With a lot of like-minded people banded together normalizing it, and favoring buddies over objective performance.
People often only change if they have to, if the risk of being held accountable for poor behaviour is higher than getting away with it. The more these things come to public light, the less opportunities the rotten eggs also get to continue their vile practices in another company when they’re let go.
That’s the thing, though. It’s a rhetorical question and that this came to light in a big way makes me queasy at the thought of how long it’s been nurtured like black mold in the company structure.
The same way it always happens. People are rather compliant and turn a blind eye than do something about things. Whether it’s at a schoolyard where 20 kids refuse to do anything about one bully (even when they could easily overpower them together), a generation of woke customers who consume iphones mined in hellish conditions in Congo, or a corporation case such as these. It’s easier to turn a blind eye or just bite your tongue than do something.
Yeah…
Yet another reason not to consume blindly.
Firm disagree
Site of notoriously healthy workplace cultures for women; Japan
He’s absolutely complicit in the creation/continued existence of a work environment like this. You don’t spend so long a time, and so close to people implicated in this, while not knowing about these incidents and considering how fondly he’s always spoken of his old boy network buddies he sure doesn’t seem to have minded!!
The accusations are from the justice system, following a two year long investigation by the justice system, and three attempted interventions by the state government in trying to resolve the situation which failed thanks to Blizzard
Throughout this investigative period, incidentally, several bigwig figures in Blizzard including mister “haha we call his office the cosby suite” have left.
Blizzard’s response, after refusing to cooperate with creating a better work environment, was to angrily proclaim that if the state wants to prosecute people for sexually harassing an employee into suicide, they’ll just move somewhere else!1!1!
I think it’s pretty obvious that things over at Blizzard are bad, and have been bad since well before Activision popped up - how much involved Metzen was we don’t know, of course, but it’s flat out impossible for him to not have known, and it sure seems like he hasn’t tried doing anything about it and still sticks to being good buddies with the people involved which is very telling of his character IMO - unfortunately the only thing he’s said himself on this matter so far is “Chris metzen” on twitter which he quickly deleted, a cryptic message for sure…
Sometimes you just have to make a statement
A powerful statement indeed (and totally not the dude quickly checking twitter to see if any of the accusations raised have been against him specifically…)
He just had to put his foot down. He had to draw a line in the sand and say enough is enough, had to get it all off his chest.
“Chris Metzen”
Truly inspiring words.
Good thing that we will have a court hearing and a conclusion done about that then before we start to decide whether he is guilty or not. 
The worst part about all of this is that some of the claims and/or actions sound absolutely crazed and insane, so much so that you get this feeling of “no way this can be real”, but then you have the literal state of California on the case + things like the Tiger King Joe Exotic, and you start to remember that anything and everything, both good and bad, is possible in the USA.
Ed balls
(This joke only makes sense to en*lish people)
The serious answer of how we stop this is by calling for workplace unionisation for game development, but also these industries in general. These cultures arise when people feel they are untouchable and exploit the systems around them to protect them - HR becoming a wing of the abuse rather than a solace from it, etc - and collective action is the best way to tackle it.
Also important is diversity, from the top down. Bigoted men make bigoted systems, so you need to simultaneously dismantle both
We don’t oftentimes agree, but yeah, unions are based and good. They create welfare to the employees, employers and societies alike. Just looking at Norway which has this worlds strongest unions to date, their integral involvement in how work is conducted has just been a net positive for all the stakeholders.
Unfortunately whenever you so much as rise the idea of unions in the USA you’re labelled as a commie.
I just saw this clip from BlizzCon 2010 and it made me cringe so much (women cheering, followed by loud audience booing making it all the worse):
https://twitter.com/TheDavidMurphy/status/1418051306409762817?s=20
Glad to see this thread not insta deleted / postlocked tbh. It’s something I’ve come to expect lately
That being said the news regarding Blizzard’s actions are so disheartening. I’d hate to work at a workplace where the person next to me is receiving vastly inequal opportunuties. It speaks a lot about the company failing to recognise talent.
And on top of that there’s the whole harassment which seems to have ran rampant. By this point it’s hard to impossible to justify my sub despite having joined a RP community I’ve grown to love, which is my only reason for playing. So it’s imperative that the predators guilty of their constant harassment and inequality get punished asap.
The worst part about this is that likely we won’t hear much for a while about it, and WoW won’t have any content for another 6-8 months. So once more, we will have radio silence.
But by Jesus Christ this company is so morally bankrupt it’s insane and disgusting
Don’t worry there’ll be a fun new cinematic for you all to get hyped about and forget everything with next week 
On one hand a part of me feels like “WoW setting has always had outfits like these”. But the way how they responded to that question feels really awful.
She didn’t even demand them to change anything about current characters, she just asked if in the future the new female characters could look less like, well, that. Which is a complely fair request.
Also Afrasiabi’s extremely crange response re: how sylvanas should look (i miss her pre-wotlk look) and re: tauren femsle farm wear has aged extremely badly. Jesus.
Then there’s the druid form thing which was very weird till i realized she just meant the moonkin form (and I bloody agree). But the worst part about that was when the dev just said like “ask us some real questions”.
Yeah there may be a few good months before we hear anything else but I hope that I am wrong
I find some personal enjoyment in the fact that we cleary can imagine Sylvanas in another way despite Afrasiabi’s complaints considering she got her amazing Legion model a few years ago.
i’ve honestly always found him to be one of the worst panelists at blizzcon. he’s always so dismissive and standoffish in Q&A’s
Ed Balls…