What the heck is going on with the professional RPG industry in regards to Zak S?

[Celebrim]

And this is chilling?

How much leeway do you think I got? I've already mentioned a few things outside of the realm of gaming.

Or, (sorry about this [MENTION=4937]Celebrim[/MENTION]) the comparison between state sponsored public torture of political prisoners by one of the most repressive regimes in modern history (Maoist China) and the MeToo movement.

The problem is that I can't really explain where I was going with that. It's just going to snowball into a larger political discussion if I start bringing in examples, but I did point at some things that would make interesting reading for the interested student when I was trying to 'reach across the aisle' and find some common ground.

And yes, I do think there is a connection between some modern political movements and Maoist China.

I don't think that the #metoo movement is a problem, and I welcomed the long overdue house cleaning in the movie industry (and the gaming industry?), but I do think it has gotten hijacked in ways that are detrimental to the goal of outing what Umbran called the "missing stairs". For example, can I be positive about #metoo but critical of #believeallwomen, or is that far enough beyond the pale that the ban hammer comes down? Can I suggest that the whole thing started out as a political move that backfired, and that the politicking over it has gotten out of hand because it hurts the cause of those women who need to be believed? Is it enough to say I believe Mandy, and that I hope that no further awards to Zak or forthcoming, or do I also have to show my purity to the cause by demanding shows like removing him from the credits of a book already published, rescinding awards already awarded, and generally trying to a modern reenactment of a Puritan community shunning someone, or the Ministry of Truth trying to repair history? Because that's what this sort of thing feels like to me. I said before that nothing we as a gaming community could do could come close to the embarrassing behavior of the Motion Picture Arts Academy, but when they finally decided they didn't want Roman Polanski as a member any more they at least didn't try to pretend they'd honored him in the past, and if they had have been, I wouldn't have believed that they were motivated by sympathy for his victim. Nor for that matter do I believe Hollywood has really reformed, and I won't until they no longer expect women to undress to be 'taken seriously'.

If people want go further than just not wanting to be associated with him any more, they have a right to do so, but I feel then like maybe I ought to walk away slowly from the mob with its pitchforks and torches and schadenfreude, especially given that the same crowd doesn't limit its targets to people like sexual predators.

We have to wade through post after post after post of hysterical hyperbole and people trying to derail the conversation (join me in deploring porn? WTF?).

No, see this is exactly an example of the problem. You think I'm derailing the conversation by deploring porn. But, I'm inclined to see a connection between the acceptance of pornography and the acceptance of degrading and abusive treatment of women and see it as completely on topic. I don't imagine I'm alone in that. Now, I've been banned for one thread for even weakly implying that years before this scandal came out when Zac was parlaying his friendship with a bunch of beautiful women into stardom in the geek community, because well that sure reflected well on us as a community didn't it, but now that this has come out I'm willing to risk it again. You see in my mind anyone who is willing to stay silent about the porn industry is aiding and abetting the abuse and degradation of women, so anyone that is unwilling to join me in that unpopular opinion (at least in these circles) I wouldn't trust to not stay silent when there was some "missing stair" around that needed protecting any more than some here wouldn't trust me unless I'm pumping out slogans like 'believe all women' or whatever else is on the twitter feed.

But, no, just like every other time this has come up, we have to flail around blindly. It's incredibly frustrating.

You don't have to tell me that.

 

[CleverNickName]

*spends a couple of hours writing a thoughtful post*

*clicks the Post Quick Reply button, page refreshes*

...wow. Things really took a turn.

 

[Sadras]

*spends a couple of hours writing a thoughtful post*

*clicks the Post Quick Reply button, page refreshes*

...wow. Things really took a turn.

That sucks. I'm sure you tried it, but just in case, sometimes I have been lucky when pressing the return page that it retains all I have written.

 

[Celebrim]

But we are turning a social corner. People on talk radio and television can't stop talking about how things are changing and how confusing it is. Some comedians are complaining about how they can't tell the same kinds of jokes they used to, workplaces now have mandatory sexual harassment training, the Pope is no longer denying but actively speaking out against sexual assault within the church. Maybe it's not a full 90-degree turn, but society is definitely changing direction.

Oh that? No, that's not changing direction. That's marketing. That's not even something worthy of applause. That's an example of losing the plot along the way.

Let's avoid getting into the Pope, as if we didn't have enough to discuss. Let's just say that I'm proudly a member of a community that has been protesting the Catholic church for like 400 years and leave it at that.

If you feel sad, maybe take heart in that.

I take heart that a few notable well known figures got what they had coming, if even by accident. What makes me sad is that we clearly as a society didn't change. We just incorporated new hashtags on to the banners of political purity, and then went after the entirely wrong targets for the entirely wrong reasons. Sometimes, but may be not always, the comedians have a point. Don Quixote had a better sense of what to tilt at and why. It's extremely important to distinguish between stuff that is relatively innocent and stuff that is not and not make the whole thing collapse out of ridiculousness.

Pick out an example so you'll know what I'm talking about: "Santa Baby". You take on that, and you just diminish the entire movement. Not only is it exceptionally easy to show that in context it's not a 'rapey' song, but rather 'innocent flirtation' but by treating that as something that needs condemning and not a target like say the depiction of women in rap songs, you make it clear how hypocritical you are and how false your puritanical stance is. People start ignoring you.

We can all remember a time when it was risky and self-destructive to speak out against an abusive partner. Victims of abuse today have more support and respect now than they had when I learned that monsters are real.

When did you learn that monsters were real? Did you not read Brother's Grimm? I think we do kids a disservice maybe by excising the sexual and emotional abuse out of those stories since in many cases what they were actually about. This isn't the first time this has come up, and I'm not sure if I'm utterly niave or overly jaded. First someone says that everyone was rape positive until recently, and now you've said you learned monsters were real. Until recently I attended a church that still was part of the Underground Railroad, and was still maintaining a secret infrastructure for smuggling slaves out of places where they were held and into safehouses and on to new lives. So, there's my background, I still knew the Underground Railroad was a thing.

But it has made abuse harder to hide, harder to ignore, and harder to profit from. That is real progress. So close, personal relationships aren't the only ways to change things: tens of thousands of people taking a stand can be pretty darned effective too.

Emmm…. see, that's complicated.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

So instead I wonder; where do we go from here? How do we do more than simply react to bad behavior, but instead actively prevent it? This is a community driven hobby; I refuse to believe that we lack any kind of social power. But how to harness it in a way that’s productive and constructive, rather than simply reactive and retributive (not that such actions are not also important and effective) is what I’ve been mulling over today.

I’ve had the misfortune to personally know & socialize with 3 people who eventually got revealed as sexual predators. 2 were in the hobby. Part of what they are makes them hard to detect, even for professionals. So prevention, while being a laudable goal, may not be a feasible one. The mantra about “see something, say something” may in fact be the best first step we have available to us.

That’s when the hard part begins. Once the masks get pulled away, what do we do?

In most cases, as noted above, few people will have any standing to pursue legal actions. But like some are now saying of R. Kelly, we don’t need to keep supplying people with a platform in our community.

 

[Hussar]

But, [MENTION=4937]Celebrim[/MENTION], the topic isn't #Metoo, or #Believeallwomen or Roman Polanski or the connection between harassment and the porn industry. Every single one of those things are not what's being talked about here. The only thing you've brought up, that's even remotely directly connected is Zak S's original rise in geek stardom. And, again, no one is talkign about going any further than excluding him from the hobby community, so, the whole "maybe I ought to walk away slowly from the mob with its pitchforks and torches and schadenfreude" is really out in left field.

So, to me anyway, bringing in all these things is just derailing the conversation. These are your issues. These are things that concern you and I respect that. But, this is not the place for that conversation. This is the place for us, as a community, to talk about how to deal with this specific issue.

Which is the only way that this conversation can possibly be useful. Broadening the scope to what you are talking about will swirl down the drain faster than belly lint.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I don't think we are actually turning some social corner. I think mostly #metoo is advanced for self-centered reasons and I see no sign things are going to get better.

While some may be co-opting #MeToo for self-centered reasons beyond revealing hidden predators*, it has given voice to victims of criminal activity that historically goes unreported more often than not. Some of the people revealed were- up until now- untouchable. Not so much anymore.

And that’s a good thing, in my book.









* I haven’t seen any evidence of that happening in significant numbers myself

 

[Celebrim]

Here’s where I’m at. There’s a common refrain throughout this whole debacle about how the warning signs about Zak were always there, or how people have been calling him out on this crap for years. If that’s true, and I have no reason to believe it isn’t, why did it take until now for the gaming community as a whole to do something about it? What more could have been done?

Now that is a good set of questions. And I really wish that if we were going to have another one of these debacles that it would have started there.

I don't know the answer, because I don't have an insiders perspective. I can imagine two possible theories, but I don't know which one is true.

a) Umbran's missing stairs theory. This seems to apply to several much bigger industry figures than Zak as well, although Zak's behavior seems to have been notably worse and more abusive than anything I'd heard of so far (until this other scandal I just learned about broke, but I'm still researching that one). In that model, lots of people knew or strongly suspected that Zak's relationship to women was very unhealthy (heck, can we talk about the content of 'Frost Bitten & Mutilated', or is that beyond the pale because then we'd have to deal with the fact so many people liked it, and well obviously there is nothing wrong with that, right?), but because he was so obviously talented and because people thought it was healthy for the hobby for people to associate the game with people who have sex even if it was porn stars, people decided that it just couldn't come out. It would be interesting to see who would admit that they knew or should have known, but ironically, because they would be committing career suicide to do so because the mob would surely come for them as well, what we'll instead get is a lot of shows of virtue and only the vaguest sort of apologies.

b) Zak is a charismatic person who by even his accuser's account was very good at manipulating people and covering his tracks, and was friends with people and people just didn't want to believe things like that of him. I'll fully confess, that my first instincts on Zak were to chastise myself for stereotyping Zak because he was a male porn star and went out of my way in my internal conversation to humanize him and to try to think of him as a person. So likely, if I'd had any real interaction with Zak, I probably would have been pretty easy to take in, because simply you don't want to be that person who is always judging people, but that cool Christ like guy that can hang out with 'Drunks & Tax Collectors' (you see the self-flattery thing going there). Bullies are rarely unpopular people. They are usually very well liked.

I don't know. There are probably 'c's and 'd's in this as well that are beyond my imagination. One thing I will say that I've said before, I was very skeptical of treating Zak like a star in the industry on the basis of the that he was a porn star and somehow that was good image for the industry, and I was really uncomfortable with all the "porn stars are cool and nothing bad will come from linking gaming to porn". I'm reminded of my minority opinion that the Occult scare was bad for the hobby, while so many have argued that negative publicity is good publicity. No, bad publicity is bad publicity.

I’m not sure the answer is anything at this point, and I’m growing more and more confident that’s not the right question. Part of the reason these threads get bogged down in is constantly rehashing the past. So instead I wonder; where do we go from here? How do we do more than simply react to bad behavior, but instead actively prevent it?

And here is where we really depart ways. I don't believe the problem is we have a "rape culture", and so I don't think that a cultural movement is going to dent this. The only thing that can dent this from a preventative perspective is those much disparaged personal relationships. I think maybe social power might help us treat it seriously when comes out but I don't think it attacks the roots of the problem nor do I think social power is going to make it more likely to come out.

I don’t have any answers just yet, but I’m curious if anyone does.

History of humanity doesn't suggest easy answers will be forthcoming.

 

[CleverNickName]

I learned monsters were real when I was 13, and I didn't learn it from fairy tales.
You know what? I should have stopped reading right here:

Oh that? No, that's not changing direction. That's marketing.

That was my cue, and I missed it. Goodnight everyone.

 

[Hussar]

I take heart that a few notable well known figures got what they had coming, if even by accident. What makes me sad is that we clearly as a society didn't change. We just incorporated new hashtags on to the banners of political purity, and then went after the entirely wrong targets for the entirely wrong reasons. Sometimes, but may be not always, the comedians have a point. Don Quixote had a better sense of what to tilt at and why. It's extremely important to distinguish between stuff that is relatively innocent and stuff that is not and not make the whole thing collapse out of ridiculousness.

Maybe it's because I'm not American and I don't live in the US. I live in a country where up until about two or three years ago, major corporations had no local harassment policies. I live next to a country of over a billion people where this year is the first year a civil sexual harassment case is being heard. The notion that things like #Metoo have had no impact is really ignoring the massive impact it has had. Is it perfect? Of course not. But, focusing on things that have gone badly while ignoring the good seems a poor way to go forward.

And, AGAIN, you are trying to derail the conversation, digging into things like The War on Christmas and Baby It's Cold Outside. Good grief. Is it really that hard to stick to the point.