I agree with this 100%. It seems like a lot of the people who are most vocally complaining about this online have never actually worked in an office environment. The only way you’d get fired for use of twitter in most places is if you revealed confidential information. Or maybe were a white supremacist or something to that effect. Even a performance improvement plan would be a bit much for spouting off on twitter.
Not actually having a Twitter account, my impression is that it’s really easy to ignore people parachuting in if you don’t want to engage with them. Am I mistaken? Even if it’s not, I still don’t think it’s too high of a bar to say that you should be civil and professional when discussing your work, or at least apologize if you overreact.
If the punishment for not being perfect on your personal account on your personal time is termination, why would someone ever discuss work?
Again, the logical outcome of this is that no professional will ever get into a discussion about their craft with a fan ever.
Are you saying people here said that? Show me examples, because I either disagree or have misunderstood what you’re describing.
Miguk
1719
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.
Nesrie
1728
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.
