Flutterby™! : Game designer harassment

Next unread comment / Catchup all unread comments User Account Info | Logout | XML/Pilot/etc versions | Long version (with comments) | Weblog archives | Site Map | | Browse Topics

Game designer harassment

2013-08-18 14:58:34.762524+00 by Dan Lyke 2 comments

Everyone's been passing around the Polygon article about harassment of game developers and designers, but one thing that I haven't seen much about is the tie-in to SWATting and prosecutorial discretion:

"Even the swatting thing, only now that Justin Bieber gets swatted, do prosecutors go, 'Oh, we should probably do something about this'," he said. "I couldn't get the Seattle police interested to save their lives, in prosecuting the kids who were doing this. I'm like, 'Come on, guys, they're sending your SWAT team out. What if you shot somebody. Don't you have an interest in going after these kids?' And they're like, 'No, because they are kids and at the end of the day it will be a juvenile sentence in juvenile court and that doesn't give prosecutors headlines.'"

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Games Law Enforcement Seattle ]

comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):

#Comment Re: made: 2013-08-18 17:49:25.849956+00 by: TheSHAD0W

Prior to the SWATting idea, I had one troller repeatedly prank-call and threaten some poor woman while spoofing my phone number. That wasn't as bad as having armed police ready to break down my door, but was still annoying and took a bit of effort to unwind. (It didn't help that I was a long-distance call from the city where the problem took place, and the detective couldn't figure out he had to call 1 plus the area code to reach me...)

#Comment Re: made: 2013-08-19 18:51:17.116284+00 by: Dan Lyke

I'll see your detective being unable to figure out how to dial "1+", and raise you the NSA meaning to catch the "20+" country code for Egypt and instead hoovering up all of the "202" area code numbers, ie: capturing all calls made in Washington D.C..