Game Developer Harassment

While checking another game forum I stumbled onto this article about the growing problem of game developer harassment from fans that take their comments and actions to a disturbing extreme. It's a bit long, but an interesting read with some alarming details. At about the 3/4 mark of the article the focus briefly shifts to developers of crowdfunded games.

I did not realize how bad this type of harassment had become as I have rarely witnessed it firsthand. It is disappointing to say the least.

I hope that members of the Uber team and of the Uber online community never have to deal with such vitriol and hatred from anyone, but if they do I hope that it is dealt with appropriately by Uber, the rest of the community, and by the proper authorities (in the event of excessively extreme circumstances).

Link to Article on Polygon.com: http://www.polygon.com/2013/8/15/46...rassment-erodes-industry-spurs-support-groups

This is an interesting read, and I'm only a third of the way through it.

Might I suggest that a better way for developers to insulate themselves from harassment would be to keep their private lives private, and do all their public-facing work behind aliases?

Personally, online privacy is of massive importance to me. I can see how anonymity benefits the attacker, but from what I understand, the defender doesn't make the best use of it.

I had this exact same thought. However, developer fame/recognition can help to sell a game (I'm sure Uber benefited a little from this) so I understand why most developers use their real names and reveal a little about their personal lives.

This might be naive, but if I were the boss of a dev house of any flavour, I'd be having a strict policy of do everything behind a fake name, never ever give out personally identifiable information and always triple check that you're not doing that accidentally.

It'd have to be part of every single interview and talk too.

Why? Because the Internet is an electronic elephant - it never forgets. And then you have groups like Anon that can field hundreds (if not thousands) of people to crowd-source information gathering. China has a semi-official body that does that already.

Definitely, the current generation starting out on making video games should consider that Bullet. But when Mavor and other members of Uber started their careers as game developers, there would've been little way of knowing that such a thing might become necessary in the future.

Just look at the steam forums for PA people have been doing this for weeks.

I'm sure nobody on this forum would ever send a hateful message, RTS fans generally being more mature than other genre fans. I don't know how this problem will be solved given that the hateful message types are siloed in their own sites, it's not like there's some bad apples spread among forums where they can be individually dealt with. But I hope it will be solved. Just a general understanding of what it's okay and not okay to post.

I say we take off, KEW it from orbit. S'the only way to be sure.

Or perhaps you'd like something, a little more classic...

The Steam Forums for Planetary Annihilation. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious.

You can't claim that with any kind of authority, part of the problem is the anonymity built into the internet, countless users here on these very forums could turn into harassers given the right trigger.

I don't disagree with BM's idea, I just think it wouldn't help much, I'd bet there are all kind of real world (and legal) work arounds that could enable someone to get something like a list of employee names for a given company, then people would just start carpet bombing harassment against everyone.

I think in regards to policing ourselves the Game Industry has a long way to go, these people essentially get a free pass to do whatever they want with no repercussions aside from a few edge cases. It's also not something we'll be able to solve with a single silver bullet type solution, it will require a multi-faceted approach that tackles the problem from all angles and require effort from pretty much all aspects of the industry, it's far beyond just a PR job at this point.

Mike

I know, I'm just being hopeful.

BM's suggestion is merely dealing with the world as it is. And as you said, trying to change the world to be better is long and complicated.

Lets forget this topic ever landed in a Uber community
(until its time)

I'm not. If memory serves correctly, someone from Uber got some hate mail recently that they passed on to the authorities.

It's not really limited to gaming development, this stuff happens in every aspect of life everyday.

Its always sad that people are like that.

Problem is you gotta balance it, nobody want an internet that is totally control. full of spying and stuff like the whole NSA mess in the US.

Was this guy on the youtube regarding fitness named Scooby, apperently someone found out where he lived somehow, so there was some threats or something made to his family, so he had to stop making youtube videos and even move to live a new place. Just sad. but thats the reality of the world we live in.

We can just hope they good outweights the bad.

In some cases i can understand the "community rage".

The balancing sh*t that some developers make is just *insert_rage_here*.
My favorite example: BF Bad Company 2
"Destruction 2.0" - scripted destruction while you cant shoot through walls with cal50 ammo."
"Lets reduce the Tracer speed by 50%, give Helicopters Flares but don't fix the remove_tracer_with_smoke glitch."
"hay, lets give all bolt-action sniper rifles the same damage of 100 with an effective range of 100m and damage-drop after this line, so that only the only difference is the crosshair and wobbling, oh and lets set the bullet-gravity to ridiculous high values"
the moment where i have seen that i need 2 .50 bullets to destroy a drone, and that i can kill enemys faster with my Uzi or Shotgun over half the map than with my M95 Sniper, because they have no bulletdrop and no damagedrop was the moment where i quit and threw the game away.

SWTOR - now free to play, because we screwed it with a "6 month too soon release" - now you need to buy your skill-bars with real money.
Unfinished raids at release, unfinished legacy-content with 6month delay and "oh you have already all character slots at max level? too bad, you need to delete them to get access to the legacy content".

The last where i was really disappointed was Mass Effect 3 and its ending. Played through all 3 Parts, made decisions because they said that it will affect the end...and what was it? different colored explosions...
or the "photoshopped stock-model of Tali" T_T
not to mention the "if you want to know the real background story, you need to buy the day_1 DLC"

i mean...that's no way to treat customers and fans

I have completely quit to play EA games after that, stupid mass-production series. every year a "new" Battlefield, VIP content and DLCs...
EA ruins one good gameforge after another. Bioware for example.
I was so happy as i have read about the financial problems of EA...sadly it was not the end.

As mentioned above, in some cases i can understand the community rage, but on the other side its also no solution to threat the developers. EA is one of the publishers who cares a sh*t about the customers, just release a ton of DLCs for them to buy. I would also wish for them to become extinct. But still, i would not harass a single person of them, its simply no solution. Harassment and Death-Mails lead to no change.

PA for example is one of the games where i have a good feeling about. The Devs care about us (i think )
If we don't like something, there is still modding support, so we can do it like we want it.
Sadly i don't think it will protect Uber from messages like this.
Idiots exist everywhere

There's criticism and there's sending death/rape threats and horrendous personal insults. Nothing related to games can every justifiably provoke that so to bring up those famous failures is a bit of a red herring.

I always maintain that the internet is very much represented by an angry minority. Its not even gaming, look at recent UK news about trolling suicides: lots of people online are hate-filled and socially awkward, and when given an anonymous shield, they just let loose on whatever they want with no regards for anyone on the other end.

The article is very interesting, but it's easy to get too caught up in the negative. For every one rude or nasty person, there are usually 99 that range from "harsh but polite" to downright awesome. Death threats will happen, especially behind the shield of anonymity. Are most of them serious? Probably not. Just some people have no concept of internet "smack talk" (which is what they perceive it to be) and real life threats. I suppose it's possible some of them don't actually care either, but thankfully, it's easy to see all the good people.

Having good banning tools makes it easier too.

We could hide behind anonymity and just use our handles, but especially in an age where Live Streams are becoming more common, if someone is determined, they will be able to figure out who we are. There are ways to report actual threats, and as for escalation, there are ways to deal with that too. But generally, my rule is "don't engage".

At some point, though, I feel like you wouldn't be able to do that. I mean, unless you pretended to be an intermediary for real devs, but even then they'd know who to yell at.

Exactly. Even without LiveStreams, I think it just is harder to maintain that fiction. I have more important things to worry about than if someone is going to lose their **** over a video game.

I will promise to not start harassing as long as Scathis stops with the puns.