Laura Fryer gives a fairly scathing review of HR’s encroachment and obvious power grab to be less “day to day” and more to (verbatim) be “at the same level or above the CEO”.
Video goes into how HR makes toxic work environments that demonize ever speaking out or questioning anything, and the toxic positivity that holds games back.
From HR -> “People and Culture” -> “Chief Disruptors”
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Laura Fryer just gives fuel to the gamer gate fire. Most of her stuff is just conjecture and speculation. She hasn’t been in the industry for a decade.
lol. hr have no real power. they just cma based on what legal tells them.
This is disgusting Scrubbles. Why did you post a fascist to propagandize capitalist’s vanguards are “the problem?”
HR were created by capitalists to oppress the proletariat. They are quite literally doing their job: protect the interests of capitalists.
Capitalism has always killed games. It is in their very political praxis to ruin social past times.
No capitalist is for gaming. Gaming is their enemy.I wish there was a transcript I could read. I’m intrigued by the topic. Gaming has long had a real problem with interpersonal issues and toxic work culture - it’s very understandable why HR became a more important part of the industry. Certainly HR is overstepping by trying to run the entire company so to speak, but I don’t want to speak too much without taking the time to watch the video.
Whoops, I spoke too soon - there is a transcript!
Edit: Oh Jesus Christ, someone in HR really fought back against the term “Senior Technical Artist” because it might offend elderly people? The pendulum swung too far smh
“You see, from my persepctive, what happened is that HR decided that the day-to-day work of actually helping people wasn’t enough. They wanted a seat in the executive meetings and they got it. Today, most executives have HR sitting in influencing decision and driving cultural change and a lot of them want to run the entire company.”
Oooooook…HR aren’t the decision makers here. The executives are. @[email protected] is correct on this - the directives are coming from C suites that fear controversy and risk.
If game makers don’t want endless meetings about safe spaces, maybe they shouldn’t force their women coworkers to crawl around on the floor so they can upskirt them like at Blizzard? Source
A complaint, filed by the state Department of Fair Employment and Housing on Wednesday, alleges that Activision Blizzard Inc. “fostered a sexist culture” where women were paid less than men and subjected to ongoing sexual harassment including groping. (Activision and Blizzard Entertainment merged in 2008.)
Officials at the gaming company knew about the harassment and not only failed to stop it but retaliated against women who spoke up, the complaint also alleges.
This was only 5 years ago.
Honestly I have worked at companies where the head of people and culture is in the room with executives, they are at the top levels and involved in PR/marketing. I think Laura here has a point, HR was needed for exactly what you said with the Blizzard type situations. Obviously horrible, and should be stopped. However, the bell has swung the in the other direction now, to the point that nothing can be done without sixteen layers of approval. I think that’s very bad for a creative medium, and needs to come back to somewhere in the middle.
However, the bell has swung the in the other direction now,
I’d like to see some sources on this proving that the rampant sexism and toxic work environments have been done away with in the last 5 years before being this confident about it.
There’s room to have a discussion here, most certainly. But not in a way that scoffs at the entire idea of needing to be respectful of others in a work environment.
Who said they’re done with? You’re pulling out just as many extreme examples as you say the video is. God forbid I talk about a nuanced subject where the answer can lie in the middle somewhere. Why must everything here be that there are two polar opposite views and nothing can ever exist beyond those two? I’m not interested in having a conversation with you are going to keep arguing that if I have this position that I must have the most extreme version of the position.
I’m having a conversation with you. God forbid I reply to your points.
The video is very strongly opinionated about HR being useless now and that HR is ruining games. It completely ignores WHY HR became so involved in the gaming industry at large. I’m trying to have a conversation with you about it.
Then have a conversation instead of making accusatory statements about what I must believe like calling me a gamer gater and saying “I’d like to see some sources on this proving that the rampant sexism and toxic work environments have been done away with in the last 5 years before being this confident about it.”
Of course things aren’t great still, of course there are still bad toxic places to work. I’ve worked at both pure toxic and toxic positivity and they both suck and both should be removed. I’ve had places where I myself went to HR and watched them do an investigation which then ended up with me terminated after I reported people for being godawful. I have also had the opposite happen, where simply disagreeing with an approach means that I’m an agitator and the dreaded “Can we have a few minutes to speak”. They went from doing nothing to protect the employees to now overprotecting everything.
I’ll agree that she should have talked about why the bell swung in this direction, and she has previously mentioned about her own sexual harassment in the past and that would have been a good time to bring up how she told us how she felt ignored by it. It’s important to understand context to understand why it’s swinging the other way, but now it’s become where everything is so coated in foam that there’s only the “approved” way to do things, which means covering the user in bubble wrap before sending them through the feel-good forests, and it’s making things very boring to play.
Also, I wasn’t the first one to bring up “gamer gaters” in this conversation, but you sure came at me like I was:
What “other way”?
Capitalists still own the IP to the games.
Capitalists still larceny from the workers they hire.
Capitalists still culture their companies with vanguards (HR) or not.
The overton window is firmly still leaning far right: authoritarian, 1 person owning all the means.I am not dear Velma, but I am politically literate enough to know the window has shifted fascist.
now it’s become where everything is so coated in foam that there’s only the “approved” way to do things, which means covering the user in bubble wrap before sending them through the feel-good forests, and it’s making things very boring to play.
Is this because of HR or maybe it’s because of capitalism’s penchant for the enshittification of everything? If a product is appealing to everyone, it appeals to no one.
I think the HR issue is separate from the quality of the games. Indie dev companies are putting out really great quality games at a higher frequency than when AAA games were dominating the marketplace. Maybe there’s an argument that the smaller dev teams don’t need as much involvement from HR because they’re smaller and can police each other better about not being assholes to one another. It’s an interesting topic regardless.
I think it’s both. I do think they’re in the room, they have elbowed in a spot at the table and I’ve seen it first hand, however I don’t think like in the video they are the only say. I think you’re spot on in saying that bit, “If a product is appealing to everyone, it appeals to no one.”
I think HR in the room is another symptom, I think it’s executives trying to make sure no one feels put off by a game so that everyone plays it and they have the biggest audience. Then you have Legal come in and neutralize more dialogue because it could be considered rude or offensive. Then marketing comes in and says that they don’t know how to market this to this group, and then at the end you get a very boring game that is perfectly safe for everyone to play, but that no one wants to play.
It’s simply that corporations don’t understand creative work. Creative work and art are subjective, and they are meant to heighten emotions and make people think about it. They are meant quite literally to go counter to everything a corporate environment pushes for.
I also agree that I have been going Indie more because you can tell they aren’t as over-encumbered by corporate pressure. They have something they want to make or say, they are passionate and they get it done. I guess my thesis, seperate from Laura’s, is that HR and these other teams need to let creatives be creatives. Step in when you need to for sure, but stop at that line and go no further. HR should be there for HR reasons, Legal should protect the company from liability, and marketers should market the product, but none of them (or the executives) should be swaying the creative process to make their jobs easier. It’s their jobs to protect the creative process, not the other way around.
This has been a personal pet peeve for a while, but man did it hit for Dragon Age: Veilguard.
Dragon Age was always personal choice matters. If you choose something seemingly benign it could cause massive ripples. You could have teammates leave. You could have entire factions turn their backs on you. You could have people who were once friends try to ambush you in a back alley! It had real stakes and made you pay attention.
The 4th installment, Veilguard, was so obviously written with HR (People & Culture) in the room. No one was ever angry! There were decisions, but they were so low stakes because no one would ever get angry at you. You could literally destroy someone’s home and they’d say “It’s okay, I understand why you had to”. WHAT? They should be threatening me - OR WORSE. No one truly died, no one ever got mad, the game literally has “team meetings” where all you do is talk about how great everyone is.
Then each character was whittled down to one specific trauma that you had to help them through. Multifaceted characters with actual emotions? No, that might make someone feel things. This one has a hard time talking to people. This one had a mean dad. This one is trans and can’t come out to her mom. Each thing individually is fine, but that’s literally their only character trait. Friendship with every person was immediate and permanent. If you talked to them it would only be about their exact trauma, maybe one sentence about the last mission and how we all tried our best. It was so fucking annoying.
Even the antagonists kept repeating how good you were and how you were trying your best! They were gods who thought of mortals as puny ants and you were… a single person, yet they still stopped to mention over and over “You are sure doing a super job at defeating us!”. Absolutely immersion breaking.
You could just tell that HR had the only vote on every single line of dialog. No one ever gets their feelings hurt, no one ever is mad, the player might feel something and that could be bad. By trying to make everything so “positive” they’ve carved out the very humanity from these games.
Anyway, thanks for letting me rant, the video does a great job at summing up my feelings. These people should have no say in the creative process or work culture. They are toxic to anything art related.
Please feel free to share if you have other games like this where you can feel the palpable taint of HR.
Edit: Apparently it needs to be explicitly said that while I do absolutely blame “People and Culture”, that blame is not a one-dimensional thing and that I can also blame executives? There are also some big leaps of saying that me saying that someone is a one-dimensional character means that I must be a gamer gater who hates wokeness? I actually liked the trans storyline, what I didn’t like is that they made trans people seem like all they have is being trans, instead of that there could be a person there too. To me that seems more reductive and even more harmful to the trans community, but again nuance isn’t really a thing on the internet. I said a thing, it must mean I’m a horrible person.
I can basically guarantee you that “HR” had nothing to do with these decisions as you’ve presented them.
You think some random employee that works in resource management has the final say on creative decision-making?
These directives come from C suites that fear controversy and risk. These decisions are made for financial reasons, to eliminate every possible wrinkle that might upset someone and plant a seed of bad publicity and threaten the return on investment in the product being shipped.
The problem isn’t HR, it’s that games are products being sold by corporations that need to show growth next quarter at any cost
For real, Bethferny in HR isn’t killing your games. This person’s whole yt channel is a farce. Of course the exec is gonna say anything but that the exec is at fault. Literally ceo brained take from Fryer, and the gamer gaters eat it up.
The complaint boils down to whining about having to sit in meetings being told they should treat their coworkers with respect. Blaming HR for why games suck now is reminiscent of DEI being blamed for government corruption. Of course gamer gate types are going to gobble this up hook, line, and sinker.
Christ do you need some Bengay for that overreach?
“Now, why HR? Because people are at the heart of every business challenge and every business opportunity that we’ll face in the future and we are the experts and people in our organizations, or at least we should be, but clearly based on the comments I’ve read and what I’ve seen in the industry this is not the case because game makers aren’t happy and it’s simple - makers are happiest when they are making. They don’t want endless meetings about safe spaces, ok? They want to obsess over their art. They don’t want an environment where they feel like they’re walking on eggshells.”
The reason the game makers need to sit in those meetings about safe spaces is because of the incredibly toxic work environments that these companies were fostering.
Production quality is the death of high-choice RPGs. When a game has two artists pumping out dozens of assets a day and every choice just changes some text and objects around, you can afford to give the player a ton of choice. Even the early DA games were on the tail end of that, with all the dialogue voiced, requiring recording and implementation cost for every line.
These days, big games are expected to have not just voiced dialogue but to have choreographed cutscenes. Making your animators spend a week on a cutscene 5% of players will see is viewed as a waste of money, so you cut the decision branch that leads to it.
There was a period in the late 90s to early 2000s where you could make an RPG that was top-5 in every way. That will never happen again.
Ok
The 4th installment, Veilguard, was so obviously written with HR (People & Culture) in the room.
It was salvaged from an entirely different game design altogether, likely with pieces they could use and pieces they threw away, and I’m sure there were limits on how much they could redo. When it was a multiplayer game, it may have been written so every player was the star, which could create this sort of dynamic. That’s purely conjecture, and I haven’t played the game, but there are a lot of reasons why it could have manifested that way without it being HR’s fault.
I’m not a fan of this lady. Her channel is used as a justification for right-wing channels complaining about “woke”, which makes it no surprise that her first cited video is from Colin Moriarty; or that the recommended next video after this one is “The Woman Who Ruined Videogames - The Story of Anita Sarkeesian”. Meanwhile, last I saw before tuning this lady out, she put more fuel on the fire about games media being told how to review a game by citing phrases that they used in common (that’s not how it works). At best, this video seems like a different perspective on the pitfalls of what happens to all companies as they grow large, and at worst, it comes across as some weird kind of conspiracy for corporate power.
HR is killing everything it touches.
Where’s the heat for the CEO and CFO then? Aren’t they the ones inviting HR into the boardroom?
Where did they come from in a discussion about HR? Yes, CEO, CFO and other ‘officers’ are often bad for creative process. hr are universally bad for any process.
Did you watch the video?
Partially skipped most of it, not that interested in the topic nor have a lot of time to listen to someone narrate three sentences for 12 minutes.
Ok then don’t try to have a conversation here with people who have watched it.
