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[Graelyn]

Oof.

This is why RL me has zero internet footprint.

I think a lot of people simply saw all of this as the sins of the Goons coming home to roost on the mistakes of one guy.

Is that fair? I dunno.

But the tears from the goons are unexpectedly delectable!

[GoGo Yubari]

The point is keep the bloody ingame pressure ingame and it remains healthy. Move it out of game and it becomes an arms race of fuckery that will eventually get somebody killed or thrown in prison.

I'd have to agree 100% with this. And it's not like the Goons don't regularly up the ante in that very arms race, so it is a bit funny (ie. hypocritical) that they are all indignant now that their fearless leader has been the target of Goonish shenanigans.

But that's exactly how they are. They are Internet hipsters saying "Internet spesships is srs buisness", while themselves taking the game very seriously... in as much as one can paint the goons with one big brush, anyway.

Too bad for Mittani, really. There's a lot about him that I like (and a lot to his methods that I don't personally agree with, but I can respect the ruthless efficiency of some of it) and it seems he brought some effectiveness to the CSM as well. The fact that he's out of the CSM after that public faux pas shouldn't be a surprise to anyone, though. That's what happens in the real world.

[Matariki Rain]

I'm still travelling, and not following the response in detail.

-- I hear there was a YouTube clip, since taken down, possibly from early this year, where The Mittani tells the Goons that at this year's alliance panel he will talk about the different sectors of the EVE community, and why Goons hate them, and why they should kill themselves. Did any of you hear this while it was public? Any comments on the summary I've heard of what was said?

-- I've been thinking a bit about "tears" lately.[1] The griefing game-style may have its primary active expression in-game, but the tears it seeks are "real", resulting from real upset caused to other players. When we've received flak from morally-driven NRDS groups for not taking our NRDS seriously enough it's been because (I summarise) piracy and griefing are real problems with real victims, while slavery is a make-believe problem that's all in our fantasy world. (I can see that this view is internally consistent, but also that those who hold it are playing a different game to the game I'm playing.)

EVE is also a game which has significant meta-play. At Fanfest I found myself several times mentioning the metagame in contexts where I hadn't previously realised how deeply I accepted and expected that there'd be meta-play, so this is exercising my thinking now.

Boundaries get blurred, especially when griefer rhetoric is involved, amping up the emotional response by using loaded language. Inciting people to do things in-game to cause upset and induce tears and rage is pretty much part of the game for certain sections of the EVE community. At what point does that go too far and cause not "just" tears and rage but violence and self-harm? Are people who play griefer-style aware of this possibility or--one of the concerning prospects to arise from this brouhaha--would their response to an actual griefer-induced suicide be that the person was obviously lame, broken, and shouldn't have been playing in the same game/gene-pool?

I'm basically an ethical pragmatist on this one: Alex Gianturco did something stupid and there need to be consequences in order to preserve the game for the rest of us. But I am strongly aware that I don't recruit to the game and I'm cautious about some of the ways I play because it can be a brutal environment out there: I can make the choice for myself, but I wouldn't recommend it to most of the people in my real life. So when some in-game friends are making this the issue on which they make their stand about acceptable behaviour in the EVE community, I can't say I blame them. Some others seem shocked and bewildered that something they don't see as particularly serious griefing is having such effects... and that's bugging me a bit. I don't believe intention is a fully mitigating factor when the "crime" is incitement: you don't get away with saying "but I didn't think anyone would take me seriously when I said people should firebomb the ragheads". How much of this is about "private" speech--where the rhetoric of griefing people to suicide might, maybe, be just a rousing speech to the troops--being spread into the public domain, where it has "normal" meanings and significances?

There's quite a bit of thinking aloud here, so this isn't at my usual level of polish. Thorny issues.


[1] OOG as well as IG, actually: I have no appreciable tear meniscus and now need to resort to artificial tears, which is a metaphor in waiting.

[Jade Constantine]

I'm still travelling, and not following the response in detail.

-- I hear there was a YouTube clip, since taken down, possibly from early this year, where The Mittani tells the Goons that at this year's alliance panel he will talk about the different sectors of the EVE community, and why Goons hate them, and why they should kill themselves. Did any of you hear this while it was public? Any comments on the summary I've heard of what was said?

I've seen the youtube clip and yes, it does have Mittani saying how he hates various people from roleplayers to titan pilots to miners and how his presentation is designed to tell them to "kill themselves". The original video was taken down but not before enterprising eve players rehosted it. I'm not going to give you the link here but I imagine you can find it easily enough. Its being alleged that Soundwave did something wrong in appearing with Mittani there, but having listened to it - not really.

-- I've been thinking a bit about "tears" lately.[1] The griefing game-style may have its primary active expression in-game, but the tears it seeks are "real", resulting from real upset caused to other players. When we've received flak from morally-driven NRDS groups for not taking our NRDS seriously enough it's been because (I summarise) piracy and griefing are real problems with real victims, while slavery is a make-believe problem that's all in our fantasy world. (I can see that this view is internally consistent, but also that those who hold it are playing a different game to the game I'm playing.)

EVE is also a game which has significant meta-play. At Fanfest I found myself several times mentioning the metagame in contexts where I hadn't previously realised how deeply I accepted and expected that there'd be meta-play, so this is exercising my thinking now.

Boundaries get blurred, especially when griefer rhetoric is involved, amping up the emotional response by using loaded language. Inciting people to do things in-game to cause upset and induce tears and rage is pretty much part of the game for certain sections of the EVE community. At what point does that go too far and cause not "just" tears and rage but violence and self-harm? Are people who play griefer-style aware of this possibility or--one of the concerning prospects to arise from this brouhaha--would their response to an actual griefer-induced suicide be that the person was obviously lame, broken, and shouldn't have been playing in the same game/gene-pool?

Its a bit appalling even to reach this realization but I honestly think that many SA-style players would celebrate and relish a RL suicide by an in-game rival. That its possible to actually write such a thing should probably give us a wake up call.

I'm basically an ethical pragmatist on this one: Alex Gianturco did something stupid and there need to be consequences in order to preserve the game for the rest of us. But I am strongly aware that I don't recruit to the game and I'm cautious about some of the ways I play because it can be a brutal environment out there: I can make the choice for myself, but I wouldn't recommend it to most of the people in my real life. So when some in-game friends are making this the issue on which they make their stand about acceptable behaviour in the EVE community, I can't say I blame them. Some others seem shocked and bewildered that something they don't see as particularly serious griefing is having such effects... and that's bugging me a bit. I don't believe intention is a fully mitigating factor when the "crime" is incitement: you don't get away with saying "but I didn't think anyone would take me seriously when I said people should firebomb the ragheads". How much of this is about "private" speech--where the rhetoric of griefing people to suicide might, maybe, be just a rousing speech to the troops--being spread into the public domain, where it has "normal" meanings and significances? There's quite a bit of thinking aloud here, so this isn't at my usual level of polish. Thorny issues. [1] OOG as well as IG, actually: I have no appreciable tear meniscus and now need to resort to artificial tears, which is a metaphor in waiting.

Not much to add to that.

[Rodj Blake]

I think Lallante on FHC (typically among the worst of the shitposters) had a rare moment of clarity and said it best, so I'll just c/p his post rather than put it in my own words:

The difference is its hard if not impossible to believe that Mittens actually wanted or believed it possible that they could collectively troll that guy into suicide. He meant it as a joke, which makes him a drunk, dumb, insensitive prick.  But as his apology shows and anyone who has actually had dealings with him could tell you, he isn't actually an evil baby eating cunt who genuinely wants people to kill themselves.

Mel gibson on the other hand is ACTUALLY an anti-semite.  The views he expresses while drunk are his true views, not just some drunken showing-off shock humour to his goonfleet of faggot brownnosers.

tl;dr - Mittens can be a douchebag, but he isnt THAT much of a douchebag.  He fucked up and went too far with a joke, rather than revealing his "true" evil nature.

Regardless, Mittani crossed the line.

That really nails it down tbh.  He made a joke in extremely poor taste.  He did not show up at the guy's door with a loaded gun, sit down on his couch, hand the guy the gun and encourage him to put it in his mouth and pull the trigger.  But you wouldn't know that from some of the reactions I've read.  Half of them make this out to be a case where Alex went up on stage with the express intent of ending this guy's life and maliciously did his best to make sure it happened.  And to me, intent matters. 

When Gibson made his rant, he was representing himself.   

When The Mittani made his rant, he was doing so not only on his own behalf, nor that his alliance, but as the elected representative of the entire Eve community. 

[Jev North]

It's a pity, I used to have respect for you. Now you're just starting to act like one of the goons instead.

Bacch was "acting like a goon" before the first goon had ever heard of eve.   He was a pioneer of the persona.

Thread kind of saddens me, so no more substantive comments on it, but this could not go unremarked: http://jestertrek.blogspot.com/2012/03/picture-of-week-twins.html

[Louella Dougans]

seemingly, the person that the mittani suggested people harass ingame, is being harassed out of game. phone and emails to their employer and so forth.

it just gets worse and worse. 

[Caellach Marellus]

seemingly, the person that the mittani suggested people harass ingame, is being harassed out of game. phone and emails to their employer and so forth.

it just gets worse and worse. 

That would require someone to give out his RL information, how they managed that when all they had was an in game name to go off is 

[Louella Dougans]

he did at one point have a link in his bio to a blog thing.

[orange]

It's a pity, I used to have respect for you. Now you're just starting to act like one of the goons instead.

Bacch was "acting like a goon" before the first goon had ever heard of eve.   He was a pioneer of the persona.

Thread kind of saddens me, so no more substantive comments on it, but this could not go unremarked: http://jestertrek.blogspot.com/2012/03/picture-of-week-twins.html

I should probably give the EULA a good read, but does this potentially open up Bacch to petitions from those who thought they were talking to The Mittani?  (Bacch has sort of asked this question already)

Since CCP owns all the property involved (Ships, ISK, etc), no "real" theft has occurred and this protects against legal actions.  (I do not think impersonating a person is illegal, unless you are impersonating a particular type-of-person.)

I think Bacch's questions in that area are valid.

Does lying to one character about the relationship of the speaking character to another character constitute a breach of the EULA?  Said another way, if I am playing a character and I claim to be an alt of someone else - have I broken the EULA?

[Morwen Lagann]

Does lying to one character about the relationship of the speaking character to another character constitute a breach of the EULA?  Said another way, if I am playing a character and I claim to be an alt of someone else - have I broken the EULA?

Conversely, and more importantly imo, if I say on some character of mine that I'm not the alt of one of my other characters, have I broken the EULA?

[Bacchanalian]

FWIW, his blog was making stuff up to some degree.  The only things I actually got out of people mistaking me to be Mittens was them buying me a few beers/at one point trying to interview me about the CSM (halfway through that interview I lost it as I was rather drunk, started laughing, and let the guy know that Mittens was actually just behind me and I was Bacchanalian--just before the picture below was taken in fact).  I only introduced myself seriously as Mittens once, at the Saturday night party, when one of my corpmates started charging through crowds of people drunkenly yelling "MAKE WAY FOR YOUR CSM CHAIR MITTANI, MAKE WAY" and I rolled with it.



In any case, I think Alex made a very well-thought-out response to the whole thing in the Ten Ton Hammer article that was put up today: 

http://www.tentonhammer.com/eve/spymaster/77

You may or may not agree, but personally I tend to think he's not wrong in saying that labeling what he did as cyberbullying undermines the term entirely, and that the real perpetrators are those who go out of their way to repeatedly harass someone to the point of ruining their lives.  See also; 4chan when some poor girl makes the dumb choice of sending out pictures of herself performing less-than-kosher acts with a significant other or in various states of undress, and they go out of their way to not only figure out who this girl is, but to harass her on Facebook, contact her parents/peers and share the photos, and ensure that her existence is utterly ruined by them in the process.  At one point I even saw someone proudly proclaiming that they had already succeeded in forcing one victim to move states and change her name once and now that they tracked her down a second time were going to do it again.  That is cyberbullying, and it's utterly disgusting.  Making a very dumb, insensitive, and assholish comment is not.  Putting up pictures of RL Jade with the term "child rapist" attached to it is cyberbullying.  Hell, when I was repeatedly called the same term in-game by someone (Boma Airaken, incidentally) who then went on to give out my location and IP address (not sure how they got that, but my IP also traces to about 40 miles away, so it wasn't that big of a deal) could even be termed cyberbullying.  Telling people to harass some dude in game so he kills himself?  Tasteless, unbecoming of a CSM member, and generally dickish, but not cyberbullying.

[GoGo Yubari]

But it is incitement to do just that (ie. cyberbullying)? Especially considering such tactics have been known to be employed by Goons and Mittani is the Goon leader who regularly issues out targets. He was only joking? Sure, okay. I'm sure some Goons (and maybe others, too) took his joke as a directive. I'm sure he's aware of his influence as well.

[Lyn Farel]

He could have the decency to admit the seriousness of what he did (or just stfu), instead of trying to minimize it. Its just getting even more ludicrous to me.

Warning, exagerated analogy inc : in the same vein, thats not because some dude is doing a genocide somewhere that you killing only a single person is not very serious in itself.

[Rodj Blake]

"Bully" is one of those words that has been devalued over the years.    A bully used to be someone who engaged in systematic violence to affect others. 

The archetypal school bully was someone who went around beating up smaller kids if they didn't hand over their lunch money but nowadays a lot of schools consider simple name-calling (whether or not systematic) to be acts of bullying.

So as with a lot of things in life the question of whether or not publicly suggesting someone should be hounded to the point of suicide is bullying depends upon which definition you're using.