 So, this recent controversy with a firing of a pair of Guild Wars 2 developers after a Twitter fight was interesting to me. A lot has already been written about it from several sides, and while I'll briefly touch on some of those things today, we're going to discuss a couple of angles that have, strangely, gone almost completely uncommented on. Let's begin by saying this. I have no opinion on whether they should have been fired, as opposed to, say, having an uncomfortable meeting with their bosses or serving a two-day suspension. I can see both sides of that argument. All I have to add to that is companies generally do not fire important employees for small infractions, which leads me to believe this might not have been the only issue Orita Net has dealt with. Ms. Price was aggressive and rude, and quite arrogant in her Twitter outburst, and in my experience, people like that are generally unpleasant to work with. In short, the Twitter thread in question is that of a bully, quick to take offense where none is attended, shifting the battleground, and denigrating any who dare disagree. Instead of gender or diversity or corporate compliance, that's what we're going to touch on in this quick, little, late video. Power dynamics and professional arrogance. As always, if you like what I have to say, or at least, how I sound saying it, slap the like and sub button, and follow me on Twitter if you please. It's the same thing there, plenty of the welder. Controversy after the logo, y'all. Okay, let's get one thing straight right at the top. I have absolutely zero doubt that Ms. Price has faced considerable professional difficulty as a result of her gender. People are assholes, and say ass-holy things. Groups in power, be they white men in corporate culture, or Buddhist monk nationalists in Tibet, tend to do whatever they can to stay in power. Nobody gives power, they only have power taken. It is one of the foundational lessons of human history. Women have, for what I'm sure are a huge variety of reasons I'm unqualified to comment on, dominated the tech industry, and studies have shown that men do treat the arguments of women dismissively. The general state of violence and intimidation that women face out in the real, non-prominent fantasy writer world keeps women constantly on the defensive. All that said, the nature of these gender dynamics problems almost always come down to power dynamics. They are all about a privileged group maintaining power by shutting down the voices of a group with less power. But here's the thing nobody's talked about. In this situation here, Ms. Price had the power. Ms. Price was punching down. As you can see by the almost shocked way the young man who was trying to engage with her reacted, it is classic bully behavior. And I'm here to let you in on a little secret, bullying sucks. If any of you have ever worked with a bully, you know just how miserable they can make your life. And here's another way I know about that. From the age of 11 to the age of about 21, I was a bully. I was a violent, angry young guy who just cruised the world looking for someone to cross me so I can make them feel small before I kick them in the teeth. Were there a variety of things in my history that had pushed me to become a bully? Sure, I guess. I grew up feeling utterly powerless and stupid. I had a father and a brother who were both happy to make me walk on eggshells in between bouts of extreme violence. They made me feel incompetent, stupid, and useless. And it made me want what they had, power over someone else. So when I got old enough and bold enough to take it, I did. I broke every bone in my hands, my nose, lost teeth in those years of bullying. And certain people's faces are seared into my mind. I still to this day recall one young guy's sinking look of fear and resignation as he understood what I was about to do to him. It haunted me for years. So there were reasons for my bullying. But none of that excuses jack shit. My internal issues were mine to work out. I had no right, and Ms. Price has no right to turn our internal frustrations and feelings of powerlessness outward like a fucking fire hose in the face of anyone who disagrees with us. All I, and now Ms. Price, accomplished was making others feel what we felt. The spreading of fear and misery is not a credible or laudable response to injustice. It's a wheel of violence. Fuel that keeps spreading and spreading because violence breeds violence. There's simply no defending Ms. Price's outburst against a person with less power than her. She's the big writer full of self-aggrandizement and he was the small voice trying to engage with her for a moment. If she was in the middle of a bad day or was having difficulty containing her frustration, she, as the one in power, could easily have simply not responded. What was gained by the response? The only thing that was gained was the feeling I used to get when my fist hit someone's nose and I heard a crack, the transference of my misery onto another. And that sucks. And that's all I have to say about that. That's my quick take on the power dynamics of the issue, but there's what I feel is the more important point we have to address. And that's the wisdom of the layman and the arrogance of the professional. Ms. Price and her colleague were quick to defend her indefensible tirade by citing gender dynamics that played absolutely zero role in this issue. It was so obviously not at play that they quickly retreated to an appeal to authority argument. You see, as a professional MMORPG fantasy writer, a genre famous for the quality of its narratives I might add, they were simply above being questioned by anyone other than professional writers. Now, I'm about to admit a personal bias here, but either way, I believe my argument stands. I find this writer's plain and particularly repellent on a number of levels. Let's start with the personal. I write. I have for years, decades, from poetry and literary short fiction back in the day, to articles, to YouTube videos, to social media posts. I spend a tremendous amount of time writing and I put a huge amount of effort into honing a voice. I also write and play music. The little blurb during my logo is all me, drums, bass, voice, guitars, all of it. I spent years playing in very good bands, none of which ever made it far enough for me to become a full-time professional. From my 30 years of playing music has left me highly confident in my chops. I feel fully qualified to discuss rock music composition and performance with anybody. Now, I'm not confident to discuss the difficulty of specific professional matters like booking an arena tour or how to best pack my gear into a private jet, but I am able to discuss how best to get a certain feedback tone or whether doubling vocal tracks takes away from the natural voice of the recording. Likewise, as a layman writer and more importantly, as an observant and thoughtful member of an audience, I and you and all of us are completely qualified to discuss ways to improve video game narratives. Because video game stories are, by and large, fucking terrible, dreadful, barely literate dreck. Destiny and Destiny 2 were presumably written by professional writers and yet they are two of the least competent examples of storytelling it is possible to achieve. Are we, as a paying audience, somehow unqualified to point that out? And considering that, the media defending Ms. Price is particularly galling to me, as honest criticism is allegedly the media's stock in trade. Ms. Price was linking to a thread where she made excuses. Very old, very used excuses, for why player character writing in MMOs is so notoriously fucking awful. And, a careful, thoughtful, observant layman audience member offered an opinion for why she might be mistaken. By saying his opinion is baseless because he himself is not a professional fantasy writer, you invalidate all criticism from anyone other than yourself and your peers. The very people who have a vested personal and professional interest to immunize themselves from critique. Charles Bukowski was a mailman until his fifties. In that entire time, though he was writing, he could hardly be considered professional. But he knew quite a bit about poetry, didn't he? Raymond Carver remained a not-professional writer, even as he was crafting some of the greatest short fiction ever set to page. And beyond even examples of non-professionals who are capable of critiquing a craft they understand, there are hundreds of fantastic critics of literature or film or games on college faculties or in newsrooms or writing on a blog or in YouTube at this very moment. None of the writers on Kotaku or Rock Paper Shotgun who left to Ms. Price's defense because they, like me, agree with her stances on social justice, are professional video game writers. And yet every single day these very people write articles critiquing video game narratives. Are their opinions utterly invalid because they are not now currently working as genre video game writers? This principle is toxic and dangerous. It leads to a kind of authoritarianism. You want to criticize how your doctor treated you? Fuck off and shut up. You're not a doctor. You don't like some poorly worded legislation that's currently working its way through a state house of representatives? Shut your fucking mouth. You're not a state assemblyman. Disagree with a verdict in a criminal court case? Sit the fuck down. You're not a judge. Don't agree with a cop shooting an unarmed civilian? Fuck you. You're not a cop. This is a tyranny of professionals. It completely immunizes people from accountability from anyone other than their peers. And people's peers tend to protect the status quo and each other. It's just flat wrong. There is wisdom in a layman's opinions. Not all of them, of course, but many of them. For a multitude of reasons, both within and outside of my control, I ended up with a career that does not require me to write or play music. But I still do those things and, I like to flatter myself, do them pretty well. My opinion and yours matters. And professionals don't know everything. If they did, the writing and video games wouldn't be so fucking hilariously bad. So maybe Ms. Price and the writers at Bungie and anyone else who thinks that they know better than their audience should pause, if only for a moment, to consider the possibility that they too can be wrong and understand that useful criticism can come from anywhere. Alright, bye. See you next time.