Laura Fryer just gives fuel to the gamer gate fire. Most of her stuff is just conjecture and speculation. She hasn’t been in the industry for a decade.

This is disgusting Scrubbles. Why did you post a fascist to propagandize capitalist’s vanguards are “the problem?”
HR were created by capitalists to oppress the proletariat. They are quite literally doing their job: protect the interests of capitalists.
Capitalism has always killed games. It is in their very political praxis to ruin social past times.
No capitalist is for gaming. Gaming is their enemy.

I wish there was a transcript I could read. I'm intrigued by the topic. Gaming has long had a real problem with interpersonal issues and toxic work culture - it's very understandable why HR became a more important part of the industry. Certainly HR is overstepping by trying to run the entire company so to speak, but I don't want to speak too much without taking the time to watch the video.

Whoops, I spoke too soon - there is a transcript!

Edit: Oh Jesus Christ, someone in HR really fought back against the term "Senior Technical Artist" because it might offend elderly people? The pendulum swung too far smh

"You see, from my persepctive, what happened is that HR decided that the day-to-day work of actually helping people wasn't enough. They wanted a seat in the executive meetings and they got it. Today, most executives have HR sitting in influencing decision and driving cultural change and a lot of them want to run the entire company."

Oooooook.....HR aren't the decision makers here. The executives are. @TheJesusaurus@piefed.ca is correct on this - the directives are coming from C suites that fear controversy and risk.

If game makers don't want endless meetings about safe spaces, maybe they shouldn't force their women coworkers to crawl around on the floor so they can upskirt them like at Blizzard? Source

A complaint, filed by the state Department of Fair Employment and Housing on Wednesday, alleges that Activision Blizzard Inc. "fostered a sexist culture" where women were paid less than men and subjected to ongoing sexual harassment including groping. (Activision and Blizzard Entertainment merged in 2008.)

Officials at the gaming company knew about the harassment and not only failed to stop it but retaliated against women who spoke up, the complaint also alleges.

This was only 5 years ago.

Can someone explain to me how games are "dying"? I see this sentiment a lot and I can only assume that the people who say this are the same people who think that their personal inability to scroll past the Netflix show with a gay character and choose one of the hundreds of shows that don't, is a conspiracy theory to erase white cisgender christians.

Because there's any endless wealth of good games around, especially in the indie scene. But if you're an own face hammering, piss drinking conservative that hates anything and everything, I can see how you would be having a hard time.

lol. hr have no real power. they just cma based on what legal tells them.

This has been a personal pet peeve for a while, but man did it hit for Dragon Age: Veilguard.

Dragon Age was always personal choice matters. If you choose something seemingly benign it could cause massive ripples. You could have teammates leave. You could have entire factions turn their backs on you. You could have people who were once friends try to ambush you in a back alley! It had real stakes and made you pay attention.

The 4th installment, Veilguard, was so obviously written with HR (People & Culture) in the room. No one was ever angry! There were decisions, but they were so low stakes because no one would ever get angry at you. You could literally destroy someone's home and they'd say "It's okay, I understand why you had to". WHAT? They should be threatening me - OR WORSE. No one truly died, no one ever got mad, the game literally has "team meetings" where all you do is talk about how great everyone is.

Then each character was whittled down to one specific trauma that you had to help them through. Multifaceted characters with actual emotions? No, that might make someone feel things. This one has a hard time talking to people. This one had a mean dad. This one is trans and can't come out to her mom. Each thing individually is fine, but that's literally their only character trait. Friendship with every person was immediate and permanent. If you talked to them it would only be about their exact trauma, maybe one sentence about the last mission and how we all tried our best. It was so fucking annoying.

Even the antagonists kept repeating how good you were and how you were trying your best! They were gods who thought of mortals as puny ants and you were... a single person, yet they still stopped to mention over and over "You are sure doing a super job at defeating us!". Absolutely immersion breaking.

You could just tell that HR had the only vote on every single line of dialog. No one ever gets their feelings hurt, no one ever is mad, the player might feel something and that could be bad. By trying to make everything so "positive" they've carved out the very humanity from these games.

Anyway, thanks for letting me rant, the video does a great job at summing up my feelings. These people should have no say in the creative process or work culture. They are toxic to anything art related.

Please feel free to share if you have other games like this where you can feel the palpable taint of HR.

Edit: Apparently it needs to be explicitly said that while I do absolutely blame "People and Culture", that blame is not a one-dimensional thing and that I can also blame executives? There are also some big leaps of saying that me saying that someone is a one-dimensional character means that I must be a gamer gater who hates wokeness? I actually liked the trans storyline, what I didn't like is that they made trans people seem like all they have is being trans, instead of that there could be a person there too. To me that seems more reductive and even more harmful to the trans community, but again nuance isn't really a thing on the internet. I said a thing, it must mean I'm a horrible person.

She keeps using the words “safe space” but it’s clear she doesn’t know what they mean