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The problem of game developers receiving abusive messages

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Re: The problem of game developers receiving abusive messages

#21

Post by arkades »

vvanders wrote: post #16
arkades wrote: post #6

I don’t understand what forces devs to participate directly in this public discourse. Barring those so small they can’t hire someone to run interference, why precisely are you publicly interacting with your customers? Anyone who works with the mass public, be they cashiers or physicians, knows damn well that the Public is terrible. Don’t give them a hotline into your head.

Did you read the article? He laid it out pretty clearly: > All of this is hardest on indies for two reasons. Firstly, because they are generally at the coal face of their games. They don’t have a marketing person standing between the hostile feedback and their work — it all comes in direct and unfiltered. Secondly most indies don’t make mass market games that appeal to the broadest cross section of players, and that…

Did you read my comment?

“Barring those so small they can’t hire someone to run interference,”

Let’s both appreciate the moment.

Re: The problem of game developers receiving abusive messages

#22

Post by guildwriter »

dorkwood wrote: post #13
jancsika wrote: post #4

Do all game devs experience similar types of abuse, or only the devs of games with environments in which the developer's company is attempting to monetize the player as they move through the game? For example-- there is some beautiful sidescroller game I've seen where the animation looks like old-school Fleischer studio cartoons. Do devs of games like that get abuse from players, too?

The first tweet they link to is directed at the makers of 'Firewatch', which doesn't have any in-app purchases at all. http://www.firewatchgame.com/ If Firewatch isn't safe, I'm not sure anything is.

The Firewatch devs took a public stand on the Pewdiepie drama and got hit in the head as a result. It went far beyond Twitter harassment and their Steam reviews got bombarded with negative reviews. The hate campaign they got has nothing to do with their development or business practices.

Re: The problem of game developers receiving abusive messages

#23

Post by dasil003 »

This is just an ugly side of humanity that has always been there, but is magnified by the combination of anonymity, disenfranchisement, and ever more addicting Skinner-box style entertainment.

We are a tribal species; in the past this type of behavior would be socialized out of you or else you would be a recluse. You didn't have the opportunity to sit in your own filth and project your self-loathing onto anyone across the Internet.

As a species we're just not emotionally equipped to deal with the current reality.

Re: The problem of game developers receiving abusive messages

#24

Post by InclinedPlane »

dasil003 wrote: post #23

This is just an ugly side of humanity that has always been there, but is magnified by the combination of anonymity, disenfranchisement, and ever more addicting Skinner-box style entertainment. We are a tribal species; in the past this type of behavior would be socialized out of you or else you would be a recluse. You didn't have the opportunity to sit in your own filth and project your self-loathing onto anyone acros…

That's a cop-out. This isn't genetic, this isn't universal, this is a cultural trend.

Re: The problem of game developers receiving abusive messages

#25

Post by arkades »

Pfhreak wrote: post #17
arkades wrote: post #6

I don’t understand what forces devs to participate directly in this public discourse. Barring those so small they can’t hire someone to run interference, why precisely are you publicly interacting with your customers? Anyone who works with the mass public, be they cashiers or physicians, knows damn well that the Public is terrible. Don’t give them a hotline into your head.

Games have credits. Developers have Twitter accounts. Devs are excited about their work, share what they are working on. The devs are not seeking these interactions at all.

All of my patients know my name. It’s on a badge, with a picture ID and all. This includes drug seekers, people looking for a suit, a handout, and just a general smattering of crazy folks. Yet they don’t manage to find my fb, my Twitter, my LinkedIn.

Part of this is that devs plug deeply into social media, personally and professionally, and have few (or no) firewalls between the two.

Unless you -have- to be the public face of a product, your professional media interactions shouldn’t be accessible to the masses. Your private definitely shouldn’t be. They need to be heavily firewalled. If I can trivially message the lead dev of my favorite game, he’s done something wrong. If I can reach him on a private account he can’t just burn or ignore, he’s done a lot wrong.

The internet hosts the majority of people on earth: it’s a very, very long tail of crazy, poorly socialized, immature, etc. There is no changing that if you are accessible to seven billion people, some tiny percent of that will amount to an overwhelming amount of shit.

The answer is jealously guarding your privacy and communications channels, which isn’t something I’ve seen in these discussions.

Im not trying to victim blame here. I just don’t see as fruitful lamenting something that boils down to “dealing with the public en masse sucks.” It does, and it will:

Re: The problem of game developers receiving abusive messages

#27

Post by InclinedPlane »

Cafey wrote: post #8

"I want [something] and I want it now." This is what I hear from reading most of those angry tweets/comments. Sadly, sometimes they are simply shouting because the game is not what they were hyped about. Maybe we are over-hyping games to get pre-orders in? I remember a time when the first time I heard about a game was when it was actually on the store shelves (good ol' boxes). Now there are dev-blogs and the likes ye…

That's victim blaming. Hype is irrelevant. The problem here is not just entitlement, it's that some people feel perfectly ok leveling abuse at other people. This isn't a new phenomenon. There's always been a subset of "I need to speak to the manager" folks who have been willing to treat individuals doing certain jobs in an inhumane and abusive fashion. Today the boundaries on those sorts of interactions are drastically changing, and the levels of abuse that are commonplace have grown much greater. A fast food worker running into an irate customer who avows that they will kill them and rape their family has always been an extraordinarily rare occurrence, today that sort of behavior is commonplace in many contexts and especially in the realm of game development. That doesn't mean everyone is doing it, but the fact that it's tolerated and ubiquitous means that it has a universal impact on those affected.

Re: The problem of game developers receiving abusive messages

#28

Post by vvanders »

arkades wrote: post #21
vvanders wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read the article? He laid it out pretty clearly: > All of this is hardest on indies for two reasons. Firstly, because they are generally at the coal face of their games. They don’t have a marketing person standing between the hostile feedback and their work — it all comes in direct and unfiltered. Secondly most indies don’t make mass market games that appeal to the broadest cross section of players, and that…

Did you read my comment? “Barring those so small they can’t hire someone to run interference,” Let’s both appreciate the moment.

You're assuming that game developers want to live in some sort of isolated ivory tower.

Everyone I knew who got into the industry did it to share the joy that gaming brought them to other people. It's an explicitly social industry in that respect.

Also, I don't know of a single place that can afford to run interference for every single dev. Even on the large AAA stuff I worked on we were lucky to have 1 or 2 marketing people who were even aware the dev team existed.

Re: The problem of game developers receiving abusive messages

#29

Post by Pfhreak »

arkades wrote: post #25
Pfhreak wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Games have credits. Developers have Twitter accounts. Devs are excited about their work, share what they are working on. The devs are not seeking these interactions at all.

All of my patients know my name. It’s on a badge, with a picture ID and all. This includes drug seekers, people looking for a suit, a handout, and just a general smattering of crazy folks. Yet they don’t manage to find my fb, my Twitter, my LinkedIn. Part of this is that devs plug deeply into social media, personally and professionally, and have few (or no) firewalls between the two. Unless you -have- to be the publi…

Think about scale. A good indie game might have hundreds of thousands or millions of players. Is that the same order of magnitude of patients you see?

Re: The problem of game developers receiving abusive messages

#30

Post by arkades »

Pfhreak wrote: post #29
arkades wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of my patients know my name. It’s on a badge, with a picture ID and all. This includes drug seekers, people looking for a suit, a handout, and just a general smattering of crazy folks. Yet they don’t manage to find my fb, my Twitter, my LinkedIn. Part of this is that devs plug deeply into social media, personally and professionally, and have few (or no) firewalls between the two. Unless you -have- to be the publi…

Think about scale. A good indie game might have hundreds of thousands or millions of players. Is that the same order of magnitude of patients you see?

No, of course it isn’t.

But then, I’m pseudonymous or anonymous everywhere, and do my level best to keep my pseudonyms unrelated to one another across multiple platforms.

As opposed to letting my patients trivially connect my real name to my various social media channels.

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