Some day, GamerGate will be a textbook example of how unconscious biases can turn two opposing groups of people into complete ****lords, with neither of them ever recognizing the problem.

Ha! Put this way, it does indeed summarize how / why this can be considered about sexism. Thanks.

I don't really want to jump into this dumpster fire of a thread, but I'm of the understanding that this turned out to be false and the journalist she was in a relationship with never actually reviewed the game.

It genuinely bugs me that I absorbed some information about "GamerGate".

That was my understanding as well, but then again I never cared that much to investigate.

Oh yes, I remember reading that as well somewhere. Still, while it's not like we're the best of mates now, I do think that Jon'C's distillation of why this all went haywire was nothing short of excellent. Essentially, it doesn't matter if the guy reviewed her "game" (it's a Twine hyperlink webpage ported to Steam, apparently rather poorly written), I'd say, the point still stands.

However, on a similar note, how come there *aren't* more scandals about what is allegedly the "real" issue (corruption in game reviews / journalism)? Or there are, and I just don't know about them?

Actual GamerGate pretty much went through it's course in a couple of days. It wasn't even the allegation that the game review was biased, it was that it looked like moderators of several major subreddits were making a systematic effort to censor the issue. People thought it was part of a conspiracy by the games journalism industry to suppress discussion of their corruption. It turned out later that too many people were posting personal information and the mods couldn't keep up, so they had to just shut down the threads. For everyone who was remotely reasonable, this is where it ended. I mean, some crappy game site may have published a biased review of a dumb game, but who really cares about that in the grand scheme of things?

After that a bunch of horrific people decided that Gamer Gate was a rallying flag for their socially maladjusted nonsense, and sent death and bomb threats to people while complaining about being victimized. The only thing particularly remarkable is how gullible mainstream media figures were lending credibility to anti-GG figures. It probably didn't help that a lot of game reviewers tried to spin the narrative that anyone who questioned their integrity were part of the gamergate movement. In my mind anti-GG people and GG people are basically identical and I give them both a wide berth. Some people are only able to define themselves in term of who they hate.

Games journalism has been a marketing arm of the games industry for decades. I think there's just not that many people who care enough to challenge that relationship. The only time I remember it seriously gaining attention was when that guy got fired for giving Kane & Lynch a bad review score. If anything I'd say games journalism considerably more independent now.

But that was never GamerGate's gripe at all. Their issue was that a lot of the major game sites--Kotaku, Polygon, etc--would, from time to time, post articles about "diversity in games," or criticize representation of women or minority groups in a game review. They saw this as the games journalists forcing a personal political agenda on their readership via what should have been (in the GGers' opinion) apolitical game reviews. They felt like this was an abuse of power, and a breach of "ethics." This view went hand in hand w/similar attitudes to that guy who just got fired from Google, that women & minorities didn't generally make good games and that trying to forcibly elevate them in the games industry was leading to worse games w/more "SJW" content. This type of attitude was simmering for years before GamerGate became a thing--you could see it in the comments sections for all the major games sites. The games journalists, to the extent they acknowledged it at all, would basically say "times are changing, games are getting more inclusive, deal with it." Which left the proto-GGers feeling increasingly ignored and powerless.

With all that in mind, Zoe Quinn, an outspoken feminist female developer who made artsy games that didn't appeal to the traditional gaming audience (and, hey, might have been legitimately bad), shouldn't be at all surprising as a flashpoint.

GamerGaters definitely tried to lump in the (actual) problem of games publishers and games media being too chummy after the fact, but their gripe was always, essentially, with the preponderance of social progressivism in games journalism.

Yeah.

This is a good summary. To me it's always been a conservative reaction against cultural trends they hate. They're the sort of people who post twenty minute long rants about woman characters in the WW2 Call of Duty. Of course they <yes I'm referring to a specific person/video> coat in in "historical accuracy", but there's obvious ulterior motives.

It's pretty damn transparent to seemingly worry about the historical accuracy of a CoD game. You were referring to a specific video, but that reasoning for being upset about the female characters is pretty common.

Well, and then somehow as if through magic not-so-crappy sites started talking about the dumb game too, like NY Times, for example.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/23/magazine/twine-the-video-game-technology-for-all.html

In their defense, they most talk about Porpentine, who, unlike Zoe Quinn, is a badass writer. Also, unlike Zoe Quinn, she's more or less normal to interact with (though not like we had lengthy discussions, or anything like that). I really couldn't care less that she's transgender, and while it does inform some of what she makes, she doesn't use it as a marketing flag (as far as I know). I mean, she has a game about being transgender AFAIK, I haven't checked it because not really my sphere of interest, but I did check a cyberpunk game (and by game I mean Interactive Fiction -- she also works in Twine, and she doesn't pretend it's anything other than IF), and it was really, really well-written.

While we're on the subject of IF, ladies and gentlemen, I invite you to check out Adam Cadre's Photopia, if you haven't already.

It is one of the most-well-known, award-winning Interactive Fiction games of the last decades, is more of a "story" than a "game" and one of my personal favorites creations (games? works of transmedia art?) of all time.

http://adamcadre.ac/if.html

I *highly* recommend it. And everything else Adam Cadre has ever worked on.

Talking about lone creators, did you know that Gemini Rue was made by one guy, while he was still in uni? That guy is mega-talented as well, but unfortunately he left game creation to be a missionary. I mean, nothing wrong with being a missionary, I just wish he'd be making games. Hmm ... which gives me an idea (as I have to talk to him re: something)! Ok. Back to reading the thread.



Clever; reminded me of A.M. in Harlan Ellison's classic I HAVE NO MOUTH AND I MUST SCREAM short story.

I haven't thought about it like this before, but A.M. was *defined* by its hate of the human race. Interesting stuff.

Onwards and upwards, then.

Btw, "strong female protagonists" are all the rage now. Star Wars, Atomic Blonde, and countless science fiction / fantasy books that came out recently all feature strong female leads. Not a bad thing in itself, but I guess its going to equalize in the next few years.

Another liberal bites the dust!
Google fires an engineer with a very impressive resumé for expressing views on gender inequality:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/08/technology/google-engineer-fired-gender-memo.html

He's conservative, not liberal.

I read his whole essay. He was fired for creating a hostile work environment, not simply for expressing his views; the essay contains many ~biotruths~, but that's not the part that got him fired. It was him saying that Google doesn't filter out minorities and women as effectively as they do white men. He hedged it but it was clear how he felt: male Googlers are more carefully selected and are better engineers.

If you had an engineer like this on your team, would you trust their opinion of a female candidate? Would you trust them to give a code review for a woman who works on another team? I sure ****in wouldn't. When you get to the point that you can't trust an engineer's judgment in day to day job responsibilities like code review, that means they are garbage and you need to fire them. And that's exactly what Google did.

I guess it's possible that he got fired for expressing his political opinion, but really I don't think there was any other way this could have played out. Maybe he should have A/B tested his essay first, lol.

>>If you had an engineer like this on your team, would you trust their opinion of a female candidate?

Depends on whether he's right or wrong about the selection / gender policy (objectively).

But considering my team is called -=Digital We'd=- and consists of exactly 2 people, we're pretty laid back, so mileage may vary.

>>He's a conserative, not liberal.



Src: http://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-diversity-screed-1797564320

A small point, but I believe he attempts to self identify as an individual with left-leaning tendencies in the essay if I recall correctly. Not that self identification as a liberal means **** when you're busy talking about how women should nurture and men should WORK.

I appreciate your viewpoint on his firing. It's refreshing to see a better justification than "**** yeah string him up by his balls sexist pigdog" or "goddamn liberals ruining my free speech." I got real ****in tired of the media coverage on this topic as soon as I finished reading the essay.

>>Not that self identification as a liberal means **** when you're busy talking about how women should nurture and men should WORK.

Zloc_Vergo, that is not what he is saying from what I understand of his essay.

Do you really believe men / women have similar occupational predispositions?

That said, the "higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance" of women vs. men is very questionable, to say the least. Quick Google search reveals that the American Psychological Association put up a paper claiming that while stress is about the same, men are less likely to see help to manage it (src: http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/stress/2011/gender.aspx)

Also, as per FBI stats of 12,966 homicides in 2010, "Of the offenders for whom gender was known, 90.3 percent were males."

We are definitely different; not necessarily in favor of men, but we are different, I think, and companies / HRs should focus on technical merit and ignore gender altogether. It will probably happen, but not in the next couple of decades.

There's an argument to be made that diversity is itself an asset. People from different backgrounds will bring different perspectives that will enrich social interactions between employees, and produce better services and products that will appeal to a greater number of people.

I'm absolutely up for diversity and equal opportunities / free expression; this includes not getting fired for expressing controversial opinions.

"The prouder you think you are, the weaker you become. The more humble you are, the stronger you are, & the firmer you stand."
-- a Russian writer.

EDIT:

The quote continues (although less relevant to discrimination, but relevant to some of the things said in this thread):

"It is bad when you think of yourself as good, because you will not do the most necessary thing, which is to improve yourself.

Every day, make an effort.

True love is possible only when you are humble.

You can see your faults through the eyes of others."

If he ever rejects a female candidate, is it because she's not good, or is it because he thinks women have it too easy everywhere else and evaluated her more harshly to make up for it? Even if he was right about the policy, you can't trust his opinion under it.

Classical liberal ~= moderate conservative, today. The terms don't mean what they used to (especially in the US).



I'm ignoring the ~biotruths~ portion because I don't think the why debate is very interesting - mostly because you can't do anything about it, whether it's nature or nurture. So I will talk about company policies only.

A major problem is that Bay Area tech companies really do prefer the loner, basement dweller, easily cowed, tech-obsessed standard nerd types (almost all of which are male). They work long hours, feel lucky to be there, and don't understand that bro-y managers are a toxic train wreck yet. They reinforce their preference with free lunches, free dinners, ball pits, ping pong tables, open bars at company events, "breaking bread" and a bunch of other nonsense that's designed to keep people working long hours and turn the workplace into a social club for like minded people, despite the well proven productivity costs of this mindset.

Meanwhile, people with families and social lives are effectively excluded. This is the root of ageism in tech as well as sexism. If you are serious about fixing discrimination in tech, it starts with eliminating exclusionary cultures and the policies that generate them, and that means fixing tech management, because managers in tech are imo the most immature and incompetent of all major industries.

There are many ways he could have chosen to express the same idea. Only some of those ways required him to get fired.

By the way, most tech companies try to address diversity in two basic ways:

- Hiring more people with diverse backgrounds, but it's totally not the same thing as discriminating against white men we promise.

- Singling out people for special awards and treatment on the basis of the gender/race, with the unstated assumption being that they can't possibly win the white/Asian male dominated merit awards, which is totally not alienating them even more we promise.

And Google's program by all accounts seems to fit this mold.

I just wanted to emphasize my "tech managers are ****ing morons" comment.

what is the manual for good tech management?

There isn't one, nor is there one for any other field (I suspect you are being sarcastic). However, there are established organizational practices in more mature engineering disciplines that could be applied to software, and there are many well known management books specifically about software, but these are either unknown or deliberately ignored by most software engineering managers and companies.

One big difference between software companies and other product companies is poor delegation and separation of responsibilities. In software, it is typical for the same person to be responsible for strategy, product, organization, and logistics; in more mature fields, these responsibilities are usually separated across many people who are specifically good at one job. The result is, you get a lot of wannabe Steve Jobses, product/design fetishists with bad personalities, put in people management, when they aren't actually any good at managing people. And because their boss isn't good at managing people, either, they don't understand why it's a problem.

When that kind of management culture takes root in another industry, analysts call it a culture of fear, that the managers are afraid to delegate and don't trust their own employees anymore, and everybody predicts the company is doomed. But like I said, in software it's routine.

Classical liberal is just a buzzword reactionaries/right wingers use in America. It means "I'm liberal by 18th century standards"*. AKA right wing.

*they often don't actually know what these thinkers thought or believed.

I do not think you understand what I said.

He had an entire section about how tendencies that work against proportional representation still have a small gender difference compared to the overlap between genders, and how we should judge people on an individual basis.

What he said may have an implication that in aggregate, women and minorities at Google are technically less qualified, and that's true. It's literally Google policy for that to be so. He's not bringing anything new to the table here. Policies like this *do* promote discrimination toward these groups, because whether it's openly admitted or not, people are quick to assume that the person from a minority group is only there because of their minority status. Worse, the effect is likely to be largely exaggerated beyond reality due to confirmation bias. Silencing discussion of these issues just encourages the discrimination to become more insidious, and managers to hide discrimination by manipulating statistics. It doesn't matter if you have equal numerical representation of women at every level if those women get treated as second class workers in subtle ways and receive promotion for inappropriate reasons. IE, willingness to play along with the narrative and ignore mistreatment.

[/COLOR]

Except that's equally true for every other male employee in the company. To pretend otherwise is catastrophically naive. Based on his report, my expectation is that he's probably less biased than the average male employee. Pretending the issue doesn't exist doesn't make it go away.

I honestly spent about an hour trying to think of a good way to respond to this post, but I'm having a really hard time. I'll make it brief, and you can ask follow up questions if you want.


No. He needed to get fired. This is a social skills thing, not an "um actually" thing. His essay was very unprofessional and inappropriate.

Man sends company memo calling large chunk of his co-workers incompetent and genetically inferior, expects to keep job.

Why would you send out a memo to the entire company anyway, unless you were authorized or were management?

um, actually, if you read his essay I believe you will find that he specifically said that's not what he was saying even though it's what he said.

It was sent to the internal Google ~meme network~ and if the idea of Google having its own internal /b/ isn't just the most insufferable thing, you probably haven't spent enough time in mountain view yet.

The more I learn about Silicon Valley, the more I hate it.

Last night, right-wing groups marched on the UVa campus, fights broke out. Police were hardly there. Today is shaping up to be a ****show.

Showed to the counter protest today. Got in just before most of the major groups. Almost immediate violence. Eventually riot police and national guard shut everything down. Did get tear gassed.

Some counter-protestors were run down by a guy in a car. City is in state of emergency. ****'s really bad here.

Stay safe dude.

I'm safe - I was burning all over and had to wash off the tear gas. I don't know now but just a bit ago cops were patrolling to get people inside. Saw some Nazis harassing a woman in a BLM uniform and did my best to ward them off. They talked some **** but didn't follow.

Today has been an extremely tragic day.

Charlottesville mayor claims someone died.

Just so you all know - because nobody in the MSM would mention something like this - there was a huge presence of nonviolent socialists at the protest, groups like the Democratic Socialists of America, and Black Lives Matter was mostly peaceful. Black bloc anarchists and antifa were the more violent on the left. On the right was a few alt right groups, but there was a significant KKK and neo-Nazi presence. No, not light-Nazis, Nazi-Nazis.

Also, the driver was arrested, and they're throwing the book at the scumbag. I really hope he is convicted.

Glad you're okay, Reid. This is horrible news.