Blips: Everybody Calm Down

Source: Plague of game dev harassment erodes industry, spurs support groups
Author: Brian Crecente
Site: Polygon

Brian Crecente has written up a great piece on the recent rise in game industry departures spurred in part by online harassment from fans, often including death threats. The article is flat-out depressing in its mini-profiles of several figures in the development community, and comes out at the end with a none-too-hopeful message. Will this problem become less of an issue over time or will it continue to get worse? Can anything really be done?

Pointing out the actions being taken by sites like Kotaku and IGN to moderate their comments and forums is a good start. Even if these are private websites, they're some of the largest game enthusiast communities, so if hate speech can be tamped down there, it sends a message about the image the gaming community is trying to project as positive.

Still, the one thing I found missing from the Polygon article was hearing from harassers. Maybe that would require a separate piece so as to not detract from the stories of the victims of this abuse, but I think getting insight into the minds of these knee-jerk hotheads would prove a helpful perspective to have. I can't fathom uttering threats like this at all, much less in the context of rebalancing a video games multiplayer mode. What triggers it? Top-down solutions are only going to get us so far. We have to sit down and speak to these *shudder* gamers. Otherwise we're just moving the class to another room and hoping the "problem kids" don't find us.

Why are the "problem kids" problematic to begin with? It might have something to do with games and the Internet, but tons of people, especially young people, engage in new media without these kinds of issues. How much of this outlandish behavior can be attributed to the nature of the medium, and how much is the result of outside factors like socioeconomic status, family/household environments, and mental health? How much is that young people have defined their own rules for online behavior because parents and other responsible adult parties don't have the experience of growing up with social media to teach proper behavior? I don't know, but I'm willing to bet that it's a factor.

Blips: Playing It Safe

Source: Can a Playground Be Too Safe?
Author: John Tierney
Site: The New York Times

I witnessed my grade school playground transform over the years, incrementally older, simpler equipment (balance beam, rings) was replaced with more complex, safer designs made of plastic and rounded metal. Since I attended the same school from pre-kindergarten through 8th grade, I had a full 10 years to witness these changes, and while some replacements were due to decrepit equipment, particularly components made of wood, others seemed to have been made primarily with safety in mind. Injuries did occur, though mostly minor cuts and scrapes, but there was always well-known risks with the more dangerous kinds of play. Take the swing set for example. Not much harm comes from simple back and forth swinging, but using the seat as a kind of human sling to fly out at a peak angle was another matter, a risk everyone was keenly aware of.

By the sound of John Tierney's article in The New York Times, the saftifying of playgrounds has been taking place on a national level. Apparently you can't have merry-go-rounds or seesaws here in New York, which is too bad. Seems everyone is afraid of lawsuits from injuries these days, and the resulting safety upgrades have significantly cut down on the number of suits filed. However, psychologists site other negative effects of this kind of ultra-safe playground environment: without risk-taking, kids have more sheltered play experiences and are more likely to develop phobias of things like heights. Also, even though safer surfaces like rubber and wood chips reduce concussion rates, people tend to over-trust the safe nature of the surfaces and sustain minor injuries as a result.

I know this stuff isn't video games, but it is play, and it is games, and I just find the very nature of playground design fascinating. I don't think Katamari Damacy designer Keita Takahashi got to witness his playground designs come to fruition, but I'd have loved to see what he came up with.

:image credit Replicant Dreams: