Topic: Alison Rapp no longer with Nintendo Treehouse

What is GG?

Neogaf users have been shaming Nintendo over it, saying that they buckled to GamerGaters, which is where this all came up.

Basically, the timeline seems to be:

Controversy over localisation changes -> Alison defends Treehouse members, shares her opinion on the matter and points out that it isn't an easy topic, but isn't part of the localisation teams -> GamerGaters are infuriated, and begin attacking her and attempt to dig up info from her past -> They find an essay on certain topics that, based on certain interpretations, could point to her advocating pedophilia -> Nintendo gets contacted repeatedly over this -> Attacks and harassment escalate -> Nintendo finally decides to terminate her.

Unfortunate. Hope she hands on her feet.

A fascinating read indeed! No, she is not condoning pedophilia at all in this paper.

This is my first exposure to any of this. But it seems like a big deal if comments in the NL article were closed in advance. So I have many questions.

What is Gamergate?
Who is this lady?
What has she done that is contorversial? The article just seemed to assume everyone already knew what was going on.

Btw my phone doesn't seem to want to load the page in the link above.

@IceClimbers Just saw your post; I think I have a better idea of the situation now. But I still don't know what GamerGate is. It seems like a part of a bigger picture I don't know about.

So there's more to it. Nintendo provided a statement to IGN about her termination, and it turns out the whole GamerGate thing isn't directly repsonsible.

http://www.ign.com/articles/2016/03/31/nintendo-terminates-fi...

If Nintendo is telling the truth, then she was fired for other reasons.

Reading the introduction I have to wonder why people wanted to have a go at her. It's certainly not advocating paedophilia as some have suggested. She's arguing that the West shouldn't try to force Japan to crack down on Child Porn. The rationale being that imposing moral standards on other countries via censorship is a bigger evil.

Given that people have wanted to attack NoA for censoring games? Especially games that in Japan had weird (by western standards) suggestive content. Skimpy costumes on characters that were underage. Minigames involving suggestive massaging? You would have thought that the people who were outraged over that would want someone who wrote the above paper to stay at Nintendo.

..... unless of course their outrage was not about cultural censorship at all. If their whine was about feminism then of course the person in question is a woman. An outspoken one at that. That makes here the "enemy". Take a long hard look at yourself if you are claiming victory for her being let go.

If anything, it looks like she would have been one of the biggest advocates for not censoring Lin (that's just from reading the tweets, I don't have the time or patience to read that essay). Internet harassment has never been a good thing, so shame on those GG'ers. It's a shame she had to go under the conditions she did (can't say I'm behind her or have done enough research to be completely opposed to her).

For everyone wanting to know what Gamergate is, I'll try to provide a decent explanation. It's a fractured and pretty ugly term now. A significant and particularly awful group of people wielding the hashtag are internet harassers. They generally only target women supporting progressive causes (of varying degrees) and send death threats, rape threats, and vicious insults or leak private information (Social Security Number, Address, Address of Family/Friends, etc.). On the other hand, there are also more civilized individuals who hold comparatively-conservative stances on the issue (although they can also include far-right conservatives as well). I consider this a fair definition, although I will note that I lean on the GamerGate side to a certain degree, but refuse to identify under the term. I hope that helps. I tried to be unbiased, but I'm inherently biased.

@IceClimbers: Nintendo very well may of fired her for those reasons stated legally. However when a company has reasons to fire someone but not the means to they look for ways legally as to not get sued.

That's what I find strange too. She actually probably would have supported fewer censorships.

Wow, the Gamergate war has turned out like this year's US presidential election: I strongly dislike both sides...

I've been keeping up with this story since the whole Wayne Foundation fiasco started (and following Ms. Rapp on Twitter for much longer), and I see much truth in this statement.

And I, for one, am glad this is open for forum discussion. Personally, I disagree with Mr. Whitehead's decision to close comments (though I understand where he's coming from). As Alison has stressed today, the best thing that can come from this is discourse on why this keeps happening to outspoken women in the video games industry, and what we can do to break the industry out of this backwards trap. Given her account of Nintendo essentially sidelining her before the termination, I don't buy the official "she was moonlighting" company line for a single second. I am not proud of Nintendo of America today.

So is the US the only country that thinks "pedophilia" is sexual desire of ppl under 18?

It sounds like Rapp supports ephebophilia. Which is actually just fine and probably legal in more places than it's not.

I'm curious what that 2nd job is/was

Thomas needs to update the article.

"Alison Rapp was terminated due to violation of an internal company policy involving holding a second job in conflict with Nintendo’s corporate culture. Though Ms. Rapp’s termination follows her being the subject of criticism from certain groups via social media several weeks ago, the two are absolutely not related. Nintendo is a company committed to fostering inclusion and diversity in both our company and the broader video game industry and we firmly reject the harassment of individuals based on gender, race or personal beliefs. We wish Ms. Rapp well in her future endeavors."

@cheesesteak7:
From what I read of the paper where all that crap came from? It looks as though she did not support paedophilia of any kind. She didn't even support child pornography. At most what she said was that prohibition and censorship of child pornography doesn't "solve" anything. And that specifically the west asking Japan to toughen their laws in regards to child porn is a bad idea. Because doing so is essentially a form of moral imperialism.

Now I'm not going to state my opinion on the topic of child porn either way. It's a sensitive topic and it gets very complicated very quickly. But I think it's fair to say that she held a strong position against cultural censorship. And because of that I think it's fair to say that her online harassers were a bunch of hypocrites. Regardless of whether or not that was the reason she was let go.

@skywake: What harasser?

She was let go, not because of her opinion.

What people tend to forget:
1) This issue was brought to Nintendos doorstep by the Wayne Foundation, a non-profit organisation fighting against sex trafficking. The co-founder cought wind of the whole mess, looked into it and found it troubling, contacted Nintendo to look into it. This was not some dubious "harassment campaign", but id love to see evidence for that. The last few "victims" hadnt any either, just filled bank accounts after claiming harassment.

2) She regularly posted lewd pictures of herself on her work account (which doubles as her private account) and judging by Nintendos reaction to the Wayne Foundation, they werent aware what she posted there.
She later took several photoshoots and openly stated that shes looking into selling those, again, lewd content. This overlaps with Nintendos official statement, that she was let go due to "moonlighting" ie having a second job. Depending on her contract, such statements might be against the stated terms.

So its very well possible that her termination was due to her simply being bad at her job as a PR person and her trying to turn her photo hobby into a secondary income.
As for the harassment cries: Again, it wouldnt be the first "woman who cried wolf" to profit off of it.
There are plenty of proven cases out there, that got quite a pretty penny off of blaming GG for basically everything. Its easy, its quick and the media jumps on it without doing as much as looking into the whole affair.

@TheLastLugia: They've disabled comments before.

I'll refrain from speculating on this issue. Her employment with Nintendo is none of my business, frankly.

@VelvetElvis: She was terminated for NSFW a photoshoot. Honestly, I think they were silent because they were looking into her records. I doubt her opinion alone would have gotten her fired.

I think you misunderstood what I was saying. I didn't make a comment on why she was let go and I don't have an opinion of it. What I was saying was that the people who did harass her? People who are part of the "gamer gate movement" who think they're fighting against the PC brigade? Those people were hypocrites. Because the only thing I think is very clear about all of this was that she was OPPOSED to censorship

I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt here, even though it strikes me as exceedingly odd that you would repeatedly stress Nintendo's official PR statement while also implying that harassment didn't factor into Alison's termination. It's well documented that Ms. Rapp has been the public target of GamerGate-tinged and GamerGate-affiliated (Daily Stormer, etc.) harassment for many months. These groups have done everything from file Change.org petitions to get her fired to torpedo her with daily tweets and messages calling her "cancerous" a "femnazi" and things much, much more unsavory that I can't post here. If you'd like a concise summary of the situation — and of why it's of interest to the gaming community — I'd start with this piece from Kotaku.

And, moving on to @Einherjar's statements, this same group is what brought her to the attention of the Wayne Foundation — again, let me stress that the Wayne Foundation did not come across Alison Rapp and decide that she was a threat; an abusive fringe group brought Rapp to the Wayne Foundation's attention. That was a terribly unfortunate situation, as the Wayne Foundation strives to do genuine good; they hotheadedly followed a malignant source and damaged both Rapp's name and their own reputation in the process.

Yes, Rapp's thesis paper is on a controversial topic (ironically, her controversial views fall in line with the abusive fringe group that blames her for the "censoring" of Nintendo games, though she was not part of the localization department at all — that's a whole other can of worms — but as a progressive feminist, she became the "SJW" witch to hunt; further, anyone who has taken the time to read the thesis knows that it is not in support of pedophilia at all). Yes, her moonlighting surely factored into the firing decision. I am not aware of what this moonlighting was, and I'd appreciate some credentialed sources on it. And yes, you can certainly make a case that her radical views could be problematic for a marketing professional (which she was; again not a localization staff member).

However, none of these things would have been a factor had abuse not been a major part of the picture. The fact is, an abusive fringe group organized a campaign that called for her firing. An abusive fringe group dug through this woman's virtual trash can to create a witch hunt that resulted in her losing her job. For Nintendo to cave to that group's demands sets an extremely dangerous and unhealthy precedent. When abuse achieves the desired result, it encourages abusers to continue using those tactics. There are many complicated factors to explore in this situation, but this part of it is simple.

This is ludicrous. They aren't "harassment cries" when the harassment is on the record; that's the thing with Internet harassment — it's a two-way street. The harassers use the Internet's everlasting imprint to dig up any digital trash they can (in Ali's case, anything from Amazon Wish Lists to college essays), but it also means that the abuse is all on the record. You won't have to look far to find it.

Who in the hell "got a pretty penny from blaming GG for pretty much everything"? Name me one person. What media is jumping on this without looking into the whole affair, aside from GG-affiliated sites? Sites from Kotaku to Game Informer seem to be looking at the issue as a complicated, big picture affair, as far as I can see.

Whether it's Alison Rapp, Jade Raymond, Anita Sarkeesian, or any other of the dozens of prominent women in gaming who are abused on the daily, it's too loud, too damaging and too well-documented for you to fall back on some thin "girl who cried wolf" argument. What was Ali's devious master plan here? How has getting fired profited her?

To quote Rapp herself, "Let's not pretend like this kind of thing happens everywhere, all the time. It doesn't."

This is endemic in the gaming industry, and it needs to change before more people get hurt. And that's why it's important to discuss.