4 ms·

Granted what the players are doing to harass her in her personal life is ridiculous and ought to be stopped, but lets consider what she said. We have a writer

Granted what the players are doing to harass her in her personal life is ridiculous and ought to be stopped, but lets consider what she said. We have a writer with a high degree of influence on a game development staff, claiming that she does not enjoy playing games. This to me is a PR failure. Some industries can get away with being indifferent to their work (e.g. no one cares if you love making widgets so long as they're good widgets), but entertainment products such as books, movies, and games are naturally expected to be "labors of love". Can you imagine a studio director coming out to say that he doesn't watch movies? If she or anyone else on her team doesn't like their product, they ought to keep it to themselves for PR value alone.

danso 15y ago
Do you have the actual quote and context at hand? Because this seems to be a statement with a high degree of nuance. I'm pretty sure that at some point, Steve Jobs said statements that made it sound like he hated the way computers were designed. Doesn't mean he should've been fired from Apple.
- true_religion 15y ago
  The interview is supposed to say this: > "What is your least favorite thing about working in the industry? > Playing the games. This is probably a terrible thing to admit, but it has definitely been the single most difficult thing for me. I came into the job out of a love of writing, not a love of playing games. While I enjoy the interactive aspects of gaming, if a game doesn't have a good story, it's very hard for me to get interested in playing it. Similarly, I'm really terrible at so many things which most games use incessantly -- I have awful hand-eye coordination, I don't like tactics, I don't like fighting, I don't like keeping track of inventory, and I can't read a game map to save my life. This makes it very difficult for me to play to the myriad games I really should be keeping up on as our competition." However the link to the real interview is dead[1]. The only posting available is a copy from the BioWare forum 12 months ago[2]. I'll admit that the long-form really softens up the impact. It give her nuance and personality, and its hard to shamelessly hate someone you understand unless ofcourse, you willfully choose to selectively remember the worst of what they say. [1] http://killerbetties.com/killer_women_jennifer_hepler/?page=0%2C0 http://killerbetties.com/killer_women_jennifer_hepler/?page=... [2]http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/141/index/6605174/ http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/141/index/6605174/
dagw 15y ago
Let's look at the thing in context. First of all the claim was made 5 years ago when she was fairly new to the computer games industry (she'd worked on tv shows and written for table top games before). Who know how she feels about games today. Also she didn't simply say she hated games she actually said "...While I enjoy the interactive aspects of gaming, if a game doesn’t have a good story, it’s very hard for me to get interested in playing it. Similarly, I’m really terrible at so many things which most games use incessantly — I have awful hand-eye coordination, I don’t like tactics, I don’t like fighting, I don’t like keeping track of inventory, and I can’t read a game map to save my life. This makes it very difficult for me to play to the myriad games I really should be keeping up on as our competition." Finally her comment about wanting to skip combat was made in the context of her having a baby and simply not having the time needed to get through an RPG. She just wanted an option to follow the story of the game without having to dedicate month of her life (time she no longer had) to do so.
- true_religion 15y ago
  I actually didn't realize till now that it was something she posted in 2006. It's still not good to have it come up now but to me it makes it less relevant. However, PR is like politics and if you remember the Obama campaign--opponents can make impact by dredging up old dirt about you from even 30 years ago.
ANH 15y ago
It's clear from the article that she loves writing and story, not to mention the quality of the people working in the industry and BioWare in particular. I would not describe her overall engagement with the work as "indifferent".
jonnathanson 15y ago
"We have a writer with a high degree of influence on a game development staff..." Does she? From what I understand, she is a character and dialogue writer who handles relatively small portions of the games (from her BioWare Wiki bio: she wrote dialogue and characters for some of the zones in the dwarven city in Dragon Age). [For what it's worth, those sections happen to have been very well written.] People are acting as though she's some pernicious influence at BioWare, holding everyone on the development staff in thrall to her agenda. It seems exceedingly unclear to me whether a) she even has an agenda, or b) she commands any significant influence over the design/gameplay elements of development. She's a staff writer. She's not even a lead writer (or, if she is now, she certainly wasn't back in 2006). People have been attributing things to her that couldn't possibly have fallen under her scope (to wit: claims about her malign influence over Mass Effect, a series she hasn't worked on). PR failure? Perhaps, but then, this never should have blown up the way it did. And it almost certainly wouldn't have, had the writer in question not had a pair of ovaries instead of testicles.
- true_religion 15y ago
  I think its very wrong to attribute the level of furor to her gender, and not to her words---misunderstood, and out of context as they may be. The level of furor would be the same were she a man, though the content of the flamewar would be much different since presumably males are insulted by different things than females and thus trolls have to tailor their speech for maximum impact. Anyways, the reason I choose to frame this as PR struggle is that Bioware can take the highroad and have her publish another statement that clarifies her current thoughts on gaming. The other option is to flame their own customers as misogynistic and leave FUD in the air about whether or not their games will be gutted for action content. I'd much rather they treat this as trolling, than as a civil rights crisis.
  - jonnathanson 15y ago
    Level and content may be more closely correlated than we think. There comes a certain tipping point wherein the outrageous (read: hilarious to the 4Chan crowd) content of a smear campaign inspires a bandwagon, and so the campaign both intensifies and scales up. Call it a not-so-virtuous cycle.
hythloday 15y ago
You're misunderstanding what she's saying (or what she said 6 years ago, rather). She isn't saying, "I don't like BG, ME or DA". She isn't saying, "I don't play games". She is saying, "I'm dissatisfied with the medium: I think it can be more than it is". That dissatisfaction is a necessary precondition for advancing the state of the art. I would be aghast at a game designer who could not talk for hours about what's wrong with the medium of games.
- true_religion 15y ago
  This is what she wrote: > I came into the job out of a love of writing, not a love of playing games. She then goes on to enumerate the many ways she isn't good at playing games. I don't mean to be rude---but I doubt she plays very many games considering her dislike of them. That said... if you want to say she may help move the industry forward I agree. Though story-driven titles are nothing new (see: interactive fiction for the deep end of that), its really rare to see an AAA title put so much emphasis on story. That said, personally, I feel that the Bioware games of the past were more open ended than those of the current generation. Ironically, by having more 'story' they've made it into less of a game---something akin to a choose-your-own adventure novel with inter-spaced action sequences.
andylei 15y ago
> This to me is a PR failure you're so wrong. this has nothing to do with PR. people are not criticizing the game or Bioware because of this person. people are personally attacking and harassing a human being because of their remarks.
gee_totes 15y ago
Can you imagine a studio director coming out to say that he doesn't watch movies? I can, and to give a tech example of this analogy, here's a quote from the guy who wrote the first version of PHP: I really don't like programming. I built this tool to program less so that I could just reuse code. Source: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rasmus_Lerdorf http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rasmus_Lerdorf

danso 15y ago

Do you have the actual quote and context at hand? Because this seems to be a statement with a high degree of nuance. I'm pretty sure that at some point, Steve Jobs said statements that made it sound like he hated the way computers were designed. Doesn't mean he should've been fired from Apple.

true_religion 15y ago
The interview is supposed to say this: > "What is your least favorite thing about working in the industry? > Playing the games. This is probably a terrible thing to admit, but it has definitely been the single most difficult thing for me. I came into the job out of a love of writing, not a love of playing games. While I enjoy the interactive aspects of gaming, if a game doesn't have a good story, it's very hard for me to get interested in playing it. Similarly, I'm really terrible at so many things which most games use incessantly -- I have awful hand-eye coordination, I don't like tactics, I don't like fighting, I don't like keeping track of inventory, and I can't read a game map to save my life. This makes it very difficult for me to play to the myriad games I really should be keeping up on as our competition." However the link to the real interview is dead[1]. The only posting available is a copy from the BioWare forum 12 months ago[2]. I'll admit that the long-form really softens up the impact. It give her nuance and personality, and its hard to shamelessly hate someone you understand unless ofcourse, you willfully choose to selectively remember the worst of what they say. [1] http://killerbetties.com/killer_women_jennifer_hepler/?page=0%2C0 http://killerbetties.com/killer_women_jennifer_hepler/?page=... [2]http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/141/index/6605174/ http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/141/index/6605174/

dagw 15y ago

Let's look at the thing in context. First of all the claim was made 5 years ago when she was fairly new to the computer games industry (she'd worked on tv shows and written for table top games before). Who know how she feels about games today. Also she didn't simply say she hated games she actually said "...While I enjoy the interactive aspects of gaming, if a game doesn’t have a good story, it’s very hard for me to get interested in playing it. Similarly, I’m really terrible at so many things which most games use incessantly — I have awful hand-eye coordination, I don’t like tactics, I don’t like fighting, I don’t like keeping track of inventory, and I can’t read a game map to save my life. This makes it very difficult for me to play to the myriad games I really should be keeping up on as our competition." Finally her comment about wanting to skip combat was made in the context of her having a baby and simply not having the time needed to get through an RPG. She just wanted an option to follow the story of the game without having to dedicate month of her life (time she no longer had) to do so.

true_religion 15y ago
I actually didn't realize till now that it was something she posted in 2006. It's still not good to have it come up now but to me it makes it less relevant. However, PR is like politics and if you remember the Obama campaign--opponents can make impact by dredging up old dirt about you from even 30 years ago.

ANH 15y ago

It's clear from the article that she loves writing and story, not to mention the quality of the people working in the industry and BioWare in particular. I would not describe her overall engagement with the work as "indifferent".

jonnathanson 15y ago

"We have a writer with a high degree of influence on a game development staff..." Does she? From what I understand, she is a character and dialogue writer who handles relatively small portions of the games (from her BioWare Wiki bio: she wrote dialogue and characters for some of the zones in the dwarven city in Dragon Age). [For what it's worth, those sections happen to have been very well written.] People are acting as though she's some pernicious influence at BioWare, holding everyone on the development staff in thrall to her agenda. It seems exceedingly unclear to me whether a) she even has an agenda, or b) she commands any significant influence over the design/gameplay elements of development. She's a staff writer. She's not even a lead writer (or, if she is now, she certainly wasn't back in 2006). People have been attributing things to her that couldn't possibly have fallen under her scope (to wit: claims about her malign influence over Mass Effect, a series she hasn't worked on). PR failure? Perhaps, but then, this never should have blown up the way it did. And it almost certainly wouldn't have, had the writer in question not had a pair of ovaries instead of testicles.

true_religion 15y ago
I think its very wrong to attribute the level of furor to her gender, and not to her words---misunderstood, and out of context as they may be. The level of furor would be the same were she a man, though the content of the flamewar would be much different since presumably males are insulted by different things than females and thus trolls have to tailor their speech for maximum impact. Anyways, the reason I choose to frame this as PR struggle is that Bioware can take the highroad and have her publish another statement that clarifies her current thoughts on gaming. The other option is to flame their own customers as misogynistic and leave FUD in the air about whether or not their games will be gutted for action content. I'd much rather they treat this as trolling, than as a civil rights crisis.
- jonnathanson 15y ago
  Level and content may be more closely correlated than we think. There comes a certain tipping point wherein the outrageous (read: hilarious to the 4Chan crowd) content of a smear campaign inspires a bandwagon, and so the campaign both intensifies and scales up. Call it a not-so-virtuous cycle.

hythloday 15y ago

You're misunderstanding what she's saying (or what she said 6 years ago, rather). She isn't saying, "I don't like BG, ME or DA". She isn't saying, "I don't play games". She is saying, "I'm dissatisfied with the medium: I think it can be more than it is". That dissatisfaction is a necessary precondition for advancing the state of the art. I would be aghast at a game designer who could not talk for hours about what's wrong with the medium of games.

true_religion 15y ago
This is what she wrote: > I came into the job out of a love of writing, not a love of playing games. She then goes on to enumerate the many ways she isn't good at playing games. I don't mean to be rude---but I doubt she plays very many games considering her dislike of them. That said... if you want to say she may help move the industry forward I agree. Though story-driven titles are nothing new (see: interactive fiction for the deep end of that), its really rare to see an AAA title put so much emphasis on story. That said, personally, I feel that the Bioware games of the past were more open ended than those of the current generation. Ironically, by having more 'story' they've made it into less of a game---something akin to a choose-your-own adventure novel with inter-spaced action sequences.

andylei 15y ago

> This to me is a PR failure you're so wrong. this has nothing to do with PR. people are not criticizing the game or Bioware because of this person. people are personally attacking and harassing a human being because of their remarks.

gee_totes 15y ago

Can you imagine a studio director coming out to say that he doesn't watch movies? I can, and to give a tech example of this analogy, here's a quote from the guy who wrote the first version of PHP: I really don't like programming. I built this tool to program less so that I could just reuse code. Source: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rasmus_Lerdorf http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rasmus_Lerdorf