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July 15, 2018 11:34 am

Game Company Receives Complaints About Bad Example Set By FEMALENAME

ArenaNet narrative designer Jessica Price was fired last week after she accused a Twitter user of "mansplaining", and adding later "Don't expect me to pretend to like you here." (Her employer characterized this as "attacks on the community.") So what happened in the week that followed? An anonymous reader writes:A Reddit user indicated he'd been speaking satirically when he posted that "We can probably fire anyone on the GW2 dev team as long we make a big enough stink," and expressed surprise later that no one had disagreed with him. But another female developer told Kotaku she saw a real call to action on 4chan, and that it was followed by angry letters to the game studio she freelances for calling for her firing too, complaining their games had declined since she was hired (along with another woman). The letters also complained her Twitter account set "a bad example for the letter-writer's children, who supposedly play this game." The company's CEO received "a three-digit number's" worth of angry letters -- though "Fifty or so of them glitched out with a lot of variables exposed, including %FEMALENAME." "A deeper look at the names and emails associated with the letters went to Facebook bot profiles and people whose profiles indicated associations with Gamergate or 4chan," reports Kotaku -- and Brianna Wu made a similar charge on Twitter last week, citing research by a team of volunteers. "The overwhelming majority of people harassing Jessica Price today on Twitter are bots and sock puppets. These are throwaway accounts that are used as toys. Almost no one claiming to be upset is an established, normal Twitter user." The Verge reports that Wu monitored Jessica Price's account, and found harassment "as bad as she's ever seen," blocking at least 600 different accounts. Another female narrative designer at Arkane Studios says her employer was messaged with a complaint that she'd "verbally abused" a Twitter user -- and discovered a (since-deleted) online petition calling for her firing. And an angry message was also sent to Opaque Space (collaborating with NASA on VR games and training), complaining the company should take responsibility for the "man hating ideals...spread through social media accounts" by their game design lead. "I know MANY people like me, especially women, who have frequent experience with people calling for their employers to fire them for speaking up, speaking out," she posted on Twitter. The latest furor began with an accusation of mansplaining which a YouTube streamer defended as "my obvious attempt at creating dialogue and discussion", calling it "disheartening" that Jessica Price didn't "correct me in my false assumptions."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


Original Link: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/1BrtFj8NDG0/game-company-receives-complaints-about-bad-example-set-by-femalename

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