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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

#171

Post by ryathal »

curryst wrote: post #165
ryathal wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

WoW is an RPG so it has those elements, you can't infuse an RPG with RPG elements.

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

#172

Post by wheelinsupial »

gogopuppygogo wrote: post #166
chadcmulligan wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How do sports unions work? They seem to have no issues with negotiating salaries that are multiples of the league minimum for superstars.

Unions I’ve worked in or am familiar with do care about seniority over merit as you mention. They also make it so new jobs need to go to internal candidates over external candidates. Furthermore, internal candidates are even provided retraining opportunities. Management needs to show there is no one in the organization capable of doing the job before opening it externally.

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

#173

Post by danaris »

shapefrog wrote: post #146
runawaybottle wrote: post #46

I just saw the Kotaku article about Blizzard devs having their own ‘Cosby Suite’: https://kotaku.com/inside-blizzard-developers-infamous-bill-... You know, I’m not condoning or excusing anyone, but it might be time to stop drinking together as coworkers. You cannot come up with this kinda shit if your sober. Keep the beer out the office, keep the parties an hour long at most. We can’t handle it, it’s obvious.

So basically no friends at work? But still be there for 16 hours a day ...

If you can't be friends with someone without alcohol, then you might need some help.

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

#174

Post by pjmlp »

garmaine wrote: post #167
pjmlp wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is sad that one of the countries where the union movement was born out of the abuse from companies during the industrial age revolution, a subject that Charlie Chaplin even joked about, has turned into an union hate country.

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

#175

Post by runarberg »

908B64B197 wrote: post #169
runarberg wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I doubt an average tech worker knows the extent of the non-compete clause in their contract. And I doubt anybody except skilled lawyers know whether the non-compete clause will hold if they are moving to a new startup which is registered in Delaware. It is enough for Activision to threaten to sue, and surely that will deter many enough workers from moving together that they wont be able to move as a team.

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

#176

Post by 908B64B197 »

runarberg wrote: post #175
908B64B197 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not in California. If your jurisdiction has different laws than California for non-compete, that's a red flag.

I doubt an average tech worker knows the extent of the non-compete clause in their contract. And I doubt anybody except skilled lawyers know whether the non-compete clause will hold if they are moving to a new startup which is registered in Delaware. It is enough for Activision to threaten to sue, and surely that will deter many enough workers from moving together that they wont be able to move as a team.

> And I doubt anybody except skilled lawyers know whether the non-compete clause will hold if they are moving to a new startup which is registered in Delaware

Doesn't matter if the work is performed in California.

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

#177

Post by runarberg »

908B64B197 wrote: post #176
runarberg wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt an average tech worker knows the extent of the non-compete clause in their contract. And I doubt anybody except skilled lawyers know whether the non-compete clause will hold if they are moving to a new startup which is registered in Delaware. It is enough for Activision to threaten to sue, and surely that will deter many enough workers from moving together that they wont be able to move as a team.

> And I doubt anybody except skilled lawyers know whether the non-compete clause will hold if they are moving to a new startup which is registered in Delaware Doesn't matter if the work is performed in California.

The average worker—including my self—doesn’t know that and can therefor be intimidated by a potential law suit.

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

#178

Post by garmaine »

pjmlp wrote: post #174
garmaine wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It is sad that one of the countries where the union movement was born out of the abuse from companies during the industrial age revolution, a subject that Charlie Chaplin even joked about, has turned into an union hate country.

Arguably we have had the industrial successes we have because of the caution about unions. Unions definitely have incentives which hold back innovation and productivity increases (in the economic sense).

But also I didn't say union laws are bad. There are some specific industries/occupations in which unions are A Good Thing. What I said is that the laws we have around unions are really non-ideal and lead to worse outcomes for everybody.

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

#179

Post by drdeca »

danaris wrote: post #163
drdeca wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

> Most game development is not funded by a rich person just handing a development studio a chunk of money and saying "build this".

I didn’t think they were; I thought we were just talking about people who own (controlling shares in), or lead, companies, and their influence over the processes of the development of the games (both in terms of the working environment, and the content of the game).

Perhaps I read over a previous part of the thread too quickly?

I’m confused as to what the disagreement is about? It is in some way about “capitalists” and game development funding, but like, everyone understands that games aren’t funded by a single person paying a group of people to develop a particular game. What is the actual disagreement here?

____

Regarding the worship of the wealthy , that would, of course, be idolatry, and bad. I’m confident that I’m not doing that.

____ Regarding “exploited workers” : perhaps due to me being perhaps strongly biased, I don’t really, feel compelled by this phrase. It means very little to me. When people say “exploited workers”, as far as I can tell, all it means is “profited by employing people” + the speaker disapproves of that. The emotive language doesn’t compel me to agree with their disapproval.

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

#180

Post by 908B64B197 »

runarberg wrote: post #177
908B64B197 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And I doubt anybody except skilled lawyers know whether the non-compete clause will hold if they are moving to a new startup which is registered in Delaware Doesn't matter if the work is performed in California.

The average worker—including my self—doesn’t know that and can therefor be intimidated by a potential law suit.

I wish engineering programs added a law crash course: types of partnerships, how equity comp works and basic employment laws.

At good schools you can generally enroll in one as an elective.

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