Harassment in gaming

[Jeremy E Grenemyer]

Let's follow this a bit. I feel offended by your post.

He was talking about a situation at a gaming convention. Your comparison doesn't follow.

 

[sunshadow21]

Ok, now let's consider what will happen in the real world.

I'm in a Magic the Gathering tournament at the con. I end up in the top 8, there's one person with a deck that can consistently beat mine. So I have a plan I setup earlier. I call a female friend that came to the convention separately and have her go report the guy for making an offensive rape joke. Wait 15 minutes, call a second female friend and have her report him for inappropriately touching her.

By your standards he's out, and I win the tournament.

That's the problem with these policies that permit anyone to declare "Harassment" by allowing them to define what is harassment and then making the mistake of following Anita's "Listen and Believe", it's trivial to exploit them to gain advantage in competitions or to eliminate people who disagree with you (I.e. Honey Badgers incident last year).

"I'm offended" isn't enough. "I feel harassed" isn't enough. The only way to handle this is to clearly define cause for ejection in the convention's documentation and leave nothing up to the interpretation of the person making the complaint, because otherwise people are just going to do what they're doing right now, exploiting it to eject people they don't like or don't want to be at the con.

That's part of the problem, but it's not actually what bugs me the most about the idea. People who are that desparate to game the system will always find a way to do so; which policy they use to do so is of little concern to such people.

My biggest concern is reliance on phrases that usually completely fail to achieve the desired goals. Most of the people who feel that those statements are are genuine in their concerns and their complaints; they just have no interest or ability in looking at how those statements actually interact with others. People who rely on those phrases put all the responsibilty of resolution on someone else while expecting very specific results despite the fact that they have given those they expect to resolve the problem any hint of precisely what resolution the accuser expects or why that resolution is justified. They are basically expecting to have full control of the situation but trying to use a proxy that usually has no clue of all (or perhaps any) of the relevant facts in order to exercise that control, and that is pretty much guaranteed to fail each and every time it is attempted.

 

[sunshadow21]

One big aspect that just came into my head that I haven't seen mentioned in this thread is that most cons and managers at game stores have resources and tricks up their sleeve that are not known to the average customer or con attendee. If I am helping run a convention for the 20th time, I almost certainly know tricks of problem resolution that you as the person with the problem have never even considered; I have probably seen situations that are far, far worse or weird or difficult that most anything you can throw at me. If I am just starting out helping run conventions, I probably know someone with more experience that I can turn to ask for help. Automatically binding my hands by saying my response must be this very specific generic response is going to be very, very frustrating to the many volunteers that genuinely want to help, but know from hard experience that the resolution that people seek is not going to be best achieved in the manner that they, with their probably far more limited experience, currently believe to be the best solution. If I am not allowed to ask questions, I will never be able to find out if there is a better solution out there than what they are proposing or expecting.

Trying to claim that it isn't worth the risk of harming the self identified victim to ask questions also removes the possibility that I, as someone who is in a position to deal with these concerns routinely from a viewpiont that is more likely to see the entire picture, might have a better idea that would resolve both the immediate conflict and the long term problem. My personal opinion is that if someone is bothered by something enough to seek help, they need to be flexible enough to understand that the person they are seeking help from may need information that is not entirely comfortable and may end up deciding to provide help in a manner that is unexpected and/or not entirely comfortable in the immediate situation but has a good chance of easing future difficulties.

 

[Jabborwacky]

To be fair, if your job is the enforcer of discipline in an organization, "What did he say?" is actually an appropriate- arguably necessary- question when dealing with allegations of language creating a hostile work environment.

Speaking from experience, I know of a situation in which a woman heard "menstrual" when the speaker said "minstrel" in a particular sentence. Since the error was caught, there was no need to go at the speaker.

My post was in context to the poster I was quoting. Maybe its not what he actually meant, but it seemed as though he was suggesting that expressing doubt/criticism to a victim in regards to their claims is a good idea when in reality it is the opposite.

To help a victim, be supportive and non-critical of them. At the very least they believe such harassment really did occur, and there are likely other factors involved that are not public knowledge. The victim may have survived a war, made a suicide attempt in his/her teens, or possess some other form of emotional trauma exacerbating the situation. Something that would never effect you could well effect someone else.

And here I deleted three paragraphs for slipping into my own issues as a result of just talking about this stuff. It's tough talking about any kind of harassment when you happen to be a person who was harassed into nearly killing himself at a young age. From a person who survived this stuff: Like anything where the damage is psychological more so than physical, its hard to create a single definition encompassing all instances of harassment. That same complexity makes it difficult to spot.

 

[Ovinomancer]

He was talking about a situation at a gaming convention. Your comparison doesn't follow.

Two things: one, just saying that doesn't make it so -- add some reasons to your declaration. Two, I find your statement offensive and have reported it.

 

[sunshadow21]

To help a victim, be supportive and non-critical of them. At the very least they believe such harassment really did occur, and there are likely other factors involved that are not immediately present. The victim may have survived a war, made a suicide attempt in his/her teens, or possess some other form of emotional trauma exacerbating the situation. Something that would never effect you could well effect someone else.

This is absolutely true, but to me it simply highlights why there needs to be room to ask questions. The process of doing so absolutely must be done with care, but I cannot truly help someone if I don't at least know the basics of the probem and why they feel like harassment occurred. If I am helping run a convention, I almost certainly have multiple tools at my disposal to help them, but I cannot know which one is going to be most effective if I can't find out more than the fact that someone feels like it happened and that they are a victim.

 

[Jeremy E Grenemyer]

Ok, now let's consider what will happen in the real world.

Wow.

OK, so you're saying it's absolutely certain not just one, but two females will collude with a male gamer to make a rape accusation--no small thing, mind--so the guy, and not the girls, gets a reward?

Is it too much to ask what world you're living in?

The hidden claim in your argument is that accusations of harassment are equally likely to be false as to be true.

This claim doesn't hold up under scrutiny, because we know that harassment of women is widespread to the point of being endemic. Whereas examples of people exploiting harassment policies to gain some sort of advantage are few and far between, to the point of being outliers.

The second hidden claim is that one person losing out on a tournament win due to unscrupulous lying is at least as morally objectionable as the widespread harassment of an entire gender, for which there are deleterious effects to gaming culture and the industry.

The claim does not follow.

Ultimately, your scenario is a good example of the problem of false equivalency that is polluting this discussion.

 

[Taneras]

The "Duke lacrosse team" example is overused to the point of nonsense.

Let's do some math. There are ~15,000 students at Duke. We'll pretend that 7500 of them are women (probably more). Of those 7500, ~20% - 1500 - will be sexually assaulted while at Duke, on average. Number of students on the Lacross team? About 50? So there are still a 30:1 ratio of false accusations to average sexual assaults at Duke alone for that single year. Now let's add all the other colleges where there WEREN'T false accusations that year: ~12 million (under 25), half of whom (really more) are women. That's about a 1.2 million to 1 ratio of sexual assaults to false reports IN ONE YEAR. Now let's add all the other years that there WEREN'T false accusations at Duke, or any other college, but there continued to sexual assaults. The point is obvious. Even if you think the 20% number is wrong and it's closer to 2%, that's still hundreds of thousands more assaults than false reports.

Using the Duke lacrosse team as a counter example is like saying, "that one time, someone who was wearing a seat belt died because of it." That one time. Out of thousands of lives saved every day. You can't justify never wearing a seat belt because of that one time, and you can't justify a muted or non-existent response to sexual assault because of a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of false reports.

Yes: false reports are horrible. You know what else is horrible? The hundreds of thousands (or maybe millions) of sexual assaults that happen per single false report. The numbers are incomparable, so the idea that one equals the other is ludicrous. The idea that because one can happen we still need to err on the side of the one that happens maybe a million times less often is ludicrous. The idea that nothing needs to be done is ludicrous.

But false reports are scary to men: that's the only difference. Even though women are assaulted zillions of times more often, that doesn't affect most men in a direct way - but false reports! That could affect ME! That's the only reason why false reports are elevated to such a scare level, and why they are cast time and again as a reasonable response to sexual assault responses when in fact they are trivial in comparison.

(There are many other examples in politics right now of similar comparisons which are nonsense but are nonetheless SO SCARY to the people in charge that they outweigh the nonsense. Trans people assaulting women in bathrooms, for example.)

I'd just like to point out that the 1:5 sexual assault/rape rate at college campuses figure that's been floating around is very misleading. Christopher Krebs and Christine Lindquist, the two Senior Research Social Scientists at RTI International who directed the survey in question had this to say about it: "There are caveats that make it inappropriate to use the number as a baseline when discussing rape and sexual assault on campus."

This survey caused a lot of attention to the issue of rape and sexual assault on college campuses and helped spur an actual indepth investigation on this issue. Here's the results: https://www.aei.org/publication/new...2-6-college-women-victims-rapesexual-assault/

The study found that the 1:5 figure was off by a significant amount, showing a 1:52 figure and also showing a declining trend when compared to the 1990's. They also noted, using the same methodology, that college campuses were safer than the general population, suggesting the opposite of a crisis on college campuses.

 

[Taneras]

OK, so you're saying it's absolutely certain not just one, but two females will collude with a male gamer to make a rape accusation--no small thing, mind--so the guy, and not the girls, gets a reward?

Several (3+) Canadian women schemed up a sexual assault/rape claim against Jian Ghomeshi, a Canadian Musician and radio host, which the courts just threw out because there was evidence of collusion via facebook private messages between the women and after the dates the women claimed they were raped/assaulted there were loads of pictures of them still going out on dates with Jian, calling/texting/leaving him messages - some of which included sexual themes. The whole thing really was a circus show. Feel free to Google it.

I'm not saying that Rygar's story was correct, but these sorts of things happen more often than people imagine. And I'm not picking on women, no doubt there are loads of instances where men cover for each other to cover up actual rapes or sexual assaults. I think this just shows how we need to be careful how easily we just drop everything and simply believe anything that we're told.

This claim doesn't hold up under scrutiny, because we know that harassment of women is widespread to the point of being endemic.

What constitutes an "endemic", and how do we know that it's that bad?

The second hidden claim is that one person losing out on a tournament win due to unscrupulous lying is at least as morally objectionable as the widespread harassment of an entire gender, for which there are deleterious effects to gaming culture and the industry.

Rygar never made such a claim.

 

[Jeremy E Grenemyer]

Several (3+) Canadian women schemed up a sexual assault/rape claim...(snip)...Google it.

I'm not saying that Rygar's story was correct, but these sorts of things happen more often than people imagine. (snip) I think this just shows how we need to be careful how easily we just drop everything and simply believe anything that we're told.

Let me see if I have this right:

If a story of women scheming against men can be found via a Google search, then it's true because you believe it's true.

If a woman relates stories of harassment of herself or other women, which can also be found on a Google search, then we had better be careful not to "drop everything and simply believe anything that we're told."

That's an interesting double standard.

I think people would be more likely to consider your arguments on their merits if you afforded the same respect and legitimacy to women and the problems they are raising through blog posts and similar online (and doing so, unlike you, by using their real names and not hiding behind a screen name/alias) that you seem to expect from the rest of us each time you relate an anecdotal counterexample that requires people to go see for themselves.

What constitutes an "endemic", and how do we know that it's that bad?

I wasn't using "endemic" as a noun. I was using it as an adjective.

Maybe you're confusing it with a word like "pandemic."

As to your question: there's no good reason to believe that all women who relate instances of harassment, or otherwise being made to feel uncomfortable and powerless, are lying, much less that they are somehow conspiring in secret, just as there is not good reason to assume male gamers are lying when they say, "Oh, I enjoyed the Con," or "Dude, my DM in the last game was an ass. Skip that guy if you see him."

"But we must have objective proof!" you say (and keep saying, in various ways, in this thread and the last one), or "But here's an example where women were in the wrong!" you say (again, in various ways, in this thread and the last one).

I just have to ask: are you suggesting, Taneras, that as a rule women are not to be trusted?

Rygar never made such a claim.

Do you know what a hidden claim is?