Please No Steppy

CW: This is going to mention death threats and rape threats.

Colin Moriarty published a video on January 18, 2018 called Bullying, Harassment, and Abuse in the Video Game Industry as part of his series of videos Colin’s Last Stand: Side Quest. In it Colin Moriarty lays out three tales of “harassment, stalking, [and] toxicity in the Games industry.” He sets this up to talk about how social media is used in “such destructive ways,” and it’s also a setup for people to “do better.”

It’s not a great video. From 4:51 to 8:20 of a 18:53 video, we get two of our three tales. Those two tales establish that harassment can happen to games writers and game developers, and that harassment can be rape and death threats. I think that most of us can, and all of us should, agree with this. It’s after those stories are told that Moriarty moves on to put this into “more human terms” for us, which is where we get to the meat of this whole video: Colin Moriarty plays fast and loose with how he defines harassment.

The Harassment in The Video

Once Colin Moriarty starts to open up about the “harassment” from Bob Mackey, that’s where I think you get to see the reason he made the video in the first place. He describes Bob Mackey tweeting some criticism (“he’s absolutely toxic and it’s shameful no one in the industry can speak out” or “ he’s extremely bad at content. it’s what happens when you’re given a job at IGN and get to coast on fumes for a decade”) in the following ways:

When things are intentionally misrepresented in order to blow things out of proportion and injure a person’s character When the level of stalking and harassment leads a bully to spend much of his time the content he apparently hates Looking at social media accounts he’s blocked from seeing Directing his and his army’s ire against the person who never, as in literally never, throws the first punch

Moriarty also tries to wrap this in the stories he told earlier. While the other two people were dealing with rape and death threats, he’s going to explain how this criticism he receives is harassment, and how he’s opening up about it for them.

He calls these tweets “textbook harassment.” The tweets he’s showing are sometimes barely related (a few seconds before he said that the tweets were “textbook harassment” he had a screenshot up of a tweet that was dunking on long island), and sometimes contradictory to his other points (Moriarty shows this tweet, where not only is Mackey showing that he isn’t “throw[ing] the first punch,” Moriarty says it’s “since deleted”, which is obviously not the case).

Moriarty then (finally) goes in-depth on what he considers an example of harassment, and I think this one (1) example he goes in-depth on shows exactly where Colin Moriarty’s head is at when it comes to calling out “harassment.”

At 14:20 of the video, Moriarty shows a mostly complete exchange he had with Danny O’Dwyer about workplace diversity where Moriarty argues that hiring O’Dwyer and having “two white guys” brings more “diversity that matters” compared to, say, “ a black American from Long Island.” Moriarty then shows the following Mackey tweet, leaving out the thread he made, or the responses he made to people who replied. Mind you, as that singular Mackey tweet is on screen, Moriarty is saying the following:

So what did Bob do? Here’s what he did: He selected a screengrab of the conversation, totally devoid of context, tweeted it out to all his followers without linking to the totality of what is said, and allowed the harassment to rain down on me by design.

He then shows, again, context-less tweets of random people who were criticizing him after the Bob Mackey tweet happened. My favorite tweet example of “harassment rain[ing] down” on Moriarty is the following: Colin Moriarty is bad

Colin Moriarty is bad

Another example Moriarty uses, which I think is by far the best distillation of what he considers harassment, is the following tweet:

The reason I think this is such a good example is because it’s part of a larger thread, which you can clearly see in the YouTube video:

So much “harassment is when you intentionally misrepresent something,” huh

The closest the tweet screengrabbed even gets to name calling is saying that his views “borderline on racist/sexist/whatever,” and the tweet shown and the thread conveniently left out itself has a critique of Moriarty’s views, how he reacts to criticism, how the games industry as a whole doesn’t call this out. I would be hard pressed to call this harassment, but Moriarty does. This doesn’t tag Moriarty, this is some random person, with around 100 followers and no likes or retweets on the thread, making criticisms into the void. This is the type of comment Colin Moriarty considers harassment.

Colin Moriarty’s Harassment, By His Own Definition

By his own definition and the examples of “harassment” he uses in his video, the video Colin Moriarty made is harassment.

First, Colin Moriarty intentionally takes Bob Mackey out of context to paint him as “unhinged” As we’ve seen in the video, he does this in a few ways. He takes several tweets out of their threads and out of context to make Bob Mackey look as bad as possible. The most egregious example is when Moriarty is explaining that having his tweet screengrabbed, “totally devoid of context,” is harassment, Moriarty is doing the exact same thing to Bob Mackey and his tweet criticizing Moriarty’s views on diversity. And that’s not the only time! Compare the follwing tweet Colin Moriarty shows on his video to the actual thread the tweet came from: