Alison Rapp Fired By Nintendo Discussion Thread -- Read Ground Rules in OP
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SolicitorPirate
Member
I really hope we pour in tons of complaints to Nintendo and exercise discipline in not buying their products. Make it clear to them there is a price to pay for capitulating to hate groups.
Who's being targeted and why. Of course the primary people being harassed are typically notable women, anyone with an outspoken opinion about sexism and progressivism in video games can be targeted, male or female.
Yeah, she was really awful during the whole mess. She knows farttocontinue and familiar with his and other GG moderates works. She claims to be neutral but she's not at all.
I'll keep saying it until the cows come home but for someone who represents the Wayne Foundation, she's a terrible detective for the company. And she seems to conspire with more villains on Twitter than any heroes.
A Link to the Past
Banned
"Can" be
Yes, anyone "can" be a target. But whataboutisms is distracting from the fact that the people who "are" targeted are horribly, disproportionately a certain type of people.
NO, I am not suggesting making them neutral, I know exactly what they are.
But conceding that they've "won" is ludicrous. It gives an impression of an incontestable victory, when there doesn't need to be. That everyone should just walk away and hope that things turn out better by chance the next time they do this.
Instead, what should be done is pressuring Nintendo, the company that conceivably gave GG what they wanted because they wanted it, into coming down harder against them. Not saying "oh well, they'll give them what they want, nothing we can do about it."
This is the major flaw in all of these situations, and part of why GG doesn't seem to die. We say that the industry doesn't fight against them on this sort of thing, but how many of us are ASKING them to? GGers are clearly engaging with these corporations directly, as evidenced by this outcome, but where is the pressure coming from on the other side? Instead, we seemingly just fold our arms and say "better luck next time" with commentary about how they "won". And that DOES, in fact, allow their numbers to grow.
So yeah, I am going to take issue with the passivity of the suggestion that they won. Because they don't win anything until we stop doing anything about it.
Hey some male treehouse employee got fired for saying something on a podcast (details escape me). So Nintendo firing Alison Rapp can't be so shocking. She clearly drew a lot of attention to herself, and that doesn't jive with a company like Nintendo. GG treated her horribly, but her part in it can't be ignored.
I already suggested boycotting Starfox, but someone just laughed D:
When people start actually ignoring them, then we will know if it does nothing. Go after the people with their prints on the doorknob, even in a united front someone has to take the actual risks. stop conjuring the word gamergate before they even take responsibility, let them do it themselves, enough to feel dumb and impotent about having to remind everyone who they are. We bring them to life and make them feel like much needed antiheros, and some of the time they aren't even behind it but bet your bottom dollar they will take responsibility.
Goro Majima
Kitty Genovese Member
I'm really curious about the mechanisms behind the localization process now. If it's like every other company ever with a product I imagine it going like this:
Bob, who works in marketing and whose job it is to help maximize sales, says to his boss Steve the VP "Hey we did surveys and found that by making our content a bit less sexual, we can actually increase sales and protect our brand in our territories"
Steve the VP says "awesome, I like money, let's do that. Tell the localization team to identify a list of proposed changes to the source material"
The localization team goes over the game and singles out the content they felt should be changed to meet the directive of making the game less sexual. They present a report to the VP, the VP signs off on it saying the changes look good, and everyone heads to the Winchester for a pint believing that they'll now make more money or at least protect the brand.
Basically I believe everything revolves around money and there are literally no "SJW"s in play here at any point of the process. I just don't believe that companies are actually looking to censor products on the basis of progressing social values if it meant fewer sales. Therefore the whole crusade against censorship feels really misguided and I just don't get it. So it seems like the whole thing started on a flawed understanding of the process.
If someone is familiar with the process of localizing, I'd love to know how far off I am about all this!
Bob, who works in marketing and whose job it is to help maximize sales, says to his boss Steve the VP "Hey we did surveys and found that by making our content a bit less sexual, we can actually increase sales and protect our brand in our territories"
Steve the VP says "awesome, I like money, let's do that. Tell the localization team to identify a list of proposed changes to the source material"
The localization team goes over the game and singles out the content they felt should be changed to meet the directive of making the game less sexual. They present a report to the VP, the VP signs off on it saying the changes look good, and everyone heads to the Winchester for a pint believing that they'll now make more money or at least protect the brand.
Basically I believe everything revolves around money and there are literally no "SJW"s in play here at any point of the process. I just don't believe that companies are actually looking to censor products on the basis of progressing social values if it meant fewer sales. Therefore the whole crusade against censorship feels really misguided and I just don't get it. So it seems like the whole thing started on a flawed understanding of the process.
If someone is familiar with the process of localizing, I'd love to know how far off I am about all this!
JB-the-Hunter
Member
I haven't been able to sit down and read up on this until now, but based on what I've gathered, there is information still unknown to the general public that is key to her firing, and until Nintendo says exactly what she was fired for (instead of the somewhat broad reasoning they gave), I don't have enough to form a concrete opinion on the matter. I'm not one to jump to conclusions. The only things I have to go by are Nintendo's generic, straightforward and undetailed statement and Rapp's emotional, opinionated, defensive series of tweets. I do not believe that either party is lying, because both of their statements/stories line up for the most part, but there is definitely more to it. That said, there is really nothing about this firing that stands out to me as unjustified and it seems to me like a lot of people are making this out to be a gender issue, including Rapp herself, when it really seems more like a company's policy/employee's actions issue. If people have issues with the policy that Nintendo included in their statement, that's understandable, but I'm not seeing where Rapp's gender comes in to play. If you grouped her together with Bill, Krysta and Samantha, Alison is the one that stands out as not like the others, her tattoos, her piercings, her unfiltered Twitter account, and despite those things, she was still employed by Nintendo, so whatever she was fired for had to be something that came to light recently (apparently whatever her second job was), and that is something that still remains unknown... to me at least.
I know that I won't be buying anything from them for a while. I think this whole thing might cause me to take a step back from gaming/gaming culture for a while and perhaps check in later to see if the climate has changed. All of this is so dumb.
prag16
Banned
https://twitter.com/alisonrapp/status/715362765326553088
That's the tweet that's missing from the OP.
But basically read the QuixoticNeutral post.
I think the focus needs to be on what can be done to stop the harassment/GG going forward (and whether Nintendo being publicly supportive of Rapp earlier would have helped that), and not whether Nintendo should have fired her or not.
That tweet makes it sound like the "moonlighting" was more (possibly a lot more) NSFW than anything on her social media accounts. We have very incomplete information. Therefore I'd agree with the last line; it's hard to have a discussion about the firing in particular. Some people will really be assholes when shrouded in the cloak of relative anonymity of the internet. It's something I'll probably never understand.
charlequin
Banned
"Gamergate is a misogynist hate movement" is exactly the correct amount to generalize.
She had no part. They dug until they found something that Nintendo bit on.
AcademicSaucer
Member
Thats not going to work tho, I've been reading, and it seems that US citizens can somehow pressure their representatives to do something about online harassment.
Don't buy from Nintendo if that makes you uncomfortable tho, is your money after all.
It's not her gender people are saying they are firing her for. It is the Gamer Gate harassment context, whose victims tend to be predominantly women.
But you gotta make sure your house is in order before being so outspoken. Just the reality of it, look at politics. Not right, but it's the way of things at the moment.
A Link to the Past
Banned
Like it or not, this is, indisputably, a GamerGate win. GGers may be mouthbreathing, socially inept losers, but they're smart enough to be able to identify a pattern. This is them having forced another woman out of her job, and Nintendo helped them in this by buckling. When Nintendo surrenders to GamerGate, it does mean that GamerGate won, and a GamerGate win is more painful to people like me than you can ever imagine. They are not going to become more or less engaged in their terrorism if I deny them the win. They got exactly what they wanted, and only because Nintendo was willing to compromise and elevate GamerGate to a point they've never been to before. Has GamerGate ever been able to accomplish this before now?
This doesn't work. It never works. Ignoring them has literally no result besides bringing less of a spotlight to their horrible actions, and thus less understanding of how horrible they truly are. Again, these people don't feed off of attention, they feed off of the ability to ruin people's lives, which they do with or without attention.
meltingparappa
Member
This terrible debacle, moreso than the other gamergate antics, follows a lot of parallels to other twitter witch hunts.
Someone recently wrote a book about online mobs who bring great harm to people in the name of social vengeance, and has a pretty great excerpt as a Ted Talk.
(Also thanks everyone who quoted me to teach me how the Wayne Foundation head is a complete scumbag)
Same could be said of the GOP and their policies, yet millions continue to support them. Unfortunately we don't live in a just and fair world where people care about the Other and somehow end up with a lot of frustration and hate that leads to dehumanizing the Other, resulting in discrimination, hate campaigns, and oppression (individually and systematically).
Pretty fucked up situation, even after all the statements and clarifications. She doesn't say what the second job was, but frankly she shouldn't have to. This should never have gotten this far. Nintendo could have stopped all this early on by backing her up, but they chose silence. Unacceptable.
To be clear she never fucked with anyone, talked shit about anyone, or bothered anyone online. Her being outspoken is not on the same level as what these fucking losers do to people online.
Lets not compare the two.
TheBaldEmperor
Member
Why? How can we say they are in the wrong here?
They need some policy changes imo. I don't believe boycotting will get the message across. In the other thread, everyone was passing around their corporate email link about this issues and I think that should be done.
A Link to the Past
Banned
How ridiculous. Outrage is a tool that everyone uses. In fact, right now, go to the most conservative person you know and tell them that you hate the police, or that God doesn't actually exist. You do that, and tell me how they react to that.
No problem. :v Here, have this illustration of a cat by Allie Brosh
The issue at hand is that, had GG not effectively dug up everything on her while also getting a known Anti-Sex Trafficking group on Nintendo, then her second job would have never come to light and her outspokenness would have not mattered. She'd not have been fired.
She may have been butting heads with some NoA higher-ups but they never did anything to her outright until GG started digging into her life and throwing shit at Nintendo. The reason she was targeted is obvious.
The only real point left, and where you draw an opinion, is if you think Nintendo was in the wrong, the right, or if there hands were tied. I am in the first and third category as I think this shit went bananas for the company when the Wayne Foundation got involved and that thesis got dredged up out of context. I don't think her actual outspokenness and persona were a problem for Nintendo because its not like she's a new hire.
The issue I kinda have with it is I think the GG people clued Nintendo in on about it. That's a major privacy issue.
LudicrousSpeed
Member
That's not at all how I read that quote. It goes along with the entire chain. Remember, earlier in the chain is where she mentioned that they had asked her to stop tweeting about rape culture in the first week.
What she's saying is what many people here are suggesting, that any objection with the second job is merely a pretext so they don't have to say "We fired her because we agree with the mob". The comments about sex-positivity and the industry being afraid of women aren't about the nature of her second job, they're about Nintendo's behavior up until that point.
But to connect those in sequence, you'd actually have to see it in context and not just as a standalone tweet.
KuwabaraTheMan
Banned
The moonlighting was only even brought up because some anonymous GGer contact Nintendo to tell them about it, in a clear attempt to get her fired.
So the whole situation really does still boil down to those guys.
yeah but who dug up her moonlighting gig and found her tweets controversial. Hint: starts with G
TheBaldEmperor
Member
It isn't Nintendo's place to say what her second job was.
I don't think you can ignore something just because of who told you of it though. If the "public" knows then you as an employer should too.
Yeah Jon Ronson is The Dude on this subject. He has a bunch of writings and interviews on podcasts and stuff on these Get People Fired Mobs. I remember when this kind of retributive social media campaign first started happening I was chill / even supportive of it. Because fuck racists, right! But it became very clear very quickly that blowing up single tweets or single pictures into A Total View Of A Person's Soul was not at all a healthy way to go, especially with how vicious some of the dogpiling could get.
Nintendo and Alison likely each respect the other's privacy. Its for them and for them only.
It stopped being posted in the other thread once Nintendo made their statement, but I still think a message needs to be sent, so here it is again: http://en-americas-support.nintendo.com/app/ask/ht/576/cp/599.
Honestly, who the fuck cares? Why does the focus of harassment always turn to the victims? Nintendo felt they were within their rights to fire her. Fine. But let's not drag her business through the mud any more. Fuck that shit.
Nintendo likely won't make a statement. Alison says it has nothing to do with games and feels she doesn't need to talk about it further. She instead would like to make games a better place to be and just plain better.
prag16
Banned
I don't think anyone's comparing her social media behavior to a misogynistic hate mob. She obviously doesn't seem to deserve what happened to her, but there are realities that come with being a visible customer-facing representative for a company. The bar is a LOT higher for people like that than random anonymous internet morons.
Would you agree or disagree that acknowledging this "win" would or could create defeatism among people who would engage in opposing action against them?
I wouldn't go so far as to say they don't feed off of attention. Some of them seem to quite relish it, in fact. People with polarizing beliefs often do.
But again, if GG didn't bring it to their attention, they wouldn't have found out about it. That's the issue.
That was a situation where he went on a podcast as an employee of Nintendo to speak about Nintendo, without approval from higher ups, and used the opportunity to badmouth a group of their customers.
This is someone being attacked for things said on a personal account that were unrelated to company business, and for a second job she held under a pseudonym and again unrelated to company business. There's definitely a difference between the two.
Laughing Banana
Weeping Pickle
So, as far as GAF is concerned, it is an accepted fact that Nintendo lied about why they fired her?
JB-the-Hunter
Member
I don't care if Gamer Gate led to her firing, all I care about is whether or not her firing was justified (and I'm not stating that it was justified. I don't know if it was). Are people saying that, even if it was warranted, Nintendo shouldn't have fired her just because Gamer Gate was involved? I'm not sure what people are up in arms about. Fill me in.
They didn't lie, they just never told the whole truth.
Why would that not work? Not buying their products and getting others on board would be a strong message ( Well and still emailing them about the issue)
TheBaldEmperor
Member
The reason it's being asked about is because it's the unknown piece fair or not. If it helped her case she would have said what she was doing for a second job I imagine.
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