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.
Speaking as a GenXer … women were involved in game development early on. Put some respect on Roberta Williams’ name, you bonkeyheads.
The activision shit is just horrifying. It still sickens me that there are folks whose response to that is to blame the people being hurt.
I’m having a hard time squaring “radfem,” a moniker often associated with the belief that all sex is rape, with “fuck[ing] their way to middle management.”
I’m probably overthinking this.
@Harpy
If you’re thinking, you’re overthinking this…
So that’s where the feminism understanders hang out.
The thought that my money may have gone towards enabling the abhorrent behaviour at Actiblizz makes me feel ill.
After four years researching gamergate… color me SHOCKED….
I’m pretty sure that their concept of radfem is in contrast to tradfem, when we all know that a radfem is a feminist that’s totally rad. Given the screen names there’s certainly enough fashy sentiment to be blind to any other distinction as it is!
Tangential I know, but you forgot to mention how Activision Blizzard loves to give top jobs to high-profile Republican assholes, and that they also recently hired an union-busting firm to represent them as their employees strat to consider organizing.
The only one who seems to have a good point is “YetAnotherCommenter,” but then it’s marred by the assumption that people who say “frat boy culture” are only blaming masculinity. What else is associated with stereotypical fraternities? Social pressure, conformity, and systems of power based on wealth – the very things YAC deplores in their comment.
As for Klaus73:
Wait, wait, wait, I thought your problem is that they’re putting all the left people in. 😉
I’m a Gen Xer. To be fair, I was born the very last year of the generation. But am GenX. Everybody had a Nintendo when I was growing up. Absolutely everyone played Super Mario Bros. and Tetris. The cool kids. The nerds. Everybody. In the 80’s everyone went to the arcade. This idea that video games became mainstream only in the past decade or so is a crock of shit. Nobody got bullied for liking video games.
Also,
Scild!!! It’s been ages!
Welcome back!
Sadly, this is hardly the exception. Ubisoft got in hot water last year for similar accusations, and according to the people who work there nothing has changed. The actual predators just got swapped to different departments or even promoted.
Also, the situation at activision-Blizzard was so bad that a female employee took her own life while on a company trip. It’s beyond disgusting. This Cosby-suite is new to me, but only surprising in how blatant it is.
@WWTH : your take is, sadly, wrong. Tons of people got bullied for liking videogame in theses decades. And it was a Very Bad Idea to show publicly you liked that.
Notably, what you say about a lot of people having console is true ; the concept that it somehow translated on it being mainstream and not shameful isn’t. Something similar happened with mangas, where they were a pretty long stretch of time where they were very common (at least in France), but you absolutely needed to hide them.
Nah. Playing video games has always been mainstream. I’m sure there’s some nerdrage gamer bros who were bullied as kids. But not for liking video games.
@Ohlmann. I am not sure where you grew up, places differ. But as a Generation Xer who didn’t play video games I was very much in a minority in the industrialised west. The fact that so many movies got made starring teenagers into videogames should be a clue, a teen being reluctantly called from their game is practically a cliche in 80s and 90s films. Let alone the blockbusting videos directly about videogames, like “The last starfighter” or “War Games”.
In fact, one way you can tell Sarah from the Labyrinth starts as an unusually lonely, troubled teen, is that her maladaptive fantasy life involves acting out old books in a park by herself and not playing video games.
@WWTH : you have rose-tinted glasses if you think that people didn’t get bullied for videogames. Probably because you confuse something being popular with something being accepted, with a hint of just world fallacy to suppose they were bullied for something actually bad.
I would add that being bullied isn’t an excuse for anything and that the theory of that guy in the article is complete bullshit. Still, being a videogame fan in the 80/90 was only slightly ahead of being a tabletop RPG player at that time.
@mogwitch : would you say the fresh prince of Bel Air is a proof that black people weren’t oppressed in the ’90 ? A similar logic apply here. Sure, not every single piece of culture of the time was depicting videogames as the tool of satan, but quite a lot did. I remember TV show litteraly showing the villain using videogame to brainwash the heroes. Also videogames being blamed for everything, including Columbine, but also bad eyesight, concentration problems, etc etc.
@Ohlmann; @weirwoodtreehugger:
Did it make any difference what kind of video games an 80’s kid played? Abstract games like Tetris? Shooters? RPGs (which I suspect would have carried the greatest Dork Stigma; tabletop D&D certainly did)?
Something similar happened with mangas, where they were a pretty long stretch of time where they were very common (at least in France), but you absolutely needed to hide them.
I’d had the impression that anime became mainstream in France far earlier than in the U.S.; things like Candy Candy, Goldorak (UFO Robot Grendizer), and Albator (Space Pirate Captain Harlock)* were what kids watched. Was a distinction drawn between anime and manga fandom?
*Who, now that I think of it, has a strong atmospheric overlap with Captain Nemo: you’ve got a brooding antihero, obedient to nothing save his own principles and code of honor, wandering about in a futuristic pirate vessel with a handful of trusted confidants. Note that the 2013 CGI movie, which portrays him as something along the lines of Disney’s Davy Jones, is not a good introduction to the character.
…Has anyone thought of hijacking the Gamergaters’ imaginary friend Vivian James as a mascot for, oh, actual female gamers? Just a thought.
At my school (in the 90s) you could get bullied for basically anything, if you did it excessively or in an unusual or otherwise remarkable way. You could get bullied for gaming, if you had a nerdy aura or liked difficult puzzle-like games a lot. Below is a list of things you could also get bullied for. The list includes actual examples I remember people (including myself) being bullied for, and is not in any way complete.
x Being overweight
x Being too skinny
x Having no boobs
x Having to big boobs
x Being good in school and actually interested in the knowledge, not just studying for grades
x Having difficulties in school
x Being poor
x Having the wrong clothes, not keeping up with fashion and wearing what was in practice the current school uniform
x Not being popular among the boys (aka “ugly”)
x Being too popular among the boys (aka “slut”)
x Not being feminine enough
x Being even associated with something that were in the slightest considered feminine (if you were a boy)
x Being friends with someone who was any of the above
x …and so on.
Can confirm you used to get bullied for playing video games in France. I was.
By gamers. For playing the wrong games.
Ohlmann, I don’t know which part of the country you grew up or when, and if you experienced that kind of shit I am so damn sorry and it sucks, but in my experience, the only shit I ever got for playing video games was first from gamers themselves. Later it came from folks close to me about the sheer amount of time I spent with video games instead of with them when I was having episodes of depression or anxiety. Something I think I’m still liable to do. And pretty ashamed of.
One thing I do remember is thinking I would be bullied, and I kept my interest in video games mostly to myself. The weird unjustified shame prevented me from making a few friends I could have made. Even today I have fragments left of that, and they mix with the part about caring more about games than about my own folks, and my depression beats me up over it, and in a conversation with a new person I usually don’t mention I’m a gamer until they say they are.
Yeah, it’s painful. But it’s largely self-inflicted. And the reality is that you’re more likely to be found boring in a conversation by talking too much about politics than by talking too much about video games. Here’s a fun experiment : go to a political rally and talk about the cultural impact of video games on political thinking. Then go to a gamer discord server and talk about the same thing. See which reaction you get, from who.
@Moggie
If you live in the US, chances are Activision gets more money from your tax dollars (because they dodge taxes, but still get MASSIVE tax rebates) than from you buying their games.
It also means you have a very clear moral high ground when stealing their games. You already paid for them anyway, regardless of if you ever bought any.
Of course this is not legal advice.
@Full Metal Ox
The reason we do NOT want to do that is how much porn they’ve already made of Vivian James. Like, they started pretty much the exact second she became their mascot. One of the many reasons we don’t steal the fascists’ toys is because there is no way to touch them with a ten-foot barge pole without being exposed to the filth.
@Ohlmann. I never saw Fresh Prince of Bel Air but the crossover success of shows made for a black audience was partly because more people in the 90s were trying to be anti racist and then a general audience found the shows. Blockbuster films treating video games as an activity expected of their teen protagonists were always trying to market to a mainstream audience. The “satanic” stuff you mention never made it to where I grew up, places do differ and overtly Christian stuff was seen as completely embarrassing and too stupid even to mock.
I’m agreeing with Gatecrasher though -kids could be bullied for anything. Certain people could get away with anything – there was a guy at our school ( actually quite a kind boy ) who was definitely the coolest kid. At 13 he used to read Danielle Steele novels openly in the playground and if anyone gave him shit he would stand up and declaim selected paragraphs to applause. There is no way anyone else in the school would have felt able to read that stuff openly, male or female. On the other hand kids who couldn’t hide hurt feelings or sensitivity, would be mocked for walking down the corridor in a way indistinguishable to anyone else. Nobody really got bullied for anything they chose to do, the choice of victims and what they react to most comes before the content of the bullying. Nerdy people are usually more openly escapist, and yes, bullies will try and destroy their refuges, so if that was video gameing for some people I could see that is what they would be mocked for.
Here’s a 1982 article about Pac-Man, from OUI magazine of all places, that proves that women have been gamers all along: NSFW because of boobs and butts.
Off-topic and hella disturbing, but in a leaked audiotape Chris-Chan(the creator of the trainwreck known as “Sonichu”) just confessed to committing incest with their mother.
I remember my mom playing Tetris in the early 1990s. She’s not a game-playing person generally, though she was professionally connected to Russian trade at the time.
I don’t really have anything to say about Activision Blizzard, so I’ll add to the people saying you can get bullied for anything. Harry Potter was recognised as a popular thing when I was at school, but I still got all sorts of comments for being into it (supposedly because I was too into it, which, in hindsight, probably fair) because I was the sort of person whose interests were to be mocked.
@Lumipuna
My mother played Super Mario in mid-nineties. I seem to remember her being especially fond of Yoshi. She was also very good at Tetris, but that came later.
@Full Metal Ox:
I believe you’re looking for the “Rescuing Vivian James” sequence of “A Voice for Pierre,” conceived on this very site: https://pierre.thecomicseries.com/comics/35/