221–230 of 272 posts
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It is shocking. It was completely unheard of behavior at S2 Games. I was shocked to even be in the same market segment.
Except for the CEO?
I know my interview with Riot was more like a freshman college hazing. At the end they setup a 2nd call and I was like wtf. They said they were just testing me to see if I could handle the culture and that I passed so I can move on to the next interview. I told him to diaf and never contact me again. I'm male, I can't even imagine what its like for Women.
I have never played league of legends, but one of the things I've heard repeatedly is that there is an extremely toxic culture around the game. If true, it isn't surprising to see that the company has a toxic culture as well. I feel for the author. It is sad that her dream job turned into a nightmare. I just hope some positive change comes from this at Riot and other companies.
Not that much anymore. Riot made a good job at detecting slurs and banning their authors. Racist and homophobic slurs have completely disappeared from the game from what I observed in the recent years. To compare, I've played some games of CS:GO this week and got called "fils de pute" in one of them. In another one, a guy spammed the n word for 5 minutes before being kicked manually by his team. It's also common to h…
I'm not sure if I'd consider that a better player experience...
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> "A senior staff member proceeded to repeatedly call me sexist for not being willing to room with a man I’d never met before. At first, I thought he was kidding, but he continued to make arguments to his point. I explained why I would be more comfortable sharing a room with another woman, and told him I wasn’t enjoying the conversation and would leave if I was continued to be called sexist. The conversation continue…
I think you have to look at the quote in the context of the situation, she'd already antagonized the whole company in her first 6 months by throwing probably the most explosive political grenade that you can. Her manager clearly wasn't trying to make her room with him, he's trying to hit her with what he sees as "her own philosophy" given that he thinks she's a SJW. I don't really agree with his point but you can see…
No, very little of modern feminism starts from this perspective. And even if it did, this is a strawman.
Regardless of the manager's goal, it is vastly inappropriate. It would have been inappropriate even if the genders in the story were reversed. Arguing that the manager was so immature that they engaged in petty political bickering to make a point at the expense of a team member's emotional well being doesn't make me feel like they were any more justified.
That's not something that should happen in a professional environment.
> My whole point was that the article is very thin on specific bad experiences
From the article: "While on a team outing, the same senior staff member messaged a new employee’s girlfriend on Facebook asking if she was “DTF” - shorthand for “down to f-ck”. He thought it was a funny joke. The new staffer didn’t feel comfortable challenging him, even though his girlfriend was very uncomfortable and called to ask why she was being harassed by his boss."
But I'm sure there's a perfectly reasonable explanation for why it's appropriate for a manager to abuse a power structure to hit on an employee's girlfriend that he's never met.
Seriously, the entire article is example after example after example. Employees asking personal questions about her sex life. Abusing fans - a female just got fired for being short with fans on Twitter, but sure, forcing a cosplayer to tears is just boys being boys. Trying to run blackface in a cosplay parade. Physical advances and professional retaliation against female employees.
This isn't a conversation at this point. You're mischaracterizing her story to throw doubt on her claims. You're not arguing in good faith, you're just gaslighting.
Interesting that this one is doing well compared to the longer in-depth kotaku article a few days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17710188 - fwiw that piece has since been corroborated by a ton of former riot employees on twitter. At the risk of sounding overly cynical, this is all true and everyone knows about it, people feign disgust at these articles but we're all complicit and understanding that this is…
This is not the way things are though. I’m a manager, and I wouldn’t tolerate any of the painted stories for a second. In fact, none of the people in my network, which includes numerous large Scandinavian tech companies would tolerate anything of the sort. You do see that stuff, of course, but you see it mainly in children aged 10-15, and otherwise only in private, because anyone who keeps it up after that will be un…
Interesting that this one is doing well compared to the longer in-depth kotaku article a few days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17710188 - fwiw that piece has since been corroborated by a ton of former riot employees on twitter. At the risk of sounding overly cynical, this is all true and everyone knows about it, people feign disgust at these articles but we're all complicit and understanding that this is…
This is not the way things are though. I’m a manager, and I wouldn’t tolerate any of the painted stories for a second. In fact, none of the people in my network, which includes numerous large Scandinavian tech companies would tolerate anything of the sort. You do see that stuff, of course, but you see it mainly in children aged 10-15, and otherwise only in private, because anyone who keeps it up after that will be un…
Brandon Beck and Mark Merrill as the business guys are ultimately responsible for the culture allowed to flourish under them - they made the hires that made this possible, and not stopping it is on them. I look forward to an expedient response, because the fact that its gotten so far to come to a post like this means they've been negligent for a long time.
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> "A senior staff member proceeded to repeatedly call me sexist for not being willing to room with a man I’d never met before. At first, I thought he was kidding, but he continued to make arguments to his point. I explained why I would be more comfortable sharing a room with another woman, and told him I wasn’t enjoying the conversation and would leave if I was continued to be called sexist. The conversation continue…
I think you have to look at the quote in the context of the situation, she'd already antagonized the whole company in her first 6 months by throwing probably the most explosive political grenade that you can. Her manager clearly wasn't trying to make her room with him, he's trying to hit her with what he sees as "her own philosophy" given that he thinks she's a SJW. I don't really agree with his point but you can see…
Questioning the lack of diversity of body types for female avatars compared to make avatars is “throwing probably the most explosive political grenade that you can.”?
I don't see it. Or, I sure see how the blatantly sexist response [0] could be viewed as politically explosive, but I don't think she anticipated or reasonably should have that that would be the response.
[0] which either outright claimed or implicitly relied on each of these: (1) that avatars of a particular gender matter only to players of that gender, (2) that female players are concerned only with the attractiveness of their avatar, while men have more varied interests, (3) that only a single female body type is attractive.
> a lot of modern feminism starts from the assumption that there are zero differences between men and women
No, it doesn't, though a lot of sexist rants about feminism start with the claim that it does.
> I don't agree with it but it's just a stupid political argument he's having with her, it's not in any form sexual harassment.
Alone, it's maybe not extreme enough to constitute sexual harassment as a single event, though it's quite easily the kind of thing that with a bunch of other stuff reported in the story could easily qualify as part of a pattern constituting sexual harassment by creation of a hostile workplace.
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There's also a difference between "talking about women" and the things described in the article (and a lot of different ways of talking about women, which can be done without degrading language). Calling a coworker a "Ho" or complaining they'd not be willing to share a hotel room with an unknown man is not the same level as "they didn't like that we talk about women".
I think the Ho thing was clearly an attempt at humor, and an attempt to "bring her in" to the group. It's like an old job where I was called a coal miner (being the only guy from north England). It's a nice thing, you're taking stick but that's how male groups normally bond. Instead of taking the humor as it's intended she takes offense, and what's really happening is that instead of submitting to their culture and j…
Employment lawyers fucking love it when employees say "It was only banter", because that's almost a guarantee of a payout.
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YouTube, Facebook and others have several orders of magnitude more money to throw at the problem than an indie game company. That’s why Riot’s level of progress over the problem is so remarkable.
Throwing an 'indie' tag on a company that makes over 1 billion in revenue annually is ridiculous. And even indie companies have to pay the piper when the bad culture and tough decisions that are put off result in blowback.
With the same rate of false positives there will be enough community rage (I guarantee someone is going to find a way to have your system ban the top 10 streamers of your game after 2 days you put it in place) your players (both good and bad) will go somewhere else. :)
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It's almost like...there's some sort of gendered power imbalance in society? That might make men comfortable disregarding this? But that might not afford women the same privilege?
There are a million power imbalances in society and gender isn't close to the most important, it's just the most discussed. The real wage gap when you control for time worked and job choice is tiny. Ask yourself this - would you consider your child more lucky to be an ugly, short boy or a pretty girl? Or a boy and you have 20k a year to bring him up vs a girl and you have 50? Walking around furious as a good looking…
I dunno, I think race is discussed at least as much, and economic class even more.