Blizzard/Activation being hit by the Perfect Storm. Will they survive?

This thread derailed a while ago. I think it was cleaned up once and the vomit continued.

I’d like to keep the thread as it’s an important topic, but the OT stuff needs to go.
 
This case against Blizzard / Activision is pretty clear. There's a bunch of dirtbag womenizers possibly raped women and extremely bullied them and made the workplace pure hell.

Is there?

Show us the proof. Show us the proof any rape actually happened, and real workplace abuse actually occured. I don't mean "i recieved this vaguely critical memo which is actually in the main quite positive to me" kind of abuse. I mean, actual, concrete abuse.
 
Is there?

Show us the proof. Show us the proof any rape actually happened, and real workplace abuse actually occured. I don't mean "i recieved this vaguely critical memo which is actually in the main quite positive to me" kind of abuse. I mean, actual, concrete abuse.

I'm confident workplace abuse happened. Now... Whether these specific people did anything I don't personally know.
But commenting on women's bodies? Making work-inappropriate jokes? Sure. There's disagreements about the degree to which this happened or to which it's a problem but not really about *whether* it happened.... I am certain it happens in every tech company on earth.
 
Clearly a lot of folks have never worked in a place consisting of 95% of either gender. Going from an auto tech with 13 guys to a teacher's lounge in an elementary school with 16 women, I can confirm neither one is worse than the other.

He eye banged me for a solid 5 seconds as I leaned over the table != he raped me repeatedly without my consent
 
Clearly a lot of folks have never worked in a place consisting of 95% of either gender. Going from an auto tech with 13 guys to a teacher's lounge in an elementary school with 16 women, I can confirm neither one is worse than the other.

He eye banged me for a solid 5 seconds as I leaned over the table != he raped me repeatedly without my consent
I agree people are toxic in general, they get clicky, gossipy, and self absorbed pretty quickly. The gaming industry however seems to exemplify some extremes of socially unacceptable behaviour, which shouldn't be surprising to any gamer that has played online ever.
 
I'm confident workplace abuse happened. Now... Whether these specific people did anything I don't personally know.
But commenting on women's bodies? Making work-inappropriate jokes? Sure. There's disagreements about the degree to which this happened or to which it's a problem but not really about *whether* it happened.... I am certain it happens in every tech company on earth.
What inspires that confidence, though?
Clearly a lot of folks have never worked in a place consisting of 95% of either gender. Going from an auto tech with 13 guys to a teacher's lounge in an elementary school with 16 women, I can confirm neither one is worse than the other.

He eye banged me for a solid 5 seconds as I leaned over the table != he raped me repeatedly without my consent
I work in a place that is probably 98% women right now and can say that I've experienced situations that some women would consider "harassment" in this day and age. I'm not going to try and bring down the whole company because of it, but I would be laughed at even if I tried anyway since I'm a man.
 
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What inspires that confidence, though?

I work in a place that is probably 98% women right now and can say that I've experienced situations that some women would consider "harassment" in this day and age. I'm not going to try and bring down the whole company because of it, but I would be laughed at even if I tried anyway since I'm a man.

I spent years around it at blizzard.
Lots of hearsay I heard makes sense in context of these accusations.

I saw plenty of game leaders get away with being assholes because of their status.

So that's not exactly what's being accused, but because of my experience I have no difficulty believing *some* of the accusations.
 
This thread needs to go away.

You mean people are saying things which you disagree with and need to be silenced because you consider it to be blasphemy? Considering your username is a patriarchal term which connotes sexual dominance and emotional abuse you may want to reconsider casting those stones.
 
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You mean people are saying things which you disagree with and need to be silenced because you consider it to be blasphemy? Considering your username is a patriarchal term which connotes sexual dominance and emotional abuse you may want to reconsider casting those stones.
Oh joy. Its one of those wonderful individuals with selective reading disorder. Sigh
I don't know why im bothering but i guess ill waste five minutes.

No.
Meaning your obviously ignoring the toxic filth that this thread devolved into. The fact that you chose to omit the bulk of my response and what led up to it says everything i need to know about you. Go find someone that gives two shits about you if you feel the need to argue. Im just not your guy 😂

My username? Woooow, that sick twisted shit is what you turned my username into? You have a truly fucked up imagination.
My username has nothing to do with sexual dominance or emotional abuse. Where the hell did you dig that twisted shit up from? I honestly don't know what to say to that sick shit other than please dont make anymore assumptions about me. You clearly have no clue about me or what im about and we'll be keeping it that way.
Ive never felt the urge to add someone to the ignore list but you my man, have just become ignore boy #1.
 
Blizzard has the presumption of innocents until proven guilty. Lets see how this all plays out rather than attacking one another just for the sake of stroking ego's.
 
Oh joy. Its one of those wonderful individuals with selective reading disorder. Sigh
I don't know why im bothering but i guess ill waste five minutes.

No.
Meaning your obviously ignoring the toxic filth that this thread devolved into. The fact that you chose to omit the bulk of my response and what led up to it says everything i need to know about you. Go find someone that gives two shits about you if you feel the need to argue. Im just not your guy 😂

My username? Woooow, that sick twisted shit is what you turned my username into? You have a truly fucked up imagination.
My username has nothing to do with sexual dominance or emotional abuse. Where the hell did you dig that twisted shit up from? I honestly don't know what to say to that sick shit other than please dont make anymore assumptions about me. You clearly have no clue about me or what im about and we'll be keeping it that way.
Ive never felt the urge to add someone to the ignore list but you my man, have just become ignore boy #1.
So what else can your username mean?
 
So what else can your username mean?

Fair enough, i know it immediately brings lowly things to mind to most but surprise! Nope.
Back in my CFS2 clan days (DFA_DeathFromAbove) my wingman and i had a quick saying for a sneak attack when we were facing superior numbers. Hit it n quit it. Sure we could have simply said hit and run but where was the fun in that. Anyhow...
When i couldn't get my original username, maxfly to work with my pw(after years of not visiting... yeah i know) i decided to simply change it. Being that i almost always use screen names based off of that game or flying, hititnquitit fit the bill.

Now that the world knows my screen name back story, does anyone else care to share?
 
Blizzard has the presumption of innocents until proven guilty. Lets see how this all plays out rather than attacking one another just for the sake of stroking ego's.

There's nothing much to see though. All the accused (or anybody who was old and male really) are stepping down. Company is getting more woke to "fix" the problem (because that follows somehow), with some firms stepping in suggesting all sorts of equity programs. The games will get even worse. Nobody will go to jail.
 
Blizzard has the presumption of innocents until proven guilty. Lets see how this all plays out rather than attacking one another just for the sake of stroking ego's.
Is this a criminal trial, because that is the only time innocent until provwn guilty is in effect. No one should be nieve enough to beleive that it exists in the court of public opinion, guilt is entirely irrelevant there.
 

How am i wrong?

Or rather, which part? The blackface? The cultural appropriation, or both?

In either case, wrong back at you. When you start to take issue with stuff like Black Pete, something from a completely different country that has nothing to do with black people at all (Black Pete is covered in soot, the paint has nothing to do with skin color whatsover) you know you are dealing with the same kind of mass psychosis as that hover hand absurdity.

People always describe wokeness as a kind of religion or cult, and by that token one could easily claim political correctness is a form of superstition now. People mistaking a garage rope for a "noose" is not too far from Mexican grandmas seeing the Virgin Mary at the bottom of a tea pot. It's pure self-suggestion.
 
Is this a criminal trial, because that is the only time innocent until provwn guilty is in effect. No one should be nieve enough to beleive that it exists in the court of public opinion, guilt is entirely irrelevant there.

The presumption of innocence should apply to all walks of life. Unless you wanna go back to the 16th century.

Witch_Burning.jpg

I mean, what are we arguing about here, that we should presume innocence only when the threat is jail time but freely ruin someone's life in every other way based on an accusation alone? Mind you, this seems exactly where we are at.
 
How am i wrong?

Or rather, which part? The blackface? The cultural appropriation, or both?

In either case, wrong back at you. When you start to take issue with stuff like Black Pete, something from a completely different country that has nothing to do with black people at all (Black Pete is covered in soot, the paint has nothing to do with skin color whatsover) you know you are dealing with the same kind of mass psychosis as that hover hand absurdity.

People always describe wokeness as a kind of religion or cult, and by that token one could easily claim political correctness is a form of superstition now. People mistaking a garage rope for a "noose" is not too far from Mexican grandmas seeing the Virgin Mary at the bottom of a tea pot. It's pure self-suggestion.
The blackface. It should be obvious that making a blanket statement that blackface is not offensive is absurd because that is not up to one person to decide. Furthermore, its a basic rhetorical tactic to cite the origin of a thing and intentionally ignore the reality of how it now exists in contemporary culture (how its perceived by many or most people alive today) to advance an argument.

Basically, you are stirring up shit in this thread and you know it. It would help this thread stay on track if you didn't lob these aggressive assertions around and then act like its some woke liberal fascist conspirract when people call you on it. Take that kind of thing to reddit or 4chan or wherever else the angry internet men hang out.
 
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I'm not trying to stir up anything, i'm just expressing my opinion on the matter.

I do not think there is anything offensive about dressing up as a black person. In fact, one must point out that there's actually no such thing as "blackface" at all, because all those people who are getting punished retroactively for dressing up as black people were probably not even aware of such a thing minstrel shows ever having been a thing, and they certainly never heard of a term like "blackface", because it didn't exist then. How can someone be held up for blame when there was no intent to offend, and no consciousness that an offence was taking place? In fact, if you wanna talk about how something like this came into being, i'll tell you. The politically correct crowd pulled it out of thin air. As i said, there is no such thing as blackface, much like there's no such thing as cultural appropriation, and correct me if i'm wrong, but who decided to make the woke people rulers of our society? Where is it written that we have to bow down to their made up crimes and definitions? Who gave those people the right to go destroy the lives of regular people left and right for made up offences? I must have missed the meeting where we as a planet collectively decided to appoint any of those people as our masters and the sole definers of what is true or real.
 
Here's an example of how far down the rabbit hole this is getting:

https://www.ladbible.com/community/...ropriation-after-skin-colour-changed-20210811

As if the story of that girl who lost her restaurant because she was accused of "cultural appropriation" for daring to serve Mexican dishes wasn't bad enough, we are now into full mass hysteria territory. And for what? Some dogma those people pulled out of thin air to have an exscuse to retroactively punish people for heresy, because this is what this is, and it's even worse for at least in something like Christianity all the dogmas were decided in the first few centuries, but in this new woke religion new dogmas are invented with each passing day. If you are a Catholic you know you are not supposed to regect the Trinity but if you are woke you'll never know what new crime you will be accused of at some point in the future, since new rules get introduced all the time.
 
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I do not think there is anything offensive about dressing up as a black person. In fact, one must point out that there's actually no such thing as "blackface" at all,

I think there is 2 different definition of offensive being past over each other in that conversation.

Offensive (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dic...of 2),offensive weapons an offensive strategy)
: giving painful or unpleasant sensations
: causing displeasure or resentment
: causing someone to feel hurt, angry, or upset : rude or insulting


Something is offensive in most definition if a significant amount of people are made upset or insulted by it, not if one person do not find it to be.

Something can become offensive by the very fact that enough people say it is and convince themselves that it is (think about a religious based blasphemy, it will be offensive to believer even if it is all 100% made up).

Someone drawing Mohamed is not offensive in some absolute sense or to most people, but for a subset of the Muslim world it is, it cause them unpleasant sensations.

Morality based of gut discuss and offensive historically has quite the inconsistent record historical with most things terrible coming from it, sodomie was illegal until recently because it was offensive and disgusting to people for example.
Morality that do skip the part that explain the link between people actions and the hurt is really dangerous and is becoming really popular (say how does the quality of life of African American is diminished by Justin Bieber wearing dreads ?, the only reasoning I ever heard is in a complete contradiction).
 
The presumption of innocence should apply to all walks of life. Unless you wanna go back to the 16th century.

View attachment 384354

I mean, what are we arguing about here, that we should presume innocence only when the threat is jail time but freely ruin someone's life in every other way based on an accusation alone? Mind you, this seems exactly where we are at.
It does not and never has, the education system failing in action. Innocent until proven guilty applies to criminal charges brought forward by the state only. Wanting something to be so does not make something so.
 
It does not and never has, the education system failing in action. Innocent until proven guilty applies to criminal charges brought forward by the state only. Wanting something to be so does not make something so.

So you are completely on board with, for instance, schools and universities expelling students based purely on an accusation before any court has had a chance to look at the case.
 
So you are completely on board with, for instance, schools and universities expelling students based purely on an accusation before any court has had a chance to look at the case.
This is the way the system is, if a private institution is within their legal rights then they are within their legal rights. pretending it
is otherwise is just being an idiot and setting yourself up for failure. Know the system, know how it works, realize mob justice is
and always has been a thing. Learn how to work within it and thrive, you can find institutions that align with your values, or game the system, its never been easier with all the knowledge at our finger tips. welcome to life.

You don't have to like it, but it is reality.
 
This is the way the system is, if a private institution is within their legal rights then they are within their legal rights. pretending it
is otherwise is just being an idiot and setting yourself up for failure. Know the system, know how it works, realize mob justice is
and always has been a thing. Learn how to work within it and thrive, you can find institutions that align with your values, or game the system, its never been easier with all the knowledge at our finger tips. welcome to life.

You don't have to like it, but it is reality.
There is still a plaintiff-defendant dichotomy in civil matters. The former is bringing the accusations and has to prove it in court if a settlement is not reached, in front of an arbiter, judge, or jury. The presumption of innocence is still there in this segment of the justice system. Staff changes due to some internal controversy are the result of it coming out in public, and the court of public opinion will always find the accused guilty in the absence of evidence or an investigation because most people judge these types of things based on their emotions rather than logic. Yes, in the court of public opinion, presumption of innocence does not exist. But that just further cements the philosophy of assuming innocence in judicial matters, civil or criminal, to ensure real justice is served. And justice involves both protecting the innocent and punishing the guilty, despite people always forgetting the first part of the equation.
 
Someone drawing Mohamed is not offensive in some absolute sense or to most people, but for a subset of the Muslim world it is, it cause them unpleasant sensations.

I'll quote this to make my point: sensations have nothing to do with anything. They are irrelevant. It does not matter what makes one feel bad or good, and sensations cannot be the base for any form of sane social order, not the least because what makes one feel bad can be altered through suggestion (i will take a guess here and argue that no black person ever considered "blackface" to be bad until they were told they should feel bad about it).

When it comes to the prophet Muhammad, the issue is not that drawing depictions of him causes bad sensations to Muslims, the issue is that it is unlawful to them. This is not a question of feelings, it's an objective, concrete reality to anyone who follows this religion, as exact as their dietary rules, their fasting and prayer hours and so forth. And the injuction Muslims have against depicting the prophet goes beyond their founder because it is actually an injuction against pictorial art as a whole (this means that to a Muslim, western art as a whole is "offensive").

Now, it so happens that Muslims are also told to obey the laws of any country they reside in which they are not the ruling majority. This means that according to their own rules they do not have a cause to force anyone to respect their prophet or their laws even if it makes them "feel" bad. In fact, there's a whole slew of things in modern western societies that is bound to make them feel "bad". It is probably "offensive" in the eyes of a Muslim to see women in western countries walk around with barely any clothes on, more so since one of the reasons Islam does not have a tradition of monasticism is that their entire society is "monastic", a more forgiving kind of monasticism but one that applies to their whole society instead of a select few, and this goes also with the idea that every man under Islam is his own "priest". For them looking at women with barely any clothes on is probably just as scandalous as a Christian being presented with a group of nuns wearing short skirts and the like. Unless one is willing to change society to accomodate Muslim law and Muslim morality there is no way NOT to cause offence and "bad" feelings to most of them.

But then, what would happen if we were to reshape society to accomodate Muslim feelings and taboos? Islam is pretty adamant in condemning homosexual acts. Christianity too for that matter (it is a sin that cries unto heaven for vengeance according to the Gospels), and likewise for Judaism. Should we ban homosexuality to prevent Muslims to have bad "sensations", while then giving bad "sensations" to those who believe people should be free to love whom they wish?

Once you go the road of relying on subjective feelings to form some kind of social order you are going to quickly discover that makes a person happy gives bad sensations to others and vice versa.

It seems that western society has gone into the dangerous path of conflating the subjective with the objective. Hate crime laws are a direct example. If i kill a person, what difference does it make what was going on in my head while i was committing the act? The crime is the act of murder, not the reasons for the murder, whether it is racial hatred, or individual hatred, neither of which is provable in either case, something that applies also to this idea of "giving offence", for it is very possible that people will claim to find something offensive even when it is not only as an exscuse to bring harm on others.

A very pertinent case here is all those regulations against supposed "transphobia", where we are told that giving people bad "sensations" (for instance, by arguing that calling yourself a woman just because you have decided you wanted to be one is bat shit insane) is actually a form of violence given the high suicide rate found among the trans community. We are told that tans people commit suicide at such a staggering rate (what is it now, 50%?) because society is refusing to accept them for what they are (nobody has ever proven that this is the actual cause of their high suicide rate of course). We see here an evolution of the bad "sensations" argument where "offence" is now tantamount to actual, concrete violence, further sliding down to the path of conflating the subjective with the objective and paving the way to making it possible to more easily criminalize speech and even thought.

So now we live in a society where you can retroactively be punished for acts that are offensive now but were not so yesterday, or you can have your livelyhood shut down because some have decided to come up with a new way to be offended, and nobody seems to find this troublesome. And unlike with other religions, forgiveness is not possible in this cult of political correctness. In Christianity, you can confess your sins and if you are steadfast in your resolve to avoid committing those sinful acts you are forgiven and accepted by the fold. If you confess your sins before the altar of the woke religion, that just opens the way for even more abuse and chastizement. Confession is tatamount to admiting that one has not committed just this one sin, but that one has committed all the sins. It instantly makes you into a pariah and persona non grata. I don't understand how our society can go on like this. You can't control whether something you did is going to be considered offensive at some point in the future and you can't make amends if that ever happens. It's lunacy.
 
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This is the way the system is, if a private institution is within their legal rights then they are within their legal rights. pretending it
is otherwise is just being an idiot and setting yourself up for failure. Know the system, know how it works, realize mob justice is
and always has been a thing. Learn how to work within it and thrive, you can find institutions that align with your values, or game the system, its never been easier with all the knowledge at our finger tips. welcome to life.

You don't have to like it, but it is reality.

I see. So you were not condoning this state of affair, just explaining how things are. Fair enough then.
 
There is still a plaintiff-defendant dichotomy in civil matters. The former is bringing the accusations and has to prove it in court if a settlement is not reached, in front of an arbiter, judge, or jury. The presumption of innocence is still there in this segment of the justice system. Staff changes due to some internal controversy are the result of it coming out in public, and the court of public opinion will always find the accused guilty in the absence of evidence or an investigation because most people judge these types of things based on their emotions rather than logic. Yes, in the court of public opinion, presumption of innocence does not exist. But that just further cements the philosophy of assuming innocence in judicial matters, civil or criminal, to ensure real justice is served. And justice involves both protecting the innocent and punishing the guilty, despite people always forgetting the first part of the equation.
Plantiff has the majority of rights in civil court, not the defendant.
 
I'll quote this to make my point: sensations have nothing to do with anything. They are irrelevant. It does not matter what makes one feel bad or good,
Feel like you are passing over the message and having a different conversation here, I am giving an example of something that is offensive and completely made up (i.e. It does create strong emotion to some people, according by their actions) in the context saying that the fact people are offended by something is a bad start for creating moral value by giving the example that people were offended by sodomie not so long ago and decided to make illegal base on that feeling more than to avoid harm.

When it comes to the prophet Muhammad, the issue is not that drawing depictions of him causes bad sensations to Muslims, the issue is that it is unlawful to them.
Not from my understanding, from my understanding it is illegal (for a subset of the Muslim world a large portion of it had Mohammed frame in their house) for a Muslim to draw him but that a rule that do not apply to the infidel. That is pure feeling when a non Muslim does it.
The Quran does not explicitly or implicitly forbid images of Muhammad. The ahadith (supplemental teachings) present an ambiguous picture,[3][4] but there are a few that have explicitly prohibited Muslims from creating visual depictions of human figures
 
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So you are completely on board with, for instance, schools and universities expelling students based purely on an accusation before any court has had a chance to look at the case.
The reason schools do this is because of certain, more recent, laws that have been passed at the federal level. They're pretty much damned if they do, damned if they don't. If they do, and the accused is innocent, they have to make a giant payout in the eventual civil case against them. If they don't, and the accused was actually guilty, they'll again, have to make a major payout in the eventual civil case against them.
 
Granted that i brushed over your post, but i was itching to make those points.

Islam is not just the Quran and the hadith or the sunnah, it is also the commentary and interpretation, a lot of modern Muslims have forgotten this because they are either Wahabis or Salafi, puritanical sects of relatively recent origin, and it seems that in the west when people think of Islam they think of Wahabism and nothing else, because that is all that they see.

The Quran is actually a "closed" book and needs to be interpreted to be made sense of, and this is where the various "schools" of Islamic thought come from. Scholarly opinons are not of course on the same level as the primary sources but they are generally binding nontheless. Under Wahabism or Salafism, only the primary sources matter and and it is the "letter" of those primary sources that is binding, and no reading between the lines is allowed.

So knowing what can or cannot give offence to a Muslim hinges enitrely on what kind of Muslim we are talking about which makes trying to accomodate them an impossibility.

On the fallacy of neo-puritan movements like Salafism for those who are curious:



If you follow his argument, it shows that a Muslim's own personal judgement is completely irrelevant. Islam does not operate on personal whims, or at least should not in principle.
 
The reason schools do this is because of certain, more recent, laws that have been passed at the federal level. They're pretty much damned if they do, damned if they don't. If they do, and the accused is innocent, they have to make a giant payout in the eventual civil case against them. If they don't, and the accused was actually guilty, they'll again, have to make a major payout in the eventual civil case against them.
Or, they could refer the case to the state like they should in those kinds of matters. The Title IX memo is the worst thing to happen to college students in a long time. The accused literally has no rights in university kangaroo courts.
 
I think we're all venturing into SB territory. Might want to ratchet it back to Blizzard issues only my fellow [H]ers... :eek:

Obligatory "INB4SB"
 
I spent years around it at blizzard.
Lots of hearsay I heard makes sense in context of these accusations.

I saw plenty of game leaders get away with being assholes because of their status.

So that's not exactly what's being accused, but because of my experience I have no difficulty believing *some* of the accusations.

Wanted to chime in here with some secondhand experiences that I've heard. Disclaimer being that I don't know details and I have never worked at any game studio or Activision / Blizzard specifically.

I used to be active in the game jam scene and met a few developers who worked in some capacity professionally. Of those, I heard generally bad comments about the work environment (staff treated like shit, expendable, crunch , etc) regarding AAA publishers and specifically Activision, EA, and Bethesda. The staff being treated badly by management / treated as expendable could probably be construed as bullying - I suppose it depends on your definition. Also knew a guy who worked as a mid tier manager for playtesting and QA at Activision Blizzard. It did sound like a "toxic" environment or whatever you want to call it - the way he described, it was thankless, lots of turnover for the folks doing real work, crunch, groups/leaders controlling their own little fiefdoms within larger teams, a lot of "high school"-type of BS with poor oversight.

I say innocent until proven guilty in all things, but I have no problem believing most of these accusations could have happened given what I've heard. I haven't talked to the Activision Blizzard guy in years, but as I understand he left (or forced out / fired?) around 2016 after being involved with COD infinite and some sort of internal drama around not hitting whatever arbitrary sales figures it was supposed to.
 
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