Here is an example:
Remember when Daniel Vavra had all those foreigners amerisplaining to him about the history of his own country? He got tired of it and made a couple of responses on social media that weren’t entirely polite. How many people in this thread were defending him back then for being less than perfect?
My problem with the Gamergaters is that they’re a bunch of whiny, hypocritical bigots who try to stir up hatred while pretending that they’re the victims. So from where I’m sitting, Price’s defenders have a lot more in common with them than they do with me.
The PR situation created demands a public response or they’d just suffer the reverse problem with the other group of bad actors crowing about how they shut down that streamer as well as possible repercussions in their community interaction and development if people don’t feel they can give legitimate feedback without being accused of sexism and attacked.
As for as whether firing is too strong… if she wasn’t willing to apologize or at least have the company apologize on her behalf - particularly if she presented herself in the meeting the way she has on Twitter and in the press afterwards - then firing is absolutely a reasonable response. You don’t create a PR problem for your company and then refuse to help clean it up.
That’s only part of what you said. The specific part I don’t understand is what you mean by
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.
Because yes, having a public social media account means you’re always just an @ away from any random fan, any random critic, any random troll, and any random psycho. I think we all agree that’s the reality, whether it’s pleasant or not, right? Wyndwraith phrased it a little more neutrally when they said you’re “consenting”, saying someone is “asking for it” is a little loaded, but we’re describing the same situation.
But you are only responsible for your side of those engagements. Price didn’t have to respond at all if she thought she was being harassed, or if she just didn’t feel like it for any reason at all. She didn’t have to respond with an attack of her own.
So the “obvious conclusion” is not “that Game Developers should leave every public forum (including this one)”. The obvious conclusions are that they (and everyone) should understand their visibility and associated risks with a public platform, and that they should consider (probably constantly) whether any harassment or threat of harassment on these platforms is worth their time and emotional well-being to endure or beyond their ability to respond to appropriately.
These are sort of fundamental decisions we make subconsciously in how we live our public lives all the time—online and off—and they’re not unreasonable issues to wrestle with, or to come to different conclusions about where to set the boundaries, but unless someone truly doesn’t understand the interaction model of a platform, no, the only recourse is not complete withdraw from public platforms, nor has anyone here said anything supporting that.
When the penalty for not being perfect is summary termination of employment, and given the level of entitlement among game fans (and that’s not even counting the deliberate bad actors who simply want to sow chaos and for whom games are just a pretext), again, we get to the conclusion that game developers should simply never talk about how games are made with the fans.
After all, why risk your job to explain to people how things actually happen?
Holy shit who started this “not being perfect” refrain? That’s not what anyone said.
Well, if we’re requiring people to never lose their temper, regardless of anything else going on in their life, any previous provocations, or even just misreading someone’s intent, sounds like a demand for perfection to me.
If I were to run into a line chef from a local restaurant talking cooking in the park with some people, and when I went to contradict them on something they were harsh in their response, would I be justified in going to the restaurant and demanding the owner fire them?
Do you really think that’s what happened here? You think Price was called into the HR office and they said “well, you obviously lost your temper, I think it’s clear we have to fire you”?
Price’s statement was that she was terminated by the CEO with no opportunity to state her case.
The CEO’s public statement on the matter does not refute that claim.
What do you think happened? And on what basis do you think that?
What kind of terrible company must Opaque be that they can share that “complaint” about Jennifer Scheurle and then do anything other than have a good laugh together at that?
What is the threat of idiots feeling “emboldened” to keep being idiots?
I meant to bring this up earlier but another problem I have with the Polygon piece is the way it presents it as a given that ArenaNet fired Price because of the online reaction. There’s cause for Price to be fired based on her actions, whether a bunch of idiots or bad actors were cheering for it or not. To assume ArenaNet was caving to those bad actors is making unfair assumptions.
And along those lines, Jennifer doesn’t have anything to worry about from emboldened trolls.
Well they didn’t just fire one employee… so all the explanations you’ve been giving, if you believed them in their entirety, only explains one.
Price lost her cool with a fan, and they fired her for it. That’s exactly what happened, according to ArenaNet.
So, the message you took from her post was that there was no real worry of this causing a problem for other people. Which is, you know, exactly the opposite of what she was saying.
That is correct, I am disagreeing with her. I’m looking at the barely coherent complaint submitted and laughing at its merit, wondering why she feels worried.
Ok. You disagree with her. On what basis?
On the basis of the complaint she cited. It’s almost illegible, and literally nothing but empty accusations:
I would like to take this opportunity to inform you about the current behavior of some of your employees. particularly [Jennifer Scheurle]. She has been consistently been using her twitter account to spread group/gender hating ideals especially towards men. I am completely supportive of equal opportunities for every person from every nationality, gender, race or social background as long as their qualifications are present. She consistently shares misinformation about the “equal opportunities of women” compared to men within the gaming industry in order to improve her own personal agenda and career. As a studio involved within the gaming industry I would like to believe that you are not supporting/ or god forbid practice these stereotpyical behavior against any specific groups. But none the less I believe you are held responsible from your employees actions/words/ and man hating ideals they spread through their social media accounts. Finally as we seen lately these kind of subjects and the eagerness to ignite “gender” drama is dealt with major actions to employees as we seen happening to Jessica Price, which i might add your specific employee I make this complain about is closely band with. I hope you take the right choice and work on your employees communication skills and how their represent your company. I will make more inquiries with other organisations and gaming outlets about this specific individual. Best of luck.
They provide no evidence whatsoever of…whatever it is they think Jennifer Scheurle is doing, “ignite gender drama” I guess.
So the only way this would scare me is if Price was also fired for baseless accusations, which she wasn’t.
Posted this about Fries earlier.
I agree it’s harder to understand why he was fired, but it’s not hard to understand why he would’ve been disciplined in some way for his tweets. How his termination went down isn’t information anyone has shared yet, so beyond agreeing “it’s harder to understand”, you’d be making an assumption to argue his termination wasn’t justified, and I’d be making an assumption to argue that it was.
It’s not “what I think happened” that’s up for debate, it’s whether or not there’s a possibility that ArenaNet was justified with the information we know. My position has been that we don’t know everything that happened, and from what we do know, such possibility exists.
So here’s what we know, or at least what I know. If there’s been more information from Price or ArenaNet than what was shared via Polygon, I haven’t seen it.
This is the second, longer statement that I’m aware of from ArenaNet, given to Polygon when they contacted them after their interview with Jessica:
Jessica had identified herself as an ArenaNet employee on Reddit and Twitter, had been discussing Episode 3 storytelling with fans on Reddit, then had written a 25-part tweet about how we tell stories in MMOs, relating it back to Episode 3. She was representing the company. The expectation was to behave professionally and respectfully, or at least walk away. Instead, she attacked.
Concerns have been publicly raised that she was responding to harassment. It’s not my place to tell employees when they should or shouldn’t feel harassed. In this case, however, our employees could have chosen not to engage, and they could have brought the issue to the company, whereby we would have done everything we could to protect them.
We won’t tolerate harassment. When an employee feels harassed, we want them to bring the issue to us, so that we can protect the employee, deal with the issue, and use it to speak to the larger issue of harassment.
Whatever Jessica and Peter felt internally about the situation, this was objectively a customer engaging us respectfully and professionally, presenting a suggestion for our game. Any response from our company needed to be respectful and professional. A perceived slight doesn’t give us license to attack.
We’ve all dedicated our careers to entertaining people, to making games for the purpose of delighting those who play them. We generally have a wonderful relationship with our community, and that’s a point of pride for us. We want to hear from our players. It’s not acceptable that an attempted interaction with our company — in this case a polite game suggestion — would be met with open hostility and derision from us. That sets a chilling precedent.
The tweets were made on July 4, when the studio was closed for the holiday. We were aware of them that day, and decided we’d need to take action in the morning. The fact that the community’s anger was escalating on July 5 could make it look like our action was a response to the community’s anger. But that wasn’t the case. We took action as soon as we practicably could.
I hate to let an employee go, and I wish the best for Jessica and Peter, as for any former employee, in whatever they choose to do next.
Whatever you thought of the tweets, Jessica and Peter were also part of the team that brought you the kidnapping scene in Episode 1, which was a wonderfully well-executed scene. That’s how I want to remember their time at ArenaNet.
There’s a lot there that’s adding context, some important, some not. I think the part about the July 4 holiday is important—it’s a plausible explanation for firing her the next day instead of immediately. I think some of the other stuff could be read as empty corporate platitudes or legitimate concerns, depending on your suspicions, but doesn’t meaningfully affect the cause given for termination either way.
So to boil that down to “Why was she fired?”:
Jessica had identified herself as an ArenaNet employee on Reddit and Twitter, had been discussing Episode 3 storytelling with fans on Reddit, then had written a 25-part tweet about how we tell stories in MMOs, relating it back to Episode 3. She was representing the company. The expectation was to behave professionally and respectfully, or at least walk away. Instead, she attacked.
Any response from our company needed to be respectful and professional. A perceived slight doesn’t give us license to attack.
It’s not acceptable that an attempted interaction with our company would be met with open hostility and derision from us.
If you really want to cut it down:
Jessica had identified herself as an ArenaNet employee on Reddit and Twitter. She was representing the company. It’s not acceptable that an attempted interaction with our company would be met with open hostility and derision from us.
At its harshest reading, that’s all the justification they need to fire her, or anyone else (unless someone wants to wake legowarrior up to talk about how unions are the answer 🙂).
So ArenaNet’s claim is not that she was fired for being “less than perfect”. She wasn’t fired for “losing her temper”. She wasn’t fired for “misreading someone’s intent”. She was fired for representing ArenaNet with open hostility and derision.
So what does Jessica say?
She says ArenaNet “folded like a cheap card table”* when confronted by toxic fandom. I dispute that that’s been proven, ArenaNet offered a specific and plausible response to why she was fired the next day instead of immediately after becoming aware of the tweets.
Further quoting Polygon quoting her:
“I was given no opportunity to argue my case,” she said. “My manager was on vacation. [O’Brien] spent some time insisting that developers must be friends with the company’s customers, and that it was unacceptable to say that we aren’t, even when we’re not on the clock. He told me I’d look back and regret this, because we were doing great work and I’d ruined it.
“The whole thing was highly unprofessional,” she continued. “There was zero reason for him to be there. He wanted to vent his anger, and he had the power to command a woman to stand there while he took his feelings out on her, so he did. Then he walked out, [the manager] got my stuff from my desk and the HR person asked for my key card.”
“I was given no opportunity to argue my case” may literally just mean “I was not given the chance to argue that attacking the fan was the right thing to do”. That does not seem like evidence of an injustice, the exchange was public and available for management to review for themselves, and the explanation given for termination did not depend on whether she had the moral high ground or could convince them she did.
As leveled, the explanation would’ve been accurate even if Deroir was objectively, unabashedly attacking her.
“I had, in my time there, zero warnings about my social media use. Everything I said on Twitter was consistent with what I’ve been saying for years and how I’ve been saying it.”
I have no reason to believe she’s lying, at no point does ArenaNet indicate she was warned. Their justification for termination did not involve failure to heed earlier warnings. They stated plainly what she did this time, the implication is that was enough, a fireable offense on its own.
To ultimately answer your question @Dave_Weinstein, I think what happened is that Jessica Price was fired for representing ArenaNet with open hostility and derision toward Deroir. I think that’s harsh, but so is what she did. At face value from both sides, I can live with their decision and simultaneously wish it hadn’t come to that. If there were ulterior motives and agendas that colored the decision to fire her (sexism, caving to toxic fandom, etc.), I haven’t seen sufficient evidence to convince me. I’m not ruling out the possibility, but I’m not assuming that’s what happened.
*you’d be forgiven for thinking she was accusing ArenaNet of “not cooperating and pinching her fingers because of toxic fandom.”
Emboldened idiots are not necessarily a more credible threat, exhibit B:
So, to recap. You think no one has anything to worry about, based on this letter.
Jennifer Scheurle (the target of this and numerous other letters like it) thinks that she doesn’t need to worry because she has strong corporate support, but that other women in the industry do have to worry.
Since the only thing you cited was the text of the letter, I can only assume that you are depending on your experiences to assess the threat it and letters like it pose.
What experience(s) do you have as the target of coordinated emailed attacks? And what experience(s) do you have with the internal structures, policies, and practices of game development studios?
When I said “Jennifer doesn’t have anything to worry about from emboldened trolls”, maybe I should’ve phrased that less definitively. I can’t know for certain that an emboldened troll isn’t currently egging her car or DMing her hateful threats or worse. Predicting what the fringe is capable of is beyond either of us.
What I should’ve said to be more specific was that a developer being fired for cause does not give the empty threats of trolls against other developers more weight. Can you explain to me why it would? Jennifer Scheurle didn’t in the tweets LMN8R shared, all she did was share a hilariously bad example of these threats. She didn’t demonstrate why that would be taken seriously now, because I remain unconvinced that empty threats and reddit rage played any significant role in Price’s termination.
That’s what was shared, that’s what I responded to. It is a safe assumption at all times that all of us are depending on our experiences to assess everything, we have nothing more. But our experiences include taking in what others have shared with us about life—experiences, events, knowledge, etc., about things we haven’t done or witnessed for ourselves.
Only what I’ve read/heard about, to both. If your bar for entry to this discussion is that I need to have done one or both, I guess our conversation is over.