I enjoyed the gamergate ones..you know, seeing ppls point of view is always a great insight, even if they're flaming someone.

Fortunately for you there are plenty of websites out there who are more than willing to host such content without regard to issues such as cyberbullying, doxing, character assassination, etc etc. Conveniently many of these websites are located in countries that enable them and their posters to be legally unaccountable to the realities of what happens to the victims of such attacks.

If gamedev went down the path of enabling this sort of content then I would hazard a fair guess that the current stakeholders in this website would evaporate in short order.

I'm not going to read everything here, but I don't like the new rules.

Seriously? Opinions are fine, but simply launching yours out there without context in the discussion that has already taken/taking place really devolves down to the fact that other than saying "I don't like the new rules" you have no idea if you have contributed anything new or useful to the discussion at hand.

I've never liked these rules, and I've never liked the US-centric tech industry's cowardice about tackling them head on. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that 90% of the time the root reason for locking down discussions on identity issues, on these forums and elsewhere, is simply people's "discomfort" in talking about them. That's really convenient if the status quo doesn't actively harm you, but for those of us who do face constant risk and threat of various kinds, it's not a very impressive reason.

• I have a three-year old son. Just about every week in America, someone who looks vaguely like my son might when he gets a little older is killed by (sometimes self-appointed) authority figures.
• I look around my technology organization and virtually no one else who looks vaguely like me is in a position of core technology implementation, decision making or strategy. They're all in sales/marketing, QA or occasionally design.
• Every time I see a picture of a startup or technology firm's "technical braintrust," I count the number of faces that look vaguely like mine. 95% of the time the answer is zero.

You're telling me that all of that is irrelevant, that it doesn't affect the products we create, the games we make? That the homogeneity of perspective in the creators doesn't bleed into the product? That critiquing the oversights in the product is not valid because it makes some people "uncomfortable"?

Let me tell you a story that involves GameDev.Net people—staff—whose names will be withheld. One year I brought my then-girlfriend with me to GDC. At this point I had been involved with GDNet for about 5 years, and attended GDC and met the other staff at least once or twice Sitting at a table with a bunch of GDNet people, one of them, A, started talking about my skin, and how "black" I was, and how you could only see my teeth. Now this is a problematic, often offensive characterization even within the black community, because darkness of skin has been used as a pretext for all kinds of discrimination (see: brown bag parties, for instance). My girlfriend was furious, but it was her first time meeting them so she didn't want to create a scene. Another staffer, B, has some black ancestry, and they were clearly uncomfortable as well, and at the next available opportunity they chipped in their 2 cents about identity and bias.

To insist that we can't talk about these things because they sometimes get uncivil strikes me as choosing the easy way out. Plugging your ears and claiming the silence means nobody is complaining. The ways that people act are often fundamentally uncivil, and we need to be able to point that out and grow, collectively, as a consequence.

I've been talking about race, but it's the exact same thing for gender or sexual orientation (where I am of the dominant class). The furor over Anita Sarkeesian's Feminist Frequency project suggests staggering ignorance not even about feminism and gender issues, but about media criticism. (Seriously. Read Mulvey.) How do we rectify that if we can't talk about it? And saying that, "Well, THIS isn't the place for it" just makes this a refuge for those who don't want to talk about it. The nature of a community is that it creates the familiarities in which people are willing to extend to each other the benefit of the doubt necessary to make contentious conversations potentially profitable. Absent that context, you get Twitter's instant devolution to death threats. This is exactly the place where these topics can be discussed productively.

»shrug«

Fwiw, Oluseyi, I was going to link at your posts in the Confederate Flag ones, as useful examples to counter Swiftcoder's "The problem I have with this is that you are only seeing a single point of view."; but I think Swiftcoder is right that we're mostly only seeing different views argued by the same demographic.

When you posted in that Confederate Flag thread (the first time I saw your posts in a few years, I think) I was very pleased you were sharing your viewpoint, and thankful you for correcting some false historic information I had. Its those kinds of posts that I value alot.

Swiftcoder's posts was what really bothered me before I realized he wasn't speaking for the site but just his own views. The idea that any group would unilaterally say There's clearly a right and a wrong, and we're the right, so you're the wrong and your views are no longer welcome for discussion". There IS clearly a right and a wrong, but since we have differing views on which side is right, then it should always continue to be discussion.

I see this alot in the media, from both liberals and conservatives, with the liberals saying something like, "Abortion is here to stay, you're increasingly on your own, the discussion is over." (to use abortion as an example. Replace 'abortion' with 'workplace inequality' if you like)... uh, if half the country is passionately still arguing, clearly the discussion isn't over. It's like saying, "The Jews are already boarded on the trains, all Germany supports it, so don't bother talking about it". Just because an overwhelming majority is determined that X is okay, and just because X is already socially acceptable and legally permissible, does not automatically mean it is morally correct, and does not automatically mean no discussion should occur. Silencing dissenting voices because it's already the status quo is the exact opposite of what needs to be done.

That being said, jbadam's posts in this thread helped put me at ease, assuring me that GameDev.net wants these (diversity) discussions to continue and is just looking for a less emotionally-tangling way for moderators to ensure the discussions remain civil.

Keep in mind that these threads (pretty much all the "problem" ones) go on for quite a while before devolving to insults. 4-5 pages is pretty long considering how much content is packed into each post, or obviously the community as a whole can have an intelligent discussion.