How a Pepsi consultant burned a "$400k game jam" down with one sexist jibe

Yeah, I'd prefer the title changed as well.

Sorry for being a skimmer, but based on the post saying that the Pepsi "consultant" was pretty much told in his contract to cause drama, was he causing drama for all the teams or just picking on the team with a woman developer? It still doesn't make what he did right, but I'm curious to know what kind of trash talking or harassment he was giving the all-male groups.

At any rate, reality TV 101 is as a host you play fair and impartial and you recruit some highly offensive dude-bro to be your villain.

jdzappa wrote:

Sorry for being a skimmer, but based on the post saying that the Pepsi "consultant" was pretty much told in his contract to cause drama, was he causing drama for all the teams or just picking on the team with a woman developer? It still doesn't make what he did right, but I'm curious to know what kind of trash talking or harassment he was giving the all-male groups.

At any rate, reality TV 101 is as a host you play fair and impartial and you recruit some highly offensive dude-bro to be your villain.

He was trying to cause drama by asking leading questions to all teams and isolating individuals looking for them to talk trash about their teammates. And by all accounts they weren't giving in.

The stuff about females was more of a last straw than a first.

In no way am I defending his comments, but what sort of reality tv competition were they expecting? The sexist comments aside(which should ever be allowed or justified) - isn't interpersonal drama a prerequisite of reality tv competitions?

SallyNasty wrote:

In no way am I defending his comments, but what sort of reality tv competition were they expecting? The sexist comments aside(which should ever be allowed or justified) - isn't interpersonal drama a prerequisite of reality tv competitions?

Only if you're going after the lowest common denominator. I'd rather watch indie game developers doing their usual thing than watch a bunch of manufactured human "drama".

SallyNasty wrote:

In no way am I defending his comments, but what sort of reality tv competition were they expecting? The sexist comments aside(which should ever be allowed or justified) - isn't interpersonal drama a prerequisite of reality tv competitions?

From my reading of the indiestatik article, it wasn't originally conceived of to be a reality show, but it morphed into one because the people sponsoring it didn't know how else to approach it, and the people making it didn't stand up to them. The jerk guy was doing exactly what you'd expect from a crappy reality/competition show, but he made the decision that it should be that way himself (and again, the people making it didn't stop him until it was too late).

They were aiming for it to be reality TV, like Survivor or Big Brother. That is why there were clauses in the contract allowing the producers to misrepresent or distort what was said. This guy that was fired was trying to stir up trouble like Jeff Probst does. Unfortunately, he had no skill at doing it with questions and instead was just being offensive.

SallyNasty wrote:

In no way am I defending his comments, but what sort of reality tv competition were they expecting? The sexist comments aside(which should ever be allowed or justified) - isn't interpersonal drama a prerequisite of reality tv competitions?

It would have been naive to expect “GAME_JAM” to be a perfect window into our process. ... From the onset I was prepared to make compromises for showmanship. The game-show structure seemed forced, but a worthwhile compromise to reach a wider audience.

I think, at the end of the day, they still expected to be able to do their thing and actually make a game.

Okay, I’ll deal with it. I’ll make fun of it under my breath and off camera, I’ll power through. At the very least, there will be a show about game development that maybe some non-developers will watch and be interested in. Maybe we can educate people about the amazing culture that is indie game development. Maybe there’s a redeeming factor to this.

I can deal with that. I can deal with selling out to have some fun with my friends.

What I can’t deal with is supporting what happened next.

Next is when the "pretty girl" question came out.

Seems that these people gave the show a fair shake, but that it was just too forced, too corporate-over-the-top crazy and then it became sexist.

SallyNasty wrote:

In no way am I defending his comments, but what sort of reality tv competition were they expecting? The sexist comments aside(which should ever be allowed or justified) - isn't interpersonal drama a prerequisite of reality tv competitions?

The problem was the the studios (and specifically Pepsi guy) came in thinking that this was a reality TV competition. It's not. A game jam isn't even really a competition. The studios fundamentally misunderstood what they were getting into and they never explained their direction to the devs before the whole thing started. The devs went in thinking it was more or less a documentary. The studio turned it into Survivor.

Edit: I see I've been double-tannhausered.

SallyNasty wrote:

In no way am I defending his comments, but what sort of reality tv competition were they expecting? The sexist comments aside(which should ever be allowed or justified) - isn't interpersonal drama a prerequisite of reality tv competitions?

Not necessarily - see Penny Arcade's Strip Search for something that is much closer to what I think they were expecting.

I think real interpersonal drama was indeed a thing that could have happened, and that would have been OK. Consider the thing with Quinn and JonTron: I don't think they would have been as upset and taken aback by the cameras coming in to document that without the vibe that had lead up to that point and the "we can misrepresent you" thing being in the original contract.

If it hadn't had that vibe, that would have been an interesting tidbit of two people working out how to get along better together, and if things were established ahead of time that they'd have some say in how it was represented, I think they would have been cool with that.

But given the actual vibe on the scene, and the stuff leading up to it, it was really pretty scary. I mean, that thing where Quinn had to [em]get a new phone number[/em] because of Internet jerks doxxing her over the Depression Quest greenlight was no joke. She knows Internet assholes are out there and exactly what they're capable of. If she was confident she'd be represented in a way true to who she is, you know, that's one thing. But the idea of people intentionally throwing accelerant on the fire? That's freaking scary.

Bringing sexism into things was certainly the straw that broke the camel's back, but there was a lot going wrong with this—just as there was a lot right that went into the initial idea.

In the end, it fell apart because unlike your usual run of reality show stars, indie devs are not people who have to fight for the scraps of big media, and wouldn't stand for being treated like they were just to get some handouts that they didn't want in the first place. "Dew Packs" were not worth selling their souls and subjecting themselves to things that could destroy their livelihoods and interfere severely with their lives in general.

If anything, their goal was to get exposure for what game jams are about and how cool it is to make games and how it's awesome to work with different people and how it's not actually super hard and people should go out and do it. And... everything that was wrong with this show was diametrically opposed to all of that.