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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

#161

Post by kevingadd »

pronlover723 wrote: post #136
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…

My experience with unions from from (a) conventions centers and (b) aerospace. In both, they are a net negative from my POV. At convention centers they inflate prices by passing rules that no one but a union worker can carry anything into the convention center. The monitor broke and your booth and you run to best buy to get a replacement. Sorry, find a unionized person to carry it in for you or GTFO. Oh, you want to…

Having done sweng in various roles, I think in aerospace I wouldn't want a UI programmer working on autopilot or fly-by-wire code, but that's just me.

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

#162

Post by me_me_me »

jayd16 wrote: post #88
SwSwinger wrote: post #4

Without 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?

Don't be silly. There's still plenty of starry eyed hope and misplaced loyalty to run a death march through the holiday season.

less and less every year.

The reality of game dev life are often discussed online and at this stage if you consider the career you'd hear about it.

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

#163

Post by danaris »

drdeca wrote: post #137
jessaustin wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money doesn't come from rich people. Most money nowadays comes from the state. Rich people might have it temporarily, but it exists independently from them. (Of course many states are controlled entirely by rich people, but at least theoretically that doesn't have to be the case.) Of course money itself is mostly an abstraction. It represents the value of human creation, and you don't need rich people to create value…

I don’t think “money doesn’t come from (in the sense of originate from) rich people” does much to address the question of “how do you propose that game development projects involving many people be funded?” . The question is not “what is the ultimate origin of the money”, but “by what mechanism does it come to be allocated to the project”. I think some would answer “the funding for the project should be democraticall…

Most game development is not funded by a rich person just handing a development studio a chunk of money and saying "build this". It's funded either off the profits of a previous endeavor, or, these days, through Kickstarter.

And while I certainly support worker cooperatives as a company model, even that doesn't require funding for new initiatives to be "democratically allocated by employees of the company". There's still usually at least some form of hierarchy.

We really need to get over the worship of rich people in this country. Having more money than God doesn't mean they should be treated like gods. In fact, what it means, in almost every case, is that they exploited workers in some form or other to get their fortune. The only exceptions I know of are people like MacKenzie Scott, who got their billions from someone who exploited workers to get their fortune.

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

#164

Post by kbenson »

toofy wrote: post #140
kbenson wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like an easy way to discount any criticism of your own actions or views, which doesn't seem a particularly healthy way to go through life. You could almost mistake it for being the same thing you're saying causes others to be not worth engaging with...

Who is saying not to analyze the event? And who is saying never to engage with others? I’m certainly not saying either of those things. Did you respond to the wrong comment?

If you assume there is nothing you can do to change someone's mind, there is little to no reason to interact with them with regards to that thing. Without that interaction, you won't get their concerns and criticisms. Not interacting with people about something you and they disagree on is a good way to make sure there's nothing they can do to change your mind, and I wouldn't be surprised if they view you in a similar way to how you described them originally.

The only solution to that is to engage, and engage with the assumption that change is possible, for both of you. Otherwise you're just lecturing someone, and that's not engagement.

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

#165

Post by curryst »

ryathal wrote: post #156
elefanten wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The grinding collecting "rpg" elements are 100% Activision influence as these are great entries to monetization. Blizzard barely had monetization on wow outside of the subscription until the merger. Every game since has been littered with some amount of monetization.

I strongly disagree with that categorization. "Grinding and collecting" has been the entire gameplay loop, since the beginning of WoW. Grind quests, so you can level up. Then grind dungeons to get some gear. Then grind Heroic dungeons to get better gear. Then grind raids to get better gear. Then grind Heroic raids to get even better gear. These days, you then grind Mythic raids to get the best gear. Then you find out it's not actually the best gear, and grind some random dungeon or PvP to get a trinket with a weird effect on it. And then by that time, the expansion is usually over, and the new one has a new set of more powerful gear, so you're back to square 1.

The phases change based on the expansion, but the core gameplay loop has always been "grind to get better gear, so you have to access to harder content that drops even better gear". There's precious little to do on a character that is max level and has cleared the highest tier of raid (kudos to those who pull it off, they aren't easy).

The monetization thing is largely Activision, or at least the degree of it is. Iirc, Blizzard dipped their toes into that water first by offering pets that you could buy or were rewards for buying Overwatch, etc. Activision did crank that knob up to 11 though.

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

#166

Post by gogopuppygogo »

chadcmulligan wrote: post #131
winphone1974 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Some unions did some bad things, therefore everything unions did is bad. That wasn't my experience with unions, I see kids now being treated very badly by dictatorial management, things that just wouldn't happen with a decent union presence. Sure unions need to be kept in line, but no unions isn't a good solution imho.

Unions have a well deserved reputation for putting seniority over merit. If we ever figure out how to Unionize with meritocracy as the focus we can solve a lot of problems for labor.

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

#167

Post by garmaine »

pjmlp wrote: post #153
HowTheStoryEnds wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a european(Belgian) I can only anecdotally tell you: no, it doesn't. They're the same instrument of collusion with the employer to keep wages down for the many in exchange for benefits of the upper few while also serving as the counterweight that keeps both the incompetent and the malicious firmly fixed in place. To put it in current days' terms: they're a major source of toxicity.

Well it works in Portugal and Germany from my point of view. I take my 40h week, health insurance, vacations anywhere I feel like, paid overtime, over some magical wage in exchange for less benefits that exploit working class. Anyone that feels it isn't their thing is free to make their own business, free of union agreements and see how they manage for themselves in the market.

> Anyone that feels it isn't their thing is free to make their own business, free of union agreements and see how they manage for themselves in the market.

In the United States this is not true. In many states once the union is established in an industry, it becomes illegal to operate a new business without the union.

We have bad union laws.

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

#168

Post by 908B64B197 »

pronlover723 wrote: post #136
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…

My experience with unions from from (a) conventions centers and (b) aerospace. In both, they are a net negative from my POV. At convention centers they inflate prices by passing rules that no one but a union worker can carry anything into the convention center. The monitor broke and your booth and you run to best buy to get a replacement. Sorry, find a unionized person to carry it in for you or GTFO. Oh, you want to…

> An aerospace it meant everyone's role was super strict and trying to do anything outside your role was against the rule.

Was it because of regulations (ie who's certified for maintenance on X airplane type) ?

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

#169

Post by 908B64B197 »

runarberg wrote: post #73
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…

Non-compete clauses are very much a thing in our industry I wouldn’t be surprised if Blizzard were to enforce—or at least threaten to enforce—them if a sizable bulk of their workers migrated to a new workplace.

Not in California.

If your jurisdiction has different laws than California for non-compete, that's a red flag.

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

#170

Post by 908B64B197 »

poisonarena wrote: post #44

From the article: "Just 20% of Activision Blizzard’s 9,500 employees are women, and leadership at the company, one of the largest video game makers in the world, is largely white and male." I am 36 years old, white male. I imagine alot of the employees there are within my age range give or take 5-10 years. For me it just makes sense. in the late 90s and early 2000s if you asked me, an obsessed computer gaming white g…

I love these stats because it doesn't account for age and CS graduation rates.

If all senior leadership has ~20 years of experience in the industry, it makes sense that it would be pretty representative of the graduating class of 20 years ago.

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