Alleged harassment, threats of doxxing, hitpiece journalism, 'fake' gamer girls... Oh my!

[TopazFusion]

There's a lot to unpack here, as it's quite the wild ride of a story. But I'll try my best to describe the events and what has unfolded.

If you'd rather watch a youtube summary of this story, I'd recommend the following video by Freedo from 'Your Overwatch':

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6U-VwhhlstA

I've watched a number of different videos covering this story, but (surprising no-one) most of them fixate on the 'SJW' or 'hostile journalists' aspect. Freedo's video is the most sensible and objective video I could find.

Anyway, it all starts with a player called "Ellie" appearing (as rank 4) on the Overwatch North American Top500 leaderboard.
For those not in the know, Overwatch's top500 leaderboard is such a high echelon to be in, that pretty much everyone there knows everyone else. It's mostly filled with streamers and pro (or former pro) players. Additionally, the leaderboard doesn't change much from competitive season to season.
"Ellie", however, was a recent newcomer that appeared out of nowhere. Moreover, it was a female newcomer, as this player could be heard communicating (with a female voice) via the in-game voice comms system.

One of the 'Overwatch Contenders' pro teams, called "Second Wind", decided to enlist Ellie as a member of their team, as the team was short a player, and Ellie was someone new (and also someone who was obviously pretty good, to reach rank 4 in NA). It should also be mentioned that females are rare in the traditionally male-dominated esports pro scene.
But this is where things start getting a bit weird.
Pro team lineups all list their players on the team's website. They list both the player's gamertag AND the player's real name too. However, Ellie was just listed as "Ellie" (ie: just the gamertag), and no real name was given. This immediately led to a large number of players (mostly other top500 players / pro players / streamers) to postulate that Ellie was actually not real. Specifically that it was an existing top500 player playing on an alternate account with a female sat next to him on the mic. There were even threats of doxxing to try and "root out" who the "real" Ellie is.

A few days later, Ellie stepped down from the team, citing "unforeseen reactions".

Cue a large number of gaming journalism sites all jumping on the bandwagon, with the predictable hitpieces about how a female gamer was harassed out of the pro scene and how gaming is a hostile and toxic environment to females, etcetera, etcetera.

... And the story could have ended there. But no, it gets better (or worse, depending on your point of view).

As it turns out "Ellie" was fake and an imposter all along. The voice was actually a 17-year old girl who wasn't very good at the game. The actual person playing was someone else (or perhaps 2 other people at different times, as some sources speculate), and the whole thing was supposed to be a "social experiment".

Neither Blizzard nor Second Wind knew about this ruse or stunt, and Second Wind responded with the following statement:
http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1sqp4fv
They talk about how they didn't press Ellie for any of her personal details out of respect of her privacy, and because the negative and hostile reactions towards her had already started at that point. They also apologize and say they will do a better job of vetting their players in future.

...

This whole debacle is an absolute shitshow, and a lot of people - from journalists to Blizzard themselves - have been left red-faced over this. Additionally it's going to make it a LOT harder for females in future to make their way into the pro scene, as they're all going to be met with the "lol are you real?" stigma from now on.

Leave your comments on this below, and please be civil and respectful, as a lot of issues are covered here, and many of them are likely to be contentious and spirited.

 

[meiam]

From what I understand people didn't just call "her" out because her real name wasn't listed but instead they had suspicion from the way she commented in game being delayed and unresponsive, i.e. this wasn't just because she was a women, they had soft evidence something was off.

Yeah weird clusterfuck, I initially saw this news when the person behind it said it was a "social experiment" (from the headline I though it was an attempt at making an AI or something like that). Obviously when the news initially hit that "she" was stepping down this was painted as a case of toxic gamer culture and everything, with call for the person who initially made the accusation to be banned and all that. Turn out they were right all along. Somehow I don't think people will use that as a moment to think about jumping to conclusion based on unrelated information (i.e. the sex of the people involved).

 

[Basement Cat]

*SLAMS TOPAZFUSION WITH A BAN*

Oh, wait! A Mod started this thread.

Guess I can't *smush* it out of hand. DARN YOU TOPAZ!!!

*retreats back to the Basement*


Mod Edit: Shall be monitoring this thread for similar posts that may be out of line.

 

[Samos205]

*SLAMS TOPAZFUSION WITH A BAN*

Oh, wait! A Mod started this thread.

Guess I can't *smush* it out of hand. DARN YOU TOPAZ!!!

*retreats back to the Basement*


Mod Edit: Shall be monitoring this thread for similar posts that may be out of line.

Out of curiosity, what would you deem out of line?

 

[Mcgeezaks]

I mean it is pretty suspicious for someone to expect anonymity when they're in a pro-circuit of a game female or not. I very much doubt it's gonna make it harder for females to enter the pro-league, all they have to do is not lie or withhold their identity like everyone else.

 

[Basement Cat]

*SLAMS TOPAZFUSION WITH A BAN*

Oh, wait! A Mod started this thread.

Guess I can't *smush* it out of hand. DARN YOU TOPAZ!!!

*retreats back to the Basement*


Mod Edit: Shall be monitoring this thread for similar posts that may be out of line.

Out of curiosity, what would you deem out of line?

I'm tipsy. I was talking with other Topaz and others on our Chat. I'm silly.

Mostly it's a poke to keep this thread's topic peaceful and civil.


*hangs head in shame*

 

[Aiddon_v1legacy]

Yeah, this was a big mess. Like the video said and with responses from other women, if this was a "social experiment" then it's one that didn't help. In fact it reinforced a TON of negative stereotypes about female gamers that misogynists have used in order to marginalize, harass, and threaten them. It's what I like to call "Idiot in the Kitchen Syndrome" and it's basically where someone THINKS they were helping, but in fact has just made things worse.

 

[Marik2]

This looks like a poorly constructed social experiment.

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

I mean it is pretty suspicious for someone to expect anonymity when they're in a pro-circuit of a game female or not. I very much doubt it's gonna make it harder for females to enter the pro-league, all they have to do is not lie or withhold their identity like everyone else.

Pretty much this. Someone comes out of nowhere, gets signed to a team and then wants to remain anonymous? Of course the internet isn't going to allow that.

The fact that it was a "female" gamer doesn't really factor into it. It's like if a basketball player suddenly started playing with a Guy Fawkes mask on and a bunch of hashtags on his jersey instead of a name. There's going to be an immediate question about who he is and what's he trying to hide.

The team is silly for not trying to investigate further after their player told them they wanted to be anonymous. You can't be a "professional athlete" and be anonymous.

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

So being reasonably skeptical with enough evidence to back up your suspicions is now considered sexism by video game "journalists"? Gotcha. I gotta remember the names of those "journalists" so I don't make a mistake of reading any of their shit in the future.

This looks like a poorly constructed social experiment.

It's a prank. And it's not even new and original. Back in the early days of Quake and Counter Strike this type of stuff used to happen on a regular basis. It's just something that people do from time to time.

There's no agenda here and no social experiment took place. People who engage in these sorts of pranks don't actually think things through. They just do it because they think it would be funny to them. That's the whole sum and substance of what has occurred here. And the response of other players is exactly what the response has always been and will always be. That's what happens every single time.

I can't believe that people are turning this into a scandal. What the actual fuck?

 

[Dreiko_v1legacy]

I don't buy the social experiment excuse. It's just something to say to avoid getting blamed. No 17 year old will do all this for some unspecified experiment and then not present any findings or somehow summarize the results but just go away unceremoniously.


It's really easy to prove you're good at a game if you actually are so I don't see any esports related issues for women stemming from this and I am competitive with fighting games so I have lots of tournament experience to go by. You just play one match and the skill of your foe will instantly shine through if they're good, even if they're having their worst day ever. Hell, just because women are rare, the one really good one you fight is all that much more memorable.

What we should focus on is the ease with which journalists which are supposed to be for gamers will turn against us for the sake of something else such as equality or feminism or what have you. If that's their perspective they're feminism journalists talking about games and not games journalists and I think we really need to highlight that difference going forward and not grant them the authority that ought be wielded by one whose foremost goal is the wellbeing of gaming to the expense of other goals.

 

[Here Comes Tomorrow]

Once again I'm reminded why I only play single player games in offline mode. Know how much shit I have to deal with? None. Because I learned years ago that playing online multiplayer is basically inviting people to fling shit at you and suck all the fun out of games for you and everyone around them.

The e"sports" community is a fucking shitshow, it's the pinnacle of No Fun Allowed gaming where everything is SERIOUS and an even bigger invitation for people to act like elitist cock wombles and gatekeep their chosen game like they're some lord-high demigod spergmeister whos authority on said game is infallible.

I'm glad this happened because it means I get to sit and watch something I hate consume itself further while enjoying my game-bubble where I can play stuff I like without someone 4000 miles away dictating to me how I should be having fun.

 

[Dreiko_v1legacy]

Once again I'm reminded why I only play single player games in offline mode. Know how much shit I have to deal with? None. Because I learned years ago that playing online multiplayer is basically inviting people to fling shit at you and suck all the fun out of games for you and everyone around them.

The e"sports" community is a fucking shitshow, it's the pinnacle of No Fun Allowed gaming where everything is SERIOUS and an even bigger invitation for people to act like elitist cock wombles and gatekeep their chosen game like they're some lord-high demigod spergmeister whos authority on said game is infallible.

I'm glad this happened because it means I get to sit and watch something I hate consume itself further while enjoying my game-bubble where I can play stuff I like without someone 4000 miles away dictating to me how I should be having fun.

It's more that it's more fun to play in that way for a certain segment of the population. The kind of fun you have by pitting thousands of hours of work at getting good at a game against someone else who also has spent similar amounts of time and effort is on a different scale than just playing single player or vs the AI.


The whole "no fun allowed" thing is a meme by those who are not among the group that finds what I described fun, not a notion actually shared by competitive people.

 

[Gethsemani_v1legacy]

What we should focus on is the ease with which journalists which are supposed to be for gamers will turn against us for the sake of something else such as equality or feminism or what have you. If that's their perspective they're feminism journalists talking about games and not games journalists and I think we really need to highlight that difference going forward and not grant them the authority that ought be wielded by one whose foremost goal is the wellbeing of gaming to the expense of other goals.

There's a lot to focus on here, one aspect being that journalists ran with a story too soon and made too grand conclusions from very little material. At the same time there's no denying that e-sports have a very problematic relation to women, considering the frequent stories about how female pro's aren't getting picked up by teams with all kinds of excuses ("The team shares a house and a woman would mess with the dynamic" is my favorite). With that in mind, while journalists pulled the trigger early, and deserve the blame for it, there was also a lot of things said about "Ellie" prior to the reveal that would definitely not have been said had it been "Ellis" and a guy's voice. So the sexist undercurrent is there, which doesn't mean that everyone who doubted Ellie is a sexist by any means, it is just that this time the people who got triggered by a potential woman can claim they were right in doubting her. There is, after all, quite a wide difference between "There's something off about this player coming out of nowhere and there's something weird about how they talk to their team" and "A woman can't be this good at Overwatch" (and both of those appeared in this case).

Personally, I think we should more focus on the fact that Ellie got picked up by a professional e-sports team, a for-profit organization that is the employer of all their players, without doing any background checks, without having her sign any kind of employment contract, without getting provided a bank account for salary and bonuses payment (or at least a physical address to send checks to) or bothering to verify that she was who she claimed she was. It is equally bad if any and all of these things actually took place, because that would mean that Second Wind actually hired someone without making sure they were genuine. Whichever of the above took place, it should lead to a serious discussion about the professional conduct of e-sports teams, their legal responsibilities as employers and the working conditions of e-sports pros. Because either they hire people indiscriminately and without proper verification or their hiring practices are shady as fuck, up to not including proper legal paperwork for employment. That to me sounds like it has much broader consequences then a bunch of gaming journalists once again putting the cart before the horse.

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

I don't buy the social experiment excuse. It's just something to say to avoid getting blamed. No 17 year old will do all this for some unspecified experiment and then not present any findings or somehow summarize the results but just go away unceremoniously.


It's really easy to prove you're good at a game if you actually are so I don't see any esports related issues for women stemming from this and I am competitive with fighting games so I have lots of tournament experience to go by. You just play one match and the skill of your foe will instantly shine through if they're good, even if they're having their worst day ever. Hell, just because women are rare, the one really good one you fight is all that much more memorable.

What we should focus on is the ease with which journalists which are supposed to be for gamers will turn against us for the sake of something else such as equality or feminism or what have you. If that's their perspective they're feminism journalists talking about games and not games journalists and I think we really need to highlight that difference going forward and not grant them the authority that ought be wielded by one whose foremost goal is the wellbeing of gaming to the expense of other goals.

I don't understand why anyone would think that this story was even newsworthy. Yet so many gaming oriented websites latched onto it like there's nothing else to write about. Like, I don't know, video games? Even if it turned out that it was a real female player it would still be a non-story. Who gives a shit?

 

[I can't enter my old name]

Overwatch is a "competitive game" marketed as a Disney movie, hence the higher female count.

You have CoD players who couldn't into LoL because it was boring clicky clicky and last hitting was just too much for them, and then you have a lot of women who mainly play RPGs. Put these two together and bad things happen between them.

I'm going to shit on Overwatch every chance I get. It's a bad game.

It's neither a competitive game or a casual game. It's a game where people who want one or the other squabble at each other. It's a game where your average LoL/CoD player can feel good by being above average in Overwatch. Then Blizzard has to devote resources for an unnecessary problem by borrowing the flawed MOBA report system where you can get banned for simply being bad at the game.

The Overwatch e-sports scene is seen as a joke. The fps mechanics are borrowed from tf2, another casual game, and there's a reason why competitive tf2 never became a thing. The artstyle is a Disney/Glen Keane ripoff, and most importantly the porn is shit. If you own Overwatch, I recommend you burn your copy this instant.

 

[Dreiko_v1legacy]

What we should focus on is the ease with which journalists which are supposed to be for gamers will turn against us for the sake of something else such as equality or feminism or what have you. If that's their perspective they're feminism journalists talking about games and not games journalists and I think we really need to highlight that difference going forward and not grant them the authority that ought be wielded by one whose foremost goal is the wellbeing of gaming to the expense of other goals.

There's a lot to focus on here, one aspect being that journalists ran with a story too soon and made too grand conclusions from very little material. At the same time there's no denying that e-sports have a very problematic relation to women, considering the frequent stories about how female pro's aren't getting picked up by teams with all kinds of excuses ("The team shares a house and a woman would mess with the dynamic" is my favorite). With that in mind, while journalists pulled the trigger early, and deserve the blame for it, there was also a lot of things said about "Ellie" prior to the reveal that would definitely not have been said had it been "Ellis" and a guy's voice. So the sexist undercurrent is there, which doesn't mean that everyone who doubted Ellie is a sexist by any means, it is just that this time the people who got triggered by a potential woman can claim they were right in doubting her. There is, after all, quite a wide difference between "There's something off about this player coming out of nowhere and there's something weird about how they talk to their team" and "A woman can't be this good at Overwatch" (and both of those appeared in this case).

Personally, I think we should more focus on the fact that Ellie got picked up by a professional e-sports team, a for-profit organization that is the employer of all their players, without doing any background checks, without having her sign any kind of employment contract, without getting provided a bank account for salary and bonuses payment (or at least a physical address to send checks to) or bothering to verify that she was who she claimed she was. It is equally bad if any and all of these things actually took place, because that would mean that Second Wind actually hired someone without making sure they were genuine. Whichever of the above took place, it should lead to a serious discussion about the professional conduct of e-sports teams, their legal responsibilities as employers and the working conditions of e-sports pros. Because either they hire people indiscriminately and without proper verification or their hiring practices are shady as fuck, up to not including proper legal paperwork for employment. That to me sounds like it has much broader consequences then a bunch of gaming journalists once again putting the cart before the horse.

The fact that the bulk of the concerns about her turned out to be true absolves most of those issues you raise. Sure, there are the kids who will try to be edgy (or the genuine weirdo misanthropes that are like 0.000000001% of the competitive community) and say stuff like "women can't be good at overwatch" and all that. At the same time, when you paint people with legitimate concerns about the veracity of someone's claims with the same brush as those rare comments, as is the go-to move when someone is looking to avoid taking responsibility for their failures be they ethical (such as the games journalists who decided to write gamers are dead articles instead of look in the mirror) or artistic (such as the ghostbusters team), you're doing greater harm.



I think the reason for why the journalists believed the deceptive account of events until it was debunked is the same reason why the team didn't pry into her private details. They just believed her cause she has the veil of a protected class and granted her flexibility that they would not have normally granted some other random dude.


Another highly interesting thing about that team was how the guy who was actually playing under her name was not even considered for recruitment, but when his skill was bottled in her person, he was somehow all of a sudden a lot more desirable. Because e-sports teams apparently have a thing against women. Cause yes, that's how logic works.

I don't understand why anyone would think that this story was even newsworthy. Yet so many gaming oriented websites latched onto it like there's nothing else to write about. Like, I don't know, video games? Even if it turned out that it was a real female player it would still be a non-story. Who gives a shit?

It's cause you're thinking of them as "games journalists" and not as "feminist journalists talking about gaming" because they happen to work in sites that purport to be primarily about gaming when in fact they're becoming more about politics and equality and all those other random things. Once you start seeing that what they say is said through the prism of an ideologue and not through the prism of someone genuinely trying to do the best thing they can for the benefit of gaming you will have an easier time coming to terms with the reasoning behind their actions.

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

It's cause you're thinking of them as "games journalists" and not as "feminist journalists talking about gaming" because they happen to work in sites that purport to be primarily about gaming when in fact they're becoming more about politics and equality and all those other random things. Once you start seeing that what they say is said through the prism of an ideologue and not through the prism of someone genuinely trying to do the best thing they can for the benefit of gaming you will have an easier time coming to terms with the reasoning behind their actions.

It doesn't make sense even if you think of them as feminist journalists. It's still a non-story. The fact that some people on a video game server somewhere didn't believe that one of the players is female is not something worth writing about in any article for fuck sake.

 

[TopazFusion]

It isn?t just this instance that?s a shitshow; it?s pretty much the online gaming conglomerate in general.

Anyways, these goofballs involved just set it back even farther with this fake ?cry wolf? stunt. Might as well throw them to the wolves, figuratively speaking (mostly).

 

[Dreiko_v1legacy]

It's cause you're thinking of them as "games journalists" and not as "feminist journalists talking about gaming" because they happen to work in sites that purport to be primarily about gaming when in fact they're becoming more about politics and equality and all those other random things. Once you start seeing that what they say is said through the prism of an ideologue and not through the prism of someone genuinely trying to do the best thing they can for the benefit of gaming you will have an easier time coming to terms with the reasoning behind their actions.

It doesn't make sense even if you think of them as feminist journalists. It's still a non-story. The fact that some people on a video game server somewhere didn't believe that one of the players is female is not something worth writing about in any article for fuck sake.

The way I understand it, anything that showcases the evils of the status quo is somehow a blow in the war against the forces that oppress women. Something along these lines would be the explanation.


How much sense such an approach to journalism of any flavor that makes, I leave for you to decide lol.