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Interviews: Brianna Wu Answers Your Questions 557

Posted by samzenpus from the here-they-are dept.
Last week you had a chance to ask the head of development at Giant Spacekat Brianna Wu about Gamergate, starting a company, and women-in-tech issues. Below you'll find her answers to your questions.
Penalties and Online Harrassment
by Anonymous Coward

I read all the time about the experiences of online harassment victims. As pointed out in your Patreon, most all of this is obviously criminal activity, and it takes lots of time to document it for police. Why have I virtually never read about someone getting arrested? I've even looked around. I was sure at the height of Gamergate, a flood of news about arrests was coming, and now it seems like that's never coming.

I can only think of two cases: One was in Canada, where a very mentally ill young man, no older than 20 I think, was arrested for SWATting people repeatedly, among other things. The other was in the UK where again a very young man was arrested for threatening a politician over twitter. Just googling "twitter arrest" brings up lots of cases where people who pulled various stunts had their anonymity removed and were arrested, but none of them for the kinds of harassment you've discussed reporting to the police. The first hit is several Huffington Post articles about it. Is it not reported in the media? Do the police just not care, or not know how to investigate it? Are the people doing the harassment just that crafty? Do you believe increased enforcement will reduce harassment online, and particularly if so, what needs to happen between then and now?

Brianna: So, starting this conversation - I should say that the FBI has asked me not to comment on the specifics of ongoing cases. But, I can talk about the situation in general terms.

Working with law enforcement has been one of the most exasperating experiences of my life. The amount of media attention to my case has been extreme. There was a Law and Order episode based on my experiences and those of other victims of harassment. I’ve been in most major media around the world. I’ve been on Nightline and John Oliver, and there still have not been any prosecutions in my case.

As bad as it’s been for me, the women I worry about are ones that don’t get media attention. The truth is, if you are a woman, and someone threatens to murder you online, it's overwhelmingly likely that no help is coming, and you're on your own.

I don’t think the people working on my case don’t care. I think most people go into law enforcement because they want to help people like me. It does seem like a question of training and resources, particularly with local police, that the need has far outpaced the tools.

It greatly troubled me when, after sending the FBI leads for months, they asked me to mail them a hard drive with my evidence. They said, because of their systems, they were unable to read email attachments or access shared Dropbox folders. It’s hard to imagine how any law enforcement agency can operate in 2015 with those constraints.

The FBI employs over 15,000 people. As best as I can tell, none of them are specifically tasked with prosecuting cases like mine. In June, Representative Katherine Clark submitted a proposal to congress that would allocate 10 operatives and an attorney to prosecute online threats. I hope we can make that happen.



Questions:
by juanfgs

I never heard much about game developers, but it seems like GamerGate has put many of them in the spotlight, specially women. Has the Gamergate movement somehow boosted your popularity and of other game developers and benefited you in any way? Do you regret that a big part your popularity didn't stem from the work you've made all these years in your professional life and rather from a political counter-movement?

Brianna: One of the biggest misconceptions about me is that, professionally, I was unknown before Gamergate. I had more conference invites than I could accept before Gamergate. I had a show on 5by5 before Gamergate, which was a very prestigious network. I had been speaking up on women in tech for years before Gamergate. In fact, the month before I was dragged into the mess, I had a two-hour talk with my team about their need for me to be in the office more. It's been a struggle for years, balancing my role as head of development with the responsibility of being an increasingly public figure for the company.

I do think it’s accurate that Gamergate has made me better known to the general public, rather than just industry insiders. It frustrates me to no end that the public doesn’t recognize my work as an entrepreneur, as a software engineer, or as a leader of an ambitious company - but rather as a feminist figure and a victim of Gamergate.

My career goal has never been to be a feminist media critic like Anita Sarkeesian. To be honest, the thought of my career still being about this five years from now is incredibly depressing.

I want to make games, and I want to provide jobs to the many talented women I know in the industry. I don’t want to be known as a victim. I want to be known as someone solving engineering problems about emotion the rest of the industry isn’t interested in.

One the key parts of my personality is I am extremely pragmatic. Maybe it’s the developer part of my brain - but I work with the system I have and not the system I want. And, if standing up to the horrific abuse of Gamergate has opened doors for me? Yeah, you'd better believe I’m going to walk through them.



Capital
by HellYeahAutomaton

How did you secure the capital to start Giant Spacekat? How did you do it in 3 months, and what obstacles did you face?

Brianna: So, I can’t talk specifically about all of our funding. But I can say how we started Giant Spacekat and made our "minimal viable product." I quit my job when I married my husband, and followed him to Boston. I was trying to figure out what to do with my life. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to pursue a graduate degree or start my own company.

A family relative offered us the chance to live in Frank’s grandmother’s house for free if we renovated it. That would free up capital for us, so I jumped at the chance. I spent half a year renovating the house. Then, we moved in - took our rent money, and used it to hire our first employee.

The part of this story that’s key is, I saw an opportunity - and I went all in. Renovating this house was disgusting and backbreaking. My husband and I spent hundreds of hours removing this horrible wallpaper from the 40s. I had to wear a hazmat suit and a respirator to encapsulate asbestos in the basement. We had to redo the entire electrical system of the house. But I sucked it up, got to work - and I launched my company.

As for obstacles faced, something that a lot of people don’t know about are the criminal efforts to harm our company financially. We’ve had multiple attempts to hack into our company’s dev account, to the point where we have had to work with Apple to put additional safeguards into place. We’ve also had to deal with repeated identity theft and credit card fraud.



egalitarian?
by johncandale

Why are you a feminist instead of a egalitarian?

Brianna: Egalitarianism is about equal rights for all people, but this is assuming that everyone starts in an equal situation, which is not the case.Feminism is advocating equal social, political, legal, and economic rights for women - and we are at a huge deficit with those rights.

I think this question is really telling about the incredible amount of unconscious privilege men have in technology. Anyone outside the industry can see it - this is a place built by men for men. It’s so built to serve them that women can’t even have a movement to address our systematic exclusion without some men insisting it should be about them too.

I am a feminist because my focus is, correctly, on making technology more equal for women.

The absence of privilege is not oppression. But, I think it often seems like that to some men. It distresses me greatly that when I talk about problems like exclusionary hiring practices - just how quickly men turn the conversation to what is fairest for them. You’re essentially asking for your privilege to be baked into the language of our fight for equality.



Game Design
by deltatype0

I am a "neutral" in the Gamergate debacle, preferring to observe more than directly interact, but in one case I watched the somewhat-infamous interview between Wu and Reddit KotakuInAction mod TheHat2. In it, they discussed the points of her iOS game "Revolution 60" and game design in general. One of the questions asked there was why she decided to work with iOS first versus the popular PC platform Steam. I don't remember the exact answer, but I think it revolved around developing for a platform that more women were likely to use, being the mobile market, and maybe some development-specific answers.

My question is this: Given what you've learned about programming in iOS, would you have developed for a PC platform like Steam first and ported to mobile later? Given female trends towards mobile platforms like the Nintendo DS/3DS, would it make more sense for your studio to explore developing games there? Or was your goal all along to produce a more 3D-visual action title for mobile phones?

For context, my wife is not as big of a gamer as myself, but I find she enjoys playing a lot of mobile puzzle games. I think the mobile market has a lot of potential for bigger things, and I think having the input of the majority player base on that platform makes sense, but I often don't understand why, as a mobile developer, you would be overly concerned with "the core gamer" demographic in the console platform. It seems to me that they aren't likely to crossover into the mobile market often, so there is little reason to "attack" that demographic as we've seen a few people, including Brianna, do through the last year.

Brianna: First of all, if you are “neutral” on the horrific abuse many women have suffered at the hands of Gamergate, you are a part of the problem. Being able to lean back in a chair and talk about Gamergate as if it’s a fun controversy isn’t a privilege I have, and it’s not a privilege women in the game industry have. This is about being able to continue working in the field I love.

Being neutral about threats to murder, rape and intimidate women with opinions is a character defect.

As far as your question - we’ve certainly thought about working with Nintendo. I have good connections with Nintendo of America - but Unreal is barely supported on Wii-U and 3DS. Often, these versions of Unreal are custom variants that are not supported by Epic. It’s a shame, because I think the touch interfaces would make us a natural fit for both - though the vert decimation it would take to get our skeletal meshes to work on 3DS makes me cringe to think about.

My proudest accomplishment with Revolution 60 is that anyone can pick it up and play it, regardless if they are a gamer or not. I don’t think that you should have to be a hardcore gamer to enjoy a story. That didn’t happen serendipitously, it happened through game design constraints and a lot of playtesting. I think that design philosophy is extremely compatible with Nintendo.



Are custom engines dead for 'normal' developers?
by MBCook

More and more developers seem to be using the existing engines (i know you used Unreal 3 for Rev 60, Unity, UbiArt, etc) which makes sense given the huge number of features they provide with little initial development cost and common tool sets/plugins used by other developers. Do you think there is much future in developers using custom engines for games (both indie and non-AAA) or do you think it will continue to become more uncommon for common genre games as you start at a larger and larger feature 'deficit' by having to redevelop the features on your custom engine, let alone porting issues, leaving only vert large/profitable houses (Naughty Dog, Insomniac, EA, etc) to be able to bear the time/$ costs?

Brianna: When you are an indie studio, you have to be absolutely ruthless about what you spend resources on. To me, getting into OpenGL and coding custom engines is a suicide mission for small teams. It’s worth noting that Apple’s 3D frameworks just don’t measure up to Unity or Unreal.

If someone has solved an engineering problem already, I see no point in reinventing the wheel.

I think indie teams get a little bit of a break - but you still have to do one or two things better than anyone else, including AAA. For us, we concentrated on characterization and animation. I would put the quality of Revolution 60s animation against anything on any platform. We wouldn’t have been able to do that if we’d wasted resources writing a custom engine.



"Developer" or "Journalist"?
by Rick in China

I'm interested in what development languages you excel in and how you mastered them - as head of development for a gaming company, I think that's my first question. Follow-up side-points would be when you transitioned from journalist to game developer, and why game development? Was it related to some of the 'sparks' and 'movements' by some other females 'in the gaming community' - and seen as an easy way to jump on a bandwagon that was clearly going to make waves? Journalist to developer just seems like a very strange transition to me, so I'm curious about the particulars. Do you have a github account where you publish some of your code?

Brianna: I’ve had many jobs over the course of my life. I’ve worked in politics and well as media. Both have been very helpful backgrounds for me in running a studio, which is a very political job. One of my greatest frustrations as a developer is that I don’t get to spend as much time doing gamedev as I used to. The truth is, I can hire another engineer - but I can’t hire someone to replace me.

I feel like my entire life has prepared me for this moment. There’s very little I would change about the choices that brought me to this point.

I can’t help but read your question and feel like you might not have the best of intentions. I read it as you are feel that I need to prove to you that I’m a legit developer. I think my record as someone whose first game won several game of the year awards speaks for itself. I think my two popular shows on Relay.FM where I am an industry analyst on technical issues speaks for itself.

I do have code up on Github, but like many women developers - it’s under a gender-neutral pseudonym, because I know it will be torn to pieces if it’s not. I once wrote a joke on Twitter with pseudocode, written to be readable for non-developers - and received a litany of sexist accusations and code critique.

There is an unconscious bias that men are assumed competent until proven otherwise, and women are assumed incompetent until proven otherwise. My track record of success speaks for itself.



Customization / Modification of Unreal Engine
by Anonymous Coward

Hi Brianna. No idea if this will bubble near enough to the surface for you to see it, but I'm curious how much, if any, work you and your team had to do in the "guts" of the Unreal Engine to get your game out the door, or if all of your work was done at the Unreal Script / editor level.

Brianna: One of the great things about Unreal is that there are certain game types that are coded into the engine already. If you want a top-down Diablo game, they’ve done that work already. If you want to make an FPS, they’ve done that work already. But it doesn't cover everything so we ended up having to do a lot more work than other game types.

It’s hard to stress just how much work we had to do to get Revolution 60 to run on older Apple devices. You start out with 512 megs of RAM, and a good chunk of that is taken up with Springboard. Then, iOS 7 came out midway through development and we found ourself suddenly with 134 megs less RAM to work with. We lost over four months solving that problem.

Revolution 60 got a lot of critique for our textures - which has always felt unfair to me. Low resolution textures were a deliberate tradeoff. Infinity Blade looks amazing, but they only have 2 characters on screen at a time. Cyrus has 22 mesh influencing bones, with a level 2 joint influence. Holiday has over 75 mesh influencing bones - requiring a second draw call with level 3 joint influence. We have up to five characters on screen at once, all with a 2k diffuse and a 2k normal. On top of that, there is a ton of custom animsets and sound that isn't hardware decoded. This is very ambitious to ask all of this to run on the iPhone 4S.

I would guess that about 1/4th of our development was spent working around these hardware limitations in Unreal. Holiday doesn’t run because we are loading and unloading every section you walk through from memory. I was handed sections to texture, and I had four 1k maps for many of them. Given those constraints, the game looks AMAZING. I could write a textbook on extremely efficient texture stacking.

A lot of people think beautiful textures are the test of a good materials artist, and it's true. But - I think working under memory constraints is an even greater challenge.

There are a lot of gamers out there that like to play armchair developer because they don’t understand these engineering tradeoffs. None of them could have made a game as ambitious as Revolution 60. I made the choice to emphasize characters over graphics, and I’d absolutely do it again.



Virtual Reality?
by Anonymous Coward

You hinted a bit in an episode of Rocket that you're playing with the idea of making a game for VR. Can you go into any detail on that, or talk about the future of VR gaming (if there is one)?

Brianna: As much as I would love to, I am unable to comment on that right now. I will say, if you thought I shook up the industry last year? Trust me, our best is yet to come.
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Interviews: Brianna Wu Answers Your Questions More

Interviews: Brianna Wu Answers Your Questions

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  • So the good questions were ignored. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 22, 2015 @01:00PM (#50162143)

    Just like many people predicted in the submission for asking the questions, it looks like the good, hard-hitting questions were totally ignored.

    What's the point of having these /. interviews, regardless of who they're with, if all we get are answers to lame, uninteresting questions?

    This isn't the only case where this has happened, of course. The same thing happened with the Linus Torvalds interview a few weeks ago. The best questions remained ignored, or if answered indirectly, the answers were pretty half-arsed.

    If the best and most relevant questions aren't going to get answered, then /. should stop with these shitty interviews. Each one takes up two front page slots that could instead have been filled with relevant, useful stories.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Maybe they were really bad questions. Retard level stupid. :D

      You have some links to the questions so we can verify or rule out?

      • Re:So the good questions were ignored. (Score:5, Interesting)

        by jez9999 ( 618189 ) on Wednesday July 22, 2015 @03:57PM (#50163683) Homepage Journal

        Transgender voice? [slashdot.org]

        You recently tweeted that no one who isn't transgender should voice opinions on transgender issues yet you regularly voice your own opinion on these issues. Is this a tacit "coming out" of your own transgender past, and if so, what does it mean for your own position as a representative and "megaphone" for women's issues and how you speak to the personal history of growing up as a woman?

        Steam Greenlight [slashdot.org]

        You recently ran a successful campaign to get your game approved on Steam's greenlight. What approaches did you use to get your game ranked high enough to be greenlit. What do you feel had the biggest impact in getting the numbers? What suggestions do you have for other Indie Game Developers who want to get their games approved on Steam's greenlight system?

        Regarding your own game [slashdot.org]

        Considering you have spoken out in the past about female characters in games being overtly sexualized, could you explain why the protagonists of your own game Revolution 60 wear what appears to be skintight lycra to show off their perfect hourglass figures?

        And that's just a few that didn't get modded down. Many of the +5 best questions early on got "mysteriously" modded down to -1 flamebait by.... somebody. Like this one which was at +5 funny when I remember reading it a few days ago:

        On Managing a Patreon Campaign [slashdot.org]

        Ms. Wu, when sending yourself harassment over steam [theralphretort.com] or twitter and faking having to leave your house [theralphretort.com] over harassment in response to trolling people, do you find TOR or a more traditional anonymous proxy to be more effective?

        A bunch more were mysteriously modded down. [slashdot.org]

    • Re:So the good questions were ignored. (Score:5, Funny)

      by PvtVoid ( 1252388 ) on Wednesday July 22, 2015 @01:16PM (#50162319)

      Just like many people predicted in the submission for asking the questions, it looks like the good, hard-hitting questions were totally ignored.

      I doubt she has an opinion one way or another on systemd.

    • Brianna Wu doesn't fail to disappoint yet again. Always ducking the hard questions. Too bad the truth is already out there, and failing to address it yet again only adds more confirmation. Cowardly to the end.

      • Re: So the good questions were ignored. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Coren22 ( 1625475 ) on Wednesday July 22, 2015 @01:49PM (#50162581) Journal

        Exactly what I was thinking reading through this. She answered not a single negative comment, only the positive ones. Just like Cosby, if you don't respond to critics, they will bury you.

        I am still very curious about her response to the accusations of her harassment and doxing of others. If she truly thinks these things are wrong when used against women, how can they be acceptable when used for a woman against people she disagrees with.

        Also, though it is hardly my business, I would have loved to see her either confirm or deny all the comments about her being trans. There is nothing wrong with being this way, but it does kind of reduce credibility of her cause which may be why there was no answer either way.

      • Re: So the good questions were ignored. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by NecroPuppy ( 222648 ) on Wednesday July 22, 2015 @02:00PM (#50162689) Homepage

        We don't actually know that she got sent the hard questions.

        Does the interviewee go through the original post and look at everything that got a score of 5? That's a fairly low bar to hit, and probably a bit unreasonable.

        I think it more likely that one of the editorial types gathered up the questions, using the best spelled of various repeats among questions (ok, that's a stretch), and decided what to send. I don't expect that they'd send anything that was outright abusive, no matter what score the question had, or how many people supported it.

      • Some of the questions she chose to answer she weaseled her way around anyway. She'd make a great politician.

        • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

          by Darinbob ( 1142669 )

          You're assuming she's done something wrong. You seriously think she's going to say "yup, the morons behind gamergate were right, abuse of women is a good thing because they shouldn't be in gaming, and I'm only doing this for the lulz"?

    • Always ducking the hard questions. That's not news or stuff that matters. I do not welcome our click bait overlords

  • Wow (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 22, 2015 @01:01PM (#50162169)

    "The truth is, I can hire another engineer - but I can’t hire someone to replace me."

    Impressive.

    "I read it as you are feel that I need to prove to you that I’m a legit developer. I think my record as someone whose first game won several game of the year awards speaks for itself. I think my two popular shows on Relay.FM where I am an industry analyst on technical issues speaks for itself."

    Neither speaks to being a developer at all, unless you wrote the game yourself, which you didn't. And being an analyst doesn't make you a developer.

    Incredible.

    • Re:Wow (Score:5, Insightful)

      by NotDrWho ( 3543773 ) on Wednesday July 22, 2015 @01:55PM (#50162629)

      But dude, she totally wrote some code that's under another name that she can't disclose at present because of, you know...stuff.

      And I totally have a hot supermodel girlfriend in Canada. She's a developer too!

    • Wouldn't it be better to call herself a producer/manager then? I'm not saying that's any more or less legitimate, but it seems like that's what her job entails. A lot of modern games have dozens to hundreds of people involved and getting everyone to work together is just as important as creating the sound assets, coding the enemy AI routines, or tightening up the graphics on level 3 [youtube.com].

  • Thanks, /.! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by nyet ( 19118 ) on Wednesday July 22, 2015 @01:02PM (#50162183) Homepage

    To be honest, the thought of my career still being about [gamergate] five years from now is incredibly depressing.

    If it happens, you can thank /. in part for that.

  • wrong answer (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 22, 2015 @01:08PM (#50162247)

    "Brianna: First of all, if you are “neutral” on the horrific abuse many women have suffered at the hands of Gamergate, you are a part of the problem."

    no, anyone who attacks a neutral party is a part of the problem. not everyone knows all of the details, and neither side seems to be entirely trustworthy.

    carry your argument out a bit further - you are suggesting that portugal,in part, caused the holocaust.

    roflcopter captcha: partly.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by BrookHarty ( 9119 )

      That was expected, "if you are not for us, you are against us" would be her answer.

      She was unknown to me before gamergate, and now the only thing I ever see from her is hate speech against men. Her toxic views of male gamers appear on video game sites as fact. Her views of video game design as being misogynistic is being promoted as fact.

      Her video games reviews are only about sexism, leaving off what games are really about, gameplay, interaction, puzzles, design, ingenuity.

      Shes a one sided hate parrot, an

  • Interesting choice of questions to address (Score:4, Insightful)

    by pla ( 258480 ) on Wednesday July 22, 2015 @01:12PM (#50162281) Journal
    Of all the good questions actually upvoted in the original thread, why the hell did you decide to respond to not only the most soulless of the bunch, but ones that also require the disclaimer "I can't talk about this, but here's my opinion about a tangentially related issue"?

    You say that you don't want to play the victim or the token IT female or the feminist propagandist... And then proceed to focus on literally nothing else, even at the expense of answering the damned questions asked. Seriously, why bother?

    • I think the editors need to expand the Q&A FAQ. They usually say they will pick 10 of the highest rated questions to send along, so I don't think Brianna Wu actually picked the questions. The editors would probably filter out any questions they thought would be offensive to the interviewee, so likely the "hard" questions wouldn't have been sent along.

      Also, I'd note that many of the so-called "hard" questions could easily be categorized as "bullshit" or "harassment" questions.

  • This is funny. (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 22, 2015 @01:14PM (#50162297)

    Stopped reading after the second question after Wu said she was well known before GamerGate. No, no she wasn't. She's taken full advantage of the GamerGate situation for her own shameless self promotion, even going as far as trying to incite abuse against herself on Steam. She just forgot to log out of her developer account.

    http://theralphretort.com/wp-content/uploads/Selection_999023.png

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by serviscope_minor ( 664417 )

      Well the moron mods are out in force.

      Finding conference invites (which is what her claim is about) from before gamergate is an easy google search away and yet people mod up these easily disprovable lies.

      And I fully expected to get modded down for this.

      • Re:This is funny. (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Panoramix ( 31263 ) on Wednesday July 22, 2015 @07:11PM (#50164855) Homepage

        Well the moron mods are out in force.

        Yep, I can see that. What the hell happened to you, Slashdot? I leave for a couple years, 'cause I've been busy, and now you're giving this opportunist a Q&A? Not only that, but throwing her softball questions so she can push her professional victim schtick, and downvoting people who point this out?

        This is just sad.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Mashiki ( 184564 )

          Yep, I can see that. What the hell happened to you, Slashdot? I leave for a couple years, 'cause I've been busy, and now you're giving this opportunist a Q&A? Not only that, but throwing her softball questions so she can push her professional victim schtick, and downvoting people who point this out?

          Simple, they got sold off to an advertising company, that also mets out a job search site and they tossed their lot in with the social justice crowd because "outrage sells."

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday July 22, 2015 @01:14PM (#50162301)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • What rights do men have that woman do not?

      HATER!!!

      Any other questions?

  • No nuance allowed. You're for us or against us. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by halivar ( 535827 ) <bfelger@gmai l . com> on Wednesday July 22, 2015 @01:17PM (#50162327)

    First of all, if you are “neutral” on the horrific abuse many women have suffered at the hands of Gamergate, you are a part of the problem.

    And this is why we can't have grown-up conversations. Even the mere thought that there might be anything of merit on the GG side is tantamount to a rape threat. It's intolerant and childish.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Translation Error ( 1176675 )
      If you don't like people re-interpreting your words as rabid, intolerant vitriol, lead by example. She didn't say everyone who had anything to do with Gamergate is an evil monster.

      When there's public abuse and large numbers of people thinking "Meh, whatever" or "Not my problem" allow it to continue and are part of the problem. Instead of "being neutral", support the parts of the movement you believe in and condemn what's not acceptable.
    • Gamergate was originally about ethics in video game journalism. The moment female developers were targeted ended that conversation with those people. After all, you can't have a movement about ethics while utterly lacking them.

    • That's not what she's saying; that's a gross misrepresentation.

      The fact of the matter is that Gamergate, from its inception, was largely a misogynistic endeavour that wildly eclipsed anything legitimate buried way underneath. It started with an insane screed by a jilted ex-boyfriend and continued on as an excuse for hundreds of people to harass women. It MAY be possible to feel that Gamergate had legitimate points, but there's so much hate swirling around it that it was hard to get down to those points.

      It i

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jez9999 ( 618189 )

        It started with an insane screed by a jilted ex-boyfriend

        So what part of the "insane screed" agaisnt Zoe Quinn are you claiming was untrue? And on what evidence?

      • You can't be neutral on GG, honestly.

        I can only speak for myself, but I think a lot of others may fall into the same category. Most everything I know about GG is spillover in slashdot discussions. I know there's accusations of journalistic impropriety, and accusations of misogyny, and a lot of harassment, and a huge heaping pile of arguments. But it's such a mess that I still don't even know what someone means when they say they're "anti-GG" for instance, because I don't know which side of which issue that actually means. And frankly, just based on the generally incoherent and overheated arguments that have spilled over here, I'd rather not investigate further.

        I know I'm against harassment (of all kinds, against all types). I know I'm against unethical journalism. I'm also disinclined to insert myself into situations of histrionic drama where I'm unlikely to be able to make a difference. So I don't really know what sides of what parts of what sub-issues that puts me in relation to GG, and I don't care to find out. So I'm agnostic, or neutral, or maybe willfully ignorant of enough details to be able to say more. It doesn't seem such an unreasonable stance to take.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by rabtech ( 223758 )

      Even the mere thought that there might be anything of merit on the GG side is tantamount to a rape threat. It's intolerant and childish.

      No one said that, you made it up.

      Being neutral that people (mostly women) are being repeatedly doxed is definitely a character flaw. Having strangers call your family or coworkers at 3AM and screaming at them is a pretty clear cut case of abuse.

      There is definitely one side to the GG controversy that is intolerant and childish, but it isn't the women game developers.

      Here's a plan: stop being assholes because someone said some words you don't like. When other people, even ones who agree with you behave this w

      • Re: No nuance allowed. You're for us or against us (Score:4, Informative)

        by jmac_the_man ( 1612215 ) on Wednesday July 22, 2015 @04:15PM (#50163811)

        Being neutral that people (mostly women) are being repeatedly doxed is definitely a character flaw... There is definitely one side to the GG controversy that is intolerant and childish, but it isn't the women game developers.

        I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but Briana Wu, along with other "SJWs," is accused of doxxing and harassing GGers... Exactly what she accuses them of doing. She's also accused of posting threats to herself under "anonymous" screen names, then claiming that the treats came from GGers. I'm sure if I look hard enough, I can find SJWs accusing GG of false flag harassment too.

        Obviously, real harassment is bad. False flag harassment is bad for a different readon. But to a dispassionate observer, both "sides" are doing the exact same thing. It's ridiculous to claim that one side is the side of the angels. That's why "neutral on gamergate" is a reasonable position.

        It's a shame that your criticism is targeted at GG exclusively, because both sides could stand to follow your advice.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by narcc ( 412956 )

      GG has merit? I thought that anyone with something reasonable to say abandoned that moniker a long time ago. The remainder being just a noisy bunch of bottom feeders pretending it's all about ethics in journalism while spending all their time ranting about feminism and harassing women online..

      If you actually think there's a diamond at the bottom of that cesspool, please, pull it out and show us. Then get it as far away from that mess as possible. Leave it in that filth and no one will ever see it.

  • Feminist vs egalitarian (Score:5, Insightful)

    by myrdos2 ( 989497 ) on Wednesday July 22, 2015 @01:18PM (#50162339)

    Why are you a feminist instead of a egalitarian?

    Brianna: Egalitarianism is about equal rights for all people, but this is assuming that everyone starts in an equal situation, which is not the case.Feminism is advocating equal social, political, legal, and economic rights for women - and we are at a huge deficit with those rights.

    I don't understand this answer; how is advocating for equal rights for women not egalitarian?

    • I don't understand this answer; how is advocating for equal rights for women not egalitarian?

      Because she doesn't care about anything but women's rights, nor what rights might be lost by everyone in the process of securing them. Which I totally understand, because she's a woman, and because she's clearly very self-focused. Which I totally understand as well, because most of us are.

    • If infinite money exists, but right now I have $50 and you have $30, egalitarianism says you should get $20 more.

      Infinite money does not exist. So if I have $50, and you have $30, I would have to give you $10. Which isn't equal for me, because you get $10, and I lose $10. I lose. Why should I have to lose?

      Of course, civil rights aren't money. Which is why the idea of egalitarianism seems sound. But when the exercise of equality influences the course of zero-sum decisions (like money decisions), the idea of

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by myrdos2 ( 989497 )

        So, you're saying that feminists want gain more civil rights while removing some of men's civil rights? What civil rights do men have that women don't?

      • If infinite money exists, but right now I have $50 and you have $30, egalitarianism says you should get $20 more.

        Infinite money does not exist. So if I have $50, and you have $30, I would have to give you $10. Which isn't equal for me, because you get $10, and I lose $10. I lose. Why should I have to lose?

        Of course, civil rights aren't money. Which is why the idea of egalitarianism seems sound. But when the exercise of equality influences the course of zero-sum decisions (like money decisions), the idea of egalitarianism doesn't work. Whoever already has more wins.

        Last time I checked, infinite money has existed ever since we stopped backing it with finite resources (gold, silver, etc.). Now we have governments printing as much as they like and banks that are "too big to fail" that are allowed to gamble with our 1's and 0's however they choose all the while knowing that there will be no repercussions for failure.

      • While it's impractical to build a system of government that redistributes wealth constantly so that everyone has the same amount, there is something to be said for creating a system that ensures everyone, no matter how rich or poor, the same quality of education, medical care, and other opportunities in early life so that they can become the best person that they possibly can. There comes a certain point where a person has to become responsible for their own self and situation in life, but it's a lot more d

    • she says she's not an egalitarian because she's only interesting in advocating rights for females.
      Why? Because they start out with less rights than men (in her view).
      Personally i believe she just doesn't like the word egalitarian and wants to identify as a feminist without realizing it's the same thing logically.

  • Non-answers abound (Score:5, Insightful)

    by goose-incarnated ( 1145029 ) on Wednesday July 22, 2015 @01:18PM (#50162345) Journal

    Q: "I'm interested in what development languages you excel in and how you mastered them"

    A: "My track record of success speaks for itself."

    Hmmm...

  • Okay. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 22, 2015 @01:19PM (#50162357)

    Learned a bit more about Brianna today, cool (I guess).

    Unfortunately, her logic:
    (Neutral in the Gamergate argument) == (You Support Rape and Death Threats etc..)

    Doesn't sit well for my respect of her and became a bit of a stigma.

  • Remember when Brianna Wu did this: http://i.imgur.com/zlEkMPQ.png [imgur.com] She's only known because of GamerGate, despite what she says.

  • Well, that's a wrap folks (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 22, 2015 @01:28PM (#50162425)

    I quit my job when I married my husband, and followed him to Boston. I was trying to figure out what to do with my life. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to pursue a graduate degree or start my own company.

    Ms. Wu, right there you already have vastly more privilege than many trans women I know and a lot of guys I know, too. How dare you speak of privilege? How dare you take these things for granted?

    I do hope you gender lunatics one day learn how to think critically. How many trans women are unable to get bottom surgery? How many trans women are uncertain how they'll afford their next prescription refill? How many trans women are unable to work as their mental gender? Switching gears, how many men are out of work and about to lose their homes? How many men with degrees are homeless or working 2 shit service jobs 80 hours a week with no hope to even save more than $500 before the next disaster saps their savings entirely?

    Do you even know one single thing about privilege? No, it appears that you've never had those problems. You would never understand what it's like to have nothing in the world and to lose even what you have when you come out. You have the privilege of being unaware of your privilege!

    How many trans women get married and rely on a man for income? Hell, how many people who aren't cisgendered women get those advantages and privileges?

    You've made your choices, Ms. Wu, as have a good number of gender lunatics. I will never understand your worldviews. I will never understand why you rely on men to provide for you and then ask for pity under the delusion that somebody's denied you some ephemeral privilege instead of following the way of the Amazon feminist/woman.

    "It is a man's world, not because it should be, but because we let them have it. The man's world is based on a woman's weakness. The Amazon world is based on truth and a woman's individual strength."

    Fare thee well, Slashdot. I'm afraid it's time to uncomment your line in my hosts file one final time. If anybody wants to debate me on these points, look me up over on Soylent.

    -- kurenai.tsubasa

    Captcha: discord

  • she's just another man hater. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by JustNiz ( 692889 ) on Wednesday July 22, 2015 @01:52PM (#50162609)

    This line shows it all for me:

    "The truth is, if you are a woman, and someone threatens to murder you online, it's overwhelmingly likely that no help is coming, and you're on your own."

    Why is she making this a gender-specific issue?
    Does anyone else see the inherent sexism and wrongness of her thinking here?

    Unfortunately this is just another perfect example of a massive problem in society now from many women and most PeeCee media outlets blatantly promoting the idea that a politically correct society just automatically understands that a women's life and rights are somehow intrinsically more valuable/important than a man's, so women should get extra special protection just because vagina.

  • Ah yes, let's talk about gender politics some more (Score:5, Insightful)

    by LaurenCates ( 3410445 ) on Wednesday July 22, 2015 @01:58PM (#50162677)

    Ms. Wu, you don't know me, but I'm a woman in tech.

    I admit that I have been harassed in my career. Sexually, by men. But by women also, where the weapon of choice was rumor and innuendo.

    So you see, men and women are equal, in that they are perfectly capable of cruelty towards others.

    All that having been said, you will not, during the course of a normal workday, ever hear me talk about being a woman.

    Know why?

    Because my job is not dependent upon being a woman. It depends upon me being able to do my job, and last I checked, being able to communicate, use a computer, or design a test does not automatically somehow reject me from the process of doing my job or make it harder.

    Yes, there is sexism, I will not deny this, but it isn't pervasive, it isn't everywhere, and you'll never find me pointing at shadows demanding everyone within the sound of my voice do something about some formless terror that in the course of damn near a year hasn't become as corporeal as, say, Ferguson, or Charleston, or the Bill Cosby controversy.

    Because it doesn't help anyone.

    YOU are the one creating a hostile environment by stirring up this imagined "terror" of Gamergate, and demanding this wild snipe hunt be enacted to purge no one in particular, and scare everyone to varying degrees.

    YOU are the one saying that the environment hates women so much that you need to create a "safe space" for women around you to the exclusion of men, and yet somehow find yourself "qualified" to decry sexism.

    YOU are the one reacting defensively to questions by even the most neutral of submitters.

    People actually like me because I'm not all about gender politics, at least not until women like YOU show up and demand to be taken seriously and I have to tread carefully, so people don't think I want to be part of your crusade...because, fuck, I just want to do my job and get along with my coworkers.

    So, here's a proposition for you: if you want it to stop being about sexism, how about you stop talking about sexism?

    If you want people to take you seriously, don't sidetrack the discussion into other subjects.

    If you want people not to question your credibility, avoid questions about the things you don't want to talk about and answer questions about the things you do, and DO NOT WAVER. Give people the impression that the only subjects you'll entertain are the ones that make you credible in the field. Make sure they know you don't have time for the bullshit that ISN'T about game development.

    That is how I am successful, Ms. Wu, and Slashdot. That is how many women I know, peers and mentors, have been successful. Not by being a woman first and a developer/engineer/career whatever second.

    I'll not be cynical for the moment and ask you to emulate those women. Not the ones whose valuable time is spent glossing over the few individuals who have wronged you because I guarantee, there weren't that many.

    I hope you take this advice, Ms. Wu, because I think that's what a good feminist would do.

    • Well said!

    • Sadly she won't (Score:5, Informative)

      by Sycraft-fu ( 314770 ) on Wednesday July 22, 2015 @03:36PM (#50163485)

      Because it is good advice for actual progress. Wu isn't a feminist, she's a professional victim. I mean that literally: She makes her money by whining about being victimized and guilting people in to donating to her pateron to fund her life. She's a developer in only the most basic sense. She has one product ever, a mobile game that is very poor quality. She has no track record for actually working to advance women's rights or gender equality. Her profession is literally being a victim.

      So she has no interest in advice from actual successful women developers because she's not. Her issue isn't having lots of skill but being kept down because of gender, it is having minimal skills and then playing pretend about the source of her problems.

      That's why she agreed to the Ask Slashdot. She wanted the "mean" questions she refused to answer because she can point to those as examples of "harassment" to further her cause. She's not stupid, she knew what she was doing.

      However while she won't take your advice, hopefully other women will, because it is excellent.

  • Will the real Brianna Wu ever show up and actually answer questions? I did thoroughly enjoy reading these obviously fake, asinine question/answer pairs though, so thanks for the laugh!

  • Older Apple Devices (Score:3)

    by khr ( 708262 ) <kevinrubin@gmail.com> on Wednesday July 22, 2015 @02:06PM (#50162743) Homepage

    ..to run on older Apple devices. You start out with 512 megs of RAM...

    Yikes... Must be an age difference... When I think of "older Apple devices" I'm thinking of like 64 KB... And I know people with older ones still...

  • The truth is, if you are a woman, and someone threatens to murder you online, it's overwhelmingly likely that no help is coming, and you're on your own.

    First, it's not because you're a woman. If you're a man, woman, or other and someone threatens to murder you online, it is overwhemingly likely that no help is coming because no one is actually coming to murder you. There is no actual threat. Some 14 year old is saying nasty things to you to get a rise out of you.

    And yet you claim this is a serious threat and somebody needs to come protect you. You were not "driven from your home" by angry gamergate neckbeards. You'd have a point if you left because an actu

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