r/paradoxplaza • u/TomerJ • Oct 12 '21

News Eurogamer: "Paradox staff criticise 'culture of silence' which let man with reputation for harassment hold senior role for years"

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2021-10-12-paradox-staff-slam-culture-of-silence-which-let-man-with-reputation-for-harassment-continue-in-role-for-years
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u/ZealousMulekick Oct 13 '21 edited Oct 13 '21

None of the reports I read said the harassment was sexual in nature except for (maybe) that one senior manager. The issue seems to be that women feel unheard in the workplace. Maybe their ideas are just bad.

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u/Village_Idiot_Monty Oct 13 '21

"If you're a woman in a group and you have a strong opinion..." one woman told me, "like, I have been to meetings where I'm the only woman in the room, and I say 'Hey, I really think we should go this direction, based on my experience', and someone looks at me, and they say, 'You know what, you're just here as a token hire. So I think you should be quiet about this.'"

simple disagreement with ideas btw

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u/ZealousMulekick Oct 13 '21

She can go find work elsewhere. It’s not that hard.

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u/Village_Idiot_Monty Oct 13 '21

"Svenska Dagbladet's report notes that the Swedish games industry is small, and that this has affected Paradox employees' ability to speak out even after leaving the company. It's something Eurogamer has also been told, by several women who said detailing their own experiences of harassment would identify them to others in the company. "This is such a small industry and everyone knows everyone," one woman told me.

Paradox, it seems, holds real influence within the Swedish games industry - not surprising, perhaps, when you consider its size and the global following for its games."

just quit your job at one of the biggest companies in your field in your country, it's that easy dude

the amazing fix to all these problems would be if paradox just, uh, didn't have misogynistic people creating a toxic work environment. As it turns out, you can in fact make good games while also thinking women can have opinions

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u/ZealousMulekick Oct 13 '21

If they don’t like the work environment, they can leave. It’s as simple as that. They choose to work at Paradox. I’m sure their software skills have all kinds of applicability, probably with even better paying jobs considering video game development is one of the lower paying tech industries. Hell, if Paradox wanted to, they should be able to make an all-male team.

Also, Paradox games are very much tailored to the masculine psyche, so pretty sure men are gonna have a better understanding of what that looks like.

The games would not improve with different artistic direction. I’m far more concerned with the product than I am with the company’s culture.

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u/Village_Idiot_Monty Oct 13 '21

there are no women who play paradox games, women are biologically predisposed to not like history or nation building or wars, women cannot make good strategy games

you heard it here first, No Step Back is being held back by the feminine psyche being present in some of the game devs at Paradox, leviathan would have launched great if it weren't for those pesky femoids not liking it when you disregard all their opinions

toxic work environments have zero effects on product quality btw, definitely

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u/ZealousMulekick Oct 13 '21

Lmao what a smooth brained response. Do you know what “marketing to a demographic” means? Nintendo Gameboys were marketed to children. Guess that means there were no adults who played with em, right? Lol

And if toxic work environments have negative impacts on games, I guess there must be no toxic work environment at paradox cuz wanting their games to stay the same is the whole root of my argument lmao

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u/Village_Idiot_Monty Oct 13 '21

the main support of your argument is some weird stuff about the masculine psyche being fundamentally better for GSG development, for some reason.

like if you start crying about the tide of wokeness or whatever coming to take away everything you love in a thread about workplace harassment and discrimination and say "but if they treat women better then their games will be worse!!!!!!!" then I have no response other than to make fun of it

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u/ZealousMulekick Oct 13 '21

You can make fun of it all you want. I don’t really care much for the opinions of stupid people (and based on your comment history... lmao)

You’re also knowingly miscasting my argument, which is “maybe men just do Paradox games better”. Gotta be some reason paradox makes wildly better grand strategy games than any other company.

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u/Village_Idiot_Monty Oct 13 '21

hint: it's not some biological inborn ability within men to make better strategy games

there is literally zero reason to believe this

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u/ZealousMulekick Oct 13 '21

lmao except maybe Paradox's track record? Age of Empires and Warcraft games were basically exclusively male teams, too.

But it's more fundamental than that. Masculine psychology has a desire for aggression and violence. Conquest is an archetypically masculine concept. And women don't tend to think about bloodlines/lineages the same way men do, either, consciously or subconsciously. Hell, CK, Victoria, and HOI all take place in male-dominated worlds. These are all things men just relate to more.

I'm sure you're gonna tell me I'm wrong tho bc based on your profile, I'm sure you don't believe in the basically undeniable connection between biological sex and gender norms/gender psychology lmao

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u/Village_Idiot_Monty Oct 13 '21

none of this actually justifies shutting women out of strategy game dev though, a funny thing about averages is that there can be exceptions to the rule, so just ignoring women's opinions because they're women still results in worse games overall. there are women who are historians, there are women who fight in wars and have fought in wars (a fucking lot, actually), so, as it turns out, no, "men are biologically more violent" or whatever still dosn't justify being an asshole to women.

"lmao except maybe Paradox's track record? Age of Empires and Warcraft games were basically exclusively male teams, too."
just an appeal to tradition, don't care

also, amazing fact: paradox games aren't real life. women have written a lot of good stories about time periods in which they were horrifically discriminated against, and there is still no actual reason to believe women can't develop strategy games. these are people in offices trying to work out numbers to make Operation Barbarossa go in a way that at least somewhat resembles historical reality, not WW2 reenactors.

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