Plague of game dev harassment erodes industry

[Morreion]

Plague of game dev harassment erodes industry, spurs support groups (Polygon)

Jennifer Hepler left BioWare this week to begin work on a book about narrative design and do some freelance work. Her most recent job title was senior writer on Dragon Age: Inquisition. But it was Dragon Age 2 that led to the death threats, the threats against her family and children and the harassment.

When asked if the harassment led to her depature, Hepler told Polygon "No, leaving Bioware was for family reasons. I am going to be working on a text book on narrative design among other game-related freelance projects."

After Dragon Age 2 came out in 2011, Hepler told Polygon, many of the people involved in the game's development received angry emails, abusive forum posts and petitions calling for them to be fired. About that time, someone dug up an old interview Hepler participated in six years earlier. In the interview Hepler mentioned that her least favorite part of working in the game industry was playing through games and combat. Some of the interview was put in the official forums as evidence that Hepler was to blame for changes in the game's combat. The forum post was removed and Hepler went on maternity leave. But then the following February someone created a forum post resurfacing the interview and called Hepler the "cancer" that was destroying BioWare.

"I had opened a Twitter account a few weeks before that, and this poster or others quickly found me there and began sending threatening messages," she said. "I shut my account down without reading them, so I'm not certain what they said, but other people have told me they were quite vile."

The forum post and Hepler's initial response on Twitter, ignited a firestorm of hatred and harassment that included emailed death threats and threats against her children.


This is crazy and definitely is a side-effect of consequence-free online behavior when people threaten others with harm.

Here's another take on this article from the standpoint of why people are pissed to begin with-


Stick and Rudder: On crowdfunding and 'dev abuse' (Massively)


See, gaming fans, particularly those who have been gaming for a while (let's call them hardcore, for lack of a better term), know what they like. They've played a lot of games, they generally play games for long periods of time and as their primary means of recreation, and they don't take kindly to things they love being co-opted to service less invested fans.

This is of course directly at odds with the big business that gaming has become, where for-profit entities are falling all over one another to find new ways to monetize existing customers while simultaneously making a "gamer" out of every muggle with an internet connection...

When a triple-A dev like former BioWare writer Jennifer Hepler says that "games cost much too much money to focus on a niche market" and that "to survive, they need to be such a broadly popular part of entertainment culture that you would be hard-pressed to find anyone who doesn't play games," she is inviting internet vitriol from the very people who made her industry successful and provided her with a job.

It's kind of a "duh" moment. I mean, really, should fans who are being marginalized by the industry's mass-market leanings simply smile and take the erosion of their pastime lying down?

More importantly, Hepler's statement is patently false -- or at least myopic -- as Star Citizen is showing us. Maybe BioWare's games "cost much too much money to focus on a niche market," and maybe that's because BioWare is doing it wrong and is a prime example of the sort of over-staffed and over-produced game development that needs to go away.

Why was BioWare, for example, unable to deliver an MMO with half of Star Citizen's feature set on nearly four times its budget? Now, you're right in thinking that Star Wars: The Old Republic and SC are vastly different MMOs. And that's my point. Star Citizen is going to have a fully voiced, story-driven campaign (Squadron 42), but it's also going to have sprawling, free-form sandbox play and all of the associated virtual world sticky stuff that SWTOR lacks. And oh yeah, actual space combat, too!

Maybe it's not so impossible to make a triple-A game with a relatively small budget? We'll find out when SC releases.

[Regolyth]

While I completely condemn the actions of gamers (or whomever) that threatens others or their family members, I do see the reasoning behind the outrage.

I don't know where people get off thinking that they have the right to cause emotionally torment to someone. We're all human beings and no one has the right to say hateful things such as death threats. I'm going to travel down the rabbit hole for a moment and reference an article that I read earlier about a cop who assaulted a woman and her child. In the comments section to that article, someone said that the cop should have the same done back to him and his family. Whoa, whoa... what? His family? I get the wanting to beat the cop, but his family? Where does someone get off saying something like that. After being confronted by another commenter, he came back with something along the lines of "it sucks, but that's the way it should be." How can people think like that? Even if the cop should receive such a beating for his actions, it in no way should involve his family as well. Just because he's a jerk and doesn't care of others, doesn't mean his family doesn't. So I go back to the death threats against Helper's family: why? Even if you think that Helper is the scum of the Earth and was destroying your game, why threaten her family? Ugh...

It's sad that Helper was run off from Bioware by idiots, but if they weren't idiots, they might see that it's probably EA that's bringing down Bioware, not Helper. Look at all of EA's acquisitions over the past decade. A lot of them were great companies that produced top-notch games, but once purchased by EA, some of that quality began going severely downhill as did the companies (some of them). Now you don't even hear of those companies anymore. In recent years, look at what happened to EA's acquisition of Mythic, and now Bioware. It's sad.

Now as far as the game being ruined goes, I can completely see where the gamers are coming from. "Games" don't cost too much to focus on a niche market, their games cost too much to focus on a niche market. In famous internet words, "you're not doing it right." I really hope Star Citizen blows up and just dominates the market. Maybe it'll shut up some of this talk that's spewing forth from greedy CEOs of gaming companies.

We've had this discussion several times on these forums: what makes a gamer? Helper states "...you would be hard-pressed to find anyone who doesn't play games." Apparently she's of that school of thought that someone playing Candy Crush Saga is a gamer, and I'll bet she wants them to play her MMO. Even if someone who played CCS would be considered a gamer, there's no way you could make a game broad enough to cover the person who plays CCS, WoW, CoD and everything in-between; but that appears to be what these big publishers are trying to do. It's ridiculous. This thread aggravates me.