The Story of Why I Left Riot Games

> At the end of that example, Brandon laughed and said, “I was about to say something.” He paused, and then went on to say, “No doesn’t necessarily mean no.”

Brandon _changed_ the context into something offensive and then made the joke. This was an attempt at rape joke. He even prepped the audience for it by laughing and saying, "I wasn't going to say this, but..."

Hearing "no doesn't necessarily mean no" as a play on "no means no" is not some insane unreasonable interpretation, and "no means no" has been pretty consistently used as an anti-rape slogan for ages.

And maybe that phrase has been used that way in sales for ages, but the commonly accepted language has changed over time and will continue to change in response to changes in culture.

Edit: literally the entire first page of google results for “no doesn’t mean no” are anti-rape articles. This is seems like a pretty black and white issue.

It's specifically a slogan about sexual assault.

So when you modify that statement to "No doesn't necessarily mean No" you're making a play on words associated specifically with a PSA slogan about rape.

It could be a casual coincidence I suppose, or you could add further context like in the examples you supplied, but on it's own there's really no other way to see it. Sure, while the underlying principle may hold true; be persistent, don't give up too easily, etc., there are plenty of different ways to convey that and specifically choosing this wording seems deliberate.

I suppose it would come down to whether the statement was delivered as a joke in an attempt to get laughs or simply some folks found it funny. Based on the story seems more like the former.

Either way seems like they eventually developed an approach to dealing with culture fit (or lack thereof):

https://www.businessinsider.com/riot-games-pays-employees-25...

As a sales slogan "no doesn't necessarily mean no" isn't a joke and certainly wouldn't be played for laughs. Clearly the context was different here.

I suspect there is a deeper issue that doesn't get talked about that is rooted in not only traditional gender roles, but, probably to some extent, gendered psychology. And I imagine it would be all kinds of drama to even try to describe it.

So I think it gets into some very sensitive territory that is essentially of the "unspeakable" variety, and that's why it is such a hot button.

But as someone whose read some negotiating books, etc, yes, you are correct that deals take work to broker and persistence is required in such things. But it also matters how you handle it. It matters a whole lot. And in sales you know they can say no and you need to work at getting a yes. A certain type of man doesn't really feel they need to genuinely respect a woman and they feel entitled to use rather ugly tactics to try to get what they want. People have very good reason to not want to give such men additional justification for their awful behavior.

Precisely why I abhor 'sales' folks. No really does mean no for some folks, and many people in sales cannot differentiate between the 'no means no' and 'no means meh, maybe?' groups. Here's a pointer: one group you will convert into mortal enemies (who can/will influence the other group), the other group you might make a sale.

If you leave, you have literally none of those downsides, you've still got a good career and you can go off to one of the many other companies that are just as successful without those downsides.

So to speak up you need to be incredibly principled AND you have to have some very deep stake in making THIS particular multinational corporation better. I think it makes perfect sense not to speak out for the vast majority of people.

These habits are ingrained into us by peer groups we often do not choose throughout high school, college, and past work environments. Even the most respectful and astute individuals will let their guard down under stressful, impaired, or distracted, situations.

Eh, I've been gaming since the 90's, and in my experience it's more or less the same. Honestly, with the proliferation of in-game voice and reporting tools it's probably gotten a bit better, esp. in regards to racist name calling.

It'd be like, "We're gonna smash the competition so hard they have PTSD." to room where 30% are Iraqi war vets likely insulting to some of them.

I'm a woman and I've done a fair bit of research on the topic. I don't think it helps to use this framing. When I talk about my opinions, I am often accused of being a rape apologist. Women often perceive me as the enemy. Many of them seem to want to preserve some special victim card just for women rather than acknowledge that lots of men are also sexually assaulted, though it typically is not legally defined as rape because in many jurisdictions the legal definition of rape does specify that it is something only done to a woman. Nonetheless, men who are sodomized against their will in prison will say they were raped. The word encapsulates something that no other word quite captures.

Second, joking about being slaughtered in the meeting probably in no way increases the risk of actual physical violence per se, much less murder, in an otherwise civilized environment. But letting ugly and actively hostile sexual remarks become the social norm can start a slippery slope that can help make things less safe when it comes to sexual boundaries per se.

Most sexual abuse doesn't begin with rape. In a worst case scenario, it culminates in rape.

It begins with myriad forms of disrespecting your boundaries and that disrespect absolutely can begin as verbal disrespect and then move on to unwanted touching, etc. Rapists whittle away at your expectations of respect and act like you are being ridiculous to react negatively to their behavior. This is done very intentionally and persistently.

People who stand idly by and do nothing as they watch things go down this slippery slope are complicit, whether they realize it or not. It can't happen if other people stand up and say "No, this is not okay as a social norm."

I used to be a lot more affectionate and expressive than I am. But I did a lot of research and, these days, I try hard to err on the side of treating other people with respect first and foremost. I don't always get it right, not by any stretch of the imagination. But I'm too aware of how this stuff works to not feel that it needs to be taken seriously.

You mentioned a "slavery analogy," which makes things interesting: I'm sure if you think hard enough you could come up with a slavery joke that, if uttered, would be obviously inappropriate.

Nothing you've said even gets off the ground until your counterexamples are analogous to the joke uttered.

Further, I'd wager rape and sexual assault occur much more commonly than murder for those working in white collar, professional contexts, and that it disproportionately affects women, who already have a bad hand dealt in tech.

* Well that sucks, but it was just a one off event.

* Oh you're a guy that's been raped, what are you some kind of pussy?

* Are you sure you're just not making rape claims for attention?

* Let's just probe you a bit more for evidence that we'll lock away and probably won't even use to help prosecute the criminal who did this to you.

Theft and murder also don't usually have undertones (or rather really overt tones) of homophobia and toxic masculinity.

The manner and context in which these jokes/hyperbole are delivered can be the difference between being topically hyperbolic and just outright revealing how ignorant of a person you are. To use your murder joke analogy, there's a difference between "You're gonna get slaughtered this game" versues "I'm gonna lynch you this round", to a presumably black competitor.

It's not the fact the action is being used in a joking, hyperbolic manner. It really is about the context and manner you deliver the joke. You can in that process play to darker aspects of our society's status quo. The author of the article gives explicit examples of this and pretty much spells it out.

That one or the other is being called out now, specifically, is a matter of political fashion. Sexualized language, racist language, those get airtime because there's groundwork there to carry those stories widely. In the past, it was religious oaths and the like that were transgressive. On the other hand, language around mental illness and disability, for example, has less of a support system now. You will easily get away with saying that an idea is "fucking retarded". I know I've said similar things many a time and I have some regrets about it.

And that's a thing that the culture negotiates one conversation at a time. It might not matter in any one instance, and if you look at it in more weaponized terms of "oh, I need to call out that guy for using a bad word" it gets embittered and negative really quickly, but any sensationalization ultimately hinders intended use of the term. When you go looking for strong language of this sort, you end up in a space where you're going to borrow the imagery and insert it in situations that are just flat out not the same, and make people think: "What? Is that normal? Should I play along?"

On an individual basis what's most important is just communicating clearly to make language and conversation pleasant and not going for "colorful" just because you can.

Regarding the slaughter analogy: it's not explicitly about murder, but killing. Slaughter doesn't apply only to humans, of course. Slaughter is typically associated with the killing of animals for food, after all. The difference between rape, killing, and stealing, en mi opinion, is society still grapples with killing and thievery, for certain edge cases. There's no such gray area for rape.

Stealing if you're starving isn't condoned, but people do have more sympathy if you have extenuating circumstances. Murder is wrong, of course, but killing people in self defense is understandable. Killing animals for sustenance is okay. We need to eat or we'll die. Killing animals for pleasure is also okay. I could cut out steaks/Popeyes/breakfast sausages from my diet, but I've calculated the cost of a dead cow/chicken/pig is worth a nice meal.

There's no equivalent case in society where people find it defensible to rape.

So yes, murder/theft/violence are perceived as indiscriminate are thus less severe compared to rape/racist/religious jokes.

The problem wasn't using rape in a verb like that sentence, definitely not as a one-off. It was the fact that everything was being reduced to rape analogies. And it was culminated by a comment that very much crossed the line, and was very much meant to cross that line.

There is a comment I saw quite a long time ago which was to the effect that the use of swearing to convey emotional intensity is a sign of immaturity, not maturity.

You can't imagine seeing massive pushback to a Silicon Valley type deciding to make a tone deaf, poorly timed "slaughter" analogy in the U.S. in 2018?

a) "Brandon, imagine that I f* your wife..."

b) "Brandon, imagine if I cut off your arms and legs one at a time..."

c) "Brandon, imagine if you shot yourself in the back of the head... with a shotgun... twice... and declared it suicide..."

d) "Brandon, imagine if I fed you to the pigs, and they never found your body..."

e) "Brandon, imagine if I tortured you to death..."

f) "Brandon, imagine if the Germans cut your d* off..."

I just don't really get their "sense of humor". Why is (a) funny? It's like when somebody says "that's what she said", it's just not very funny, but I can imagine they say that there.

I've actually never heard of Riot Games before this article, but I don't think I would ever want to work there. Seems like a waste of time.

I used to work for a company that had HQ in California and offices down in Mexico. The head of HR was horrified when she visited the offices in Mexico and saw the interaction between colleagues... of particular interesting to her was that people were hugging each other!. She instructed our Country Manager to ask us not to hug each other. Of course everybody laughed when this was mentioned during an internal office meeting.

It is the same problem as with the "Puto" chant of Mexicans during soccer games. Sure, literaly it is a homophogic connocation, but in practice it is used just to show animosity to the goalkeeper. It does not mean that 5000 people believe the male goalkeeper preffers to have sexual relationships with other men... they don't care.

https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/9aslos/the...

There are techniques to do it less confrontationally, as suggested by the poster elsethread who urged giving people the "opportunity for personal growth". I'd argue that the author of the article did an admirable job of handling things, under extreme duress -- even though he was not ultimately successful.

There's also a place for in-your-face obnoxious confrontation (e.g. ACT-UP), civil disobedience (breaking the law when the law is unjust), and even violence (American Revolution). None of those are the easy path.

That's not what the article says at all. It says that 25% of the staff fired in the year prior to the experiment would have been given the "toxic" label had they been subject to the experiment rather than fired for whatever reason. Most of the employees labeled "toxic" were, as you might expect, younger and junior, with less experience in "the working world". The article suggests nothing about some huge portion of Riot's "OG" staff being fired by this policy.

> Riot looked at the preceding 12 months of gameplay of every employee and discovered there was a correlation between in-game and in-Riot toxicity. They determined that 25% of employees who had been let go in the previous year were players with unusually high in-game toxicity

It sounds more like the wanted to reduce the turn-over of their hiring process by pre-screening candidates for behavior, rather than dealing with a systemic problem in their organization.

It could be that the results of the re:work article were glossing over unaddressed toxic behavior (i.e. crude language) but it could also be that they were targeting different kinds of toxic behavior.

Now, I wouldn't use the kind of language described by the OP, nor do I think I would feel especially comfortable working in an environment that did. However, I can conceive of other kinds of behavior (with regard to playing the game) that they might have been looking for, including:

* being a "lone wolf" and generally not cooperating with teammates

* persistently blaming others for one's own failings

* taking undue credit for successes

* rage quiting, or otherwise being a sore loser

* trolling others rather than actually playing the game

EDIT: fix formatting

[ Riot Games have 2500 employees, most in the same place (per https://www.inc.com/magazine/201612/burt-helm-lindsay-blakel...) which makes 160 people with hiring privileges seem reasonable. ]

At least they won't ban headphones.

It's ultimately the people in power at Riot Games who have the responsibility to change.

I hate this trend. I don't have to agree with people to understand them from their own frame of reference. But it often makes me feel like an outsider to do something as simple as disagree with my southern relatives on political points without assuming conspiracy theories about their motivations and hating the core of their essence over it.

Here's a less charged example: The NY Times released a video about the late bodybuilder and internet personality Zyzz yesterday. He was simultaneously inspiring and a downright terrible role model. The vast majority of people that like him know that and easily separate the whey from the chaff (positivity = good, steroids = dumb). There can be a lot of light-heartness, sarcasm and trolling on fitness parts of the internet. It was all taken at face value, stapled to existing media narratives, and shoved in front of a huge audience. I feel like, at some point, most people trying to share an understanding of others online are thick, not really trying, or actively malicious. It was a pretty depressing video (especially because the angle of the piece was to pick apart kids in their teens/early twenties trying to figure out life, that made the mistake of doing so online).

As opposed to the brave people who dynamically and forcefully sit quietly by as asshats bake offensive rape jokes into company culture?

How can someone who is against being too sensitive argue against criticism, anyway? You should be like, “Fuck Yeah, bring it on!” Instead we get this sniveling whining.