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Nintendo of America's testers say they faced years of sexual harassment:

Draugoth

Draugoth

Gold Member
https://kotaku.com/nintendo-of-america-sexual-harassment-sexism-aerotek-1849414921

443caac9840540b008901819ec784de3.jpg


Two years ago, a contract game tester named Hannah (not her real name) had a harrowing experience that led her to quit her dream job at Nintendo of America after nearly a decade. Several employees had created a group chat on Nintendo’s Microsoft Teams server called “The Laughing Zone.” It was supposed to be a lighthearted place for coworkers to share memes with one another. That changed when a male translator was added to the group. Soon, he posted Reddit screenshots about why Vaporeon was the best Pokémon to have sex with. Hannah was disgusted by the explicit descriptions. When the conversation turned to Genshin Impact, the translator posted a gif of Paimon, a child character in the game. He posted about how it’s okay to be sexually attracted to Paimon despite the character’s childlike appearance, voice, and personality. Hannah screenshotted the sexual comments and attempted to escalate the situation with Aerotek, the staffing company she was contracted under while working at the Redmond, Washington headquarters.

“Nintendo was almost like a nightmare. It’s sad because I love Nintendo; I grew up with Nintendo. I was so excited to join Nintendo when I first got there, and I thought I was going somewhere,” said Hannah. “I had my supervisors telling me I was doing such a good job.” But by reporting the incident, she had set off a chain of events that led her to quit her job testing Nintendo’s games.
The problem was that women were both underrepresented among contractors, but also not often hired into full time roles. Five sources who worked at Nintendo estimated that the percentage of women contractors in testing hovered at around 10 percent (based on the head-counts on their own teams). In some projects that sources worked on with several dozen team members, women on the team would number in the single digits. This discrepancy can be explained by the fact that many Nintendo games were not tested by staff who were classified as Nintendo employees. They were employees who worked under the contracting company Aerotek. But even among full time employees, 37 percent of Nintendo of America’s salaried employees are women, and only 23.7 percent of its managers are women globally.

Hannah also told Kotaku that she struggled to assert her financial worth while testing Nintendo’s games. After working at Nintendo for nine years, she found out a more junior male contractor in her testing department was making $19 an hour while she was making $16. She asked Aerotek what she could do to close the wage gap and fought for a pay increase for several weeks before she finally landed at $18. One woman said she stayed at the same base wage for six years until she got a higher offer elsewhere and threatened to leave. Another woman was offered double her current pay when at a different company.
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Kataploom

Kataploom

Gold Member
Ok, but why are these "reports" coming from external companies that have nothing to do with Nintendo apart from contractual obligations of providing a service? I'm yet to see any recent relatively recent report from an actual Nintendo employee complaining about the company? Oh, and it's always kotaku... Weird, isn't it?
 
M

ManaByte

Gold Member
Kataploom said:
Ok, but why are these "reports" coming from external companies that have nothing to do with Nintendo apart from contractual obligations of providing a service? I'm yet to see any recent relatively recent report from an actual Nintendo employee complaining about the company? Oh, and it's always kotaku... Weird, isn't it?
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Because people like Kotaku don't have any fucking clue how the video game industry actually operates outside of their little blog, Twitter, and Ko-Fi donations. Most QA testers ARE temps working for an external temp agency. That's how it works. But Kotaku doesn't know that, and some of these testers aren't that bright and they think if they go and throw a big fit in a Kotaku expose, it'll result in them being hired on full time at whatever company they're contracted with.

The reality is, it's really easy for Nintendo to find out who sent this to Kotaku and they'll just call the temp agency and tell them not to send her back and they'll get another expendable replacement.
 
Robb

Robb

Gold Member
The most surprising thing in this story is that it doesn’t mention the guy she reported being fired..
 
DeepEnigma

DeepEnigma

Gold Member
lovetalkgames said:
No, I’m saying it’s ironic to point out a particular group of fanatics on a forum dedicated to fanatics (or enthusiasts).
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This has nothing to do with fanaticism, but rather to do with someone who actually reads.
a child character in the game. He posted about how it’s okay to be sexually attracted to Paimon despite the character’s childlike appearance
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M

ManaByte

Gold Member
Kamina said:
Alison Rapp was a Treehouse host that turned out to be moonlighting as hOoker in seattle
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There's more to it than that.

It happened not long before Nintendo was to reveal the Switch, and it coming out that one of their Treehouse employees was moonlighting as a hooker (while her husband worked in the NOA coffee shop), it'd be a PR nightmare. So Nintendo fired her.

Of course this was during GAMERGATE so she immediately took to social media and cried that she was fired because evil GAMERGATERS were harassing her. Normally Nintendo wouldn't comment on a termination, but the heat was so bad they came out and made a statement that she was let go for holding a side job that conflicted with Nintendo's company moral standards. Of course, that's when detective mode started and nude pics of her on an escort site operating under the name "Maria Mint" (a Nintendo themed hooker) were found and suddenly people wanted to sweep it under the rug.

https://www.neogaf.com/threads/alis...ssion-thread-read-ground-rules-in-op.1202656/
 
Bernd Lauert

Bernd Lauert

Banned
Two years ago, a contract game tester named Hannah
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This seems to be a common trend, these stories are always about people who are at the literal bottom of the hierarchy. Only something like a janitor is below "contract game tester".

Several employees had created a group chat on Nintendo’s Microsoft Teams server called “The Laughing Zone.” It was supposed to be a lighthearted place for coworkers to share memes with one another. That changed when a male translator was added to the group. Soon, he posted Reddit screenshots about why Vaporeon was the best Pokémon to have sex with. Hannah was disgusted by the explicit descriptions. When the conversation turned to Genshin Impact, the translator posted a gif of Paimon, a child character in the game. He posted about how it’s okay to be sexually attracted to Paimon despite the character’s childlike appearance, voice, and personality. Hannah screenshotted the sexual comments and attempted to escalate the situation with Aerotek, the staffing company she was contracted under while working at the Redmond, Washington headquarters.
Click to expand...
Creepy dude being creepy. I think it's fair that she reported him, it just isn't appropriate for a group work chat.

The problem was that women were both underrepresented among contractors, but also not often hired into full time roles. Five sources who worked at Nintendo estimated that the percentage of women contractors in testing hovered at around 10 percent (based on the head-counts on their own teams). In some projects that sources worked on with several dozen team members, women on the team would number in the single digits. This discrepancy can be explained by the fact that many Nintendo games were not tested by staff who were classified as Nintendo employees. They were employees who worked under the contracting company Aerotek. But even among full time employees, 37 percent of Nintendo of America’s salaried employees are women, and only 23.7 percent of its managers are women globally.
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Not a problem. Nobody cares.

Hannah also told Kotaku that she struggled to assert her financial worth while testing Nintendo’s games. After working at Nintendo for nine years, she found out a more junior male contractor in her testing department was making $19 an hour while she was making $16. She asked Aerotek what she could do to close the wage gap and fought for a pay increase for several weeks before she finally landed at $18. One woman said she stayed at the same base wage for six years until she got a higher offer elsewhere and threatened to leave. Another woman was offered double her current pay when at a different company.
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Another classic, women being too risk averse to ask for a pay raise and then they complain about wage gaps. Smh.

Hannah claimed that Aerotek management warned her to be less outspoken after she reported the incident. She said that her friends from the work group chat blamed her for reporting the incident, and that the only repercussion the translator faced was being assigned sexual harassment training. Aerotek had previously fired one of its contractors for making comments about the color of Hannah’s underwear, but the translator who made the sexual comments in group chat was a full-time Nintendo employee. Working for Nintendo meant the third-party contracting company couldn’t terminate his employment.
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Classic hierarchy issues. Not ideal but it's how the world works.

Hannah felt that Aerotek’s response was unsatisfactory, and she had endured enough inappropriate incidents during her decade-long tenure working on Nintendo products. She quit her job because she felt that her workplace did not adequately protect her from sexually inappropriate behavior from men.
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Go into a male-dominated industry, expect a few men to behave like dude bros (or autistic manchildren, if the industry is video games). Ask a male nurse how the female nurses treat him, you'd be surprised (or not).

“I applied for a bunch of other jobs in the industry, and they would ask me why I was looking to leave Nintendo [after several years]. A lack of advancement opportunities was a huge part of that,” a former contractor said.
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More hierarchy issues. Contractors are simply very disposable.

“Your chance [of being converted to full time] was probably worse as a girl,” said a former product tester who worked on the 2017 hit The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (28 million units sold globally). “It’s usually guys [who get promoted]. They’re usually all friends. They watch the Super Bowl together.”
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Again, male-dominated industry. Suck it up.

Former testers told Kotaku about a revolving door of female talent and a management indifferent to keeping them. Contractors are given no explicit goals or benchmarks to hit that might assure a full-time conversion—or even a contract renewal.
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That's the entire point of having contractors. Most of them do cheap grunt work and are very disposable.

“There was lots of favoritism, cronyism,” says another former contractor who tested games during the 3DS and Wii U era. “The assumption was that if a woman was doing well, it was because she was friends with the right people.”
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Classic corporate culture.

“There was a male [full-time employee] that was constantly making really gross jokes and comments, but he was the friend of everybody there. Everybody loved him,” Hannah said. “Me and other female employees didn’t like that it was being said. But we didn’t say anything because if you [did], you were called overly sensitive.”
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No lies detected.

Melvin Forrest has been working in the product testing department since the early nineties, and he eventually became the head of the department. [...] Several sources tell Kotaku that Forrest made inappropriate advances toward female testers. Among them was Allison, who worked under Forrest as a data entry assistant. “It was pretty common knowledge that he would make comments, hit on people, like to [tell] associates, ‘Oh she’s so beautiful,’” she says.
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Old boss chasing young girls. Creepy but very common.

“[Product testing] really felt like a frat house sometimes,” said one former tester who worked in the department in 2017. She tried to avoid interacting with a man who held so much power within the department, but she still had to deal with male coworkers. They would make jokes about gender stereotypes and female characters who got their skirts flipped. When she complained, men would tell her that she had to be tough enough to work in product testing.
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Yawn.

Queer women experienced an extra layer of unwelcome behavior and unequal treatment. Hannah is an out lesbian and was open about her sexuality while at Nintendo.
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Is this normal? I never talk about my sexuality in the workplace. Why would I?

Another queer tester who worked on Nintendo games for almost a decade claims she was unfairly targeted by Aerotek for her sexuality. During breaks, she and a fellow female tester she was dating would hold hands. She says an Aerotek supervisor called them into the contracting office and admonished the pair for violating the agency’s ‘no-touching policy,’ which was rarely enforced for straight couples displaying affection in the office.
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Sucks if true. Ultimately, still unprofessional.

Despite these unwelcome incidents, many women chose to stay at Aerotek for years due to their attachment to the Nintendo brand. Still, sources don’t believe that loyalty was necessarily reciprocated. “You’re just a disposable commodity,” one former Breath of the Wild tester told Kotaku. “And you’re reminded that if you’re not willing to do something…someone else would love to have your spot.”
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I mean... yeah. That's how it goes.


TL;DR:

sam winchester yawn GIF
 
Kamina

Kamina

Golden Boy
ManaByte said:
There's more to it than that.

It happened not long before Nintendo was to reveal the Switch, and it coming out that one of their Treehouse employees was moonlighting as a hooker (while her husband worked in the NOA coffee shop), it'd be a PR nightmare. So Nintendo fired her.

Of course this was during GAMERGATE so she immediately took to social media and cried that she was fired because evil GAMERGATERS were harassing her. Normally Nintendo wouldn't comment on a termination, but the heat was so bad they came out and made a statement that she was let go for holding a side job that conflicted with Nintendo's company moral standards. Of course, that's when detective mode started and nude pics of her on an escort site operating under the name "Maria Mint" (a Nintendo themed hooker) were found and suddenly people wanted to sweep it under the rug.

https://www.neogaf.com/threads/alis...ssion-thread-read-ground-rules-in-op.1202656/
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Yeah i remember, it was a right mess it was.
Nice nudes though
 
hemo memo

hemo memo

You can't die before your death
When the conversation turned to Genshin Impact, the translator posted a gif of Paimon, a child character in the game. He posted about how it’s okay to be sexually attracted to Paimon despite the character’s childlike appearance, voice, and personality.
Click to expand...
Dude
 
Mokus

Mokus

Member
I'm failing to see the harassment, or there is more in the article? What I see is someone having bad taste at joking. Immoral but nothing illegal.
 
Punished Miku

Punished Miku

Human Rights Subscription Service
Mokus said:
I'm failing to see the harassment, or there is more in the article? What I see is someone having bad taste at joking. Immoral but nothing illegal.
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nah, it keeps going. They put the guy's full name in there too. He's going to have a fun day today I'm sure.
 
M

ManaByte

Gold Member
Bernd Lauert said:
This seems to be a common trend, these stories are always about people who are at the literal bottom of the hierarchy. Only something like a janitor is below "contract game tester".
Click to expand...

The funny thing is that Nintendo can have Aerotek fire her just for pretending to be an actual Nintendo employee. Kotaku just ruined her dream job.
 
JackSparr0w

JackSparr0w

Banned
Robb said:
If someone at my work posted pictures about having sex with Pokémon and writing justifications to have sex with children they’d be gone in an instant, thankfully.
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What kind of people you think work there? If Nintendo fired everyone who fantasized about cartoons there would be no one left.

Remember that Kotaku female journo who wrote an article about Harry Potter underage porn? She never got fired. And we're talking about a private whatsapp group here.
 
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Robb

Robb

Gold Member
JackSparr0w said:
If Nintendo fired everyone who fantasized about cartoons there would be no one left.
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Do whatever you want at home.

This was posted in a freaking workplace to other colleagues. Like, what the actual fuck is wrong with that person thinking something like that would be appropriate at the workplace?

That’s just my opinion though. Something like that would never fly anywhere where I’ve worked.
 
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