(Implied) Boycott Against Giant Bomb

Before I begin, I'd like to state I am not suggesting action of any kind. I merely wish to shine a light on some curious and catty internet business being implicitly aimed at Giant Bomb.

Right, so here's the background story: The Giant Bomb E3 panel existed, as it does annually. The usual cast of characters were invited, as you'd hope they would be. Things went off without a hitch, save for some split beer.

One person, at least, was offended. These two quotes are from Twitter:

"@ElizSimins: Watching a bit of the e3 @giantbomb bombcast from last night and damn that is a lot of (white) dudes. :-/"

And later:

"@ElizSimins: I know so many women at all levels of game stuff and I'm way less connected than @giantbomb, how hard is it to find more than 1 per panel?"

Perhaps she was offended she wasn't invited to the panel. I don't really know or care. Later on the 19th, Patrick Klepek replied via Tumblr in the post linked below. I might not have said anything but he is thoughtful and considerate, as evidenced by the content of his post:

http://patrickklepek.tumblr.com/post/89165256269/my-rolodex

12 hours ago, @ElizSimins teamed up with lead writer on Borderlands 2 and internet meme enthusiast, @reverendanthony on the following initiative:

"@reverendanthony: So @ElizSimins and I are organizing a list of games dudes who won't participate in panels/podcasts/etc without women http://plzdiversifyyourpanel.tumblr.com"

Evidently the happy pair were unsatisfied with Patrick's explanation and have decided to launch this implied boycott. As stated at the top, I merely wished to shine a light on this topic.

Thank you.

Personally I don't watch anything that doesn't have every single ethnic group/gender group on the planet.

"straight, white, cisgender, able bodied dudes"

Everything tumblr hates all in one.

preferably mashed into one giant rolling ball of doom, Katamari style

I get that diversity is a good thing and all but I'm vehemently against going down your diversity checklist to make sure everyone is included.

@garfield518: Hey man Giant Bomb is definitely not against fat people.

People like her are self-destructive to her cause.

A majority of people in the industry are white dudes. So, until there's more minorities and women, there's going to be white dudes on panels. GB, i feel, does a great job diversifying who's on, from indie devs like Rami, Japanese CEO's like Shuhei Yushida, and a number of women made an appearance.

Seems like a shitty thing to bitch about anyway.

To be honest i had it with this " feminist race and color stuff " click bait. GB just invites people they have a good relationship with.

BTW. why wasnt there a Vetican Albino in the panel !

I'm all for equality but this just seems silly

The title of this thread is maybe a little inflammatory. The post doesn't mention Giant Bomb or Patrick at all.

Nowhere is that pledge stated to be about Giant Bomb specifically.

This started before E3 anyway, I've seen this idea kicked around on twitter ever since the PAX latest dickwolves thing. This is more about panels in general than Giant Bomb.

I think it's a great idea and I hope it has the intended effect.

Laughable. This isn't how you fix a problem, by forcing a solution (nothing in life is solved like this). Instead, she should be trying to solve the underlying problem of women being so outnumbered in the games industry; she should be advocating for more women to get into the industry.

Diversity on panels is a nice thing, but attempting to force diversity for diversity's sake is a poor idea.

So wait, these people are refusing to be on panels that don't contain any women at all? Isn't that actually worse? The women talk about being invited to be a token women on a panel (which I agree isn't cool) but now these guys won't join a panel unless there is a token woman?

How about everyone just invite interesting people to panels regardless of gender or ethnicity and everyone get over this whole everything has to be 100% PC all the time crap. I can only see this current trend ending with panels being made up of someone from every gender/ethnicity/minority regardless of if they have anything interesting to say just to avoid offending anyone and then all we will end up with is every single panel from every single website being exactly the same.

OP I'm really not sure why you felt the need to tweet this thread at Simins. People here get way too defensive about this website.

I love GB, but more diversity in the games biz is a good thing. It may be true that the reason so many panels and podcasts tend to be dominated by white dudes is because those are the people who make up most of the industry, but it's still important to make some kind of effort to get others involved.

All the game writers and developers will continue to be mostly white dudes until people of different genders and ethnic backgrounds actually have some visibility.

The lack of different perspectives is something that hurts the industry as a whole including GB. We should all be looking at the call for more diversity as a chance to improve rather than some attack.

I'm pretty furious that you can't play as a transgendered, paraplegic Inuit in Assassin's Creed XXII: The Diversining

What. The. Hell. Giant Bomb E3 panels felt organic and full of interesting people. Are these "critics" saying that panels should just have equal number of all ethnicities, shapes, sizes and genders?

I am all for more diversity in video game related stuff, but this isn't the way to go about it.

More diversity is always welcome, but someone like Elizabeth Simins is not someone I want to see spearheading that campaign. I only needed to browse through her twitter account to see that there's no point in taking this seriously. The thing reads like a parody.

That's a bit extreme.

Would Bonnie Ross have been a better guest to talk about Halo than Frank O'Connor? I don't know. Should Patrick have insisted of calling her instead to fill some quota? That doesn't seem right.

This :)

Forcing diversity to artificially solve a problem? Got it.

Wait no, fuck that. This is an idiotic way to go about this.

I'll just go back to ignoring this "issue" altogether and give it another shot again in a year. Maybe everyone involved will have grown a brain by then. (probably not)

Hey is Shuhei secretly a white guy?

The problems with the Giant Bomb panels were adequately addressed by Patrick. We are all victims of our friend circles, which may or may not be diverse. But, the issue is that the panels should be constructed to create the best panel, whatever that composition might be. The panels would probably be better if they were more diverse, but worse if they were diverse only to check a box. Making a diverse panel just to say you did may cause more personality clashes than we are comfortable with

When your diversity campaign only cares about gender diversity, and completely ignores racial, cultural and other forms of diversity, you have a pretty self defeating campaign. Also, as always this campaign would be much more effective in the long term if it encouraged diversification in education and employment at game developers, rather than panels which are a sideshow at best.

And yeah, it's pretty obvious this is directed (or inspired) by Giant Bomb after reading her tweets about the Giantbomb panels. Of course she completely ignored the fact that Cara Ellison, Tina Amini, Abbie Heppe, Alexa Ray Corriea, and Zoey Quinn.

I'm not sure what some people expect. A lot of people involved in the video game industry are straight white dudes. There isn't an equally proportional number of women and certainly not a lot of Porpentines or Caroline Petits. The idea that a podcast or panel needs to represent everyone and everything is just absurd.

Or Rami

gross

Of course you do.

So this Eliz person is a racist. Good to know.

Yo I'm going to give everyone a tip for how to handle things like this... stop giving them attention. Like seriously these are the fringiest of fringe people, this isn't a movement.

As an actual feminist the straight up treating people as categories and quotas is insulting. Diversity can certainly be improved in gaming but any one panel not featuring women is not the real problem it's the aggregate.

@darthslughorn: The reason most had a problem with Leigh Alexander wasn't because she was a woman, it was because she acted like a drunk imbecile on the E3 podcast.

Jup. Overly PC people keep on bugging everybody about their lack of PCness, to prove to themselves just how much more evolved and superior they really are compared to everybody else. Great. The GiantBomb E3 panels were plenty diverse. If you can't see diversity past the color of skin and gender, you're the one with the problem. They had fucking Canadians on the panel. How much more diversity do they want?

Oh right, they're thinking networking with people works like a server browser. Just select all the preferred critieria, and what you seek will magically show up. Fat Asian chick that's gay and writes FPS campaigns and loves to talk about it on video podcasts in the public eye. No problem. Gender confused pre-op black guy with tits and and a dick, that makes text adventures about riding unicorns - check! A ginger man with a soul, who has worked on The Last Guardian, and is allowed to talk about it too. Right around the corner. How about a secret psychopath who loves to flay people alive and wear their skin as a coat? I'm sure Buffalo Bill will gladly be the token guest for the murderous psychopath minority.

Easy peazy.

@heyguys said:

I agree that their ideas are fringe but the lead writer for Borderlands 2 is not a marginal figure.

The thing i hate the most about this is the constant implications thrown around. Not just this particular "incident" but just in general. This one implies GB is sexist because there wasn't enough women on the panels. It implies that anyone who watched and didn't see a problem are sexist. I'm sorry i was born a white man in the 80s and thus am part of the plague that is the 30 something white dude.

I'm not sexist but if one thing ever leads me to saying stuff that is, it's gonna be this.

Well, and this is going to sound mean, after playing through Borderlands 2 maybe he should be.

Their hearts in the right place but rarely is an 'All Or Nothing' approach the right one. You should check out Rami Ismail's feed for some pretty great reasons as to why it's a bad idea (as well as some incredibly frustrating replies from a white dude who thinks the entire world works like it does in the west). The more I get to know about that guy the more I like him he seems to have a really solid head on his shoulders. For the tl:dr it essentially means cutting off really small communities where the barrier to entry is really high or people have to deal with more intense cultural/economic barriers to actually get into development just because they don't meet a quota. Not to mention it ignores any other type of diversity to focus on gender. A lot of this initiative feels like a knee jerk response without a lot of thought put into it. Kinda like one of those web petitions.

I dunno like I said I get what they're going for I just don't think that's the answer. Also it is kinda weird the OP tried to link this to the people who started it. I don't know what that's gonna accomplish.

@bocam: I know, I'm just saying that it is possible that people invited to check a box may ruin panels. Main point: Shitty panelists, men, women, white, black, brown, and everything else, are shitty panelists and not worth inviting.

But are their hearts in the right place or are they just seeking attention / publicity?

People keep forgetting about Japan. I mean, that doesn't change the "dude", but it certainly changes the "white."

That's an easy dismissal that I'm not a big fan of. Plus both those people are already pretty well known. I have zero doubt they're doing this because they want to see a change and think this'll help. But good intentions don't equate to a good idea.

To answer your question, @reverendanthony told me here that "I hope you fail in your life goals" after I made a joke about this tumblr initiative being unsurprising from the guy that filled Borderlands 2 with internet memes. I deleted the joke immediately after making it, not wanting to start trouble but I guess he got an email notification and replied with his blessing.

It seemed only fair to link him to my reply.

@wsgexe: I dunno anything they read here, if they even do, they're gonna either dismiss or use to point a finger at the community to say "hey look these guys suck". Especially with Simins already giving the guys grief over the E3 panels.

Two years in a row, even.

@hailinel: Indeed. Once you start playing that game everyone loses. People are such a diverse mix of race,gender and sexual orientation that its impossible to appease everyone.

I didn't watch all the E3 stuff but it doesn't surprise me that Patrick went with the familiar when setting up the guests. Part of it probably fan service, part of it also just being easier to ensure those guests show up (having shown up before). It also wouldn't surprise me if Patrick tried to diversify a bit more when hes comfortable setting up these podcasts and events since he seems like the kind of guy would value that kind of thing.

At first I thought this was a parody of actual efforts for diversity because of the way they were pushing it on twitter, but it might work out fine if enough people sign on to it. It definitely doesn't read as a boycott against Giant Bomb to me, though.

I would hope they would be able to explain their point of view in depth and articulate why their initiative would be a good thing.

And I don't care what the panelists look like or what their gender is, they just need to know their shit and have interesting things to say.