[Rant]/[D] Witch Hunting and 'eSports'

Destiny was playing on the ladder, and after a frustrating loss to a Terran player, he had used a racial slur against the player. This was brought up on TL, in which the person originally posting the thread states that they are not personally offended by his actions, but his actions are offense in nature.

This player has the right to be offended, and he can do what he sees fit that Quantic (the previous administrative party involved) is made aware of Destiny's actions. Instead, a witch hunt is formed up and Razer, not Quantic, is involved into a seemingly innocuous situation. It would be akin to mass calling Coca Cola because your drink you bought at a local store wasn't cold. Now, while the situation that Quantic could have been left in is quite 'rough' as Destiny had stated, and whether Destiny was released, or he walked away to shoulder the burden, he is no longer a part of Quantic.

This is what particularly irks me about this situation. If Destiny had shouldered the burden and walked away, I commend him on his act to save Quantic's reputation. If he was released, it was Quantic attempting damage control. Either way, the reputation of Quantic is salvaged. However, because of the witch hunt, the reputation of Quantic and its players came into question. The involvement of the sponsor turned the witch hunt against Destiny into the entirety of Quantic Gaming. Each and every player would have been affected if Razer had pulled sponsorship for this relatively small occurrence. And this is part of the hidden cost behind witch hunts.

To Destiny, losing the sponsorship is not as big a hit as any of the non-streamers would have taken; the fact that Razer had to be involved is absolutely ludicrous. This was a local matter for Quantic to deal with, and instead, a full scale witch hunt results in Destiny losing his team, and losing his stream listing on TL temporarily.

On May 07 2012 22:10 Irre wrote:

Seriously though, what you are trying to advocate for the sake of "Growing esports" is to sweep under the rug a very dark/shady side of online gaming..and its not going to work. If our game doesnt do it, there are plenty of others that do, and the sponsors are already full aware of it, or they will continue to be reminded that its there. People need to face consequences for their actions, and teams need to face them as well if we really want to move things forward. Maybe when things are unnacceptable to even the average internet troll, things will be a lot less tolerated, but when "progamers" and people that are spokespersons (casters) for the community and the professional esports scene are using that offensive material, we are not ready and we need to fix it...

I would just say that "esports" is clearly not as ready for mainstream as we think it is, and until we have some unifying bodies and codes of conduct across teams/leagues etc., and we start cleaning up our reputation and "gamer culture" to some extent, things will stagnate. Blaming people who write to teams and sponsors is silly, and things need to run its course, and bad personalities will be purged, especially if they aren't high level progamers that esports does not need.

Illustrates both sides of the coin succinctly (read nested quote as well):

On May 07 2012 22:35 Shafanhow wrote:

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Using the N word is not just a "slip up". If Orb or Destiny had raged with terms like asshole or scumbag or douche none of this would have happened. You can't use that word, it's toxic.

Summarises how I felt on the topic on sponsor mailing well:

On May 07 2012 22:53 Sylfyre wrote:
I think that the big issue arises when sponsors are involved. In the western world, e-sports isn't as big, but it is starting to grow and get more companies interested and sponsoring, etc etc.

I think that bringing up an issue with the team (EG, Quantic, etc) is acceptable, because the players represent them, and they as a team represent their sponsors, so it's part of the team's job to keep an eye on the players in terms of their image, and it's up to the team to deal out any punishments.

If people have a problem with someone throwing a game, or making racial comments, or whatever, then they should direct their issue to the team, it's their responsibility. Directing it to the sponsors just give them, and other potential sponsors watching the scene a red light about entering, what to many of them is a new world and therefore a risk.

TL;DR: "witch-hunting" should be directed to the team management, not the sponsors

On May 07 2012 23:21 QuanticCinergy wrote:
I selected Destiny for the team because I wanted Destiny the player, not Destiny the entertainer. Our shared goal was to provide Steven the support system and opportunities to become the Top GM Zerg player he is today. Everything we have ever done with Steven was either directly or indirectly centered around his growth as a player and as a professional, including sending him to Korea for a few weeks to train.

Being the overseer for 2 of the 3 provided examples, let me say that Steven, Orb, and NaNiwa share among them what I believe to be the fundamental issue at play in these situations - a lack of professionalism in a highly visible and sensitive business environment. To say "Quantic knew what they were getting into" makes me think that people misplace our motivations. Both players (NaNiwa & Destiny) have grown in both skill and demeanor during their time at Quantic, so much so that I would assert they are both the very best today that they have ever been in their entire career.

As a team, we share the same common values as the greater community when it comes to discrimination and equality, but we also stand by our players, even when they make a misstep, not because we are selfish or greedy, but because we see such occurrences as what they truly are - a coaching opportunity to help the player learn and grow so that in future they may be better prepared to make better choices. While I'm left unsure of the best way to handle such situations as a community, I am sure that the way we have tried so far only causes more potential collateral damage than good. At the end of the day, we now are no longer able to help this player, and he likely hasn't grown as a result of this experience. So, in a way, the energy invested in the campaign against his actions counter-intuitively produced a result that likely will not lead to improved future choices, and I can't see that as good for anyone involved.

On May 07 2012 23:34 Delwack wrote:
I don't think it is possible to stop what you term as 'witch hunts'. For your three examples, I think that the response is rather understandable from a lot of people. A lot of this debate revolves around interpretation. Some people think the offenses listed there (and others) were bad enough that action had to be taken. Others felt that they were no big deal at all. I think the last thing we should do is prevent people from having their voices heard in steering the direction of where the community thinks it should go.

I want to make one point clear: If the community cannot clean up it's own act and drives away sponsors, it is the fault of the community for tolerating the public figures that caused controversy, not the people who wish to express their opinions. Not writing teams and sponsors because it can 'potentially hurt the greater esports' is in my opinion insane. Do we put up with anything just because we want to see SC2 grow, regardless of the actions taken by the public figures that represent the community? Even if emailing sponsors over these controversies hurts some organizations (and SC2/Esports) in the short run, I think in the longer it'll help the scene by making it more professional, more mature, and more acceptable to a general audience by pressuring unacceptable elements from the public parts of the scene. I also believe SC2 as a scene can demonstrate that we are making progress in cleaning up our act.

Remember the recent controversy surrounding the fighting game scene recently with respect to sexism and racism? My understanding of that was such incidents occurred because the culture there is more accepting of that kind of thing. You know what drives sponsors away faster than single incidents like the one we see in SC2? A culture like the fighting game community that tacitly accepts and weaves those values into their community.

I think the problems here lie more with the teams and other SC2 professional organizations. Public figures will always be subject to much scrutiny and held to a higher standard. Anyone backing those public figures (in this case, casters and players) will have to accept the way those public figures behave in the public sphere. Ultimately, it is up to the teams to make the appropriate decisions.

1) The teams and organizations should do their due diligence with respect to the people that they hire
Just as with any other job interview, review of an employee/contract worker's past history should be done. This is made easier in that the SC2 and esports community in general is fairly tight knit right now. It's not hard to get a good feel for people, and their past. Sure, things won't necessarily be perfect (e.g. orb's case was rather obscure), but Naniwa and Destiny both have had histories where teams understood the risk they were taking when signing their players. That isn't to say that they shouldn't hire them, but if they do....

2) The teams and organizations set the standard for what is acceptable and unacceptable from their players, casters, and other public figures.
The teams are the one that pay the salaries and bills at the end of the day. Players are contracted to their teams, and are in essence either employees or contract workers. The teams are essentially their 'boss'. The team management are the ones that set the ethical standard for what is acceptable and unacceptable, and as with any other organization that faces the public it is the organizational management that has a responsibility for going over with public figures how they should act. You see this all the time in any public-facing arm of an organization: retail sales training, customer service representative training, salesman and account management training, broadcasting training, etc. If the teams fail to set those standards appropriately, the community will respond to where it thinks it should be set.

Even when signing players and casters with 'problem' histories, teams can set the standard and work with their players to make sure they operate within the appropriate framework. I think Naniwa and Quantic has been a pretty good example of how this works out well in practice. The only issue being Quantic wasn't able to help Naniwa until after the incident. Ideally Quantic would have been able to change Naniwa's attitude before anything as drastic happened.

3) As public figures, all SC2 teams and organizations must be conscious of their reputations at all times, and respond to developing issues quickly.
This may be unreasonable to some degree given staff limitations given how quickly these situations develop sometimes, but teams again could help limit bad PR by trying to deal with problems as best they can in real-time. Sometimes, simple statements like 'we are looking into this issue now, and are gathering all the facts needed to come to an appropriate decision. We ask for your patience while we work through this issue' is enough to give many people pause before talking to sponsors and because it demonstrates the issue is being taken seriously, and that action is forthcoming.

Part of the reason people went to Quantic's sponsors is because there was general consensus that Quantic did not believe this was something that they should be worried about. I think people felt that emailing Quantic was a dead end.

People are generally reasonable and a proactive approach is often significantly better than a reactive one. For teams, this will sometimes be as simple as explaining all sides of a story, and explaining how something done in the past fits in the context of today. Sometimes it means issuing an apology proactively. Sometimes it may mean terminating a player or caster before things get out of hand. If the professional organizations within the community self-polices, the problems ultimately solve themselves.

Conclusion
I don't necessarily think that the community policing itself right now through these 'witch hunts' is necessarily inappropriate, but I also believe there are much better ways to handle it. I don't think the solution is to tell the community to 'let these things slide', in the hopes that they somehow fix themselves. I think the solution lies with the teams and other organizations. They set the standard, and have much more power to either outright preempt these situations, or else do a better job of communicating and resolving them in a timely manner. As the community's confidence in teams and organizations to self-police grows, these issues will become further and fewer between and the community will take to talking to the teams about these issues (instead of sponsors) due to the increased level of trust and responsiveness from these organizations.

On May 07 2012 23:48 QuanticCinergy wrote:

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Just because I "said nothing about any actions to address his behaviour" doesn't mean that nothing was said, to the contrary we talk to our players about professionalism and core values all the time. But in order to us to help, both the player, and the community, after such an event, we must have the opportunity to discuss the matter directly with the player before taking any action or making any statement. We don't throw our player under the bus to protect our own interests - our interest is our players, and yes, I think behaviors are an important consideration, but if you place it above all else, there are many talented players that are largely admired that would be possibly considered non-engage-able, yet are on equally prominent teams, with equally prominent sponsors. I agree though, as the space and the community it serves evolves these standards should evolve too.

On May 08 2012 01:20 Kazeyonoma wrote:
I don't see how 'interacting with the community' and 'use terms/behavior that could impact sponsors' are the same? There are lots of members of this community who interact with their fans, and don't have to resort to 'just being who they are' as an excuse to say things inappropriate. Hell you can even be angry, or outlandish and create tons of fans (see 1a2a3a4a5a) but you don't have to resort to vitriol in doing it. angry you lost? rage! sure! cuss even, but you don't have to use racial or homophobic terms to get it across.

In real life, if you work for a 'service industry', and you do something that reflects poorly on your employer in a public way, angry letters and phone calls get written. Hell, in larger corporations, you get sued for millions of dollars, often times winning, and hurting plenty of company's bottom line. But you know what the corporations do? They don't try to tell people 'don't contact us', they realize that as a service industry provider, they need to please their consumers, and if that means being politically correct, then you hold your employees responsible, you conduct training, you make sure people understand the corporations ethics code of conduct, and you enforce it. I don't think anyone on the teams involved, WANTED to end up in the situations they were in, but they HAVE to take responsibility for it, and react, and they did so in ways that would be accepted as professional.

Emailing sponsors, doesn't HURT esports, it shows we are not only passionate about what we do, but that we are conscious consumers, who know how to both appreciate good sponsors, and boycott bad ones. This is the real world now, we're entering a new state of our beloved gaming culture, and you can grow with it, and move forward, or you can cling onto your childish ideals and internet hate speech, and claim 'that's just how we are', and be left in the dust.

Summarizes the threads current stances well:

On May 08 2012 01:38 Prophanity wrote:
I feel as though the two sides of this argument are playing out as follows:

1) You shouldn't contact sponsors as it hurts everyone involved along with the entire idea of esports.
2) The sponsors should know what they are supporting with their dollars and so we should contact sponsors and let them when we approve or disapprove of what they are doing with the money we give them for their products.

The issue, as I see it, is this (and here's the tl;dr portion): If the sponsor sponsor's the player directly, go to the sponsor. If the sponsor sponsor's not the player but rather the team, go to the team.

Say, for example, Nony started going off on some racial garbage (which would tooootally happen...he's such a BMer, ya know) - in that example, you have Stride gum that sponsors him directly. In that case, I feel it's perfectly fine to speak with Stride. On the other hand, the sponsors that put up money not for Nony directly but rather for Team Liquid...those sponsors should be left out and the concerns directed to TL. It's terribly harmful to go over a team's head not just for the sport but for the image of the team as a whole...it puts out the idea to the sponsors that said team is incapable of handling their own business.

The actions of one should not harm all. If people go to the team and the team refuses to act, then I think it fine to engage the sponsors as a whole. However, going over the team's head harms everyone...you're blowing up a village to take out one person. So if a company sponsors an individual, feel free to go to that company. If the company sponsors a team, please go to the team...if the team fails to act, THEN climb the ladder.

On May 08 2012 04:44 QuanticCinergy wrote:
Wow, I wrote a really awesome reply explaining my position on this in detail, and the browser didn't post properly, or I wasn't logged in or something, anyhow.... what I say here are my own views as a custodian of this community and it's future, not as a business leader and should not be viewed as an official position of Quantic Gaming - because we didn't make one, remember - that wasn't by accident. I have nothing to gain by sharing my personal perspective, but I hope that perhaps some of you might:

It's required that you speak directly with the player before making a statement of any kind. Unable to reach him until later than evening, and because TL did not close the forum post for the benefit of everyone involved, the sponsor calling and emails and brand bashing campaign were already well underway by then - the damage was done - making any sort of statement at that point would have only prolonged and increased the severity of the damage report. Bottom line - when people you work with at sponsors are being tapped in the shoulder by executive management they usually only know by name and title, about tickets/emails/calls from people talking about Hitler - people's jobs are on the line. Steven did all there was left to do by leaving the team willingly and respectfully. I respect and support his decision, and will miss working with him, because his antics aside, almost every pro player out there, aside from maybe White-Ra, could learn something from Steven about serving fans and building brands. Steven has done more direct community engagement for charitable causes than any other single player in the scene, and has always given of himself for fans, even for his critics. To assert that we shouldn't have provided him an opportunity to grow as a player and as a professional, when he expressed a clear desire to be taken more seriously in both, is a dramatic oversimplification of things that is mis-guided, cruel, and unfair. While I disagree with his using discriminatory language, Steven, in spite of his inner rage getting the best of him at times, may be full of a lot of things, but hate isn't one of them.

On May 08 2012 08:46 QuanticCinergy wrote:

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No, no, no, no.... Good lord, you guys are so hung up on Destiny, you can't see the larger issue I entered this thread discussing in the first place. I'm not really sure my continued contribution here is needed, you all seem to have this debate in good hands.

The moment you go to sponsors directly, you not only place the ENTIRE TEAM at risk, but you pretty much eliminate the jurisdiction and judgement of the team and it's management, and now you have the sponsor staff dealing with an issue that is overwhelming them, putting their career at risk as well, and pretty much, team management just gets to sit on the sideline and try to decipher if we are going to lose a player, funding we need for the entire team, our brand, our reputation (with player, fans, other teams, etc) Even just in this thread alone, people think I'm defending Steven, which I haven't, that I should have made announcements when the message and the entire dialog, hell even the outcome, wasn't really even manageable by the team at that moment anyhow, and of course, we get what we deserve for even picking up this player in the first place.

I should listen to my PR folks and stay off the forums, lol. You guys just do whatever you feel is best, because from all the productive dialong we have exchanged here today, you are going to do what you want anyhow, regardless of if a single player can bring an entire team down, if it becomes possible to orchestrate attacks on another teams key players, or if sponsors simply withdraw from the space entirely because of the actions of a few who become so magnified as to poorly represent the many. We are a staff of people who do this because we love the fans, the players, and want to see eSports grow. You should pause to consider that perhaps the top teams are run by people who both know what something about how to manage these sorts of events as well as care a great deal about the views of our fans, the image of our partners, and the well being of the players too.

I participated in this thread to share that perspective with you, not because I feel a need to justify my management decisions or provide explanation as to why things are the way they are or are not, or simply suggest that any player out there is so far a lost cause, that even engaging them with the right and proper motivations isn't worth the risk. I posted here so that you might understand how carefully we try to manage things like this, how we are not simply passively checked out on a beach somewhere hoping the shit goes away, but that we take these outcomes very seriously, and while everything may not always end in happiness and roses for everyone, if you insist on venting to sponsors you are engaging in one activity above any cause of justification you may have, and that is the tearing down of the trust bonds and relationship equity that people like myself invest months, sometimes years, developing.