CrunchyPickles

Well yeah it's more complicated than that obviously, but I think it's hard to disagree with the idea that the people doing it are shitty people. But yeah, back on topic to avoid thread detonation. Overall there's not much else to really say on my part re: corruption. I've seen a few more examples thrown around on twitter but I haven't been paying much attention, and this is an industry where there is no universal set of standards/ethics in media coverage yet, so it's all just become the giant mess we see today. Question is, what can be done? I know it's become taboo to ask that, but no problems are solved by avoiding attempts to find a solution.

@milkman: Yep, saw it on Patrick's twitter. Shitty people gonna keep being shitty because they get their psychotic thrill from it. Luckily a few people have been caught, I know GG people caught some Brazilian tech guy making fake accounts and threatening/doxxing Sarkeesian using GG to get more attention for his site or something. I think he might have been one of the many threatening/doxxing Boogie2988 too, but I don't know for sure.

@extomar: You make a good point about peoples' social media histories, but keep in mind that social media is on the user's end. In an interview, they can ask you to log onto facebook/twitter/whatever, but it's not exactly a set requirement and if I remember right it's been the cause of a few legal battles in different areas. Ultimately anything said on social media is always assumed to have been posted by the user, so it's pretty much 100% their responsibility to be, well, responsible.

The Paranautical Activity dev example, I dunno if it's a very accurate comparison to what happened with Destructoid/GJP. On one hand, a very young and immature developer loudly and publicly said very stupid things on Twitter, resulting in the game's removal from Steam and him removing himself from the company and severing all ties to the game. On the other hand, we have someone who, through a streak of bad luck and unfortunate events, wound up outing a trans woman while working on researching their IndieGoGo project thinking it was a scam (did it end up being one or was it legit? I'm not fully up to date on this, sorry). This resulted in GJP, an undisclosed mailing list between journalists from different companies (that's the important part) discussing why this person should be fired and not hired elsewhere, and Dtoid's management failing miserably at handling the situation, probably from a severe lack of management experience.

I know it's not good to get hung up on the blacklisting thing as @lonelyspacepanda said, so I won't push it beyond here, but I will say that if anyone who's actually gone to school for journalism and/or worked in other media coverage/news, this would not have happened because it is a pretty big deal. Even without the blacklisting though, the whole situation was still a clusterfuck of unprofessionalism on levels that made me happy as hell to have decided to never get involved in the games industry.

@extomar: I don't think the long history of blacklisting as a concept justifies the act itself. And blacklisting almost never involves a formalized, documented process or list of people. It obviously can't, because it's illegal, and leaving a paper (or email chain, in a more relevant example) trail means you'll get caught at some point.

Bottom line, if a group of media companies is coming together unofficially to "warn" each other of a particular employee and telling each other to avoid them, that is essentially blacklisting. It doesn't mean they'll NEVER get a job again in the industry, it just significantly damages (if not completely destroys) their ability to get a job at those companies.

RE: background checks, calling another company's HR department to find out some basic info about a potential employee is very different from what happened in the case we're talking about. Legally, they are VERY limited in the information they can get, though this varies from state to state I believe. Where I live, the only questions someone can ask about a former employee are "how long did they work for your company" and "would you hire them back?" The latter is pretty much restricted to a yes or no answer, because reason for termination/resignation can't be disclosed.

@lonelyspacepanda: That's a pretty good point, with how young the industry is overall it makes sense that its massive growth spurts have caused issues when the games media industry tries to grow at the same pace. I'm more than willing to believe that, had the technology been available, we'd see the same kind of stuff come up at the onset of writing/music/movies. And yeah, I think Giantbomb is one of the best examples of how to not only disclose personal relationships between games and games media, but do so in a very entertaining way. Their willingness to not review games with developers they're very close to is admirable as well.

If I remember right, didn't Patricia Hernandez do some pretty extensive coverage of stuff Anna Anthropy, her friend/roommate (or a while at least), without disclosing their relationship? I think they went back and added that info to the articles, but at the time it was a very blatant conflict of interest.

And yeah basically everything going on at Destructoid lately. Using a "secret" (or at least not publicly disclosed) mailing list to talk with competing sites/organizations to collectively decide that someone can't/won't/shouldn't work at their companies is a big fuckin' deal. Blacklisting is a huge breach of journalistic ethics and standards, anyone who's taken journalism 101 could tell you that.

@spraynardtatum: I pretty much agree with you, it's important to point out that saying you want no social commentary in reviews means all of it, it's not really fair to cherry-pick what can be talked about. However I don't really agree with the notion that reviews MUST include it. There are enough objective (yes, really) aspects of a game to provide enough content to fill a review. There was an article on Dualshockers that talked about this, actually. I will say though that personally, I don't mind social commentary as long as it's an isolated part of the review that doesn't have a direct, or at least significant, impact on the score. I mostly just care about the score thing because of what McTaters said up there; since review scores are so intertwined with developer budgets now, a low score should represent a game's technical failure rather than a disagreement between the reviewer's social views and the game's perceived message.

@duckhunter: I wouldn't go so far as calling it puritanical, but I'd certainly agree that sex-negative feminism is a much more conservative view on the subject.

RE: the threat, it really does get more and more depressing each time this shit happens. Nobody is safe from it, honestly. If you give an opinion one way or another on Twitter about the recent games-related stuff, at best you're going to get shit on by randos for a few hours. It's terrible that good people, regardless of their opinions, have to go through this just because they're popular. Sarkeesian, Quinn, Boogie2988, Totalbiscuit, all victims of sociopaths. It doesn't matter what "side" these threats are coming from, the people who threat/harass are their own "side," the side of lunatics that seriously need mental help.

@oldirtybearon: Pretty much my take on it. Social commentary is all well and good, but it's not a review. There are many elements of a game that need to be brought up in a proper review, like any issues with the technical quality of the game. The social discussion makes a good addition to a review, but it falls on its face when trying to replace the review itself.

@jadegl: I think you'll find that just about everyone here completely agrees with your stance, that harassment and threats should never be tolerated. I would extend that statement to cover everyone, regardless of stance on the various topics that have been popping up in the last few weeks/months. There's been some vile shit going around, and no "side" in any of this is innocent anymore. I will say though that, rather than trying to bring the harassment to the forefront of any conversation about her, we should encourage discussion of the content she produces. You're right in that the reactions to her videos tend to be way overblown, but that doesn't mean people can't still sit down and talk about the content itself and the myriad of good AND bad points she tries to make. If we were limited to just talking about her harassment, there would be no conversation because it would just end up as an echo chamber with everyone just repeating the same conclusion that has long since been reached by most people.

Overall, the most critical thing any of us can do is remember that it's entirely possible, and very easy, to have civil discussions about any of these issues/people/videos. All it takes is minimal social effort and tact, and realistically a higher character limit than something like Twitter allows.