Activision Blizzard, the game giant best known for its blockbuster Call of Duty and World of Warcraft games, is in turmoil amid accusations of a “frat boy” company culture rife with sexism and sexual harassment. More than 1500 workers at the company walked out earlier this week, angered by company management’s belligerent response to the accusations, detailed in a lawsuit filed by the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing.
You can read more of the sordid details here or here; click here to learn about the company’s notorious Bill “Cosby Suite,” which is pretty much as disgusting as you might expect.
After sorting through the voluminous media coverage of the mess, I found myself wondering what the self-declared ethicists of the movement once known as GamerGate had to say on the subject. So I went to the KotokiInAction subreddit, the favorite online hangout of the GamerGate dead enders. Here’s some of what I found.
A commenter called RedditIsTraitorous was, lets say, skeptical of the reports of sexual harassment:
oh boohoo, some of the radfem gamer grrlz at blizzard could only fuck their way to lower middle management, and had to pick from only the soyest, meh of “men” available since everyone with a fucking shred of T left long ago.
cope harder bitches. the entire company is a dumpsterfire of franchise corpses and fucked up dye jobs. Kick the entire thing off a cliff and find better games from more stable devs imho
Personal_Cicada886, meanwhile, is skeptical of anything that comes from a woman’s mouth:
it’s feminist whining about nothing. I categorically refuse to believe women. I don’t get weak in the knees and start tipping fedora to m’ladies every time some bint files a frivolous lawsuit
ironwolf56 declared himself skeptical of the entire west coast. (Activision Blizzard is headquartered in Santa Monica, California.)
When I lived on the West Coast I learned that they virtue signal so hard over there because so many of them are soulless scumbags in ways that it matters. It’s like the Secular Humanism version of medieval Catholic indulgences.
FarRightTopKeks suggested the real problem stemmed from hiring any women at all.
As usual this just sounds like people who never really belonged there trying to make it their space rather than going somewhere else.
Can’t imagine why it used to be so common for office jobs to avoid hiring women
Safebrowse offered a similar, er, analysis:
Men aren’t allowed to have their own space anymore and when women forcefully enter it, they cry when some of the men do retarded things. I don’t think anyone should be harassed really ever, but a lot of these old Blizzard employees are male Gen Xers who grew up getting absolutely shit on by people for liking video games. Now that it’s safe and mainstream to like them, everyone wants a piece of that pie. I am in no way condoning the harassment, but people need to realize that these women entered a space where there’s a lot of socially inept men and then wonder why they’re being harassed.
I see. He’s not condoning the abuse but the women brought it on themselves.
Dnile1000BC, like many of his colleagues in the subreddit, seems to think that the real problem isn’t that Activision Blizzard has a “frat boy culture” but rather that it was too “woke” to begin with.
Virtue signalling woke Blizzard turns out to be a real slimeball. Just like male feminists, who would have guess it?!
YetAnotherCommenter also took umbrage at the mention of “frat boy culture.”
Calling things “frat boy culture” is an attempt to blame masculinity (or a particular version of masculinity/male culture) for the problem.
But Harvey Weinstein wasn’t all men. Nor was he particularly macho. He opportunistically exploited the power he had in Hollywood.
Its much easier – and more politically correct – to blame “toxic masculinity” (however defined) rather than to look at a complicated situation of perverse institutional incentives, a culture of entities seeking to perpetuate themselves and their own prestige and wealth, and how such cultures can facilitate the behaviors of opportunistic predators.
Some thought that the lawsuit was actually just part of a vast, if somewhat nebulous, conspiracy against Activision Blizzard.
Klaus73 spelled out his dumb theory:
This is about infiltrating blizzard – read the wow [World of Warcraft] forums where there are calls to replace the leadership – which likely had zero fucks to give about this and even less authority until this had went to court. …
Now the goal is to drag blizzard in the public stocks – to force social pressures to get rid of people in positions of authority so they can be replaced with “the right people” – which will then be used to REALLY push the social agenda.
Klaus explained further in a followup comment:
Its all a effort to put the right people into a very successful and established gaming company.
I got no love for blizzard for many years – but this is all about putting the cult inside of a very successful economic engine that Cali government can count on.
Heck just read what people are saying – its clear the goal is to take it over with the woke-sjw cultists as a good pet for the Cali gov.
Go home, GamerGaters, you’re drunk.
@John : Kotick is an asshole, but the harassment and toxicity were before him. It’s just that he don’t care, not that he actively try to create it.
Insofar as to the harassment itself, his dismissal would be appreciated, but just like the one from Brack, it wouldn’t be enough. He is unfit to lead anything bigger than him, but there’s other culprits to catch here.
@Ohlmann
I’d argue that someone who is in Epstein’s black book is, in fact, actively contributing to the harassment. I agree that firing him isn’t enough, though.
I wouldn’t call it firing. I’d call it cashing out.
Ohlmann gotta ‘mann, I guess 😐
Please stop being a turbo-contrarian, or at least address the multiple responses to your previous crap before you move on to the next one. We exhaust ourselves giving long responses to you after you feel the need to disagree with some joke or off-hand comment or whatever, and then you completely ignore all of it and immediately do it again with something else. Hell, I feel a bit targeted sometimes, I swear most comments I post get a contrarian response from you, and the ones you don’t answer are my retorts. And I’m definitely not the only one.
I don’t know why I’m even doing this though, I’ve tried before, others have tried before, it happens in basically every thread. I was gone for a long time and came back to see a lot had changed, except for this.
I swear, you’re the most french person I’ve ever seen.
@Sinkable John: without taking any sides, I must inform you that your last sentence made me spit-take.
ETA: other than the obvious side of “all these dudebro frat predators should be fired and investigated”.
Kotick is a monster, as are the fratbros; @Kupo (hi!) is absolutely right. Anyone who’s soluble in the oily morass of Epstein’s black book deserves to be removed from authority, someone like that shouldn’t be allowed to have control of so much as a houseplant. It’s not that he doesn’t care, @Ohlmann (hi!), he’s an active pollutant.
@Jesalin (hi!) is absolutely right, though. He’s cashing out. Taking the fall for the company to try to save face, and will be well compensated for the “sacrifice”. That’s what CEOs are for, after all. Eugh.
@Scild
(sigh…guess I’m not gonna get the gif to work)
*waves*
@kupo, haha, don’t worry. I’ll imagine the best gif ever. Hi!
@Scildfreja Unnyðnes : especially since as far as I can tell that president was put here as a yes man for Kotick. They sacrifice someone who stopped adding actual value. He get out with money. And still, one of the numerous facilitator* of whatever happened *do* have a mild inconvenience, so I guess for no it’s slightly better than average ? But clearly not enough.
As for active polluant, I guess I should have said that it’s more that the Very Bad thing started before he was involved, and were already at the worse possible level on my moral compass. It’s not like he induced a culture of violence and misogyny at Blizzard ; he just kept it here because it was 100% fine by him.
Or saying otherwise, Blizzard was thorougly corrupted and rotten. When the head kotick was added, the rot did not spread from the head because it already was here.
@Sinkable John : matter of factly and not talking about you in particular, a lot of the time, it correspond to the point where I write 3 entires paragraph to show the numrous problem in excrutiating details, then delete it instead of post and stop looking at the thread because that’s better than posting. In other words, generally silence form me is “I *REALLY* disagree but losing energy into that conflict seem wasted”. (I don’t *remember* you being often saying things I don’t agree TBH, which show difference of perception I guess)
*as in, we know he knew, and I didn’t dig enough to see if he leaded, but maybe he leaded that too.
**if we take at face value how both say they did nothing themselves and just left things happen, which is enough for me to condemn as human wretch.
@Ohlmann, I understand what you’re saying! And you aren’t wrong. I’ve just come to think that anyone in a leadership position is an active participant and influence in the culture of the group that they lead. He didn’t cause the culture, but did nothing to arrest its behaviour while being in the best position to do so. That makes him actively culpable.
Perhaps that’s just me being squirrely, but I am in a place right now where I give any leaders absolutely zero benefit of the doubt. Leadership is a rarified privilege, and giving leeway to leaders does nothing but harm. They can and should be held responsible for the culture of the groups they lead, regardless of whether it predates them. If they thought the culture was bad, they’d be making efforts to change it.
Those are my thoughts on it anyways!
For thoses that follow, there’s more cleaning in the house of Blizzard specifically of a bunch of abusers of decently higher profile than the president.
Same caveat as usual : it’s not all complete justice, it might be a diversion (some suppose they are trying to bury the shit of the activision part of Activision-Blizzard), they didn’t say much about the victim or cultural change just yet, there may still be a bunch of other abusers. But it’s something, and significantly more significant than the last one.
TBH it’s more than what I expected, but it’s still a long road.
I’ve got a little scoop on a story from gamergate. There was a guy who signed up to the Escapist right when they fell apart, in good part due to allowing gamergate shit, and destroyed their forums by letting the scum in. This guy called himself “ScaredIndie”. As his username would suggest, his bit was that he was scared of censorship, of people like Zoe Quinn, of people disliking racism and sexism, or reporting abuse. AKA, a spineless wannabe abuser.
I was only reminded of this pondscum, because he recently defended the 14th Battalion of the Waffen SS, when a memorial dedicated to them in Canada was vandalised. https://twitter.com/TheCasualCritic/status/1426346833194885122
His username can be tracked back to his Steam account, which goes to the Steam Group backup for the most hardcore gamergaters which he signed up for referencing his username.
My family fought in WWII. I don’t care what your opinion of the Soviet Union is, signing up to the volunteer political Nazi organisation, the same one that operated the death camps, is wrong. There’s nothing defensible about a monument dedicated to them, frankly, it was polite of those who vandalised it to not bomb it. People with my grandparents surname, with my sexuality, were killed by the scum this manchild defends out of contrarianism.