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Activision Blizzard employees walk out over harassment and ‘frat boy’ culture

theguardian.com

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Re: Activision Blizzard employees walk out over harassment and ‘frat boy’ culture

#111

Post by dang »

fhjkkkg wrote: post #36
drdeadringer wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Did the walkouts at Google change anything? I was a "TVC" at Google several times. One of those times was during the walkout period. Even though I had no way of finding out about it until a lucky "right now in 3 minutes" time period, I participated. Whilst the walkouts may not have changed much on corporate or the outsourced "side-corporates" [the contract companies], it did change myself. For decades I've heard of…

If this isn’t parody, and I am guessing it’s not, then it’s still a perfect depiction of what changed in the American left in the 1960s. Politics became more about changing the orientation of one’s mind than the orientation of one’s society. Walkouts are worthless.

Could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

Re: Activision Blizzard employees walk out over harassment and ‘frat boy’ culture

#112

Post by underseacables »

winphone1974 wrote: post #27
chadcmulligan wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unions do this, they negotiate agreements that are fair and equitable for the members. I grew up with unions and have seen them go out of favour, and the practices that caused the unions in the first place are rising again. The part I find surprising/despicable is how much money is put towards denigrating unions so that the workers think they're bad - the recent amazon vote comes to mind.

Well I grew up on the other side of unions where my parents couldn't get jobs because a strong union protected those lucky enough to get in early, with no concern for their skills or performance. The same behaviors that people here are so shocked by are busy as common in the old school unions you're proposing as the solution.

My grandfather worked in a Coopermill and you had to be a member of the union. If you tried to leave the union, as a few people tried, your legs got broken. Unions can be effective, but not if you forced everyone to join it.

Re: Activision Blizzard employees walk out over harassment and ‘frat boy’ culture

#113

Post by underseacables »

dbsmith83 wrote: post #64
kevingadd wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This specific criticism goes both ways and isn't unique to unions, though. Even in a non-union workplace, the bosses' friends are likely to be protected from termination despite bad performance. Maybe one of your parents ends up sick or injured so their performance at work is suffering and you really want them to be protected while they get through that temporary hurdle instead of being laid off and replaced with che…

> Even in a non-union workplace, the bosses' friends are likely to be protected from termination despite bad performance Maybe one or two, but not a large proportion of an aging workforce riding purely on the protection of the union

I think the federal government is a good example of what happens when you have a union that protects bad employees. It’s very hard to get fired from the government, because the union protects the bad with the good. A great example are the rubber rooms where they have to put bad teachers because the union forbids them from being fired.

Unions had their day, now they are just slush funds and protections for bad people.

Re: Activision Blizzard employees walk out over harassment and ‘frat boy’ culture

#114

Post by xsmasher »

epicureanideal wrote: post #12

Is there a VC out there that can just throw a few tens of millions of dollars at these employees and literally just teleport them from Blizzard to NewBlizzard in the same roles in a new company with a culture they prefer? I'm actually surprised this isn't "a thing". If a large percentage of a well known, profitable company doesn't agree with a direction it's taking... why doesn't a VC or private equity just help fina…

That's what Uncapped Games, Front Giant, Dreamhaven, Lightforge, Bonfire, etc. are.

Re: Activision Blizzard employees walk out over harassment and ‘frat boy’ culture

#115

Post by IntelMiner »

bryan_w wrote: post #54
trs8080 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

does being written up in the Guardian not count as being noticed?

Not really, because it's the Guardian, but in a better newspaper, sure

What's wrong with The Guardian?

Re: Activision Blizzard employees walk out over harassment and ‘frat boy’ culture

#116

Post by nientedev »

poisonarena wrote: post #97
goldenManatee wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You identify with dev and gamer culture and feel that it reciprocates a sense of belonging. Therefore you have no reason to protest; all your interests align and not protesting is the path of least expended energy. The people complaining do so because they too identify with a culture of devs and/or gamers, however they feel there is an overwhelming majority that identifies its members who are alike and yet does not a…

I totally agree with you, at least the first part. I think female gamers on the EQ servers were actually treated better than the male gamers and were often 'twinked'(maybe they weren't really females).. I dont think there is anything wrong with a bunch of middle aged white men doing what they want, making a game they wanted to play when they were younger. If these 'others' (who I think are included in gaming/gamedev…

This is weird, but I am actually a developer (and a woman) who works on EverQuest.

MMOs are quite difficult to make. There is a reason the most successful MMOs to date are quite.. old. FFXIV is the newest very successful MMO, but suffered greatly at initial release, which is it's own story. EQ, and WoW, both benefit from the 20+ years of development into their current architectures that don't need to be written today, just maintained. Adding something to these games now is building on top of a very established game which already has many features people want in a new game.

Most new MMO projects fail. In fact, the Amazon MMO project New World which was one of the game projects Amazon didn't cancel recently, has many former EQ developers. The MMO development world is small.

Aside from that, going off and starting your own game company, getting funding, building all the technology needed to run a game (payment, logins, account use, etc) is a lot of work and investment which these existing companies have built decades ago and maintain. It may also interest/surprise you to know that women generally do not get much VC funding (see https://hbr.org/2021/02/women-led-startups-received-just-2-3...), so I am not sure this idea works out that well in reality.

Re: Activision Blizzard employees walk out over harassment and ‘frat boy’ culture

#117

Post by Tiktaalik »

elefanten wrote: post #7
nielsbot wrote: post #3

Wouldn'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.

As someone in the games industry that has seen the stuff that foreign "helper" studios "contribute" I do not feel this is likely...

Re: Activision Blizzard employees walk out over harassment and ‘frat boy’ culture

#118

Post by georgeecollins »

user68858788 wrote: post #16
epicureanideal wrote: post #12

Is there a VC out there that can just throw a few tens of millions of dollars at these employees and literally just teleport them from Blizzard to NewBlizzard in the same roles in a new company with a culture they prefer? I'm actually surprised this isn't "a thing". If a large percentage of a well known, profitable company doesn't agree with a direction it's taking... why doesn't a VC or private equity just help fina…

Several senior employees left the company to form new studios, taking several people with them. Ben Brode and Mike Morheim for example.

Frost Giant.

Re: Activision Blizzard employees walk out over harassment and ‘frat boy’ culture

#119

Post by aaron-santos »

shadowgovt wrote: post #52
breck wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we had Freedom of Ideas, then yes, you could pull this off. But we don't have that. We have copyrights and patents. Those with capital have a lot more freedom with ideas. Those without, don't. If we abolish copyright and patent laws ( https://www.reddit.com/r/ifa ), then workers will have a lot more power.

Video games are one part idea and three parts implementation. And the talent at Blizzard has no lack of good ideas.

One part idea? I've been told that "ideas are essentially worthless" for the 20 years I've been developing software. What changed?

Re: Activision Blizzard employees walk out over harassment and ‘frat boy’ culture

#120

Post by garmaine »

nielsbot wrote: post #3

Wouldn'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…

Unions work where labor is interchangeable. That is definitely not the case in game industry, where people are highly specialized and super creative.
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