Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 199 posts

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

#181

Post by blitz_skull »

trs8080 wrote: post #21
blitz_skull wrote: post #8

eSports 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?

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

I would say they were probably noticed because of the Guardian, not vice versa. No real way to know, but I’m sure no one simply noticed a LACK of tweets.

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

#182

Post by blitz_skull »

TameAntelope wrote: post #32
blitz_skull wrote: post #8

eSports 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?

Is your journal read and watched by millions of people? C'mon, we can do better than this.

If I didn’t write in my journal would anyone know? Would anyone care? No.

That was my point. I doubt anyone cared that some streamers stopped tweeting.

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

#183

Post by blitz_skull »

ikr678 wrote: post #17
blitz_skull wrote: post #8

eSports 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?

Withholding content in solidarity sort of hurts Blizzard's attempts to keep interest in their E-sport franchises. I'd prefer they didn't actually stream either, but they make their living from Blizzard products in a more precarious way than the direct employees do.

I’d hardly classify NOT TWEETING as withholding content. Withholding streams? Sure, yeah I could see that. But tweets?

No one is sitting on the edge of their chair waiting for their favorite streamer to TWEET something.

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

#184

Post by esyir »

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.

I'm fine with that. Western games have by large fallen off the radar for me, at least those run by large companies. Only a few really stand out right now.

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

#185

Post by esyir »

pjmlp wrote: post #138
underseacables wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In Europe many appreciate the benefits they get from union agreements, even without belonging to them. Ironically I have never heard of anyone going to management stating that they wanted to be out of the agreement that was settled for the industry they were in, regardless of their actual job.

You can disagree with something because of second order effects.

If the government came out with a monthly 10k usd handout, I'd call it shortsighted and dumb. Doesn't meant I'm not taking it regardless.

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

#186

Post by esyir »

MattRix wrote: post #108
noirbot wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That... seems optimistic about the state of the modern average engineer at Blizzard. Which isn't to say that folks are bad at their jobs, but it's not as if it's a company that's done well-received and breakthrough modern game design in the last 5 years. If anything, the folks who made the company what it was either were the people being protested or left 5-10 years ago, or both.

This ignores how Blizzard works. They operate on glacial time scales. They released, Overwatch five years ago, which was fantastic. They haven’t released any new games since then.

There's been a noted downward trend though. See the sc2 expansions and the remastered games.

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

#187

Post by lmm »

underseacables wrote: post #113
dbsmith83 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> A great example are the rubber rooms where they have to put bad teachers because the union forbids them from being fired.

Actually teachers in those were those who had been accused of misconduct and then either they were awaiting arbitration, mostly because the state wasn't paying their agreed proportion of arbitration fees, or arbitration had cleared them and the state wasn't returning them to their jobs as agreed. Some may have been bad teachers but most were just people the admins had taken a dislike to. Blaming the unions for that is pure propaganda.

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

#188

Post by seanhunter »

garmaine wrote: post #135
seanhunter wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are unions in the film industry for example which seems extremely comparable.

Not for the creative roles. Maybe you're thinking of guilds? They're both forms of collective representation, but quite different on the ground.

They certainly are a union and describe themselves as such.

For example, from https://www.wga.org/the-guild/about-us/guide-to-the-guild

"We are the Writers Guild of America West (WGAW), a labor union composed of the thousands of writers who write the content for television shows, movies, news programs, documentaries, animation, and Internet and mobile phones (new media) that keep audiences constantly entertained and informed. "

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

#189

Post by pjmlp »

garmaine wrote: post #178
pjmlp wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 out…

> Unions definitely have incentives which hold back innovation and productivity increases (in the economic sense).

I happen to see it in other way.

Then again, I surely wouldn't like to be on US during the McCarthy era.

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

#190

Post by toofy »

kbenson wrote: post #164
toofy wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Again, Im just not following. This has little to do with the point my comment was making.

I said, anyone who would tune out The Guardian article as noise because they disagree with the topic is not the target audience of the walkout.

How much someone chooses to spend their personal energy or personal time “debating” contrarians just isn’t relevant to my comment…

You seem determined to change the subject away from who the walkout was for into this boring and repeatedly beat-to-death discussion, so, here’s where I stand: You can say they somehow have an obligation to spend their valuable time and valuable energies engaging with people who would tune it out as “just more SJW noise” or whatever, but I would personally argue, if they’re already tuning out an article because they disagree, rather than wasting time on them, there are thousands of ways to better use one’s time.

The second part of my argument would be, I understand that some of these people who would ignore it as noise have convinced themselves that everything has to do with them. But they should be asking themselves, “Why do I think this walkout was to convince me?” and “Why do I think they would spend their time and energy to do this walkout for me?” and “Why do I think my opinion is even relevant to this company where I don’t work and people I don’t even know?” and then, they if they’re honest with themselves, at least one of the conclusions they’ll come to is, “omg, im so vain that i believe these people i don’t know at a company i don’t work for should be seeking my approval…” which should lead themselves to ask the most important question of all…

But yeah, this topic of “you ought to spend your limited personal time and personal resources convincing contrarians” is boring af. we’ve read it in comment threads tens of thousands of times by now and with people who still can’t figure out how to break out of the elementary level loop they’ve gotten themselves stuck in.

So to sum it up, people who have tuned out the article as noise because they disagree are absolutely not the target audience. And if they find this basic fact troubling, they should reorient themselves to figure out why they would even imagine they are.

Post reply on HN