Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare‘s Lead Dev Michael Condrey spoke to BBC Newsbeat today in response to Zoe Quinn’s call for large game studios to speak out about the online trolling of women related to GamerGate, in which he states that the gaming community in general is healthy, and he has no tolerance for the toxic and misogynistic elements that exist as a minority:
“I certainly wouldn’t characterize the community of fans I know and had the pleasure to engage with as toxic or misogynistic. The community as a whole is very healthy, engaged and thoughtful and probably like anything anywhere well outside of gaming. In the fringes of a lot of areas of society there are examples of people behaving poorly.”
Come to the game to have fun, come to be social, come to enjoy and build a community and have a positive energy. Toxic behaviours, abusive language, inappropriate emblems, I don’t want that around. So for our community, Sledgehammer Games and Advanced Warfare we have pretty low tolerance for toxic behaviour.”
These comments came during an interview related to the release of Sledgehammer Games’ much-anticipated release Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. GamerGate has been quite prominent in the media lately, so it’s not surprising that the interviewer decided to probe Condrey’s thoughts into the matter after Zoe Quinn made her highly publicized plea to the industry as a whole.
Meanwhile the issue of ethics in gaming journalism is more or less overlooked by the large media outlets as the debate has been overshadowed by the toxic element of the community who do harass and threaten women, such as when a threat of a Montreal-style massacre was e-mailed to Utah State University when Anita Sarkeesian was scheduled to speak there.
Did Michael Condrey do a good job in defending the gaming community and addressing the concerns of misogyny in gamer culture? Let us know in the comments.
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