The Jennifer Hepler Incident - Are We Our Own Worst Enemies?

[Grahf]

I'm planning to cover this more thoroughly during this week on my blog </shameless plug> but I'm also curious to see what other people, particularly a group quite involved in RPG's such as yourselves is likely to think about this.

To elaborate, during this past week there has been somewhat of a hullabaloo around Jennifer Hepler. Hepler is a BioWare employee that has written for both Dragon Age games as well as Star Wars: The Old Republic. Last week someone posted a topic on Reddit that cited her as the reason BioWare is declining in quality; the reasoning behind this is a pair of quotes taken from a 2006 interview:

>Q: What is your least favorite thing about working in the industry?

>A: Playing the games. This is probably a terrible thing to admit, but it has definitely been the single most difficult thing for me. I came into the job out of a love of writing, not a love of playing games... I'm really terrible at so many things which most games use incessantly -- I have awful hand-eye coordination, I don't like tactics, I don't like fighting, I don't like keeping track of inventory, and I can't read a game map to save my life.

>Q: If you could tell developers of games to make sure to put one thing in games to appeal to a broader audience which includes women, what would that one thing be?

>A: A fast-forward button. Games almost always include a way to "button through" dialogue without paying attention, because they understand that some players don't enjoy listening to dialogue and they don't want to stop their fun. Yet they persist in practically coming into your living room and forcing you to play through the combats even if you're a player who only enjoys the dialogue.

The quotes are used somewhat out of context, as at the time Hepler was on the verge of having a child and thus wouldn't have much time for gaming, but nevertheless a faction of the community pretty much exploded. In a case of what has to be the worst timing ever, Hepler created a Twitter account mere days after the Reddit post went up (she has since gotten it closed due to the sheer amount of vitriol she's been subjected to) and got hit by this crazed backlash full force.

A lot of what has been levelled at her is pretty much hateful, spiteful trite that mocks her weight, her gender, and even her religion have been attacked, and although some of what she responded with was incendiary -- telling people that "they're jealous that I get to have both a vagina AND a games industry job, and they can't get either." probably wasn't the best idea -- she in no way deserved to be targeted with such ferocity and staggering toxicity, at least that's what I believe.

I'm honestly saddened that the community is being mired by the hostile and inappropriate actions of what seems to be a very vocal minority. It's rather hard to blame some developers for becoming more cloistered and secular when they have to deal with people that they can not only never please, but are also more than happy to engage in utterly crap-slinging behaviour.

I can partially understand the anger at someone who appears to be flippant in regards to the medium they've chosen to work for, but this honestly doesn't seem to be the case with Hepler, and even if she doesn't like games, does that mean that she shouldn't write for them? Likewise is gameplay such a sacred calf that even suggesting that it might not be the sole reason why people become invested in games is seen as an attack on the fundamental fabric of gaming itself? I believe that with games like L.A. Noire -- a game which allows you to skip action segments after a few retries -- which was released well after Hepler's initial statements proves that gameplay isn't the sole drawing factor of gaming anymore by a longshot, and besides that no one is forcing the people who actually like the gameplay to skip it, just as skippable dialogue doesn't force those who like the story to miss out on it.

So, what do all of you think?

Some links for further reading:
Destructoid Article
Gamespot Article
Forbes Article

[Brian]

Playing the role of youkai's advocate:

Hepler dislikes one of the primary cornerstones of what gaming is.  When games first started out, 'story' was a page or two of text in the manual, or a single screen of description at the start of a round at the arcade.  As a somewhat older gamer who remembers the Atari 2600 and the C64, I actually don't have much of an issue imagining the gamers who were basically told, "I don't like the fundamentals," and grew outraged.

Beyond that, while more and more female players are entering the market, it is unfortunately true that males make up more than half of the target audience.  Bluntly, she screwed up with that abrasive remark she followed things up with -- and more likely than not, her employer screwed up by letting her interview and represent them.  Alienating/attacking more than half of the market is a terrible move.

I do actually have some sympathy for what she says about not having the skill to progress in a game -- that applies to me in a lot of games as well.  'Difficulty' and 'good design' aren't automagically the same thing.  At the same time, gameplay is the foundation of the game.  With very rare exception, the bulk of a game's content is the gameplay, not the story.

Even in an RPG, you're going to spend more time in combat than watching cutscenes.  Even for Xenosaga!  Look at it this way: in the development phase, your testers are going to go through the story with a focus on it once, and a focus on the actual gameplay mechanics every time.  The story usually isn't going to change, but the gameplay should.

While there are arguments to skip any part of the game that a player doesn't like, it goes against the tradition of the genre to ignore the bulk of the 'interactive' portion of the product.  A lot of dev time, test time, and (naturaly) money are sunk into those aspects, and developers are afraid to diminish their product by (effectively) releasing what's just something you watch.  While there is a space in the market for that, it turns out there's another industry that provides that already.  We generally call it 'Hollywood'.

[thepanda]

Grahr

I'm not sure sure what you're asking. Is it our opinions on Hepler's views in that 2006 interview or is it our opinions about the behavior of the peoples involved in the blowup?

[Anastasia]

telling people that "they're jealous that I get to have both a vagina AND a games industry job, and they can't get either." probably wasn't the best idea

Aahahahhahahahah. Nicely said.

Anyway, I think she's a decent person who doesn't deserve any of this. She doesn't deserve this treatment no matter what her opinions are. It's crass, base and a failure for every person that's attacking her. I don't go as far as analyzing her opinions, as the behavior shown is wrong regardless of what they are. If you want to disagree with her, at least have common courtesy and respect.

For what it's worth I don't agree with her opinions. Honestly, if you're playing the game and not enjoying the main parts of the game, you need to ask yourself why you're playing it in the first place.

[thepanda]

telling people that "they're jealous that I get to have both a vagina AND a games industry job, and they can't get either." probably wasn't the best idea

Aahahahhahahahah. Nicely said.

Anyway, I think she's a decent person who doesn't deserve any of this. She doesn't deserve this treatment no matter what her opinions are. It's crass, base and a failure for every person that's attacking her. I don't go as far as analyzing her opinions, as the behavior shown is wrong regardless of what they are. If you want to disagree with her, at least have common courtesy and respect.

This.

For what it's worth I don't agree with her opinions. Honestly, if you're playing the game and not enjoying the main parts of the game, you need to ask yourself why you're playing it in the first place.

I have to disagree with you, here. There have been plenty of games with features that give you options to bypass stages, lower difficulty, or give you power-ups and the like that let you get back to the parts of the game that you enjoy. If someone wants to shell out $70 for what amounts to a 20-40 hour visual novel, more power to them. It isn't like bioware isn't getting paid for the purchase, nor are gamers being forced to use the option. Hell, I can't stand point and click combat (diablo, dragon age, most mmorpgs) but I liked dragon age's story enough to watch someone else play through it.

Admittedly, I could see why Bioware wouldn't want to implement such an option. I doubt they want to compete with used versions of their jest released games a week after they've come out.

I just don't see the problem with the option of being able to skip combat systems that you don't like if you're still paying for the game.

[Brian]

Eeeeh.  I kind of don't fully agree?  While I do agree with her opinions to a degree, I also recognize that there's validity to the point that as an employee of the company, she represents the company.  Yes, it's hypocritical to hold the industry to a higher standard than the community, but that's the way it goes.  She shouldn't have been attacked for not caring about gameplay (as a writer).  However, I think she fails to recognize her own bias when she says, "You should be able to ignore all the combat and just pay attention to the writing."  And, there is a bias there.

But after that point, by making the condescending remark that she did?  This is the internet.  What did one really expect to happen?  So, some player was told off by a member of the marketing staff, supporting his co-worker/employee (Hepler).  She could easily have been supported internal to the company -- a representative to the company responding derisively just added fuel to a fire that's already based on stupidity.

End result: Customer relations have been damaged.  Yes, there's a possible bid for sympathy insofar as she's being attacked, but let's face it -- that's just playing to a different double-standard, when really, none of this drama had to happen.

The better option would have been for her to say nothing, instead of what she did.


Anyway -- corporations are held to higher standards.  People who represent them, likewise.  This was being discussed not long ago (though centering around different figures) in #sr.  There is some basis for this argument, too -- the customer is paying for the product, and thus, do have legitimate grounds to complain about some things.  The fact that one writer doesn't care for combat and gameplay mechanics, and only cares about story ... shouldn't be one of the things that even enters the scope of discussion.  But this is why testers are never interviewed for games -- let's face it, as a former tester, I can tell you this interesting fact:

Pretty much no tester genuinely likes any game they work on.  That kind of familiarity breeds contempt.

Some people in the industry shouldn't speak about what they do to the public -- and this looks like it's pretty clearly one of those cases.  She made a somewhat derisive comment, or a comment that could be taken in a derisive manner out of context.  When she got flak, she responded with something genuinely derisive.


At the end of the day, someone at Bioware is going to have to swallow their pride to appease the wrath of fans scorned.  There's going to be an apology from them, because they want to retain their customers, and someone in the marketing/PR side of things is going to realize this fire has to be put out before it goes further.  But let's face it, while you can appease fans on the internet ... you can't reason with them.  And it's pretty much just because they pay money -- and in fact wholly support both of the people who made derisive comments at the gamer community.

If the customer is an asshole ... he's still the customer.

(The Destructoid article was especially irritating insofar as it was preachy and telling us to be better people; I didn't and wouldn't make such a comment, so found it unnecessarily condescending.)

[Grahf]

Grahr

I'm not sure sure what you're asking. Is it our opinions on Hepler's views in that 2006 interview or is it our opinions about the behavior of the peoples involved in the blowup?

I'm more focused in this case on the backlash that these views recently caused. I don't agree with her opinion myself -- akin to what Brian said if I wanted to just experience a story I'd watch a film or read a book; I play a game to have the actual gameplay -- but from the reactions she's gotten you'd think that she announced that she was somehow able to make every gamer in the world skip the gameplay segments.

@Brian

I found that out of the three articles I linked that the Destructoid one is the most loaded. I think that Jim does raise some valid issues. I hope to avoid being preachy about this myself, but the kind of reactions that this has gotten honestly have me worried. I realize that this can just as easily be dismissed as a massive case of GIFT, but there's something deeply unsatisfying about using that as a measure of allaying the blame.

Much like the incident that involved Paul Christoforo (although that was much, much worse) I think that representatives of the company should have handled it better. Certainly having the GM of BioWare calling someone a "fucking moron" is unacceptable, even if those on the BioWare side found it deeply cathartic. The problem I run into is that in cases like this it seems that there's nothing that really can be said, because these people are out for blood and won't be satisfied until they see Hepler both admit her wrongdoing for merely suggesting a different way of approaching games, and then BioWare unceremoniously dumping her because she doesn't 'deserve' such a position.

[Brian]

"It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt."

The silence would not have been damning.  It's unfortunate that it's come to this, but there's that double-standard.  It's judged as an entitlement issue, and I'm still mulling that one over.  Are customers (gamers, in this instance) acting like over-entitled, spoiled children?  To a degree, yes, without question.

But it's not wholly unprovoked, and the money --> goods/services transaction is a genuine one-way thing from the consumer to Bioware.  The gamer community should have thicker skin, but again, corporations need to protect themselves from generating things like the comments that Hepler made.  Not the 'gameplay should be optional' aspect (this is an interesting, but I think, separate debate, and I didn't understand the specific aspect you were interested in initially), but the 'you guys suck for judging me!' aspect.

Frankly, as much as I sympathize with her (hello, mailbombing from anonymous trolls >_<), she's probably not 'in touch' enough with the gamer community to be making the remarks that she did. :\

[Grahf]

While I agree that silence would have been more useful in this case I think that it ultimately would have failed to make a difference. Perhaps a PR Statement could have been issued on behalf of Hepler from BioWare stating that she has the support of the company, but that would just have likely resulted in the same degree of complaining. It seems sort of like a damned if you do damned if you don't situation.

I don't think anyone in this situation is right, to be honest. Hepler and BioWare might have the high ground just barely but it's one of those scenarios where everyone winds up looking bad, at least that's what it seems to be developing into.

A question that has been raised regarding all of this is whether people that aren't really into games should be allowed to work on them. It's a tough call to answer and of course it depends on a case by case basis. Someone working on level design or character design or the actual gameplay itself should probably at least be interested in what they're doing, but in Hepler's case does not being completely into the medium that she's working for prevent her from writing effectively for it?

I'd argue that it's not the case. I don't believe that Hepler is as indifferent to gaming as she's been made out to be, but even if she is her occupation is that of a writer. Certainly knowledge of the type of scripts and scenarios that are common and effective for gaming is useful here, but you can have that knowledge without actually being that invested into gaming. On top of that if you can write good characters and scripts, then that should be able to apply to any medium, some more easily than others of course.

As for the gameplay optional thing, if it's something that is strong enough to stand alone then I certainly wouldn't mind a thread about it. Should I make one or does someone else want to tackle it?

[Brian]

Go ahead and make a new thread for it.  I think it warrants discussion.


I disagree, though -- silence would have been the better option.  It wouldn't fail to make a difference -- it wouldn't have given the 'outraged' fan a leg to stand on, whining about being called a moron, if Bioware had said nothing.  Or released even a simple statement along the lines of the boilerplate, "The opinions of XXX do not reflect that of Bioware inc, blahblahblah."  And, naturally, if Hepler hadn't added fuel to the fire with the twitter thing....

There's a discussion in here about how video-gaming culture doesn't appreciate rockstars.  This goes all the way back to John Romero -- and he had a lot more 'gamer cred' than Hepler.  Gamers didn't tend to appreciate his stance, or the ad campaign of, "John Romero will make you his bitch," when it came out.

Beyond that, there's also the unfortunate fact that customers expect respect.  Both for them and their medium of interest -- they are giving you money.  Should they be respectful in return?  Yes.

But let's be honest -- how many people does it take to make someone feel persecuted for their opinions?  From what I can tell (as closely related as this may be) -- only one, with sufficient motivation (re: e-mail bombing, again).  Does this mean it was only one person who attacked Hepler?  No, but I think it's pretty clear that the backlash isn't representative of the entire gaming community -- certainly, no one in this thread is hating on her, or her 'gameplay should be skippable in favor of the story' stance.  It's all on what she said after being provoked.

So -- because of that, (in retrospect) I took issue with the Destructoid article.  My feelings toward it were, "Don't get all pedantic and preachy on me -- I certainly wasn't part of that problem!"  A lot of hype and backlash because of a very small (but incredibly vocal) section of the community that does not accurately portray the whole.

Now ... on to the issue of 'should people in the industry not work in the industry if they don't care about games' question....  Absolutely, if someone doesn't care about the game they're working on, they shouldn't be allowed within ten feet of the job.

The job of designer.

For any other role involved in making a game? It couldn't matter less if they cared or didn't care about the game.  Well -- maybe there would be some small benefit to the gameplay design if (say) an art designer said, "Yeah, I can put in some animations, and we can give the hero a sweet grappling hook to add more interesting and engaging platforming elements," (or something more subtle).  But let's say you're looking at someone who writes a display/rendering engine.

It honestly has no bearing on his ability to make a good engine, provided he has competence.  He can even utterly loathe games, as long as he does his job well.  For writers, Hepler I think demonstrates that you can be indifferent to gameplay, and that shouldn't be a problem if you're not working on gameplay.  She obviously does care about story, or else she wouldn't have emphasized it in her interview, and ['button-through-gameplay' text macro].  Case-in-point, as I mentioned before, testers tend not to like the games they work on -- but they're not designing them, they're trying to figure out what's wrong with them.  Being critical to it actually helps (and in fact, testers frequently can offer good feedback to designers on what aspects of the game are flawed or could be improved).

So, if someone doesn't care about what they're doing specifically, they shouldn't be doing that -- but that goes well beyond the gaming industry.  The bigger question is....

Should you let people who dislike things that the gaming community cares about ... talk to the gaming community?

And that, I think the answer is honestly 'no'.  Hepler came into the discussion as an outsider, someone who isn't interested in what the gaming community frequently is -- and effectively attacked it and told people they were wrong when they retaliated against her non-gamer status.  That's no different from the marketing person who doesn't care about the product -- but as long as that doesn't impact their ability to sell it (and it almost never actually does -- indifference to a product doesn't make it harder to sell, especially if it's a luxury/entertainment product), then does it matter?  You wouldn't want your marketing guy talking directly to the gaming community either -- look at the backlash against the guy who was hired for PR for that controller company a few months back, and then got lambasted by Penny Arcade and (wait for it) the gaming community at large.

(That guy didn't care about the product, but also was doing a poor job -- so he lacks the competence to be an example of 'guy who doesn't care but is capable anyway'.  ...yeah, okay, maybe 'marketing' wasn't the best example -- but I think the rendering engine example still stands.)

[thepanda]

Hepler came into the discussion as an outsider, someone who isn't interested in what the gaming community frequently is -- and effectively attacked it and told people they were wrong.

Did you read the interview they quote-mined? I thought she explained herself well; I don't see how you can conclude she was attacking the community at all.

[Brian]

I did not.

I read only those two quotes and the twitter line.  But the comment I was calling an attack was the twitter line.  I could be wrong about her coming into the thing as an outsider, but I have a hard time seeing that after her, "You're jealous because I'm female and work in games, and you do neither," remark.

I'm also drawing on the specifics of the, "I came into the job out of a love of writing, not a love of playing games..." and following dismissal of core gameplay values as emphasizing her outsider status.

Am I wrong?


Edit: Clarified that earlier post; that was clumsily written on my part, yeah. >_<

[Grahf]

Sorry, I should have included the link to the original interview from the start. It was in the Gamespot artcle.

Here it is: Original Interview
Had to do it as a WayBack Machine link, because the original site is defunct now.

I agree completely that Hepler could have handled herself better, I think I mention as much in the first post. I'm not sure what to make of the idea that she shouldn't have talked to anyone in the community at large though given the extremely strange circumstances regarding this entire thing.

The original interview where the inflammatory quotes came from was from 2006, and they are taken somewhat out of context, Hepler does some amount of clarification in the interview as to why she thinks her ideas are valid, and the reason behind her want of a fast forward button:

The biggest objection is usually that skipping the fight scenes would make the game so much shorter, but to me, that's the biggest perk. If you're a woman, especially a mother, with dinner to prepare, kids' homework to help with, and a lot of other demands on your time, you don't need a game to be 100 hours long to hold your interest -- especially if those 100 hours are primarily doing things you don't enjoy. A fast forward button would give all players -- not just women -- the same options that we have with books or DVDs -- to skim past the parts we don't like and savor the ones we do. Over and over, women complain that they don't like violence, or they don't enjoy difficult and vertigo-inducing gameplay, yet this simple feature hasn't been tried on any game I know of.

Granted, many games would have very little left if you removed the combat, but for a game like Deus Ex or Bioware's RPGs, you could take out every shred of combat and still have an entertainment experience that rivals anything you'd see in the theater or on TV.

Now, while I'm not sure I agree with the gender based argument there, she's at least trying to validate herself. Whether she's successful or not in doing so is a matter of opinion, but without that knowledge the original mined part of the quote seems to paint a much harsher picture.

Also on the point of the date, I know that everything on the Internet can and does last forever, and that people will be more than happy to dig up and muck rake anything if they feel it justifies their point, but I doubt that anyone would have thought that an interview that they conducted five years prior that didn't cause any indicident would be dug up and used as a coat of arms to march against them. I realize that people have to be careful about what they say, but this seems a tad extreme.

[Brian]

Now, while I'm not sure I agree with the gender based argument there, she's at least trying to validate herself.

I'm not sure I agree with it either.  Women (and mothers) are not the only people who don't have time to sink into 100+ hour games.  That's probably true of most people with full-time jobs and any amount of additional responsibility. >_>;

Whether she's successful or not in doing so is a matter of opinion, but without that knowledge the original mined part of the quote seems to paint a much harsher picture.

While I do like the idea of what she suggests as an option, it fails to take some things into account -- namely, you make choices throughout both of those games that have an impact on those storylines.  How do you 'opt out' of interacting with the game?  (This is for that other discussion, though.)

Also on the point of the date, I know that everything on the Internet can and does last forever, and that people will be more than happy to dig up and muck rake anything if they feel it justifies their point, but I doubt that anyone would have thought that an interview that they conducted five years prior that didn't cause any indicident would be dug up and used as a coat of arms to march against them. I realize that people have to be careful about what they say, but this seems a tad extreme.

Yeah, whoever started the crusade against her with the argument that she was responsible for the game's decline is an idiot.  My stance on her not talking to the gaming populous wasn't meant to say, "She's not worthy of talking to them," as much as, "If you don't speak the language, that's a nest of sharks that will tear you apart."  I meant to advocate not letting people who haven't been hired specifically for the job of speaking to customers more to protect the employee and customer relations in general.

We are, unfortunately, generally represented by a few loud-mouthed idiots who are (among other things), over-entitled, sexist, and narrow-minded.  GIFT in action, absolutely.  They only need to pull in a few people who listen to fellow gamers over anyone else to get enough motion to harrass a woman who's peripherally related to design (at best), and target her for something that's not her fault at all.

Going to WoW and the World of Whinecraft forums (Blizzard's official forums), eventually all developers except for Greg Street (Ghostcrawler) were removed from the pool of people who reply to posters directly.  It's him and the specifically elected Community Managers -- people who are hired and paid just to deal with that nastily vocal contingent.  And if you want to see what they deal with, go to mmo-champion.com and check out the blue tracker -- they're pretty terse in their responses, but it's hardly unwarranted.  Even so....

Getting back to the specific topic: if Bioware's going downhill (and I'm not sure it is), it's not the writing, it's the design.  I don't know -- does she gethave to design things or influence them?  Or does she just get instructions to generate content according to some designer's vision?  I'm just going to guess it's the latter, since she doesn't really identify herself as a gamer.  I'm guessing there's not actually a lot of room in what she does, and her writing is still on the rails of some other designer's plan -- especially if there are multiple writers and they need to stay on track with regard to characterization and so forth.

Bottom line: She makes an easy target.  It's unfortunate, but ... let's face it.  The marketspace we share with other gamers is fairly polluted.  At the same time, I don't know that we can call ourselves our own worst enemies, because the gamer populous is a vast and diverse group.  We are, unfortunately, burdened with our share of bad apples, and it really doesn't help that gamer culture is more entangled with the internet than almost any other.  I think that's another consideration we may have overlooked with regards to that vocal minority.

[Arakawa]

Observation from other, similar incidents: Twitter is just generally an awful medium to have flame wars in, let alone any sort of sane discussion. After being compressed into 140 characters, even the most reasonable replies tend to resemble schoolyard insults. Not that anyone involved seems to have been particularly trying to sound reasonable.

What I'm trying to wrap my head around is the alleged six year gap between the supposed flippant remarks by Hepler about gameplay and the ensuing Twitter bombing.

I'd have thought six years to be an awfully long time to hold a grudge on the Internet.