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On August 02 2021 04:15 Timebon3s wrote:
I work with a lot of other people, and a lot of shit goes down that the bosses can't possibly be aware of.
Imagine having 9000 employees. Yeah, it's his job to know these things but ffs he is not guilty of sexual harassment just because he is a boss.
And yet there are companies with many times more employees than that who doesn't have this problem.
At some point, you have to start wondering what you're doing wrong. These things don't just happen out of the blue.
The company I currently work at has over 40000 employees. I certainly don't know every one of them (or even 1% of them), and I'm sure there's plenty of assholes amongst that number of people. But there's no systematic issues, because problems that pop up gets dealt with instead of shoved under the carpet.
If you are at the top and you have some asshole employees, that's on them. But when you have a systematic issue across your entire work environment, that's on you, because you've allowed it to happen. You've fostered an environment where this is allowed to happen, and you either did it maliciously, or through sheer incompetence. Neither gets you off the hook
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On August 02 2021 04:15 Timebon3s wrote:
I work with a lot of other people, and a lot of shit goes down that the bosses can't possibly be aware of.
Imagine having 9000 employees. Yeah, it's his job to know these things but ffs he is not guilty of sexual harassment just because he is a boss.
Can you point me to the posts that are accusing Morhaime of sexual harassment? The only things I've seen being stated in this thread and elsewhere is that Morhaime was aware of the harassment and chose not to do anything. While not a crime(or maybe it is if he is the boss and the one accused is his friend and colleage?) it is still extremely unethical and would take him down a peg or two on the 'what a great nice guy' pedestal - myself included btw, I used to think Morhaime was awesome and a standup guy who was just trying to navigate through Activision's bullshit.
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Exactly my sentiment. I never said Mike was guilty of any sexual assault or harassment, in fact I've made the contrary quite clear, but I did illustrate why he is still part of the problem for being all buddy-buddy with the guys who were doing the harassing and looking the other way, despite multiple women having the guts to tell him about what they went through and him being close enough to take action at pretty much every instance. He is not innocent in the larger picture, and he definitely is not part of the solution if he's part of the original problem.
We need to be just as ready to talk about why Mike's behavior was problematic as we are to roast guys like Alex Afrasiabi for their outright predatory behavior.
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Poland3756 Posts
On August 02 2021 06:35 Excludos wrote:Show nested quote +On August 02 2021 04:15 Timebon3s wrote:
I work with a lot of other people, and a lot of shit goes down that the bosses can't possibly be aware of.
Imagine having 9000 employees. Yeah, it's his job to know these things but ffs he is not guilty of sexual harassment just because he is a boss. And yet there are companies with many times more employees than that who doesn't have this problem. At some point, you have to start wondering what you're doing wrong. These things don't just happen out of the blue. The company I currently work at has over 40000 employees. I certainly don't know every one of them (or even 1% of them), and I'm sure there's plenty of assholes amongst that number of people. But there's no systematic issues, because problems that pop up gets dealt with instead of shoved under the carpet. If you are at the top and you have some asshole employees, that's on them. But when you have a systematic issue across your entire work environment, that's on you, because you've allowed it to happen. You've fostered an environment where this is allowed to happen, and you either did it maliciously, or through sheer incompetence. Neither gets you off the hook
The fact that shit can happen without manager's awareness is one thing. But whether company has a mechanism that allows employee to raise the issue in some way without going through "proper" channels that might be part of the problem is another. And the latter is not THAT complicated.
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Yeah, its very weird how these government people wind up in the fuckin' games industry of all places, but also its not weird at all given I'm sure being allowed into positions like these is why they were in their governmental positions to begin with.
Weird that it winds up being the games industry though.
Whats probably more immediately alarming to me is the union-busting firm they hired though, same one Amazon uses, and I can't imagine ActiBlizz's intentions for hiring them are primarily to do with fixing their sexual harassment issues.
ActiBlizz started cancelling it's all-hands-on-deck-meetings around when the announcement of them hiring the law firm, shifting to smaller scale discussions and directing employees to share concerns individually.
Reads to me like they're trying to keep people from collectively talking about the issues at hand and any possible unionization by keeping any everything at a smaller or individualized scale.
https://uppercutcrit.com/activision-blizzard-cancels-any-further-all-hands-meetings-prioritizes-discussion-sessions-with-no-mention-of-walkout/
ActiBlizz is going to go down the absolute shitter if the union-busting tactics work, theres been speculation that Blizzard might switch to a more mobile game focus if big tent poles like WoW aren't raking it in enough, and uh, given one of the biggest PR fuckups was them announcing a mobile game, I can't imagine Blizzard's core fanbase sticking it out through just all of the dumb good will draining bullshit that Blizzard's done, from Diablo Immortal, to Blitz Chung, to Warcraft: Refunded, to severe sexual harassment cultural issues. Thats a lot of good will to set on fire in the time frame they've managed it.
EDIT: Wait, of course, Activision makes Call of Duty, that fuckin' explains why Republican administration officials are involved with Activision, thats so fuckin obvious...
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United Kingdom20326 Posts
On August 02 2021 17:07 plasmidghost wrote:
This situation is god-awful but I was not expecting it to be "ActiBlizz hired war criminals as C-suite executives" awful. Nothing can change at this company fast enough.
She's also literally blocking the employees involved in the walkout on social media.
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Jesus fuck. I had an idea it was bad, but this is next level bad
If anyone is wondering why we say "It starts at the top", this is what we mean. Whenever systematic issues like these pop up, the problem is ALWAYS at the top. Shit always drips down. You don't get a company full of systematic discrimination and misogyny without the rotten apples at the top laying down the groundwork for it to be possible in the first place
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I would have never thought, that Activision-Blizzard is a cosy little place for Republican ex-officials.
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On August 02 2021 03:09 Excludos wrote:
What if I twist the argument a little bit for you guys:
If Mike Morhaime didn't know about what was going on within his own company, does that really mean he's off the hook? His job was literally to know about these things (among much more, of course), and not knowing about them meant he did such a terrible job it borders on negligence. He actively ran a company which fostered this kind of environment, and not knowing about it isn't necessarily a valid excuse.
To me, he's guilty either way, whether he knew about it or not. The question is only on whether it was due to malice or incompetence
He's not off the hook, it's his company, this was happening, knowingly or not, under his watch.
The question is, how liable is he? That's a legal term, and that has VERY specific qualifications that it's up to the court to figure out.
Far as I'm concerned. Since Blizzard is now (and has been for at least 2 decades) a publically traded company. Liability falls to the brand itself before it falls to the individuals in said company if they weren't the actual people creating the problems. I'm not a lawyer though so maybe (probably) I'm wrong about that.
People can crucify Mike however much they want to on social media. As far as this lawsuit goes, I sincerely doubt he will be held personally liable for much. I do hope the victims get a nice settlement out of this, but I personally think that will come from the money of the publically traded lable rather than specific individuals that do not meet the criteria I mentioned already. That's IF this lawsuit is successful. Again I'm no law expert, so I can't even guarantee that it will be.
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On August 02 2021 22:34 Silvanel wrote:
I would have never thought, that Activision-Blizzard is a cosy little place for Republican ex-officials.
Well they don't pay tax and claim loads of government money too, so it seems kinda fitting to me.
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This is way more disturbing than the sexual harassment stuff.
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United Kingdom20326 Posts
J.A.B. stepping down but this is just the start. Townsend and more have to go IMO.
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Huge, long list of people that SHOULD go, but I very highly doubt we'll see more than JAB tbh. In my fairy tale world almost every C-suite executive from Kotick downwards would be flushed down the toilet, though.
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Northern Ireland26629 Posts
On August 03 2021 22:07 Zambrah wrote:
Huge, long list of people that SHOULD go, but I very highly doubt we'll see more than JAB tbh. In my fairy tale world almost every C-suite executive from Kotick downwards would be flushed down the toilet, though.
I dunno, in an ideal world perhaps.
There’s plenty of standard corporate shit types that have presided over the decline of an institution whose value to others they don’t, and perhaps can’t comprehend.
I’d certainly rather this business, and businesses in general be less dominated by such types and sweeping changes be wrought.
On the other hand I think there’s a perhaps dangerous conflation of the decline of Blizzard due to the increasingly shortsighted chasing of the bottom line for shareholders, and the work environment and cultural problems within.
The former sucks for gamers, because they aren’t gamers, they’re business people and want to get short term returns even at the detriment of the products and the company’s reputation.
The latter, well the problem is that they are gamers and brought the worst of the misogyny in ‘gaming culture’ into the workplace and imposed it on others who weren’t comfortable with it.
As much as I agreed that Acti-Blizzes prior missteps were due to corporate types, the call that those missteps could be fixed if the company was run by people who love games again, well this latest debacle IS those creatives, almost exclusively as far as I can tell.
Bobby Kotick is a ruthless arsehole, and the archetypal ‘price of everything, value of nothing’ kind of guy. But last I checked he’s not running his business like a frat house.
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I mean, ActiBlizz IS Bobby Kotick's business, given how much money these executives make, and given they are in leadership roles, they have responsibility for not taking action. Its not that every executive was directly contributing to the frat house sexual harassment bullshit, but if you're going to be in a leadership role raking in grotesque sums of money you better be prepared to take responsibility when the company you run turns out to be run like shit.
Im not saying anything about the quality of games being made, thats a significantly more complicated question to track, I'm frustratedly resigned to accepting that video games are going to slowly become experiences dedicated to getting whales to spew money at companies, and I do hate it, but I don't strictly think that means executives have to be fired for.
Letting your company cause someone to commit suicide on a business trip though? Thats not something that just stays quiet in the lower levels of the company, thats big serious news that these executives will hear about.
Leadership should involve taking responsibility when what you're leading is a colossal sexual harassing frat house that was allowed to fester for a very long time.
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Bobby Kotick may not run the company like a frat house, but I think knowing what we've learned about the board of executives he probably laughed when the sexual assault allegations came out. The "Hold my Beer" meme seems particularly apt.
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Yeah, I have precisely zero faith that he takes sexual harassment seriously, especially given hes literally been sued for sexual harassment before.
https://latimesblogs.latimes.com/entertainmentnewsbuzz/2010/08/activision-ceo-kotick-loses-battle-with-top-hollywood-litigator.html
Describing a May 2007 meeting with Abu-Assal and Cove’s chief financial officer, the arbitrator wrote that “Mr. Kotick wanted to destroy the other side and not to pay Ms. Madvig anything.... Mr. Kotick realized this was not a good business proposition, but said ‘that he was worth one-half billion dollars and he didn’t mind spending some of it on attorneys’ fees.’”
Man, this makes me want to go back and find some of his more infamous horrible quotes, dude can read like a Captain Planet villain from the outside.
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Northern Ireland26629 Posts
On August 03 2021 22:39 Zambrah wrote:
I mean, ActiBlizz IS Bobby Kotick's business, given how much money these executives make, and given they are in leadership roles, they have responsibility for not taking action. Its not that every executive was directly contributing to the frat house sexual harassment bullshit, but if you're going to be in a leadership role raking in grotesque sums of money you better be prepared to take responsibility when the company you run turns out to be run like shit.
Im not saying anything about the quality of games being made, thats a significantly more complicated question to track, I'm frustratedly resigned to accepting that video games are going to slowly become experiences dedicated to getting whales to spew money at companies, and I do hate it, but I don't strictly think that means executives have to be fired for.
Letting your company cause someone to commit suicide on a business trip though? Thats not something that just stays quiet in the lower levels of the company, thats big serious news that these executives will hear about.
Leadership should involve taking responsibility when what you're leading is a colossal sexual harassing frat house that was allowed to fester for a very long time.
Just what I’m noticing from comment threads, especially on Twitter people seem to be jumping on Kotick, who I think probably operates at a pretty high level of abstraction from these goings-on.
Do I think corporate responsibility should include him? Absolutely.
Not an accusation I’m levelling at you at all man by the way, but I’m getting a rather pungent whiff of ‘we finally have a weapon to use against Kotick for ruining our games’ attitude to this in many quarters, rather than genuine concern for the culture and the victims of said culture.
I think they’re pretty separate things and the unpalatable aspect is that people who were probably Gamergaters are concern trolling to try to get leverage and try to revert some of ActiBlizz’s general movements.
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EPT
