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The problem of game developers receiving abusive messages

153 points by guildwriter 9y ago

sixtypoundhound 9y ago
This. Seriously, I run a bunch of FREE websites and I'm amazed by the stuff that shows up in my inbox. When did it become ok to harass someone running a FREE website? If you don't like it, hit the frigging back button. And get a life.
- vtange 9y ago
  This reminds me of an article I read a long while back (I don't remember the title..) that basically argued that by lowering the barrier of entry to your content, be it a game, app, etc., you make it such that others have nothing to lose for slinging mud. IIRC the same article did a study on online free-to-play and subscription games and noticed that games with higher barrier of entry, be it with price or even a lottery system, tend to see more civility in their communities, since people have something to lose if they are banned. It would be great if someone could link that article in or something.
  - percival_krusen 9y ago
    SomethingAwful.com had (perhaps it still has, haven't been in a while) some incredible forums because membership was $10. If you got banned you had to pay up to get access again. That made it possible to enforce strict rules on post quality and civility.
- tonyedgecombe 9y ago
  In my experience the more people pay you the better behaved they are, people who get things for free are the most entitled and abusive.
  - collyw 9y ago
    I would disagree based on experience at a previous workplace. We were paying a Salesforce consultancy a lot of money, so our technically clueless founders thought that gave them a licence to act like arseholes. One consultant had a nervous breakdown after a couple of months.
    - jnwatson 9y ago
      That’s a bit of a different relationship. The ability to fire the consultant changes the power dynamic.
Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
I got a glimpse of this working on my open source Minecraft clone, and it's at least half of the reason that game is sitting on the backburner. Gamers can be a pretty entitled group. I also see this in the rest of my open source work, to a lesser extent. On the whole I probably get slightly fewer "fuck you"s than I get "thank you"s.
- camus2 9y ago
  > Gamers can be a pretty entitled group. Just like sport fans, moviegoers, fooding enthusiasts or people who buy books. In every circle you'll have a tiny loud minority who behaves like crap, it has nothing to do with gaming. You'd think people who buy books have a better education and behavior? People like J. K. Rowling or Stephen King have had plenty of stalkers and death threats, King wrote plenty of books about on subject.
  - Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
    In my experience gamers are a clear outlier.
    - camus2 9y ago
      Compared to what? violent hooligans in football?
      - Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
        Other online communities. I haven't really met any violent holligans in football so I can't compare to that.
        camus2 9y ago
        Because you think hooligans aren't being mean and hateful online as well? let's not even talk about political circles which have nothing to do with gaming. You are talking from you experience standpoint but you're wrong, there is way worse than gaming communities.
jancsika 9y ago
Do all game devs experience similar types of abuse, or only the devs of games with environments in which the developer's company is attempting to monetize the player as they move through the game? For example-- there is some beautiful sidescroller game I've seen where the animation looks like old-school Fleischer studio cartoons. Do devs of games like that get abuse from players, too?
- JasonSage 9y ago
  > Do devs of games like that get abuse from players, too? Yes, without a doubt. It's a huge problem.
- kec 9y ago
  Several of the devs tweeted at in the article (camposanto and klei at the very least) are being tweeted at over games which have traditional (ie non microtransaction based) business models.
- itronitron 9y ago
  > old-school Fleischer studio cartoons... Sounds like the game you are referring to is Cuphead in which case I am pretty sure the devs for that game are getting plenty of abuse from players.
- justinpombrio 9y ago
  Yes - look at the tweets in the article. I've played Don't Starve Together and Terraria, and neither of them have any in-game monetization. Those are also both family-friendly games. Don't Starve has a cartoony art style, too. I can't speak for the other games. Strangely, the tweets don't either. They're not like "I am angry about this particular feature", they're like <word salad of swear words>.
  - Mithaldu 9y ago
    Terraria (178k followers) and Don't Starve (63k followers) get this stuff because they have the kind of playerbase size that makes people feel like the devs won't ever see their message anyhow. They tried to ask for stuff, or saw others try and didn't even see evidence that the devs saw the question. So they figure it's fine to just yell at the ocean.
arkades 9y ago
I don’t understand what forces devs to participate directly in this public discourse. Barring those so small they can’t hire someone to run interference, why precisely are you publicly interacting with your customers? Anyone who works with the mass public, be they cashiers or physicians, knows damn well that the Public is terrible. Don’t give them a hotline into your head.
- vvanders 9y ago
  Did you read the article? He laid it out pretty clearly: > All of this is hardest on indies for two reasons. Firstly, because they are generally at the coal face of their games. They don’t have a marketing person standing between the hostile feedback and their work — it all comes in direct and unfiltered. Secondly most indies don’t make mass market games that appeal to the broadest cross section of players, and that include every feature under the sun. Lots of book authors and other artists who have to "promote" themselves on social media run into similar issues.
  - arkades 9y ago
    Did you read my comment? “Barring those so small they can’t hire someone to run interference,” Let’s both appreciate the moment.
    - vvanders 9y ago
      You're assuming that game developers want to live in some sort of isolated ivory tower. Everyone I knew who got into the industry did it to share the joy that gaming brought them to other people. It's an explicitly social industry in that respect. Also, I don't know of a single place that can afford to run interference for every single dev. Even on the large AAA stuff I worked on we were lucky to have 1 or 2 marketing people who were even aware the dev team existed.
      - arkades 9y ago
        I’m assuming no such thing. I’m saying this is a “have your cake and eat it too” issue. Either you’re accessible to millions or you arent, and that choice comes with benefits and drawbacks. If one can’t handle the drawbacks of being publicly accessible to millions, one should go to great pains to prevent that, rather than lamenting the inevitable - and I do mean inevitable - long tail of jerks. And when I say “run interference,” I mean “handle all public interactions for the product, which your devs shouldn’t be involved in at all, because they’re devs, not marketers.”
debacle 9y ago
> The big issue here is that when you speak to players (and I have, a lot), a large number of them would agree with this statement “There are times when it’s reasonable to send personal abuse to a developer,” although they differ on when those times are. Seems disingenuous. Without qualifying what those times are, it's logical that almost anyone would agree with that sentiment on some level. Did the developer take a drug-fueled sex tourism jaunt with your Kickstarter donation? Yeah that person probably deserves a little abuse. > And what will happen when the best established developers and most talented up-and-comers decide that it’s not? I think that gaming is probably the last industry that will suffer from something like this. There's always going to be a glut of people that want to work on games/in gaming. I don't think this editorial really says anything. Some people on the Internet are loud assholes. Game developers put themselves on the Internet. Ergo, some people on the Internet are going to be loud assholes to game developers. You can find someone complaining about anything: https://twitter.com/search?q=%23applesucks&src=typd https://twitter.com/search?q=%23applesucks&src=typd https://twitter.com/search?q=%23nycsucks&src=typd https://twitter.com/search?q=%23nycsucks&src=typd https://twitter.com/search?q=%23berniesucks&src=typd https://twitter.com/search?q=%23berniesucks&src=typd https://twitter.com/search?q=%23catssuck&src=typd https://twitter.com/search?q=%23catssuck&src=typd https://twitter.com/search?q=%23rainbowssuck&src=typd https://twitter.com/search?q=%23rainbowssuck&src=typd This has been a problem for decades, and probably ages before that: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19 https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19 Loud, angry, vocal minorities tend to drown out the majority. If you can't ignore that, you'll never succeed.
Cafey 9y ago
"I want [something] and I want it now." This is what I hear from reading most of those angry tweets/comments. Sadly, sometimes they are simply shouting because the game is not what they were hyped about. Maybe we are over-hyping games to get pre-orders in? I remember a time when the first time I heard about a game was when it was actually on the store shelves (good ol' boxes). Now there are dev-blogs and the likes years before a game is actually going to release...
- InclinedPlane 9y ago
  That's victim blaming. Hype is irrelevant. The problem here is not just entitlement, it's that some people feel perfectly ok leveling abuse at other people. This isn't a new phenomenon. There's always been a subset of "I need to speak to the manager" folks who have been willing to treat individuals doing certain jobs in an inhumane and abusive fashion. Today the boundaries on those sorts of interactions are drastically changing, and the levels of abuse that are commonplace have grown much greater. A fast food worker running into an irate customer who avows that they will kill them and rape their family has always been an extraordinarily rare occurrence, today that sort of behavior is commonplace in many contexts and especially in the realm of game development. That doesn't mean everyone is doing it, but the fact that it's tolerated and ubiquitous means that it has a universal impact on those affected.
- Impossible 9y ago
  The thing is marketing a game does not justify death threats, rape threats, doxxing or even personal insults. Poor user reviews, not buying a game, refunds and civil complaints should be enough to signal that a game isn't good enough. If making a game to the best of your ability, marketing it, and not quite hitting the bar for a subset of gamers justifies abuse then I'd recommend developers stop making games. There are better job options that don't subject people to that level of abuse. If you made abusive comments toward startup founders because the MVP doesn't live up to the hype of the landing page on HN you'd get banned or at least heavily downvoted, I don't see why game developers should tolerate that kind of abuse.
keriati1 9y ago
I guess it's not just game developers, I work with my team in finance sector on a customer portal and we also get almost similar level of feedback from some people... But we have millions of users. I like to think that at this scale we can't avoid to have some of those guys.
- itronitron 9y ago
  I was going to write something insightful but then realized that yeah, people are just being incredibly rude when they provide feedback in that manner, to the point that their comments are not useful as feedback.
djroomba 9y ago
I've seen a few indie developers actively antagonize so called gamers. I've seen abusive companies like EA get rightfully called out. So Im skeptical of the depth of the claims, but I believe there are a few crazies. I've ran a few foreign tax information websites, and I got extraordinary death threats very graphic and very detailed. I think the internet really allows the mentally ill to scream for the attention they desperately want.
- vvanders 9y ago
  That article was signal boosted by every indie game dev I know of so I wouldn't dismiss it so casually.
- swivelmaster 9y ago
  Do you think the type of abuse that EA received was appropriate? The answer is: Absolutely not. Remember when Mass Effect: Andromeda came out and the facial animation system was broken? Some enterprising players looked through the game credits, found a woman they thought was responsible for said animations, and personally harassed her about it. If you think this abuse is limited to complaining about loot boxes, you're wrong; it isn't.
- tehwebguy 9y ago
  A thousand raging jerks treating random employees like shit because they think the game they made is somehow abuse. Zero people tweeting about the abuse the employees suffer for being in never-ending crunch time until their studio folds.
jstewartmobile 9y ago
If this is such a problem, how about making a game that teaches people to show a little class instead of yet another 8-bit remake for supercomputers? Reminds me of that Don Daglow talk[0] at GDC Europe where he basically told them that Americans are idiots and how to cater to that. I would like to think that most people would do something less cynical if they had come to the same conclusion -- like Wozniak[1] did. [0] http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/7.385041-Don-Daglow-Dissects-the-American-Online-Gamer http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/7.385041-Don-Dag... [1] https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/kb7y3v/steve-wozniak-was-my-computer-teacher-in-1995-5886b75bb3515d45f3dc2f90 https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/kb7y3v/steve-wozn...
- dragontamer 9y ago
  > that teaches people to show a little class Are you serious? This will get you labeled as a "SJW" and then the crazies will DEFINITELY flock to you and try to Dox you. That's the easiest way to get a target painted on your back. If there's one thing on the internet that is dangerous, it is deciding to have social commentary in today's political environment.
  - jstewartmobile 9y ago
    Show, don't tell. Do it right, and no one will even notice what you're up to...
dasil003 9y ago
This is just an ugly side of humanity that has always been there, but is magnified by the combination of anonymity, disenfranchisement, and ever more addicting Skinner-box style entertainment. We are a tribal species; in the past this type of behavior would be socialized out of you or else you would be a recluse. You didn't have the opportunity to sit in your own filth and project your self-loathing onto anyone across the Internet. As a species we're just not emotionally equipped to deal with the current reality.
- InclinedPlane 9y ago
  That's a cop-out. This isn't genetic, this isn't universal, this is a cultural trend.
  - dasil003 9y ago
    A cop-out? No, it's an explanation. How are you going to reverse the trend? First you have to understand the underlying factors. It's incredibly naive to think this type of impulse never existed before just because it's permanently recorded and visible for the first time.
    - InclinedPlane 9y ago
      Humans aren't feral, their patterns of behavior are dictated by culture, education, etc, regardless of "impulses". People may have impulses to hurt or steal from others, but those impulses can be controlled and the impacts of those impulses can be diminished on society. Socio-cultural norms and education teach people that there are other ways to get what you want than theft, for example, and provide strong discouragement against engaging in such "anti-social" behavior. On top of that there are legal proscriptions against such behavior. All of this adds together to massively reduce the level of murder, rape, and theft in civilized humans vs. hypothetical feral human populations. And the same dynamics can occur with individuals hurling abuse online. Those individuals could experience consequences for their actions (from twitter, valve, potentially the criminal justice system in some cases, etc.) from institutions as well as from society as a whole. Telling a game developer "I will rape you!" should be an action that dramatically curtails the perpetrators career options and results in losing friends, but today it doesn't. Sure, people hold dark impulses inside them routinely, everyone understands that. That doesn't mean they are uncontrollable. This is a recent phenomenon, which itself is proof enough that it is not due to some uncontrollable universal urge.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
ohiovr 9y ago
I have followed dreams that became unsatisfying. But I can tell you life can survive a dream. And enjoying life doesn't have to be difficult. I did do some indie game work but because of my own incompetence I could not make sense of the business. Fortunately I have gathered skills which had value elsewhere. And you can always have the satisfaction of knowing what the dream really was all about. Sadly most of us never even try.
swivelmaster 9y ago
I had a long phone conversation recently with a game industry friend who had the misfortune of being involved in multiple games that became targets of abuse. I had asked him for advice about potentially making some youtube videos about game design, including f2p game design (which I have substantial expertise in). He warned me that depending on the approach, even implying that I thought certain types of games or monetization weren't the worst thing since cancer could result in hate mail, doxxing, death threats to myself and my family, etc. He had been through that experience and wanted to warn me against it. Despite being involved in some very popular f2p mobile games, the worst abuse I've had was someone sending me a DM on Reddit saying I should get cancer. I don't really know what, if any, the solution here is. I've been able to ignore the worst of what I've taken because it's been pretty mild compared to what's possible. It makes me wonder - if I were the public face of a game that really, really pissed off the trolls, would I be able to emotionally handle the result? I have no idea and I don't want to find out.
- QAPereo 9y ago
  Death threats and abuse are a non-starter, but working on making more addictive games-cum-casinos should probably come with polite disdain. Given that so much in gaming has become a money grab from kids and people wired to gamble is, a shame. So... death threats? Doxxing? Abuse? No, never. Respect for a good job well done? Also no. Hunting “whales” for vast profits is a good business model, but so is selling tobacco or opening a casino. I don’t know that pandering to addictive personalities, the young, the inexperienced, and the impulsive is a very good use of anyone’s talents. Worse, it’s going to turn s generation off the medium once they realize how abusive it’s becoming.
  - swivelmaster 9y ago
    Not all of the games involved were mtx-based. One was more like "you screwed up the IP I love, die!" edit: Also, it is profoundly unhelpful to the discussion to say what you said, which is basically "Well, what did you expect, a pat on the back?" We're talking here about abuse, not constructive criticism. Here's an analogy: Nobody expects an Oscar for working on Transformers 6, but personally subjecting them to online abuse for it is totally unacceptable. There's no need to come into the discussion and remind us that Transformers 6 is not likely to be a very good movie.
cageface 9y ago
I'm sure this is worse for game devs but I think it affects anybody that creates customer-facing apps. The culture of rudeness and entitlement among customers today is very deep rooted. It's one of several reasons why it's smarter to build B2B businesses.
jnordwick 9y ago
Yawn. A lot of professions deal with this. I work in high frequency trading, and i get told I'm the Devil by people multiple times a week including major publications. But i love what i do and nobodys unintelligent abuse is going to change that.
- IronKettle 9y ago
  You get told to "hang yourself" and told you should "die screaming" or just have someone yelling "cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt" at you multiple times a week? I used to work for a hedge fund. Mostly people just didn't understand it and were skeptical, but phrased it in a way that gave me an out: "I don't understand how it provides any value to society," or things like that. Nobody ever harassed me online with just "cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt".
Uhhrrr 9y ago
This is just something that happens when you put something out into the world. I had a project I worked on reviewed by a major newspaper as, "At best obscure, at worst ridiculous." That (temporarily) stung worse than "CUNT CUNT CUNT CUNT" ever would.
- pavlov 9y ago
  The difference is that the newspaper doesn't actively send you their review hundreds of times per hour, or try to discover your personal information and intimidate you with insinuations of what they could do to you directly.
guelo 9y ago
What we need is to take a page from Uber and have user-side ratings along with the producer-side ratings. A forum like steam could let producers or peers downvote gamers and then producers could choose to not sell games to people whose ratings are too low.
- jdiaz5513 9y ago
  Something tells me there may be an inherent danger to isolating these people further. You may be on to something, but perhaps restricting sales is not the best use of user-ratings. I've often wondered if weighing a producer-side rating against the user-side rating could work (e.g. a user with a low rating can give a 1 star review yet have little effect on the game rating).
user68858788 9y ago
Up until about five years ago, I've only ever wanted to create and share video games. After a couple years doing it independently and getting my first professional game job, gamer gate happened. It's absolutely terrifying to see the lengths at which people will go to make someone's life a living hell. Every industry friend was affected, and reacted mostly by reducing their online presence, and I've done the same. Some were targeted personally. A few left the industry. It's hard to want to make games now. The best feeling in the world was watching someone on YouTube play something I'd made. It's different now. Part of it is fear of being targeted, but it's also made me think of why I would put so much effort into something that attracts so much vitriol. I know it's a minority of people, but games take months of hard work to create and these thoughts take a toll over time, especially on bad days. The more personality a person puts into their game, the more they risk being targeted. It's depressing to have to hide self expression, reduce social media presence, and use pseudonyms when all I really want is to make games for others to have fun with.
- monkeydreams 9y ago
  Game design is a form of expression which requires substantial investment both from the developer and also from the participant. The customers have serious skin in this interaction in the form of money spent on the game, time invested in progression, social standing (sometimes you have to be playing this game because all your friends are playing it) and so on. This leads people to thinking that the moral high ground lies with them - they paid for this, they spent precious time, etc, etc - and the game developers should listen to them (and them alone). In a way the relationship is like the archetypal "number one fan" for a musician, writer, artist in times past, who had seen all the shows and purchased all the books and now feels, because the object of their attentions has made a choice they disagree with, somehow they have been betrayed. What game development has done is lower the cost of entry into these toxic relationships.
- ManuelKiessling 9y ago
  As someone who heard and read about Gamer Gate, but not more, I'm genuinely curious: What exactly is it that GG did to people working in the industry? My understanding was that the two parties having a fight were female developers and game reviewers on one side and a horde of "young angry white males" on the other (at least if you simplify the whole thing enough). And from this I understood that it was mostly the life of these females that was made a living hell. So, are you one of those female game developers, or did the mob turn against everyone creating games, regardless of gender? I hope this doesn't come across stupid - it's just that it seems to be an extremely complex topic and I just want to understand it a bit more.
forapurpose 9y ago
The mistake is to take the users' comments at face value, IMHO. They are not that upset about a game; something else in their lives is painful for them and they are taking it out on you. They are unable to deal with their emotions otherwise. That perspective can help in a couple of ways: First, you know it has nothing to do with you or your game; you are just an object, a mental construction, at which they unload their anger; they might as well be talking to the pin-up poster on their wall (or to the pixels which form an enemy on their screen). Second, if you realize these are troubled people who feel powerless; if you have some empathy for them; they lose their power over how you feel. Here's a recent story about the comedian Sarah Silverman taking that approach and going a step further, with amazing results: http://www.cbc.ca/radio/q/blog/sarah-silverman-s-response-to-a-twitter-troll-is-a-master-class-in-compassion-1.4471337 http://www.cbc.ca/radio/q/blog/sarah-silverman-s-response-to... Also, it may be important to ask why so many young males (if that's the demographic) have such emotional problems, why so many can't process their emotions effectively and feel so vulnerable. I think we sort of take it for granted that young males (and to a degree, all males) can't process emotions and act out, but I think that's a mistake.
- Terr_ 9y ago
  I also wouldn't be surprised if there's a default positive correlation between angry or confrontational gamers (writing abuse or not) and games designed around having "stab your enemy in the face" as part of their marketing and gameplay loop. That said, the article contains some other examples (like Terraria) which don't fit that mold.
- percival_krusen 9y ago
  My personal guess is that adolescent male humans have basically evolved to fight for survival and mating opportunities in violent Stone Age tribal societies. And the prefrontal cortex - that part of the brain that enables rational thought - doesn't finish developing until ten or more years after the onset of puberty. Convincing them to act rationally, and not emotionally, in a nonviolent, conflict-averse, gender-equitable society is working against the grain. It clearly must be done. A just civilization depends on it. But I expect doing so will be difficult and involve unpleasant tradeoffs; I don't expect it to be easy or simple. I think that women and some men may make the typical mind fallacy about young men that are irrational, emotional assholes. I don't think such young men have been insufficiently exposed to basic morals and etiquette. I think puberty hits people differently and that it hits many young men very hard in a particular way. Nature says "alright, time to start dominating others to ascend the Hobbesian tribal hierarchy" in a big way. Imagine being a male member of a violent ape species drugged into a stupor with aggression-inducing hormones while the small part of your brain capable of rational thought is still in diapers. That's my image of male adolescence. Of course I'm speaking from personal bias here. I'm socially well adjusted now in my 30s. I pay my taxes. I recycle. I'm nice to people. And I'm an intelligent person. But I was a horrible teen; I terrorized my family, nearly destroyed my own life, and had to be sent to a therapeutic boarding school at 15. I was an idiot back then.
cannonedhamster 9y ago
This sounds like a lot of industries I've worked in, most of which involve IT. I'm sort of amazed how many people think it's okay to hurl abuse at other people in general. Don't like a completely voluntary video game? Don't buy the next one and stop playing the game. Maybe submit some feedback on what is causing you not to continue playing and move on. I'm both a child and a parent and while there were a few years where I was will of spit and vinegar and mouth off at other people, I've never felt it okay to send the types of comments that some people think are acceptable (I've looked in case my memory was rose-colored). What amazes me more are the people who bring this attitude into the real world. I've had my job threatened, co-workers physically threatened (I'm apparently somewhat imposing so I don't get physical threats often), screamed at, had someone shoot a nail gun at me...It never ceases to amaze me how people can have so little respect for themselves or others. Kindness literally costs you nothing, and yet it can often be so hard to find.
davidbanham 9y ago
I left the industry because of the entitled behaviour of the community.
Viliam1234 9y ago
Seems like most of the abuse could be avoided by leaving Twitter.
arkh 9y ago
> Abuse is the cost of doing business. Reading the article, that's the guy behind Firewatch. I think the problem is not his games but his social media use. I'd wager most of this abuse he received was after he DMCAed pewdiepie after pdp used the word nigga while playing. People don't like devs who have a "stream our game all you want it's free publicity for us" message when launching it and use spurious DMCA claims on people they don't like. Maybe the problem are people who decided to make the video game industry woke and all about US centric politics. Or maybe the huge difference between the author and his father is "social" media and giving a damn about what is written there.
auggierose 9y ago
Well, try to publish an academic paper, and prepare for abuse in the form of reviews. At some point you need to learn to just shrug it off and focus on your work. Same is true for making games, I guess.
- DanBC 9y ago
  Do reviews of academic papers typically come in the form of "Hello, FUCK YOU - people do not read this SJW paper, it is retarded and a piece of crap"?
  - auggierose 9y ago
    Different words are used, but the meaning is sometimes the same
    - jstewartmobile 9y ago
      "Hello, FUCK YOU" would be an improvement over some of the the passive-aggressive backstabbing I've seen. It's like, at least you'd know...
- vanderZwan 9y ago
  I'm sure that negative feedback on research papers hurts, and that there is more emotional vitriol thrown in there than necessary for constructive criticism, but I highly doubt it's comparable to the type of abuse gamers send game designers on-line, let alone that researchers have to worry about death threats and doxxing from fellow researchers. Public backlash to controversial research is another topic entirely of course
EugeneOZ 9y ago
I understand I will be in minority here and I'm ready for downvotes. This article is outrageous not less than tweets inside of it. I think players have a right to express their hatred when they were asking for months about some balance change or submitting negative (but polite) feedback about some change, and didn't receive a single response. And after all of that they receive even worse update for the game they truly love. And more they love the game more they will hate developers who ignore their feedback. Of course, imbeciles who write life threats or personal attacks - they are just trash of humanity, nobody should listen them. But don't ignore hateful feedback without threats - this feedback comes from the people who love your game, love so much that it drives them crazy when you are moving it in the wrong direction.
- elthran 9y ago
  I think if your emotional reaction to a developer not developing their game in the way that you want is "hatred" you should probably consider that you might be overreacting?
  - EugeneOZ 9y ago
    I think if developers are ignoring feedback for months they should expect overreacting.
    - meheleventyone 9y ago
      Why? In what world do people have to respond to unsolicited commentary?
      - EugeneOZ 9y ago
        In this one. If you really don't care about feedback and (polite and constructive) commentaries are unsolicited - you deserve hateful feedback.
        meheleventyone 9y ago
DoreenMichele 9y ago
I can't help but wonder how much this is rooted in general distress out in the world. If you feel you can't control your life at all and a game is your escape, controlling that can take on an excess of importance.
Gatsky 9y ago
Isn't this just overstimulated people having their gratification loop interrupted? I guess gamers are more likely to be this way. Even the ones that aren't so shrill seem to enjoy watching others act it out for them on twitch.
xg15 9y ago
Slight aside, but: > Would you sign up for a job where you get screamed at all day, every day? Why would you go through that, when there are a million other fields where that doesn’t happen? The amount of customer service rep/call center jobs we have answers this with a "Yes", I think. (Not taking into account the reasons people sign up for those jobs though. Probably not because it's their passion...)
- stoolpigeon 9y ago
  Retail it's not all day, every day but not uncommon either. The military can be that way though I guess it is expected a bit. Lots of jobs include abuse.
- DoreenMichele 9y ago
  In all seriousness, no, I don't think so. They get some of that, but not all day, every day. I shadowed a call center person for an hour at a Fortune 500 company. None of the calls were like that. They do get such calls. We talked about that. But, no, it is not exclusively what they deal with.
- finnthehuman 9y ago
  When I was younger there was a popular line of thinking that the typical highschool job in customer service was where people learned to grow up into the kind of people that wouldn't yell at customer service. It sounded like the kind of thing that could be true, but was certainly the kind of thing you want to be true if you have one of those jobs. I've recently been thinking it has merit. -Having someone directly in my face yelling at me over a couple of dollars made it a practical necessity to cultivate in myself an industrial-strength version of "you can't control other people, you can only control how you react to them." And that includes calibrating your level of fear to the actual level of risk. Even if all you are is a wimpy teen somehow made shift lead, ya gotta look a scary motherfucker in the eyes and tell them "No," when the only thing you've got to defend yourself is "Get out or we're calling the cops." -My sense of how to treat others is based on concepts of shared humanity. When someone is screaming at you, there ain't time or good reason to try and empathize with them. But you can't stoop to their level, either. So peg a bare minimum for behavior as a personal standard, and then try to live up to the standard. -- Consequently, I don't understand the trendy ideas on empathizing that posit I have to cultivate a personal connection before I can determine "oh yeah, it turns out I shouldn't be a prick to this person, either."
rhcom2 9y ago
Four years after Gamergate, how can this be news to anyone?
abiox 9y ago
i suppose a couple questions might cause some people to infer otherwise, so to be clear: it's not implying the behavior is "fine" or shouldn't be critically analysed. ok. so, things like online death threats and other such things get talked about a lot, and i have two main questions: a) what kind of conversion rate is there - that is, threats being acted upon (how many threats vs how many events)? b) has there been any analysis that shows these threats are credible and should be considered as demonstrating legitimate danger? (again, this isn't to meant to excuse such behavior.) my question stems from the fact that there is a rather long standing "internet gaming culture" which provides a context for hyperbolic aggressive commentary and interpersonal behavior, that some people may not be familiar with. for example, for as long as i can remember (i started with quake 3 over modem) to lose a match was to 'get raped'. to go on a win streak was to be 'fucking raping everyone'. my thinking is that the vast, overwhelming majority of 'death threats' are hyperbolic and aggressive, but also utterly throwaway comments void of danger. as a consequence, talking about real world fear and even actions (like moving house) doesn't really garner a sympathetic reaction from many in the internet gaming culture, because it (from their perspective) demonstrates either significant naivete and ignorance, or some kind of intellectual dishonesty (given the idea that the threats do not represent an actual danger).

153 points by guildwriter 9y ago

This. Seriously, I run a bunch of FREE websites and I'm amazed by the stuff that shows up in my inbox. When did it become ok to harass someone running a FREE website? If you don't like it, hit the frigging back button. And get a life.

vtange 9y ago
This reminds me of an article I read a long while back (I don't remember the title..) that basically argued that by lowering the barrier of entry to your content, be it a game, app, etc., you make it such that others have nothing to lose for slinging mud. IIRC the same article did a study on online free-to-play and subscription games and noticed that games with higher barrier of entry, be it with price or even a lottery system, tend to see more civility in their communities, since people have something to lose if they are banned. It would be great if someone could link that article in or something.
- percival_krusen 9y ago
  SomethingAwful.com had (perhaps it still has, haven't been in a while) some incredible forums because membership was $10. If you got banned you had to pay up to get access again. That made it possible to enforce strict rules on post quality and civility.
tonyedgecombe 9y ago
In my experience the more people pay you the better behaved they are, people who get things for free are the most entitled and abusive.
- collyw 9y ago
  I would disagree based on experience at a previous workplace. We were paying a Salesforce consultancy a lot of money, so our technically clueless founders thought that gave them a licence to act like arseholes. One consultant had a nervous breakdown after a couple of months.
  - jnwatson 9y ago
    That’s a bit of a different relationship. The ability to fire the consultant changes the power dynamic.

Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago

I got a glimpse of this working on my open source Minecraft clone, and it's at least half of the reason that game is sitting on the backburner. Gamers can be a pretty entitled group. I also see this in the rest of my open source work, to a lesser extent. On the whole I probably get slightly fewer "fuck you"s than I get "thank you"s.

camus2 9y ago
> Gamers can be a pretty entitled group. Just like sport fans, moviegoers, fooding enthusiasts or people who buy books. In every circle you'll have a tiny loud minority who behaves like crap, it has nothing to do with gaming. You'd think people who buy books have a better education and behavior? People like J. K. Rowling or Stephen King have had plenty of stalkers and death threats, King wrote plenty of books about on subject.
- Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
  In my experience gamers are a clear outlier.
  - camus2 9y ago
    Compared to what? violent hooligans in football?
    - Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
      Other online communities. I haven't really met any violent holligans in football so I can't compare to that.
      - camus2 9y ago
        Because you think hooligans aren't being mean and hateful online as well? let's not even talk about political circles which have nothing to do with gaming. You are talking from you experience standpoint but you're wrong, there is way worse than gaming communities.

jancsika 9y ago

Do all game devs experience similar types of abuse, or only the devs of games with environments in which the developer's company is attempting to monetize the player as they move through the game? For example-- there is some beautiful sidescroller game I've seen where the animation looks like old-school Fleischer studio cartoons. Do devs of games like that get abuse from players, too?

JasonSage 9y ago
> Do devs of games like that get abuse from players, too? Yes, without a doubt. It's a huge problem.
kec 9y ago
Several of the devs tweeted at in the article (camposanto and klei at the very least) are being tweeted at over games which have traditional (ie non microtransaction based) business models.
itronitron 9y ago
> old-school Fleischer studio cartoons... Sounds like the game you are referring to is Cuphead in which case I am pretty sure the devs for that game are getting plenty of abuse from players.
justinpombrio 9y ago
Yes - look at the tweets in the article. I've played Don't Starve Together and Terraria, and neither of them have any in-game monetization. Those are also both family-friendly games. Don't Starve has a cartoony art style, too. I can't speak for the other games. Strangely, the tweets don't either. They're not like "I am angry about this particular feature", they're like <word salad of swear words>.
- Mithaldu 9y ago
  Terraria (178k followers) and Don't Starve (63k followers) get this stuff because they have the kind of playerbase size that makes people feel like the devs won't ever see their message anyhow. They tried to ask for stuff, or saw others try and didn't even see evidence that the devs saw the question. So they figure it's fine to just yell at the ocean.

arkades 9y ago

I don’t understand what forces devs to participate directly in this public discourse. Barring those so small they can’t hire someone to run interference, why precisely are you publicly interacting with your customers? Anyone who works with the mass public, be they cashiers or physicians, knows damn well that the Public is terrible. Don’t give them a hotline into your head.

vvanders 9y ago
Did you read the article? He laid it out pretty clearly: > All of this is hardest on indies for two reasons. Firstly, because they are generally at the coal face of their games. They don’t have a marketing person standing between the hostile feedback and their work — it all comes in direct and unfiltered. Secondly most indies don’t make mass market games that appeal to the broadest cross section of players, and that include every feature under the sun. Lots of book authors and other artists who have to "promote" themselves on social media run into similar issues.
- arkades 9y ago
  Did you read my comment? “Barring those so small they can’t hire someone to run interference,” Let’s both appreciate the moment.
  - vvanders 9y ago
    You're assuming that game developers want to live in some sort of isolated ivory tower. Everyone I knew who got into the industry did it to share the joy that gaming brought them to other people. It's an explicitly social industry in that respect. Also, I don't know of a single place that can afford to run interference for every single dev. Even on the large AAA stuff I worked on we were lucky to have 1 or 2 marketing people who were even aware the dev team existed.
    - arkades 9y ago
      I’m assuming no such thing. I’m saying this is a “have your cake and eat it too” issue. Either you’re accessible to millions or you arent, and that choice comes with benefits and drawbacks. If one can’t handle the drawbacks of being publicly accessible to millions, one should go to great pains to prevent that, rather than lamenting the inevitable - and I do mean inevitable - long tail of jerks. And when I say “run interference,” I mean “handle all public interactions for the product, which your devs shouldn’t be involved in at all, because they’re devs, not marketers.”

debacle 9y ago

> The big issue here is that when you speak to players (and I have, a lot), a large number of them would agree with this statement “There are times when it’s reasonable to send personal abuse to a developer,” although they differ on when those times are. Seems disingenuous. Without qualifying what those times are, it's logical that almost anyone would agree with that sentiment on some level. Did the developer take a drug-fueled sex tourism jaunt with your Kickstarter donation? Yeah that person probably deserves a little abuse. > And what will happen when the best established developers and most talented up-and-comers decide that it’s not? I think that gaming is probably the last industry that will suffer from something like this. There's always going to be a glut of people that want to work on games/in gaming. I don't think this editorial really says anything. Some people on the Internet are loud assholes. Game developers put themselves on the Internet. Ergo, some people on the Internet are going to be loud assholes to game developers. You can find someone complaining about anything: https://twitter.com/search?q=%23applesucks&src=typd https://twitter.com/search?q=%23applesucks&src=typd https://twitter.com/search?q=%23nycsucks&src=typd https://twitter.com/search?q=%23nycsucks&src=typd https://twitter.com/search?q=%23berniesucks&src=typd https://twitter.com/search?q=%23berniesucks&src=typd https://twitter.com/search?q=%23catssuck&src=typd https://twitter.com/search?q=%23catssuck&src=typd https://twitter.com/search?q=%23rainbowssuck&src=typd https://twitter.com/search?q=%23rainbowssuck&src=typd This has been a problem for decades, and probably ages before that: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19 https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19 Loud, angry, vocal minorities tend to drown out the majority. If you can't ignore that, you'll never succeed.

Cafey 9y ago

"I want [something] and I want it now." This is what I hear from reading most of those angry tweets/comments. Sadly, sometimes they are simply shouting because the game is not what they were hyped about. Maybe we are over-hyping games to get pre-orders in? I remember a time when the first time I heard about a game was when it was actually on the store shelves (good ol' boxes). Now there are dev-blogs and the likes years before a game is actually going to release...

InclinedPlane 9y ago
That's victim blaming. Hype is irrelevant. The problem here is not just entitlement, it's that some people feel perfectly ok leveling abuse at other people. This isn't a new phenomenon. There's always been a subset of "I need to speak to the manager" folks who have been willing to treat individuals doing certain jobs in an inhumane and abusive fashion. Today the boundaries on those sorts of interactions are drastically changing, and the levels of abuse that are commonplace have grown much greater. A fast food worker running into an irate customer who avows that they will kill them and rape their family has always been an extraordinarily rare occurrence, today that sort of behavior is commonplace in many contexts and especially in the realm of game development. That doesn't mean everyone is doing it, but the fact that it's tolerated and ubiquitous means that it has a universal impact on those affected.
Impossible 9y ago
The thing is marketing a game does not justify death threats, rape threats, doxxing or even personal insults. Poor user reviews, not buying a game, refunds and civil complaints should be enough to signal that a game isn't good enough. If making a game to the best of your ability, marketing it, and not quite hitting the bar for a subset of gamers justifies abuse then I'd recommend developers stop making games. There are better job options that don't subject people to that level of abuse. If you made abusive comments toward startup founders because the MVP doesn't live up to the hype of the landing page on HN you'd get banned or at least heavily downvoted, I don't see why game developers should tolerate that kind of abuse.

keriati1 9y ago

I guess it's not just game developers, I work with my team in finance sector on a customer portal and we also get almost similar level of feedback from some people... But we have millions of users. I like to think that at this scale we can't avoid to have some of those guys.

itronitron 9y ago
I was going to write something insightful but then realized that yeah, people are just being incredibly rude when they provide feedback in that manner, to the point that their comments are not useful as feedback.

djroomba 9y ago

I've seen a few indie developers actively antagonize so called gamers. I've seen abusive companies like EA get rightfully called out. So Im skeptical of the depth of the claims, but I believe there are a few crazies. I've ran a few foreign tax information websites, and I got extraordinary death threats very graphic and very detailed. I think the internet really allows the mentally ill to scream for the attention they desperately want.

vvanders 9y ago
That article was signal boosted by every indie game dev I know of so I wouldn't dismiss it so casually.
swivelmaster 9y ago
Do you think the type of abuse that EA received was appropriate? The answer is: Absolutely not. Remember when Mass Effect: Andromeda came out and the facial animation system was broken? Some enterprising players looked through the game credits, found a woman they thought was responsible for said animations, and personally harassed her about it. If you think this abuse is limited to complaining about loot boxes, you're wrong; it isn't.
tehwebguy 9y ago
A thousand raging jerks treating random employees like shit because they think the game they made is somehow abuse. Zero people tweeting about the abuse the employees suffer for being in never-ending crunch time until their studio folds.

jstewartmobile 9y ago

If this is such a problem, how about making a game that teaches people to show a little class instead of yet another 8-bit remake for supercomputers? Reminds me of that Don Daglow talk[0] at GDC Europe where he basically told them that Americans are idiots and how to cater to that. I would like to think that most people would do something less cynical if they had come to the same conclusion -- like Wozniak[1] did. [0] http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/7.385041-Don-Daglow-Dissects-the-American-Online-Gamer http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/7.385041-Don-Dag... [1] https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/kb7y3v/steve-wozniak-was-my-computer-teacher-in-1995-5886b75bb3515d45f3dc2f90 https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/kb7y3v/steve-wozn...

dragontamer 9y ago
> that teaches people to show a little class Are you serious? This will get you labeled as a "SJW" and then the crazies will DEFINITELY flock to you and try to Dox you. That's the easiest way to get a target painted on your back. If there's one thing on the internet that is dangerous, it is deciding to have social commentary in today's political environment.
- jstewartmobile 9y ago
  Show, don't tell. Do it right, and no one will even notice what you're up to...

dasil003 9y ago

This is just an ugly side of humanity that has always been there, but is magnified by the combination of anonymity, disenfranchisement, and ever more addicting Skinner-box style entertainment. We are a tribal species; in the past this type of behavior would be socialized out of you or else you would be a recluse. You didn't have the opportunity to sit in your own filth and project your self-loathing onto anyone across the Internet. As a species we're just not emotionally equipped to deal with the current reality.

InclinedPlane 9y ago
That's a cop-out. This isn't genetic, this isn't universal, this is a cultural trend.
- dasil003 9y ago
  A cop-out? No, it's an explanation. How are you going to reverse the trend? First you have to understand the underlying factors. It's incredibly naive to think this type of impulse never existed before just because it's permanently recorded and visible for the first time.
  - InclinedPlane 9y ago
    Humans aren't feral, their patterns of behavior are dictated by culture, education, etc, regardless of "impulses". People may have impulses to hurt or steal from others, but those impulses can be controlled and the impacts of those impulses can be diminished on society. Socio-cultural norms and education teach people that there are other ways to get what you want than theft, for example, and provide strong discouragement against engaging in such "anti-social" behavior. On top of that there are legal proscriptions against such behavior. All of this adds together to massively reduce the level of murder, rape, and theft in civilized humans vs. hypothetical feral human populations. And the same dynamics can occur with individuals hurling abuse online. Those individuals could experience consequences for their actions (from twitter, valve, potentially the criminal justice system in some cases, etc.) from institutions as well as from society as a whole. Telling a game developer "I will rape you!" should be an action that dramatically curtails the perpetrators career options and results in losing friends, but today it doesn't. Sure, people hold dark impulses inside them routinely, everyone understands that. That doesn't mean they are uncontrollable. This is a recent phenomenon, which itself is proof enough that it is not due to some uncontrollable universal urge.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

ohiovr 9y ago

I have followed dreams that became unsatisfying. But I can tell you life can survive a dream. And enjoying life doesn't have to be difficult. I did do some indie game work but because of my own incompetence I could not make sense of the business. Fortunately I have gathered skills which had value elsewhere. And you can always have the satisfaction of knowing what the dream really was all about. Sadly most of us never even try.

swivelmaster 9y ago

I had a long phone conversation recently with a game industry friend who had the misfortune of being involved in multiple games that became targets of abuse. I had asked him for advice about potentially making some youtube videos about game design, including f2p game design (which I have substantial expertise in). He warned me that depending on the approach, even implying that I thought certain types of games or monetization weren't the worst thing since cancer could result in hate mail, doxxing, death threats to myself and my family, etc. He had been through that experience and wanted to warn me against it. Despite being involved in some very popular f2p mobile games, the worst abuse I've had was someone sending me a DM on Reddit saying I should get cancer. I don't really know what, if any, the solution here is. I've been able to ignore the worst of what I've taken because it's been pretty mild compared to what's possible. It makes me wonder - if I were the public face of a game that really, really pissed off the trolls, would I be able to emotionally handle the result? I have no idea and I don't want to find out.

QAPereo 9y ago
Death threats and abuse are a non-starter, but working on making more addictive games-cum-casinos should probably come with polite disdain. Given that so much in gaming has become a money grab from kids and people wired to gamble is, a shame. So... death threats? Doxxing? Abuse? No, never. Respect for a good job well done? Also no. Hunting “whales” for vast profits is a good business model, but so is selling tobacco or opening a casino. I don’t know that pandering to addictive personalities, the young, the inexperienced, and the impulsive is a very good use of anyone’s talents. Worse, it’s going to turn s generation off the medium once they realize how abusive it’s becoming.
- swivelmaster 9y ago
  Not all of the games involved were mtx-based. One was more like "you screwed up the IP I love, die!" edit: Also, it is profoundly unhelpful to the discussion to say what you said, which is basically "Well, what did you expect, a pat on the back?" We're talking here about abuse, not constructive criticism. Here's an analogy: Nobody expects an Oscar for working on Transformers 6, but personally subjecting them to online abuse for it is totally unacceptable. There's no need to come into the discussion and remind us that Transformers 6 is not likely to be a very good movie.

cageface 9y ago

I'm sure this is worse for game devs but I think it affects anybody that creates customer-facing apps. The culture of rudeness and entitlement among customers today is very deep rooted. It's one of several reasons why it's smarter to build B2B businesses.

jnordwick 9y ago

Yawn. A lot of professions deal with this. I work in high frequency trading, and i get told I'm the Devil by people multiple times a week including major publications. But i love what i do and nobodys unintelligent abuse is going to change that.

IronKettle 9y ago
You get told to "hang yourself" and told you should "die screaming" or just have someone yelling "cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt" at you multiple times a week? I used to work for a hedge fund. Mostly people just didn't understand it and were skeptical, but phrased it in a way that gave me an out: "I don't understand how it provides any value to society," or things like that. Nobody ever harassed me online with just "cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt".

Uhhrrr 9y ago

This is just something that happens when you put something out into the world. I had a project I worked on reviewed by a major newspaper as, "At best obscure, at worst ridiculous." That (temporarily) stung worse than "CUNT CUNT CUNT CUNT" ever would.

pavlov 9y ago
The difference is that the newspaper doesn't actively send you their review hundreds of times per hour, or try to discover your personal information and intimidate you with insinuations of what they could do to you directly.

guelo 9y ago

What we need is to take a page from Uber and have user-side ratings along with the producer-side ratings. A forum like steam could let producers or peers downvote gamers and then producers could choose to not sell games to people whose ratings are too low.

jdiaz5513 9y ago
Something tells me there may be an inherent danger to isolating these people further. You may be on to something, but perhaps restricting sales is not the best use of user-ratings. I've often wondered if weighing a producer-side rating against the user-side rating could work (e.g. a user with a low rating can give a 1 star review yet have little effect on the game rating).

user68858788 9y ago

Up until about five years ago, I've only ever wanted to create and share video games. After a couple years doing it independently and getting my first professional game job, gamer gate happened. It's absolutely terrifying to see the lengths at which people will go to make someone's life a living hell. Every industry friend was affected, and reacted mostly by reducing their online presence, and I've done the same. Some were targeted personally. A few left the industry. It's hard to want to make games now. The best feeling in the world was watching someone on YouTube play something I'd made. It's different now. Part of it is fear of being targeted, but it's also made me think of why I would put so much effort into something that attracts so much vitriol. I know it's a minority of people, but games take months of hard work to create and these thoughts take a toll over time, especially on bad days. The more personality a person puts into their game, the more they risk being targeted. It's depressing to have to hide self expression, reduce social media presence, and use pseudonyms when all I really want is to make games for others to have fun with.

monkeydreams 9y ago
Game design is a form of expression which requires substantial investment both from the developer and also from the participant. The customers have serious skin in this interaction in the form of money spent on the game, time invested in progression, social standing (sometimes you have to be playing this game because all your friends are playing it) and so on. This leads people to thinking that the moral high ground lies with them - they paid for this, they spent precious time, etc, etc - and the game developers should listen to them (and them alone). In a way the relationship is like the archetypal "number one fan" for a musician, writer, artist in times past, who had seen all the shows and purchased all the books and now feels, because the object of their attentions has made a choice they disagree with, somehow they have been betrayed. What game development has done is lower the cost of entry into these toxic relationships.
ManuelKiessling 9y ago
As someone who heard and read about Gamer Gate, but not more, I'm genuinely curious: What exactly is it that GG did to people working in the industry? My understanding was that the two parties having a fight were female developers and game reviewers on one side and a horde of "young angry white males" on the other (at least if you simplify the whole thing enough). And from this I understood that it was mostly the life of these females that was made a living hell. So, are you one of those female game developers, or did the mob turn against everyone creating games, regardless of gender? I hope this doesn't come across stupid - it's just that it seems to be an extremely complex topic and I just want to understand it a bit more.

forapurpose 9y ago

The mistake is to take the users' comments at face value, IMHO. They are not that upset about a game; something else in their lives is painful for them and they are taking it out on you. They are unable to deal with their emotions otherwise. That perspective can help in a couple of ways: First, you know it has nothing to do with you or your game; you are just an object, a mental construction, at which they unload their anger; they might as well be talking to the pin-up poster on their wall (or to the pixels which form an enemy on their screen). Second, if you realize these are troubled people who feel powerless; if you have some empathy for them; they lose their power over how you feel. Here's a recent story about the comedian Sarah Silverman taking that approach and going a step further, with amazing results: http://www.cbc.ca/radio/q/blog/sarah-silverman-s-response-to-a-twitter-troll-is-a-master-class-in-compassion-1.4471337 http://www.cbc.ca/radio/q/blog/sarah-silverman-s-response-to... Also, it may be important to ask why so many young males (if that's the demographic) have such emotional problems, why so many can't process their emotions effectively and feel so vulnerable. I think we sort of take it for granted that young males (and to a degree, all males) can't process emotions and act out, but I think that's a mistake.

Terr_ 9y ago
I also wouldn't be surprised if there's a default positive correlation between angry or confrontational gamers (writing abuse or not) and games designed around having "stab your enemy in the face" as part of their marketing and gameplay loop. That said, the article contains some other examples (like Terraria) which don't fit that mold.
percival_krusen 9y ago
My personal guess is that adolescent male humans have basically evolved to fight for survival and mating opportunities in violent Stone Age tribal societies. And the prefrontal cortex - that part of the brain that enables rational thought - doesn't finish developing until ten or more years after the onset of puberty. Convincing them to act rationally, and not emotionally, in a nonviolent, conflict-averse, gender-equitable society is working against the grain. It clearly must be done. A just civilization depends on it. But I expect doing so will be difficult and involve unpleasant tradeoffs; I don't expect it to be easy or simple. I think that women and some men may make the typical mind fallacy about young men that are irrational, emotional assholes. I don't think such young men have been insufficiently exposed to basic morals and etiquette. I think puberty hits people differently and that it hits many young men very hard in a particular way. Nature says "alright, time to start dominating others to ascend the Hobbesian tribal hierarchy" in a big way. Imagine being a male member of a violent ape species drugged into a stupor with aggression-inducing hormones while the small part of your brain capable of rational thought is still in diapers. That's my image of male adolescence. Of course I'm speaking from personal bias here. I'm socially well adjusted now in my 30s. I pay my taxes. I recycle. I'm nice to people. And I'm an intelligent person. But I was a horrible teen; I terrorized my family, nearly destroyed my own life, and had to be sent to a therapeutic boarding school at 15. I was an idiot back then.

cannonedhamster 9y ago

This sounds like a lot of industries I've worked in, most of which involve IT. I'm sort of amazed how many people think it's okay to hurl abuse at other people in general. Don't like a completely voluntary video game? Don't buy the next one and stop playing the game. Maybe submit some feedback on what is causing you not to continue playing and move on. I'm both a child and a parent and while there were a few years where I was will of spit and vinegar and mouth off at other people, I've never felt it okay to send the types of comments that some people think are acceptable (I've looked in case my memory was rose-colored). What amazes me more are the people who bring this attitude into the real world. I've had my job threatened, co-workers physically threatened (I'm apparently somewhat imposing so I don't get physical threats often), screamed at, had someone shoot a nail gun at me...It never ceases to amaze me how people can have so little respect for themselves or others. Kindness literally costs you nothing, and yet it can often be so hard to find.

davidbanham 9y ago

I left the industry because of the entitled behaviour of the community.

Viliam1234 9y ago

Seems like most of the abuse could be avoided by leaving Twitter.

arkh 9y ago

> Abuse is the cost of doing business. Reading the article, that's the guy behind Firewatch. I think the problem is not his games but his social media use. I'd wager most of this abuse he received was after he DMCAed pewdiepie after pdp used the word nigga while playing. People don't like devs who have a "stream our game all you want it's free publicity for us" message when launching it and use spurious DMCA claims on people they don't like. Maybe the problem are people who decided to make the video game industry woke and all about US centric politics. Or maybe the huge difference between the author and his father is "social" media and giving a damn about what is written there.

auggierose 9y ago

Well, try to publish an academic paper, and prepare for abuse in the form of reviews. At some point you need to learn to just shrug it off and focus on your work. Same is true for making games, I guess.

DanBC 9y ago
Do reviews of academic papers typically come in the form of "Hello, FUCK YOU - people do not read this SJW paper, it is retarded and a piece of crap"?
- auggierose 9y ago
  Different words are used, but the meaning is sometimes the same
  - jstewartmobile 9y ago
    "Hello, FUCK YOU" would be an improvement over some of the the passive-aggressive backstabbing I've seen. It's like, at least you'd know...
vanderZwan 9y ago
I'm sure that negative feedback on research papers hurts, and that there is more emotional vitriol thrown in there than necessary for constructive criticism, but I highly doubt it's comparable to the type of abuse gamers send game designers on-line, let alone that researchers have to worry about death threats and doxxing from fellow researchers. Public backlash to controversial research is another topic entirely of course

EugeneOZ 9y ago

I understand I will be in minority here and I'm ready for downvotes. This article is outrageous not less than tweets inside of it. I think players have a right to express their hatred when they were asking for months about some balance change or submitting negative (but polite) feedback about some change, and didn't receive a single response. And after all of that they receive even worse update for the game they truly love. And more they love the game more they will hate developers who ignore their feedback. Of course, imbeciles who write life threats or personal attacks - they are just trash of humanity, nobody should listen them. But don't ignore hateful feedback without threats - this feedback comes from the people who love your game, love so much that it drives them crazy when you are moving it in the wrong direction.

elthran 9y ago
I think if your emotional reaction to a developer not developing their game in the way that you want is "hatred" you should probably consider that you might be overreacting?
- EugeneOZ 9y ago
  I think if developers are ignoring feedback for months they should expect overreacting.
  - meheleventyone 9y ago
    Why? In what world do people have to respond to unsolicited commentary?
    - EugeneOZ 9y ago
      In this one. If you really don't care about feedback and (polite and constructive) commentaries are unsolicited - you deserve hateful feedback.
      - meheleventyone 9y ago

DoreenMichele 9y ago

I can't help but wonder how much this is rooted in general distress out in the world. If you feel you can't control your life at all and a game is your escape, controlling that can take on an excess of importance.

Gatsky 9y ago

Isn't this just overstimulated people having their gratification loop interrupted? I guess gamers are more likely to be this way. Even the ones that aren't so shrill seem to enjoy watching others act it out for them on twitch.

xg15 9y ago

Slight aside, but: > Would you sign up for a job where you get screamed at all day, every day? Why would you go through that, when there are a million other fields where that doesn’t happen? The amount of customer service rep/call center jobs we have answers this with a "Yes", I think. (Not taking into account the reasons people sign up for those jobs though. Probably not because it's their passion...)

stoolpigeon 9y ago
Retail it's not all day, every day but not uncommon either. The military can be that way though I guess it is expected a bit. Lots of jobs include abuse.
DoreenMichele 9y ago
In all seriousness, no, I don't think so. They get some of that, but not all day, every day. I shadowed a call center person for an hour at a Fortune 500 company. None of the calls were like that. They do get such calls. We talked about that. But, no, it is not exclusively what they deal with.
finnthehuman 9y ago
When I was younger there was a popular line of thinking that the typical highschool job in customer service was where people learned to grow up into the kind of people that wouldn't yell at customer service. It sounded like the kind of thing that could be true, but was certainly the kind of thing you want to be true if you have one of those jobs. I've recently been thinking it has merit. -Having someone directly in my face yelling at me over a couple of dollars made it a practical necessity to cultivate in myself an industrial-strength version of "you can't control other people, you can only control how you react to them." And that includes calibrating your level of fear to the actual level of risk. Even if all you are is a wimpy teen somehow made shift lead, ya gotta look a scary motherfucker in the eyes and tell them "No," when the only thing you've got to defend yourself is "Get out or we're calling the cops." -My sense of how to treat others is based on concepts of shared humanity. When someone is screaming at you, there ain't time or good reason to try and empathize with them. But you can't stoop to their level, either. So peg a bare minimum for behavior as a personal standard, and then try to live up to the standard. -- Consequently, I don't understand the trendy ideas on empathizing that posit I have to cultivate a personal connection before I can determine "oh yeah, it turns out I shouldn't be a prick to this person, either."

rhcom2 9y ago

Four years after Gamergate, how can this be news to anyone?

abiox 9y ago

i suppose a couple questions might cause some people to infer otherwise, so to be clear: it's not implying the behavior is "fine" or shouldn't be critically analysed. ok. so, things like online death threats and other such things get talked about a lot, and i have two main questions: a) what kind of conversion rate is there - that is, threats being acted upon (how many threats vs how many events)? b) has there been any analysis that shows these threats are credible and should be considered as demonstrating legitimate danger? (again, this isn't to meant to excuse such behavior.) my question stems from the fact that there is a rather long standing "internet gaming culture" which provides a context for hyperbolic aggressive commentary and interpersonal behavior, that some people may not be familiar with. for example, for as long as i can remember (i started with quake 3 over modem) to lose a match was to 'get raped'. to go on a win streak was to be 'fucking raping everyone'. my thinking is that the vast, overwhelming majority of 'death threats' are hyperbolic and aggressive, but also utterly throwaway comments void of danger. as a consequence, talking about real world fear and even actions (like moving house) doesn't really garner a sympathetic reaction from many in the internet gaming culture, because it (from their perspective) demonstrates either significant naivete and ignorance, or some kind of intellectual dishonesty (given the idea that the threats do not represent an actual danger).