"Plague of game dev harassment" (Polygon article)

Vuther: Lol. It is a mouthful.

From the article. The problem even followed someone who is argueable as not famous. The Policy Enforcement guy Stephen Toulouse was still seeing the exact same behaviour.

edited 22nd Aug '13 6:34:46 PM by TuefelHundenIV

Who watches the watchmen?

I am not taking any side in this argument yet Tuefel Hunden IV, but I ask you, if Hideo Kojima and the Austrian guy are not comparable in fame, how about Hideo Kojima vs Austin Aries. How would you say their fame compares?

Yes, there is a point to this question, just bare with Cider for a post.

Modified Ura-nage, Torture Rack

Who?

The point is when you're famous jerks will hate you and write meaningless death threats at times.

Its just a fact of humanity. Going "SHAME ON YOU" like Jim Sterling did won't do jack shit.

edited 24th Aug '13 12:32:38 PM by Thorn14

*googles* Its some pro wrestler guy I haven't heard of because I don't watch pro wrestling

But yeah, I agree with that even if devs aren't mainstream famous, they are still famous enough in small circles to get a lot hate mail that they aren't used to as normal people

And Cider's point is that it happens to people who aren't even all that famous (I don't know who Austin Aries is, either) and who might not have ever handled something like this before in their lives. They haven't built up any sort of "mental callouses" that let them shrug it off from constant exposure to negativity.

I've been there before. I was bullied in high school, by people who made threats of physical violence against me and my family to my face. If you don't know how to filter the serious ones from the bluster and react accordingly, it's a terrifying experience.

EDIT: Ninja'd by , who said basically the same thing.

edited 24th Aug '13 12:40:45 PM by Specialist290

Edit: My point was, that even if you are not famous, if you are throwing your name out for people to see you are taking a risk, more so if you also give them a face or access to your body.

But while I wait on Tuefel 4's answer I will ask no one in particular what qualifies for harassment? Telling a developer you do not like their work? I cannot remember ever saying such to a developer, in person or electronically but I could see myself saying "I do not like it because of __, __ ect" if I was at an E3 or something and was displeased with a reveal.

Exactly when does criticism become harassment or is sending your personal criticism (nonconstructive or otherwise) to developers harassment in of itself?

edited 24th Aug '13 12:44:22 PM by Cider

Modified Ura-nage, Torture Rack

It becomes harassment when thousands of people come together and send in all their hate into several places at once, and maybe when the insults start getting a little too personal.

So, it is not just insults on a person rather than a work but general criticism in high volumes?

The latter can be solved by not letting people readily access communication that can reach you with five key strikes and a click {it sht!) or alternatively not to read messages from people you do not know if it contact only takes five key strikes and a click. But when you have "please comment" on your site or take advantage of a social space lot of other people are already using it comes with the territory.

If you make something for the public, someone is not going to like it. I you want the public to know who you are, someone is inevitably not going to like you and if you want to communicate with the public those someones will let you know. That is not to say people should be name calling or condemning daughters based on her father's sprite work, but complaints will always come.

edited 24th Aug '13 7:07:06 PM by Cider

Modified Ura-nage, Torture Rack

Cider: In my last post I pretty much pointed out the same thing you did. How many people knew who that guy was? He is still getting hate mail to this day.

The problem is not just simple occasional hate mail which is unavoiadable. It is mass harassment and in some cases is becoming organized mass harassment.

I do agree reducing access or exposure of the game devs might make their lives easier to bear.

edited 24th Aug '13 2:42:08 PM by TuefelHundenIV

Who watches the watchmen?

I no longer work with the M.U.G.E.N. engine because of its community. Masses of harassing messages are nothing to envy but think of getting your identity stolen by someone you provide free service to, a hobby that puts nothing in you pocket but drains your disposable income for other their benefit, because you told them an uncomfortable truth.

I refuse to put up with it, yet people who were not just criticized, insulted or threatened but robbed, vandalized and saw this pettily motivated assault spread to family members who had nothing to do with the freeware game still went back to the M.U.G.E.N. engine, running their "databases", their forums, giving out their "tool kits", ripping sprites, coding for it and whatnot. Exactly why they have such dedication I may never know but I do know if you really have a passion emails will not keep you from it.

The situation is not exact. The freewares do not have schedules, deadlines or standards of quality to meet. They can put out what they want, at the pace they want at whatever intervals they want but they also do not have provided resources or paychecks for motivation. Austin Aries had to provided his own transportation between events across national borders and put up with 'fans' who would go out of their way to fight him for a job that consisted of getting beat up for hours at a time throughout the week for their entertainment. So he occasionally punched a few fools and carried on. He might be doing well for himself now as a main event mainstay in the second largest company in his country but he was not always so lucky and he had to endure some crap to get where he is.

I am not saying it is a good thing some fans go above and beyond our expectations to attack the very people who give us entertainment. Maybe we should make efforts to combat this tendency of our communities, but developers really committed to developing will persevere until they have no way to actually continue, they will not voluntarily quit over messages. If they cannot find that commitment in the face of fan harassment maybe they should look to their showbiz peers for inspiration.

Modified Ura-nage, Torture Rack

I won't argue on actors, but you might want to educate yourself on how the music industry actually works. Musicians, in reality, don't make all that much at all, unless they're huge megastars like Paul Mc Cartney or something (and even then, The Beatles, for example, didn't even make too much money themselves at the height of their fame, since they were being taxed at an exorbitant rate of 95% for everything they made then).

Insert witty and clever quip here. My page, as the database hates my handle.

You know, I actually knew all that but completely forgot about it. My bad.

I do think my overall point still stands, though.

While it is unacceptable to send people death threats, no matter how impotent they may be, the devs really should learn to accept that opening themselves up to public media means accepting public criticism and harassment. If you can't handle people saying what you're doing is stupid, why it is stupid, and why you are stupid for doing it, then shut down the Twitter, never visit your own forums, and keep on doing what you're doing. You'll miss out on valuable criticism, but if you can't handle getting insulted, then it's for the best.

EIGHT GLORIOUS SIDES

Also, exploding at people on Twitter is not a good response.

Not Three Laws compliant.

Okay no. No no no. Noooooooo.

There's a biiiiiiiiig difference between criticism and harassment. Criticism is GOOD. It is HEALTHY and it needs to happen. Reviews on a website? Criticism. People saying the ending for Fallout 3 on a forum sucked and it made no sense? Criticism. Talking in the global chat of your MMO saying that the new nerfs to the Paladin class are unfair? Criticism.

Maybe not good or legitimate criticism. But criticism. Criticism is something everyone on the planet needs to get better, especially at creative endeavors.

That is NOT harassment.

Making a site specifically to foment hatred for big name developers? Harassment. Spamming the official forums with death threats? Harassment. Screaming at people through text and insulting them at every turn? Harassment.

That is nothing but destructive, demoralizing behavior and it shouldn't be done or tolerated.

Conflating harassment and criticism is wrong both morally and mechanically. They are VERY different things and shutting off one should not mean avoiding both. One is healthy and necessary. The other is toxic and pointless.

Bleye knows Sabers.

And in this country can get you jailed. No shit. Our laws are strict and getting stricter.

Yeah.

Shutting off harassment should not mean shutting off criticism. People have a right not to be harassed while accepting criticism at the same time.

Bleye knows Sabers.

I wonder how much harassment is avoided by just not having a twitter account.

In my tiny role as a fan-fiction author, i can attest to my enjoyment with interacting with fans, and i'm low-key enough that i've never been hit by trolls (maybe, like, once, someone who really disagreed with my portrayal of Motoko Kusanagi...), so i can see the allure that someone who is really making something of merit might want to have fun with those who appreciate their work, but the possibilities of trolls make it much harder.

Really, they should just focus on community control. Controlled instances to interact.

I think this comment on the article is worth a look. Not quite sure how much I agree tbh:

"Frankly, I don’t understand why developers deign to tell us anything at all about their games until they’re finished.

Look at just about any other medium. Movies, books, music, whatever. The other media might as well have been conceived in a black box. We don’t know anything about them until their imminent release. They just appear on the scene, there’s not much advance discussion beyond “I wanna see that” and “can’t wait for that album.” If the work sucks, we make a point to tell our friends or give it a nasty review online. But aside from game developers and George Lucas, we generally don’t burn artists in effigy.

Take movies, for example. Its probably the closest medium to games in terms of budget and production values. We don’t get updates from movie producers like we do with games. They don’t run ideas by us, or give us the weekly cutting floor status. Instead we get trailers when the film has already wrapped and then it’s out next summer in a theater near you. We don’t know a thing about them that isn’t contained in 30 second commercials or actor promos at the 11th hour. Sure there are film nerds, but there’s no significant 2-way communication between production and even serious movie buffs.

Yet developers (with some exceptions) have to be transparent about a large portion of their game mechanics from the moment a game is announced to years after launch. It’s just expected. Nobody ever speaks out against the practice, and some games actually pride themselves on vetting just about every substantial mechanic with the public before release. Sure, we all appreciate the info, it helps save us from buying obviously bad games, but is it really necessary? Rockstar, Valve, and Blizzard are pretty tight-lipped and they seem to get away with it.

If gathering feedback is the aim, just how helpful is that community feedback when the signal-to-noise ratio of good ideas to trollbait is so pathetically low. And whatever happened to creative vision? If we were capable of designing a better game than the devs, wouldn’t we do it ourselves? Where’s the conviction? If there was ever an industry that didn’t appreciate the full meaning of the saying “what they don’t know won’t hurt them” meant, it’s this one.

The fact is, developers hang themselves out there. Every update and forum post creates expectations and contributes to the emotional investment in their product, and then, inevitably, the devs have to manage, change, and/or fail to meet those expectations. None of those are positive outcomes. The thin line between love and hate is the expectation of the emotionally involved. Assuming the professionalism and talent of developers, would they not be better off trusting their own professional instincts and, given enough time by their publishers, do their own work in the comfort of secrecy, then make their big reveal and marketing push? It’s not like they can’t do focus groups, ND As, paid QA and beta consultants.

Or is the transparency just cheap marketing to save publishing and TV bucks?

Is it lack of upper management trust/confidence in the project?

And why don’t movie studios have this problem? Pixar has never once asked me for my advice, thank God.

The internet isn’t really the problem. The anonymity just amplifies what’s already out there: a user base that has been over-stimulated, with a serious emotional investment to products long before they can truly appreciate the full depth or lack thereof of that product’s gaming experience. A user base that will often create high expectations for a product even when the developer has set their sights low, and one that will almost certainly apply standards from other passably similar games whether it’s fair to apply those standards to a completely different product or not.

It is a user base that can never be pleased 100% of the time, that really doesn’t know what it wants or what is best for it, and for which the best approach is to show it something that it had no idea it wanted or needed. Flaws, omissions, or otherwise.

I’m not sure it’s one that needs the power it has been given by developers today."

That's not true at all (though I admit it depends on whoever's making it). Filmmakers give a very revealing plot synopsis, behind-the-scenes looks, do interviews about all the stuff, show on-set pictures, tell about all the casting decisions (remember the crapshoot that was casting Mary Jane in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and the barrage of awful, hateful comments that followed?), trailers that give away even more than video game trailers do, test screenings...and there probably still a lot more stuff I'm missing too.

If the whole argument rests upon "Video game devs are the only ones who do this!" then it is an extremely fallacious argument.

But let's assume that it's an argument that works. Okay. Well, a movie/book/album/whatever doesn't require much more than active listening/watching/reading to enjoy, whereas the user will be actively participating in the medium if it's a video game, thus, will be experiencing on a deeper, more personal level, as they are more in control (or at least have the illusion thereof) of what goes on rather than the creator. Wouldn't you want to be able to know what you're interacting with and want to be able to get as much personal enjoyment out of it as possible? You can't do that with any other medium, unless it's a Choose Your Own Adventure book or something.

edited 25th Aug '13 4:59:13 PM by 0dd1

Insert witty and clever quip here. My page, as the database hates my handle.

Nintendo seems to have got the hint, waiting at least two year to estimated completion time before letting everybody know everything.

Modified Ura-nage, Torture Rack

Of course, the flip-side of things is to go the Overgrowth route, and enable fans to participate in the early design/implementation process. You'd think fans would be more receptive if the devs are willing to enable them to try out the game at various stages and enable them to provide feedback on the gameplay itself.

You can't really get rid of the deplorable garbage, but there are ways to vastly reduce it. Funnily enough, Miiverse is probably the only 'social platform' that has actually somehow managed avoid GIFT entirely, I've heard a lot of people say that its genuinely surprising how positive people are on Miiverse, and I don't think it's Nintendo's moderation that's doing it, either. Few things get people on Miiverse riled up, and one of those things happened to be the outrage over the delay of Rayman Legends (which was totally justified, all things considered).

I'd like to hear more about dem Miis then

How would you define harassment? If I were to say something along the lines of, "Deep Silver, Techland, please understand a mutilated woman is not a smart way to try and promote your game. And while we're at it can we have more launch trailers and less child killing and suicide?" would be fair enough. If I said that the mothers of who wrote the ending to Mass Effect 3 slapped the stork that delivered them then I think that was going a bit far, in retrospect, but for the fanboys who were sending death threats and forced Bio Ware to act on their forums this one's for you.

FU

STFU

edited 26th Aug '13 5:53:24 PM by tsstevens

Currently reading up My Rule Fu Is Stronger than Yours