Activision Blizzard employees walk out over harassment and ‘frat boy’ culture
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
FTA: "Activision Blizzard employees are also calling for an end to mandatory arbitration in employee contracts, which prevent workers from taking conflicts with their employer to court, policies to improve representation of women and marginalized groups, the publication of salary data, and an audit of the company by a diversity, equity and inclusion taskforce."
Are we OK with employees being treated like this? Are we willing to make concessions on our relationships with our employer under threat of losing our jobs (outsourcing is just one of the many ways a job can be taken away).
I’m of the thinking that companies should not be able to abuse the inherent power they hold as employers to deny some pretty basic rights like the ability to sue from individual employees.
As far as not being able to get a job goes, it sounds like your real complaint is that there aren't enough jobs. That will be true whether or not a workplace is unionized in most cases since the employer has a certain amount of work they need done by a certain number of people.
Maybe one or two, but not a large proportion of an aging workforce riding purely on the protection of the union
Unions had their day, now they are just slush funds and protections for bad people.
Actually teachers in those were those who had been accused of misconduct and then either they were awaiting arbitration, mostly because the state wasn't paying their agreed proportion of arbitration fees, or arbitration had cleared them and the state wasn't returning them to their jobs as agreed. Some may have been bad teachers but most were just people the admins had taken a dislike to. Blaming the unions for that is pure propaganda.
I don't think you really interpreted my statement fairly. Perhaps I should have chosen another word instead of aging, but I was thinking in the traditional factory sense where there is a correlation with age and performance doing manual labor. Age should not be the indicator, performance should.
At convention centers they inflate prices by passing rules that no one but a union worker can carry anything into the convention center. The monitor broke and your booth and you run to best buy to get a replacement. Sorry, find a unionized person to carry it in for you or GTFO. Oh, you want to plug in it in? Sorry, call a unionized electrician or be sued.
An aerospace it meant everyone's role was super strict and trying to do anything outside your role was against the rule. In software that would mean things like front end programmer not allowed to touch backend code. UI programmer not allowed to touch business logic code. Etc.... Maybe someone will argue that's a good thing but AFAICT it just slowed work to a crawl and made people uncooperative
Was it because of regulations (ie who's certified for maintenance on X airplane type) ?
Ironically I have never heard of anyone going to management stating that they wanted to be out of the agreement that was settled for the industry they were in, regardless of their actual job.
If the government came out with a monthly 10k usd handout, I'd call it shortsighted and dumb. Doesn't meant I'm not taking it regardless.
Unions I’ve worked in or am familiar with do care about seniority over merit as you mention. They also make it so new jobs need to go to internal candidates over external candidates. Furthermore, internal candidates are even provided retraining opportunities. Management needs to show there is no one in the organization capable of doing the job before opening it externally.
A union is political in it's very nature (and of course it's an organisation).
In certain cases such as entertainment, it might be desirable to maintain markets as a significant fraction of the industry, but we've seen how large concentrations of private money lead to companies taking "safe" and monoculture approaches to movies, games, etc.
We already have huge concentrations of media doing their own planning exclusively for their own benefit right now. The planning should be made democratic.
The workers will control their workplaces. The exact division of control of the industry will have to be negotiated politically and the way the rewards are shared between industry and the public generally will also be democratically decided. There are many proposals for how this might be done.
It's helpful to think about the division of labor between town, state, and federal levels. The company would form a new democratic level. It forms a political entity now, but not a democratic one.
The slogans are helpful because they elicit questions like yours.
1) Most people in this country don't vote (outside of a slim majority in presidential elections) for a large variety of reasons, but mostly because they know it doesn't change anything for them. The American system was designed as a system of baffles to insulate the elites from the rabble quite explicitly (indirect election of senators, 3/5 compromise, bicameral legislature with senate apportioned by territory instead of people, voting restricted to white male property owners (literally a vote by the elite only), etc), but these days it has developed into an effective democratic illusion in a path dependent fashion. So in other words, I don't think the country is split in this way, but the partisans of the two flavors of the single political party are highly polarized. Neither of them have any concern for workers, note the total lack of economic issues in their agendas and the tomfoolery around 15 $/hr minimum wage. More political participation would right the ship imo.
2) There are cases where votes are split fairly evenly on contentious issues. I'm not sure that private dictatorships are always better on these questions. Sometimes the mad king flip flops constantly, other times a hard line is taken against the will of half the people. It's something that has to be worked out politically and possibly with leadership. In some cases, I do think such things require constitutional remedies (for example, no one should be allowed to vote to re-institute slavery for example). For such close votes, I would shy away from saying the result is "the people's will", but an outcome of process. Votes are one method of measuring the will of the polity. Unfortunately, I don't think there's ever a way to be completely precise as it's possible even for people to change their minds and switch sides on an issue en mass!
One example of a vote I would be skeptical of: the way Uber rigged the wording of the recent proposal to recognize its employees as contractors to get out of a court ruling. They made it sound like voting yes was voting no. Votes are really effective ways to do democracy, but I don't think there's any method we can use that allows us to stop thinking critically about it.
Of course money itself is mostly an abstraction. It represents the value of human creation, and you don't need rich people to create value with and for other humans.
The question is not “what is the ultimate origin of the money”, but “by what mechanism does it come to be allocated to the project”.
I think some would answer “the funding for the project should be democratically allocated by the employees of the company, from previous company income”, which, I suppose is coherent, though I think some substantially overestimate how much of a benefit it would have.
And while I certainly support worker cooperatives as a company model, even that doesn't require funding for new initiatives to be "democratically allocated by employees of the company". There's still usually at least some form of hierarchy.
We really need to get over the worship of rich people in this country. Having more money than God doesn't mean they should be treated like gods. In fact, what it means, in almost every case, is that they exploited workers in some form or other to get their fortune. The only exceptions I know of are people like MacKenzie Scott, who got their billions from someone who exploited workers to get their fortune.
I didn’t think they were; I thought we were just talking about people who own (controlling shares in), or lead, companies, and their influence over the processes of the development of the games (both in terms of the working environment, and the content of the game).
Perhaps I read over a previous part of the thread too quickly?
I’m confused as to what the disagreement is about? It is in some way about “capitalists” and game development funding, but like, everyone understands that games aren’t funded by a single person paying a group of people to develop a particular game. What is the actual disagreement here?
____
Regarding the worship of the wealthy , that would, of course, be idolatry, and bad. I’m confident that I’m not doing that.
____ Regarding “exploited workers” : perhaps due to me being perhaps strongly biased, I don’t really, feel compelled by this phrase. It means very little to me. When people say “exploited workers”, as far as I can tell, all it means is “profited by employing people” + the speaker disapproves of that. The emotive language doesn’t compel me to agree with their disapproval.
Curious what definition of capitalist you are using here.
Three common meanings according to the Oxford dictionary are:
1. a person who invests capital in business enterprises.
2. an advocate of capitalism.
3. a very wealthy person.
You can advocate capitalism and also support behavioral standards and worker rights in the workplace. It's not anti-capitalist to disagree with your employer's policies or culture, standing up for you and your fellow workers' bottom line can be capitalistic in of itself.
If there's a market for services to help individuals assert their rights and fight for better conditions, then investing in this market is as fundamentally capitalistic as investing in a market that services the opposite.
As a capitalist, you could even invest in both these markets at the same time. Check out this index fund:
https://www.invesco.com/us/financial-products/mutual-funds/q...
There's Altria (cigarettes) and Anthem (health insurance). Tesla (EVs) and Exxon (gasoline/petroleum). Even Activision (corporation of topic) and Stryker (actually no idea what this company does, so assuming they fund and profit off worker strykes). The thing about capitalism is that it doesn't run from conflict or mobs or regulation, it profits off the needs and desires these things create.
EDIT: To elaborate, if you are in a bind, you have usually four places to turn. The employer, the state, your coworkers and other workers in a union, and the people generally (via the media, protests, etc). Your coworkers are likely to have similar interests to you and are strategically positioned to make demands by virtue of the fact they have their hands on the levers of production. Take your pick.
Speaking out against a company while not unionized means you'll have your coworkers sympathy, if nothing else. Do the same against a union in the US and you can forget having even that.
Closed shop, one-union-per-company is surely the worst of both worlds. You end up with two managerial classes that you have no power against.
For example, from https://www.wga.org/the-guild/about-us/guide-to-the-guild
"We are the Writers Guild of America West (WGAW), a labor union composed of the thousands of writers who write the content for television shows, movies, news programs, documentaries, animation, and Internet and mobile phones (new media) that keep audiences constantly entertained and informed. "
If you are a television producer hiring a writer, you don't go to the WGA. You just interview a bunch of writers, select the one you want, and offer them the job. Like you would any other job, really, except that if the writer is a member of the guild then the terms of employment must meet some certain standards, with rules about crediting and overtime, etc. But so long as you adhere to the guild's rules, it's like hiring any other independent contractor.
But if you're a ship captain wanting to offload cargo, you go to the longshoreman's union and as for N day workers. You don't pick who, and you don't negotiate rates other than specifying (and paying for) the desired experience level. You ask for N longshoremen, and you get N warm bodies and the bill.
To the point of this conversation, a guild makes more sense in a creative project where the skill and art of the worker matters to the end result. If you're producing a TV comedy, you really need to make sure you employ the correct writers. Likewise for game designers.
That being said, even if you don't accept that, there are unions (not guilds) for independent contractors in the creative fields for example in the UK the musicians' union and Equity (the actors' union). If you are hiring musicians or actors in the UK you will for sure be hiring the specific people you want and they will very likely be members of the union.
Your example about hiring union workers may be how it works in the US but is not the case in other countries - you would hire them just like any other independent contractor or employee.
Source: I have been a member of both creative and non-creative unions in my career. I've been in the musicians' union and my wife and many friends are members of the ISM (another union for musicians with more traction in the classical music world) and I have also been a member of a more conventional union (the GMB or "General Municipal and Boilermakers' union") believe it or not. In no case have I ever been hired on the basis of a process like you describe.
I take my 40h week, health insurance, vacations anywhere I feel like, paid overtime, over some magical wage in exchange for less benefits that exploit working class.
Anyone that feels it isn't their thing is free to make their own business, free of union agreements and see how they manage for themselves in the market.
In the United States this is not true. In many states once the union is established in an industry, it becomes illegal to operate a new business without the union.
We have bad union laws.
But also I didn't say union laws are bad. There are some specific industries/occupations in which unions are A Good Thing. What I said is that the laws we have around unions are really non-ideal and lead to worse outcomes for everybody.
I happen to see it in other way.
Then again, I surely wouldn't like to be on US during the McCarthy era.
If the issue you have with management is harassment primarily, is it possible to create a union only to resolve that issue? Many may not want to give up individual bargaining on pay or hours simply because they wanted collective bargaining to deal with workplace harassment culture. How can an individual on the fence about supporting a union have guarantees to prevent that scope creep when forming a union? Or is it an all or nothing proposition? I.e. the union must negotiate everything on your behalf or it can not exist.
I'm actually surprised this isn't "a thing". If a large percentage of a well known, profitable company doesn't agree with a direction it's taking... why doesn't a VC or private equity just help finance a new company and absorb those people into it? If the people have anything to do with the products they create, they should be able to compete with their former employer as relative equals, and possibly even with an advantage because their former employer has lost a significant amount of staff.
They could easily create large IPs and games if they so desired/needed, after all that's what they were hired to do in the first place
But we don't have that. We have copyrights and patents. Those with capital have a lot more freedom with ideas. Those without, don't.
If we abolish copyright and patent laws (https://www.reddit.com/r/ifa), then workers will have a lot more power.
And the talent at Blizzard has no lack of good ideas.
If anything, the folks who made the company what it was either were the people being protested or left 5-10 years ago, or both.
I don't have high hopes for Diablo 4, though I'll probably end up buying it anyway...
... Minecraft, on the other hand, was an adequate idea (and not even original to Notch) doggedly implemented over years of iteration.
An amazing idea but with no or a bad implementation is worthless to you.
Nearly all raw ideas are unworkable. It takes considerable engineering to turn it into a workable idea, before implementing it.
For example, the idea of running current through a wire to heat it up till it glows, and voila! You've invented the electric light!
No, you haven't. You'll need to determine:
1. wire size
2. wire composition
3. how much voltage to apply
4. how much current
5. how to keep the wire from melting and burning up
6. how to supply voltage and current
7. how to keep the filament for setting nearby things afire
8. what kind of fixture to put the wire in
9. how to manufacture it for a reasonable cost
10. how to manufacture it in quantity
and probably a number of other things, too.
The right person will take 10 others.
There were many other studios created by ex-ActivisionBlizzard employees but I think this had the most bad blood associated with it.
If your jurisdiction has different laws than California for non-compete, that's a red flag.
Doesn't matter if the work is performed in California.
At good schools you can generally enroll in one as an elective.
Frankly, is it coming to the point where we have to say it's too dangerous for men and women to work together? Dangerous for individuals and companies a like.
Aren't the protesters pretty much by definition protesting the most productive actual employees though? If whatever the protesters are saying about the ones being protested is even remotely true, then the people being protested must have been incredibly valuable to remain protected under such accusations - and the protesters themselves are the ones who are viewed as effectively expendable.
I am 36 years old, white male. I imagine alot of the employees there are within my age range give or take 5-10 years. For me it just makes sense. in the late 90s and early 2000s if you asked me, an obsessed computer gaming white guy nerd teen, what company I would want to work for, it would probably be Blizzard(I was more of an Everquest fan but still). It makes sense those people would want the jobs and there would be mostly those type of people in the spots. I don't understand how this is a bad thing. I consider computer gaming a part of my culture or subculture, and yes there are other people that get into it, lgbt, women, trans, but I feel like this stuff was specifically marketed to young men.
That's why they're censoring Hearthstone cards worldwide because it appeals to China.
That's why they punished a Pro gamer for voicing his support for Hong Kong in 2019, because it appeals to China [0].
That's why they're releasing a mobile-only Diablo!
And that's why the customers are saying "Blizzard isn't what it used to be". Because at no point does anyone still care about the quality of the product.
MMOs are quite difficult to make. There is a reason the most successful MMOs to date are quite.. old. FFXIV is the newest very successful MMO, but suffered greatly at initial release, which is it's own story. EQ, and WoW, both benefit from the 20+ years of development into their current architectures that don't need to be written today, just maintained. Adding something to these games now is building on top of a very established game which already has many features people want in a new game.
Most new MMO projects fail. In fact, the Amazon MMO project New World which was one of the game projects Amazon didn't cancel recently, has many former EQ developers. The MMO development world is small.
Aside from that, going off and starting your own game company, getting funding, building all the technology needed to run a game (payment, logins, account use, etc) is a lot of work and investment which these existing companies have built decades ago and maintain. It may also interest/surprise you to know that women generally do not get much VC funding (see https://hbr.org/2021/02/women-led-startups-received-just-2-3...), so I am not sure this idea works out that well in reality.
If all senior leadership has ~20 years of experience in the industry, it makes sense that it would be pretty representative of the graduating class of 20 years ago.
Walkouts are pointless. True Employee organization and collective bargaining is the only answer to holding execs accountable , whether it’s at Google, Activision, or anywhere else.
Certainly bad press. And I hope it has impact. But I'm not seeing direct lines to it.
https://twitter.com/JeffAHamilton/status/1419115702569472003
I was a "TVC" at Google several times. One of those times was during the walkout period. Even though I had no way of finding out about it until a lucky "right now in 3 minutes" time period, I participated.
Whilst the walkouts may not have changed much on corporate or the outsourced "side-corporates" [the contract companies], it did change myself.
For decades I've heard of strikes, read about walkouts ... stuff in history books ... documentaries on the History Channel back when the History Channel was the History Channel ...
Seeing it live, participating in it live and in person -- added new color to the understanding. The live speakers, the live news cameramen right there, the whole deal.
Consuming ourselves in intra-labor factionalism while the wealthy elites feed anti-union propaganda does everything to reduce our bargaining power and our feeling of love and respect for our fellow human beings. Because at the end of the day it's not how much melanin you have in your skin or how female you feel or what terms you're using at your workplace, it's your humanity and your labor that unites us.
Buddhism, which I often reference, makes much to do over the uselessness and continued suffering we bind ourselves to by the reification of concepts. We need to stop reifying those ideas which divide us and find the common in which to celebrate our closeness.
There is a stark difference between lifting up and listening to women (which I am strongly for) because they are our fellow human beings in labor not because their state of being will never be understood by their male counterparts, which is often the refrain of the new far left.
Class politics not identity politics.
I don't want to give away personal info on this account, but the issue was related to treatment of minorities. At this company I was in a management position in a technical role which put me above the vast majority of employees in both pay and autonomy.
I decided to do the walk out because I'm sure there were people who worked at this company who did not feel comfortable expressing their views publicly because they made just enough to get by and couldn't get a new job in two weeks if they wanted.
I want these people to see that there was someone in a management role that at least gives enough of a shit to visibly make their unhappiness with the decisions and actions of senior management known.
Maybe it's a meaningless gesture politically, it certainly didn't change anything at the company, but for me it was like lighting a candle and placing in with others in honor of someone who has passed. It won't change anything but it helps those who are struggling and grieving feel a bit less isolated. Its nothing to be proud of, it doesn't change the world, but for me it was better than sitting at my desk for a few hours completing ignoring a problem that didn't personally impact me.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
We have seen that the only way to get any sort of customer support out of big tech companies is making noise on social media. And it works when enough noise is made. This is the next level of that: making noise in publications with global reach. The management will be wise not to ignore it.
No one seeking change is targeting them as the audience. Though, in their own heads, they probably delude themselves into believing they are.
Did you respond to the wrong comment?
The only solution to that is to engage, and engage with the assumption that change is possible, for both of you. Otherwise you're just lecturing someone, and that's not engagement.
I said, anyone who would tune out The Guardian article as noise because they disagree with the topic is not the target audience of the walkout.
How much someone chooses to spend their personal energy or personal time “debating” contrarians just isn’t relevant to my comment…
You seem determined to change the subject away from who the walkout was for into this boring and repeatedly beat-to-death discussion, so, here’s where I stand: You can say they somehow have an obligation to spend their valuable time and valuable energies engaging with people who would tune it out as “just more SJW noise” or whatever, but I would personally argue, if they’re already tuning out an article because they disagree, rather than wasting time on them, there are thousands of ways to better use one’s time.
The second part of my argument would be, I understand that some of these people who would ignore it as noise have convinced themselves that everything has to do with them. But they should be asking themselves, “Why do I think this walkout was to convince me?” and “Why do I think they would spend their time and energy to do this walkout for me?” and “Why do I think my opinion is even relevant to this company where I don’t work and people I don’t even know?” and then, they if they’re honest with themselves, at least one of the conclusions they’ll come to is, “omg, im so vain that i believe these people i don’t know at a company i don’t work for should be seeking my approval…” which should lead themselves to ask the most important question of all…
But yeah, this topic of “you ought to spend your limited personal time and personal resources convincing contrarians” is boring af. we’ve read it in comment threads tens of thousands of times by now and with people who still can’t figure out how to break out of the elementary level loop they’ve gotten themselves stuck in.
So to sum it up, people who have tuned out the article as noise because they disagree are absolutely not the target audience. And if they find this basic fact troubling, they should reorient themselves to figure out why they would even imagine they are.
No, you said "There is almost nothing which would change the minds of the people who don’t already understand these as problems." That's far more expansive than a statement about the people that read the Guardian that don't agree ignoring it. It's one thing to say people may not trust one source or how it's presented, it's an entirely different thing to say they are unwilling to consider any source or argument. One is stating the people have a bias around a source and/or topic, the other is painting a large group of people themselves as entirely unreasonable, and to me it seemed your statement was conveying the latter.
If that's not your intent, then we can just chalk this up to some combination of poor expression and poor interpretation and call it a day.
Over time this leads to increased marginalization and concentration of the vary behavior that provoked the activist response in the first place.
The only thing that actually works is board level action and commitment to following through on the change. Boards can hold execs accountable.
> True Employee organization and collective bargaining is the only answer to holding execs accountable , whether it’s at Google, Activision, or anywhere else.
What do you imagine this path to "true employee organization" might look like, if it doesn't involve actions like these along the way?
We have to remember how many people still say “Did Occupy really change anything?” —- on its own? Of course not. However “The 99%” is absolutely a concept which every disconnected midwesterner now knows and understands what it means, in two small words. This is a concept which was not previously a dinner table conversation and Occupy flipped that on its head. And when we’re dealing with something that’s as complex and messy as superpowers and their economic systems, that is absolutely not something to hand-wave away and proclaim “it did nothing.”
None of these incredibly ingrained societal problems will be solved from one single instance of a walkout, and frankly, it would be more than a bit myopic to expect they would.
These are complex and messy issues and there isnt one single thing which will address any of them, it’s going to be a lot of single instances that add up to something over time–and I think most people understand this.
The reality of game dev life are often discussed online and at this stage if you consider the career you'd hear about it.
Am I missing something? Was this supposed to do literally anything to support it?
I’m genuinely puzzled. That’s like saying I stopped writing in my journal for the duration of women’s suffrage “in solidarity”.
Aren’t you supposed to do something people will notice?
I'd prefer they didn't actually stream either, but they make their living from Blizzard products in a more precarious way than the direct employees do.
No one is sitting on the edge of their chair waiting for their favorite streamer to TWEET something.
C'mon, we can do better than this.
That was my point. I doubt anyone cared that some streamers stopped tweeting.
To me they're somewhat akin to cigarette or vape companies or even Facebook... They're driving addiction and causing people to pour their lives or at least their time down the drain.
How widespread are these types of issues in other game companies?
Comparing Starcraft to Candy Crush may help elucidate how off you are with the vape/fb comparison.
The original RTS games (Warcraft 1-3, Starcraft 1) did not really contain these systems. But virtually everything else Blizzard has produced (including Starcraft 2) has grinding & collecting in it.
As mentioned, this spread to other genres, infusing Activision's flagship Call of Duty franchise with grinding & leveling. The mobile division, King, does all these things as a matter of course -- it's nearly 100% of the business and design models in mobile gaming.
To be fair, you can't blame Blizzard entirely for spreading these design choices. It was an industry wide shift. But they were one of the shining golden examples of its success, and they sure leaned into themselves.
Assuming gp was referring to these mechanics, there's a lively debate to be had about propensity to spur addictive behaviors.
Many would blame Activision. And not a few would say that Blizzard sold out. To me they seem to be mostly milking the cash cow, and they’re hardly alone in doing it.
I’m not sure who invented loot boxes, but that’s another (unmentioned) issue entirely.
I guess you could argue league systems are a pvp grind, but that's not quite the same as my original point. Competition naturally includes (relative) ranking.
The phases change based on the expansion, but the core gameplay loop has always been "grind to get better gear, so you have to access to harder content that drops even better gear". There's precious little to do on a character that is max level and has cleared the highest tier of raid (kudos to those who pull it off, they aren't easy).
The monetization thing is largely Activision, or at least the degree of it is. Iirc, Blizzard dipped their toes into that water first by offering pets that you could buy or were rewards for buying Overwatch, etc. Activision did crank that knob up to 11 though.
Likewise (and even moreso) Baldur's Gate 2 is a totally different subgenre of RPG than Diablo 2 (unless you're talking about Dark Alliance 2 on consoles).
Baldur's gate is a hybrid turn based DnD rules adaptation with multiple player characters and more of a focus on characterization and storytelling. Diablo 2 is a single player character, full real time, random loot, multiplayer focused action RPG.
There aren't really any contemporary games that were a "better version" of Diablo 2 because in improving what they did with Diablo 1 it popularized the subgenre and made way for later games. Later games that could be considered improvements to the formula are things like Titan Quest (great first playthrough experience, but less replay value) and Path of Exile (really feels like a true successor to Diablo 2, with it's endless replay value and deep build customization).
https://kotaku.com/inside-blizzard-developers-infamous-bill-...
You know, I’m not condoning or excusing anyone, but it might be time to stop drinking together as coworkers. You cannot come up with this kinda shit if your sober.
Keep the beer out the office, keep the parties an hour long at most. We can’t handle it, it’s obvious.
If you cant be friends with someone whithout the dopamine, then you might need some help.