🎭 Dramacow Gamergate / Depression Quest Shitstorm

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I'll try not to shit up the thread so much after this unless more relevant info comes out, but I just have one more thing to say.

Recently, it's come up that more adult women are playing games over teenage boys. I know people want to have their arguments of BUT THAT'S CASUAL SHIT or JEEZ THEY AREN'T REAL GAMERS, and those people are missing a huge fucking point here.

It's time for women, actual every day women who don't throw up sensationalist click bait for cash "articles" to voice themselves in this entire debacle. You need to let people know if you are OK with letting a few scummy people change an entire industry because they perceive you as a little snowflake damsel in distress. Be honest and be clear; if you are fine with someone telling you you are weak and need protection, say so. If not, speak up. If you want to tell them they are stupid assholes and just want to play video games without their agenda, do it.

There are always, always going to be assholes telling you to "show tits or gtfo", "go back to the kitchen", all kinds of BULLSHIT. These are the same assholes that tell me I'm a perma virgin and never leave my basement or shave my neckbeard. Don't let that shit get to you. It's a tactic of hate and insecurity, it's a stupid stereotype, you are what is important here and you are gravely needed. Let the industry know!
 
Venusaur said:
I really want somebody to write a comprehensive article critizing and pointing out the hypocricy of these "gaming news" websites. Their reaction to this whole thing has not only been wierdly uniform, but it's completely show how out of touch they are with their audience.

Instead of maybe analyzing why their audience might have taken umbrage because of this scandal and looking at all the evidence (which is available online)....they've just gone with "gawd gamers are sexist neckbeards, grow up lol".
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We've reached a fucking weird place when we have people who have been as hateful towards their own userbase and customer base to the point where it's reached full-blown parody status, but we've already left behind that nonsense at well past Ludicrous Speed.

Whether it's Devin Faraci equating people criticizing this corruption scandal as worse than ISIS, Ben Kuchera telling us that Zoe Quinn and Depression Quest is worth more than the entire games industry's customer-base, Phil Fish telling us all that we're sub-human vermin for daring to criticize a serial manipulator like Quinn, or this fucking brain-turd by Leigh Alexander - and that's just for a start - we've officially reached the point at which it's become clear that this has reached some kind of critical mass.

This is the sort of thing you normally see used by tin-pot dictatorships when they're attempting to demonize another race or culture in order to marginalize real issues and try to make them seem less important or less credible than they actually are, and it's fucking chilling to see that kind of shit aimed at regular people just for the sake of protecting someone who has increasingly shown themselves to be a liar, con-artist, and charlatan. In any logical world, these people would do the smart thing and decouple themselves from supporting Quinn, but as we've seen, this corruption runs deep.

I am really glad we have people that are willing to cut to the heart of the matter, past the obvious "if you say anything about Quinn you are misogynist" nonsense. Whether it's Bro Team Pill willing to (rightly) call this corruption out from the outset, Jontron willing to put himself on the line to make a stand for what's right, or TotalBiscuit delivering one of the most chillingly well-worded and well-said calls for rationality I've seen on the Internet in close to a fucking decade, we have a lot of people trying to force the truth on this one through.
 
I have to wonder about the impact of some these articles though. There have been so many articles espousing how women in the gaming industry have been mistreated, and now with this huge mess, I am curious to know how many women have seen them and decided against joining the game industry because of them. I won't deny that there are problems in the gaming industry that affect women, but with so many of these articles it paints a picture of "If you are a woman in the gaming industry you WILL BE mocked and/or sexually assaulted" that I don't think is true. I just imagine there being women who are on the fence about what they want to do and think, "Well I like video games, but I don't think I could take the abuse" and pass on what could otherwise have been amazing opportunity and career. On the same point, I wonder how many of these articles have attracted people with a martyr mindset. As they publicize their struggles with an exaggerated, fabricated, or otherwise misrepresented foe, the exaggeration becomes the normal perception, and as people less inclined to fight a supposed injustice at the risk of themselves are turned away, perpetuating a cycle of martyrdom. I have thoughts about joining the games industry sometimes, but I have to ask myself if I am willing to put myself out there and receive all the kind of criticism and derision that gets thrown to people such as TotalBiscuit or Jim Sterling, and I'm not sure I could. Right now these websites are portraying an image that this massive amount of criticism is coming exclusively from people who only hate women and have no legitimate grievance in turn leading to more women deciding that they wouldn't be able to take all this abuse that they would inevitably get being women and going elsewhere, perpetuating the problem of women being unrepresented in the gaming industry.

Sorry for the ramble, but I felt like talking about this. On a side note though, I love how at one point Phil Fish said something to the extent of "If you are a talented and creative developer who wants to bring equality, run away! This is your terrible audience and they don't deserve you!". What I got from this is that if you would be a positive influence on the game industry (At least in Phil Fish's view) you should not join the game industry. Then he proceeds to bitch about the terrible games industry filled with assholes.

God I hate Phil Fish.
 
I've thought about getting into the gaming industry as a writer. Never made any serious strides in that direction, but it's something I think I'd like to do if I could.

If I did decide to pursue it as a career, all this stuff about women being harassed in the gaming industry would have zero impact on my decision. In my experience the portion of gamers who are genuinely hostile toward women is very small. I imagine it's even smaller in the professional setting of a game studio. Even if I'm wrong it wouldn't dissuade me from doing something that I love.
 
PaxtonFettel said:
God I hate Phil Fish.
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When Fish's bullshit first broke, I was sort of ambivalent towards him, because on some level or another, he had clearly been through a lot of shit. When he stuck around after Fez 2 was cancelled, however, that's when I started getting pissed off at him. It's one thing to say "I'm leaving the industry because the userbase is too vitriolic;" it's quite another to say that, then stick around using your position as a mouthpiece to scream about how much better you are than anyone else and screaming at critics to suck your dick.

That's fucking Derek Smart level. Jesus.

A really great image macro that a friend of mine linked me once very nicely compared just how different Fish is from other cherished indie developers like Pixel, the creator of Cave Story. Whereas Pixel and several others specifically set out to make fun games that others would play because - holy shit, they wanted to make fun games - Fish makes abundantly clear that his by-all-accounts interesting-but-ultimately lackluster Xbox Live Arcade Title was intended to kickstart his career and give him money and prestige. As time has gone on, not only has Fish been revealed to not only be a major friend and close ally of Zoe Quinn, but of many purported games Journalists. And there's an interesting coinkydink.

One thing we can thank the Quinn Scandal for in this fucking shambles is for finally fucking getting rid of Phil Fish - his twitter account is finally gone and as he got the scope leveled on his personal connections to Quinn and friends an associates of his, he did the smart thing and fucked off - and I can guaran-fucking-tee that the reason he did so is because further scrutiny along these lines would, almost with 100% certainty, show that Fish had the same close personal connections to the industry. We already saw Depression Quest - an overglorified Choose-Your-Own Adventure - win top billing in Indiecade against games that it wasn't worthy to hold the jockstrap of. How much of a stretch is it to even suggest that Fez - by all accounts a mediocre XBLA-exclusive platformer that isn't worthy to feed on Cave Story's table scraps - got where it was the same way? We know that Quinn and Fish have a very close relationship, and with many of the same people....

Also, you may not be aware of it, but there's been a very long-held suspicion that Fish himself did not actually create Fez, and that it was an associate of his that did a huge amount of the work before being fired from the project by Fish, who then proceeded to claim all credit. Now, this very likely is not true - we've seen minimal evidence to suggest that it may be (and if someone find such evidence, by all means, sauce us, plz), but in light of the recent revelations, one has to ask: Would this theory even have the slightest shred of credibility were it not for bullshit like the previous paragraph?
 
Jaimas said:
When Fish's bullshit first broke, I was sort of ambivalent towards him, because on some level or another, he had clearly been through a lot of shit. When he stuck around after Fez 2 was cancelled, however, that's when I started getting pissed off at him. It's one thing to say "I'm leaving the industry because the userbase is too vitriolic;" it's quite another to say that, then stick around using your position as a mouthpiece to scream about how much better you are than anyone else and screaming at critics to suck your dick.

That's fucking Derek Smart level. Jesus.

A really great image macro that a friend of mine linked me once very nicely compared just how different Fish is from other cherished indie developers like Pixel, the creator of Cave Story. Whereas Pixel and several others specifically set out to make fun games that others would play because - holy shit, they wanted to make fun games - Fish makes abundantly clear that his by-all-accounts interesting-but-ultimately lackluster Xbox Live Arcade Title was intended to kickstart his career and give him money and prestige. As time has gone on, not only has Fish been revealed to not only be a major friend and close ally of Zoe Quinn, but of many purported games Journalists. And there's an interesting coinkydink.

One thing we can thank the Quinn Scandal for in this fucking shambles is for finally fucking getting rid of Phil Fish - his twitter account is finally gone and as he got the scope leveled on his personal connections to Quinn and friends an associates of his, he did the smart thing and fucked off - and I can guaran-fucking-tee that the reason he did so is because further scrutiny along these lines would, almost with 100% certainty, show that Fish had the same close personal connections to the industry. We already saw Depression Quest - an overglorified Choose-Your-Own Adventure - win top billing in Indiecade against games that it wasn't worthy to hold the jockstrap of. How much of a stretch is it to even suggest that Fez - by all accounts a mediocre XBLA-exclusive platformer that isn't worthy to feed on Cave Story's table scraps - got where it was the same way? We know that Quinn and Fish have a very close relationship, and with many of the same people....

Also, you may not be aware of it, but there's been a very long-held suspicion that Fish himself did not actually create Fez, and that it was an associate of his that did a huge amount of the work before being fired from the project by Fish, who then proceeded to claim all credit. Now, this very likely is not true - we've seen minimal evidence to suggest that it may be (and if someone find such evidence, by all means, sauce us, plz), but in light of the recent revelations, one has to ask: Would this theory even have the slightest shred of credibility were it not for bullshit like the previous paragraph?
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Don't be surprised if he reappears next month after having lost his entire fanbase, promising he's going to make Fez 2, 4realz this time.

Also, /v/ made this brilliant poster about the whole debacle.
1409337762327.jpg
 
PaxtonFettel said:
I have to wonder about the impact of some these articles though. There have been so many articles espousing how women in the gaming industry have been mistreated, and now with this huge mess, I am curious to know how many women have seen them and decided against joining the game industry because of them. I won't deny that there are problems in the gaming industry that affect women, but with so many of these articles it paints a picture of "If you are a woman in the gaming industry you WILL BE mocked and/or sexually assaulted" that I don't think is true. I just imagine there being women who are on the fence about what they want to do and think, "Well I like video games, but I don't think I could take the abuse" and pass on what could otherwise have been amazing opportunity and career.
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Well, no, I don't completely agree. At least at this point in time, with the industry as it is, you ARE incredibly likely to be the target of negative attention for being a woman in the game industry, and that is absolutely something that women should be aware of and prepared for when making their decision to follow that path. When I decided I wanted to pursue game design, I emailed Kellee Santiago of thatgamecompany (flOw, Flower, etc.) and she told me "there's a big difference in working at companies that are predominantly male, and working at companies that are like locker rooms." Companies like the latter do exist, and they are absolutely not the places that women want to work.

Whenever I was trashtalked or ogled or whatnot by a male classmate at school, I always dealt with it by telling myself, "well, this is practice for if I ever end up working at a locker room company;" it's terrible that anyone should even have to consider such "practice" necessary, but it is a fact of life in this industry. I had a classmate tell me my art was completely unusable for our game because it made him want to masturbate (ergo, it was too distracting to use in a game). Another classmate, the programmer for my senior project, became enraged and frustrated when I wouldn't back down from his incessant trash talk, as I should, being a meek and submissive woman and all (he ended up unfriending me on Facebook, which I found amusing but simultaneously infuriating, as he was cutting off a line of communication in the middle of game production).

These are the kinds of people we have going into the industry, and it isn't pretty. As it is right now, it is certainly not the place for a woman weak of will.

(btw the senior project game ended up being complete crap with a bunch of the sprites I made being completely disregarded because the programmer got basically nothing done over the course of the entire year, and I was left completely in the dark about this because he refused to show me a playable of the game despite my countless requests throughout the year. Isn't that great, I have no idea what to tell any potential employers if they happen to ask about it or ask why my BIG HUGE IMPORTANT SENIOR PROJECT is the only project in my portfolio without a downloadable version hahaha.)
 
Himawari said:
Well, no, I don't completely agree. At least at this point in time, with the industry as it is, you ARE incredibly likely to be the target of negative attention for being a woman in the game industry, and that is absolutely something that women should be aware of and prepared for when making their decision to follow that path. When I decided I wanted to pursue game design, I emailed Kellee Santiago of thatgamecompany (flOw, Flower, etc.) and she told me "there's a big difference in working at companies that are predominantly male, and working at companies that are like locker rooms." Companies like the latter do exist, and they are absolutely not the places that women want to work.

Whenever I was trashtalked or ogled or whatnot by a male classmate at school, I always dealt with it by telling myself, "well, this is practice for if I ever end up working at a locker room company;" it's terrible that anyone should even have to consider such "practice" necessary, but it is a fact of life in this industry. I had a classmate tell me my art was completely unusable for our game because it made him want to masturbate (ergo, it was too distracting to use in a game). Another classmate, the programmer for my senior project, became enraged and frustrated when I wouldn't back down from his incessant trash talk, as I should, being a meek and submissive woman and all (he ended up unfriending me on Facebook, which I found amusing but simultaneously infuriating, as he was cutting off a line of communication in the middle of game production).

These are the kinds of people we have going into the industry, and it isn't pretty. As it is right now, it is certainly not the place for a woman weak of will.

(btw the senior project game ended up being complete crap with a bunch of the sprites I made being completely disregarded because the programmer got basically nothing done over the course of the entire year, and I was left completely in the dark about this because he refused to show me a playable of the game despite my countless requests throughout the year. Isn't that great, I have no idea what to tell any potential employers if they happen to ask about it or ask why my BIG HUGE IMPORTANT SENIOR PROJECT is the only project in my portfolio without a downloadable version hahaha.)
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You know what. In every area of employment I have ever worked in the people most likely to ruin a woman's career are other fucking women. Men can be childish cunts and the very small minority harass women in the workplace but it is not the 1970s and everyone in their teens is full of hormones and kind of dumb (sorry teenagers). I had guys steal my bra at school which was super embarrassing but I had girls who tried to physically assault me. You are talking about people with very poor social skills and you want to be careful as to how you judge their motivations. Was that guy mad because women should back down or was he mad because he's a bossy fucker who thinks everyone should back down? If he did mention that you were a woman at the time was it a genuine bias or an attempt to get a rise out of you? The teenage boy looking at your art... Teenage boy... Made of hormones... He probably got aroused looking at gardening catalogs. He might have had an unwanted erection and was taking out his embarrassment on your art (guys don't bleed and have cramps but they do have their own shit to deal with). You also can't judge grown men by the actions of teenage boys.

That being said, the gaming industry has a larger than average proportion of socially awkward people. Which means you are going to get slight amplifications of all social fails. That includes the kind of women who will ruin a game jam designed to help women out, women who will "elevatorgate" their male co-workers and women who will ruin you office reputation with lies because they are jealous. There will also be occasions of sexual harassment and other issues that should be dealt with individually.

In the 90s I had a boss who liked to use my cleavage as target practise for firing rubber bands across the room. I was jeered at, groped and once duct-taped to my office chair. When I went to see my area boss I was laughed at and told to get a a sense of humour. If some guy did that today they would be fired. If someone harasses you, you have many different ways to combat it. @PaxtonFettel is right, it will end up discouraging women. Yes, there needs to be courses of action to deal with all problems in the workplace and there are. The vast majority of men do not harass women and find it abhorent to do so. Some are kind of dumb, have had very little experience interacting with women, or are scared of women. There are some men who are genuinely misogynistic or industrial psycopaths and get kicks out of upsetting and harassing women but you can't teach a psychopath to care.

The focus needs to be on awesome women being awesome.
 
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Jaimas said:
We've reached a fucking weird place when we have people who have been as hateful towards their own userbase and customer base to the point where it's reached full-blown parody status, but we've already left behind that nonsense at well past Ludicrous Speed.

Whether it's Devin Faraci equating people criticizing this corruption scandal as worse than ISIS, Ben Kuchera telling us that Zoe Quinn and Depression Quest is worth more than the entire games industry's customer-base, Phil Fish telling us all that we're sub-human vermin for daring to criticize a serial manipulator like Quinn, or this fucking brain-turd by Leigh Alexander - and that's just for a start - we've officially reached the point at which it's become clear that this has reached some kind of critical mass.

This is the sort of thing you normally see used by tin-pot dictatorships when they're attempting to demonize another race or culture in order to marginalize real issues and try to make them seem less important or less credible than they actually are, and it's fucking chilling to see that kind of shit aimed at regular people just for the sake of protecting someone who has increasingly shown themselves to be a liar, con-artist, and charlatan. In any logical world, these people would do the smart thing and decouple themselves from supporting Quinn, but as we've seen, this corruption runs deep.

I am really glad we have people that are willing to cut to the heart of the matter, past the obvious "if you say anything about Quinn you are misogynist" nonsense. Whether it's Bro Team Pill willing to (rightly) call this corruption out from the outset, Jontron willing to put himself on the line to make a stand for what's right, or TotalBiscuit delivering one of the most chillingly well-worded and well-said calls for rationality I've seen on the Internet in close to a fucking decade, we have a lot of people trying to force the truth on this one through.
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Can you link TotalBiscuit's video? I haven't been able to find it.
 
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teheviltwin said:
You know what. In every area of employment I have ever worked in the people most likely to ruin a woman's career are other fucking women.
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I won't argue this, I used to work at a bank where the manager refused to hire anyone but female tellers, and it was an absolute bitchfest hell. But it was a different kind of harassment than what I've received from male gamedevs.

teheviltwin said:
Men can be childish cunts and the very small minority harass women in the workplace but it is not the 1970s though and everyone in their teens is full of hormones and kind of dumb (sorry teenagers). I had guys steal my bra at school which was super embarrassing but I had girls who tried to physically assault me. You are talking about people with very poor social skills and you want to be careful as to how you judge their motivations. Was that guy mad because women should back down or was he mad because he's a bossy fucker who thinks everyone should back down? If he did mention that you were a woman at the time was it a genuine bias or an attempt to get a rise out of you?
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Believe me, I want to think that it wasn't personal and that he treated everyone that way regardless of gender, but no matter how much I think it over or talk about it with people of all sorts of different viewpoints, the consensus is that he was very likely frustrated that a female wouldn't take his shit. I was the only person in the dev team that he treated that way.

teheviltwin said:
The teenage boy looking at your art... Teenage boy... Made of hormones... He probably got aroused looking at gardening catalogs. He might have had an unwanted erection and was taking out his embarrassment on your art (guys don't bleed and have cramps but they do have their own shit to deal with). You also can't judge grown men by the actions of teenage boys.
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I don't remember ever stating that this grown, married man in his mid-twenties was a teenager.

I'm fully aware that it's an industry full of social retards but that doesn't change the actions that a woman is likely to be on the receiving end of. If anything, that makes it all the more likely for it to happen. I genuinely believe that these guys who mistreated me had no intention to do so, which makes it even harder to combat.

I'm not saying that women shouldn't enter this industry, they absolutely should. But they need to be prepared for what is an absolute truth.
 
teheviltwin said:
There are some men who are genuinely misogynistic or industrial psycopaths and get kicks out of upsetting and harassing women but you can't teach a psychopath to care.
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This is the thing that seems to be lost on a lot of SJWs and feminists. There are some people who will just never care. It reminds me of this story called 'The Racist Tree.' Just replace 'racist' with 'sexist.'

dE70S.jpg
 
Himawari said:
Believe me, I want to think that it wasn't personal and that he treated everyone that way regardless of gender, but no matter how much I think it over or talk about it with people of all sorts of different viewpoints, the consensus is that he was very likely frustrated that a female wouldn't take his shit. I was the only person in the dev team that he treated that way.
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How do you reach that consensus? What if it's a personality clash? What if it's two eldest/only children in a project?

Himawari said:
I don't remember ever stating that this grown, married man in his mid-twenties was a teenager.
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Well you did did say it was a "classmate" in "school" so I assumed you were all under 18. But then this is a consensus that you came to based on him being bossy. As you haven't mentioned any specific slurs made about your gender I am going to assume that he didn't call you a "cunt" (does not really apply to Brits and Aussies) or tell you you should be "barefoot and pregnant" or discuss the inability for the female brain to comprehend such difficult topics (which happened to my older sister many times when she was studying her degrees in physics). He acknowledge you but thought you were wrong.

Himawari said:
I'm fully aware that it's an industry full of social retards but that doesn't change the actions that a woman is likely to be on the receiving end of. If anything, that makes it all the more likely for it to happen. I genuinely believe that these guys who mistreated me had no intention to do so, which makes it even harder to combat.
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No. it makes it more likely for all social fuck ups to happen. How did they mistreat you? A guy tells you that he finds you art work arousingly distracting... So what? He finds it arousingly distracting so, from his perspective, others might too. Did you say "TMI?" Did you think it might be because some people are genuinely concerned about over sexualised images in games and he just worded it like a 'tard? What does any of this have to do with you being a woman? Are men not capable of drawing sexy images? How do you discuss such topics with you without you deciding you're being persecuted for your gender?

Himawari said:
I'm not saying that women shouldn't enter this industry, they absolutely should. But they need to be prepared for what is an absolute truth.
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But that's exactly what will happen. This huge media roar about just how violated and disgusting you will feel in this job. You're going to be abused. You're going to be harassed, groped, overlooked and generally devalued in this industry. And it will make working lives impossible because the smallest 'foot-in'mouth' slip could get a guy demonised and fired. And it is sexist because it doesn't work the other way. I've seen the sexual jokes made by 'feminists' because it's totally fine to make guys feel uncomfortable in the work place because they're just men.

And I haven't even mentioned the fact that in some rare cases you really do get women being abused at work and now no one will believe them. Real harassment in the workplace is devalued instantly and will be ignored because of all the entitled women who can not handle normal social interactions or deal with slightly awkward ones like mature adults and view everything said by men through a lens of 'feminism'.
 
Okay, just to add on to my previous posts, I want to clarify that I'm not trying to claim that all male gamedevs are disgusting trash. Nor am I trying to say that all female gamedevs are precious innocents and paragons of perfect behavior in the industry. I mean come on, just look at who this thread is centered around.

I spoke of two men in the industry who have treated me poorly because of my gender. Two. Out of the probably hundreds of male gamedevs I've met and spoken with. There may have been a few at TGS that gave me creeper-vibes, but those aren't people I've had to work with.

There are always rotten apples, and you can't pretend that there aren't. Sure, you're not as likely to find them in the cooler, cleaner environments, but unfortunately the huge gender divide in the game industry does result in a number of damp, murky places where apples go bad and/or continue to fester. All I'm saying is that women who want to go into the industry shouldn't be under the false impression that all apples are good.
 
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