RedDave2 wrote:Yossarian wrote:So your stand here is based on there being no difference between targeting and criticising?
Criticising someone over a criminal act without proof sounds incredibly dangerous to me. Take it outside of the sexual assault aspect, imagine you were accused of racist or homophobic actions. How do you stop that from spreading on twitter or similar. Can you even force a retraction. And what if you get accused of a genuine crime. Sure, it may be untrue and the police may never prosecute but damage can be done.
I understand that society and the law has badly, badly let down victims here. I'm not blind at all to that. It's not right what anyone who has suffered a sexual assault has to go through to legally prove their case. But this doesn't feel right to me either.
Well, sure it can have consequences. Everything can have consequences.Vela wrote:To a global audience? Put them in the stocks so a few million people can point and laugh? Sure, that wont have any consequences.So should bullies, abusers etc. never be outed?
Diluted Dante wrote:So what audience should their actions be outed to?To a global audience? Put them in the stocks so a few million people can point and laugh? Sure, that wont have any consequences.So should bullies, abusers etc. never be outed?
Yossarian wrote:Does any such medium exist?
djchump wrote:There's a few private games industry forums. Companies are regularly named and shamed in places like that as "don't work in that place, it sucks because X". People less so, but gossip spreads.
But then, that's how things like this become "open secrets" whereby people who were already in the know end up not doing anything about it because "oh, yeah, that's just person X. They're like that".
Some people want to know exactly what we knew and when so they can figure out who around him is most complicit. Some people want us to give them hard evidence, as if such a thing was even possible, or as if it would appropriate to give them in the first place. Some people randomly doubt all of this because nobody had Alec arrested, which shows a weird understanding of the reality of human relationships and abuse that I can only assume comes from experience of the world via online chatter and a list of how things should work. The idea that there's a foolproof system in place that can stop this, can riddle it out, can tell us exactly who is and isn't guilty, a system which can set all this right. But it doesn't work like that in real life. Some of the demand for more info stems from the idea that if something is put out in public then any interested party is owed as much information as they want to work out their own stance and to judge ours. But at least for us the only reason we're working this out in public is because we have to. It was out there, and we've had to respond to it. Like we have to tell you now. And it's been like stabbing myself in the stomach every day to have to type words like this. To sum up- this isn't some "guilty til proven innocent" or "social media mob" thing for us. There's years of real life context to this, involving lots of people who aren't even online or public about this, and the fact that some folks just found out about it this week doesn't mean it began there. It's just when it became public.
Well, of course - that's part of the equation that puts the abuser in a position of power and authority. Everyone is aware of that.Vela wrote:This also applies to Yoss' and chumps' posts above, but have you noticed in the threads amongst the accused, victims and supporters - almost all were in the same industry or connected services?
Almost always this was already done. Quite often, it was already done in public on Twitter etc anyway, but never got much attention. For better and worse, this recent explosion of attention seems to me to be entirely due to the signal boost from Quinn and Alexander, which got the huge attention due to the priors with GG and then further snowballed because it emboldened further victims to tell their stories.Vela wrote:Maybe a medium confined in that space rather than a global space is more appropriate and practical when you are naming names.
While this happens all the time - no doubt we've all worked somewhere and when a new person joins they get a headsup about "watch out for X, they can be a handful" - I think what makes it rather different for the Indie scene is how small and relatively ad hoc the companies are, how baked into it the use of Twitter, Twitch and other social media channels and also that the people trying to join are often hobbyists. Those that have left a large devco generally know people in the industry and have more of a grounding in the local areas and pitfalls, but how do you get a message out to hobbyists and people just starting out about the perils of taking up offers from an established Indie person to come and work with them? Explicitly, that kind of message has to be global.Vela wrote:If its a case of general sympathy with another victim, sure - go global. If its in a smaller environment what does broadcasting it to everyone achieve other than making them absolutely singled out? The localised warning achieves the practical outcome of making sure colleagues know the risks and have support too.
JonB wrote:So you've dismissed this whole issue before even knowing what it's about based on a single name that's involved. OK.Armitage_Shankburn wrote:But yeah, I wrote her off back in 2011. Antibody who hasn't, is a foolish man.
Armitage_Shankburn wrote:
That said, I can believe that sexless dorks who think they have achieved powerb and influence might not behave so well around women. I just wish we wouldn't name Zoey fucking Quinn as a credible whistleblower.
Armitage_Shankburn wrote:Facewon wrote:. You've imagined that I have said something about other women coming out against abusive practice - I did not, I just bemoaned bringing up Zoe fucking Quinn. I expressly indicated I'd be minded to believe those claims, or claims in general, without more, because of the profile of men who end up "big in the industry.
Got anything else chief, or is your brain still in "criticising Zoe Quinn = ergo Plato "full on GG", which is a fucking insult
JB wrote:Which one are you?Armitage_Shankburn wrote:Pay attention to nice people, to kind people, to talented people. She's none of those things.
Armitage_Shankburn wrote:Me too movement for the games industry, FML. Zoe Quinn. Zoe fucking Quinn?
Tempy wrote:Laying all of this at Quinn’s feet regardless of whether she’s a liar is wrong. Laying it all at twitter’s feet seems wrong too, though I can understand the feeling that it exacerbated it.
JonB wrote:Armitage_Shankburn wrote:Me too movement for the games industry, FML. Zoe Quinn. Zoe fucking Quinn?
Vela wrote:Tempy wrote:Laying all of this at Quinn’s feet regardless of whether she’s a liar is wrong. Laying it all at twitter’s feet seems wrong too, though I can understand the feeling that it exacerbated it.
If this is veiled or not at me, Ive been pretty clear that Quinn's allegations deserve to be taken seriously. Several times.
On twitter, Ive said my part.
Its the digital equivalent of the stocks in front of an audience of millions. Someone like weinstein or kevin spacey might weather that, but someone who isnt a global name? The magnifying impact is surely more severe.
Tempy wrote:What Holowka did had a huge bundle of context you can’t just divorce from it.
Vela wrote:Tempy wrote:What Holowka did had a huge bundle of context you can’t just divorce from it.
Indeed. The mental health angle also suggests the public outing wasnt the most constructive approach to take, surely?
If you've been raped and struggling with the effects for years after, and feel that there's no legal recourse, and that the person who raped you is still working in the same areas, potentially assaulting others, is it surprising if you don't take the most constructive approach to dealing with it? Should you even give a shit?Vela wrote:Indeed. The mental health angle also suggests the public outing wasnt the most constructive approach to take, surely?
So, when someone says things like, why don't they go to the police, or why don't they take a more constructive approach, I think you need to put it in context. Why are the victims, the ones going through the trauma, expected to be the most rational actors throughout the situation? Sometimes people struggle with it for years and then eventually it just 'boils over'.How did Alec do all of these things to multiple people over several years and it never went public?
Well, most things that happen in the world don't get written about on the internet. So there's that. But also the nature of abuse is often such that each person feels like they're the only ones receiving the abuse at any given time, and when the abuse stops happening to them they can easily believe it stopped altogether, because most people aren't sitting around comparing abuse notes. And often when multiple people ARE being abused in some fashion, there are extenuating circumstances keeping the abuser from being held accountable- finances, a job, a living situation, fear of retaliation or personal loss, etc. And abuse can often just catch people off guard or wear people down to the point where they don't fight back in the ways that a Logical Outside Party might see as common sense. This is why there are abuse counselors and people who specialize in this, because this shit is complicated in 1000 terrible ways and most abuse never gets made public in any setting. Often the abused will just feel ashamed. Or alone. Or helpless. Or straight up terrified and at risk. And a lot of times the abused will still really care about the abuser. Another thing that happens with a lot of abusers is they, consciously or not, farm out responsibility for their actions to someone else. So for example if an abuser threatens to kill themselves and places the responsibility for stopping that on someone else, a lot of people will do anything to help the abuser. It becomes your responsibility to fix the situation, your fault if it all goes wrong.
I have spent much of the past week fighting the urge that I am somehow, somehow, responsible for all of this.
Beyond that, often people will know about the abuse and cover for the abuser, for a variety of reasons both understandable and downright evil. Whole networks of abusers cover each other's asses. Sometimes people profit off of the abuse of others. There are any number of reasons why so much awful shit that people do to other people isn't visible until maybe someday it boils over and you suddenly find out that you and a dozen other people talk about the same person at therapy.
Kara_Jane_Addams wrote:How exactly does one delete their account on here?
Andy wrote:Something weird going on here.
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