Brianna Wu / John Flynt - Original Thread

[Takayuki Yagami]

A lecture that Wu gave last month:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=IeOM3xpRQ7A
I haven't watched it myself and don't plan to, but feel free to point out anything outrageous.

Can you give a synopsis? I can't stomach her voice (another trait she she shares with OPL).

 

[XH 502]

FSS, I just skipped to 15:00 to avoid the crap, and

Don't worry, I've got you covered.

0:25 - What better way to start than with a hesitant announcement by a white man? "Brianna Wu is one of the most interesting and... outspoken people in games right now." He then proceeds with the ass-kissing.

1:15 - She begins. As an aside: this is the first time I've heard her voice, and wow, are we sure she's ever taken hormones?

1:55 - She literally states that she "threw this talk together" while on the "plane out here".

2:18 - "This is going to be HONEST and TRUE."

She starts off by talking about her dad, who she claims was so poor he had to work on a farm as a teenager before he became a gynecologist and joined the Navy as a healthcare provider.

3:17 - Story about how she began her first start-up at 19 after being given 250k. Completely ignores the fact that it tanked, instead promotes it as a positive aspect of her background.

3:38 - "My approach had always been: be good at what you do, keep your head down, and don't engage on this stuff it's not worth arguing about. You know, in the last five years it's changed my mind a little bit." I love how this completely contradicts her documented shenanigans dating back to college.

- shows the R60 trailer -

5:40 - She begins to heap on the praise, talks about how it's an ambitious game for so few people, but can't even keep the numbers right. "5, 10, 11 people". Of course, Bastion was made in half the time by a team of seven people...

5:59 - "I LOVE sexy awesome women that kick butt! I've watched every Underworld movie, like, a hundred times! Resident Evil! But loving that stuff and being a tech feminist is not always compatible."

6:18 - She immediately backtracks about the skin-tight outfits and makes an "off-hand" comment about how they're adding armor for the Steam version.

6:45 - She refers to the Ice Climbers as a singular male character, completely ignoring the fact that there are two of them and one is a woman.

6:58 - Complaints about lack of women in games since the "very beginning" with no mention of Samus Aran, Laura Croft, Zelda, Sypha Belnades, every woman in Chrono Trigger...

7:28 - "I wanted to make games with women characters that were awesome, and I wanted to do that because as a 'cold, hard Capitalist' I think there's a lot of money to be made out there." Brianna just outright admitted that she's not in it for social progress, but profits.

8:00 - She's talking about how she wanted to advance narrative games on mobile because no one was "tapping into that market". R60 is apparently supposed to emulate Final Fantasy Tactics.

8:20 - (in reference to her team-up with Amanda) "The two of us together, it was like Steve Jobs and Wosniack."

9:00 - "One of the main features for our game is there are no 'right' answers. There's no 'best ending' for Revolution 60. No matter what you do, things are going to be 'good' things are going to be 'bad'. It's kind of like life. You make your choices and you deal with the fallout from it." In other words, yes, there are right answers.

9:50 - Starts talking about the Blue Ocean Strategy and appealing to "unfished" markets that want games different from the norm.

10:50 - "This is a word I made up: 'Neogamers' as opposed to 'classical gamers'."

11:05 - "Just in 2007, only 17% of gamers were women." [citation needed]

11:10 - She's talking about "Neogamers" and what "they/we" want, but has yet to define the term.

11:36 - "We shipped our game, and it did very, very well. It got three separate Gameof the Year awards. We got rave reviews, Kotaku."

12:08 - "Things really telling that, you know, most of our very positive reviews were from women reviewers which is a whole 'nother reason you need women in game development press, but that's a whole different talk."

[guys, Brianna keeps pacing and her arms can only move in the rigid up/down motionand I want to punch my screen]

12:53 - "You know we have 24 endings, they're all dark, there's no pass/fail state." Which is why @Smutley couldn't lose the game- oh.

 

[Francis York Morgan]

24:10 Giant Bomb doesn't hire women or black people. (No idea if this is true.)

That was the point I stopped listening because I was afraid I'd lose my temper. Statements like this are one of the most infuriating things to me from people like Wu.

When a team doesn't have a certain portion of the population represented in their workforce, it's not necessarily indicative that they just refuse to hire people who belong to that group. My division, for instance, doesn't have a single black person in it. However, want to guess how many African American applicants we've had since I have been working here? Zero. Hell, this division was all women before I was hired.

EDIT: I somehow missed that line about her game's endings being "all dark". How the fuck is that indicative of quality?

 

[Peace and Harmony]

5:59 - "I LOVE sexy awesome women that kick butt! I've watched every Underworld movie, like, a hundred times! Resident Evil! But loving that stuff and being a tech feminist is not always compatible."

There's an infinite number of holes to poke in her insane ranting but I'm going to choose this one because I'm a cinephile. I completely reject the notion that stuff like Underworld, Tomb Raider, etc is feminist - those are just women doing men's jobs. Amazingly, there are hundreds and hundreds of outstanding movies were incredibly strong women are depicted as being independent in their own right without having the need to gun down werewolves - Yesterday is the one that always sticks out in my mind because I found that one particularly powerful.

Oh wait but people speak a funny language in that movie and she isn't tearing out anyone's throat so she's just another victim of the EVIL PATRIARCHY.

 

[Sarcastic Username]

48:50 "When we launched we were featured by Apple. We ended up getting :blah: most of our profit came from that. After gamergate come up[sic], it went up by that much (puts hand up just a little). So this is frankly a lie (that we do it for money)."

49:40 "I'm hear talking to you but I'm not doing development because I'm talking to you about feminisinininsm."

50:00 "I am going to write a book."

50:45 "Arlington police are clueless. They've been actively hostile to me when I've invited them to my house to fie police reports."

"Um, I'm legally unable to tell you which higher agencies I'm working for, I mean working with, on active prosecutions. We've had hundreds of death threats, some of them very actionable."

51:25 "No one has gotten arrested, or even gotten a ticket! It must be because law enforcement doesn't care." (paraphrased that last part)

51:55 "Software developers need to be on Twitter to get jobs." <-- Bullshit.

52:20 Some shitty cartoon on screen by that cut-and-paste loser.

53:10 "Gamergate says it's about journalism but they spend most of their time talking about women."

53:30 A lot of what I do "I can't talk about it publicly." In my heart I'm a diplomat but I try to do stuff behind the scenes. ... "I've had conversations with Twitter, I've had conversations with Reddit, I've talked with members of government. All of these institutions are completely failing women right now."

54:10 "Back to our studio. WE have a hit game coming out." Our PC release came out on Steam Greenlight, it was a warzone again. We got greenlit in 2 days, that was lightning fast, but the forums were so overfilled with personal attacks that we ended up having to shut us down."

55:00 we develop games for women.

55:45 when I was 6 or 7, my dad graduated from the navy and we were in Mississippi, in this culture hard for me to understand. The vents from the 60s are still reverberating. I've been 10 or 20 KKK members in my life."

56:50 so you have this culture when, even in the 80s and 90s was racist, was homophobic, was sexist. I was at UMiss, at the Lycaeum, where James Meredith went to go enroll, which is a very white racist place. They dispatched the National Guard to MY SCHOOL so he could register.

59:10 "This is game development today:" shows picture of UMiss, unwilling to listen to the problems of the other.

 

[MiloWuCollusion]

The Giant Bomb stuff was specially shitty because she got close to Patrick Klepek (for all its faults, at least he seems to be a true believer of SJW BS) and I think he did a interview with her about her shitty game before/during the GG meltdown. And she was pretty happy of throw the site under the bus even when she tried to act "diplomatic". when Jeff wrote that he decided to ignore the drama (THANK GOD FOR THAT). I tend to think that her drama in NeoGaf was the thing that made Patrick leave for Kotaku after "celebrating" the ability to talk about "harassersruining gaiming" in twitter before Wu meltdown.

Funny, Alex has dropped many of his SJW tendencies after Patrick left, or at least is bussy with Vinny in getting the NY studio in an aceptable condition to get in the "they need voice to denounce" band.

 

[Jaimas]

32:25 "We are going to lose Gamergate, we are hemorrhaging women."

Someone please crop this segment. Wu openly acknowleding that her side is losing to Gamergate is the sort of thing we can use to provoke chimp-outs.

 

[Francis York Morgan]

@Sarcastic Username, about how much of this talk is her trying to sell you something? Can you give a percentage?

 

[Kablamo]

A lecture that Wu gave last month:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=IeOM3xpRQ7A
I haven't watched it myself and don't plan to, but feel free to point out anything outrageous.

I made it 1:30 in, right up until Wu actually started talking and referenced #thedress

And now I actually, sincerely, have a headache.

 

[Smutley]

EDIT: I somehow missed that line about her game's endings being "all dark". How the fuck is that indicative of quality?

The best part, and one she has never brought up, is that all her "dark endings" are completely incongruous with the game itself. You have kung fu geisha bots, robot spiders everywhere, sassy Gurl Power barbies having sassy conversations, never ending meaningless tech babble, and a final boss fight with fucking GLaDOS who uses wikipedia to say an obnoxious stream of geometric words her autistic mind was briefly obsessed with. Then suddenly bam dark ending where everyone was a secret bad guy double agent and maybe Holiday gets murdered by the person you spent the whole game agreeing with.

Followed by the atrociously cheeky "Player Two Press Start" song that plays over the credits.

GRIMDARK

Someone please crop this segment. Wu openly acknowleding that her side is losing to Gamergate is the sort of thing we can use to provoke chimp-outs.

If Wu was still a republican who wasn't disowned she could have had her rich dad buy her tickets to a Romney fundraiser. I hear he has binders full of them she could have used to fill those tech positions.

 

[Sarcastic Username]

these are all past the one hour mark

2:47 the workplace at your studio? Do you have crunchtime? She says "no." Which is good.

3:10 "when you give women a bunch of money and let them do it, you get a giant hyper-collaborative company. I do have a boss-card that I can play where I can say 'no, I'm in charge,' because you need that so you don't get mired."

4:20 they work with parents who need to pick their kid up at 5. Which is good. Gamedev really is the worst part of software development for work-life balance.

6:40 someone asks about white-knighting, angry that it shuts down conversation. POT KETTLE!

8:40 "It's fine if dead or alive exists, if that's what you need to get off the ground." ... "Rev60 may not be a perfect game from a feminist POV, but I think it's clear that it informs my choices."

11:30 "I'm always looking for talent, but you have to go look for it."

12:00 "People say that QTEs suck, like 'press X to pay respects.' That's why you draw a circle to make Holiday to a bicycle kick, because that's fun. If a character betrays you on a bridge, you have to type in the emotion you feel."

next: touch screen monitors make drawing very hard, so gesture-based interfaces don't work there

13:10 "I work 80 hours a week on a computer so this (moving arms) is going to get tiring".

14:50 when dudes would play the game, they would (hits podium rapidly) and complain that the game was slow. When women played, they vastly prefer timing based mechanics, or pattern-recognition. This is very general, there's a ton of gender-overlap here. Women aren't looking for constant-attack games.

@Sarcastic Username, about how much of this talk is her trying to sell you something? Can you give a percentage?

Maybe only 10%, but it seemed a lot more when I dropped in at the 15 minute mark.

 

[MiloWuCollusion]

24:10 Giant Bomb doesn't hire women or black people. (No idea if this is true.)

There was a SJW branded drama a little before the beginning of GG where people bitched about GB hiring Dan and Jason (two white dudes, one friend of Jeff) after a open call for job applications. This included people that are in Patrick friend list or at least he gives them benefit of doubt ( like Leigh "SHE IS A GOOD WRITTER HONEST" Alexander that is infamously passive agressive with GB after she got drunk and nobody thought she was a "funny drunk" in the boys club house)

Giant Bomb is a small crew that fought by two years when bought by CBSi to get more employes. One of his founding members died and Vinny and Patrick moved to the East coast in between this period. So Jeff really thinks about the new hires beyond quotas or looks. Dan was his friend before joining, but Dan... actually works pretty well with the crew and has generated content that is probably more popular than anything Patrick did in Video Stuff.

So yeah, Jeff did hired two white dudes (with experiencie in vidja journalism should be say) over many other applicants because he knew that he cannot affor having a thin skinned awkward person with little to no experiencie that sees no wrong in buying domains of upcoming NDA protected games.

 

[Sarcastic Username]

16:20 There's disgust over Angry Birfs or a 40-year-old Mom playing Farmville. There's a disgust built into the culture.

17:40 "I see 12 year old girls see Gamergate and they say 'I won't go into gaming, it's too scary.'" Audience member response: Ooooooh, yeaaaaah.]

18:30 "I am a vastly imperfect role model. If you want a role model in life do not choose me."

21:20 "How many times in my career have I talked to a VC who was a woman? One time."

22:20 "I've stopped buying games that don't feature women."

24:00 "Can you name any woman over 40 in a game that is not a butt of a joke?" Audience gives person from Warcraft nearly immediately. Wu says "you're reaching," he says back "no, it's the game I play the most!"

24:30 Wu says that there aren't a diversity of women-types in games.

25:10 talks about how bigger women need to have their body types represented. Wu has mentioned that she's aware of her characters earlier.

31:25 "Watchdogs is horrible, and so is the writer behind it, given his views on gamergate."

32:55 "One of the flaws of Rev60 is that all 4 of those characters are different parts of my personality."

35:50 "Simplify, simplify, simplify. That was Rev60." They don't want the game to get in the way of the story.

36:40 "I voted to kill the combat engine and my team overruled me. One of the most beloved features, and I hated it."


Now, I need to do some freaking work so I don't get fired.

 

[MiloWuCollusion]

16:20 There's disgust over Angry Birfs or a 40-year-old Mom playing Farmville. There's a disgust built into the culture.

17:40 "I see 12 year old girls see Gamergate and they say 'I won't go into gaming, it's too scary.'" Audience member response: Ooooooh, yeaaaaah.]

18:30 "I am a vastly imperfect role model. If you want a role model in life do not choose me."

21:20 "How many times in my career have I talked to a VC who was a woman? One time."

22:20 "I've stopped buying games that don't feature women."

24:00 "Can you name any woman over 40 in a game that is not a butt of a joke?" Audience gives person from Warcraft nearly immediately. Wu says "you're reaching," he says back "no, it's the game I play the most!"

24:30 Wu says that there aren't a diversity of women-types in games.

She didn bite her tongue after that last comment?

 

[Francis York Morgan]

18:30 "I am a vastly imperfect role model. If you want a role model in life do not choose me."

Well, at least she's finally right about something.

 

[millais]

That's really pathetic if she actually showed off the Deagle Nation street racing accident video and tried to pass it off as a credible threat to her safety. It's been two months already and she still hasn't managed to pull any sort of legal action on Jace, much less get that bogus restraining order past a judge.

Though I'm glad she's only getting offers to speak at crappy no name universities no one has ever heard of.

 

[Sarcastic Username]

PS I was back-editing a lot of my comments so if you were only reading new you missed stuff.

That's really pathetic if she actually showed off the Deagle Nation street racing accident video and tried to pass it off as a credible threat to her safety. It's been two months already and she still hasn't managed to pull any sort of legal action on Jace, much less get that bogus restraining order past a judge.

Though I'm glad she's only getting offers to speak at crappy no name universities no one has ever heard of.

I hadn't watched it before, but, without context, it's kind of scary. With just the little bit of context that the guy is hamming it up, it's hilarious.

 

[AnOminous]

48:50 "When we launched we were featured by Apple. We ended up getting :blah: most of our profit came from that. After gamergate come up[sic], it went up by that much (puts hand up just a little). So this is frankly a lie (that we do it for money)."

That sure looks like a soundbite to me. I don't know if anyone is considering a soundboard.

 

[ZehnBoat]

35:50 "Simplify, simplify, simplify. That was Rev60." They don't want the game to get in the way of the story.

as an aspergers, that was insulting

 

[MiloWuCollusion]

I hadn't watched it before, but, without context, it's kind of scary. .

Thats the tactic that many Wu supporters used when going against Jace pre-reveal. Alas, Wu knew way before the car stunt that Jace was a threat to no one (fake or not), as she bitched about his "going AssCreed with her" stunt previously (including restraining order and call to police) . The regular facebook/twitter/tumblr reader will just watch that and give her victim points without asking "why does this crazy Jace guy has a intro/outro?"

It surprises me that she is still betting on it or hopes that no colleage student has more than superficial SJW painted knowledge of her. Makes me think that she deep down knows that she is a pretty small fish.