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https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/activision-blizzard-sued-by-california-over-frat-boy-culture
Reading through this, some of these allegations and events are extremely troubling.
*trigger warning*
+ Show Spoiler +Female employees working for the World of Warcraft team noted that male employees and supervisors would hit on them, make derogatory comments about rape, and otherwise engage in demeaning behavior, the agency alleges.
+ Show Spoiler +The suit also points to a female Activision employee who took her own life while on a company trip with her male supervisor. The employee had been subjected to intense sexual harassment prior to her death, including having nude photos passed around at a company holiday party, the complaint says.
What's interesting to me is it's not the employees suing, but the state of California. It must have been really bad and the agencies (I'm not sure who would be in charge of this, maybe the workers reported it to some sort of workers' protection agencies) must have received enough complaints and evidence to pursue charges. Thoughts?
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Doesn't surprise me. Glad to see a major lawsuit go through.
From Kotaku's article
In the office, women are subjected to “cube crawls” in which male employees drink copious [amounts] of alcohol as they “crawl” their way through various cubicles in the office and often engage in inappropriate behavior toward female employees. Male employees proudly come into work hungover, play video games for long periods of time during work while delegating their responsibilities to female employees, engage in banter about their sexual encounters, talk openly about female bodies and joke about rape.
I can't imagine someone not filming some of these incidents, I'm sure if they did happen they will come out eventually.
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no wonder theyve been making shitty games all they do is get boozed up and hit on their coworkers
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This is very serious stuff. Hope they get to the bottom of this and that it results in this cancer getting removed completely.
Really hope the new studios that are formed by former Blizzard staff take these things seriously and take steps to prevent such a culture from developing.
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Should be moved to general. Not related to Starcraft.
Also: fuck does bastards
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This is one of the reasons I why I prefer a work environment where the male/female ratio is even. Eighty percent men often leads to a dysfunctional work environment.
Ultimately it the leaders that create the culture though. If the top is rotten the rest of the company will follow.
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Canada8991 Posts
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Not surprising to me at this point, things rarely are anymore, but damned disappointing for sure. Now I'm forced to look back at all the questionable changes made to their games and their staff over the years, and wonder how a toxic frat (read rape?) culture contributed to that. Not totally a "few bad apples" thing, because the leadership were also part of the bad apples, but seriously a damn shame on the game front in addition to the human rights front. Really hard to evaluate how to feel when the company that made so many of the games that defined my childhood turns out to be so deeply problematic. But at the end of the day, fuck everyone who took part in perpetuating this shit, that matters way more than what I think of their games. They need to feel some heat for enabling a sexist, racist culture, and they need to do better, bottom line.
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On July 22 2021 18:30 MockHamill wrote:
This is one of the reasons I why I prefer a work environment where the male/female ratio is even. Eighty percent men often leads to a dysfunctional work environment.
Ultimately it the leaders that create the culture though. If the top is rotten the rest of the company will follow.
This is pure and simple a leadership issue, nothing else. Stuff like this doesn’t happen if the Boss isn’t involved and actively promotes it.
I have worked all my life in heavily women dominated companies, if a group/section turned «bad» (never to the level described here tho because O_o) it normally happened after a change in leadership of said group (via promotion or external didn’t matter).
It was usually fixed pretty fast by changing (firing) the leadership and «recommending to leave» (firing) to the main culprits once a certain treshold was reached, too late for many for sure but, well, you kinda need things to go bad so people can see and do something against it.
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All of these allegations seem unsurprising. Sad to think none of this shocked me (to a degree).
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lol so bad the state had to get involved. Glad to have hated Blizzard since SC2 now.
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This is one we can't blame on Activision. We can't blame it on Bobby Kotick. This has been a problem from before the merger. The documentation makes it clear that this has been occurring in the World of Warcraft development offices for longer than we all want to believe. The years we're nostalgic for with Blizzard? The "glory days", the "golden age"? This was happening back then too. This is a bigger problem than "look what my precious corporation has turned into." We can't let it be made out to be that way.
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Yeah one of the chief scumbags was at the company during the Morhaime days, this is a rot that can't be blamed on Activision.
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Absolutely disgusting. I hope to see all parties from both companies held responsible. And I agree, this company culture is not something that can be laid at the feet of the Activision Blizzard merger. Company culture is formed top-down and the management/executive people involved on the Blizzard side of things were already with the company before the merger took place. How much did the higher ups know, how much were they complacent in, and how much did they actively particpate in? Was this isolated to the WoW team or was this pervasive in multiple or even all the Blizzard Development teams? This gives me serious reservation of supporting any of the new studios formed by ex-Blizzard senior membership now.
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Maybe this is the reason that so many old blizz people are leaving the compagny. Not so much because they miss making RTS games, but because of how awful work environment it was.
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This is absolutely disgusting and tragic x.x Toxicity and harassment like these instances need to be purged big time.
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I am in doubt it's says Kerri's chef on the trip was female and that the employee driven to suicide was traveling with male chef. But how many employees can blazzard have that commit suicide on business trips.
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The only surprising thing is that this hasn't come up until now. We're talking "constant harassment" that went on for years, there are people citing horrible things that go on in the offices and that they have PTSD even when driving next to the offices despite not being employed there any more.
Are people so insecure about their job opportunities or their personal abilities that they put up with this shit for years without quitting on the spot or recording it and blowing the whistle?
If I joined a company and saw such shit going down I'd immediately demand people be fired or quit myself and went to the press. That's assuming I only saw that, were I being harassed like that I'd bring hell down on their heads.
Perhaps it's just the US/corporate employment issue in general, where people are not inclined to fight for their own rights and dignity as an employee.
Developers worldwide should definitely unionize and stick it to the corps.
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EPT
