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Video game developers at Activision Blizzard say they'll walk out Wednesday

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Re: Video game developers at Activision Blizzard say they'll walk out Wednesday

#321

Post by bcrosby95 »

tehjoker wrote: post #90
liambates wrote: post #63

After reading a little more about the CCO, her response does not surprise me in the slightest... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Townsend

"Frances M. "Fran" Fragos Townsend (born December 28, 1961) is the former Homeland Security Advisor to United States President George W. Bush from 2004 to 2007, and is currently executive vice president for corporate affairs at Activision Blizzard." The Bush administration was the kind of place to sell illegal wars and cover up torture programs, so this lady is fine with sweeping dirt under the rug.

She also is a C-level and has worked there for 4 months. She has zero insight to this problem.

Re: Video game developers at Activision Blizzard say they'll walk out Wednesday

#322

Post by CydeWeys »

gambiting wrote: post #224
sandworm101 wrote: post #177

Appeal to public opinion is generally a great idea but there is a risk. Activision gets no sympathy from me, but I also don't think the answer will come from the masses. I'm not sure that most gamers really care about sexism in the gaming industry. Video games are synthetic, we don't really see the people behind them. At least in movies we see the actors. If push comes to shove, I think most gamers will still be lini…

The thing is, your "average gamer" won't know or care about any of this. I work in the industry and according to our own stats the "average gamer" is a 20-30 year old, owns a console, and buys exactly three games every year - fifa, CoD, and one other title that got the most advertising that year. I used to live with such guys at uni, had them as flatmates - you wouldn't catch them dead talking about video games, "ner…

> I'm also absolutely tempted to believe any backlash from this will be minimal to Activision.

Consumer backlash is not the intended means/outcome here. Blizzard is being sued and there is massive organizing within the company. They will likely end up paying out lots of money in compensation to the employees who were wronged, heads will roll, and the toxic culture will end up being cleared out forcibly (like what happened at Uber). Consumer backlash is an orthogonal concern.

Re: Video game developers at Activision Blizzard say they'll walk out Wednesday

#323

Post by 908B64B197 »

Daishiman wrote: post #68
908B64B197 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The tech industry is strongly biased in the favor of white men That's debatable. CS was overwhelmingly male and wasn't prestigious until recently. > video games even more so I wonder how much of that we can attribute to DOOM. The DOOM devs wanted to make an hyper-violent game centered around Demon and heavy metal, and that reflected in the culture at id (not the violence). And they made a bunch of money which spurr…

> That's debatable. CS was overwhelmingly male and wasn't prestigious until recently. We're talking about the same career that's been known as a money-printing machine for the past 25 years?

Domestically, certainly not post dotcom crash.

Common wisdom was that going to be completely outsourced in "the next decade". Then Google, Facebook and the rise of SV proved all of them wrong.

Internationally? No. In a lot of countries there's no track for ICs, no staff engineers and you are supposed to go into management. Programming is seen as brick-laying. Ironically, that's one of the reasons outsourcing failed so bad...

Re: Video game developers at Activision Blizzard say they'll walk out Wednesday

#324

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

madamelic wrote: post #300
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People also got mad about Tifa's bust size apparently being reduced to a more realistic level in FF7R. It's nuts that we just kind of accept this as a culture.

I was thinking about that after walking away for a bit. I don't _hate_ sexualization of characters. Like, totally. Let's make sexy characters that we all adore, but let's not make it a default where female characters _have_ to be sexy. I am all for the ridiculous boob sliders or boob physics or whatever, I think it is just that there is an expectation in video games that a female character has to either be sexy or no…

Yeah, I agree with that. Tifa had a huge rack, but she was also a fully fleshed out character and not really sexualized outside of being a nebulously romantic interest of Cloud's. Her bust size was reduced in the remake because, and I'm guessing here, they were going for a more realistic look than the superdeformed look of the original and it would have been out of place [0].

The problem is that the backlash was entirely in the form of man-children making this out to be some woke appeasement move because they can't ogle quite as much volume of virtual knockers. And even worse is that, as a culture, we just kind of shake our heads at this and ignore it.

[0] Barret is still ripped as fuck, but his proportions are much better. The Rock actually looks like that.

Re: Video game developers at Activision Blizzard say they'll walk out Wednesday

#325

Post by 0x500x79 »

ttyS1 wrote: post #226
0x500x79 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DFEH is a California entity, so I don't think it's fair to talk about all other major game studios. Most of the articles you posted are all stemmed from the same start: The Kotaku article. The wired article is from the same author noting that COO was not fired (and other employees that are employed by CEO have had complaints). It looks like EA is based in LA and isn't under investigation by the DFEH, but Riot and Act…

2K, Disney, Niantic, Unity, WB, Roblox, Marvel are some others that are CA based that I can name off the top of my head. The parent post does make a decent job of pointing out that it's pretty rotten, from the top to the bottom. The players at the bottom are terribly toxic, the C-levels are allegedly just as bad. I am curious if this is more about culture - I would imagine EA and Niantic for example to have a relativ…

I think Roblox is as big based on revenue, Unity has a very different development model, but the others seem a lot smaller than Riot/Activision-Blizzard.

My point about the C-Levels is that it is primarily 1 C-level who is being spoken about: The COO. While there was an allegation against the CEO earlier this year, it was found to be unsubstantiated and thrown out because the claimant was proved to have stolen money/scammed Riot and falsified the claim. I am not sure if it's fair to group all of the other executives into the same bucket as the COO.

I can see how the culture is playing a part in it. Riot has softened up on the "need not apply if not a gamer" in the past couple of years, but many of the people who started that are still there. I guess my big question is: Why Riot/Blizzard? Are they the worst companies in California right for sexual harassment and inclusion? These have been the two prominent DFEH cases against tech companies in the past couple of years.

Re: Video game developers at Activision Blizzard say they'll walk out Wednesday

#326

Post by blibble »

TameAntelope wrote: post #40
beebeepka wrote: post #33

Blizzard is done for. Everyone important left. There's no one to work on StarCraft 3 / WarCraft 4 and their reputation is deservably not what what it used to be only a few years ago. Like almost until the "you all have phones, right" moment. Activision ruined the company. Sure, the market changed but Blizzard was doing much better under Vivendi.

What would, "Blizzard is done" look like? Are you suggesting that the IP (Overwatch, Warcraft, Starcraft) would be shut down, all employees laid off or incorporated into Activisions other departments? I could not imagine any business abandoning billions of dollars of IP like that.

the parent company gave the Diablo 2 remake to another studio inside Activision (i.e. not the Blizzard studio)

so... more of that: fewer and fewer Blizzard IPs developed by "Blizzard"

Re: Video game developers at Activision Blizzard say they'll walk out Wednesday

#327

Post by TameAntelope »

dleslie wrote: post #278
MAGZine wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've missed the point. The point is, cultural (and time differences, language differences, etc) differences slow down collaboration. it has nothing to do with specifically american (or german, or polish) culture. How many roles do you think to be outsourced by the polish or japanese? not a lot, which keeps them efficient. especially in creative endeavours, its best to keep things colocated.

Like I said, I work in the industry. I've worked on several projects with teams on more than one continent. The much-repeated "it'll slow down collaboration" is only a factor of how terrible your company's communication strategy was at the outset. If your company worked entirely verbally and contained little to no digital communication or memory, then you'll have a terrible time. 100% remote work makes intercontinent…

I cannot be more direct about this, it is not seamless, or even close to seamless, in general, to work across continents such as you describe.

Maybe you've cracked a nut here, and we'd all benefit from your wisdom, experience, and stories, but that is not the experience most folks have working across continents or cultures.

Re: Video game developers at Activision Blizzard say they'll walk out Wednesday

#328

Post by mhuffman »

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #265
cletus wrote: post #233

If you haven't read the state of California's claims here you should. It's the result of a two year investigation and the claims are.. shocking. I want to make a point about "culture fit". "Culture fit" in a company typically comes down to "we like you" and the reason why people like other people is that they are like them. Similar age, background, whatever. It's why Stanford grads probably like other Stanford grads.…

I want to make a point about "culture fit". "Culture fit" in a company typically comes down to "we like you" and the reason why people like other people is that they are like them. Similar age, background, whatever. There are plenty of people who like each other that have nothing in common. The idea that the reason people like people is because they are like them just feels ridiculous to me, but maybe I am an outlier…

>There are plenty of people who like each other that have nothing in common. The idea that the reason people like people is because they are like them just feels ridiculous to me, but maybe I am an outlier. Personally, the more someone is like me, the less I like them.

Yes, you are an outlier. There is a very large amount of studies that show that people like people that are like them.

[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/026540750809670...

Re: Video game developers at Activision Blizzard say they'll walk out Wednesday

#329

Post by UnpossibleJim »

nineplay wrote: post #310
cletus wrote: post #233

If you haven't read the state of California's claims here you should. It's the result of a two year investigation and the claims are.. shocking. I want to make a point about "culture fit". "Culture fit" in a company typically comes down to "we like you" and the reason why people like other people is that they are like them. Similar age, background, whatever. It's why Stanford grads probably like other Stanford grads.…

> I want to make a point about "culture fit" "culture fit" is one of the biggest causes of workplace discrimination and I still see it pushed in 'hiring training' as perfectly valid criteria. Things I've seen teams consider "culture" - will the candidate go to our weekly study session at the micro-brewery? - will the candidate stay after work to play multi-player games with us? - is the candidate entertained by all t…

As a side note (and a fully conjectural query), do you think that the desire of control of a branded monoculture in the work place is one of the reasons for the push to bring employees back to the workplace?

You can separate the culture of Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook and Twitter as easily as any brand, like Nike and Reebok. Those cultural brands are surely dissolving without the guiding hand of in office guidelines.

Re: Video game developers at Activision Blizzard say they'll walk out Wednesday

#330

Post by 908B64B197 »

dleslie wrote: post #197
908B64B197 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Here in Canada, we have a thriving industry that includes both primary developers and developers who focus on outsourced work. Most of my career has been involved with shops that were sub-contracted labour from American studios. The situation in Canada is interesting: their own government heavily pitched the country as an outsourcing destination, boasting Canadians devs are worth 50k less than American ones. [0] Is…

I think most folks are unaware, really. What's more, here in BC the NDP (left-leaning labour party) stripped Tech Workers of the majority of their labour rights. Not even meal breaks were saved. https://www.itworldcanada.com/article/employment-standards-a...

Interestingly, that party and the people in charge of the "tech policy" are all Indians aren't they? [0][1]

It makes sense they would pitch offshoring and low cost for programming since they saw it working for their country.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jagmeet_Singh

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navdeep_Bains

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