Games Journalism 2018: We're taking it back!

Games
1819

So now responding to a Twitter post is “out of left field”? How ludicrous is that? You make it sound like Deroir showed up in the middle of the night, knocked on her door and starting explaining why her inferior female brain could not understand why she was wrong. She posted something on social media. Do I need to explain the term social media? He responded respectfully and politely and she jumped his shit for it.

Stop trying to explain bigotry to me. I have known it is a problem in the workplace (school, religions, communities, etc.) probably longer than most posters on this board have been alive.

You can talk about all the articles or examples in the world but it still does not matter. IT DOES NOT JUSTIFY HER ACTIONS. You do not get a Get Out Of Jail Free card because you are a minority in race, religion or gender. In fact it is the exact opposite. You must be even more careful because no one reacts well to false accusations of bigotry. That is the world we live in and frankly I am grateful for it. I do not want the power to accuse someone falsely of bigotry and get away with it because I am some sort of lowly oppressed minority. That is just as degrading to me as being subjected to bigotry in the first place. It is simply another form of it.

1820

If anyone is racing to the bottom, you are. You refuse to believe that someone can honestly take this kind of out of left field advice as aggressive and therefore respond to it defensively. It’s a known problem, actually. Then you confirm you know this but then try to discount it because others have it hard too.

You don’t have to agree but don’t pretend like it’s a not a known problem when it is. It’s a very well known problem. In fact it’s been a handful of months, we’re probably due for a new article about it.

1821

Fwiw I agree with you, so dont feel like you are crazy and alone here :) I am surprised at how many respected fellow colleagues and posters are on the other side of this. It gives me pause to think further perhaps I am missing something. But its fine to have those disagreements.

Less so the lack of compassion towards the victim of her sexist slurs here, Derior.

This guy has done nothing wrong but is having his reputation and social media messages examined for the whiff of gamergateism (the post Dave linked even implies such a connection) and his name being dragged through the mud. It is incredibly unfair and unwarranted.

1822

He was just unfairly painted as being a misogynist. Why should anyone care about that?

I am having a very difficult time understanding the point of our fellow colleagues and posters because they seem to spread over three approaches.

(1) That somehow her reaction was justified because Derior’s comment was sexist or could easily be construed as such.

(2) The somehow her reaction was justified because that is the way she perceived Derior’s comments, even if her reaction was entirely unreasonable because there is nothing in his comment to make such a conclusion.

(3) That somehow she gets a free pass to perform these actions because the industry has issues with race and gender.

Of course, the responses to each are as follows:

(1) This is the least supportable of the three as there is zero justification or backup of this position. No one has shown any intended or even reasonably perceived malice in his comments.

(2) This is the most frighting of the three because it, in essence, allows any minority to accuse anyone of bigotry because we perceive it to be true even if it is not. Given the social stigma of being labeled a bigot and the effect of shutting any discourse down once someone is effectively labeled as such, this is has a chilling implication on any reasonable discussion. Unjustly accusing people at will of wanton bigotry without support is counterproductive in the long term and will result in nothing more than resentment and hatred.

(3) This is probably the most insulting to me. Excusing my discourteous actions because I am a minority and subject to bigotry in my industry is simply another form of bigotry. It means that you expect less of me and that I can not cope because it is too difficult in my chosen profession. What a bunch of horseshit.

If I screw up I expect to be treated equally. If I unfairly call a customer a bigot, I expect to be treated similarly as if someone called me a sand nigger. Both offenses deserve termination.

1823

I don’t think I’ve seen that here. I even mentioned Derior seems to have vanished, and that’s unfair to him. He shouldn’t have to hide or avoid this and if people are digging around or internet mobbing him, that’s not okay either.

1824

Thats fair, we cool, more broadly the twitter/facebook/gamasutra developer community at large things as it were though… yeah its rather one sided.

1825

Not sure anyone said it was justified, just explainable. If it was justified, it wouldn’t be labeled as a mistake as often as it is. No one is giving her a free pass… see the mistake piece. I think you think everyone who does not agree with you is “taking her side”… which is literally not happening.

1826

I hear ya! I agree! I also think a lot of the eloquent defences of Price out there would be better served elsewhere because in Price’s case she was simply in the wrong. Dont put good argument in defence of a bad cause.

1827

You are not explaining her actions. You are excusing them. There is a very significant difference.

A very large part of your defense seems to be that since she is in a misogynist industry she is allowed to act poorly or not to be treated as harshly when she does. This is far more insulting to women than most anything else you could post. If someone insinuated that they expected less of me because I am a minority in a difficult industry I would be even more offended than if you actually called me a bigoted term. After all, Jackie Robinson was not given an excuse to hit .200 by Branch Rickey because he was black.

1829

That’s how you are reading it, but that’s not what I am doing. I am explaining why someone might be defensive in a certain scenario.

1830

Most people who are “taking her side” seem to be saying she did something bad, but it was not something that she should have been fired over. Post gamergate, I think many people are wary of companies ceding their personnel decisions to angry Internet mobs, which is what this looks like.

This could have been handled better by everyone involved.

1831

So you believe that someone should be able to publicly unfairly call a prominent customer a bigot and not be terminated over it? That is an interesting perspective. However, I do not think I will step foot in the conference room tomorrow, immediately call my customer a racist and see how it all shakes out. I would give my over / under on my length of employment about 4 hours after that.

It does not look like ArenaNet ceded their HR responsibilities to an internet mob. Some only want it to look that way because it helps their narrative. It appears to me that ArenaNet saw an egregious social media error by one of their employees and terminated them for it. The angry internet mob has nothing to do with her termination beyond bringing visibility to it, much like the angry internet mob did nothing but bring Justine Sacco’s “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” tweet to the masses. The tweets themselves were what was actionable, not the visibility they were given.

1832

I don’t agree with your characterization of Price’s tweets, which is why we are at an impasse. I also don’t think that what she did was the equivalent of walking into a conference room and calling a customer a racist.

1833

Correct, it’s more like calling a customer an asshat and sexist to the entire world not just a conference room. And then doubling down on it when it should be obvious to her she may have overreacted a bit. But I don’t think she said anything about him being racist.

1834

Social media is different from a conference room. Treating a comment on social media as equivalent to one made in a conference room is bizarre to me.

1835

Blah, long response that went no where so I deleted it. Anyway, from what I’ve seen (Eurogamer link) of her reaction to an innocuous response was way over the top and not ‘private’ as she claimed and was fire-able on its face for a customer facing (in this case she chose to be) employee.

And she may have come upon her anger/annoyance with customers honestly due to dealing with crap, but she still appears to have let her anger cloud her judgement to the point I can’t see how she couldn’t be fired.

But I’ve been wrong before an could be here.

1836

Ok. Let’s start.

You (and others) read Derior’s messages and thought they were polite.

I (and others) read Derior’s messages and though they were condescending.

Text being what it is, and the large groups on either side, I think we can fairly say that a reasonable person could read it either way.

I’m going to pause for a moment though, and explain why it reads to me as condescending.

Derior is an enthusiast. Not an expert in the field. And yet, in his self-described attempt to have a discussion with an expert, he started by making an argument, rather than asking a question. Had he said something like “Can you talk about branching dialog? What are the issues with that that would keep it from addressing this problem in an MMO?” I think we would not be having this discussion at all. But what he did was exactly what she actually accused him of, being a layman lecturing a professional on their area of expertise.

The question then becomes why? Are we looking at the unfortunately common “enthusiast entitlement” which leads people (sadly especially in areas of mass media) to have an exaggerated opinion of their own expertise? Are we looking at someone who for other reasons (possibly even not at the conscious level) will try to position them-self as a peer or colleague in any discussion, even when they haven’t earned that role and do not have the knowledge to back it up? Or are we looking at misogyny (again, conscious or not, everyone has biases) where we have a male enthusiast who at some level thinks that the combination of gender and hobby implicitly makes him a peer of any female developer?

Honestly, no clue. All of them are actually possible, which is why I think that drawing the final conclusion is not inherently unreasonable.

At the core, he absolutely did what she accused him of. He, who has never made games, was in fact trying to tell someone who did it for a living how they should do their job.

Now, the next question is, is it fair to read a male enthusiast doing that as doing it because of her gender. That is, would he have done it to a male developer? While we cannot say for sure about him, we absolutely can say that this lecturing problem seems to be far more likely to be aimed at female developers than at male developers.

Moreover, communications don’t happen in a vacuum. There are plenty of phrases and patterns in English which have been used so often as micro-aggressions (or even aggression aggessions) or to signal prejuidice to like-minded people that they themselves become problematic.

So, is Derior misogynist? If you made me actually have to pick one way or another, I’d probably go with “entitled with an exaggerated self-opinion of his expertise” rather than misogynistic. I just think that reasonable people could read that pattern the other way.

1837

It’s hard to come up with any polite reply to that and I don’t want to cause any hurt manfeels. I’ll just say, remember the post above this the next time I tell you that both sides of Gamergate are the same. You’ve got someone is objectively 100% innocent of any wrongdoing and now there’s a witchhunt against him.

1838

So you are judging his expertise? Why do you think it’s exaggerated? And why do you characterize him as entitled? Is a fan who has played a game for – I’m guessing – hundreds and probably thousands of hours – not entitled to an opinion? I really don’t know, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he had spent much more time in game, much more time doing quests and reading quest text, than Price ever did. She was at Anet for a year I believe. GW2 has been around for six years.

If you look at what both wrote, Price was the one who was very condescending and, really, a bit nasty. And this to someone who was a booster for the game.

If you have an employee who can read what this guy wrote and somehow take that and pick a fight over it and be insulting, you want that employee to shut up. Because it’s potentially doing harm to your product – the product that’s paying the salaries and benefits of all the other company employees. Management has a responsibility to squelch it. I don’t know if termination is the best response, but that’s a different issue.

1839

Yes, I’m judging his expertise. Playing a game for hundreds of hours no more gives you expertise on how games are made than watching hundreds of hours of television qualifies you to lecture a showrunner.

And hey, anyone can have an opinion. But if I were to go lecture the England international team on fitness and conditioning on the grounds that I’d spent thousands of hours watching athletes, I’d expect to get laughed out of the room at best.