Hacker News Reader

Comment by swivelmaster | Hacker News Reader

I had a long phone conversation recently with a game industry friend who had the misfortune of being involved in multiple games that became targets of abuse. I had asked him for advice about potentially making some youtube videos about game design, including f2p game design (which I have substantial expertise in).

He warned me that depending on the approach, even implying that I thought certain types of games or monetization weren't the worst thing since cancer could result in hate mail, doxxing, death threats to myself and my family, etc. He had been through that experience and wanted to warn me against it.

Despite being involved in some very popular f2p mobile games, the worst abuse I've had was someone sending me a DM on Reddit saying I should get cancer.

I don't really know what, if any, the solution here is. I've been able to ignore the worst of what I've taken because it's been pretty mild compared to what's possible. It makes me wonder - if I were the public face of a game that really, really pissed off the trolls, would I be able to emotionally handle the result? I have no idea and I don't want to find out.

View on HN

You just need to not give a fuck. It works for online interaction and it sure work for other parts of life. Care about what you can influence, don't about things you have no control over.

Someone cut in front of you in traffic: good for them. Someone insults you: heh, must be their own insecurities showing.

I think the only threshold for online interaction would be people threatening violence against you. If they do, file a police report then don't sweat it anymore.

Learn to not care about things and you'll endure a lot less stress. Then your life will feel a lot better.

This advice is entirely oblivious to how the creative process works, and why people create games, music, literature or art in the first place.

It's also somewhat irritating to me, because it reminds me of how I was constantly told the same thing in the context of being bullied as a child. Which in the end is really about it being easier for adults to make the one bullied kid conform, than the clique of kids who do the bullying. It's basically victim blaming in disguise.

Well, one view is to consider it victim blaming. Another view is to consider it the offer of a strategy to minimise the upset caused.

> the offer of a strategy to minimise the upset caused.

Ah yes, the "upset caused". Also known as "a complete lack of empathy for or insight into the situation by the person offering the advice, usually due to not really thinking about the problem at all".

At least, that's the only way I can imagine someone thinking to themselves "oh, this kid is being beaten up, his stuff is being destroyed or taken from him. The best strategy is clearly to be less upset about all that"

EDIT: But I guess you were talking about on-line trolling. Again, that advice shows a complete lack of understanding about the creative process. We are a social species, and a large part of why people do any kind of creative activity at all is wanting to share what you made.

Telling people to not give a shit about the response to your work is missing the point of why people do it to begin with.

Not the person you're replying to.

>At least, that's the only way I can imagine someone thinking to themselves "oh, this kid is being beaten up, his stuff is being destroyed or taken from him. The best strategy is clearly to be less upset about all that"

This is a straw man. No one has claimed anything like that at any point in this thread. You are exaggerating their point to make your own, and it lessens the impact of what you're trying to say.

>Telling people to not give a shit about the response to your work is missing the point of why people do it to begin with.

When I create things, I create them because there is something inside of me that needs to get out. I don't create it for other people. I create because there is no way for me to contain it otherwise. It feels very good when other people like what you create, but I wouldn't call it the reason I'm creating something.

If you constantly seek validation from others, you are going to be let down and discouraged, because people won't consistently provide that validation.

That is separate from whether or not people should ignore bullying. If you see bullying happening, you have a duty to put a stop to it, report it, or otherwise address it. If you're getting bullied, you shouldn't ignore it, but report it to whom you can. But the sad fact of this world is that you're unlikely to receive justice for it. The only thing you truly have control over is your own reaction. Exert your control.

You're on a website that functions by social interaction validated through votes of other people.

I think this sort of thinking is far too fatalistic and basically throws people who cannot deal with abuse and hate under the bus to boot.

The platforms hate and abuse are delivered on are currently under human control. The idea we have no control over whether or not we receive hate and abuse is simply not true. The solution, moderation, isn't even new and is a core feature of all polite online spaces. HN is a good example.

moderation will never stamp out but the tiniest of hate/ignorance that will come. the only thing that will work is removing the one thing the trolls feed on... your reaction.

I think calling these people trolls misses a significant point that they feel their grievances are genuine. See a bunch of the comments below defending abuse as a legitimate response. This is way more about cultural norms in terms of what is an acceptable way to communicate and moderation is supremely effective at establishing them.

Hate and abuse are definitely hard or impossible to eradicate completely but we can do a lot better than current social media platforms and places like the Steam forums are doing.

Moderation is essential because by publicly making an example of trolls, you can change the culture to prevent it. It's the same theory as patching up broken windows to ensure that worse things don't happen.

I feel internet shaming is the wrong answer as it's a different side of the same coin. As much as these people are trying to tear down and essentially bully people with words in a negative manner -- those who shame those people end up doing the same thing back, and often take it to extremes where punishment is vastly out of touch with the "crime".

By shining a light on these groups you attract others to it. This is why (I personally feel) the extreme right and extreme left exist today in politics. When you highlight (even to shame) a group it galvanizes them and brings other loonies to their cause.

I'm not talking about shaming people, I think that if you want to have a community that doesn't have abuse then you need the admins to remove or ban the people who post abuse and threats.

I'm exactly the same.

I just can't get myself worked up over most stuff, annoyingly though people around me end up getting annoyed at me becasue I'm not getting upset or annoyed. This can be very frustrating.

The way I see it is if something is happening and it's outside my control, why let it bother me. 1 of 2 things can happen.

1) I get upset and angry and my life, temporarily, gets worse. 2) I don't get upset or angry and my life doesn't change.

In both those cases I can't affect the root cause incident so the only thing that changes is my own happiness.

Why on earth would I then voluntarily reduce my own happiness / state of mind.

If someone flips me off, cuts me up in traffic, sends me an abusive message online etc Why should I care?

So when I have people around me getting annoyed because I'm not getting upset or annoyed by it, I feel like they just want to make sure I'm getting miserable with them. Which is a shitty thing to do to someone.

> You just need to not give a fuck

Given this is an emotional issue, I suspect this is easier said than done for many people. Whether it be physical pain or emotional pain, some people are more sensitive than others.

Apathy is not a healthy approach to life in general. Forcing yourself to feel "meh" about things you really did enjoy once is soul-crushing in itself.

Not giving a fuck isn't the same as apathy.

My personal example which I am working on is cycling. A lot of drivers in the city are arseholes and think I should get out of their way if they are behind me and honk their horn (despite the fact I am a pretty fast cyclist). I used to get annoyed, flip them a finger and start shouting at them and they would usually shout back. That just gets me angry as well and doesn't really benefit anyone.

These days if I get honked at, I try not to get angry. I slow down to indicate that I heard them honking and I am not going to get out of their way just because they think I should. End result is the driver gets angry while I have a chuckle to myself at them for it. That's "not giving a shit".

I don't think @arkh is suggesting apathy, quite the opposite in fact. Enjoy your art and don't give the naysayers a second thought.

This. Try to see the good parts of things.

Someone is cursing you about your work? First, that's just words on a screen so you can close it to not see it. Two, this person bought your production so hey! your bank account feels better. And last you got a vivid reaction out of someone: isn't creating games and art goal to make people feel something? Sometime it is negative but I think the best works are those who you either love or hate. Not the bland ones.

Seeing some good in most things is not an easy mindset to get to. But you can start by doing it as a joke until it can become natural. "Another rainy day" -> Temperature are 0°C and it's good for the plants so let's enjoy those facts. I totaled my car -> I have an excuse to ask a ride-share with some colleagues I fancy until I get a new one.

It is good advice unless you live in a country with a militarised police force. Then you spend time worrying if you or your family may get SWATed...

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/calgary-woman-...

Part of it might also be which specific game you worked on. The recent battlefront fracas came about because it was a first person shooter, a genre where people are unaccustomed to being psyops'd by the devs, and thus had a fresh and untapped supply of outrage.

Meanwhile looking at your portfolio, Star Wars™ Galaxy of Heroes looks from a distance like your average mobile gacha thing created only to tick another checkbox on the spreadsheet of tie-ins. Just reading the google play store description i end up thinking i would be surprised if its f2p parts weren't horribly abusive.

(Note i'm not saying they are, but what your marketing department did makes it stand out from its brethren in no particular way.)

Death threats and abuse are a non-starter, but working on making more addictive games-cum-casinos should probably come with polite disdain. Given that so much in gaming has become a money grab from kids and people wired to gamble is, a shame.

So... death threats? Doxxing? Abuse? No, never.

Respect for a good job well done? Also no.

Hunting “whales” for vast profits is a good business model, but so is selling tobacco or opening a casino. I don’t know that pandering to addictive personalities, the young, the inexperienced, and the impulsive is a very good use of anyone’s talents. Worse, it’s going to turn s generation off the medium once they realize how abusive it’s becoming.

Not all of the games involved were mtx-based. One was more like "you screwed up the IP I love, die!"

edit: Also, it is profoundly unhelpful to the discussion to say what you said, which is basically "Well, what did you expect, a pat on the back?"

We're talking here about abuse, not constructive criticism. Here's an analogy: Nobody expects an Oscar for working on Transformers 6, but personally subjecting them to online abuse for it is totally unacceptable. There's no need to come into the discussion and remind us that Transformers 6 is not likely to be a very good movie.

Yes, the bad behaviour is well distributed allover the company. You cant blame a single gear for the functionality provided by the human-meat-grinder 40000.

If you really feel the need, blame the dedicated person for blaming, who gets a fortune for doing the Jesus Christ story as CEO.

Assaulting single persons, might be the only way to squeeze a touch of responsibility from a modern company. Touching a nerve is okay, when it leads to a thoroughly rotten teeth - like the pseudo moral everyone in the software world displays in this endless resultless discussions.

Oh, btw, in the next thread somebody is calling for goverment action against addicting games- and all those "abuse is evil" posters, will take a firm libertarian stand there.

If you systematicall disempower people, until only building a howling medieval mob remains- congrats, you reaached your destination.

> We're talking here about abuse, not constructive criticism.

Some F2P is really good and improves the product. (Warframe) That's the exception however and most of it is in fact abusive. As such people upset about it don't expect constructive criticism to get anywhere and engage in behavior that amounts to, in their view, "eye for an eye".

What I said was that everything from abuse to rudeness is simply wrong, and I made that point unambiguously, twice. You are right that I think there should be consequences for abusive practices, but reasonable ones, like what I’m doing right now. Making people feel worthless, insulting them, threatening them... is evil.

As for the people who send death treats over pure design choices, I have nothing, but sympathy for you.

Edit: No excuse for abuse, and I agree with your point about shitty movies. It is worth pointing out however, that movies don’t generally attempt to become lengthy addictions which siphon potentially ruinous sums of money over time; there is generally no attempt at behavior modification for profit.

Got it. I appreciate your point, though I don't fully agree about your characterization of f2p games and/or the developers thereof.

I'm not sure why anyone is surprised about the addictive money grabbing nature of tech which is prevalent. This is a core fundament of the capitalist system. Practically everything is geared towards increasing money. How many people do you know who have an employee/customer health and happiness tracker app compared to a stock price tracker app installed on their phone right now?

As things move away from the real world and towards increased virtualization of everything, it's a lot easier for people to fall prey to "road rage" type of reactions - folks who are otherwise well-behaved and respectable turn into assholes behind the wheel.

Same with the virtual world.

It’s also a bunch of young people, who tend to assume that turning the rhetorical volume up to 11 does something more than inspire disgust. Chan “culture” has not helped. people with the most time to burn are asymmetrically advantaged in this, as are the enraged. Can any of us really compete in terms of obsessive devotion, with a 1-issue poster? An angry, lonely person, a mentally ill person, or a teen with attitude? They’ll burn more cycles screaming than anyone else can or will reasoning, and they’re happy to just be a nuisance, or be heard.

Then you have the hyperfans, who can finally stalk and abuse from an anonymous distance. They don’t need to even leave their hovels to do it, or look someone in the eye. The drunk, the drugged, and the stupid get the same force multiplier from the internet as everyone else, but they have the numbers and the free time.

> An angry, lonely person, a mentally ill person, or a teen with attitude? They’ll burn more cycles screaming than anyone else can or will reasoning, and they’re happy to just be a nuisance, or be heard.

Many years ago, a small country where I live was dominated online by a single mentally ill person. In our country, those day the internet was new and quite slow. This person, originally from our country, was living somewhere in USA or Canada, with full disability for their mental illness, and a very fast internet connection. And they spent the whole day browsing our websites (the dozen major websites we had back then), participating in almost every discussion that contained some of their favorite keywords. And because of the difference in free time available and speed of internet connection, most admins were completely helpless. This person could create a new account and post hundred comments faster than the admins could use their slow modems to ban the account; and the avalanche continued for 16 hours a day, every day.

Yes, insane people have an asymmetrical advantage at online debates, because they spend less time reading and thinking. (In real life, too, but there at least they cannot teleport from one place to another.)

We live in an age of outrage culture, what does anyone expect? The cultural norm nowadays is to get vocally outraged whenever anyone does anything that you even slightly dislike, of course this kind of abuse is the result, it doesn't happen just in the games industry, it happens in society at large too, about most social issues.

I think this is not even the case.

I think these people are arseholes IRL. I think they are just as abusive and prone to road rage type reactions.

I don't think people are reasonable and respectable and suddenly road rage when they jump in the car. They are arseholes all the time, they just can't hide it as well when they drive.

I think they are more visible online only because they just impact less people IRL.

> I think these people are arseholes IRL. I think they are just as abusive and prone to road rage type reactions.

Not sure about "just as abusive". The example abusive messages in that article if delivered in person, face to face, would be met with conflict and increased risk (i.e. physical or emotionally charged confrontation). These trolls are spineless and weak.

Virtual road rage is certainly a large part of this--I always use the analogy that if you have 1000 twitter followers, and they are wonderful people all the time but each one only says one nasty thing a year to you, if they all do it at the same week or whatever it's gonna be brutal.

That said, I think there is also a lot of justified anger.

In a world that is increasingly terrible and hostile in a lot of ways it's really important to have a safe place, a place to unwind and settle down, place where people can tune in and drop out. Video games are really great for this purpose.

But a lot of devs don't seem to recognize that this is an important purpose of their product, either going low-brow capitalist (say, EA or Zynga or Bethesda) or high-brow artiste (Phil Fish, Jonathon Blow) and alienating their playerbase by breaking games in order to create higher profits, by patching games endlessly in the name of "gameplay" (Darkest Dungeon is a great example of this, ditto a lot of Blizzard's stuff), or by taking very public stands against various sacred cows of their customers--that is when they're not actively saying nasty things about their customers. As a gamer, why wouldn't you voice your displeasure at the people who are screwing up your ability to calm down and relax?

Similarly, even on the art angle, a lot of publishers and devs make compromises to push a message or sell a product. Like, can you imagine the backlash at a Holy Bible 3.0: HD Edition 2018, with DLC psalms? Game devs and publishers do this all the time. Imagine you heard they were making Rent 2.0, but everybody was straight and monogamous and only had the flu and were upper-middle class. Even if it was done well, even if it was a good story, it wouldn't be Rent. That's even assuming the change was done expertly--in video games it's usually a studio or a publisher chasing some market demographic or "industry trend" causing that violation of the IP and seldom is it even done well! So, if you're a gamer, why be nice to people that are willingly violating an IP that you love?

Further, on the PR front, gamers have gotten used to being fed thinly veiled bullshit as the industry has "matured". The same flaccid attempts to gloss over bugs or mistakes, the same lame attempts to use identity to sell a game, the same boring controversies and plant articles used to increase air time...it's insulting. So, why have empathy for (some random indie dev) when the industry as a whole is not behaving in good faith? Why not treat every dev communication as a weakly-spun PR gambit? Why show any charity at all?

I agree that this is bad behavior, and I agree that drive-by virtual road rage accounts for a lot of it...but not all of it.

So, if you're a gamer, why be nice to people that are willingly violating an IP that you love?

Why? Because it is devoutly to be wished that you’re a human being with a brain, conscience, and at least a scrap of both empathy and perspective. If you’re so antisocial that you honestly believe that what you described merits abuse, threats, doxxing, etc... you shouldn’t be allowed online by your guardian.

Messing with your beloved IP is not cause to abuse people. An over-dependence on a given entertainment format to calm you is not their problem. Games are, and have been for a long dammed time, mass market entertainment. Mass market. That your particular gospel isn’t being played as constantly as you require it should be, is no one else’s problem, neither should your entitlement be their problem, nor is it license to be rude, cruel, or threatening to people you don’t even really know.

Besides, and this is the main point... your options are not the false dichotomy of “be nice” or “be abusive.” Try ignoring stuff you dislike, or expressing your concerns in constructive ways when it’s not hurting people. Try to remember that being a consumer of something doesn’t mean that anyone owes you more of the same. If your local decides to go vegan and alcohol free, that may suck for you, but they still didn’t owe you anything.

I’d be with you on one point: the endless lines from AAA publishers which amount to, “We released half of a broken game, haha, we already have your money and future updates will only be planned DLC and mometization...” but you’re using it to excuse inexcusable behavior.

I mean, they had the same choice--not to work on fucking up the IP. And they have the potential to create suffering and annoyance to hundreds of thousands of people, instead of just a few people receiving grumpiness on the net.

This is a dynamic that has always existed in art and performance.

And for what it's worth, I don't think the option is "be nice" or "hurl abuse"...there is a distribution of behaviors and I'm suggesting that the more negative ones have their own reasons.

>>I mean, they had the same choice--not to work on fucking up the IP.

This argument always strikes me as something said by a child or a person who never had a job and never had to feed their family ever in their life. I work as a C++ programmer in a games company - I really don't care what you think of the changes that I make, I have a Jira list of tasks to get through and have to pay my bills at the end of the month. If you want to send hate mail to someone, there's a PR email you can contact - normal programmers working 9 to 5 have zero say in design decisions that upset people, nor do they have the time to follow the community - we have PR people for that.

Fine, be angry. Even if the reason for anger was justified, the abuse isn't. Write a scathing blog post, rant on youtube, don't buy future products, organize a boycott. Fine. Death threats, calling people at all hours, swatting them, harassing their employer, egging people on to do these things. That's abuse, and nothing that should ever happen because in your opinion someone "fucked up [their own] ip".

If you feel that somebody "fucked up" a product, don't use that product. It's really that simple, and it can be applied to every aspect of your life, not just games.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com