Hopefully this is not too much of a downer but having done this exact thing and burning out of the advocacy space because of how much of a nightmare it was to interface with companies, I can’t possibly recommend this as a tactic. It’s a meat grinder and companies will not move.
The thing I’ve been noodling on the last few days is how do we find some sort of financial incentive/blowback. Been having these fights internally a long time and the only thing I’ve ever seen work is demonstrating financial incentive or significant reputational damage
Then that becomes a real question of tactics that is worth considering - is the idea to punish bad actors or to support targets? Is there a way to do both without exhausting your resources? What do you have better tools to accomplish? Starting with a specific goal and working backwards is critical
Financial blowback is challenging in the gaming space though, the worst people are willing to throw money at hatred and gamer boycotts struggle to not just be overrun by scabs.
If you're up for it, I'd love to pick your brain at some point
I’d be down, probably not this week though if that’s ok. I’m going through some stuff and feel like if my emotional immune system is lower than usual, it’d be too easy for this to turn into a trauma dump and I don’t wanna do that to either of us lol
I totally get it. I shot you a DM, let's chat there whenever to set something up <3
Oh great! Will do
I can in the meantime though see if I can dig up a pdf of my book since the second half of the entire thing is basically me just debriefing on what did and didn’t work so I could leave that particular advocacy space and try to have a life I didn’t hate
Oh shit, that would be huge ty
I mean I'm sure I don't need to tell you that your lawyers had some legal success with harassment so you could also potentially look into advocacy in that area. Trying to get better harassment laws past that encompass some of the stochastic threats that come up in gaming spaces.
No it's an honest take and one I need. I'm just trying to fight this feeling of helplessness, you know? How do we let it keep happening?
Oh believe me, I get that. The thing I did find that WAS successful was peer to peer support. But that also comes with a HUGE need to set up infrastructure of care to the aforementioned peers that can be really hard to actually set up if that’s not like the only thing you do.
It’s not impossible to do things about it, I just think less “awareness” or nonprofit-ish solutions tend to be as effective as a bug bouncing off a windshield. The issue isn’t really about education atp HOWEVER, ways to offer support more directly to people suffering it does make a difference
Gonna second this, I straight up don't believe a lot of companies would be interested, and I think many companies enjoy having what is essentially an industry attack dog that they're not affiliated with in an official capacity, but acts in their interests. Saw this the first time around, for example
when Bethesda was practicing retaliatory blacklisting of outlets, that so called "consumer revolt" celebrated it. The harassment mobs always act very in line with corporate interests, they're extremely anti-union, they'll target marginalized employees, and corporations enjoy these unpaid Pinkertons
They'll go after individual reviewers for supposedly messing up a metacritic rank. When a studio known for making singlerplayer games gets railroaded into making a life service, they'll pin the disaster on someone other than management; Suicide Squad and Sweet Baby It's always corporate interests