msoven

I strongly agree, that was not a compliment. It was unfair, I guess. We'll see how long it lasts, but right now many Dota people in positions of power are having more honest and vulnerable discussions reflecting what they, specifically, could have done differently over the last decade. The flip side is of course that some of it is bullshit by abusers and enablers that haven't been outed yet, almost certainly. One thing I'd like to call attention to that annoyed me on the Bombcast was Jeff's slightly dismissive attitude about how much power there is in a space devoted to making light of video games: there's a lot, and it's concentrated in the usual way, and it works by pushing people out just a little bit at a time even when it isn't being expressed in a single dramatically horrible show of force.

The Dota folks also have yet to really begin to reckon with the horrific racism problem that many of them have right in front of their eyes every single day in their twitch chats. So yeah, upon reflection I shouldn't say Giant Bomb is not ahead of that in appreciable ways. Unless I've missed it, though, I can't think of ways that this site has really, consistently helped marginalized people get their voices heard apart from the aforementioned end of year lists, which frequently do quite a good job of that. My inability to think of examples doesn't mean they don't exist, but like I said I'd always love to see more.

I'm just some asshole, they don't have to do what I want. What I'm saying is not written anywhere in their job descriptions as far as I know. Just an idea, I suppose.

Two things that Giant Bomb has done lately that I've found encouraging: 1) Abby + Friends' charity stream. That was by such a large margin Giant Bomb's Blackest video ever that a cynic might say they should try to space it out a bit more rather than delivering a one-time inoculation. Nonetheless, I appreciate it.

2) Abby's Fortnite streams with her friends. A woman is deciding who to invite on the show and it turns out that this means the guest list includes a lot more women than normal. It's not hard to understand why it shakes out that way, right?

These aren't the only things Giant Bomb has been doing that I think are good, but to the specific point at hand Abby is doing all of their heavy lifting. Is that fair? The way I'm asking this question may indicate that I think it isn't.

I understand completely that their current roster is made up of the people that it is, and that they mostly seem to have joined up in the first place for the best reasons. Given that, I want to see them try to get outside of their comfort zones a bit more, as comfort for white men appears to involve a lot of other white men. We know they can invite all kinds of people to talk about games and to play them, because they have. More of that, please?

Let me also add that if they were looking for a place to start, they should check out their end of the year lists - they've got some really cool writers, developers and more contributing to those, so I know they have each other's email addresses!

Edit #2: Your fair question had me scrolling through the pages of videos, and to give credit where it's due, Jan also had a woman guest on (easier to arrange when it's a Gamespot person who works in the same building that you can both actually go to, in fairness) just before the start of the lockdown. On one hand that highlights the challenge, especially right now - collaboration is no easier now than normal. On the other, here's the short version of what I would like to see: representation of more perspectives, even if it's just getting someone on Discord for some silly multiplayer thing. I know they can because they have, more please.

Okay, I've listened to the first half hour of the Bombcast. I'm glad they talked about it, and I cannot believe I'm saying this but I think the Dota 2 community is ahead of where Giant Bomb is at right now, possibly because their wound is a dagger through their heart, and not just, "Ahhh, well, that looks bad from where I'm sitting. Guh-ross!"

"Trying to be better" doesn't mean anything. In fact that's wrong, because I think what it does mean is exactly what Brad said: "Let's try to be better, oh look, Microsoft did blah blah blah." It's a segue to the next topic, and the next topic is never what white men (predominantly) can do to stop hurting people, or how other people can stop them when they won't stop themselves.

Here's something you can do apart from "trying to be better:" look into that rumor you heard about that friend of yours that one time. It seemed pretty out of character, didn't it? That may not mean that it was wrong! Maybe you had asked him about it, and maybe he said it was because she hated him because she was jealous. Is that true? Why not try to find out? Unfortunately, all I'm doing here is condensing and anonymizing a bunch of actual things I've been reading on twitter over the last couple days.

Another thing you can do is let your actions speak louder than your words in terms of boosting the perspectives of people whose backgrounds are underrepresented in the community. Enough has been said about this lately that I don't feel the need to say more, but I'd really like to see more. I'm disappointed in Giant Bomb at the moment, because I believe they can do better.

@plan6: I haven't had time to listen to the bombcast yet, thanks for the heads up. Maybe this is being discussed to a satisfactory degree. If pressed, I couldn't actually say what my last sentence there means.

I've never started a thread on the Giant Bomb forum before so forgive me if I'm doing it wrong. It seems to me that a thing is happening at the moment that perhaps Giant Bomb people would be interested in. The short version is accessible by merely looking in the general direction of the Dota 2 reddit right now, and goes like this: A really big name english-language caster was demonstrated to be first a huge creep, and then soon after a rapist in the last 48 hours. Now the scene is imploding, which it has deserved for a long time. I feel like Giant Bomb's Dota people have mostly gotten over the game at this point, but there's a fun update.

I don't even know what's going on in wrestling, I just know that something is. I know that Chris Avellone has been outed as a predator, and last I checked he was a "friend of the site" as of pretty damn recently. I saw Jeff's tweet about Cards Against Humanity's co-founder. I guess I'd like to see more people talking about this situation as a whole, because right now it feels like a bunch of parallel conversations that are really saying the same thing and could inform one another more. Sorry if this isn't a cool thread topic, I've just been really angry for the last couple of days and this is an outlet for me right now.

I tried to use the Roku app for the first time in a while today and updating to version 5 fixed the crashing I was having at first. It looked like I was having problems linking my account and viewing premium videos, but in fact I seem to be having problems viewing videos more at random. For example, I can see Jeff's perspective on the latest Minecraft stream, but neither Vinny's nor Abby's. I'm not sure whether this is similar to what was going on with other people, or if perhaps it's still going on and I'm one of the true rebels who wants to see the Abby and Vinny views, but that's an issue I am having with the app!

Why would anyone even waste their time writing something like this when a glance at the twitter of every member of the Giant Bomb staff that I saw makes it abundantly clear that they would prefer it if you left?

The new roku app is actually so broken that I had to convince the website that my IP address is not that of a bot on my other devices, and needless to say that the app no longer works on my roku since it doesn't give you that option. It sure seemed nice for the one hour or so for which it worked!