1507: Why I Went Back, and The Fear

I was going to write about something else today, but after Mr Russ Pitts kindly linked to a piece I wrote this time last year in an excellent article regarding online abuse and trolling, I felt I should probably elaborate on some things that have happened since then.

Firstly, despite what I said in that piece, it transpires that I did eventually go back to Twitter. Why? Because, to be frank, I was lonely; I have a lot of friends on that social network, and it was difficult to stay in touch with them via other means. It’s also a particularly convenient means of reaching out to people for my current profession.

So I went back. However, I did so under a new username and a new email address — and being much more mindful of what I shared in my 140-character bio.

This is in itself kind of silly, really; I have to effectively “silence” an aspect of my personality based on my previous experience, and cannot be fully open about the things I enjoy or love, because it might attract organised bile and vitriol not just towards me, but towards people close to me, too. Thankfully, on the few occasions I have happened to mention ponies recently, things have passed without incident — I suspect the charmers at the “GNAA” have moved on to new victims by now.

Thinking of all this brings up an important consideration that I don’t believe a lot of Internet commenters stop to think about before spraying vitriol over an article they disagree with: the fact that the words you read on the Internet are, for the most part, written by an actual person with a brain, a heart, a soul and, you know, feelings. People disagreeing over various things is a fact of life — the world would be a boring place if everyone felt the same way about everything, as The Lego Movie suggested in a somewhat hamfisted way — but it’s the way you go about those disagreements that is important to consider, because arguing your case in the wrong way — or wilfully misreading or misunderstanding something someone has said — can have a severe impact on their mental health.

I’ve been fairly open on this blog about my own self-esteem issues and occasional feelings of “imposter syndrome” — the feeling that one day, you might be “found out” and have everything taken away from you. I consider myself hugely lucky to have the job I have, working alongside people I have respected enormously for many years — since childhood in at least one case. There are days when I feel like I’m even quite good at what I do — but there are also days when I seriously consider throwing in the towel and going to do something “invisible” with the rest of the drones in the daily workforce.

The difference between those two types of day can often be just a single comment. Just one, regardless of how many otherwise positive or supportive comments you might have that day — one single, unpleasant, negative or abusive comment can completely ruin the day of someone like me.

I’m not saying all games journalists are like me — though from some conversation during the establishment of TakeThis.org, which Russ mentioned in his post, mental health issues of various descriptions are alarmingly widespread in our profession — but it’s surely just basic human decency to not, in effect, walk up to someone and start hurling abuse at them. And yet it happens. And not just from inconsiderate gamers angry about the score you gave Titanfall, either; sometimes even people who claim to be fighting for worthy causes can be needlessly aggressive, confrontational or even abusive, too. It’s a plague across the whole Internet.

This leads to what I call The Fear, which in turn leads to what Russ talks about in his post: the assumption that “do not engage” is the only way to deal with bullying, abuse or even just plain unreasonable comments. There are days when I write things and I’m genuinely afraid to look at the comment section — it’s an irrational fear, I know, but it’s what this age of anonymous abuse has wrought.

And what a ridiculous situation that is, when you think about it. People who write for a living — many of whom are considerably more talented than I am — are subject to The Fear on a daily basis. You never can tell what it is that’s going to attract the next batch of abuse, or death threats, or defamation, or simple spitefulness. It’s a horrible feeling.

And yet we still stick around, for the most part. Why? Because even amid all this, we love what we do, and we love engaging with those people who like to have a reasonable discussion about things without necessarily agreeing on everything — those people who, if we’re honest, make up the majority of our feedback. Sometimes we even become friends with those people.

But as I say, it only takes one nasty comment to undo all the good those people do for us. Just one.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could live in a world where we could just love what we do without having to worry about The Fear ever again?

One day, perhaps. But there’s a long road ahead before we get there.

1158: Forking One’s Dongle

Some of you may have been following this recent unfolding story via the social Web and other avenues, but I thought I’d mention it here for those who haven’t seen it. I am talking about the recent incident at PyCon, a conference for Python developers all over the world.

There’s a comprehensive rundown of what happened over at VentureBeat (and follow-up here), but in case you can’t be bothered to read all those difficult words, here are the pertinent points:

“Evangelist” is an actual job title these days outside of the religious community. Sweet Jesus. No pun intended.
Adria Richards, a “developer evangelist” for a company called SendGrid that has something to do with email (I don’t really understand it, to be perfectly honest, but that’s not massively important) “called out” two male developers during a keynote session at PyCon for making allegedly “sexual” jokes about “forking repos” and “big dongles”. She did this by taking a photograph of them and then posting it to Twitter.
“Forking a repo” apparently refers to taking a piece of source code and developing it into a new piece of software not, you know, fucking it, despite the fact “I’d like to fork that” is a somewhat innuendo-laden phrase, particularly if you say it like a Cockney while rubbing your thighs, which reports don’t suggest these two gentlemen did.
“Dongle”, a piece of hardware that allows a particular function to happen, is an indisputably funny word because it has the word “Dong” in it. “Dongle” is also ripe for innuendo because it has the word “Dong” in it.
The inevitable Twitter shitstorm kicked off as a result of Richards’ tweet.
Richards started receiving rape and death threats but continued to feed the trolls.
One of the developers in the photograph was fired after the incident.
One of the developers (I’m not sure if it’s the same one who was fired offhand) apologised to Richards.
SendGrid suffered a DDOS attack following the incident.
SendGrid fired Richards today, explaining that the company supported her right to speak out against content she found objectionable, but not in the very public, provocative manner in which she did so.
???
Profi– wait, no, that’s something else.

Now, I’ve said a number of times on here that I recognise and accept that women in the tech industry generally — not just the video games sector — are in a difficult position, having to compete against something of a “boys’ club” mentality. And these women should speak out when something inappropriate is said or done to them.

This incident, though? I could tell yesterday when it all kicked off that it was going to be a real mess. The big issue we have here is that the things the male developers said weren’t really sexist comments. They weren’t directed at a woman, they clearly weren’t maliciously intended and for all we know, they really were talking about literally wanting to fork the repo under discussion rather than making the rather childish joke it seems they were making. (And come on. When your profession requires you to talk about “dongles” with a straight face, even the most sour-faced git has to crack a smile every so often.)

There’s also the issue of Richards and whether or not she invaded their privacy. The comments were made between the two men as a “private” joke — or as private as a joke can be in a crowded conference hall, anyway. Richards, the argument goes, eavesdropped on their conversation then shared details of it to the social Web when what she should have actually done was spoken to the two men herself, told them that the things they were saying made her uncomfortable, given them the opportunity to apologise if they wanted to, and that should have been that.

The flip side to the issue, of course, is that by making innuendo-laden jokes at a tech conference like this, these gents could be seen to be perpetuating the “boys’ club” mentality — even if the comments weren’t directly addressed to a woman. But in response to that I would again point out that at worst they were indulging in a childish, harmless pun that even a primary school kid would shake their head at, and at best they were simply using programmer slang with absolutely no intended sexual connotations whatsoever. Besides, I know plenty of women who are a dab hand at the old innuendo game themselves. And even Richards herself was caught making jokes about stuffing socks down someone’s pants for when the TSA felt them up at the airport.

In short, the whole thing ended up being rather surreal, and no-one really came out of it a winner. Richards came out of it looking like one of the stereotypical feminists that those ridiculous “men’s rights” groups get up in arms about, getting offended at something that really wasn’t worth getting offended over. The developers who made the comments have had their names and faces dragged through the mud. And in the meantime, two people have lost their jobs and at least one of them is suffering a considerable amount of bullying and abuse as a result of this whole situation.

Ultimately, Richards’ “speaking out” against the two developers’ behaviour has probably done more harm than good, not least because the manner in which she did it cost her her own job and attracted the wrath of the very worst the Internet has to offer. I sympathise with her from that perspective, having suffered cyberbullying on a far smaller scale than this incident — but I also think she was a complete pillock for inciting this whole shitstorm in the first place. To reiterate: that doesn’t justify the atrocious behaviour and abuse that has been directed her way, but at the same time, she’s not at all blameless in this matter.

The social Web is a powerful tool and can be a force for good. But it can also destroy lives. Think about that before you do or say anything stupid.

1125: Low Ebb

After the events of the last few days, which I won’t go into right now, I feel compelled to write a few words about bullying in general. I’ve already written a considerable number of words on the time I suffered workplace bullying towards the end of my time working at an Apple Store (check it out here) but I wanted to talk a little more about the subject in general.

The word “bullying” is an incredibly loaded one that brings to mind images of schoolkids taking the piss out of each other for the most ridiculous reasons. When I was a young child at primary school, it was my ears. They stuck out and looked quite large, so naturally I was picked on and ridiculed for that — not just occasionally, but pretty much daily. The experience left me with mental scars that are yet to heal, and which manifest themselves in my cripplingly low sense of self-esteem.

But bullying isn’t just something that children suffer from. Adults can suffer bullying, too, in a variety of forms. It could be workplace bullying such as that described in my previous post, where those in a position of “power” or “authority” use their influence to negative, unfair ends; it could be one group of people taking an irrational dislike to another group and expressing that dislike through verbal or physical abuse; it could be organised campaigns of hatred using the Internet.

The latter is an option that didn’t exist when I was a youngster. The Internet wasn’t a widespread thing until I was well into my teenage years, and social media certainly was nowhere to be seen. As such, any instances of bullying tended to confine themselves to the “real world” where they could normally be dealt with relatively easily, since there was usually an identifiable perpetrator to pin the blame on. It wasn’t always easy for the victim to come forward and report the perpetrator, of course, for fear of reprisals — that “knowing them in real life” thing worked both ways — but if they could muster up the courage to do so, then the situation could often be dealt with.

With online bullying, though, it’s a much more difficult proposition. There isn’t always a visible perpetrator, because they often choose to hide behind a veil of anonymity. Some particularly arrogant online bullies do so under their real name because they’ve also taken steps to ensure that they will never get caught, and herein lies part of the problem: the very nature of online crime makes it extremely difficult to police, meaning that more often than not the groups responsible for making some people feel really, really shitty go completely unpunished and thus receive the message loud and clear that what they are doing is Okay.

The worst thing about bullying in all its forms is the degree of self-doubt it can instill in its victim. Am I worthless? they’ll think. Do I deserve this? Are those things they’re saying actually true? Do people really think that about me? Is that how other people see me? These are, of course, all things that I’ve found myself thinking at various points in my life.

It’s useless and irrational to think that way, of course, but sadly, often the sort of people who are affected the worst by the actions of bullies are those who, like me, turn irrational when they have to deal with a difficult situation like this. Because it’s not easy to stay rational in the face of totally irrational, unprovoked hatred, either, for in many cases these instances of bullying are born from little more than boredom rather than feeling particularly strongly about the person or group in question. It becomes a sport for the bullies, more about the chase and the observation of the victim’s behaviour than specifically trying to hurt a person. This is particularly apparent when it comes to online bullying, where it’s very easy to conveniently forget that the target of your vitriol is actually a real person with real feelings, and that any hurtful things you send off into the ether after you click that “Send” button may have a very real impact on that person’s emotional, mental and, in some cases, physical wellbeing.

There’s no easy solution, either. And that’s sad. What’s even more sad is the fact that we seem to have got to a stage as a society where we just accept that this sort of thing happens, and we don’t do anything about it. I don’t have any suggestions or solutions, either, mind you, but surely by the year 2013 you’d think humanity might have gotten over irrational hatred by now.

But apparently not.

(Sorry for the lack of comic today. I’m emotionally exhausted and there’s no real way I can make all this shit funny.)

#oneaday Day 863: Trash-Talkin’

It’s not often I feel able to say this and mean it, but there’s a piece over on Kotaku right now that is an excellent read. Go check it out, then come back to me.

I can’t comment on being a rape survivor or anything like that, but I think that article sums up why I feel deeply uncomfortable with the idea of playing online with strangers in competitive games. I hate abuse, particularly pointless, rage-filled, deliberately offensive abuse designed to provoke an intensely emotional reaction out of the victim — and competitive online gaming seems to pride itself on this so-called “trash talking”.

In my own case in the past (and not in games, in the “real world”) abuse I have received has been in the form of hurtful comments about my appearance and my weight. I can’t begin to fathom what must have gone through the minds of the bullies in question as they said those words that lashed at me like a cat o’ nine tails, but they hurt. They perhaps weren’t intended to hurt quite as much as they did — “I was only having a laugh” is seen as a valid defence by many these days — but the fact is that they utterly ruined my day when they burst into my ears, regardless of intention.

If I feel that shitty after some stranger makes some low jab at my appearance, I can only imagine how awful it must feel to be a rape survivor and hear how freely the word “rape” is bandied about to mean “beat” or “defeated”. I feel uncomfortable using the word, given that I know at least a couple of survivors (to my knowledge), so picturing how it must feel to have such an awful thing trivialised by, say, Gears of War players is disturbing, to say the least. Like the behaviour of the bullies I described above, the intention may not necessarily have been to offend or upset, but there are plenty of people for whom such comments could completely ruin an otherwise fun experience — and, really, let’s face it, there’s no need for it, is there?

Lest you think me some sort of prude, I will point out at this juncture that I’m certainly not above light-hearted insults with my friends, which often skate into sexist, racist, homophobic and other generally offensive territory. But that’s something that we do among ourselves in private — we’ve set the boundaries as to what is “acceptable” in our group, we stick to it and, crucially, we don’t do it in public where anyone might misinterpret our words as genuine sexism, racism, homophobia or any other form of misanthropy. Not one of us would even contemplate the prospect of telling a complete stranger that they’d “raped” them — or indeed hurl any other sort of abuse at them, whether or not there was social “context” for such behaviour.

An example springs readily to mind. I was playing the then-new Dungeons and Dragons Online MMORPG, and I was doing my first run through one of the game’s cooperative dungeons with a “pick-up group” of random players. All had been going well until we got to the end and there was an unnecessarily difficult platforming section. The platforming controls in D&D Online were not very good, to say the least, so it took me a good few minutes to get through the bit that the other (evidently more experienced) players had passed with ease. I apologised and made light of it, hoping that they’d do the same. Instead, I was confronted with a torrent of abuse through the private chat channels. I turned the game off at that point and never played it again.

The unnecessary, unprovoked wrath of a complete stranger had ruined the game for me. Whether or not they had intended to upset me that much was irrelevant. It had happened. I grant that I am the sort of person who is very easily upset even by heated arguments, debates and disagreements, let alone abusive words, but being sensitive about such things shouldn’t preclude you from taking part in certain activities. Something like an online computer or console game — regardless of whether it’s cooperative or competitive — should bring people together, not leave them feeling marginalised, or that their own anxieties, issues and mental scars are somehow trivial. There’s no excuse for it, and it’s something which gaming culture really needs to clean up if we want our hobby to be inclusive to all.

Therein lies part of the problem, I think, though; some people don’t want that inclusiveness. Some people want to feel powerful, to be the top of that little clique, to feel like they have achieved something important and are therefore “better” than others. And they go about that by lashing out at the weak spots, triggers and hot buttons of others. Anything goes in the quest to make them feel like The Big Man. (Or Woman. But let’s face it, it’s significantly more likely to be a male person.)

It feels like such a futile question at times, but why can’t everyone just, you know, get along?