3 ms·

"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

"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.

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.