Jennifer Hepler leaves Bioware due to threats by fans

[bjj hero]

That's the thing though...everyone reacts to things differently.You can say something to someone that comes off as a threat to them,does that mean you should arrested and thrown in jail for it?It's a slippery slope because how can you tell the difference of real threats to imaginary ones?

Its fairly simple. Threats of physical or sexual violence are not ok, even when I have a bad day. As a well rounded individual I have plenty of coping strategies that do not involve intimidating others. Dont threaten to kill injure or rape people or their families,, even if you dont intend to follow it through. Is this so hard?

 

[Sparrow]

Well, I obviously don't support someone saying they'll murder her kids but I'm glad she'd left BioWare. She was an awful writer.

 

[ThriKreen]

Well, I obviously don't support someone saying they'll murder her kids but I'm glad she'd left BioWare. She was an awful writer.

Oh? Care to give us some examples of her bad writing?

 

[Something Amyss]

You have no idea what "my standards" but yes most of our society is mentally or emotionally damaged in some way. an emotionally stable person generally wouldn't attack a person they have never met because they don't like what they did with a video game.

Your standards were put forth when you made a statement. Let's just be clear there.

You've dilluted the concept of emotional stability to the point of no meaning, and it looks like a "no true scotsman" fallacy to boot.

Yes we do make progress by examining mental defect and emotional trauma. Pretending it doesn't exist is what makes the problem worse. Accepting that it exists allows us to examine the problem and look for solutions.

That's great. Who was this aimed at, again?

You're not examining anything. You're assuming into evidence something which isn't a given. Nor am I pretending it doesn't exist. Rather, I am attributing the majority of such behaviour to a social construct that is the end result of learned behaviour and silent consent. If you teach people that it's okay say things like "I'm going to murder your kids noob fag" then even normal people will do it.

We've turned a lot of phrases into meaningless terms, especially on the internet. People don't even think about the repercussions because we've treated them as words. death threats, suicide remarks, "die in a fire" and so on aren't outlier reactions. They're more or less the social norm, and while that should change, shunting it all off to mental illness is folly.

There's no irony in me rebuking him for "assuming" all the people involved were males, nothing was done that implies it was a male, on the other hand their actions clearly indicate emotional problems. I never said they should get a pass, just that saying we need to "remove them from the gene pool" is no better than what they did.

You made two baseless assumptions: one about mental wellbeing, another about his stance. You complain about him assuming something even though again, you're only assuming that.

What exactly are you arguing here?

See, most people would have started here. With the question, rather than trying to rebel before they knew what they were rebelling against. I'm not sure what point confuses you however. I explicitly stated my stance that this was socially learned behaviour. Even if the clumsy phrasing got you, you should be able to eke out the meaning of "learned behaviour."

Other than that?

My argument, I suppose, is that your argument is pop-psych garbage and you enter into this with assumptions justified by assumptions. You assume the beahviour of individuals is relegated to emotional damage and then use your own assumption to draw the conclusion that justifies the assumption. It's circular logic and does not stand on its own. Asserting it benefits nobody and is horribly disingenuous.

 

[Dragonbums]

How about you go and read what she actually did say (the interview is quoted in this thread. She said that she wanted a fast forward button so that people could skip through the combats and get to the dialogue. She did not make any reference to the quality of the combat, as far as she is concerned it's all an obstacle in the way of dialogue.

Here is the interview segment that has gotten people pissed at her:

Q: What is your least favorite thing about working in the industry?

A: Playing the games. This is probably a terrible thing to admit, but it has definitely been the single most difficult thing for me. I came into the job out of a love of writing, not a love of playing games... I'm really terrible at so many things which most games use incessantly -- I have awful hand-eye coordination, I don't like tactics, I don't like fighting, I don't like keeping track of inventory, and I can't read a game map to save my life.

Q: If you could tell developers of games to make sure to put one thing in games to appeal to a broader audience which includes women, what would that one thing be?

A: A fast-forward button. Games almost always include a way to "button through" dialogue without paying attention, because they understand that some players don't enjoy listening to dialogue and they don't want to stop their fun. Yet they persist in practically coming into your living room and forcing you to play through the combats even if you're a player who only enjoys the dialogue.

There are quite a many of gamers who don't care about the combat and only the story.
Who played Bioshock Infinite to shoot guys in the face? Zero people. They all played it for the sake of the story, and often times, shooting people in the face 80% of the time gets in the way of that, but there is nothing the player can do to skip it all.
She also did not claim that combat was an obstacle to dialogue. She said that it is a hindrance to people who just want to get to the story bits, but can't skip the battle scenes, like one could skip the dialogue just to see those very combat scenes.
She got that opinion because in the previous question she didn't say she hated video games. She said that for a lot of games, she lacks many of the abilities it would take to play and enjoy those games, and you would be very jaded to act like she is only a special case. Nobody likes playing a game they continuously suck at no matter how hard they try.

Not just "skip through gridning", but "skip through all combat to get at dialogue".

That's 100% the wrong way to approach writing for an interactive medium. Hepler is better out of videogames if she wants people not to play them, she can go and write TV or books or something where all that inconvenient gameplay isn't getting in the way for her.

Combat is only a single type of element that makes a game.

Fez does not have any of the above and it is considered a game.
Mario does not have a world map and is considered a game.
Sonic does not require physically fighting people and is considered a game.

I guess people forgot days of old like "point and click" adventure games. Some of the most famous ones are Pajama Sam and Putput.
Nobody disputed the fact that they are games, and for the most part they involve none of the above in what Hepler doesn't like in a lot of games.

That is like a culinary chef saying that he doesn't like seafood, and all of the food enthusiasts in the world claiming that he has no appreciation for food at all.
That is ridiculous.

 

[Sparrow]

Well, I obviously don't support someone saying they'll murder her kids but I'm glad she'd left BioWare. She was an awful writer.

Oh? Care to give us some examples of her bad writing?

Jesus Thri, we get it. You used to work for BioWare. Try to at least conceal your bias.

 

[Something Amyss]

I'm not condoning the "threats," but...that's just what they are. "Threats" on the internet are not the same thing as someone standing in front of you saying the same sort of things. And even then, the content and context of those threats are subject to analysis.

They're assholes. They're not murderers.

Hell, the number of death threats I've personally received on these here interwebs numbers in the hundreds, if not thousands, and I'm just some random schlub. So my overall response to this story, which has already been debunked, is...I don't care?

Frankly, I'd just love to be working in game writing. I'll take all the trolls, whiny kids, "death threats," and more that the web can throw at me. Just give me a job at Bioware.

Most death threats celebrities (or even public shlubs) get aren't real, either. Most people don't want to killthe President for reals, either. That doesn't change the fact that some are. The internet may be a place where it's easier to fire something off anonymously, but that doesn't mean there's no weight to internet threats. Just like in real life, you have no way of knowing what threats are real. It's a little different if you're not a public figure. You're comparing your Username getting threats to threats against a specific person?

...Yyyyyyyeah, not cool.

I mean, are you willing to give out your real name and contact info, publicly? I bet not. Nor do I want you to. I just want to see if the comparison will actually hold when your actual identity is out there for people to see.

The responses Zachary Amaranth gets are different than the ones I get in my day-to-day-life for doing things like....Well, writing. I'm a part-time, freelance journalist. Though the part-time part is kind of waning and I have nothing recent, but that's not the point. Hell, I'm tempted to try out for the Escapist's news jobs at this point, but I really am not sure I want my name attached to gaming journalism because of the innate hostility.

I mean, let me ask you seriously: have you ever got a call in the middle of the night threatening your life?

Heck, even FF13 forces you to run down a narrow corridor to get from one scene to the next.

If the gameplay is already superfluous, like simply making you run down a corridor, then taking the "game" part out of a "video game" isn't really the issue. It's the question of "why is it even there?"

Games have tried to emulate the movie, and as such some games have already made the gameplay superfluous to those interested in story. Hell, it's been a long-standing issue that gameplay and cutscenes don't typically jive. We can skip cut scenes, why not gameplay?

...Note this is an option I would probably never use, because I do play games for the gameplay. But if my games started requiring things as trivial as "walking down a narrow hallway" to progress between story parts more than occasionally, I might rethink that policy. Or just stop buying those games.

I always found that a little unfair....while the charges against him were clearly way too much, I bet that if he actually killed someone 90% of all the people who now say the police should have just left him alone would not say "oh well....it looked like he was sarcastic, so they were right not to do anything", but would have cried out in terror, pointing at the police for overlooking such a strong evidence.

Well, yes. We're a reactive culture who demands our law enforcement be without flaws. If they err to the side of caution, they're evil. If they're under-reactive, they're incompetent. This is all because we don't want any disruption to the status quo unless something's happened. If a shooter were to follow up a threat with "lol" and then do it, everyone would go nuts that nothing was done. There might even be conspiracy theories.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/jimquisition/7831-Go-Fish

This lack of empathy is uncomfortable.

Blowfish was a man looking for a fight who complained when he found out that people fought better. He himself came off as a bully and a dick, and it's hard for me to show him sympathy for being bullied right back. However, the comments people were addressing there were not death threats and the only one I'm aware of who told anybody to kill anybody else with Blowfish himself.

There is a certain amount of fairplay in dicks being dicks to dick. Even still if Phil's life was threatened, that's uncool. It's wrong. I just think we're talking about two different things here.

Hepler also jumped into the fray. She fired back at critics and attackers and honestly, I thought her response about the internet hate being because she had a job in the games industry and a vagina, two things none of her critics could get was a delicious burn. And once you engage someone like that, even if it's a defensive move rather than a Phil Fish move, you give the impression that it's fair play.

But then, Hepler is getting threats. and I don't know, maybe Blowfish did as well. I prefer to avoid him when possible. What I do know is that he told someone to kill themselves. And even quoting Futurama, it's hard to sympathise with that. I'm sorry. There are a bunch of people on the internet who catch shit for simply doing their jobs, or saying something unpopular. But Fish is, far as I can tell, a different case. And even then, death threats are too far.

However, if you're going to wade in like your standard keyboard warrior, perhaps a thicker skin should be a requisite. It's just not the same subject as "woman gets death threats for unpopular statements."

 

[Something Amyss]

Protip: Someone who literally wishes that 95% of the product that they are working on would go away so that people can get to more of their bit is not someone who should be working on any product.

While that's true, it's completely irrelevant to the subject at hand.

Even if that's what she said, she's working for a company where combat is nowhere near 95% of the product. Or she was at the time.

 

[Terminal Blue]

To be honest, I think she kind of had a point.

A lot of the hate against her writing basically seems to break down to: "But she wrote characters to appeal to girls and fags![footnote]Or at least not exclusively to us straight boys[/footnote] Ewwwww!"

Some of her comments on games were silly, but frankly I don't care. She wrote most of Orzammar. She wrote the Anvil of the Void questline. That to me is the point where you stop fucking questioning whether someone is a good writer.

 

[Bara_no_Hime]

**snip**

Well said. I'm rather sad you got a warning for it. After all, you weren't (technically) flaming anyone on this site, but rather the people who posted on twitter. Ah well, you did present your left butt-cheek.

In either case... well said, I say again.

If anyone wants to know how I feel about this, go click on Zhukov's post on page 1.

This is a sad, sad day for fans of good writing in games. Ms. Hepler, you shall be missed.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

I think I've read it perfectly fine. She was advocating the inclusion of an option to skip over the game play aspects of a game so that you could jump from one scene to the next and just read/listen-to the dialogue.

Actually, we discussed this earlier in this thread. We isolated the four major stumbling points for her...combat, maps, inventory, and tactics. I asked you if that's how you defined "interactivity"...as combat, maps, inventory and tactics alone, and you basically melted into the scenery and appeared again three pages latter coughing up the same old robble about how she was stealing the "game" out of "video games".

So I'm going to ask you again...is it your argument that "games" MUST include one of combat, maps, inventory or tactics in order to properly be considered games, or properly be considered to have interactivity. Yes or no.

I just think there's WAY too much defensive behavior going on in this thread...

Oh I agree, although I think you misunderstand what "defensive" means.

Specifically:

4. Psychology: Constantly protecting oneself from criticism, exposure of one's shortcomings, or other real or perceived threats to the ego.

So for example, if I were to come into a thread, and claim that wanting the OPTION to fast forward or skip combat, maps, inventory and tactics was INDEFENSIBLE...and somehow removed all the "game" from "games"...and someone asked me to defend that claim, and my response was to spend hours prevaricating and name calling instead of just admitting I had said something ridiculous...THAT would be the very definition of "defensive".

 

[WeepingAngels]

So why did it take her 2 years to quit and why is she staying in the business? Sounds to me like she is quitting to go freelance and is using this as an excuse.

Well, the update to the OP clarifies things a little. If she didn't say she was quitting due to harassment, then who made that up?

 

[BloatedGuppy]

Jesus Thri, we get it. You used to work for BioWare. Try to at least conceal your bias.

How is his bias relevant to the question? I'm not terribly familiar with the specific sections Hepler wrote, and couldn't say with any authority whether her writing is "good" or "bad". Given she found employment as a writer, I suspect it is at least "average", if not necessarily to my taste, but what do I know?

Just substantiate your argument. Show some examples of her writing and demonstrate why it's bad. That's fair, isn't it? That's how proper argumentation works.

Well, the update to the OP clarifies things a little. If she didn't say she was quitting due to harassment, then who made that up?

Sensationalistic video game journalism is sensationalistic.

 

[Delerien]

Jesus Thri, we get it. You used to work for BioWare. Try to at least conceal your bias.

How is his bias relevant to the question? I'm not terribly familiar with the specific sections Hepler wrote, and couldn't say with any authority whether her writing is "good" or "bad". Given she found employment as a writer, I suspect it is at least "average", if not necessarily to my taste, but what do I know?

Just substantiate your argument. Show some examples of her writing and demonstrate why it's bad. That's fair, isn't it? That's how proper argumentation works.

Well she wrote Anders in DA2 who I wouldn't call badly written (I'd have to play DA2 again to really judge this though, it's been a while) but I've heard people complain, that he basically became a "whiny insane manchild".

Also Legacy. It had some funny dialogue and the link to DA:Awakening was cool, however all in all it not only seemed entirely disconnected from DA2, which I can somewhat forgive, since it was DLC, but also bit of more than it could chew. It was filled with interesting Ideas, like the aforementioned reference to DA:A, which were never build upon. I don't know how much of that is her fault, it might have just been because the whole thing was rushed or something but as it stands, it seems to me as it misses a whole lot of explanations.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

Well she wrote Anders in DA2 who I wouldn't call badly written (I'd have to play DA2 again to really judge this though, it's been a while) but I've heard people complain, that he basically became a "whiny insane manchild".

See, I definitely disliked DA2 Anders. I don't know if that makes him a bad character necessarily, as my slowly mounting disgust with him was quite visceral and actually informed my experience quite nicely, but he was certainly aggravating.

Evilthecat mentions above she wrote "most of Orzammar". I recall quite a bit of that material being pretty good, but I cannot confirm which bits were hers.

 

[LetalisK]

Strange. I don't recall stating anything about soldiers.

Hence why I said in the very post you quoted "Same applies if you were speaking generally and not just about service members." I was open to the possibility that you weren't talking about service members and perhaps should have said "...or not service members at all", but it doesn't change the point.

Seems like an incredibly presumptuous position to take, just so you can allege moral high ground as a matter of occupation.

Yes, yes it is presumptuous, though not in an attempt at a moral high ground as there is none to be had, which was my point.

 

[Terminal Blue]

How is his bias relevant to the question? I'm not terribly familiar with the specific sections Hepler wrote, and couldn't say with any authority whether her writing is "good" or "bad". Given she found employment as a writer, I suspect it is at least "average", if not necessarily to my taste, but what do I know?

Spoiler: From what I can tell..

DA:O
Most of the NPCs and content set in Orzammar, possibly excluding Behlen and Harrowmont. She definately wrote the dwarven commoner stuff and the Carta.
The Anvil of the Void quest.

DA2
Anders
Sebastian.
Leandra
Bethany
Grand Cleric Elthina
Knight Commander Cullen
Most of the Legacy DLC

DA:I
Unknown at this time.

TOR
Some of the smugger plotlines and content. I can't be specific because I don't play.

But yeah, people are going to ignore 90% of that and ***** about Anders (and only Anders). The substantive content will be that Anders in DA2 is completely different from the way he was in Awakening, that he was too aggressively gay, that he was too much of an Edward Cullen character or that his actions in the third act were absolutely reprehensible. To which the following points are applicable.

1) Anders in Awakening had no defining character attributes beyond having ADHD.
2) Everyone who says they romanced Anders accidentally is either lying or doesn't bother to read dialogue. Frankly, this is mostly about the fact that a male character hits on a male character in game and people aren't given a special option to say "no homo!" and automatically escape all consequences. You know, like real life.
3) You know why Anders is a better character than Edward Cullen? Because his borderline abusive behaviour is not presented as normal behaviour.
4) The basic plot of Anders actions in the third act was decided above the level of the writing team. Contrary to popular belief, writers don't get free reign to write whatever they want. Neither David Gaider or Jennifer Hepler initially intended for Anders to flip out to that degree. Regardless, they did what they could and gave it both motivation and weight. It doesn't make him a nice character, but so what?

I get the feeling sometimes that all people want from supporting characters in games is smirking sub-Whedon gimboids who will crack jokes to alleviate any tension or drama which might create awkward emotional investment. DA2 didn't take that line with any of its characters, and I respect that.

 

[MCrewdson001]

when a sequal is not as good as the original then the people who worked on the game or games should be criticized, but this is just disgusting behaviour

 

[Baron von Blitztank]

So people overreact, sending death/rape threats to others because they don't like something and as a result having someone quit their job?

Just a typical day on the internet!

 

[GloatingSwine]

There are quite a many of gamers who don't care about the combat and only the story.

And there are games for those people, those games are called films. (Cheat code: Press >>)

She also did not claim that combat was an obstacle to dialogue. She said that it is a hindrance to people who just want to get to the story bits, but can't skip the battle scenes, like one could skip the dialogue just to see those very combat scenes.

Here's the thing though, if you "just want the story bits" and don't like the actual game bits, WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU PLAYING A VIDEOGAME? Videogame stories are fucking awful anyway compared to pretty much every other storytelling medium, and that goes triple when they ignore their one strength over other media, interactivity. The very thing you seem to agree with Hepler should be done away with.

She got that opinion because in the previous question she didn't say she hated video games. She said that for a lot of games, she lacks many of the abilities it would take to play and enjoy those games, and you would be very jaded to act like she is only a special case. Nobody likes playing a game they continuously suck at no matter how hard they try.

Yeah, but the point of playing a videogame not just watching a really long not very good film is precisely those bits she wants to skip!. The things she wants to skip are the GAME. Seriously, someone who wants to take the game out of games has no business creating them.

Fez does not have any of the above and it is considered a game.

I know, we should put in a fast forward button so thick people don't have to do the puzzles.

Mario does not have a world map and is considered a game.
Sonic does not require physically fighting people and is considered a game.

I know, we should put in a fast forward button so people who are crap at platformers don't have to do the tricky platforming.

I guess people forgot days of old like "point and click" adventure games. Some of the most famous ones are Pajama Sam and Putput.
Nobody disputed the fact that they are games, and for the most part they involve none of the above in what Hepler doesn't like in a lot of games.

No, but they did include a significant challenge element between the player and the story progression, in those cases pixel hunting and lateral thinking puzzles.

That is like a culinary chef saying that he doesn't like seafood, and all of the food enthusiasts in the world claiming that he has no appreciation for food at all.
That is ridiculous.

No, it's like a salad chef at a seafood restaurant saying he doesn't like seafood so everyone should just throw the horrible fish in the bin and enjoy his wonderful salads, despite the fact that the clientele came to that restaurant specifically to get seafood.