportunity to talk to people who know something about a field is going to go away.
