A Challenge

One of the things this lively debate crystallized for me is how hard it must be for people who have never questioned their sexuality to really grok the concept of "the closet".

What would it be like for a straight person to try to spend a day, or maybe a weekend, "in the closet"? Play the pronoun game! Avoid making appreciative remarks about people of your preferred gender! Avoid all lingering glances! When out in public with your partner, avoid any hint of affection! (Well, warn your partner first.) Try desperately to avoid macho/femme mannerisms! Doesn't that sound like fun?

I realized I liked girls "that way" when I was 13 or 14, so I got to go through most of adolescence trying very, very hard not to give myself away. The high school I went to was not an environment that was or is particularly gay-friendly, although lately the school itself does seem to be making a substantial effort. But in my day, you just... didn't come out. The one boy who did got himself emancipated and moved to the city because not even his parents supported him, and the one effort to set up a support group led to harassment and threats from whatever male sports team was active that season. I was on a sports team myself and... there was just no way.

That experience has left me with a couple of interesting scars. The most obvious one is that I am a complete disaster at any sort of casual physical affection. I spent so long worrying that if I touched any woman that she'd believe (or realize) that I was attracted to her that now I am almost totally incapable of initiating contact, and I'm almost as bad at accepting it without twitching and flinching and generally looking like a freak. Which annoys me, because I'd love to be one of those indiscriminately affectionate people, or at least be able to give people hugs without it being a Big Deal.

I wouldn't wish that aspect of my high school experience on anyone, but as a controlled experiment, I'd love to see some people trying to get a sense of it - consciously noting what they usually do without thinking that they'd have to change or stop doing altogether. Even without the threat of substantial social consequences for failure, it might give some folks a perspective they wouldn't find otherwise.

I Haven't Mentioned the Game's Name For a Reason

Kill Ten Rats has the right idea. One of the more frustrating things about situations like this is that there's just not much any individual can do about it. I was tickled to see myself quoted in various places, and I'm glad I brought the issue to the attention of various folks, but that's not going to hit EA very hard. It's not like I was going to buy the game anyway (I don't have the right console, or a console at all, for that matter.) I also know too much about EA's internal structure to think that boycotting, say, The Sims is going to have any useful impact - the two products are so widely separated that no one's going to be able to correlate that kind of data. A media blackout, on the other hand - that, I like.

I will have to remember this particular product, though - I will be very curious to see what the sales are, and if this controversy sparks again around launch. I suspect it will - the internet has a very long memory.

Non-Apologies and Other Links

Apologies like this are worth less than nothing, very literally. It annoys me more to see that the people behind it still can't see the problem even when it's explicitly pointed out to them than it would if they just went on their merry way.

A real live booth babe weighs in. She uses more caps than I did, and I applaud her for it.

I love Lum's blog, and I'm always grateful for the traffic, but his commenters are... not good with topics like this.

An unemotional social media perspective on the contest and the resulting stink. I usually prefer to write pieces like that, but every now and then it's more fun to bellow at the stars.

A really good link roundup and perhaps the most succinct summary of the issue at hand: "This contest ENCOURAGES the behavior that makes cons UNSAFE FOR WOMEN. PERIOD."

I'll probably try to do a somewhat more technical analysis of this contest once my blood pressure is a little more stable.

GAHHHHHH

(Warning: Adult Language and EXCESSIVE USE OF CAPS)

I am fucking sick of working in an industry where this sort of shit makes it out into the public eye. I understand that absymally stupid ideas get floated in meetings all the time, but at a billion-dollar company like EA, you'd think SOMEONE would have the basic common sense to put a stop to a FUCKING CONTEST TO SEE WHO CAN HARASS YOUR EMPLOYEES THE MOST.

Yeah, they're booth babes, yeah, they're probably used to it. I don't care. First of all, "commit acts of lust" is NOT an acceptable way to describe "take your picture with the girl in the costume!" I've worked Comic-Con, and while there are lots of perfectly normal, well-adjusted people there, there are also a LOT of people with boundary issues, an imperfect understanding of social norms, and/or a really fucking twisted view of women. It's hard enough to maintain one's personal space - having fucking Marketing supporting the random gropage as a CONTEST does NOT HELP.

Secondly, any other women in, around, or remotely near that booth is going to have to deal with the spillover, guaranteed. I can barely imagine a more hostile work environment. I hope to hell they have an otherwise-all-male booth, or that the female employees have some good practical self-defense skills and a lawyer. *shudder*

Thirdly - Jesus, what kind of monkeys did EA hire instead of lawyers? I expect a certain casual misogyny from the Marketing department (sad to say) - sex sells, those boys know it, and they don't ever bother to think real hard about the implications of using it. But if I were anywhere near the EA booth and got my tit grabbed, I'd be on the phone to a shyster in seconds.

My God, what a stupid fucking idea. I can't decide if I'm glad I'm shut of those assholes, or if I'm sorry I no longer have a building key, because there's some nuts need kicking.

(Edited to add, apparently it's ANY booth babe, not just EA's. Lawsuit in 3, 2, 1...)

Forums, Again

This is an excellent roundup of why game forums are dangerous and awful. The "Value of Forums" section is rather token, and pretty much coincides with my rant here.

My question is, if we all know this stuff, why do we keep using forums? Why play with a tiger if you don't absolutely have to?

Labels

Added labels, mostly for my own convenience. If for some ungodly reason you're reading my blog and you're not my mother, I'll remind you that this is actually about four blogs merged into one, so it's very streaky.

Proving My Point

I'm still kicking around the idea of how to teach (or at least define) good writing for community management. To that end, I was idly googling the friend who spurred this train of thought, and came across a completely unrelated paper. That paper contained this lovely bit:

"If you ask people for information (or compel them to provide it), you should give it back to them in some familiar form that lets them see how it is useful or interesting. They will then be less inclined to resent your asking in the first place, more inclined to be curious about the relationship of their work to others’, and more open to considering its implications"

I sent that around for various of my colleagues to admire, and Sanya used it as the nucleus of her weekly column. It's a good column - go read it.

What really interest me are the comments. The MMO players who are invested to the point where they read and comment on industry-insider process columns like Sanya's are the ones most likely to give feedback to the companies in the first place, so what they have to say is worth listening to.

"Sending your feedback to Customer Support will most likely get you a "Thanks for your feedback!" standard response while your suggestions will end up in the CRM's digital bin as a single person's opinion will most probably be regarded as rather unimportant.

You will be better off with becoming part of a focus group (if such thing is in place), or with providing feedback on the game forums where other players and maybe community representatives may discuss it." - Phall

This, I think, rather proves the point of the quote above. The feedback to CS is just as important, if not more so - it could be on any topic, and the CS folks are well-situated to spot trends and report them (although some teams are better than others in having a channel for the CS team to pass those issues along.) A focus group is usually, well, focused, and feedback that doesn't touch on the specific area in question is tossed out - but usually the focus groups have much more visibility into the process and the decisions as they're made, so their feedback feels much more influential.

"The suggestion and class-specific forums almost NEVER draw an official dev response... the ACTUAL feedback forums are viewed as the places where ideas go to die, so fewer and fewer people bother." - ArKane

That definitely matches my experience. People like to feel heard, and you can't look interested and nod meaningfully over the internet. What you can do is respond. The problem is, not every idea or thought or post is one we can respond to without causing even more trouble. The standard "Thanks for your feedback!" note rapidly becomes worthless, because it's a form response. That's why customers like it best when they have a forum they can post on, particularly one where the devs respond. They can tell they're being listened to by their peers as well as by their desired target audience. The problem with that of course being that it doesn't scale.

The weekly Q&A/Grab Bag style of response that Sanya herself pioneered is one way to handle the situation, but I can say from experience (about two years of those linked archives were my posts) that it can be a very tricky thing to pick what gets attention and what doesn't. And it's even trickier when you have weeks where there are literally no new customer issues that you can address, because there's no decision or reaction that can be made public.

So this is what I'm kicking around. There's gotta be a better way to do this that a) encourages quality customer feedback and b) scales with the size of the community without requiring ridiculous amounts of headcount. I have my own plots and schemes, but I'd love to hear other people's thoughts.

Stray Thought

I like some of Stephen King's work very much. I dislike some of it quite a bit as well. Stephen King writes about upper-middle-class people sometimes (writers, artists, etc) and working-class people sometimes. Are the two related? Must go flip though bookshelf.

Community Management 101, Writing Component

I had a conversation this weekend with a friend who's involved in developing writing curricula for various different disciplines, and it got me to wondering about how I'd teach the particular style of writing needed in my own job.

There are really only two key elements:

- Control of tone: Emotional content is a very big part of everything we write, because much if not most of it is targeted at individuals, rather than a general audience.

- Clarity of content: The most minor of misunderstandings can spark week-long drama fests and infinitely repeated misinformation. (Ask me sometime about the function of hunger in UO.)

The content that requires factual clarity would probably be pretty much covered by a standard technical writing curriculum. I've learned it more or less by trial and error, but I think that's the easier part to teach. (Learning to translate patch notes from programmerese is a separate art...) The question of tone is the more interesting one.

We talk a lot about "good instincts" when discussing what to look for in a new hire, and while half of this is not necessarily writing-specific - when not to respond to a situation, when to ask for backup, that sort of thing - half of it is about choosing the most effective emotional content for a particular piece of writing and being able to accurately convey it. Both parts of that are very hard.

Picking the right emotional content is hard. It's slightly easier in one-on-one communications, because you only have to predict one person's reaction - but I very seldom get the luxury of dealing with my customers one-on-one. I usually need to talk to large numbers of them at once, and walk a very narrow path that will give me the best reaction from the largest number of people. Different communities have different temperaments - a friendly, cheerful tone may give you a warm and positive reaction from one group, whereas in another it's taken as a sign of weakness. Being able to read the room is one of those things that we call "instinct" and can only be taught by experience.

I would kill, however, for a class that taught how to convey that tone - avoiding common pitfalls, learning and working around loaded words and phrases ("working as designed," "soon," etc, in the MMO industry.) It is NOT a good area in which to have to learn by doing, but that's the only way I know how to teach it.