Stardock’s Brad Wardell Brags About Creating Hostile Work Environments for Women

Kotaku has extensive coverage of the sexual harassment lawsuit filed against Stardock by its former marketing manager, and Stardock’s apparently vindictive countersuit blaming the woman filing the lawsuit for the failure of Elemental.

The most interesting part of the Kotaku story are the emails exchange between Wardell and the marketing manager, Alexandra Miseta. After an incident at dinner while Miseta and Wardell were promoting Elemental in San Francisco, Miseta was upset enough to write a letter outlining both specific things that upset her and outlining in extraordinarily clear terms how she expected that behavior to change,

1. Please never touch my hair or any of my body parts; not even jokingly.

2.Please do not talk about my private life or about my boyfriend/future husband in any terms especially negative terms.

3. Please be careful with your “jokes” which are at many times inappropriate, sexist, vulgar and very embarrassing not only to me, but everyone present.

4. Please keep your negative personal opinions of others (including family members and/or coworkers) not present at the time of your comments, to yourself. I feel, at times, it puts me in a very uncomfortable position.

With the above few behavioral changes, I’m hoping our previously friendly and professional relationship can be reestablished. My goal from day one (June 04, 2007) has been to work for this company 110% and to work together with my peers to build a high quality, successful company. I would like to continue to work with you in the future and keep striving towards that very goal.

This is an extremely professional email which speaks highly of Miseta. She is bending over backwards to try to amicably resolve apparently long-standing issues that have bothered her. If I received an email like this from a subordinate, I would go out of my way to acknowledge Ms. Miseta’s concerns and work through this in a professional manner.

Instead, Wardell responds by being an asshole (apparently he is as rude to people he work with as he is on the Stardock forums),

I don’t recall item #1 but will certainly endeavor to be extra careful.

I understand #2. I will be more conscious of this in the future.

#3, however is not acceptable to me. I am an inappropriate, sexist, vulgar, and embarrassing person and I’m not inclined to change my behavior. If this is a problem, you will need to find another job.

#4, Again, I am not willing to adapt my behavior to suit others. IF you find my behavior problematic, I recommend finding another job.

I’m not some manager or coworker of yours. I own the company. It, and your job here, exist to suit my purposes, not vice versa. The company is not an end unto itself, it is a means to an end which is to further the objectives of its shareholders (in this case, me).

What an idiot. Miseta complains that she’s tired of a hostile work environment and Wardell essentially says “tough shit — find another job if you don’t like it here.”

If you read the content of the defendant’s motion to dismiss, Miseta alleges a number of disgusting and inappropriate actions by Wardell. At one point in the Stardock offices, Miseta alleges that Wardell told her in front of her marketing team that she was to accompany him on a publicity tour “because your nipples look better on TV than mine do.”

If true, Miseta deserves everything she gets out of Stardock and the company doesn’t deserve to get a single cent from gamers.

How Much Time Should Kids Spend Playing Video Games

Peter Gray has a nicely contrarian article at Psychology Today weighing in on the debate over how much “screen time” children should have each week. I’ve talked to about a dozen psychiatrists and psychologists about this over the past few years when it comes to my own kids and it is interesting how diverse the opinions were, from one person who didn’t allow his children any screen time, to another who was more “anything goes.”

Gray comes down closer to the latter view,

I have a very high opinion of children’s abilities to make good choices about how to use their free time, as long as they really have choices. Some kids go through long periods of doing what seems like just one thing, and then some adults think there’s something wrong, because they (the adults) would not make that choice. But in my experience, if kids are really free to play and explore in lots of different ways, and they end up playing or exploring in what seems to be just one way, then they are doing that because they are getting something really meaningful out of it.

In my family, both my wife and I play a lot of video games. And what we emphasize to our kids is the importance of balance. Mom plays World of Warcraft, but she doesn’t say, “I’m not going to make dinner or go to work today because I’d rather play video games.” In fact, although we play a lot of video games, we also do a lot of reading, and other activities in our free time.

We’re more project-oriented than time-oriented at our house. Kids get home at 4 p.m. and bedtime is 9 p.m. Each day there are a certain number of tasks that each child is expected to finish, whether that is homework, helping out with dinner, cleaning, etc. Once our children have finished the tasks we expect them to finish that day, they are free to use their free time as they wish. Sometimes that means my 9 year old whips off a three hour session of World of Warcraft or Skyrim. More often it means they tend to mix up their activities, alternating between watching television, playing video games, reading, or other activities such as playing board games or going swimming.

Which is not to say I wouldn’t step in and place limits on my children’s screen time if they failed to live up to their responsibilities. My son knows the laptop in his room is there because he does such a good job of keeping up with all of the things my wife and I expect him to do, and that it can easily be removed or the password changed if he acts inappropriately (something we’ve only had to do a handful of times).

Gender and Character Creation in Saints Row 2

Saints Row 2 is essentially the stereotypical video game. By that, I mean that when I talk to non-gamers about video games, they all imagine every video game is essentially one long romp of extreme violence and explicit sex with no discernible plot or mitigating feature. Saints Row 2 is that video game and more.

Anna Anthropy also argues that the game makes some interesting choices in how it handles the gender of the main character the user plays:

There are tons of gendered accessories for the player’s character – she’s surrounded by urban gang culture, or some facsimile thereof – but the game gives the player the choice of how to use those accessories (or not) to present her gender. Play as a burly man in a dress and heels, a woman with a beard, someone totally androgynous – I played through the game as a fat woman, and I can’t remember the last time a game, mainstream or otherwise, gave me that choice. You can present as a wide variety of genders because, for all the game’s scripted scenes and recorded dialogue, no one ever gives you a gender.

All of the dialogue has been written to explicitly avoid giving the protagonist a gender, in fact. Your gang minions address you as “Boss,” and refer to you in third person either as “the Boss” or “the leader of the Saints.” No one ever gives you a pronoun. There’s a scene early in the game where one of the Saints’ lieutenants is planning a raid on a casino by moving bobble heads of the gang members through a scale model of the place: the player’s character is represented by a featureless, genderless chess pawn. The player is given the room to internalize her character how she pleases. At the start of Saint’s Row 2, a fellow Saint who knows the protagonist from the first Saint’s Row says, “You look different. You do something with your hair?” That’s the game’s tacit acceptance of however you’ve decided to present your character. And who’s going to question it? Who would fuck with the boss of the Saints?

I couldn’t agree more, and I wish more games would give you this range of choices.

For the life of me, for example, I cannot understand why Madden NFL will not allow me to create a female character for its Superstar mode. The common argument I have seen online is that this wouldn’t be “realistic.” Really? Well, it is not very realistic when I run for 1,000 yards in a game on the Rookie setting, either.

After all, this is what games do best–allow players to make all sorts of different choices in simulated worlds and see what happens. A video game where gang leaders and starting linebackers can only be one gender is beyond dull.

KontrolFreek Accessories for XBOX 360 Controllers

KontrolFreek makes a variety of accessories for XBOX 360 and Playstation 3 controllers designed to make them work better with different kinds of games.

For example, the FPS Freek lengthens the thumbsticks,

By increasing the length of the thumbsticks slightly, precision while aiming is improved dramatically.  Your range of motion is increased by 40%, giving you the opportunity to make smaller adjustments and “snap” to targets much faster in first-person shooters.  This affords you the luxury of turning up sensitivities to get the closest feel to a mouse possible on a console without an internal controller mod or cheat.

These have gotten pretty good reviews, and for $9.99-$13.99/pair are fairly cheap to give a try.