I think this is a good article, but it was a mistake to start out by citing Fish's situation. Fish is absolutely not an innocent player in this scenario. He would fill his twitter feed with rage-filled comments in reply to people who would criticize his game. By giving trolls exactly what they wanted (a reaction), more of them jumped on the bandwagon to harass him.
Combine that with Fish regularly telling people to go suck a dick, kill themselves, and all sorts of disgusting garbage littering his twitter feed, and you have a character who is extremely easy to vilify and incite others to harass. Of course, more people harassing him means that he replies with even more caustic comments, making him even easier to vilify and dislike. I've seen firsthand people trying to start hate machines on boards like 4chan's video game board where they make collages of all the disgusting things phil fish says in order to get more people to harass him.
Anyone who has ever dealt with bullying in their life can tell you that the absolute worst thing you can do is react to it. If every ugly comment someone made went into a black box and was ignored, it's very unlikely that they would continue to post.
I gotta disagree with your last sentence: the absolute worst thing you can do about bullying is say that the victim deserved it.
First, my bias: I'm a huge fan of FEZ, the game.
Aren't you victim blaming? He deserves all the abuse he gets because he's abusive? It's okay that he could be having a nervous breakdown because he brought it on himself?
I don't know what Fish's background is. What if he comes from an abusive household and triggers on bullying and lashes out? Now is it okay that he gets attacked a lot?
I think we can safely say that Phil Fish is absolutely part of the problem without it degenerating into mere victim blaming. Of course he doesn't deserve the abuse that he gets, neither do his abuse victims.
I'd be more inclined to agree with you, that Fish is simply another troll, if I'd seen any evidence of him responding to a perfectly reasonable review of FEZ with more "choke-on-my-dick" trollia.
There's a difference between simply being an asshole and being an Internet troll in my mind. Most of the things I've seen him saying is in response to some pretty inflammatory stuff.
They're not abuse victims because they opted into it by going out of their way to harass the guy in the first place. Is that hard to understand? It shouldn't be.
I see what you're saying. I guess I'm not that hung up on the definition of the word "victim". My point is that those kinds of interactions are just horrible and that nobody deserves to be on the receiving end of such abuse.
We (as geeks, video game culture people, internet culture people, humans, whatever) should be able to get past these childish escalating aggression tantrums. This isn't the bronze age.
I don't think it's textbook victim blaming at all. If a guy goes around tossing beers in peoples' faces in bars and occasionally catches a beat down, I don't think it would be victim blaming to state that, 'Hey, maybe if he didn't throw beer in peoples' faces he wouldn't catch beat downs'.
It doesn't mean anyone is condoning violent responses to provocation, just stating the role that the instigator played a role in the incident. Phil Fish repeatedly threw beer in the face of others and got a lot of vitriole in response.
You can argue that no one ever deserves to be harassed online, but I think you'd have to be utterly oblivious to continually act that way in public and not expect to be hated.
He says "Japanese games suck", and he's grinning, while the rest of the panel cracks up. Then Jonathan Blow explains why they do, and at the end, Fish says something about Zelda. At no point does he attack anyone personally, not even a whiff of it. Then the panel including moderator end up agreeing on Japanese games being "joyless husks".
If that's what it takes "to be hated", the question to me becomes "by whom?" And why are they not hating the panel for those belly laughs, too?
Yes, Fish has said some shitty things. Back when that happened, I was one of the people who argued against him and said he was a huge dick. But that doesn't mean he deserves a flurry of abusive and hateful speech; it means people should tell him to shut up and learn some manners.
Surely you agree there's a difference between "being disliked" and "being on the receiving end of a torrent of abuse"?
I think, in many ways, Fish's situation is a combination of the "perfect storm" of abrasive personality put into a situation where trolls can take advantage of that personality.
I don't think anyone will say that Fish is a saint; he's certainly no Notch, or Gaben, or Tim Schafer. And I worry that a large portion of the hate that is directed at him is /because/ he's not someone who can take things in stride.
I think what a lot of people who get accused of "victim blaming" are insinuating is that, if Fish could have taken criticism more in stride -- or, you know, been respectful of other people when they ask him legitimate questions -- when they were more innocuous and less extreme, then it might not have gotten this far. It's like he threw gasoline on a small fire and is bewildered at why his house is now burning down around him.
Does he deserve it? Not at all; /nobody/ does. But perhaps we shouldn't all be so surprised at it when you try putting out a fire with gasoline.
It's very important to be allowed to say publicly that things suck. I would argue that more people should do it.
I'm not sure that's anywhere in the same league as what's being discussed here though. His comments in the video were harsh and opinionated and the questioner was disappointed with the answer, but as the same time he was being asked for an opinion and gave a fair one.
That isn't necessarily what he does in his own twitter feed though and it's certainly not like the personal abuse described in the original article.
>It's very important to be allowed to say publicly that things suck. I would argue that more people should do it... His comments in the video were harsh and opinionated and the questioner was disappointed with the answer, but as the same time he was being asked for an opinion and gave a fair one.
I totally agree about the need for honest criticism. If Jonathan Blow had started the reply, and Phil Fish had followed up with his apt comparison involving the Zelda games, they wouldn't have come across negatively to me at all. Seriously though, how can you not see how rude (and even mildly racist) his opening remarks are, especially when given to someone who is not fluent in the English language (and is thus likely to take what he says even more seriously)?
"They suck. I'm sorry, but you guys need to get with the times and make better interfaces and like update your technology... we're totally kicking your ass... back then you guys were the king of the world, but your time has passed."
What the fuck? How can people on here get bent out of shape over the mildest use of unnecessarily gendered language, but let something like that pass?
To the sibling comment from PavlovCat's, obviously I can't get into their heads, but the impression I got was that the people on the panel were laughing at Phil's complete lack of tact. Listen again and hear Edmund exclaiming "oh wow" just before he bursts into laughter.
> how can you not see how rude (and even mildly racist) his opening remarks are, especially when given to someone who is not fluent in the English language (and is thus likely to take what he says even more seriously)?
I'm not saying he's not rude. Rude is fine, abusive is not. In some cases there's a fine line between rude and abusive, but not here.
The guy looked heartbroken, it's true. He was clearly a fan of the genre while Fish is not, but it wasn't personal.
As for racist? I don't think that any sensible person watching that video should come to the conclusion that Fish hates Japanese people as a race.
His criticism of modern JRPG design vs older JRPGs is a perfectly valid opinion, he makes some good points. Whether you agree or not is another matter.
Being arrogant is fine too, BTW. No law against being arrogant, or of using hyperbole. Again, this is not anything like the kind of abuse being talked about.
That's really not true. Almost all of his caustic responses were to people sending him shit. His post on the Steam forums was in response to trolls trashing his game. Just take a look at his forum posts.[0] Most are completely normal, while one or two are replying to jerks.
Fish isn't exactly a saint, and I'd venture to say he's quite a jerk (I'm not a fan of the shit he said about Japanese games.[1]) But the number of times Fish has dished it out is vastly outweighed by the number of times he's taken it.
Anyone who has ever dealt with bullying in their life can tell you that the absolute worst thing you can do is react to it.
With that I agree.. I once stood up for someone who was being mobbed, and we both made that mistake. Combined with things I found out afterwards I know "we were right", and if we had not reacted hurt and frustrated, that would have won out. Instead we kinda broke our backs trying to break a block of ice instead of letting the sun melt it.
But that's also kinda "woulda shoulda". Yeah, if everybody except rapists knew kung fu, there would be no rape. If you respond to insults with something witty that puts the egg cleanly on the face of the person who attacked you, you won't be bullied. And that's a worthy goal, I'm not being sarcastic, I just don't think it's fair to leave it at that. Because it's also a worthy goal for people to be able to exist before they became some kind of super person, and if someone acts stupid towards bullies for the right reason (not sure if that's the case here, but IF), then we should give them that advice while supporting them.
Why is reacting angrily to bullshit even so easy to "vilify and dislike"? Not that I necessarily want to defend all he said, especially since I'm just aware of rather random snippets with zero context. But I noticed that during the mobbing apocalypse I mentioned above: Most people don't really understand (a whole lot of) the context, or give a crap about the fact that if it's 20 on 1, the 20 started it, and that the single person can't be expected to be as calm as the 20 individuals. Some don't even understand the content of the statement(s), but nearly all of them react to the fact that one party is frustrated and hurt, and said some word or other, while the other is grinning and so light they swim on milk... so they instinctively side with the supposed "winner" (especially if that's the bigger group, or even the group vs. an individual), without really caring what the content of the dispute is. That's seriously fucked up IMHO, and a dysfunction so major, that compared to it having a bad temper or a potty mouth is EZ PZ to fix.
If every ugly comment someone made went into a black box and was ignored,
Then that would also apply to the "disgusting garbage" that littered his Twitter feed, so that sounds like a double standard and blaming the victim, no? I guess you don't mean it that way, because you are right: anger is a sign of weakness, and bullies thrive on perceived weakness. But I don't think bullies, or the people who watch such stuff idly, should be accepted as a fact of life. Not that I want to accuse you of implying that, but I know it can be read that way, and that if people can turn something into Someone Else's Problem they love to do that.
I think it's good on PA for calling it out, just like it was good on Bill Hicks when he had his "Freebird!" flip out, as ugly as that was.
That'd be awesome, especially the photoshops. Some people really ought to grow thicker skin. I think many of these people who can't take it ought to spend a few months on 4chan as an unpopular tripfriend.
Fez was one of the best games I've ever played. It's a masterpiece. But Phil Fish allows himself to be trolled and does a great job of feeding them.
Only a fool expects the world to change in order to suit him. If you can't take the heat get out of the kitchen, or at least refrain from sticking your dick in the deep fryer.
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -George Bernard Shaw
Besides the "let's paste a quote that agrees with our point of view" cliché, Shaw claims that all progress depends on the unreasonable man, not that whatever unreasonable men can do is progressive. Big difference.
Then I'll try and be a little more civilized here: Along with some nice things, 4chan is also a notorious breeding ground for some of the worst and most noxious media and hateful activity (e.g. harassment campaigns) on the internet. This has continued to be the case for many years. It doesn't seem much has changed.
Don't you feel any responsibility for the behavior of your users?
I think it would be a mistake to equate the worst of /b with 4chan as a whole. What would you do to control /b in this situation (short of shutting the whole site down)? Maybe providing a dedicated outlet for the destructive elements of a community is a good idea overall, kind of like hellbanning on HN if you think about it, except that hell-banned people can interact with each other and voluntarily retreat to their own forum.
Shut the subsite down is an effective option. Let the people know they aren't welcome at 4chan.
GameFAQs had their LUE exodus, 4Chan can have their /b/ exodus. In the case of GameFAQs, the rest of the site was able to focus more on gaming and it was better as a result. On the other hand, if 4Chan wants to be home to that element of the internet, they are welcome to do so. But I think at this point, it is fair to judge 4Chan on their acceptance of /b/, much like how I judge Reddit on their handling of clopclop and jailbait.
Nonetheless, companies built on top of community discussions have to face the facts, people will come, they will be assholes. Its a problem that any discussion-based company has to solve.
I understand protecting "Freedom of Speech", but lines have to be drawn at some point.
There's a not-so-well known secret about 4chan that can't be glossed over when considering these kinds of things.
On 4chan, there's 5-10 boards that are implicit "cancer filter" boards. These boards are used to curate the community and prevent undesirable users from leaking into higher quality boards. The cancer filter boards serve as the public face of 4chan; /b/, /v/, /mlp/, and a handful of other boards are used to divert the attention of the unwashed masses to prevent contamination of higher quality boards. Desirable users will start their 4chan experience on one of these cancer boards, come to the conclusion that they're low quality, and move on to a different, usually non-cancer filter board.
Because of this filtering process, the demographics on each board vary wildly. Recently someone ran a statistical survey on several boards (n=~100/board) and found that the average age of users on cancer-filter boards was around 17-19, with the age increasing as you got to other boards. IIRC the average age on the niche hobbyist boards was between 23 and 25.
What this means is that if you were to just remove /b/ tomorrow, all those angry violent users are just going to leak into the other boards, and turn them into another /b/. Now instead of one "problem" board, you have a dozen.
The tldr here is that while most forum websites have a unified demographic across sub-forums, 4chan does not. Nuking the board won't get rid of problematic users, it will just displace them to another board.
Indeed, and this is the same strategy that Reddit uses to "contain" clopclop and jailbait.
And yet, we look at other communities such as StackOverflow or Gaia Online, and while there are some issues... none of them are quite as bad as how the worst of 4Chan or the worst of Reddit can get.
4chan didn't create shitposters; shitposters created 4chan. Removing /b/ isn't going to make hate-filled edgy teenagers go away, in fact, it will just unleash them to ruin other sites. /b/ is a containment board.
Funded by 4chan. Figure out how much money moot spends on bandwidth and hosting costs for /b/. It makes him in the strictest sense, a financial contributor to /b/. (Arguably in part, because he may feel held hostage by them).
BTW: Freedom of speech does not have to be gratis. If you want freedom of speech, buy your own server and migrate over to it there. But as long as moot is funding 4chan and /b/ culture, I'm going to have to say that he's part of the problem.
I get it, total freedom of speech leads to /b/, jailbait, and creepshots. Total freedom of speech allows people to get together and perform dox operations. And you're cool with that? Frankly, I'm not.
I'm not cool with online witch-hunts. Reddit is perfectly happy to criticize Carmen Ortiz for "wrongfully" prosecuting Aaron Swartz... but they are perfectly fine with Sunil Tripathi (probably) committing suicide over the online witchhunt taken place over his name during the Boston Bombing event. Or maybe the legions and legions of hateful and hurtful memes... such as "An Hero" that fester on those boards.
Some speech is harmful, and we should work together in removing harmful speech. I fully understand that this runs counter to 4chan (especially /b/) and Reddit culture... but enough is enough. At some point, someone needs to take responsibility for the development of the website's culture. If it isn't the webmaster who is _funding_ the operation, then who?
There's a very large chance they'll destroy all the other boards on 4chan. Every time /b/ goes down, either deliberately or due to a technical issue, its denizens flood out to the remaining boards and turn them into cesspits until it returns.
Ditto with the GameFAQs LUE exodus many years ago. I'm very well familiar with how things happen.
Part of the solution is suffocating the community by ensuring no one new can access the site. Killing a site as big as LUE was (or as big as /b/ is today) isn't going to happen overnight. It has to happen slower with a deliberate plan.
That's what we get for breeding a society of consumers. If you don't have a meaningful way to express yourself productively, you pour all that tension into the wrong things. You become a buly, a stalker, a heckler, you name it. You get worked up about your experiences with other people's creative output, instead of channeling all that energy into your own endeavours.
I think the world would be much better off if we encouraged everyone of all ages to develop creative hobbies, instead of spending all their leisure time passively consuming the work of others. Then they would all gain a better perspective on the whole creative process and feel more accomplished all around - and happier for it!
I'm not sure that the responsibility lies with people or society at large.
Do you believe people on Twitter do not have the resources available to attempt creative works?
Furthermore, do you believe that, without being creative, it is not possible for a person to refrain from telling a game designer to kill himself?
I believe that individuals making death threats or rape threats on the internet are generally making individual choices with full knowledge of the repercussions. I do not believe they have any reasonable excuse justifying their actions. The responsibility for understanding and identifying how deeply they can damage another human is solely theirs.
"Do you believe people on Twitter do not have the resources available to attempt creative works?"
They do, but they're overwhelmed by the vast amount of empty content ready for consumption. It's so damn easy to chill out clicking this and that, and fall in a rut where that's all you do in the leisure time you spend at your desk. We should try to find a way to actively encourage people to pick up a creative hobby (or more than one!) as a form of therapy, even.
"Furthermore, do you believe that, without being creative, it is not possible for a person to refrain from telling a game designer to kill himself?"
I think outbursts like that come from immature, intellectually under-developed people who would grow immensely from pursuing a creative hobby.
My greater point was that I don't think "we should actively encourage people to pick up a creative hobby" in response to those people making death threats.
There are already people who are choosing to pick up creative hobbies. Those people make games. People that make games get crucified by gamers who do not like their decisions. Those gamers make death threats.
The people who make death threats can easily enough make something creative. Certainly there is no larger barrier for them when compared to someone like Phil Fish. I do not think we need to make it easier to expect better behavior from someone who is making a death threat.
We need to prioritize the people who made the extra effort to actually get up and make something over the people who chose to directly threaten the lives of the creator.
The tools to create and the networks to share already exist but the trouble is getting people to enjoy creation. Fix this and you might create tomorrow's economy.
>I believe that individuals making death threats or rape threats on the internet are generally making individual choices with full knowledge of the repercussions. I do not believe they have any reasonable excuse justifying their actions. The responsibility for understanding and identifying how deeply they can damage another human is solely theirs.
Fine. What are you going to do about it?
Imprison them? Highly counterproductive. Complain about them on the internet? They live for that. Sit back and do nothing?
Grandparent proposed a positive course of action that they believe will effect change. Asking whose fault or responsibility the problem is is missing the point; what we should focus on is how to solve it.
OP believes society does not do enough to cause people to be creative. That kind of problem has one kind of solution. Perhaps the very grant that Phil Fish used to initially fund his development of Fez would qualify.
I believe people that make death threats are solely responsible for their actions. They need to be held accountable. There are tons of ways to hold them accountable.
One such internet community built solely around internet gaming is Lethalfrag's Twitch.tv channel. You can see for yourself the quality of commentary on his show. He has spoken at length about his methods for maintaining a solid community. He does not do it by providing people with a creative outlet.
But I shouldn't have to point out an example of a successful internet community to assert what the problem is. I think it is in the ways in which we hold people accountable for their actions. Maybe you do not believe that is the problem.
In any case, I cannot imagine you believe the problem is that we do not make it easy enough for people who make death threats to be creative. That's an awful lot of grace we give a person before expecting them to change their behavior.
No, the problem is people making death threats. Don't mistake one of any number of possible factors that lead to the problem for the problem itself.
You believe that "the ways in which we hold people accountable for their actions" is a contributing causal factor? Fine. But identifying a causal factor is pointless unless you have a plan for dealing with it.
OP was proposing a practical intervention. Is it the best possible practical intervention? I don't know, but your counterproposal should be another practical intervention, not just a theory about one of the causes of the problem.
There are tons of creative people who have an issue with Fish. It's slightly frustrating to see someone with mediocre talent become hugely popular, but it can be infuriating when they make comments like, "i just won the grand prize at IGF tonight. suck my dick. choke on it." He's given "indie" game developers a bad name.
Exactly. I do think a lot of people in the game industry get abuse they don't deserve, but Phil earned a lot more abuse than average with his personality.
I think that's a part of it but it's not the whole story.
It's not just a society of consumers, it's a society of ... well, children really, although that might be too insulting. "Dependents" might be better. A society of people who are increasingly urbanized, increasingly educated, increasingly always online. And some of that is good but it has come along with and enabled a culture of dependence. People expect that society at large and the state specifically is going to be there to help them out. Help them get their car back on the road, defend them from the bad guys, keep a roof over their heads, keep their bellies full, and so on. This is the "brave new world" route. A population that's blissed out and utterly incapable of self-reliance.
Add to that a somewhat related phenomenon which I'll just call "fuck the rich". The idea being that those who are wealthy/famous/successful somehow "have more" than their "fair share" and therefore are less deserving of social niceties and are a valid target for abuse. The justification being that "they're rich" (or famous or whatever) and "can take it" or "deserve it". It's surprising how quickly this view has become lodges in the zeitgeist. Here's a revealing little test: if you could press a magic button which would randomly pick someone who made more than $200k/yr in the US and, via a robot or magic or whatever, punch them HARD in the face but at the same time pick someone randomly in the US who made less than $15k/yr and give them $1k in cash would you press the button? How many times? How many people would press the button? How much? Would they feel bad about it?
Add to that the general vitriol that stews in some parts of the internet due to anonymity and a variety of other factors and you get the conditions that this story talks about. It's pretty disgusting, and it's probably not going to just magically go away just by hoping it does. So what are we going to do about it?
Be kind and empathic to those around you, and call out those around you who are not. Try to use technology to further liberate people's minds from the drudgery of everyday life and give them that time back, for them to invest in actively bettering themselves. Long term, institute a living wage such that everyone is freed from the worries of everyday survival and develops a kinder, less stressed mindset. A lot of the hostility we see on and off line would go away.
Respectfully, I think your critique is entirely misguided. What you wrote above sounds more like a explanation in search of a phenomenon rather than the reverse. Couching a social phenomenon in a socioeconomic context seems like an especially poor fit, IMHO.
For instance, do you really think the police, SNAP, and federal assistance for hurricane victims incline people to flame others on the Internet? Folks who need food stamps are probably among the least likely to spend "all their time on the Internet," and more likely to be working two jobs. I'm not sure the presence of cops, SNAP, or FEMA matter to folks who don't need any of those things in a concrete fashion.
More importantly, though, it's a fallacy to assume that this sentiment is new merely because it's newly-ish observed. I do think there's an economic component, given how shitty the economy is compared to previous generations' experience; people are unhappy, but I suspect some of that stems from the idea that they're on their own, whereas "everyone else" (or perhaps the rich) is getting a handout. Actually, I'm not even sure folks like millennials believe that in aggregate, but I don't know for sure.
That said, anonymity combined with increased connectivity is novel, and I think it's an enabling factor. I think our social mores and our tools haven't caught up. People can say whatever comes to mind with little or no consequences, and the onus is on the recipient to filter that. There's a many-to-one relationship there and it's hard to manage.
A technological, "dumb" answer would be applying sentiment analysis to emails, tweets, et al. Incorporate as signals stuff like: whether it's a first-time sender; whether the Twitter account has followers; and so on. It's possible these would be band-aids for a real social problem. Or perhaps they would at least lower the percentage in harassing people online.
Socially, it might help if escalated harassment (i.e. persistent, involving death threats, etc) were treated as legal matters. As it is now I suspect it's too hard for victims to do much, and that it can be difficult to get the police to pay attention to it. I don't really have a concrete proposal; I just have a intuition that reporting harassment or stalking to the police is unlikely to be productive as it stands now, and I think the law is unfortunately a really blunt instrument, so this would be hard to get right. (It wouldn't have to be perfect, since no solution which will scale to hundreds of millions of people could possibly be.)
Internet mob justice is probably the answer that will happen from time to time, when people decide to deliberately out trolls. I am not a big fan of Internet mob justice, but sometimes it seems like it's that or no justice at all.
>That's what we get for breeding a society of consumers. If you don't have a meaningful way to express yourself productively, you pour all that tension into the wrong things. You become a buly, a stalker, a heckler, you name it. You get worked up about your experiences with other people's creative output, instead of channeling all that energy into your own endeavours.
Citation needed, because the correlation goes in the opposite direction - to me it looks like as more people take up creative endeavours, the hate they face grows ever faster.
I was the front man for a HL2 mod called Dystopia. We never made it big, but we did have a decent sized, vocal and opinionated playerbase. I'd done my best to promote a positive community and for the most part all the feedback we received was fairly civil. I'm not trying to say that my experience was anything like what Fish and the guy from Treyarch have had to deal with.
With those caveats out of the way; when I did have to deal with abusive feedback, I focused on two things:
1) I could easily separate my real life person from the "Fuzzy" persona I cultivated on the internet.
2) If our little game had prompted someone to get so worked up that they were going to rape and kill my kittens because we were making changes to a weapon, then we'd done something right.
I'd been a hardcore, vocal gamer before I had to deal with hardcore vocal gamers. I wasn't abusive, but I had felt that passion from both sides. I didn't like, tolerate or condone people who were abusive, but I tried to understand where the passion was coming from.
The electronic hordes are much crazier now than in the past. That "Scooby" bodybuilder guy got doxed by 4chan the other week. In addition to the usual relentless stream of obscene online hate comments, they sent minions over to photograph his house, and call up his employer to let them know what they thought of his sexual orientation. He pretty much had the opposite online disposition of Phil Fish, too. It would be pretty hard to argue that he "deserved" any of that treatment.
I think this attitude is a healthy one to view the abuse from. It's very unfortunate that this is necessary, though. It's great that you've made a game that people can get passionate about, but it's very depressing to me that people can't find an avenue to express that passion without resorting to violent threats.
When the threats start talking about in person interactions (looking for your address, etc), I think the situation gets even more serious.
As a side note, I played and loved Dystopia. It's a fantastic mod, and really fun to play. Well done, there!
FEZ is among my favorite video games of all time. I believe that it is a perfect expression of a 20-something's love of video games, a game mechanical representation of spiritual enlightenment, and a fiendish hedge maze of fractally spiraling content all at once. I played the hell out of that game, all the way to the end with every secret (rare for me), and devoted many pages of a notebook to walking that hedge maze. Truly a great work of art.
I have tremendous respect for Phil Fish, but I would never want to work with him. His kind of passion, devotion, and energy would probably chew me up and spit me out so fast I wouldn't know what hit me. And, yeah, he gives as good as he gets in the Land of the Trolls.
But, man, he made a helluva game. Right now I'm selfishly hoping that the need to create overwhelms the desire to heal and we'll see another few games out of him before too long.
This needs to be paralleled with the story of Caroline Criado-Perez, who campaigned to get a woman to replace Winston Churchill on the ten-pound note. After it was announced that Jane Austen will be on the ten-pound note, Criado-Perez received "about 50 abusive tweets an hour for about 12 hours."
This sort of abuse isn't limited to creative people. It's endemic. Make a stand on something, anything, and you run the risk of having people say they're going to rape you, your family, and your dog. It's really quite horrible. Luckily for Criado-Perez Manchester police arrested a 21-year old man on "about 50 abusive tweets an hour for about 12 hours." Lucky for her, but unfortunately there's an entire sea of horrible people out there to sling the shit.
The £10 note had Florence Nightingale, Charles Dickens, Charles Darwin, and it is soon to have Jane Austen. I can understand "I don't like her books" but that's not part of the criteria.
I expected this to be a piece about on-line piracy. In reality, it is about something that can be much worse.
It's profoundly disturbing that so many people have such a lack of perspective that they can seriously threaten violence against someone and their family just because that person did their job and tweaked some game mechanics.
Sure, most of the abusive people are probably kids, but that's no excuse. What kind of kid is old enough to be allowed unsupervised access to the Internet and yet so out of control that they can think this kind of behaviour is acceptable?
Some of the things described in this piece are surely criminal, but somehow I get the feeling that sending the cops round would just be a badge of honour to people who've gone that far off the rails already. I'm not sure how you fix this without change on a society-wide scale, and I'm not sure how you could even start to effect that change if you're in the the kind of position described in the article.
I don't think it really makes much sense to say that a victim is 'part of the problem' when they respond to thousands of slurs, threats, and near-constant abuse by telling the abuser to go kill themselves. It's not as if they don't actually wish the abuser were dead...
Yes, Phil Fish is part of the problem by existing. He's solved this by leaving the industry entirely. That's a helpful way of looking at it, isn't it?
Phil Fish constantly posted caustic, abusive remarks to everyone on his twitter feed. His public persona was one of a complete and utter asshole. Nothing excuses that behavior. While the internet's response to it is contemptible, I have absolutely no sympathy for Fish. He dished it out constantly, the fact that people replied in kind is expected.
On the other hand, I have a ton of sympathy for the Treyarch dev. He didn't deserve or invite any of the remarks aimed at him, and he didn't do anything to get that level of response.
That's simply an inaccurate interpretation of the facts. People lashed out at and abused Fish, and then he responded negatively. That's TOTALLY DIFFERENT than him going out there and finding random people to abuse, which isn't something he has a history of doing. Period. The fact that he 'seems like an asshole' or his public persona was unlikeable doesn't excuse the shit people did to him.
No, please stop. I can't take it. What you wrote is an inaccurate interpretation of the facts. It also exposes your hypocrisy. You seem to speak passionately about "bullying" and that Phil Fish is a "victim". Apparently, it is wrong to harass someone on the internet, unless your name is Phil Fish. It is wrong to write "suck on it" "hows your boycott going nerds" "compare yourself to me and kill yourself", and to act like a disrespectful human being who insults his own fanbase, unless you are called Phil Fish. When people ask for Fez on the PC, and you insult them. That's okay, because he is Phil Fish, he is only defending himself from his "abusers", his fans. Phil Fish has a history of doing this for the past year. He acquired his notoriety preciously because of his disgusting actions. He was a bully, yet he couldn't take the heat. He IS part of the problem. Period. Now, when you realize that Phil Fish actions are indefensible, and are the REAL problem about this situation, you will say that he suffers from "mental problems", but this is another excuse.
Notice how there are many indie developers are out there who aren't being harassed. Thats because the idea that Phil Fish was harassed randomly is simply a way to gloss over the real issue. You spend all your time, like warriors, decrying about how bad his supposed "abusers" are, like there is some type of epidemic problem of people who are spending their time attacking poor Phil Fish for no reason. Yet, what set him off weren't the abusers, it was his critics. Again and again, he responded to his critics like a child. Shifting the focus on the "abusers" is ignoring the real problem. This is what western developers have become. It is sickening to see people defending the indefensible.
You simply don't know how this industry works. Pretty much every public figure in games gets abuse by being on the internet. It's why an article was written about it, because it's not just Phil Fish and it's not just something he 'did' to 'deserve' it.
It totally changes the tone. It goes from a pompous and hateful statement, to more of a sassy put down. The original Futurama line is obviously satirical, so quoting it is referencing a satire. It was also a reasonable assumption that the target of the statement would recognize the quote.
Not defending Phil Fish. Just the "kill yourself" incident seems to have been blown out of proportion.
The Futurama line is satirical: pompous robot says obviously cruel and pompous thing. Quoting it, assuming the other party recognizes that it's a quote, keeps some of the original humour and makes it into more of a sassy put-down than a literal "you should kill yourself".
For instance, if I say "nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure" I'm not ACTUALLY saying we should nuke anything. I'm actually quite against the use of nuclear weapons.
Except there's no humor, implied, or otherwise, there. Just malice.
And honestly, the phrase "nuke it from orbit" is a rather exaggerated phrase. Unless the speaker is Barrack Obama or Vladamir Putin, it's a pretty good assumption that they are incapable of performing such an act.
However, "look at my life and go kill yourself" is much less exaggerated. Bender gets a pass when he says it because it's used in a comedic context. In real life, there is just about no point where that is a socially acceptable thing to say, except, perhaps, in a Futurama quote competition.
>> However, "look at my life and go kill yourself" is much less exaggerated
I believe Fish actually used the full quote too "compare your life to mine and then kill yourself" [1] .
Also, have you seen the abusive rant that Fish was responding to? It was this GameTrailers panel clip, 1min 50 [2]. I was appalled, it was a character assassination.
Beer called Fish a "fucking hipster," a "tosspot," a "wanker", a "fucking arsehole" and was dismissive of his game [2]. For some reason it's fucking hipster that gets my goat the most as that is just a pathetically lazy insult to throw at someone creative.
> What kind of kid is old enough to be allowed unsupervised access to the Internet and yet so out of control that they can think this kind of behaviour is acceptable?
It strikes a note of insanity: someone makes something, and another tries to bully them. There can't be a goal in mind, since there doesn't seem to be any pay-off.
Fez was a hugely fun game, with layers of secrets and depth. And now we'll likely not see another... Because of what? The game guy's a jerk? We're surrounded by jerks that do nothing, and we tolerate them.
I wonder if this is just an extension of GIFT [1], but instead of general online abuse, it's now aimed at the people building that entertainment infrastructure.
I think it's just what happens when you're exposing yourself to potentially hundreds of thousands or even millions of people. From that sample size, there will always be a lot of abusive idiots, even though they might reflect a tiny fraction of the total audience. That small percentage can end up dominating the conversation because of the nature of (most) electronic communication.
Unfortunately the medium itself is such that someone who is an abusive idiot is a gazillion times more likely to go out of their way to contact you or post something than someone who actually has something meaningful to say. The same goes for online forums and mailing lists. There's just a natural bias towards people posting extremely negative/inflammatory/abusive things. There's also a natural bias towards the people who have the least to contribute being the most likely to hop in with a comment, because they're the ones most likely to have strong kneejerk responses that they just have to share with the world right away.
To make matters worse, there's some sort of signal:noise entropy dynamic. Anyone who was into Usenet in the 90's or has followed the same online community over the course of many years has probably seen this. Online forums tend to get worse over time, and never ever ever get better, aside from attempts to impose moderation which always meet with strong resistance. It seems like one lousy comment (or commenter) breeds two more, which drive away the good commenters (meaning, people who actually try and don't just post knee-jerk responses to things). This is how things like YouTube happen.
I think it's incumbent on reasonable people to occasionally leave a positive comment, or send a short thank-you email to developers or creatives who have made something you've found enjoyable, useful or helpful.
I do.
"Do unto others, as you would have them do to you" is sage advice that's often forgotten.
In a way it's unfortunate that Phil Fish is becoming the poster child for this issue given his controversial public persona. I am not sure if people can dis-entagle his reputation from this real issue.
In a legal setting, it's often true that to protect civil liberties you end up defending...less popular characters. Protecting first amendment rights often means protecting people whose speech you strongly disagree with.
Perhaps the same is true of a social setting. In order to argue and campaign for more civility, you will necessarily be defending people most likely to fail to earn that civility.
Part of making anything and telling the world about it is sticking your neck out. The absolute worst thing is making something that ends up having no impact.
When you do make something that garners some attention you need to realize that a lot of people will be jealous. Their only valid rebuttal would be to make something that is better than your thing.
People don't say these things to your face because on top of being jealous, they are also cowards. The fear that drives their life is the reason why they never make anything in the first place.
If you make things that are a bit more intelligent and refined you won't attract the kind of idiots who are gonna post a bunch of mindless crap on Internet message boards... but then you might have to deal with a very intelligent and refined review from a noted critic. But no worries, as Frank Zappa summed up brilliantly:
"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture."
I am confused; why do you, as the creative person, need to tell the world about the death of a family person or if you are getting married (Looking at you, Neil Gaiman)? Why has this become a thing? Why can't you STFU, get off twitter/facebook/whatever social network and go do your creative thing?
Yes. How dare you use social media in a way that other humans do! If you contribute anything in the public space, social media should be nothing more than a marketing tool.
I am, like you, infuriated that a public / marginally public figure would use social media to communicate a personal message. These marginally public figures should only be allowed to talk about their creative output in a public space.
/s
Edit: I guess the general point my unnecessary sarcasm was trying to make was this: Creative people are people first and foremost. They have the same drives and desires for using social media, AND they need to use it as a marketing tool. I think one of the major problems is it's super easy to dehumanize people when you're interacting with them over the internet. They aren't just content creation machines.
I am not clear what your point is. Are you saying that it is a normal human instinct to broadcast all your shit to the world? Just because a few people think that cultural consumption should work like that, doesn't mean that everyone does think the same way.
> "Are you saying that it is a normal human instinct to broadcast all your shit to the world?"
To some extent, yes. Death in the family and informing people about an upcoming marriages are things that I frequently see people post on social media. Really any very important event in someone's life often gets posted on social media.
I'm just saying, it's easy to think of people on the internet as abstract things, and not realize that you're saying: "Hey, actual person shut about about that major event in your life, no one cares, get back to work".
Let me ask you this: if your friend posted a message about a death in their family on twitter would your response be "Why can't you STFU, get off twitter, and get back to work"?
If you use a twitter account for promotion of your product then it's not really personal any more. I mean, you know your fans, most of whom don't know you personally, are going to follow it. At that point it's a question of what kind of relationship you want to have with your fans. And while you have every right to share details of your personal life with these strangers on the internet, and certainly don't deserve abuse for it, it seems weird to want to do so.
(I write a small amount of fiction. I don't go out of my way to conceal my identity, but I do have distinct handles and to a certain extent personae for professional-programmer-me, writer-me, family-me etc. It would feel strange to use a single twitter account)
I agree that having separate accounts for promotional stuff and personal stuff is a very wise thing to do. It's very possible that you'll turn off followers, and reduce the number of people tuning in for your promotional stuff, by posting personal stuff.
That being said, I don't understand the anger when people do post personal stuff. If a twitter account posts things that aren't interesting to you, just don't follow them. I fundamentally don't understand why someone would get upset, or send in abuse, because someone posts some information from their personal life on their twitter account.
Because twitter sells. For better or for worse. Or because you enjoy using it.
I never could understand twitter/facebook appeal other than to pop cheap snippets or stalk your old friends, but I don't judge people based on what they do in their leisure time.
The Internet has a way of returning negative behavior ten or even a hundred or a thousand fold. Phil Fish has a decently long history of negativity and insults and that's what he received back in spades.
I find a lot of people who are dismissive, arrogant, condescending, and insulting often can't take that same behavior directed back at them. Fish seems to fit that mold.
I certainly wouldn't equate Phil Fish's situation to that of David Vonderhaar. Vonderhaar got harassed for merely doing his job. Fish got harassed because he crafted a persona of jerkiness.
This doesn't have anything to do with anyone's "war on creatives" (ugh, I hate that word). Anybody who rises to even minor prominence on the internet is going to get abuse. Sure, it's game creators, but it's also cat bloggers and people who make instructional language videos. It's athletes and politicians. It's anyone who whose name has bubbled to the top of a news cycle.
You people are amazingly irritating. Why do you believe that whenever a person disagrees with you it's "trolling"? Fez was a truly terrible game, and Phil Fish a terrible influence on videogames. He, and many people like him, are transforming videogames into something truly horrifying. I can elaborate as to why if you wish.
I make games, and the few "abusive" comments I received were obviously from astroturfed competitors.
Maybe because although I am a caustic person, I never go around telling people to kill themselves, or suck my dick, or other "wonderful" things that some people like to do.
I have a hard time considering "bullying" on the internet or "smear campaign" a real issue. I just think "just ignore the suckers". As long as you do have people behind you as well as opposing you, it should be alright.
Maybe the problem is that, having never been in the situation, I don't really understand how it feels. It really makes me wonder how I'd hold up in the situation.
You're 22 and you think you know anything you piece of shit. Just fucking kill yourself you fat french fuck, you deserve to die so just do it or else I'm gonna find you wherever in france you are and I'm gonna rape your family and make you watch, then kill you slowly.
How's that? That's pretty difficult for me to write, but about sums it up what these people have to deal with several times a day. I do not blame Phil Fish for lashing out, if people weren't on him like flies in the first place he probably be less agitated.
There might be a bit of desensitization involved, think 4chan culture.
Still, a stranger or the internet, or simply a stranger, does not mean anything to me if I don't know him beforehand.
I also would like to clarify that I do not doubt that this kind of abuse it is hard to deal with or anything. Just saying that it is pretty hard for me to relate, and that's probably the reason why not everyone is immediately siding with Phil Fish and other abuse victims.
I think part of the problem is that the bullying/intimidating/smear campaign business uses the same communication channels as the supportive/constructive/engaging comments.
And, even if you can thicken your skin to the point where the horrible insults don't wear you down, how do you feel about physical threats? Against your loved ones? This stuff is more terrible than you can expect a reasonable person to just shrug off.
this isn't a war on creatives. this is a war on phil fish, who's probably been the most annoying, condescending, gopher-hybrid moron-baby in recent history. phil fish and his ilk can get fucked and go be forgotten as if he ever did anything of note. calling this a "war on creatives" is patently ridiculous, and only those who suck his dick because he's some kind of over-hyped indie messiah would make this overgrown child's "take my ball and go home" stunt into some horrible crime of undeserved victimization.
Exactly. The video game industry needs to take a hard look at itself as to why they are trying to justify victimization and criticize "cyberbullying" when Fish has acted exactly like the trolls they criticize.
Obviously people on HN aren't quite aware of who Phil Fish is. Try reading the forums over at TIGsource where you'll see that the general sentiment (in the indie community) is that he's a pompous douche and general asshole who probably should not have been even featured in the indie game documentary that came out 2 years ago.
What's happening to him is shitty, true. He also has done shitty things to people in the past. One does not justify the other. However, my only point is only that the indie community (talking about devs/designers/artists) as a whole would rather have him gone.
Phil wasn't just "swimming in a sea of shit", he was shitting in the sea of shit and splashing it at other swimmers. He is not some innocent victim, he has consistently been an abusive asshole. The fact that people responded in kind isn't wonderful, but it also isn't shocking.
First world problems...right now the US is arming Syrian rebels so more Syrians can get blown to bits. You're surprised that the culture perpetrating atrocities around the world like that would also hurt the feelings of some upper middle class white "creative type"? Let me break out my violin. What happened, you opened up the window of your ivory tower and didn't like what wafted in? Take off your rose-colored glasses and take a look around you.
You have the right idea. Really puts it into perspective, when these people act like their on a moral crusade defending a upper middle class assholes because he got mean comments from other middle class assholes.
Combine that with Fish regularly telling people to go suck a dick, kill themselves, and all sorts of disgusting garbage littering his twitter feed, and you have a character who is extremely easy to vilify and incite others to harass. Of course, more people harassing him means that he replies with even more caustic comments, making him even easier to vilify and dislike. I've seen firsthand people trying to start hate machines on boards like 4chan's video game board where they make collages of all the disgusting things phil fish says in order to get more people to harass him.
Anyone who has ever dealt with bullying in their life can tell you that the absolute worst thing you can do is react to it. If every ugly comment someone made went into a black box and was ignored, it's very unlikely that they would continue to post.