[Release Date: October 25, 2022] Players, game devs, artists, voice actors, marketing people, and everyone else that works in the game industry – even game design students – sometimes need to talk to someone who understands how the video game universe can be uniquely emotionally taxing and difficult to navigate. The Games and Online Harassment Hotline was set up two years ago to help! We think they’re an amazing resource for the gaming community in ways that go far beyond what you might expect.
SHOW TRANSCRIPT
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Shlomo Sher: All right. Welcome, everybody. We’re here with Jay Lynn. Oh, sorry, Jaylin, let me
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Shlomo Sher: let me go back. Ah, real quick! So way since you haven’t heard the way the episode is structured. The way the episodes are structured is. Ah, in the beginning I record some sort of introduction that lets people know what the topic is, and I haven’t done that yet. I usually do it after.
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Shlomo Sher: Yeah, after you know it’s like, Ah, when you’re writing a paper, I you know I think it’s i’m a professor. Ah, do they in your last right, or you do the intrudent conclusion. Right? So that’s the way I kind of do it. So by the time they get to us they’ll have an idea of what the topic is, and we do a thing, and we introduce you, and then we jump into it.
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Shlomo Sher: Okay,
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Shlomo Sher: that’s awesome.
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Shlomo Sher: All right,
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Shlomo Sher: welcome, everybody. We’re here with Jay Lennon. Um. Jay Lynn is the headline director of the gauge and outline of Rasman Hotline and a mental health advocate for video game spaces. They have a background in queer community health and suicide prevention with roots and collegiate eastwards. Jay is also a community organizer around trans liberation, queer arts and racial justice in Austin, Texas, Jay Winkleton, Welcome to the show
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Shlomo Sher: so much i’m so excited to be here and have this conversation with you all today, all right. Well, we think it’s a really important one, and we’d like to help you get the word out about the games and online harassment hotline. So, first of all, let’s start with nuts and bold. So what is the games in online harassment hotline Now, who does it serve? Ah, why does the gaming community meet a hotline with us, or maybe more than one.
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: Yeah, totally. Um,
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: All right. The basic real, The games of online harassment hotline. It’s a free confidential text message-based emotional sport hotline for anyone who makes or plays games. We are currently in the us only so from anywhere in the Us you can text support to two, three, three, six, eight to get connected with us. You can text in at any time any day of the week. We’re online every day from three to seven Pm. Pacific time.
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: And so that’s when we’ll text you back. But whenever it is, whether it’s in the middle of the night or during your lunch break. You can text us, and we’ll. We’ll get back to you within a day, and we talk to folks about a whole bunch of things, you know. I think our our name is is very specific. It’s games and online harassment. But you know, we talk to folks about different mental health struggles. They’re having stresses in their workplaces we talk about. There’s a lot of crunch and burnout and mental health
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: struggles, and also like abusive situations in a workplace within the games industry. We talk to a lot of folks about that, and then we also talk to folks playing games who are experiencing harassment or dealing with other mental health issues or community struggles.
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: Yeah. And then everything in between, You know, streamers, e-worth players, coaches, uh students, and I know you all are professors. We talk to a good number of students who, you know, fall into a bunch of these categories. They might play games and experience harassment there. They might, you know, experience some stress in their schoolwork, some anxiety about entering the industry all of that. So it’s it’s um not a lot of gatekeeping. Uh, not like very clearly defined uh things. We really just want to be a
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emotionally supportive resource for the games Community
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Shlomo Sher: that’s great, that’s fantastic, and you know,
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Shlomo Sher: and my initial surprise, I I guess you know I have to. You know kind of mention that right at the the breadth of the gaming community that you guys talked to. I assume you know, when I first heard about it, I assume Yeah, we’re talking about online harassment of players, but it’s so much more than that.
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Shlomo Sher: What about that last part? Why does good? The gaming community need something like this? Hmm. Yeah. I mean
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: this. I actually don’t answer this question a lot, because the the first reaction I get from folks typically is like, Oh, thank God! Finally, we like, I wish I had this when I, when I was coming up, or or ten years ago, when I was really struggling with stuff like this, you know, I think, for folks who have been in the gaming space, either on the industry side or on you know the player’s side, or anything in between it’s. It’s a kind of a family secret that you know. These like problems,
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: harassment and toxicity are just so baked into our culture, and that has been actually pretty interesting. Um, i’m taking a bit of a a bit of a side tangent here. It’s been interesting talking to, You know. There are other hotlines and other organizations who work on online harassment and digital security and different, like online attacks and threats and stuff like that. And there is a different energy talking to them sometimes than
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: I feel in the games industry, and and also just in the game space,
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: because there is such a cultural element of it, and like different flavor of it in the ways that it shows up in gaming.
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: Yeah, like, I think, in some other spaces it might feel a little bit more Us versus them. Maybe we’re journalists, or maybe we are filmmakers, or something like that
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: outside There’s this conception that there’s outside people attacking us online or coming after us. But in the games community.
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Shlomo Sher: It’s it’s a little different, because it’s kind of from within the house right where it’s harassing each other. It’s you know all it’s within the industry, and I mean not that it’s totally binary and cut and dry like that in other industries, either. But I do think that cultural understanding and element of how really it manifests in these unique ways in game spaces is part of what makes the games hotline really stand out because we’ve heard folks who have dealt with harassment for a long time,
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: you know, gone through like really awful abuses in game spaces. Try to reach out for either mental health or emotional support in other spaces, either therapy or other hotlines, or something else,
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Shlomo Sher: and just getting met with this like reaction of like, not like whoa like that’s so wild that that happens like that. Or why would you play a game where you’re treated that way, or you know that just that just doesn’t make sense, and and then the and then the conversation is about their shock rather than what you’re actually going through, and so to be able to talk to someone who who gets it. I’m: like,
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: Yeah, that is how it is it sucks. Let’s talk about it. It makes a really big difference.
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Shlomo Sher: It’s interesting to think that there’s still a lot of people out there, because we, you know, we feel like games are so ubiquitous now, and everybody’s playing games right. Everybody. Everybody is experiencing games. Everybody is experiencing it, experiencing some kind of harassment.
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: If they’re playing online at all. If they’re online at all, they’re experiencing some sort of harassment. I can see where, like in a and a non-game-specific space, they might just say well stop playing stop playing that game
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Shlomo Sher: like there seems to be an easy solution to this right, but but that’s not. That’s not what we’re about. We want people to keep playing games. We want We want the games.
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Andy Ashcraft (He/him): We want the games community to be healthier,
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: Right? Exactly. And I think a lot of folks outside of gaming might not understand
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: that there is so much beauty and healing, and just like I don’t know, like games can be an incredibly powerful coping skill. It can be a really important and crucial, like social element of someone’s life. Developmentally, it can be really really helpful and important to like teach young people agency and ways to explore their identity. And, you know, processing big and hard emotions like grief. And all of that, you know there are so many wonderful and beautiful
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: things about games, and there is this dark side to the culture where the toxicity and things can really impact your mental health make you feel actually more isolated or unwanted. And we’re holding all of that.
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: I do think some of this attitude has shifted over the last few years, especially like you’re saying with the pandemic for one, making everyone
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Shlomo Sher: making a lot of people for the first time realize how much online is real life. Um, I think a lot of people a lot of people play like animal crossing when it first came out at the start of the pandemic. So more people are like accessing that, like social connection and mental health benefit of games. Um: And so yeah, I do think some of those attitudes have shifted in a positive way which is really exciting. Um, But yeah, generally it’s it. It can be hard to explain to someone
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: one who is not very online, what it’s like to deal with these kind of nuanced and complicated experiences.
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Shlomo Sher: You would think this would apply to any community right? I mean, if you’re providing any kind of you know therapy to a community. But you don’t understand the community
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Shlomo Sher: all right. It’s really hard. It’s not going to land. So you know. By the way, you know, i’m so used to thinking of the us and Canada, as you know, one entity with virtually like a single, You know area code, even though
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Shlomo Sher: you know. Of course it’s not a exactly a single,
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Shlomo Sher: you know. But this is for Americans only Canadians Don’t get included.
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: Yeah. Unfortunately, it’s currently only accessible with
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Shlomo Sher: in the Us. And that’s a limitation of our kind of technology at the moment, because we do Sms and short code stuff. Um, that only works in the Us. We are as a teaser working on some like whatsapp integrations and stuff that would allow folks to. Yeah, just like contact us through Whatsapp, just a non Sms method and potentially that may allow us to expand to Canada as well. It is, I think it is very like. There is so much of
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Shlomo Sher: the games community in Canada, both on the industry and player side, and it would definitely be a lovely to expand. But as a pretty new hotline we’re only two years old. We actually just turned to this month.
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Shlomo Sher: We, you know, we started where we are. Um! And we and any expansion we do. We want to be really like conscious of, like the cultural differences and and make sure that we’re We’re doing it thoughtfully as well.
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Shlomo Sher: Great Um! Let me let me ask you. So. This is only This only happened two years ago. How did this come about? How did the hotline come about?
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Shlomo Sher: Yeah. So two years ago, with like two thousand and twenty, we launched in August. Um the year before. That two thousand and nineteen is is when we really saw, like the big kind of waves of me, too, hit the games industry, if you remember, there was like the riot stuff and the least off stuff like that’s you know. We did kind of lag a few years behind some other industries um to get there. But once it finally came to the industry, of course,
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: because it all just like flooded out, and we’ve been seeing. I feel like every summer since then. There’s a new story, or an update, or some sort of development.
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: That’s a really hard thing to witness, but it’s also a really wonderful release of what I think. Yeah, I described a little bit earlier as a family secret that these problems are not new, these types of abuses, and just like disproportionate impacts of
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: violence and gatekeeping and entitlement in the games, especially industry space, They’re not new. They’ve been happening for decades.
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: What’s new is the headlines?
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Shlomo Sher: What’s new? What’s surprising is that we’re actually talking about it out loud. And so that was just such a moment. And of course, even though these things aren’t new, even though a lot of us, especially people who are marginalized for either race or gender or sexuality,
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: are very aware of all of this trauma and violence that happens. It can be it’s it’s hard to watch. It happen again. It brings stuff up, and also it kind of
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: it dispels some like a fog for folks who are sometimes experiencing it now. And so these waves they cause this outpouring of,
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: you know, like people telling their stories from the past, people getting triggered, who have experienced this in the past. People feeling like Oh, my gosh! That’s my workplace now.
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Shlomo Sher: I don’t know what to do about that. I I love my job, but it’s also like I don’t know if I can stay. It’s also really hurting me, and it also affects people who are wanting to come into the industry like this has been my dream. I have always wanted to work for
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: activision. Blizzard, you know, like. And now I would feel afraid, should I be anticipating this, Should I quit and throw it all away? There’s a lot that just comes up. And so in that moment
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: our one of our founders, Anita um she, Anita Sar Keys, and who runs feminist frequency. She just started talking to anyone that she could about this moment. What we need, what survivors need? What Um! What’s missing, I guess, in in our ecosystem of healing and of fighting back and changing this culture. Um. And one of the things you know multiple things came out of those conversations, but one of them was just that
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: there isn’t a place for folks to go right now to talk to someone, and just like have a landing soft landing pat, even if we can’t fix all their problems, even if we can’t actually like,
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: you know, get out there and superman and and save the day. Just having a place to talk makes a really big difference. And she saw that because actually that that summer, when it really hit feminist frequency opened up,
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Shlomo Sher: are Dms. On Twitter, which, if you know about the history of. From this you could see that’s no small to open up those dms and said, Hey, if you’re having feelings around this me, too. Stuff
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: diamas we’re here,
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: and no real hotline infrastructure set up. No real promise that anyone was trade and had no one, You know. People didn’t have any idea who was on the end of that account, and just dozens and dozens of folks came in and just wanted to tell their story, and we really felt in that moment. The impact of like
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: it just makes a difference to feel hard, to feel like someone believes you, even if there’s nothing substantially that we can do that. This is actually enough, and this is actually quite substantial in itself,
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: You know. She pulled in Wu Gandin Lay, who has a lot of experience, setting up suicide, hotlines and and other kind of crisis. Hotline work I got pulled in for kind of my combined background, and mental health and games and stuff like that, and
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Shlomo Sher: worked for about a year to kind of set this thing up and launched in August of two thousand and twenty in now Twenty years. Yes, great.
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Shlomo Sher: All right. So
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Shlomo Sher: okay. You mentioned that the right now the hotline works in terms of Mss: All right. So
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Shlomo Sher: as a mess. Yeah. So ah, so okay. Text message text messages. Yeah, Let’s let’s just call it text message, all right. So Ah, if I ah essentially contact the the the hotline. Who do I talk to? Ah, and what sort of ah resources? Ah! Would they be able to connect me with? Ah,
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Shlomo Sher: what sort of what sort of resource. Are they
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: right? Yeah. So again, like I said at the beginning, Right? What really makes us stand out is that we have both. All of our agents have both the like competency and training in,
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: you know, mental health and crisis, intervention, and just holding that emotional support space as well as
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: an understanding and just like kind of baseline knowledge of the games community to gain space and just the prevalent issues of of what comes up for folks in the community. And so yeah, we have a wonderful team of
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: agents who take different text message conversations all throughout the week and month and year, and we really just hold that space,
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: You know we pull on a well of knowledge and just like lived experience. The founders are all,
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: you know, the founders and leaders of of the hotline are all like directly impacted folks who have experienced abuse and harassment within game spaces and have just, you know, it’s just like been around the block like this stuff is in new, right like. And so we have. We have a kind of a welcome knowledge there that we that we sit on, and and we want to share. But first we just hold that door open and want to hear what’s going on with you, and what would be most supportive, and we can help answer questions
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: and share what we’ve seen the effective and similar situations that other people have experienced in the past. And we can yeah link out to different organizations or websites, or information or resources, or different places to contact for help depending on the situation. And what folks are feeling, because the reality is that online harassment,
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: it’s easy to think of it as this technical or digital issue. But really, more than anything, it’s an interpersonal issue. And so sometimes those technical fixes Aren’t just going to work for it. It really requires that human connection because it’s such a human experience
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Andy Ashcraft (He/him): Right? Right?
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Shlomo Sher: Um, I i’m really impressed that that
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: the people that call in tend to be not just gamers or fans of games, but people who are also in the industry people who are experiencing. I like that. That I’m. Impressed that it covers such a broad,
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: you know, like the community is not just, And that’s another thing about like we’re We’re in the house right? It’s the call is coming from in the house. Yeah,
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: you know, we feel like like the fans, feel connected to the people who make these games, and the people who make these games feel really connected to the, to the fans, in ways that I think are probably different in games, because it’s so iterative, and we see we have so many of this. This, you know, as a game maker. I know my process is very iterative. I I really want to get into my fans heads when i’m making games for them
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: right and so and So I feel like our community, a game design community, and the game Fan community is so much more sort of like. We’re all part of the same crowd. It’s not like. Oh, here’s a bunch of people making stuff for somebody else.
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: Right?
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Shlomo Sher: Yeah, yeah. And I think that’s
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: again like
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: has so much like beauty and power in that, like you said right like games are iterative in a way that some other media isn’t, you know, like films. Don’t really come out with patches and updates, and like game like new game balances and stuff like that, right? Right? Right? And movies don’t spend, You know, the last six months just watching people play, watch, watch their movies.
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: And so yeah, there is this interesting kind of intercommunal relationship that is different than in a lot of industries
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Shlomo Sher: opens up a lot of room for really wonderful relationships. We’ve also heard it open up a lot of room for a lot of conflict and harassment and often game developers then feel like they can’t even step away from that harassment because it’s their job. And so are you talking about harassment? So
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Shlomo Sher: you know I wanted to kind of get to the kind of types of harassment that you deal with, and you’ve mentioned some already.
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Shlomo Sher: Uh, and I kind of want you to kind of, you know, if you can. You know, list some examples for us, but is the the last one you’re talking about? Is that harassment from industry workers getting harassment from actual gamers from from actual players. Is that what you’re talking about, or from the from the workplace?
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: That’s yeah, that’s I think Where? Um,
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Shlomo Sher: yeah, I think in that case that’s what I was talking about. But it’s all of it all over. Yeah, for sure. Game devs definitely get harassed by their fans online,
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: and and it’s not. And I want to expand it from game. Does. I don’t want to just say devs like people who work in the industry, you know, from publishers to like marketing folks to voice actors. We’ve seen a lot of you know all of that. So it really is expensive. So yeah, And and it is interesting because there is that like kind of more like
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: fan interaction of harassment. And then there’s also within the industry. Your colleagues may harass you as well, or there may be conflict or drama, or kind of interpersonal
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: issues there to um.
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Shlomo Sher: And then there’s also workplace harassment and abuse and toxicity um, and piled on top of, you know. Ah, just like working conditions that aren’t always really like human first um part of the something. Again that is is so wonderful about the games, industry, and the games community is that there’s so much passion. So many people join games because they love games.
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: This is like all they want to do, and it’s just been their dream for a long time, and sometimes there are workplaces who
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: who weaponized that to treat workers as disposable to really cultivate this culture of Well, if you love it, you have to give all of yourself
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Shlomo Sher: for it, and you know what. If you can’t take it If you can’t deal with these conditions, there’s a dozen people waiting for your job, so you know, suck it up again. And that’s a really, really
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: mhm yeah, it’s It’s really dehumanizing in a lot of ways, and really exploits that passion that could otherwise be used for such. I don’t know positive and and generative. Yeah, and and people fail, you know, fall out of the out of the industry this way. It’d be great it could be, You know, the next stars. They can make these amazing games that they’ll never happen.
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: It has been
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Shlomo Sher: they burned out or were pushed out and and sorry to to kind of build on to this, too, On top of that. There’s also, you know, that beekeeping and kind of gendered racial um kind of homophobic oppressions that are at play of Who’s a real gamer? Who’s a real? Who who’s a real developer who actually loves games, right, or who who really has the
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: entitlement to be here, and who is constantly needing to prove themselves. There is, unfortunately, a really rapid culture of sexual assault and harassment in the games industry to really comment, to see folks being sidelined and dehumanized even further, because of their race or sexual identity or disability, or even things like body size that we see stuff like that all the time as well.
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Um and and I, I bring this up because
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: you know, we talk about all these different examples and all these things that people go through. And then we talk about burnout and mental health, and it’s so important to realize that these things are not individual separate problems. They are all the same. They’re all the same problem. It is all compounded and and cannot really be separated out from each other, so we can’t address Burnout without addressing the sexism and racism and homophobia in the industry. It is all
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: kind of tied up in each other because it’s about how we treat how we treat one another.
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Shlomo Sher: Yeah, you know It’s interesting. I was. I mean, that’s I mean, that’s A.
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Shlomo Sher: That’s super important, I think, to to understand the connection between these things, though though it’s interesting to me Right? I assume we’d be talking about. You know mostly the players themselves, and how the players themselves face gatekeeping, and, as you know, and and let’s say that just just for a moment, and stay in the and the industry
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Shlomo Sher: itself, because it strikes me that it
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Shlomo Sher: Some of this might be the case with lots of industries. So um, especially creative industries like I mean, you know the I mean. There’s a reason me too kind of started with the film industry and and the music industry not particularly better. Right? Do they have? Ah, do they have similar kind of hotlines that deal with issues in their industry? Do you know anything about this?
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: Yeah, I know there’s like there are some really wonderful film organizations like women in film who have just like have done wonderful advocacy, and I believe, has their own hotline as well. There’s the time like me two times up,
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: or that primarily works in like film and media and media.
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: Um, Yeah. So media and and offers yeah, like legal support and and other just like advocacy for folks dealing with that, too. I think they’ve recently, or maybe not recently expanded to include games as well. Um, because there is such an overlap of like voice actors and stuff um, and and just creatives and general music folks. Um.
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: And yeah, there’s a bunch of
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: journalism media rooms or yeah, yeah, press rooms have like a really big problem with this type of thing as well. Um. And they also have a lot of um. There are some really wonderful like journalism orgs who do advocacy and support. Around this we have a bunch of ah links and and resources on our website games, hobby and dot org. Just so I I don’t imperfectly list all of them from my brain. But yeah, if you want to check out our website we have. We’ve linked to a lot of those things
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: there. There are, fortunately, a lot of really wonderful folks doing this work. We’re a part of a coalition called the Coalition against online violence. That is just a bunch of folks working
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: around harassment and digital safety, particularly for marginalized folks who tend to be more vulnerable to these types of attacks. Um. And so that that work is really inspiring. And it just, you know none of this can be done alone. And Um: yeah, it really is a cultural and group average, and creating a network of of people who are well working towards the same goal. You know. It helps us all feel like we’re not. We’re not alone in this, too.
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: Yeah, yeah, absolutely
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Shlomo Sher: um. It’s. It’s actually because I I don’t know if to go back or to keep going, but I guess i’m gonna keep going and going back to the the players themselves, right when I think of
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Shlomo Sher: harassment. I usually think of people getting trolled, and you know, and I mean, there’s obviously a lot of trolling and video games, and I can’t help, I wonder? I mean here you have almost not that this is a suggestion for anybody,
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Shlomo Sher: you know. If you want to troll the perfect trolling target, like, you know, an organization whose very goal is to help people. Do you guys control? Does that ever happen? And when it happens, what do you do.
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: Yeah, it’s. It’s definitely happened since the beginning. It’s it’s, you know. Again, we have our own kind of
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Shlomo Sher: the game. Space has its own flavor of harassment and stuff like that, but it’s also not unique to us, even as a hotline suicide. Hawlines also get print calls and stuff like that, too. It’s not in common. Unfortunately,
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: I think that the approach that we take to it is that it’s. I think it’s interesting when folks decide to reach out to an emotional support hotline and say whatever they’re going to say.
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: Whatever intentions behind that we can’t really know. But what we can do is hold the door open. I kind of see that as our job in those moments
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: it’s, you know. Whatever intention someone has, they might be testing the line to check out what it’s actually about.
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Shlomo Sher: You know how you like. Make fun of a thing before you’re like. Oh, I actually like Ah, therapy with you who goes to a shrink, you know, like, and then, like in the back of your mind, you’re like, Oh, maybe What if someone took my problem seriously, you know. And so. So, you know. I
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: I wonder if some of that is is that you know I was like.
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: This is stupid a hotline for the and just wants to check it out, and we hope that they find that we’re here for them. And so we give everyone the benefit of the doubt.
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: We hold out compassion, you know, whatever they’re bringing up,
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Shlomo Sher: you know, like we believed them, and we were like, Yeah, that sucks. Do you want to talk about it? How has that made you feel? And then really, just like,
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: yeah, holding out compassion and that benefit of the doubt well, of holding our own boundaries sometimes, if it starts really crossing a line like folks being like really hostile towards our agents, or just saying like repeatedly really inappropriate things, a lot of white supremacist messages and stuff like that we will eventually set a boundary of like, Hey, if you continue talking to us like that, we’re going to have to, you know, end this conversation. But we are here to talk about,
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: You know, Xyz, if that’s what you’re looking for. And so yeah, I think all in all. We just try to out nice them, and
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: and who knows? You know? Maybe later they’ll They’ll just they’ll leave, knowing that this is an open space for them
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Andy Ashcraft (He/him): right, and I think it also helps that it’s not broadcast. Right?
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: Yeah, when you’re dealing with them you’re dealing with them one on one. They’re not. They’re not posting something to a public forum to get a rise out of somebody who’s gonna work. Who else is going to see it? Nobody else is going to see it. You’re going to get a, you know. If they get a rise out of some one person, it’s not.
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Shlomo Sher: It’s not performative in the same. Yeah, it’s not It doesn’t have the same kind of audience, right? And so you you might get people who are come and trolling like you say, who are in some ways just like, Tell me i’m wrong.
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: He’s
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: like, yeah, like I as an almost like a in some ways a cry for help.
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Shlomo Sher: So I mean, trolling is really complicated. We had a one of our favorite episodes. We did actually on with someone who studies trolling. And, boy.
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Shlomo Sher: Yeah, it turned out to be so much more complicated than we thought. Um, you know. Do people who think they may have been arrested or abused? Ah, someone in gaming like you know, who are that kind of troll that you know you know. Um, I feel bad about some stuff that I’ve done
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Shlomo Sher: the hotline to kind of, you know. Try to talk about what they did, and maybe feel better about what they did as the harassment rather than the arrest.
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Shlomo Sher: Right? Yeah, that that is really interesting like this is this is actually something we didn’t anticipate. But we got those folks texting into us and wanting to talk about things from the beginning, right from our first week of open. But we really didn’t. We really didn’t anticipate it. We were so focused on like I’ve got to think about the like marginalized and vulnerable folks.
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: But then these folks are some of the folks that showed up, and we decided not to shut the door on them, and to offer them support, too. Because, like I said, it’s not an Us versus them. It’s all of us,
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: you know, even if we just think about the lowest levels of harassment and toxicity. Some of it just feels so baked into the game’s culture
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Shlomo Sher: right right? Like It’s a lot of times. People are not flaming or saying really like offensive, and you know, like inflammatory things, because they’re evil, or because they came up with it on their own.
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: It’s because they saw everyone else doing it because
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: I wanted it to them. They had that behavior model, So they’re just kind of it, just kind of mimics and repeats itself, you know, like I remember when I was doing like a lot of these sports stuff more seriously like maybe ten or so years ago. Um saying rape as a positive thing. I don’t know. If y’all remember this.
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: It was just really common. It was just really normal to just say I would hear it all the time using all the time and games,
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Shlomo Sher: and I also used as a positive thing to give us a It’s like a win. It’s like a victory. So like if we beat the other team where we had a really great team fight, they would say, like, how? Yeah, we raped them, and that would be celebratory, right? Right? Right? And that felt just so normal. Similarly, right like homophobic slurs were just, you know. That’s so gay like very like. I remember saying all of those things when when I was, you know, playing in those spaces, and I was young, and I didn’t know better,
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Shlomo Sher: and I had just heard everyone around me saying that for me this was ten years ago. This definitely still happens now, so i’m not saying that that’s the thing of the past. But there is just this cultural element to it. And so, if we really believe that harassment as an issue is
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: is a cultural issue. It’s the problem of the ecosystem, not the individual.
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: We also have to extend that when it comes to talking one-on-one with people who have caused harassment or harm
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: even when it’s escalated above the usual flaming, even if it’s more abusive or more harmful.
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: We just thought that, like you know it’s not about throwing. Keep picking out bad apples or something, because that’s not the source of the problem. And
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: what an interesting opportunity we have! That kind of almost without us beckoning them. These folks,
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Shlomo Sher: it felt like this was a place that they could be vulnerable and share about. Maybe some of the worst mistakes they’ve ever made. That’s not an easy thing to do. I I would struggle to talk about my biggest regrets and the worst things I’ve done, and I would also
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: find it so valuable to have a space where I could talk about those things and be met with
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: empathy and and accountability of like not someone to tell me that it’s
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: yeah what you did was Ok, and no big deal, and don’t feel bad about yourself. But to really meet me and say, like, Yeah, it sounds like you really
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: regret what you’ve done, and you want to do things differently in the future. Let’s talk about that feeling.
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: So that’s where we landed Of How can we provide that space? Because we think that change can’t happen without it?
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Shlomo Sher: It just actually isn’t it. Actually, when we think about like resources that aren’t in abundance in the game space there aren’t a lot of places where folks can really talk about, you know, causing harassment or causing abuse. Definitely.
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Shlomo Sher: I mean, there’s not a lot of places in society itself where which is really interesting. It really makes me think about
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Shlomo Sher: whether this is a a common thing or not when it comes to Hotlines right. I mean, if you are someone that engages in bad behavior, you know, short of being Catholic and confessing it to your priests right. There are very few places where you can really go anonymously and and talk about that stuff. And um, you know, in a culture that is not particularly forgiving. That’s a very hard thing to do. And I think a really valuable thing that you guys are are operating.
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: Yeah, yeah, I think. As for just our hollow, and we steer ourselves in this really kind of unique. And I don’t know almost lucky place in that.
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: It’s different than a report or like an investigation. Right? We’re not. Our job is not to find the facts of what happened. You know if someone is coming to us with their story. Maybe it doesn’t all add up, because sometimes our stories don’t all that up when we tell them, especially for the first time. Maybe you know, parts of their perception
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: are off, you know, and maybe that’s not how the person who is impacted by their harm would tell the story. But that’s not our job to figure that out. We’re not investigators. We’re not, you know. No judge, jury, or executioner. Here. We’re just we’re just emotional support. So we’re here to like
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: talk about the feelings under that, and that, I think, is also kind of rare in our culture and society of a place to yeah confront the things that you’ve done that aren’t punishment based and aren’t like investigation kind of judicial based.
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Shlomo Sher: How long do these conversations typically go,
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: I think we typically like forty five minutes to an hour, I would say,
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Andy Ashcraft (He/him): Oh, I was actually thinking in terms of like how many back and forth.
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Shlomo Sher: Oh, oh, I don’t know it depends. Everyone has a different texting style. Some people are the like five short lines in a row. Some people are like, Wait ten minutes right like three paragraphs and send it.
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Shlomo Sher: Yeah, you know it’s. Ah, you know. I remember. Ah, I remember when I was in college. My my girlfriend actually worked for the suicide Highline.
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Shlomo Sher: I would listen to her, and I was just. I was amazed by how how she could do this,
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Shlomo Sher: and I just got i’m so disgusted by the idea that anyone would call the suicide hotline as a fake call it’s just so incredibly despicable. Um! And for the suicide hotline I it makes sense that it would be I mean back then. It was also no texting,
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Shlomo Sher: you know. I don’t so I don’t know if things are different now, but it really makes sense. You want someone to talk to.
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Shlomo Sher: I can also see lots of reasons why for something like this. You may want to go with, you know, Texting instead. Ah, why did you guys decide to go with text instead of voice for for this kind of support.
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: Yeah, I mean, I think
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: we felt like folks in the game. Space would
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: be more comfortable with texting um. A lot of a lot of folks who play or make games are very used to like communicating through a text, either in games or on online, like on discord servers, or whatever, or um, through like forums and and other just like avenues of communication and collaboration and community. So
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: we felt that we felt like that would be a familiar and easy and accessible way of communication. We also know that it can feel
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: maybe embarrassing or scary, or for whatever reason, wanting a little bit more anonymity, wanting a little bit more.
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Shlomo Sher: Yeah, I don’t know, just like distance um to tell your story and talk about what happened, and and really trust that the person on the other side wasn’t like, you know, waiting with a pen pad um to figure out who you are, or figure out whoever
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: you know who you’re talking about is. And so we felt that like texting would serve that purpose as well.
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Shlomo Sher: So, yeah, those those are kind of some of the thoughts. Fine. I think there’s a I think there’s a big difference between writing to somebody and talking to somebody. Um, and i’m not a psychologist. Maybe, J. You might know more about this that I do. But but, like like the immediacy of speaking,
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: can be hard as opposed to like. Well, I let me think about this. I’m: I’m writing. I can think about it a little bit better.
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Shlomo Sher: Right? Yeah. Yeah. And that you can like text in at any time, and we’ll just text you back. You know that you can get it out in that moment, even if we’re not online. Um, there’s definitely pros and cons to both, You know, talking, there is a little bit more of a human connection. You can hear their voice. You can like, read each other’s most emotions and tone a little easier. There can be something soothing, just like hearing someone
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: to in a calm way. So there are a lot of pros to phone calls. There are also a lot of pros like we were talking about to Texting, and that’s why we landed for now.
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Shlomo Sher: Yeah, it’s it’s interesting because i’m thinking about, you know, texting a therapist
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Shlomo Sher: right? And that seems to be very different. But in in a sense this isn’t like It’s sort of like toxic to therapists,
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Shlomo Sher: there is. That’s a thing. Now. Yeah. So there you go.
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Shlomo Sher: Yeah.
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Shlomo Sher: Ah, interesting. Yeah, Because I’ve never had that kind of relationship with a therapist where we would text. But I guess you know all all kinds of relationships are are available now for all kinds of ah um communication styles. Yeah, and ways of sharing intimacy.
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Shlomo Sher: Let me ask you about i’m not sure. I’m assuming that there’s people who contact the hotline more than once.
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Shlomo Sher: Right? Um, is there a continuation of uh, of of conversations? It’s interesting because texting sort of allows that to happen in, you know, in a sense, or is it just kind of a every time you get somebody new and and all that.
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Shlomo Sher: We try to treat it as a new in each conversation. As a new instance part of that is because we we very intentionally don’t want to keep case files on anyone we we don’t offer long-term care. We know the kind of our our role. We see it as that, like this, like soft landing pad, and hopefully ushering you off like kindly and to to your next destination. And so yeah, we don’t keep
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: files. We don’t like, keep records on, like each person who text in. Now we can just pull up and be like, Oh, yeah, Last time you talked about this, the the literal like text system not only doesn’t keep our display phone numbers at all, so like on the agent side. The agents never see anyone’s phone number only what you actually put into the system. Um, it. Also it cuts off
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Shlomo Sher: the last conversation, so you can’t just like scroll up and see whatever they’re talking about before. Um. So it really truly treats it as a signal instance. We think that gives people a little bit more agency if they want to like, bring up like, hey? I’ve tested him before we talked about this last time. It may be a different agent that they’re talking to. You know, the same person they can talk about like, Yeah, Last time I talked to the agent about this is this: like I wanted to give some like updates. I tried this. It didn’t work. What should I do next?
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Shlomo Sher: And that’s Ok, if they decide to do that? But sometimes people might decide to text in
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: use a different name, pretend to be a different person, and not want that connection not want to be known in that way. We want to leave that in the
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: in, the the person’s hands.
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Shlomo Sher: Yeah, that makes sense. It does. Yeah, I want to. I want to talk a little about the agents and the like. How much training do people have? And And if any of our listeners wanted to become an agent, is that something you need.
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: Yeah. So we’re constantly learning and iterating. And so when I talk about training it doesn’t ever feel like a
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: like one, you just do your forty hours here, and you’re good to go. You know everything you need to know. And so, yeah, our agents currently go through a full
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: mental health crisis, intervention, training. First, that involves
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Shlomo Sher: yeah, many, many, many hours, I think, in total like, with like role plays and observation shifts, and all of that about one hundred hours on that side. Then they go through a game-specific training where we talk a little bit more about online security a little bit more about game spaces. A lot of folks come in. They are either gamers themselves or they are developers or students um studying to enter the games industry or something like that, but no one ever knows every bit of
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: everything. So we go over kind of just all of it um to kind of feel folks in on different parts of the games community, and what people typically bring to the hotline, so that they have that kind of awareness and understanding. Um, and also about like how to hold those accountable conversations right when we made that decision to uh continue supporting folks texting in about harm they’ve caused. We had to train our agents up on that, because that is not an easy thing to do. It is not easy to
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: to hold those conversations because they’re they’re fraught. They’re hard, and we we want to make sure our agents are holding that line in an accountable way. And so yeah, a bunch of like
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: more specialty kind of skill building there that folks might not get on a suicide online, for example. And so, with all of that training, they then get on the hotline and
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: start like taking observation shifts with a buddy. And then there’s a supervisor on at all times to support and help,
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: and from there it really is just like an ongoing learning process. There are specific types of chats that are sometimes harder than others, and so we’ll have modules just for those types of chats deep dives into specific,
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: you know, experiences or topics like addiction or blackmail and stuff like that, And it really is just an ongoing or anything. And we’re also still learning and building out
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: what our infrastructure of things like. As things come up, we’re like. Oh, we really need to learn how to respond to that more effectively. So what experts can we reach out to? How do we build a little bit of curriculum around this? How do we prepare our agents to be able to take some of these chats.
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Shlomo Sher: That’s an impressive That’s that’s really a lot. Yeah, um. So uh. So to continue on on. And these questions Uh: yeah, I mean, uh, are you guys looking for uh more people to be coming about?
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: Yeah, um. We don’t have an open call for volunteers right now, but we definitely have had a lot of folks reach out with interest. So if you, if the work we do sounds like resonant to you or someone,
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: you know, or it just feels like something you’d be interested in doing definitely. Contact us through our contact form on our website games, hotline Org, we’ll send you a follow up with some different volunteer info and go from there.
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Shlomo Sher: Cool. Okay, Now I gotta jump on back on something that you said earlier you mentioned blackmail
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Shlomo Sher: blackmail. So wow! What kind of blackmail are we talking about as this with regards to employees or players or both? Blackmail is not the kind of thing I expected to hear about in a games harassment online.
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: Yeah, it’s been Really, it’s been really interesting, especially recently. We’ve had a lot of calls about blackmail.
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Shlomo Sher: I use calls, even in ruins. But anyways, we’ve gotten Yeah, we’re based.
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: They’ve come in for a long time. It’s not like any super new phenomenon. There has been a recent kind of surge in these, just like conversations recently. Like all harassment, it looks a whole bunch of different ways. It is folks in the industry. It’s full to play games. It’s a lot of cat fishing. It’s a lot of bullying from friends um or X’s.
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: It’s: uh yeah, it’s. It’s a whole bunch of things. Most often we’ve seen it’s about intimate pictures that yeah, either you got catfish about or that, like a friend stole from you, or is just, or that you sent a friend in earnest and in a good moment.
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: But now they’re using it against you because they’re mad at you or something. Um threatening to send it to your family, your employers, your followers online. Um! It’s again. It’s not a new form of harassment, you know it used to be called like revenge. Porn was like a pretty common thing. I think the shift now is that, or at least that we’re seeing. It’s it’s not
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: it. It still definitely happens where people will post like videos or pictures of you without your consent. Ah! Online or on websites, but a lot of the stuff we’re seeing now. Kind of circumvents. A lot of the rules that have now come up like now like less allowed on websites to post, you know, intimate images without folks consent. Now they’re just like dming it
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: to your family or boss, and that sucks and is scary in a different way. So yeah, I don’t know that’s that’s a lot of what we’ve been seeing lately, and it’s interesting because it’s such a It is something that Isn’t talked about very much, because it’s so quiet and
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: full of shame. Right? The whole point is that you should feel really embarrassed and ashamed, and not want anyone to know. That’s how the blackmailer can control you and get you to do what they want.
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Andy Ashcraft (He/him): Yeah, Do you ever do you ever Um uh
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Andy Ashcraft (He/him): link callers up with like legal help.
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: Hmm. Yeah, like legal and law enforcement stuff around online harassment is really tricky because the laws are very everywhere. We definitely are not a legal helpline. Um and Don’t have lawyers to offer advice. So if folks are really wanting to pursue kind of like a legal or law enforcement action. We, you know, walk them through resources, or to suggest that they find a
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: um lawyer to kind of help them out, but in reality just the laws around that are really
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: I just yeah, it’s really scattered it. Hasn’t really caught up with the online stuff. Similarly, like some larger cities might have like a cyber crimes unit in their police department, but a lot of smaller places might not, and some of those officers might not even understand what you’re talking about. They don’t know what Snapchat is.
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: Um! And so it can be. We’re really wary about like just telling folks to report and contact the police, even if it is technically illegal, like
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: experience. Often isn’t super helpful, right? It can lead to its own traumas, too.
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: Yeah, yeah.
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Shlomo Sher: So. Ah, let me and Jason. I’m going to ask you just two more. Two more questions. Okay? And Ah, okay. So um first Ah, you mentioned Ah, along with this right? Ah, how sometimes you might usher people to their next destination! Right? So one of these might be potential legal resources. What sort of other destinations do you sometimes offer to people? They say, you know you guys were really helpful? Ah, you know. Where else can can I go for for help.
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: That’s a huge question. It really depends because we talk to so many people about so many different things. Sometimes, if someone is really struggling with
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: harassment while they’re playing a game we might link them to some like supportive gaming communities that we’ve heard of. Some of them are, like,
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: you know, centered around a specific identity like there’s a minecraft server for autistic folks, so that they’re not getting bullied online as much or like.
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: There’s a queer woman of esports. It has a whole community of E sports players who are queer of all gender identities, but particularly supportive of women.
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: Yeah, there’s there’s just like, Yeah, We might link them to a supportive gaming space. If there are mental health concerns, we might rewrite them to mental health resources. If sometimes people just want more information, especially about online harassment, of what steps they can take, how they can feel safer.
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: Sometimes they feel like harassment, feels really violating and like a lot of their stuff was just exposed. And so there are steps you can take to kind of lock down your security. We can send some like basic guidance and information about that.
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: Um. And yeah, I don’t know. We’re also just like doing this work and talking about it all the time. So we’re connected with like a lot of other works and stuff like that. So we have this like pile of information. It’s not always relevant um. It’s not always what someone wants. But if folks have questions, and what more information I want someone else to talk to, or somewhere else to go and continue talking about these things, we can try to pull on that, or we try to think of a solution with them together.
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Shlomo Sher: Yeah, that’s great.
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Shlomo Sher: All right. Final question. Um, What do you want to leave our listeners with. What do you want them to? Essentially, Yeah. What do you want to live our listeners with? And J. Let’s try to keep it to like, You know, under a minute or two,
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Shlomo Sher: that yeah, I think, going back to the idea that it’s no Us. Versus them.
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: All we have is each other.
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: It’s just us. It’s about the way that we’re treating each other,
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: And of course there are different scales of harm and harassment and toxicity. Ah, but there is a lot that we can practice, even in just our own relationships when it comes to navigating misunderstandings. Um! Creating like conflict that is generative rather than destructive. Using that as an opportunity to build connection rather than push each other away.
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Jae [they] Games Hotline: We really need to practice those skills in our community outside of moments of crisis, so that we were ready to like, embrace and and push for this change when it needs to happen.
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Shlomo Sher: Beautifully said, all right. Well,
