The controversial ArenaNet firings of Guild Wars 2 writers (READ OP)
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Why would they give her a previous warning? It's not ANET's job to police their employees twitter accounts. They acted only when she jeopardized the business's standing with its customers, as they should. Price brought ANET into this, not the other way around. Plenty have lost their job to twitter because of their inhability to understand just how many people read what they type on the internet.
I understand that mob mentality in gaming is a BIG problem that needs to be addressed but I don't think its the root of the problem in this particular case. This is about people taking responsibility for what they say in public (and yes, if you have a public twitter profile you are in fucking PUBLIC).
do you have proof it was? I mean they could just be taking credit without them doing anything, no different than "hackers" claiming they brought down game servers on the holiday seasons.
Why wouldn't they? An outspoken woman on twitter who partakes in the creation of games was rude. There is now significant backlack online towards her, she was canned immediately, and there'a a history of them contacting employers.
Like, this is what they do. Why wouldn't they being doing it now?
Yes, and why wouldn't an employer can an employee for doing exactly what Price did? There is no reason to assume that Arena Net caved to GamerGate-fueled complaints because the actions of the employee were more than enough to justify a dismissal, even if I personally think that it's a bit harsh. People are regularly fired for fucking up on social media or otherwise in public, much less being hostile to a prominent community member and publicly accusing him of sexual harassment or misogyny to thousands of followers.
If all you have is a conspiracy theory then please stop trolling the thread.
But if you have actual evidence then please post it as it would be important news that all the gaming news outlets will run with.
Except other ANET developers were targeted by Gamergate hate campaigns in the past and Mike O'Brien didn't fire these individuals because they had done nothing wrong.
I mean, arenanet doesn't strike me the type to cave in to GG'ers though. Curious, were there other attacks on ArenaNet by them that you know of?
Yes, other developers have been targeted in the past for being outspoken about social justice or for being trans and those individuals weren't fired.
I don't know of, but it isn't unreasonable to say that this was their handywork. Verge outlines that well. Like, let's say they didn't have their hand in this. Why would they refrain?
The decision to fire, not that there was no involvement in this entire controversy.
Either GamerGate got her fired or they didn't. What they did afterwards to celebrate, take credit, gloat, harass or other things is a separate question.
That is a matter of elementary logic.
That's important, you wouldn't happen to have any links would ya? I tried searching but google is only giving me the current stuff lol.
Arenanet is a subsidiary of NCSOFT, a South Korean company. South Korea is notorious for attacking feminists. There was that other major incident where two developers over there were fired just for liking a feminist page. (forget if that was NCSOFT or not)
It's possible the orders came from NCSOFT.
You are not posting in good faith and you know it.
GamerGate either got her fired or they didn't. Them howling like jackals after she got fired is logically different and you know it.
It probably was to some extent. ArenaNet claims it wasn't, but they also have no reason to tell the truth there. But here's the thing: Price didn't have the backing of the normal community here, either. They felt she was in the wrong and had attacked the community, regardless of what the idiot GGers were crowing about. You can actually check Reddit for this, and a previous ERA thread on this backfired for the OP who also tried to paint the backlash as predominantly a GG affair. The OP used a post, which has now been shared in articles, about how fans can now get anyone fired that they want and devs better watch out.
That post was downvoted to hell by the GW2 community and then deleted.
Meanwhile the most upvoted comments were users who were unhappy that things had come to this, but nonetheless felt her actions were unacceptable. Perhaps a firing was not needed, perhaps it was. But Price's actions aren't being twisted into by GGers into being toxic and hateful towards an innocent fan. They were that. Besides both the GGers and the normal GW2 community, we've had multiple people in charge of precisely this type of thing with other corporations weigh in and say that, by precedent, they would have absolutely fired her for this.
So basically my summary of my thoughts is:
1. She was in the wrong.
2. Perhaps she didn't get deserved to get fired, but she certainly deserved to get reprimanded and the fan certainly deserved an apology from her (which it appears will never happen now). Had they spoken to her and she refused to apologize (which it seems she would not have) then she should have been fired.
3. It's just very sad that GGers have now latched onto Price's mistake as a rallying cry against other women in the industry who presumably are not total assholes to their fans on Twitter.
Im truth, I can't accept a downvote on the GW2 community as if they're immune to this misogynistic hate mob.
At the end of the day, this is a win for GamerGate. A woman is fired, they get some padding in terms of deflecting the blame onto her professionalism, and everyone just kind of shuffles to the side the hate mob. The whole thing becomes a wash and nothing has been really done to protect women from scenarios like this cause they aren't stopping the emails and calls to employers.
I just saw this article. The fallout of this is so much worse than the instigating event. I'm surprised how many people are still running the line of "A company should fire an employee who is rude, it makes them look bad" when the firestorm of this firing is a hundred times worse than someone being snippy on Twitter. If left alone, this all wouldn't have been blip on the radar, but now the industry will be talking about everything in the wake of what is now known as "The Arenanet Firings".
I am pointing out that context matters and how could context not matter? Words in themselves are only as insightful as their context. And in context I could easily see how those posts were taken as condescending. The fact that he said other things, perhaps even even with the intent of being polite, doesn't make the whole thing not condescending. Perhaps he is just really good at trying to hide it, which is sort of what you're suggesting people do when talking to clients. Being polite and condescending, turns out they're not mutually exclusive. I think it's all important to the context of whether her firing was appropriate or not. Not just the words used.
Oh yeah without a doubt. Even early on my thoughts were this is going to bite them in the ass. Okay, your employee didn't make it look like you have stellar developer-customer relations. But now you've blown this the fuck up and everyone is talking about it. They've done way more harm drawing attention to the situation rather than dealing with it internally and perhaps making a generalized statement to do better. Firing them so publicly I think makes them LOOK way worse than what she said over twitter. And if we're talking about optics here, and how employees make their company look, wouldn't the CEO be next? lol
Plausible deniability is Gamergate's (and the alt-right at large) biggest weapon. As long as the Enemy is guilty of some sort of offense, no matter how minor, then the privileged will put their hands in their pockets and walk away.
I still can't believe that's your take away from this whole thing despite the very specific circumstances that led to its conclusion. It's like none of the details matter to you if the end result also leads to some goons in Gamer Gate having a laugh.
How about people can simultaneously be not cool with Gamer Gate and also not cool with people acting like Price did?
Context does matter. Context: he was a big fan of hers and had been praising her and her AMA to hell and back just previous to engaging with her. Those, like Price, reading condescension into his words were looking for it to begin with. He really just wanted to talk about game design with someone whose work he admired.
Becaus I was discussing the words, responding to a post about words.
I even said right in that post that the context can make the entire thing condescending, the words are not.
Read the damn post I was responding to. (ironically you are ignoring the entire context of the conversation you entered)
We live in a world where there's a targeted hate campaign against pretty much all women in the game's industry. They harass by email, social media, phone calls, doxxing, even contacting their employers. A woman who is outspoken on Twitter is rude to another person. She is then fired without seemingly no prior warnings and so is another coworker who defended her. I think it's appropriate to cut through all the smoke and mirrors that is her professionalism and target the actual misogynistic core that drove this. If you want to discuss her professionalism then go for it, but it's just detracting from the actual issue plaguing Price and many other women in industry.
Angel McCoy and Rubi Beyer off the top of my head. She was a narrative designer for 10 years before she left the company and was no stranger to getting attacked by GamerGate. She worked with the company for 9 years before leaving to run her start up studio, Omniverse Studios. Angel has been outspoken about how she feels mistakes were made by Arenanet in this situation. I think it's important we share her perspective as a former GW2 writer herself.
There have been others but those two are the ones that I can immediately think of without digging through Anet's staff for names that might jar my memory.
NCSOFT is really Lazzari Faire with it's ownership of Arenanet.
That's one way of putting it. From her perspective she just talked about, for like 30 tweets, how the genre makes it difficult if not outright impossible to do. His response was that he knows better than her, a veteran writer, and the problem is her design, she lead the design of the content he directly pointed to, and the way to do her job better was to do branching dialogue. I'm not a gaming writer myself, but to me I get the impression that suggesting branching dialogue to a veteran writer is like suggesting a vehicle mechanic check the oil.
It's completely possible for people to talk past eachother and really make the wrong impression. I actually don't think she responded well. But I think it's relevant to determining what her state of mind was when she said what she said.
I like this one. I hope many people who argue that people shouldn't be fired for free speech support and rally behind Price.
Right?
... Right?
Yeah, I've said before but I would understand annoyance in this situation. I've been there before with clients giving me suggestions that were stupid. But I didn't think they were being condescending; they just wanted to engage and perhaps didn't realize how silly their suggestion was. They didn't think they could do their job better than me just because they were making a suggestion. To think so would be an extreme overreaction on my part. And virtually none of them went through the extent of politeness hoops that this guy did (not that they were rude).
Must have. Anyway, I think we're not likely to find common ground. I'm with you on the crusade against Gamer Gate, but I just can't agree with your implication that this situation was one completely undeserving of a firing and that Gamer Gate was the reason for her firing. I also don't see how you reconcile the need to have absolute solidarity with women in the industry but also still need to be able to take action against employees that are publicly hostile to clients and the community that supports your product.
She is very open about her personal and political views on Twitter (free speech). She didn't get fired because of that. She got fired because she was an asshole to a prominent customer/partner.
Well, yeah, we'll never actually find common ground. You want to argue her professionalism while I'm aware that's not the crux of the issue here. It's not the lesson to take from this. It's something so small in the event that people aren't updating their harassment policies because of some rude tweets made by an employee.
Yeah, you've made it clear you do not care about any of the trees (the individual instances and their unique sets of circumstances), and only care about the forest. I don't see how you can actually practically do that when real human individuals are part of these interactions.
Seems very akin to the people in the #MeToo threads that have argued that a few a innocent people getting caught up along the way is a reasonable price to pay.
Where have I done that? Because I argue for paying attention to the core issue here? That's a stretch for you to state. However, you do want to compare sexual assault to Twitch streamer getting some rude tweets @ them, so I'm not sure what to make of this.
As I've said, argue all you want about her professionalism, but regarding particular discourse, I'm out of that. It bears no meaning to the issue here.
Do you even read what you write? I hope you're at least aware of how condescending you actually are in a conversation about condescension. But back to the point.
I am saying it was condescending regardless of the specific words he chose. That the words are not relevant when not in context. Not sure why that means I didn't read the post or why you're even being so argumentative as you appear to agree at least on some points. But my point is that regardless of his lack of using overt or even subtle sexist tones, he could still have been interpreted as condescending. And that is what is important here. Not the words he used.
It's not comparing #MeToo to this, just your perspective to the one I mentioned. It's a very black and white way of viewing things to ignore all of the individual circumstances that involve real people just because you claim to care more about some greater good.
Even with the disciplinary process in this matter, it's clear cut. The company had two legitimate choices to consider, and they chose the more extreme one. But it doesn't make it any less legitimate.
Matters like this, 9/10 times, usually will result in termination.
Not only fired, but publicly torched.
I think they had way more than 2 choices and one of those many choices could have been to fire her in a way that does not draw attention to her personally. They could have quietly let her go and made a generalized statement that they're taking steps to improve the way developers interact with the community. Instead they tried to score points with the community by making a big deal out of it. I think that backfired hard.
Oh I absolutely agree in that regard. Arenanet could have handled the termination differently, but all signs pointed to termination regardless.
I've dealt with many matters involving an employee attacking/insulting/etc the customer and it's always the same end result. Regardless of policy (especially too if it's at-will), if you do anything that can be of detriment to the company in a public manner, you're gonna get sacked.
An arbitrator would side with the employer on this almost 100%.
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edit: meh, not worth the time.. you really should go back and read the conversation I was responding to, and my posts.. I "appear to agree?" You repeated back to me things I essentially had already said, while ignoring me repeatedly when I pointed out that we were specifically NOT discussing context in the conversation you responded to.
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Yah I think this is something that reeks of appealing to GG they made her firing an event.
Also people need to stop saying she was just being rude to him. She highlighted his tweet and used it as a symbol of sexism. Letting her followers attack him. I feel like this goes beyond just being rude and into more agressive terroritory.
I did see your post pre-edit and nothing I have said deserved that level of antagonism and immaturity. You do understand that converastions go beyond what you intend them to be right? I was expanding on the fact that it's my believe that it doesn't matter what words he chose. You saying you were talking about something else, okay? Good for you? I repeat myself because I am making my point about context being important and important towards intent. You read that and it's all about you still? Egotistical much? Okay, bye.
I can understand that tbh. Sometimes people don't understand the power of a retweet. People often delete in response because they don't want the attention of thousands of followers of another person.
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I got annoyed with you because you appeared to not be reading my posts; not once was I condescending nor did I once call you names. Being annoyed/angry is not condescending. Being condescending is (like what you just did here with your "Egotisticalm much?" crap.)
Insulted "someone"? Insulted a customer/client. A prominent one. In a public space.
Why do you write "someone" instead of the more accurate "customer" unless you are trying to willingly obfuscate the issue? That distinction is at the very heart of the conversation.
Is it, though? I thought the fact that she was rude in general was the heart of the issue. Or that she "falsely accused" him of sexism. Or that he's a Very Important customer, but if he weren't it would have been okay. The excuses always change.
(By the way, this is something I keep forgetting to ask in the thread: did Price even know who Deroir was? Like, could she tell him apart from some other random on Twitter?)