Regarding Anonymous Gaming Trolls, Tabletop, and More

So it turns out that this week is full of stuff that I would like to share with you, Internet.

First, I wrote a column for The Washington Post about how anonymous trolls are poisoning the video game community, and what we can do about it.

Anonymity, in some cases a key civil liberty, also enables society’s worst actors. The loudest, most obnoxious, most toxic voices are able to drown out the rest of us—a spectacle that has nearly pushed me to quit the video-game world entirely in recent months. I don’t need to hear about the sexual conquest of my mother from a random 12-year-old on Xbox Live ever again.

But here’s the thing: that random 12-year-old I seem to encounter so often? He probably isn’t 12. According to the ERSB, the average age of a video gamer is 34. That 34-year-old is certainly old enough to know better, but he probably came of age in an era when trolling was not just acceptable but encouraged by a generation of players who rarely, if ever, had to see the actual people they were playing with. No wonder he feels enabled by digital anonymity. It means he never has to face the consequences of his actions, or acknowledge that there is a human being on the other side of the screen.

It’s time to break this cycle—and to teach gamers that they can compete without being competitive, that they can win and lose without spewing racist, misogynist, homophobic bile at their fellow gamers. But doing so requires casting off the cloak of anonymity.

Early feedback via Twitter is split between a majority, who are tired of being harassed while gaming, and a minority who seem to believe I am advocating for an end to online privacy (which I clearly am not). I’m interested to know your thoughts on this column, so please read it, and comment here, if you don’t mind. If you’d like to read more about it, I highly recommend this article, which quotes my friend, Stepto, at length.

I’m hosting DC ALL ACCESS this week. Here’s the trailer, which makes me laugh:

Tabletop Season Three premieres in just two days!! We put together a special trailer for this season that asks the question that’s on everyone’s mind…

I signed agreements to do two more audiobooks. I can’t reveal their titles, yet, but I will as soon as I get permission.

Next Monday, I’m performing in a live show here in Los Angeles, with Hal Lublin, and John Ross Bowie. It’s Hot Comedy Dreamtime, written by my friend Joseph Scrimshaw.

Oh! Also next week, I’m filling in for Larry King, and interviewing Chris Hardwick for Larry King Now.

In a couple hours, I’ll sit on a seat which will magically hoist itself into in the sky, and I’ll end my day in New York City. I don’t think I can talk about why I’m going, yet, but I’ll be there for just under 24 hours, for something really awesome that I can’t wait to share with the world.

PLAY MORE GAMES!

I have additional thoughts, based on your comments, which I wrote while in a seat in the sky. They are behind the jump.

I really want to be listening to Serial, but I wanted to take a moment and talk about my column in the Post today. Before I get into it, this is important: I fully stand by everything I wrote. I’m writing this simply because I have the opportunity to take up a little more column space, here on my blog, to dig a little deeper into what we published this morning. Most of this is in response to what I’m 75% certain is just the deliberately provocative distortion and obtuseness of trolls, but if there are 25% of people who genuinely misunderstood me, this is for them.

It feels like a lot of people — unsurprisingly people who associate themselves with #GobbleGrabber — are either misunderstanding, or deliberately distorting the thesis of my piece. I could continue to just block and ignore these people, but I hope that there are some well-intentioned people among their number who are being mislead by the loudest among them, who I may be capable of reaching.

First, something I had not considered when I worked out, researched, and wrote my column: the very real possibility that some people who are survivors of various forms of abuse, or people who have dealt with stalkers may feel even more exposed while gaming online if they were forced to play games under their actual identities. I acknowledge that this oversight springs directly from the reality that I am extraordinarily privileged, and live my life on Scalzi’s lowest difficulty setting, with the celebrity cheat enabled. The fact that this is a very real fear for a lot of players (mostly women), supports my main points that the worst among us are making things terrible for the rest of us. But I will also point out that I do not believe anyone should be forced to decloak. In fact, one of the headlines suggested for my story was about “banning” anonymity in online games, and I asked that it not be used, because I don’t believe in banning anonymity online. The suggestion that ending blanket anonymity in gaming somehow ends anonymity everywhere is such a lazy argument, it isn’t even worth refuting. As I said, anonymity is extremely important for a lot of people, and I can simultaneously oppose SOPA and Total Information Awareness, and understand that some people need anonymity to be protected from abusers, while I hate that some other people take advantage of anonymity to be shitlords on the Internet. See, when you’re a grown up, that’s not difficult to understand. I believe in holding people accountable for their actions online (and offline), so maybe to that end, a player can be anonymous, but if he’s a shitlord on a consistent basis, maybe his console is banned, his IP is banned, his account is banned, or something that he can’t throw away as easily as an e-mail address ties him to his words and actions, so he will think twice about how he behaves while gaming. And, listen, people, this isn’t about forcing some sort of Orwellian surveillance onto political dissidents living under totalitarian regimes. This is about people being bullies while playing video games. This is about people driving developers from their homes, out of fears for their own safety, because someone doesn’t like a video game.

The same people who claim that #GilbertGrape is about stopping misogyny, bullying, and bigotry are also out in force, asserting that I said and believe things that I didn’t write, and claiming that I somehow support bullying, doxxing, and misogyny, because of reasons. It’s frustrating to put a lot of time and effort into making a clear point that I hope spurs discussion, only to have a small but loud hive of annoying insects buzz around, seeing how loud they can get it inside their echo chamber. A typical line of argument goes something like: But if you ban anonymity in gaming, it will make things even more terrible for women! This argument fails to consider or address the root cause of women being treated poorly in online gaming (men harassing women, threatening women, and generally making it miserable for women to play games unless those women adopt a masculine identity). Yes, if nothing were to change, and we were to continue along the arc we, as a gaming community, are on, it absolutely would make things worse for women. But when gaming online is safe for everyone, because people are held to account for their actions, everyone should be able to play as themselves, without fear of systemic and sustained harassment. These people who make this argument seem to ignore the fact that bad behavior should be addressed, and instead make the case that women should just continue to hide their identities, rather than holding accountable the men who harass them. I understand the benefits of positive anonymity, and I support positive anonymity.

I do believe in holding people accountable for their behavior, online and offline. I do believe that the vast majority — a silent majority, but a majority still — of gamers are awesome people who play hard, but aren’t dicks about it. I do believe that a very small minority of loud and persistent shitlords are having a very loud and very public temper tantrum, because they feel threatened by something that, frankly, isn’t objectively threatening. (Sidebar: the existence of a casual game like Flying Unicorn Happy Song or whatever doesn’t negate or dilute whatever First Person Testosterone-a-rama you currently love to play. The existence of a discussion about how women are portrayed in gaming, and whether that affects how welcomed women feel in the gaming community, isn’t an attack on you, Mister #NotAllMen. In fact, it isn’t and never was about you. And I won’t even dig into the insanity of expecting a review to be “objective”, when reviews are, by their nature, subjective.)

The point I was making, which I know the vast majority of people understood and comprehended, is that I want games to be accessible to everyone, and as long as a small but loud minority of people can act like shitlords with impunity, large swaths of gaming will be accessible only to the most vile and wretched group of trolls. The more people game, the more games we’ll have available to us to play. The wider the demographic of gamers, the more diverse styles of games we’ll get to play. The sooner we who are the majority of decent people stand up and demand that people who are terrible in gaming be held accountable for their actions — actions which would, in many cases, be criminal if perpetrated in-person — the sooner we can all hold our heads up high and say, You’re damn right, I’m a gamer, and I’m damn proud of it. Want to play a game?

179 thoughts on “Regarding Anonymous Gaming Trolls, Tabletop, and More”

  1. I had an experience where anonymity both helped and hurt me. Through no action of my own, I attracted the attention of a troll who saw herself as a prophet of god. She believed that god directly spoke to her and told her things. “God” told her that I was really some other person who she had a beef with and so she was going to attack me online – harassing me, threatening to contact every company I dealt with, etc. Of course, telling her I wasn’t this person wouldn’t work because it was my word against “god’s”.

    This person she thought I was has used this real name online. Consequently, she was able to find his employer, family, friends, police in his area, etc and contact all of them, making up wild accusations. Had his not pre-warned these people, some of these accusations (of the “does bad things to children” nature) might have landed him in serious trouble.

    With me, however, all she had was a pseudonym and a vague idea of where I lived. She couldn’t track my real identity down and thus couldn’t harass me offline.

    On the flip side, though, anonymity helped her. As she would get Twitter accounts set up, they would get reported and suspended. Since she was able to keep making new Twitter accounts, though, she would be able to continue to harass people and get around blocks. It was a constant game of whack-a-mole where the mole had too much time on her hands.

    (I actually know her real name and where she lives, but legal action was stymied by the fact that it would be an international legal effort.)

    In the end, she stopped harassing me merely because she moved on to other targets. She’s still out there popping up occasionally and trying to take down the “vast conspiracy” that “god” tells her exists. Though she hasn’t targeted me in awhile, I never know when she might set her sights back on me.

  3. At the risk of being really annoying (too late I’m sure), I’m going to post something I wrote almost 8 years ago that touched upon a lot of this, though I was looking specifically at political discourse (or what passes as it). The piece is called “In Praise of Incivility”.

    It says something about our society that even after all of this time the internet can still give so many folks the screaming heebie jeebies. You cannot swing a nice four-letter expletive around without hitting a main stream media lament about the state of American discourse. The culprits, we are told, are various bloggers of the left and right, anonymous commenters with dubious language skills, and assorted other evil doers who add to the near certain ruination of our fine republic. For the most part, bloggers react to such criticism by stomping their feet and shouting, “You don’t understand me! You’ve never loved me and you never will! I hate you!” If there was an internet equivalent of running up to their room and slamming the door, I’m sure they would add that as well.

    This little drama seemingly repeats itself every month or two; so often in fact that I sometimes feel like I’m stuck in the movie Groundhog Day, except without the ability to actually change anything. The reason nothing ever changes in this scenario has to do with the intersection of human nature with the nature of the internet. Believe it or not, it is a question with philosophical import and it has quite a pedigree.

    In his dialogue The Laws, Plato discusses what has to be the best analogous practice to the internet in all of the history of philosophy: the drinking party. The problem with drinking parties, obviously, is their ability to get out of hand. They become riotous affairs.

    Athenian Stranger- What I’m asking is this: doesn’t the drinking of wine make pleasures, pain, the spirited emotions, and the erotic emotions, more intense?

    Kleinias- Very much so.

    Athenian Stranger- What about sensations, memories, opinions, and prudent thoughts? Do they become more intense in the same way? Or don’t they abandon anyone who becomes thoroughly soused?

    Kleinias- Yes, they completely abandon him.

    Replace the pleasurable activity of drinking wine with the pleasurable activity of online discourse and I’m not sure what is different, other than the lack of a hangover. Many media types blame the anonymity of the web for much of this, but I’m sure that misses the mark. People will gladly sign their name to examples of their bad behavior, forgoing any semblance of anonymity in the bargain. There seems to be something in the way the internet allows us to be connected and disconnected simultaneously. We can forcefully present our ideas to any number of people without ever sharing proximity with them. Some might say the internet allows people to be belligerent without fear of actually being, well, beaten to a bloody pulp. But… it never really reads that way. It reads more like people affected by, if our good friends in the Netherlands will forgive the term, Dutch courage.

    Of course, not everyone gets “soused” in that special internet way. Many folks employ the internet the same way Plato advocates the use of wine. For those who take a moderate approach free discourse is encouraged and much can be learned for our mutual edification. Those who “overindulge” and thus act immoderately stick out like a sore thumb. In any society it is important to know who you can look to for their steady outlook on life, and who you want to avoid as being prone to flights of unhinged invective. Incivility is thus a positive benefit to our political order. You may be discouraged by the sheer numbers of these buffoons, but at least you aware of the actual state of the polity and are not deceived by polite appearances.

    In fact, for all the complaining about the coarseness of political discourse today, it might be worse in an unfailingly “proper” society. As Rousseau stated in his Discourse on the Sciences and Arts:

    “One no longer dares to appear as he is; and in this perpetual constraint, the men who form the herd called society, placed in the same circumstances, will all do the same things unless stronger motives deter them. Therefore one will never know well those with whom he deals, for to know one’s friends thoroughly, it would be necessary to wait for emergencies-that is, to wait until it is too late…”

    Lucky thing for us we live in a time with no such difficulties. Thanks to the wonderfully intoxicating properties of the internet we can all have a clear idea of just who we are dealing with in this cyber world. We may at times be distressed at the depths people will descend to in the name of their political ideology, but we will always know the true score thanks to those moments of incivility.

    So, with pure philosophical purpose in our voices we can heartily say, “Thanks, jerks.”

    1. I’m having a real hard time seeing how we should “thank the jerks” for suggesting to other players that they are ugly, fat and that they should kill themselves. This is what Wil is talking about. Not intocicated tomfoolery but cyberbullying and insults at that level. Your whole text seems completely disconnected from the topic at hand. It’s as if you were talking about energetic arguments about the problems of the world in a gentleman’s club. In none of the cenarios I think Wil is talking about do I imagine a drunk Greek in an argument suggesting what they had done to the mothers of other drunk Greeks in the room the night before.

      This isn’t about discourse on the internet that became uncivil, turning into “riff raff”. This is about people making other people want to kill themselves, threatening rape while informing their possible future victim they know where they live.

  5. Google already tried that with Real Names(TM) in G+ and whatever the heck they did to YouTube comments. They admitted that it made no difference in the amount of trolling, and that the same anonymous trolls just started trolling with their real names. But now they just stick to their original position to save face.

  6. I worked for years in the text-based chat world (CompuServe, GEnie, AOL, etc. I know, I’m dating myself.) Even back then when you had to dial in and we could basically look up your phone number to know who you were, there were trolls. People would go online hoping to escape the issues that made their “real” lives miserable and yet those same issues would eventually pour out of their fingers online. Jerks would eventually be jerks online but magnified by the fact that they could vent and rant without counterpoint. And we’d block them and they’d change their phone numbers and credit cards and set up a new account. Rinse and repeat.

    As the TSA has discovered, it’s very difficult determining a specific individual to any level of accuracy. Lots of people have the same name, live in the same city, and are around the same age. Addresses, phone numbers, and other personal data can be changed easily, which is why most medical insurance companies rely on social security numbers (which are technically only supposed to be used for tax purposes). And even that isn’t foolproof.

    I agree something needs to be done. But I’m not sure any method really exists to remove anonymity. It will just become a continuous process to remove and block the bad apples to make things tolerable for the rest of us. As Facebook discovered, even attempting to pull back the curtain results in a vocal uprising. Better to just acknowledge this as the state of social communication in a technical age and more aggressively weed out the trolls.

  7. This is going to make me seem like the creaky old lady gamer as I say this…but…I started gaming online back when speed was measured in bauds, you paid by the minute, and computers cost about the same as a used car. I was almost always the only woman regardless of the game. People were polite but if they weren’t, you could report them and they took those complaints seriously. It was too expensive a hobby to act like a shitlord. I fell in love with the experience.

    Then around Diablo, it was cheaper to play online. You no longer policed your minutes because it was unlimited. And that’s when I started encountering trolls. Blizzard may have said they were doing stuff to police it but I didn’t see it. And I couldn’t blame them. They sold the game. There was no monthly fee. No real way to sustain a staff to check into all the complaints. Certainly no desire to cut into their profits to pay for that kind of staffing.

    I often refer to Diablo as the beginning of the end.

    My screen name is my screen name. It’s almost as much my identity as my real name. Policing players by allowing others to report abusers doesn’t mean the end of anonymity. I don’t need to know your name to report you are being a douchebag – just need your gamer tag. The game company has account information and should be able to take care of it via an IP or account ban. The trouble is that most games do not have a reporting function. Considering how much they make, they should.

  8. Perhaps one of the reasons it is a silent majority, is because they/we don’t know what to do. I was always taught to “ignore the bully” and this takes away their power. Clearly that isn’t the case anymore. Everyone is more connected than ever. This includes the bullies. So now if they can’t find someone innocent to attack, they can instead just feed off each other. So the question becomes, how do we hold them responsible for their actions? How to we take away the incentive and being shitlords?

    1. A good beginning would be if guys like you would shout down the shitlord and shun him. Ignoring gives a bully a thumb-ups signal.

      1. The problem with that is that now the shitlords have an additional target. I won’t blame the “good guys” for staying silent when they have families to protect. Also, speaking up doesn’t usually help.

  9. Anyone here play pick-up basketball?

    It’s analogous to the random player matching on most video gaming services. Basketball is different from tennis, in that people rarely show up at a tennis court alone for a pick-up game. Same thing with soccer, football, or baseball. It may happen, but rarely. It doesn’t happen much in volleyball either, but may happen more in beach volleyball.

    Basically, the only sport that has a global, decades old tradition of strangers meeting up to game is basketball. And basketball is a confrontational and aggressive sport. Lots of elbows, pushing, split lips, and bruises.

    And people talk.

    Do they ever.

    All ages. The stuff that is said is pretty blue, pretty raw. Do fights happen? Yes, but rarely. There are limits and most people know them. But in my view, this calls into question the idea that holding people accountable by their “real” and “verified” names in online gaming will dramatically alter bullying. In basketball, people are standing face to face and racial, sexual, all manner of slur and pejorative gets cast about freely. Doesn’t hinder the exchange one bit.

    So, how to get around that if you’re playing basketball? Well, you can leave the game. I’ve done that a few times. You can fight. That’s another option. You can note that a particular court or particular player tends to be an a-hole. And then avoid that court or that player in the future. That’s usually how I do it. If I’m playing against a jerk, I’ll try to finish the game (so as not to inconvenience the other players). But then after that, I’ll go elsewhere.

    The real problem in online gaming is that random player matching should never be the only option. As with basketball, you can create your own group of sane, friendly, and fun companions. Bullies will always exist. Best strategy? Avoid. Don’t waste time trying to rehabilitate them. Their issues run WAY too deep.

    I’ve never had any interest in being a blacktop psychiatrist.

  11. Many reputable news, entertainment and sports sites have gone to making users go through their Facebook (alleged authenticity) or through other social media to comment on stories and/or discussion. Is this the answer for curing the “anonymous” problem?

  12. A-frickin’-men!

    This morning, I was telling someone at work that the reason I quit WOW was because of the twats and trolls.

    Hell, I was thinking that if an online game had in their Terms of Service “don’t be a douche or we will suspend your account” that maybe I would give MMORPGs another shot. The exact excuse I gave myself was, “This is why I play single player rpgs.”

    I was also reading about women being treated like lesser beings in the gaming, convention, and artistic world.

    Wil, there are times we thought you were evil (like Sheldon), and I have certainly disagreed with you on more than one occasion. Tonight, however, I wonder if you can make a difference in the real world. Let’s give it a go, shall we?

  13. I wasn’t able to finish reading the entire hyperlinked article because of work/reasons, but to me this seems like more of a societal issue. No one is parenting or monitoring ANYONE anymore. There are no consequences to acting like an ASSHAT, or as you say, Shitlords…

    People harass others on a regular basis, but until an actual physical action is taken, there are little to no legal consequences. Stealing someone’s identity, online or otherwise, has to be proven before prosecuted. Children get a slap on the hand while at school, if that. Parents are forbidden from disciplining their children because there aren’t enough intelligent people (parents or professionals) in the world to know the difference between discipline and abuse.

    Society and psychiatry say that befriending your child helps his/her self esteem. My question is that if you are your child’s friend, who in the hell is his/her parent? Without parents/true authority figures in the lives of today’s overstimulated child, the world is descending quickly into a spiral that in my fantasy-driven mind leads to the post-apocalyptic worlds we’ve been watching in movies (originally in horror, more recently in near celebration of “freedom”) since movies began, really. I don’t think it is possible for this idea to terrify me more.

    Recently, a friend was celebrating on Facebook the so called “sugar tax” recently passed (her post asserted that it had passed, I did not check myself to verify this) because in her opinion, it would help her restrain her own purchases in this arena, and help her have the “willpower” (her words) to not purchase things bad for her that make her fat.

    I couldn’t have been more shocked and offended. If I choose to put something in my mouth/body, in my shopping cart at the store, a minor tax won’t stop me. So since I don’t have the discipline and determination to do what is necessary for my own health, I should sacrifice my personal freedoms and let the federal government play Mean Mommy or Discipline Daddy and take away my constitutional rights?? What? She was advocating this. Then attempted to clear it up by saying I was arguing a rights issue and she was arguing a health issue.

    When parents are too focused on anything other than raising functional adults, we want the government and laws to step in? Does this not sound like a recipe for disaster?

    Aside from that, and looping this back to your article, I fully support the concept of limited anonymity…in so much as you may remain anonymous to the public or gaming community, but if your actions are the type that would be prosecuted by law had they been executed in public, then your anonymity would be stripped by the company providing the service originally in conjunction with the legal system. I could not agree with this more, but you run into issues of security of data, asshat employees, and so many minor things…

    But it does still come back to responsibility. If Shitlord gamers are the type of game whose sense of decency, morals, and responsibility turn OFF at the turning on a gaming device, there should be rules, regulations, and laws in place to make these offensive punishable in the system. The legal system is a few decades behind the crime wave. It needs to catch up, before it is unable to do so.

    1. I was thinking along similar lines when you mentioned parenting and responsibility. I consider my kids my friends but they’re still my kids and I set the guidelines (or my wife). Further, we are very careful with what they are allowed to consume (video games, TV and whatever).

      We are, however, unable to control our kid’s friends so if my 9 year old’s friend is allowed to play HALO or COD, well, there may be times he will as much as I might wish otherwise (aside from talking to the parents, which has worked on occasion).

      The problem is not just that some parents are stricter or more lax than others – the problem is there are parents barely involved. If their kid sits in front of a screen, mom or dad head off to something else while their child is occupied. They don’t think about what their kid is playing or HOW they play it. This is often different than sports, where most parents are watching their kids and how they handle themselves, though there are certainly bullies in sports and crappy parents as well.

      For the younger players, half of them are playing things they maybe shouldn’t and a host of them are not remotely monitored. For that, anonymity isn’t even the problem – lack of supervision and being taught how to conduct yourself is.

      None of which is cured by anything you or I can do.

  14. You know what’s awesome? When you post that Tabletop Season 3 starts in 2 days, and because my Feedly is kind of… engorged… I don’t get around to reading it for 2 days.

  15. The problem often when discussing such things is that many people do not want to listen to logic or reason. It happened in the Sci-Fi community last year around a well-known editor who was banned from a convention. Reasonable people understand the point you were trying to make. And that’s the best you can hope for.
    On a lighter note, good luck with the audiobooks! Cherie Priest and Ernie Cline have nothing but good things to say about your readings when they are at conventions!

  17. I don’t see any acknowledgement that you used the death of a 14 year old to slander GG. Let’s be clear: you are so sensitive to this girl’s suicide that you got her age wrong and didn’t bother to that in May of this year, it was determined that 14 year old Hannah Smith wrote the bullying statements herself.

    I don’t see any acknowledgement that, even though Felicia wrote vitriol about gamers as a whole based on one side of the story that appealed to a preset worldview, there is no connection to GamerGate. No one was identified as a supporter. No one brandished the tag. She got doxxed and people just assumed it was GamerGate because, well, you’re bullies.

    And it’s important that we establish that Felicia’s doxxer wasn’t connected to GamerGate because Zoe Quinn used her Twitter account to encourage people to pose as GG supporters and post vitriol and misogyny in exchange for game codes and money. So even fake GG supporters use the tag, yet Felicia’s doxxer has zero established connections save for this putrid desire among your type to really really want it.

    If wishes were fishes, we’d be under water.

    You didn’t do research for your article, Wil. I think what you did was called “confirmation bias.” I concede and agree with your view that much of this aggression is because of the safety of anonymity, but you publicly support people who say that it’s not anonymity. It’s people with a Y chromosome, so you’ll have to forgive those who take your reasoning with a grain of salt.

    Lastly, I see a complete ignorance of the online experience. That 12 year old who barked about doing your mom? Did he do it to you because of your gender? Or did he do it because of the ease that distance grants him? Clearly, you weren’t derided for your gender and unless you’re telling everyone online you’re Wil Wheaton, he has nothing but your gender and your game. Even with only your gender to work from, you hear you suck or that your mom is easy: things that weren’t misogyny in elementary school.

    So then why does the same experience become viewed as harassment toward women when it’s the SAME experience? My wife quit BlackOps 2 because the girls who played got on her nerves. The boys all tried to be her friend when they heard her voice. Nothing in her experience was sexual or overly aggressive. GamerGate, the tag you mock like a child, is supported by thousands of women who have no clue why anyone would think trash talk’s intensity is elevated to hate speech if you don’t have a Y chromosome.

    But of course, you grew up without accountability, so it’s likely this will get deleted and I’ll get banned. It’s how you proudly run your twitter account.

    1. Hi there Mr. Seamus Lion of No True Scotslandia,

      So yeah – about “not doing your research” and “confirmation bias”

      http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/hannah-smith-suicide-troll-admits-2150298

      Sure it’s the Mirror but it took me about 45 seconds to find that article.

      I won’t bother with the rest of your comment. You basically list everything supposedly wrong with Wil’s editorial and then go down that list checking all those fallacies as if you had a laundry list of things people told you were wrong with your arguments in the past and desperately try to apply those criticism you heard to other people. In this instance Wil.

      But thanks for stopping by. Nobody would believe people so void of irony sensors exist.

      In short: shoo.

    2. OK, I’m not going to defend Wil’s article as I believe the premise (anonymity is the cause) is flawed, and I certainly disagree with his stance in his additional text re. the feminist gaming “discussion” and ethics. But come on, Felicia did NOT write “vitriol about gamers” in any way shape or form. She posted about her own fears that stem IMHO from the online confrontation between gamergate and the likes of feminist frequency. It turned out that those fears did indeed have substance, regardless of who actually did the doxxing, which (very sadly) resulted in Felicia advising women not to get into gaming at the moment. Ironically, gamergate is suffering from the exact same problem as mainstream third-wave feminism; there is no leadership or “core” to explicitly exclude extremists and therefore the movement as a whole gets coloured by their actions and views. If you want gamergate to stop being blamed for things you believe have nothing to do with it, that’s something you need to address.

  19. Oh my god, people need to get over it. Shit that may get said, half the time on a game 9 times out of 10 isn’t about you.

    Playing COD online, shit gets said. Half the time it’s to antagonize the other team. I’m sure other games are similar. Some people do take trolling to extremes, and that’s why there is always a block function. With reddit, you just down vote and move on.

    It’s kind of sad that I even have to explain it.

  20. Now even bigshots within various gaming communities are doing this. But may i say one thing, we can separate harmful trolls from good trolls. Those who target hackers/cheaters and trashtalkers are good trolls, whereas those who ruin for others and talk trash, etc, are harmful and bad.

  21. “The existence of a discussion about how women are portrayed in gaming, and whether that affects how welcomed women feel in the gaming community, isn’t an attack on you, Mister #NotAllMen. In fact, it isn’t and never was about you. ”

    Oh, but it is! And thank fuck for that, because Mr. #NotAllMen is a huge part of the problem.

    Also, some around here seem to confuse rude/rough behavior and harrassment. Hating on someone, threatening them, because of who they are (which is always a bit less human than the harrasser) is not alike to being a sore loser or throwing a tantrum.

    If you want people to feel safe in your community, to have to have their backs and tell harrassers where to shove it every single time. Wringing your hands about today’s youth and their bad manners isn’t going to cut it.

  22. WIL WHEATON, I LOVE YOU! LOL Thanks for thinking more about this. Thanks for owning your privilege. Keep thinking. Keep speaking out. None of us speaks perfectly on all the issues all the time, and we need more voices like yours.

  24. “I want games to be accessible to everyone, ”

    Games ARE accessible to everyone. It’s a medium that can keep you out of.

      1. Hi there string.tostring(),

        words can have different meanings. In this case, “accessible” means something different than you think.

        Wil was trying to tell the reader that for instance if you are a woman, a game that allows you to chose a character and it only allows male characters to be chosen from (cough UbiSoft cough), the game can be considered less “accessible” to women. As in “getting into the game”. Identifying with your character, allowing you to suspend your disbelief when something “would never happen in real life”. UbiSoft might even have a point there (no not really) in that if they only have male game developers, it could have been hard for them to write a storyline for a female avatar that is believable to the player so as to not break their suspension of disbelief.

        So at its core their inablility to make a game with female avatars is emblematic of more than one thing that is wrong with the gaming industry when it comes to being accessible for women.

        I hope this clears things up.

        1. “So at its core their inablility to make a game with female avatars is emblematic of more than one thing that is wrong with the gaming industry when it comes to being accessible for women.”

          I’m going to have to ask for some proof that “they” are unable to make a game with female avatars, because this sounds like little more than sour grapes and unsubstantiated exaggeration.

          And really, what is supposed to be the solution to this? A choice of male/female avatar in every single game possible? Why isn’t this demanded in film and books?

          1. It highly amuses me that to you an exaggeration is the representation of both predominant sexes in games. In the light of more than half of the people playing games being women, it’s even more amusing.

            Oh and it IS demanded in movies.Google “Bechtel test”. People already demand it.

            It’s just NOT DONE. See the difference?

            All you just did is point out that movies are misogynistic too.

            Congratulations.

            And don’t worry, this isn’t a OR or XOR. This is an AND. There are people out there who are at the same time able to demand female avatars in games AND demand for scenes in movies to

            have at least two women in it,
            talking to each other,
            about something besides a man

            You know, something other than window dressing.

            This is ALREADY a thing. And here’s a hint: next time you think you just came up with a GENIOUS example of “hey they don’t demand that” do yourself a favor: Google it. You won’t believe how much of your fluffy priviliged middle-class white male world is criticided for it’s non-inclusiveness of THE OTHER HALF of humankind.

            And guess what – at the same time there’s also minorities (gasp!!!) who demand being treated equal and having their fair share in media. Next time you watch a movie take both of your hands and count the number of african americans in a US movie. They make up 12% of the populace. You should at least have to use ONE finger for every 10 actors you see on screen. In each movie. EACH.

            Same goes to Mexicans. One and a half for each ten actors on screen. And Asians (one for each twenty actors). They are grossly UNDERrepresented in US media. Knowing that in 2035, Latinos are going to outnumber caucasians, that’s a cruel joke.

            Go take a look at the TV ratings. Latino TV stations are often enough getting the highest ratings of ALL networks on some evenings in the US. That they are listed separately is laughable at best, racist at worst.

            So yeah – female avatars. The gall, right?

          2. “In the light of more than half of the people playing games being women, it’s even more amusing.”

            It amuses me that you explode your own position in an act of triumph. If more than half of people playing games are women, and there is a lack of female protagonists in games, then clearly lack of female protagonists are not keeping women from ‘getting into’ games.

            “Oh and it IS demanded in movies.Google “Bechtel test”. People already demand it.”

            The Bechtel test does not demand that for every movie with a male protagonist there should be a corresponding movie with a female protagonist.

            “It’s just NOT DONE. See the difference?
            All you just did is point out that movies are misogynistic too.
            Congratulations.”

            How amusing. Movies and games that don’t show ‘enough’ women are now “misogynistic”. Laughable.

            “There are people out there who are at the same time able to demand”

            Oh, you don’t have to convince me that there are insane people out there making ridiculous demands. But I’ve yet to see non-insane people like Wil Wheaton demand that for every movie with a male protagonist there should be a movie with a female protagonist. I’ve yet to see non-insane people like Wil Wheaton demand that there should be an equal number of male and female protagonist in every movie.
            I’ve yet to see non-insane people like Wil Wheaton demand that every single movie that is made should be recorded twice, once with a female protagonist and once with a male protagonist.

            “You won’t believe how much of your fluffy priviliged middle-class white male world is criticided”

            Bigotry, your name is Sebastian Peitsch.

            “You should at least have to use ONE finger for every 10 actors you see on screen. In each movie. EACH.”

            Why?

            It’s fascinating. We’re only three comments in and already your facade of civility has fallen aside to reveal the shrieking hateful bigot hiding within.

          3. You know the sad thing is that I knew your complete answer before you wrote it down. It was so obvious you wouldn’t understand the Bechtel test and what it stands for. The inability to understand sarcasm.

            But hey – I set myself an end-point in this discussion and you checked the box. Ad-hominem attack.

            You lost. Discussion over.

          4. “You know the sad thing is that I knew your complete answer before you wrote it down. It was so obvious you wouldn’t understand the Bechtel test and what it stands for. The inability to understand sarcasm.”

            I see you’ve chosen full retreat as your new strategy, when you realized shrill condemnation and bigotry wouldn’t do the trick.
            Are you claiming that the Bechtel test now stands for the inability to understand sarcasm?

            “But hey – I set myself an end-point in this discussion and you checked the box. Ad-hominem attack.”

            Oh wow, after a series of bigoted attacks on me and appeals to ridicule you’re trying to take the moral high-ground in your desperate retreat.

            “You lost. Discussion over.”

            Hahaha, yeah, exit with as much dignity as you can muster, after your total defeat.

        2. Feel free to ignore this, since the OP is like a month old.

          Anyway, I’ve never heard that Ubisoft said they couldn’t write in female characters into (I assume you mean) Assassin’s Creed: Unity. because they have too few female developers. For one, the executive producer of AC2 and Watch_Dogs (both made by Ubisoft Montreal) was Jade Raymond (female). She also was producer of Assassin’s Creed and executive producer of Splinter Cell: Blacklist which means she was high up on 4 of Ubisoft’s best games. Also, Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation (Ubisoft Sofia and Ubisoft Milan) starred a female assassin. Then there was Child of Light (Ubisoft Montreal), another terrific game that starred a female protagonist. So I think it’s pretty clear that Ubisoft can make a game with women in it.

          The actual excuse that I heard on why there were no women in Unity was that they didn’t have time to add them. And to anyone who thinks they were lying: http://cdn.bgr.com/2014/11/assassins-creed-glitch.jpg?w=624&h=390

          Bet you feel foolish now.

          2. http://kotaku.com/ubisoft-responds-to-assassins-creed-female-character-co-1589413130

            I…don’t understand. That’s completely consistent with what I said.

            “The reasoning behind the decision—that it would’ve been too expensive to animate female character models—felt flimsy to some.”

            From the update: ‘As a result, “it was really a lot of extra production work,” Amancio continued. “And it’s not like we could cut our main character Arno.”‘

            Now, he could be talking about money, but I think Ubisoft Montreal has a pretty big budget for stuff, so my interpretation is that it would cost too much time. Yeah, if you’ve got a different opinion, gonna need you to elaborate instead of posting a link and a sentence about your ability to use search engines.

          3. Look, I understand that you’re confused. You attacked a straw man, as in something I didn’t say. Feel free to point out where I said that Ubisoft said “that Ubisoft said they couldn’t write in female characters into (I assume you mean) Assassin’s Creed: Unity”

            I said the game was less accessible because it didn’t have a female playable character.

            So – does it have a female playable character?

            No.

            So actually no I don’t feel “foolish now”.

            I could now argue you on your opinion about AC:U but I honestly don’t feel like it because I get the impression next thing you’d do is again not understand what I said and make another straw man argument.

          4. “UbiSoft might even have a point there (no not really) in that if they only have male game developers, it could have been hard for them to write a storyline for a female avatar that is believable to the player so as to not break their suspension of disbelief.”

            I guess I need you to elaborate on this, then. I interpreted that to mean that the reason you heard for Unity not having female protagonists was that they couldn’t write one independent of time constraints. If you’re saying something different, I don’t know what it is.

  25. we all have bad days and become trolls for a few comments on some page or game….or respond to trolls with trolling…

    we all did it at least once….

  26. Look – you chose to insult me. You still don’t get what “accessible” means… You think that the demand for strong female characters in games and movies means that every movie has to be made twice…

    I understand that you think I am giving up. Because sure, I am. I’m slowly nodding, speaking in a soft voice walking backwards. If you think that makes you the winner here – good. No great. You won.

    1. “Look – you chose to insult me. ”

      I chose to refer to you by what your were engaging in, bigotry.

      “You still don’t get what “accessible” means”

      So define it. Because right now it’s apparently a word that you get to choose what means based on what you require it to mean.

      “You think that the demand for strong female characters in games and movies means that every movie has to be made twice…”

      I suggested it as a solution. I haven’t heard any other.

      “I understand that you think I am giving up. Because sure, I am. I’m slowly nodding, speaking in a soft voice walking backwards. If you think that makes you the winner here – good. No great. You won.”

      See? It’s this kind of petty small-minded behaviour that shows what a hateful little person you are.

      1. Look – I was wrong, ok? I was being irrational. I shouldn’t have raised my voice.

        Please don’t hit me.

        1. “Look – I was wrong, ok?”

          Admitting that you were wrong is the first step on the road to recovery. Good luck.

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