Activision Blizzard employees walk out over harassment and ‘frat boy’ culture
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Re: Activision Blizzard employees walk out over harassment and ‘frat boy’ culture
#2I'm going to take a minority position here and say that I've always hated their games.
To me they're somewhat akin to cigarette or vape companies or even Facebook... They're driving addiction and causing people to pour their lives or at least their time down the drain.
How widespread are these types of issues in other game companies?
Re: Activision Blizzard employees walk out over harassment and ‘frat boy’ culture
#3Wouldn't forming a union help them better negotiate as a group?
FTA: "Activision Blizzard employees are also calling for an end to mandatory arbitration in employee contracts, which prevent workers from taking conflicts with their employer to court, policies to improve representation of women and marginalized groups, the publication of salary data, and an audit of the company by a diversity, equity and inclusion taskforce."
Re: Activision Blizzard employees walk out over harassment and ‘frat boy’ culture
#4Without harassing frat boy culture, how else could they convince developers to work long hours for such little pay compared to the rest of the industry?
Re: Activision Blizzard employees walk out over harassment and ‘frat boy’ culture
#5I'm going to take a minority position here and say that I've always hated their games. To me they're somewhat akin to cigarette or vape companies or even Facebook... They're driving addiction and causing people to pour their lives or at least their time down the drain. How widespread are these types of issues in other game companies?
This is an odd, blanket statement considering 1. The quality/longevity of their games 2. The variance in genres they produce games in.
Comparing Starcraft to Candy Crush may help elucidate how off you are with the vape/fb comparison.
Re: Activision Blizzard employees walk out over harassment and ‘frat boy’ culture
#6Did the walkouts at Google change anything? Not only did Sundar enable the disgusting, predatory behavior of Vic Gundotra and Andy Rubin, but as far as I can tell, he’s still a darling of the press. Even on HN Sundar and Google get the kid gloves despite the abhorrence of the culture they created.
Walkouts are pointless. True Employee organization and collective bargaining is the only answer to holding execs accountable , whether it’s at Google, Activision, or anywhere else.
Re: Activision Blizzard employees walk out over harassment and ‘frat boy’ culture
#7Wouldn't forming a union help them better negotiate as a group? FTA: "Activision Blizzard employees are also calling for an end to mandatory arbitration in employee contracts, which prevent workers from taking conflicts with their employer to court, policies to improve representation of women and marginalized groups, the publication of salary data, and an audit of the company by a diversity, equity and inclusion task…
It sure as hell would accelerate the outsourcing of game development, which has rapidly growing capacity outside of the US & Western Europe. We're already very near the tipping point where non-Western studios will produce >50% of global industry revenue.
Re: Activision Blizzard employees walk out over harassment and ‘frat boy’ culture
#8eSports teams and streamers didn’t post on social media for the duration of the walk out.
Am I missing something? Was this supposed to do literally anything to support it?
I’m genuinely puzzled. That’s like saying I stopped writing in my journal for the duration of women’s suffrage “in solidarity”.
Aren’t you supposed to do something people will notice?
Re: Activision Blizzard employees walk out over harassment and ‘frat boy’ culture
#9I'm going to take a minority position here and say that I've always hated their games. To me they're somewhat akin to cigarette or vape companies or even Facebook... They're driving addiction and causing people to pour their lives or at least their time down the drain. How widespread are these types of issues in other game companies?
This is an odd, blanket statement considering 1. The quality/longevity of their games 2. The variance in genres they produce games in. Comparing Starcraft to Candy Crush may help elucidate how off you are with the vape/fb comparison.
GP, while phrased a bit stridently, isn't totally off base here. Arguably, Blizzard led the charge in proliferating RPG systems into virtually all other genres and they proved the popular power of "grind" based systems.
The original RTS games (Warcraft 1-3, Starcraft 1) did not really contain these systems. But virtually everything else Blizzard has produced (including Starcraft 2) has grinding & collecting in it.
As mentioned, this spread to other genres, infusing Activision's flagship Call of Duty franchise with grinding & leveling. The mobile division, King, does all these things as a matter of course -- it's nearly 100% of the business and design models in mobile gaming.
To be fair, you can't blame Blizzard entirely for spreading these design choices. It was an industry wide shift. But they were one of the shining golden examples of its success, and they sure leaned into themselves.
Assuming gp was referring to these mechanics, there's a lively debate to be had about propensity to spur addictive behaviors.
Re: Activision Blizzard employees walk out over harassment and ‘frat boy’ culture
#10Without harassing frat boy culture, how else could they convince developers to work long hours for such little pay compared to the rest of the industry?
You can still engender a sense of camaraderie that makes it easy to exploit passionate engineers and artists without resorting to creep shit, but it's probably harder.