Re: Brianna Wu @ Polygon: Case studies on harassment

This is a reply to "No Skin Too Thick" article over at Polygon

http://www.polygon.com/2014/7/22/5926193/women-gaming-harassment

First off, i'd like to say that i feel extremely sad that yet another woman became the target of threats of her life in our industry. Whether the source of it was somethingawful.com or something else, this is unacceptable and has to stop.

It is also extremely sad that this woman's plight was immediately weaponized in the ongoing political struggle between some game journalists and what is collectively known as #GamerGate. Almost immediately, before any sort of investigation had a chance to happen, #GamerGate was named as a culprit and had to defend itself against allegations of harassment. True to its nature as a diffuse movement, #GamerGate responded with a range of replies, some of them went so far as accusing Brianna of sending death threats to herself.

The whole thing is ugly. It is very disheartening that it happened.

I personally try to avoid commenting on these issues until proper authorities come in and make proper investigations and i truly wish everyone did the same. Regardless of her role, I feel extremely bad that Brianna had to become the vehicle for this.

The fact that Brianna opted to take on a banner of fighting for safety of women in the industry is truly commendable and is something i deeply respect. I would hope to have as much fortitude as she did in the wake of anything even remotely similar to her tragedy.

However, when it comes to her recent Polygon article, there are some things i feel are worth pointing out.

Brianna paints an extremely grim picture of life of women in gaming industry, and it is obviously her right to do so, given the experience of past days. However, any changes she will be fighting for will affect a lot more people than just her and the few people she mentions in her article. So i am writing this in hopes of adding some useful context to the discussion.

Case Study 1:

Reality: "If you are a woman in the industry with a critical opinion, you will get a disproportional amount of criticism, hostility, and scrutiny compared to men."

Conclusion: " I’ve personally never heard of a man in the games industry getting rape threats for having an opinion."

The reality is undeniable. No matter how you slice it, women get too much threats in our industry just for having an opinion. Even just one instance of this is too much already, and we definitely have more than one instance on a seemingly routine basis.

Brianna offers an explanation for this sad state of affairs. She comments that males take criticism from females worse than criticism from males. This does seem plausible, i would love to see some research on this matter.

However, Brianna then continues the explanation by saying that some manner of “male privilege” causes males in the industry to “lash out”. While i do not doubt Brianna’s account of males that she encountered in the past behaving in a toxic way, i still think that her explanation is too one-sided and does not account for the full complexity of the situation.

I personally am yet to actually meet a single person, whose "male privilege" would make him "feel free to lash out". Most of what i see about me shows that males treat females as mostly equal coworkers, attempting to address all concerns objectively. Any deviations that i do see are actually examples of the opposite: men are getting cowed by women just because they are afraid to voice criticism.

This may have something to do with the fact that i work in Russia, which may be a different work environment from USA or Europe, but this is my actual experience so far.

In light of this, i feel Brianna’s explanation is inadequate. Worse, it is also a dangerous explanation, because it can be used by less scrupulous women as a shield against all criticism, giving them the necessary conceptual tool to attack any man daring to criticise her. Attack not on the merit of his criticism but on the fact that he is male and therefore - according to the provided explanation - unable to cope with her presence. This i have, in fact, seen happen in the workplace.

My personal counter to all of this is to insist, at the very least around myself, on fair treatment of all issues pertaining to games that we make. I will not stand for either male or female voices being silenced and make as best of an attempt as possible within production schedules to explore all avenues of criticism.

Still, if we refuse Brianna’s explanation of the issue, then we need an alternative one that would allow to tackle the issue. The alternative explanation i have to offer is this. Women being much more frequent target has to do with nature of bullies.

There is a well-understood concept that the easier it is for a bully to get what he wants from a victim, the more actively will a bully go after said victim - for obvious reasons, explained entirely by his nature as a bully. And the sad fact is: it has so far been extremely easy to get a reaction out of women in our industry. A bully going after a woman even has a real shot at the ultimate bully grail - press coverage of his action - as the harassed target tries to resort to publicity as being her only real protection.

It is an unacceptable state of affairs that the only protection the people in our industry have against bullies is going to the police and the press. In other areas of life, similar situations are resolved by having various hotlines, where a person being threatened can call to get immediate professional support. Said hotlines can both provide the victim with protection and care, and assist the authorities in quickly dealing with threat.

One the things proven by #GamerGate is that this twitter-hashtag framework can adequately and rapidly respond to threats of informational nature, as long as it has a sufficient number of people passionate about the cause following it. A similar arrangement, only the one what also prevents the bully from seeing the results of his actions upon the victim, could be effective in dealing with the issue of victim-bully positive feedback loop that women have suffered from.

Case study 2:

The Reality: Many men believe women have no worth in the games industry beyond appearance. This means that an incredible amount of conversation focuses on sexual attractiveness, or appearance in general.

Conclusion: The video game industry is particularly egregious at only representing women as sex objects. As such, many gamers are trained to only see women in that context.

I'll be frank here, this seems like a bit of a blanket statement regarding all males in the industry, based on the statistically insignificant amount of Youtube commenters. Also i'd like to point out that this situation is not unique to gaming, but it also definitely present with regards to other media. This thing seems like an endemic problem with Internet culture in general.

I really am not sure how to go about fixing it at this point, too.

The reason i personally don't participate in this sort of stupidity is ... well, plainly because my parents taught me it is wrong. So i tend to tie this situation with the problems that exist with nuclear families and general public morals. If you want that to go away, the society at large will need to solve issues with upbringing of children.

Once framed this way, the problem becomes more manageable. In fact, gaming industry could do a lot for handling it, by creating more games where the protagonist is not a teenager abandoned by his parents, but rather someone with a more healthy situation, with his family serving as both a vehicle of growth and a stronghold against the ills of the world.

In fact, i personally hope that one day i'll be able to put a convincing family experience inside a game. It certainly seems we are just a small innovation in narrative mechanics away from being able to handle this.

Case study 3:

The Reality: This kind of harassment leaves long-lasting damage. It affects our friendships, and can cause us to be distant from others.

Conclusion: Paste Games editor Maddy Myers once told me, "You don’t really recover from this kind of abuse. You just change." She’s right.

This is straight up true.

Suspicion and fear are extremely hard to deal with. Once they take root inside your brain, they never completely go away. Best case scenario - you learn to deal with them a la Kevin Nash in the movie "A Beatiful Mind". Worst case scenario … is more than a little sad.

Either way, imposing yourself upon the person's world like that is a form of violence that is truly new in our tech world, but is also as real as anything physical.

Bullies are doing true damage and need to be stopped.

My recommendations are the same as Case Study #1. If there was a place where a person could go for anonymous help regarding identifying the bully and neutralizing him, it would go a long way towards helping this issue.

There is one thing that puzzles me in this case study, though. Brianna comments on how the bullies lack the requisite experience to understand the harm they are inflicting and consider themselves a sort of a gift, the intrusion of which upon her life a woman should appreciate. However, she seems to apply this logic to all men, not to just bullies. I have to ask - why?

We men are not fans of bringing up episodes of our own encounters with bullies too often. However, it doesn't mean we didn't have them and are incapable of understanding the feelings of a person held under a disgusting threat against one's will. Both internet culture specifically and postmodern culture in general has given bullies a golden free pass, and they have proven to be equal-opportunity predators.

I would like to assure Brianna, that not all of us are bullies. Most of us are not nearly as much in love with our own words as she seems to have been led to believe. Those of us that trust themselves above others and require proof to change their mind do so in an equal-opportunity way, being hard on both men and women.

If the motto is “listen and believe”, then, if we are equal partners against bullies, it really should go both ways.

CASE STUDY #4: CAROLYN

The Reality: Women are here, we love games, and we’re not going anywhere.

"And I think the industry, and our place in it, is worth fighting for."

Conclusion: Damn right it is.

I am glad to see more women in our industry and I am truly glad to see women standing up for themselves.

Maybe, with women actively participating as equal partners, we will finally be able to drive the bullies out of our industry.