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Roderick

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I feel like warm, affectionate, real-life support communities of artists and hackspaces are the antidote to this noise. A proper indie dev community may not need to exist. To hell with the internet. Make pilgrimages to artist monasteries, set up residencies...

 

I want to think this too, but they definitely have some of the same problems. Just not amplified by distance/anonymity.

 

In my experience of such organisations, I've had to fight to get safe space policies in, occasionally against people directly opposing them as "polit*cally c*rrect nonsense", and counter the "But we're not sexists!/racists!homophobes!" etc. talking points whenever an issue comes up. Because they involve games and tech, the people who start and inhabit them tend to be overwhelmingly white, male and middle class, and while few of them have malign motives, many of them are definitely ignorant to systemic prejudice, how ingrained it is in all our behaviour, and how intimidating that makes hackerspaces to any other type of person.

 

Also, building the political will to deal with harassers can be a monumental effort. Not because people are in favour of the harassment, but they feel like they're violating a part of the organisation by taking power and responsibility to make those kind of decisions.

 

(Edit: Haha, the swear filter changes "politically correct" to "opinionated in a way that is different from me" :D)

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I feel really conflicted about all this ZQ stuff. Perhaps because of the way I first found out about it. 

I rarely check my twitter but when I did I saw that Phil Fish was back on. So I checked his page and there was a post of him lambasting someone. I checked it out and it was apparently someone who said that they had been sexually harrassed. By Zoe Quinn.  Everyone dogpiled on him and told  him he was human scum and a terrible person. This was before all the ZQ stuff really hit the fan, about 6 days ago. I actually had to check a cached page of the guy because he deleted his tweet after everyone gave him so much shit. He seems like a decent guy. He seems to be pretty involved in promoting greater involvement with female game devs in the industry too. Everyone shit on him real hard and he apologized. 

I feel like people are taking sides because they see all this stuff as "Us Versus Them". Black and white, binary. Tribal warfare. Hate. 

But I don't think that's how things are. There's a lot of shit heads out there saying bad misogynistic things. There are also people who are actively suppressing information and refusing to deal with this stuff because they think that if they admit any chink in the armor it will somehow disprove feminism or give ground to the trolls. I believe in feminism, and I consider myself a feminist. I don't think that just because one person hypothetically does something wrong, and also calls themselves a feminist that somehow disproves feminism, or somehow disproves that the game industry has issues with gender that need to be worked on. I don't know if ZQ sexually harassed that guy, or if all this journalistic ethics stuff is actually true. Things are really foggy right now. But whatever the truth is, I don't think it changes the importance of encouraging greater engagement in the games community and discouraging misogyny and hate of all kinds.

Here's kind of a weird personal thing. The day before I read about the ZQ sexual harassment stuff, I went to a classic video game's convention. I don't really go to conventions very often but a guy I know invited me. I left feeling really weird. Because on one hand I saw a lot of cool stuff. There was a table set up for Atari demakes, and a section with a bunch of old Apple computers running old games. There was also a company there that had booth babes which made me cringe. And there was lots of pandering to the kind of consumerist "gamer culture" BS that I personally can't stand. There was this mix of manchild things, and neato cool things. 

And I feel like that about this too. On one hand I strongly believe in the ideals of feminism and especially want to see that acted out in the games industry, and yet I'm sick to my stomach when I see people dogpile on someone who just admitted, and seemingly with some shame and reservation, to being sexually harassed.  I'm also sick to my stomach the more I learn about the Wizardchan fiasco from last year that Quinn was involved in, that seemed to be used as a tool to further a personal career. That's all pretty foggy too. 

Why are people like this? Maybe I'm just asking a stupid question here but why do people have to be so shitty to each other? Where the fuck is some human decency? 


Like I said, I don't know what's going on, but I don't like how everyone is acting. The games industry is too cliquey. People are acting like they're still in high school. 

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I rarely check my twitter but when I did I saw that Phil Fish was back on. So I checked his page and there was a post of him lambasting someone. I checked it out and it was apparently someone who said that they had been sexually harrassed. By Zoe Quinn.  Everyone dogpiled on him and told  him he was human scum and a terrible person. This was before all the ZQ stuff really hit the fan, about 6 days ago. I actually had to check a cached page of the guy because he deleted his tweet after everyone gave him so much shit. He seems like a decent guy. He seems to be pretty involved in promoting greater involvement with female game devs in the industry too. Everyone shit on him real hard and he apologized.

 

I kind of feel the same way. You see the same kinds of dehumanizing rhetoric being spouted by both the people who are harassing Quinn and those who are supporting Quinn. Obviously the hordes that are attacking Quinn are doing far far worse things than spouting rhetoric, really terrible things, but it makes for an uncomfortable situation when you'd rather associate with no one and just stay far away from the entire mess.

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It's unfortunate that at this point no genuine criticism can be levied at Zoe, but unfortunately that's the situation that's been constructed, and it's basically entirely the fault of the people harassing her. I can entirely believe that she's an imperfect human being with her own personal issues, but I think that most of those are none of our business. That said, it is troubling to silence any form of harassment claim, but I don't know any of the circumstances.

 

As far as profiting from harassment campaigns, I think that's in the same realm as winning a lawsuit for punitive damages after getting third degree burns to your legs and genitals from a cup of coffee. I don't begrudge anyone their silver lining -- especially when any awareness she has has largely gone towards promoting a free game that builds awareness of depression.

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I feel really conflicted about all this ZQ stuff. Perhaps because of the way I first found out about it. 

I rarely check my twitter but when I did I saw that Phil Fish was back on. So I checked his page and there was a post of him lambasting someone. I checked it out and it was apparently someone who said that they had been sexually harrassed. By Zoe Quinn.  Everyone dogpiled on him and told  him he was human scum and a terrible person. This was before all the ZQ stuff really hit the fan, about 6 days ago. I actually had to check a cached page of the guy because he deleted his tweet after everyone gave him so much shit. He seems like a decent guy. He seems to be pretty involved in promoting greater involvement with female game devs in the industry too. Everyone shit on him real hard and he apologized. 

I feel like people are taking sides because they see all this stuff as "Us Versus Them". Black and white, binary. Tribal warfare. Hate. 

But I don't think that's how things are. There's a lot of shit heads out there saying bad misogynistic things. There are also people who are actively suppressing information and refusing to deal with this stuff because they think that if they admit any chink in the armor it will somehow disprove feminism or give ground to the trolls. I believe in feminism, and I consider myself a feminist. I don't think that just because one person hypothetically does something wrong, and also calls themselves a feminist that somehow disproves feminism, or somehow disproves that the game industry has issues with gender that need to be worked on. I don't know if ZQ sexually harassed that guy, or if all this journalistic ethics stuff is actually true. Things are really foggy right now. But whatever the truth is, I don't think it changes the importance of encouraging greater engagement in the games community and discouraging misogyny and hate of all kinds.

Here's kind of a weird personal thing. The day before I read about the ZQ sexual harassment stuff, I went to a classic video game's convention. I don't really go to conventions very often but a guy I know invited me. I left feeling really weird. Because on one hand I saw a lot of cool stuff. There was a table set up for Atari demakes, and a section with a bunch of old Apple computers running old games. There was also a company there that had booth babes which made me cringe. And there was lots of pandering to the kind of consumerist "gamer culture" BS that I personally can't stand. There was this mix of manchild things, and neato cool things. 

And I feel like that about this too. On one hand I strongly believe in the ideals of feminism and especially want to see that acted out in the games industry, and yet I'm sick to my stomach when I see people dogpile on someone who just admitted, and seemingly with some shame and reservation, to being sexually harassed.  I'm also sick to my stomach the more I learn about the Wizardchan fiasco from last year that Quinn was involved in, that seemed to be used as a tool to further a personal career. That's all pretty foggy too. 

Why are people like this? Maybe I'm just asking a stupid question here but why do people have to be so shitty to each other? Where the fuck is some human decency? 

Like I said, I don't know what's going on, but I don't like how everyone is acting. The games industry is too cliquey. People are acting like they're still in high school. 

 

You seem to be throwing around a lot of accusations and treating them as fact. For instance, I assume the "Wizardchan fiasco from last year" that you're referring to is the "theory" that ZQ faked a doxing attack to promote her game being on Greenlight. I only know about that theory because I spent way too much time reading blog posts that have frighteningly chronicled ZQ's life for the past year in an attempt to look for a smoking gun that doesn't actually exist. The reason the situation feels foggy is because people are promoting unsubstantiated rumors as truth and then getting mad when those rumors aren't given any consideration. I hadn't heard anything about the sexual harassment accusations, but if you have any links I wouldn't mind reading about it to see what the situation is for myself.

 

It's definitely true that Twitter creates an unfortunate echo chamber wherein even people who have the best intentions are often rewarded for not saying the smartest thing, but the loudest. There's no room for nuanced and honest conversation about complex issues in that kind of environment. However, that's not an excuse to frame the situation as binary, where both sides are equally wrong. If you actually believe in feminism, then work to improve the conversation around it instead of just walking away from it.

 

And if you want to have a conversation about journalistic ethics, fine, but you don't need to bring ZQ's personal actions into it. As far as I'm concerned, there was no ethical violation. That was confirmed by a Kotaku editor and the journalist in question. You can choose to believe them or not, but unless you have the power to go back in time and witness private conversations between people, you'd be hard-pressed to find any proof against their statements. I'm sure that wouldn't even be enough for some people, who seem willing to believe in some nefarious video game conspiracy no matter what information they're given. 

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And if you want to have a conversation about journalistic ethics, fine, but you don't need to bring ZQ's personal actions into it. As far as I'm concerned, there was no ethical violation. That was confirmed by a Kotaku editor and the journalist in question. You can choose to believe them or not, but unless you have the power to go back in time and witness private conversations between people, you'd be hard-pressed to find any proof against their statements. I'm sure that wouldn't even be enough for some people, who seem willing to believe in some nefarious video game conspiracy no matter what information they're given. 

 

This is what was pissing me off most earlier in the conversation. Hearsay is not "proof" and should not be treated as such.

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I want to think this too, but they definitely have some of the same problems. Just not amplified by distance/anonymity.

 

In my experience of such organisations, I've had to fight to get safe space policies in, occasionally against people directly opposing them as "polit*cally c*rrect nonsense", and counter the "But we're not sexists!/racists!homophobes!" etc. talking points whenever an issue comes up. Because they involve games and tech, the people who start and inhabit them tend to be overwhelmingly white, male and middle class, and while few of them have malign motives, many of them are definitely ignorant to systemic prejudice, how ingrained it is in all our behaviour, and how intimidating that makes hackerspaces to any other type of person.

 

Also, building the political will to deal with harassers can be a monumental effort. Not because people are in favour of the harassment, but they feel like they're violating a part of the organisation by taking power and responsibility to make those kind of decisions.

 

(Edit: Haha, the swear filter changes "opinionated in a way that is different from me" to "opinionated in a way that is different from me" :D)

 

Well, I've only had a little contact with the San Antonio hackspace peeps (even though they're walking distance from my house and I should participate more often), which is kinda dinky—and while they are mostly white dorky dudes, there is a fair bit of overlap and cross-pollination with the art scene which is bigger and a lot more female and queer and unwhite... I suspect any town (without a cutthroat art market) can foster a supportive art scene like SA's.

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As somebody who has been avoiding discussion of this "scandal" like the plague. Is there actually any reason to suspect any wrongdoing on anybody's part or is it, as I suspect, a bunch of unsubstantiated bull-honkey?

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As somebody who has been avoiding discussion of this "scandal" like the plague. Is there actually any reason to suspect any wrongdoing on anybody's part or is it, as I suspect, a bunch of unsubstantiated bull-honkey?

I'm fairly confident that Eron Gjoni has acted irresponsible, disrespectful, and incredibly hateful. I've been hurt in a romantic relationship before, but to me, this looks like an attempt to get revenge by throwing priviledged information to an angry mob.

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Yeah, that struck me pretty quickly. And why would anyone trust the ramblings of an angry ex anyways?

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Yeah, that struck me pretty quickly. And why would anyone trust the ramblings of an angry ex anyways?

 

Because the ex is a man and the "cheater" is a woman that lots of people like.

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I'm fairly confident that Eron Gjoni has acted irresponsible, disrespectful, and incredibly hateful. I've been hurt in a romantic relationship before, but to me, this looks like an attempt to get revenge by throwing priviledged information to an angry mob.

 

The ex's post is terrifying, I can't remember if it's actually been described in here or not.  The text is something like 8,000 words long.  It has additional screencapped multi-thousand word chat-logs with photoshopped annotations and explanation. There are pictures and a video. There's an 800+ word TLDR.  It's a multimedia dissection of an 8ish month relationship in novella form.  Can you imagine someone you've known for less than a year sitting down to produce a document like this?  If it happened to me, I'd be filing restraining orders.  I'd be fucking scared of that person.

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I'm fairly confident that Eron Gjoni has acted irresponsible, disrespectful, and incredibly hateful. I've been hurt in a romantic relationship before, but to me, this looks like an attempt to get revenge by throwing priviledged information to an angry mob.

I actually feel like it's a lot like the Chelsea Manning issue with WikiLeaks. Chelsea didn't release her information in the safest way, she just kind of let it all out, all at the same time, with no discrimination. It's awful what has happened to her, a complete injustice, and I think she shouldn't have been jailed and I think she was trying to do the right thing, but I also see why some people who support transparency in government would also think that the way she handled it was bad. If you look at what Edward Snowden did, he learned from her mistakes. He's withheld a large amount of the information, and carefully sorted it, and he distributed it through a respectable journalistic source, and made sure he had all his stuff together before he did it. But I think one reason he could do that is because he had the hindsight of what happened to Manning. So while I don't think Manning is a bad person, I do think there are ways their execution sucked. 

And I don't know much about the Gjoni guy, his twitter has been hacked and he appears to be a native Spanish speaker, so it's all really murky. But when I actually checked out his original ZoePost website I was surprised by the content because there wasn't the vitriol and ex-bashing I would have expected, though I admit I only skimmed it. He actually specifically says on there that he does not want it to hurt the efforts of feminism in games or Social Justice stuff. Maybe he's lying. For sure his way of doing things was dumb, and ineffective. 

 

 

 

You seem to be throwing around a lot of accusations and treating them as fact. For instance, I assume the "Wizardchan fiasco from last year" that you're referring to is the "theory" that ZQ faked a doxing attack to promote her game being on Greenlight. I only know about that theory because I spent way too much time reading blog posts that have frighteningly chronicled ZQ's life for the past year in an attempt to look for a smoking gun that doesn't actually exist. The reason the situation feels foggy is because people are promoting unsubstantiated rumors as truth and then getting mad when those rumors aren't given any consideration. I hadn't heard anything about the sexual harassment accusations, but if you have any links I wouldn't mind reading about it to see what the situation is for myself.

I don't mean to be throwing accusations around, I'm really just trying to process stuff and discuss it with people. The Wizardchan stuff feels wrong to me. From what I can tell there was very little initial backlash, just two anon posters on some obscure board posting about it, and there were screenshots of other users actually telling them to shut up. And looking at new stories there were Wizardchan users saying that they just wanted to be left alone and that they didn't care about the issue. I've seen some people suggest it was the scum over at ChrisChanWiki who set it up just so they could watch people tear each other to shreds, which I think actually makes sense to some degree. 

It reminds me a lot of that "racist twitter backlash" against the multi-cultural Coke ad a couple of months back. Everyone I know was sharing it, and it was always in the context of "Fucking racists keep bashing this ad on twitter!" But when I actually checked the #boycottCoke hashtag, it was just a bunch of people talking about how shitty the racists were, and no actual people seriously talking about boycotting Coke. And all the news articles I found kept showing the exact same 5 or so racists tweets, all from some stupid racist in the middle of nowhere who had like 12 followers. Yeah 5 racists tweets is too many but every story was framing it as some kind of massive backlash when I don't know anyone had made a deal about it, until the posts got made. And what was the effect of this "backlash". A Coke advertisment went super viral. Which I find hugely disturbing. Obviously we can't prove stuff, but every PR and Marketing department is trying to find the best ways to get people to share ads, and by framing it as a social justice issue, it feels like they successfully hijacked people's ideals to sell carbonated sugar water. As if Coke actually gives a shit about social justice right? Like seriously they're one of the biggest sponsors for FIFA, the organization that was basically bribed to put the World Cup in Qatar, a modern slave state where migrant works are held against their will and forced to live and work in desperate unsafe conditions. The same company that has been responsible for the violent repression of unions in Colombia.

 

It's definitely true that Twitter creates an unfortunate echo chamber wherein even people who have the best intentions are often rewarded for not saying the smartest thing, but the loudest. There's no room for nuanced and honest conversation about complex issues in that kind of environment. However, that's not an excuse to frame the situation as binary, where both sides are equally wrong. If you actually believe in feminism, then work to improve the conversation around it instead of just walking away from it.

 

Actually I think what I'm trying to do is frame this issue as not being binary. I think most people are trying to make it an "Us Good Guys versus Them Bad Guys" but I think it's much more difficult than that. I also agree that simply taking this position does not mean creating a false equivalence. I don't know how it's possible to improve the conversation though. I guess I'm hoping to have a good conversation here because I like the Idle Thumbs peeps, and in general things are definitely doing better here, but even then I don't know what we're doing. I guess I'm just seeking a way to express my thoughts, hopefully in a non-hostile environment, and also see that it is possible to have a conversation without personal attacks or wild assumptions being made. That's a purely emotional response though and I don't know if that really furthers the conversation though. What does it mean to further this conversation anyway?

At it's root it's a personal issue. It's not something any of us can really discuss meaningful because none of us actually know anything worth knowing. Actually the inciting event isn't so much what worries me. I mean I don't really think that the issue is "journalistic integrity" per se. Rather what really concerns me is that this kind of drama is such a big blow up in the first place. The fact is the games industry is filled with high school cliquey bullshit and I don't like that. 

And nepotism is such a huge issue with the games industry, and that's something that I feel really weird about. I mean I finally got a job, and I got in part because I knew someone on the team. I've applied to a lot of jobs and not heard back because of that lack of personal connection. On one hand I understand why that's a thing. It's not even a thing exclusive to the games industry, it's all over, all kinds of industries, but games, especially indie games, is such a small industry that it's a much smaller club and it plays a really big role. 

That's actually something Zoe Quinn talked about in one of the chat logs. She talked about how the games industry isn't a meritocracy, and how things are really shitty and she kind of hoped that she could change things, but that she doesn't want it to end up changing her. There's a line she said about "once you get more than 2 people involved there is always this shitty power dynamics going on". That's the thing that makes me feel concerned about the games industry as a whole, is how personal relationship, power, and hierarchy is such an unfair influence on things. This stuff is rampant in the industry and it's Doritos and Press Releases as Articles, and miles and miles of advertising and marketing marketing marketing. I don't believe in Doritos. I believe in justice though and so this Quinn stuff feels a bit like betrayal. I mean not personal betrayal, obviously, who gives a fuck about some random dude on the internet, but I mean it's disheartening to confront the possibility that any attempt at changing the system will result in the system changing you. 

That is perhaps a touch fatalistic there.  I don't know the people involved, I don't have the ability to ascertain greater truth, and I don't have the ability to do anything about this. I hope things get better, and in so far as this issue is exemplary of the problems in the games industry I will try to make things better. Still feel weird about the nepotism thing in so far as I'm guilty but I'll try and do my best to do the right thing, and love the people around me, and be fair and open. I guess I just urge everyone to try and treat one another like decent human beings as well as we can. 

 

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If there was a The Onion equivalent for video games then a good headline for the past week's shitshow would be: "Several men have sexual relationship with woman, virgins outraged".

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@MadJackalope
OK, I was sort-of on board with the disappointment at some of the rhetoric and online behavior of some of the people who are nominally the good guys in this situation, but holy shit man, have some perspective here. Every single allegation is totally unsubstantiated and, worse, even if substantiated would be disappointing but not that big of a deal. Spending so much time worrying about potential nepotism and not about why the heck there is such a huge and terrifyingly aggressive reaction to the mere rumors of (pretty bland) misbehavior of a single marginally-high-profile woman gamedev, seems ... misguided, at best.

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And I don't know much about the Gjoni guy, his twitter has been hacked and he appears to be a native Spanish speaker, so it's all really murky. But when I actually checked out his original ZoePost website I was surprised by the content because there wasn't the vitriol and ex-bashing I would have expected, though I admit I only skimmed it. He actually specifically says on there that he does not want it to hurt the efforts of feminism in games or Social Justice stuff. Maybe he's lying. For sure his way of doing things was dumb, and ineffective.

 

I agreed with your former point that the rhetoric is getting out of hand, but what Zoe Quinn does in her private life is just that: private. Quinn's personal life is none of our concern and irrelevant to any discussion of journalistic integrity. The massive post that everyone seems to want to discuss was not about ethics. It wasn't about journalistic integrity. It wasn't even remotely about the game industry in the least. It was someone hurt and angry lashing out in the most horrible of ways in an effort to destroy someone's life and that is not okay.

 

There were questions of Quinn's relationship with Nathan Grayson, but Grayson did not review any of Quinn's work. He wrote a few articles that mentioned Depression Quest amongst dozens and dozens of other games. He wrote a piece on GAME_JAM, which Quinn amongst many others was involved, but just about every other establishment wrote a similar piece. That's it. There was nothing at all suspicious about Grayson's work and Stephen Totilo specifically addressed concerns as the man responsible for the publication.

 

No one should be beyond criticism, but unsubstantiated speculation is not criticism. I'm not going to sit here and dissect Quinn's personal life as if it were some slab of meat on display for academic curiosity. If you want to talk about nepotism in the games industry fine. If you want to talk about problems with the integrity journalism go ahead, but none of that has anything to do with the details of Quinn's personal life.

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Also there's a famous story about Coke and Martin Luther King: when King won the Nobel Peace Prize, Atlanta was initially not going to acknowledge it in any way until Coca-Cola made it clear to the Chamber of Commerce that they weren't going to operate in a city that wouldn't acknowledge one of its most successful citizens, saying that while Atlanta needed Coca-Cola, Coca-Cola didn't need Atlanta.

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@MadJackalope

OK, I was sort-of on board with the disappointment at some of the rhetoric and online behavior of some of the people who are nominally the good guys in this situation, but holy shit man, have some perspective here. Every single allegation is totally unsubstantiated and, worse, even if substantiated would be disappointing but not that big of a deal. Spending so much time worrying about potential nepotism and not about why the heck there is such a huge and terrifyingly aggressive reaction to the mere rumors of (pretty bland) misbehavior of a single marginally-high-profile woman gamedev, seems ... misguided, at best.

A couple of things. One, yeah, probably spending too much time worrying about stuff. Second, on a personal level, I am more disappointed when people I agree with do bad things than when people I disagree with do bad things. I admit that is not rational. Third, as I said the thing I'm finding troublesome here is not the alleged event itself, it's the way the industry is built upon hierarchies of power that promote injustice and inequality. That is privileges of gender, cliques, and class. Nepotism is at the fundamental root of privilege because it is the preference of "those Like Me" against the "Other". [-relevant wiki article-] It is "ingroup" "outgroup" dynamics. 

 

I agreed with your former point that the rhetoric is getting out of hand, but what Zoe Quinn does in her private life is just that: private. Quinn's personal life is none of our concern and irrelevant to any discussion of journalistic integrity. The massive post that everyone seems to want to discuss was not about ethics. It wasn't about journalistic integrity. It wasn't even remotely about the game industry in the least. It was someone hurt and angry lashing out in the most horrible of ways in an effort to destroy someone's life and that is not okay.

 

There were questions of Quinn's relationship with Nathan Grayson, but Grayson did not review any of Quinn's work. He wrote a few articles that mentioned Depression Quest amongst dozens and dozens of other games. He wrote a piece on GAME_JAM, which Quinn amongst many others was involved, but just about every other establishment wrote a similar piece. That's it. There was nothing at all suspicious about Grayson's work and Stephen Totilo specifically addressed concerns as the man responsible for the publication.

 

No one should be beyond criticism, but unsubstantiated speculation is not criticism. I'm not going to sit here and dissect Quinn's personal life as if it were some slab of meat on display for academic curiosity. If you want to talk about nepotism in the games industry fine. If you want to talk about problems with the integrity journalism go ahead, but none of that has anything to do with the details of Quinn's personal life.

 

Yeah, I'm thinking you're right about the Nathan Grayson stuff, and I certainly don't think people should be speculating on those details. Agreed. 

 

 

Also there's a famous story about Coke and Martin Luther King: when King won the Nobel Peace Prize, Atlanta was initially not going to acknowledge it in any way until Coca-Cola made it clear to the Chamber of Commerce that they weren't going to operate in a city that wouldn't acknowledge one of its most successful citizens, saying that while Atlanta needed Coca-Cola, Coca-Cola didn't need Atlanta.

They also lost a class action lawsuit in the 2000s for racial discrimination in their hiring practices.... so... yeah good PR move for Coke on the MLK thing. 

 

If there was a The Onion equivalent for video games then a good headline for the past week's shitshow would be: "Several men have sexual relationship with woman, virgins outraged".

 Don't slut shame, and don't virgin shame. That's a shitty thing to do. 

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Is there any evidence that nepotism is worse in the games industry than in other industries? Not that it excuses it, but I'm having a hard time caring about it all that much when I think about all of the fields I'm interested in and how they all seem to require some kind of serious networking to break into aside from the shittiest intern/mailroom type stuff.

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I would struggle to call most of what goes on in video game industry hiring "nepotism." People know who you are because they met you at an event or because a coworker is friends with them or something (important news: this happens with all jobs ever), but you aren't getting hired unless you can do the thing you're getting hired to do. Generally speaking the actual people who work in the video game industry are smart and driven. There aren't a lot of game developers getting hired just because they're someone's buddy. I'm sure that stuff is a little looser in game journalism, simply because the skills involved are somewhat more subjective and it's easier to take a chance on someone who might grow into it, but the pay is such garbage that I can't take seriously the notion that there's some kind of big racket going on.

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Is there any evidence that nepotism is worse in the games industry than in other industries? Not that it excuses it, but I'm having a hard time caring about it all that much when I think about all of the fields I'm interested in and how they all seem to require some kind of serious networking to break into aside from the shittiest intern/mailroom type stuff.

 

Yeah... I've found that, in many instances, "nepotism/cronyism" is what people without serious networking potential call networking. It's easy to take an abstract moral stance that the person hired to do a given job simply be the best on paper and in the interview, but in an infinitely interconnected world like today, how are you supposed to find that person unless you already know them somehow (or at least know someone who knows someone who knows them)?

 

If I get my cousin work as a secretary in my department because he needs a job, that's nepotism, although really the softest kind. If I nominate my friend for the executive board, it's going to be because he's the best person I know for the position. Being my friend is just how I know that he is the best.

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I can't buy that Eron Gjoni wasn't trying to start shit. I have seen screencaps that indicate he posted all that shit directly to 4chan before he made the Zoe Post blog thing. Fuck that guy.

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If I get my cousin work as a secretary in my department because he needs a job, that's nepotism, although really the softest kind. If I nominate my friend for the executive board, it's going to be because he's the best person I know for the position. Being my friend is just how I know that he is the best.

 

That's the practical reality of the situation in my experience. The fastest way to find good qualified people is by simply knowing someone who is qualified. Selecting from people you don't know is a long laborious process of filtering through hundreds of resumes with dozens of interviews until you find a handful of candidates if anyone at all. Even then, it's not as though someone you suggest isn't interviewed or vetted.

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