What do you think about the recent ArenaNet dev firings? As an aspiring designer, the more I learn about the industry, the more I think you're on to something with this anonymity thing. I keep hearing about how small the industry is and how important it is not to burn bridges. Quite frankly, I'm afraid of ever making my opinions on controversial topics known, especially when a lot of well-respected devs are openly disagreeing. I don't like staying silent on issues I find important though.
I woke up this morning, checked my twitter, and sighed. This whole situation sucks. For those who didn’t know, Narrative Designer Jessica Price posted a twitter thread about the issues narrative designers have to consider while writing MMORPG protagonist characters. She was approached by a Guild Wars 2 Youtuber called Deroir, who politely asked her if she had considered branching dialogue. She responded as if Deroir were attempting to tell her how to do her job (he kind of was), then her coworker Peter Fries defended her. The exchange exploded on reddit and both Price and Fries were let go from ArenaNet.
I do have many thoughts on this and they are complicated. Here’s the distilled version.
My days of remaining anonymous have certainly come to a middle
For what should be obvious reasons.
I think the devs in question handled it badly and should be punished
I try to avoid engaging in any form of social media when I am angry or frustrated. Clearly these two did not. They clearly did not respond well. I think that the studio should have reprimanded both of the devs involved, then require them to take some sort of community management seminar or something as well as post a written apology to the community. Maybe they did and the two involved refused. Nobody knows except the people involved.
I think ArenaNet went too far
Frankly, ArenaNet’s response to this scares me a little. I don’t think that the two firings were warranted. I think firing them sets a bad precedent - it’s horrifying to think that enough angry redditors could potentially destroy my career if I make a mistake in a tweet. It scares me that my employer might throw me under the bus in this way. I could see it if I were a repeat offender, but not on a first-time offense.
I understand Jessica Price’s perspective and I agree with her general sentiment, despite her phrasing
She’s an experienced narrative designer. She’s worked on a lot of games, she’s created a lot of story content, she knows what she’s about. What Deroir asked about, politely as he may have been, was basically asking if she had considered turning it off and on again. As a narrative designer, branching dialogue is something she had already thought about, actually tried, and come up with two dozen reasons why it would not work the way Deroir thought it would. Had she simply said so and (we assume) Deroir accepted her statement, nothing else would have happened.
However, that was not the entire situation. Jessica is also a woman in game development and that brings a lot of social baggage from fans. For the longest time, video games have been considered a male space. Gamers as a group are generally thought of as male, and most men have grown up with video games being a large and formative part of their lives. It is something they are intimately familiar with, and thus feel a sense of ownership - especially those who post on the internet. This leads to a grossly over-inflated estimate of self-ability when it comes to the topic of things like game design - like how someone who eats a lot of cupcakes feels like they are as knowledgeable about baking as a trained patissier. After all, they’ve been playing games for years. Why wouldn’t they know how to design games? It’s the worst of the [Dunning-Kruger effect] in action.
Gamers of all walks that I’ve met do this to me all the time when they find out what I do for a living. In conversations, I usually head it off by establishing a position of authority early by showing them in no uncertain terms just how much of a difference there is between us in the amount of knowledge and context of game development. Most readers who have been following the blog for any amount of time has probably had that moment where they sit back and think “I never thought about it that way. Wow.” If I don’t perform this display of authority, they often treat me as an inferior - giving suggestions and talking about how easy it should be. I have to do this all the time.
Please believe me when I say that every woman I know in game dev has experienced this constantly. The men they speak with - friends, acquaintances, or even just those in polite conversation will assume that position of authority and speak as if they are equals or even more knowledgeable than the female dev, despite the massive difference in experience, contextual knowledge, and training. It happens to them all the time. I have seen it happen countless times firsthand. These men explain to her over and over and over and over how the devs should just do this and not that and it’s so easy and so on and so forth, but they treat her worse than her male colleagues. It isn’t even necessarily because they are doing it consciously or out of ill intent. It’s just that subconscious sense of entitlement and ownership, the same reason that fans of a particular franchise will get bent out of shape if a publisher takes a franchise in a different direction than what they want.
It is especially bad for female devs because of the urban myth that women don’t play video games so they somehow lucked into the job or something. It is super duper exhausting because it is the most common situation. I read a thread just yesterday about how there are no female CEOs at any of the top 50 game studios in Germany, and there was no shortage of armchairs throwing in their opinions about how women in game dev don’t really want to be there or just don’t want it enough. For Ms. Price, like all the others, it wasn’t just this one incident. It was just the latest in a never ending stream of gamers without even a fraction of her skill and experience telling her how to do her job. She lashed out and it burned her.
So yeah. It’s a whole big bundle of fail involved all around and it all sucks. I’m not saying that I condone Ms. Price’s response - I most certainly do not. There’s a reason I never engage in social media when I am feeling frustrated or angry. But I understand why she did it and I sympathize because I’ve been there and it really sucks.
The FANTa Project is currently on hiatus while I am crunching at work.
[What is the FANTa project?] [Git the FANTa Project]
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