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

Six Months at Riot Games

meagan-marie.tumblr.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 272 posts

Re: Six Months at Riot Games

#231

Post by chronid »

adn wrote: post #55
shawn wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I assure you it’s uncontrollable. There are millions of games played per day on Dota. How do you propose to fairly evaluate each of them?

The same way ubisoft moderates rainbow six siege: ban anyone who uses slurs etc very quickly. It's not an unsolvable problem.

The chat is not the only way you can troll your team mates and cause them to rage quit (or scream at you and get banned themselves). I would actually say that the griefing created by people using slurs is actually pretty small.

You can be silent and ruin hundreds of games. Distinguishing that from genuinely bad players is not really easy.

Re: Six Months at Riot Games

#232

Post by mikestew »

lsmarigo wrote: post #40

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…

people feign disgust at these articles but we're all complicit and understanding that this is way things are

Speak for yourself. As a manager, I've shut down far, far more innocuous things than described in the article. And now that I'm old and cranky, I'll call out those above me just as easily.

The problem is that I don't work at Riot, and likely never will, so I can hardly be accused of "knowing it's all true" nor of being complicit. I've briefly consulted at shops full of "bros", and usually ski-daddled right out (I mean, yeesh, do you never tire of being eternally 13 years old?). If they were over there calling each other "cocksuckers", I must not have stuck around long enough to find out.

So you're right about one thing: nothing will change, because decent people won't work at those places. Unfortunately, while all the decent human beings work elsewhere, some wide-eyed woman shows up once in a while.

Re: Six Months at Riot Games

#233

Post by beart »

zimablue wrote: post #148
trowawee wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an enormous gap between calling someone a sex worker and calling them a coal miner. There's an even-more-enormous gap between calling most of your team "bros" and calling the one woman on your team a sex worker. That is not in-group bonding, that's targeted, gender-based harassment.

Ho isn't used in the West as a pejorative, almost ever. It's far more often used playfully, and often by women themselves. Only a very offended culture would cause you to take it seriously. And honestly, Coal Mining is a job with like social status zero and sex work status -1. My dad actually was a coal miner and it wasn't great. Even if you mindlessly take it literally it's not that far off.

> Ho isn't used in the West as a pejorative, almost ever.

I live in 'The West' and I refute this claim, regardless of how it was used in this specific context.

Re: Six Months at Riot Games

#234

Post by ethbro »

shawn wrote: post #184
ethbro wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I absolutely appreciate the scale of the problem, and the adversarial nature of peer reporting. My day job has those same characteristics. Millions of games per week * 30 minutes per game * avg lines of chat per minute = manageable w/ a proper streaming architecture Especially when you have access to a massive, perfectly-scaled, distributed edge compute system . (i.e. running minimal, performance-optimized models on…

You're quite cocky. That's not an insult. I think if you cut your teeth on this problem for a couple months, you'd look back on this comment with some mixed feelings. When a system is inherently toxic, there is no way to make it not-toxic short of coming up with a different substance. We can't make nuclear waste pure just because we wish it were. This is a very similar situation to this particular type of game. When…

Toxicity is learned and reinforced (or not) behavior.

In the same way that HN comments are generally pretty constructive and charitable towards each other (and substantially more so than similar forums), so does negativity spread.

I'm not expecting any company to be able to turn their community into a paragon of empathy overnight. But I do believe that putting systems in place that punish poor behavior and reward good behavior has an impact in the long run.

From my first comment: > Therefore, companies simply aren't prioritizing [addressing the problem]. And won't, as long as the impact of toxic users isn't impacting the bottom line.

Because I honestly don't believe they care, in any non-monetary sense. They're essentially amoral. If they can make a billion dollars while people shout racist or sexist slurs at each other, they're fine with that.

And that's the primary annoyance I have with game companies. We hear "The player base is caustic, and we can't do anything about it, because it's too hard." When I believe reality is closer to "We ignored this problem as an industry (boy will be boys!), and now we don't want to be blamed for helping raise a generation of borderline sociopaths."

And yes, I spent many a college evening watching friends troll internet strangers in DotA, pre-LoL. So I'm familiar with the concept and execution.

Re: Six Months at Riot Games

#235

Post by taurath »

shawn wrote: post #119
lubonay wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then again, you are not the company. If anybody speaks for the company as a whole, it's the CEO.

Sure, but bucketing a company as racist just because someone said the n word once in 2009 isn’t productive. It’s like calling pewdiepie racist.

That guy is responsible for hiring everyone under them, and checking shitty culture.

Re: Six Months at Riot Games

#236

Post by dragonwriter »

zimablue wrote: post #148
trowawee wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an enormous gap between calling someone a sex worker and calling them a coal miner. There's an even-more-enormous gap between calling most of your team "bros" and calling the one woman on your team a sex worker. That is not in-group bonding, that's targeted, gender-based harassment.

Ho isn't used in the West as a pejorative, almost ever. It's far more often used playfully, and often by women themselves. Only a very offended culture would cause you to take it seriously. And honestly, Coal Mining is a job with like social status zero and sex work status -1. My dad actually was a coal miner and it wasn't great. Even if you mindlessly take it literally it's not that far off.

> Ho isn't used in the West as a pejorative, almost ever.

Yes, it is. Most often, IME, with a derogatory label indicating lack of intelligence alongside it, but even by itself it is.

Re: Six Months at Riot Games

#237

Post by ethbro »

shadefinale wrote: post #220
ethbro wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I absolutely appreciate the scale of the problem, and the adversarial nature of peer reporting. My day job has those same characteristics. Millions of games per week * 30 minutes per game * avg lines of chat per minute = manageable w/ a proper streaming architecture Especially when you have access to a massive, perfectly-scaled, distributed edge compute system . (i.e. running minimal, performance-optimized models on…

On the base level, it is not very hard to examine a chat log and glean who is being blatantly toxic from the log. A big problem with games like League of Legends or Dota 2 is that you can easily be toxic or cause your teammates to be toxic without chatting or using voice comms. There are very common trolling methods that do not require any use of chat with the express purpose of trying to incite toxicity in other pla…

Granted. And I'd be curious on the correlation between community toxcity and individual agency in competitive games. Possibly also game length.

It certainly feels like modern team games engender a different level of hate than, say, Quake III or Unreal Tournament.

Global matchmaking vs hosted servers probably haven't helped.

Re: Six Months at Riot Games

#238

Post by belorn »

TooBrokeToBeg wrote: post #210
belorn wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing will change because no one addressing or discussing the underlying causes for a culture that is drenched in gender roles and a corresponding social status ladder. All focus is being spent on either attacking "them" in as much generalized way as possible or defending "us" and the product of that fight is almost always status quo and further polarization. Imagine if we instead used classical scientific method o…

> Nothing will change because no one addressing or discussing the underlying causes What exactly are you describing? I don't see the same world you do. These stories are top concern and referenced in almost every forum from niche game communities to political discourse (ie everywhere). The underlying causes are assessed and measured in various countries (eg http://www.thejournal.ie/gender-equality-countries-stem-girl…

There is plenty of article like that which explore a single area of gender segregation and ask the question of why, and those that are close to a popular political subject like STEM get attention. What is missing is the larger context where those studies are cross referenced from multiple professions and applied with behavioral science to find common theory of underlying causes.

In the context of this (and the linked) article however, there is not much serious discussion that explore the cause of work place harassment. If I take a random article on school bullying it will contain a magnitude of deeper thinking and serious discussion compared to ones like this. A major reason for that is that school bullying is not politically polarized into a them vs us narrative, and society in general seems to be more focus on trying to understand why and how to prevent it from a perspective of behavioral science.

As long are this topic get more polarized we will likely not see any change.

Re: Six Months at Riot Games

#239

Post by taurath »

indigochill wrote: post #104
madengr wrote: post #51

Why isn’t the “bro culture” being weeded out of tech at the university stage. Bros’ and frat boys don’t make it through electrical engineering; they flunk out, at least from my experience. I don’t work with anyone like that. What’s wrong with the tech sector when it comes to computer science? Maybe the science is no longer required?

My perspective is that in a tech company you usually still have the nerds and bros dichotomy. The nerds are the engineers, while the bros are the ones in sales/management/community/design positions. You can also see this in pop culture portrayals of tech jobs as well, such as Silicon Valley (Bachman is a bro caricature) or Halt and Catch Fire (Joe's about 90% psychopath, 10% bro).

I think this is definitely an outdated dichotomy, especially in the context of a game company. The bros/jocks now are the gamers, who used to be nerds - now the nerds are the hardcore programmers/database people/accountants. Those who are in the gaming culture are every bit as much in hypermasculine jock culture as football players, just without the physical abilities.

Re: Six Months at Riot Games

#240

Post by taurath »

tinderliker wrote: post #172

The only mistake I understood Riot did was: recruiting a person who doesn't understand gaming culture. I know many girl gamers who use the same language as Riot employees. It's almost like going to France and getting offended that everyone is speaking French.

I'm pretty sure the people being hired DO understand gaming culture, and this is as much of a critique on how much toxic masculinity and the "old boys club" mentality permeates gaming culture.

Just as its not a valid argument to say hey its my culture to repress minorities and claim my race and gender is superior, its also not a valid argument to say using the N word and worse and sexually harassing coworkers and their partners is just "my culture".

Gaming is a legitimate, large, potentially wonderful community (see GDQ and a lot of other great organizations and subcommunities), but asking people to not be total abusive assholes to female coworkers is NOT much to ask, and the only way it can diminish the community is if the community believes that harassing and being abusive towards women is one of the primary pillars of that community.

Post reply on HN