This Is Why Journalists Aren't Taken Seriously Anymore

If you've been online in the last week or so you may or may not have seen/heard something about the Guild Wars 2 developers who were fired following a rather unprofessional outburst on social media. Yes, I know this sounds like the start of a hit piece, and it's funny you should say that because that's kind of what I'd like to look at.

Now, before I get into this let me make this absolutely clear: we don't have all of the information so it's not really possible to know exactly what led up to this whole thing. I will talk about my thoughts on the incident itself, of course, but my main focus is the articles surrounding this whole thing. As such, I'm going to link as many articles on this as possible - if not all of them.

That said, let's get into it.

This is a basic rundown: Ms. Price is a developer on the Guild Wars 2 game. Over the 4th of July holiday, she puts up a twitter thread about why RPG characters will always be dull/uninteresting or something to that effect. In reply, someone called Deroir disagrees with her opinion (stated in the thread). She then goes completely crazy and attacks the guy and several others - all of whom are involved with the Guild Wars scene in some way or another.

In the end the company terminates her employment as well as the employment of one other developer - Peter Fries.

This results in a number of articles being published in rapid succession. Most of which are focusing in on Jessica Price and generally painting her as a victim of male chauvinism in the workplace.

My Thoughts on the Incident

Many people are commenting on this incident and wondering if it was fair to fire the two of them and I can see that perspective. Most companies have a disciplinary process to go through before an employee can be terminated.

In an interview with Polygon, Jessica said that she'd gotten no previous warnings related to her social media use. Whether that's true or not, I don't know, it might be or it might not be. If, however, it is true and she got no prior warnings related to her social media use then I can understand her being a bit angry/defensive about it being an issue now.

Should They Have Received Warnings First?

Yes and no. I'm going to have to play a bit of devil's advocate for this one. Assuming that Jessica was telling the truth and received no prior warnings, then yes I think a warning should have been issued to the two of them with an opportunity to apologize for their unprofessional behavior.

On the other hand, an employee who attacks the consumer base is a HUGE liability. Customers, as our friendly video host puts it, vote with their wallets. They don't like the service or a particular aspect of the company so they take their business elsewhere and the company loses money. It's therefore up to the company to decide what to do in this type of situation. ArenaNet made their decision and acted on it as soon as they could.

The article on Rock Paper Shotgun talks about female game developers being condescended in the industry. RPS goes further, calling ArenaNet's statement: "A failure to understand the context of the situation and to stand by your employees."

In reading this article, I couldn't help thinking that there was a disconnect of sorts. Not in terms of what happened, but more in WHY it happened.

Articles by the Verge, PC Gamer, Paste Magazine, Fortune and Kotaku all share this problem. They all have this sort of disconnect where the focus is on Jessica Price being fired and how a bad precedent is being set. In the meantime, her behavior leading up to the termination of her employment is being either spun into a narrative about sexism in the workplace or completely ignored.

Not every article, however, is all that one-sided - and boy am I thankful for that! In spite of its title, the Variety article that I've linked is a very simple re-telling of the events. The difference is in the tone of the piece as well as in the fact that they stick purely to this part of the story and nothing else. As far as I can see, this article is giving straight up facts and that's all. This kind of lessens my growing embarrassment of my own journalism certificates.

Variety isn't the only one either. Articles by Oneangrygamer.net, CGmagonline seem to stick with the facts of the situation and as a result come across as more reliable articles. In fact, the article by Eurogamer hits on the point I made at the start of this piece: we don't know the full story.

The Straw That Broke the Camel's Back

It may be that Jessica DID receive warnings and ignored them and that this was the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back. It's also possible that whatever warnings she did get were poorly worded and so they were not perceived/understood as warnings. I know she said she never got any warnings but do you really expect me to believe that? Why don't I believe it? Well, and this is likely going to irritate some people, Jessica was one of the few who was celebrating the death of YouTube personality John Bain aka TotalBiscuit.

That was a few months ago but it's also part of the problem. Those who celebrated after TotalBiscuit passed away were on the receiving-end of some nasty backlash and caused their employers a lot of trouble. I highly doubt that ArenaNet was much different. In fact, unless I'm mistaken most companies have policies surrounding social media use - which a tweet celebrating the death of another person would've definitely been seen as a violation of - to prevent/limit the damage that social media use may cause.

The other reason I can't believe that Price never got any warnings regarding her use of social media, and I realize this might be a little silly on my part, is that she took polite feedback and twisted it into a gender/sexism issue. She pushed the whole 'sexism in the workplace' narrative right the way through her interactions with the games media ad has shown no remorse for her interaction with Deroir. Is that petty of me?

Wait a Minute, What About Peter?

You may have noticed that I haven't really talked about Peter Fries. Well, that's because he isn't the one these articles are focusing on. He got a few mentions in each one but that's all. From what I've seen of his part in this, he seems like a generally good guy who just doesn't want to be in the middle of a journalistic firestorm and that's probably the best for him. Why? Well, he isn't attacking his former bosses for one thing.

Yes, this is an actual tweet from Jessica's Twitter feed. Apparently she still has it set to public. She's been trying to drag ArenaNet's name through the mud from the start of this whole...debacle. Members of the gaming community aren't having it, however, many of them pointing out that she was the one who started the fight.

I actually went through a few of her feeds on twitter and found myself thinking along the lines of: "I wonder if she understands that she's just doing more harm to herself."

The conclusion I came to was: no, she doesn't seem to be. She doesn't seem to care either. She has, as a result, very thoroughly shot herself in the foot - metaphorically speaking. Looking at her interactions with the games media and her twitter feed from the perspective of a company CEO or manager, my only conclusion was that I would NOT hire someone like this. The risk of hiring someone who could and probably would (based off of what I've seen) drag my company's name through the mud the second they were fired - for any reason - is just not worth it.

When Peter Fries was fired he basically said, "Thanks for having me, good luck for the future" and left gracefully without a fuss. Price seems to have gone out of her way to try and damage her former employer's credibility - seemingly without much success.

Defending Jessica Price

Let's look at some of the arguments that have been used to defend Price's behavior...I'll try to keep this brief.

1. Personal, private social media accounts. One of the arguments that Peter Fries used when he intervened and defended his former colleague was that their twitter accounts were their personal accounts and therefore private. This is, of course, ludicrous because from what I can gather from all of the video coverage; Jessica had her profile set up so that all and sundry could see what she was doing/saying.
2. Maybe she had a bad day. I believe I've already mentioned one excuse that Jessica gave: that she'd gotten messages frequently from people trying to tell her how to do her job. The 'bad day' argument was something I saw in one of the videos on this topic, the idea being that maybe she was just stressed out and snapped. My response is that just because one is stressed that's no excuse to attack a customer who's trying to talk to you.
3. She never asked for feedback. Then why did she post the thread on a public forum.

Final Thoughts

In regards to Jessica Price, all I can say is that she's not helping her case in the slightest. This feels very much like she's desperately trying to possibly build up some sort of celebrity status. In the process, she's effectively destroying her chances of being employed in the industry in the future. I've no doubt that she has a good skillset (otherwise why was she hired?) but ultimately she became a business liability and at the end of the day that's what cost her what must be a dream job.

In regards to the media coverage, I don't normally write about failings in mainstream media but I think in this case I sort of have to. These articles are decently written - if you prefer hit pieces to actual coverage - but they're also making journalism as a whole look incredibly sketchy at best and a downright laughing stock at worst.

You could make the argument that this isn't exactly a fair thing to say, being that games journalism is a niche market and fair enough but that doesn't mean that other areas of journalism aren't affected.

The cardinal rule of journalism is: Always stay neutral, provide both sides of the story in equal fairness with a solid body of evidence for either side. In most of the coverage I've seen online, the fairest coverage has come from OUTSIDE of the games media. How sad is that? Articles that push one perspective and ignore anything and everything that contradicts that perspective are a huge issue. They put forward an inaccurate account of what's being covered, they make their publishers look bad and they make journalism look really, really bad.

Journalists have it hard enough as it is trying to get work, this is just going to make it a lot harder for them to be taken seriously at all.