LogFAQs > #904843474

https://www.polygon.com/2018/7/10/17550276/guild-wars-2-arenanet-firings-jessica-price-gamergate

Nobody at Arenanet is safe from the hand of Reddit. Were literally running the company now, theyre in fear of the very users they seek to consort with ... The moment a dev steps out of line or try to talk back to a player, guess what, theyll know we got their hands on their throat and we can squeeze any time we like.

This is part of a longer post on Reddit that went viral after Guild Wars 2 narrative designer Jessica Price was fired for a series of tweets she sent in response to a YouTuber, Deroir, who worked closely with developer ArenaNet. A co-worker of Prices, writer Peter Fries, was also fired for tweets supporting her. ArenaNets president, Mike OBrien, issued a statement on Guild Wars 2s forums stating that two of our employees failed to uphold our standards of communicating with players.

OBriens statement is actively dangerous; it takes at face value bad-faith arguments made by aggrieved people online who may or may not be players. Their attacks on the community were unacceptable, OBrien wrote of Fries and Price. As a result, theyre no longer with the company.

Its not an accurate statement, and the precedent it sets is a bad one for gaming. Fans and developers bristling at each other on social media is a common fact of gaming, but what makes this situation so unique is OBriens inability to act like an adult.

It might be a controversial thing to say right now, but Deroirs original tweet wasnt overtly offensive. Players who think they know more than they actually do about development are common, and the belief isnt always rooted in sexism. But Deroirs lack of empathy for what happened throughout this controversy is notable, as is his claim that hes a feminist. For that to be more than a word in a tweet, he should have understood how his tweet came off, and where Prices anger came from.

Prices response to his tweet was more aggressive than the situation called for, but Deroirs tweet doesnt exist in a vacuum. Prices anger is the result of a long history of men in gaming who try to explain the jobs of women in development to them, and makes perfect sense in that context. While Deroir may not have been the worst example of that trend, his tweet definitely exists in the proud tradition of male gamers talking down to the women who make their games. Prices response makes perfect sense in that context, and is the sort of social media venting that is hardly seen as scandalous in 2018.

So you have a tone-deaf player, and an exhausted developer who called a fan a rando asshat. The issue was then grabbed onto by some of the toxic communities in gaming that exist as GamerGate remnants, because women who dont talk to players with sufficient amounts of fealty make for tempting targets. None of this is particularly new in gaming, nor is any of it unexpected.

another day, another boys club fighting against the "Tyranny" of feminists smfh
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If you're not voting like a black woman, your opinion doesn't matter to me