The ArenaNet Catastrophe Has The Whole Game Industry Rethinking Harassment Policies

Another developer, who chose to remain anonymous, faced an especially coordinated attack, albeit an incompetently-handled one: The company this developer freelances for, she told Kotaku in a DM, received a “a three-digit number’s” worth of letters complaining that it was morally wrong to hire “a transgender,” that the quality of the studio’s games had gone down since she and another woman were hired, and that her Twitter account set “a bad example for the letter-writer’s children, who supposedly play this game.”

For a brief period of time, the developer said, her CEO was ready to tell her boss to fire her. Then, another employee realized something was amiss with the letters. “Fifty or so of them glitched out with a lot of variables exposed, including %FEMALENAME,” said the developer. This made it clear that the letters were simply form letters with blank spaces for the name of any woman that the mob wanted to attack.

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.

hmmmmmmm

So you can paint this two ways.

One is that the developer is a thin-skinned person with poor social skills who sees everything as an attack because of her low self-esteem.

And then the way Kotaku presented this, which exactly what you would expect from a racist and radical gaming outlet.

“Who do they think is going to make the games once all the developers have been fired? The angry internet mob? We need to find a better balance, because this entitlement culture is burning people out.”

Entitlement culture on which side? Sure, certain members of the public can be asshats, but that's always been the case. Restaurant wait staff have been putting up with it for years. But, if a server started calling people names and acting like a baby, they'd be fired (The Red Hen excluded). It's your customer base who's reading the tweets, so deal with it like the adult you're pretending to be.