On this week's Waypoint Radio, the crew discusses the recent slew of sexual and emotional abuse, harassment, and assault allegations happening across all sectors of the video game industry, from game-specific streaming communities to AAA game developers. We discuss how examples in other industries show that this is a systemic issue across all of society, but also the specific ways in which the gaming industry puts people trying to break into the industry in particularly dangerous positions. You can listen to the full episode and read an excerpt below.
I haven’t fully deepened Thanatos’s relationship in Hades yet, but I’m actually a bit surprised that it turns romantic. Perhaps I put a bit too much weight into the fact that until recent events prior to the game they thought they were half-brothers (and Than still thinks this, to my knowledge), and I saw shades of my own relationship with my brother in the two: the brother who works and “does the right thing” and the brother who goofs off and gets into trouble and sometimes has to be bailed out by the other.
When Patrick mentioned having made a “statement” on his own relationship with Max Temkin, I expected something more substantial than 3 tweets that amount to “same, what Anita Sarkeesian said”.
Saying “I privately started cutting ties years ago” might be technically true, but seems deliberately misleading if you were still happily including that person in tweets in January 2018. Austin’s reference on the podcast to a panel “in 2015 or whatever” felt similar.
If you’re publicly apologising for a mistake, I think it’s important to own that mistake in its entirety and its specificity. Prefacing an explanation with “this is not an excuse” doesn’t mean you aren’t being selective about context in the hopes that listeners will judge you less harshly.