The Player: SXSW apologizes for axing online harassment talks, adds full day of programming

“Earlier this week we made a mistake,” South by Southwest acknowledged in a public statement Friday. The festival of film, music and interactive media held in Austin, Texas, has officially responded to its decision to cut panels related to diversity in the gaming community.

In an effort to make amends, SXSW has added a full day of programming dedicated to the subject of online harassment. The Online Harassment Summit is now slated for March 12, 2016, and it will be live-streamed. SXSW’s gaming events, however, are set for March 17-19.

“By canceling two sessions we sent an unintended message that SXSW not only tolerates online harassment but condones it, and for that we are truly sorry,” said Hugh Forrest, director of SXSW Interactive, in a statement.

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“It is clear that online harassment is a problem that requires more than two panel discussions to address,” the statement reads.

Yet SXSW is not in the clear yet.

The organization is now being questioned for including some speakers who are believed to be sympathetic to an online cause known as “gamergate,” a term that was popularized in the summer of 2014 and has since been associated with vicious social media attacks directed at women.

An email from SXSW’s media representative stated that the organization will not be conducting interviews on the subject.

SXSW faced severe criticism from those in and around the gaming community after it pulled the plug on two discussions. One was described as Level Up: Overcoming Harassment in Games and the other was titled SavePoint: A Discussion on the Gaming Community.

Organizers canceled both, citing threats of violence. Yet canceling the panels opened organizers to additional criticisms, this time from the sort of progressive thinkers SXSW hopes to attract.

“The resulting feedback from the individuals involved and the community-at-large resonated loud and clear,” continues Forrest’s statement. “While we made the decision in the interest of safety for all of our attendees, canceling sessions was not an appropriate response. We have been working with the authorities and security experts to determine the best way to proceed.”

SXSW’s statement on the Online Harassment Summit listed all three panelists from the Level Up discussion as participating, and select participants from the SavePoint talk.

The latter had come under fire for featuring participants who have been known to be sympathetic to gamergate. Those who subscribe to the gamergate cause argue the movement is about unfair representation of gamers in the media.

“Gamers for so long have been waiting for their chance to speak up about the poor representation they’ve received in the media, and SavePoint is that opportunity,” reads an update on the website for the Open Gaming Society, which is organizing the SavePoint talk.

Game designer Caroline Sinders, a core organizer of the Level Up panel, said she was unsure if she and her panelists would be attending SXSW. She said she was taken by surprise that SavePoint was part of the harassment summit.

“We are not saying yes or not at this point,” Sinders wrote in an email to the Los Angeles Times. “We were unaware that SavePoint was joining the anti-harassment summit. I welcome their re-invitation, but their panel was on journalism and ethics, so it would seem way better suited to the gaming or general interactive track. We all still have security concerns, and that seems to be pressing to us, as well.”
Describing gamergate to those outside the gaming community is a difficult task, but framing gamergate as a debate is too kind. From the moment the term emerged as a hashtag in mid-August of 2014, it was ugly, messy and convoluted. Female game designers and critics who spoke out about the medium’s future experienced harassment, including threats of rape and death, and saw details about their personal lives published online (a practice referred to as “doxxing”).

Last fall cultural critic Anita Sarkeesian, who created a video series called “Tropes vs. Women in Video Games,” canceled a Utah State University appearance after school officials received an email that promised, according to a transcript obtained by the Deseret News, “the deadliest school shooting in American history.”

Randi Harper, one of the speakers on the Level Up panel and a founder of the Online Abuse Prevention Initiative, questioned SXSW’s understanding of online harassment and said her appearance at the festival was also up in the air.

“We worked closely with SXSW over the past few days, but we were very surprised to find SXSW making gamergate a part of the discussion about online harassment,” Harper said. “While we fully support gamergate being a part of SXSW Gaming, adding them to the summit creates a safety concern for many of the people who are currently scheduled to be participating.”

Thus far, other participants at the summit include Monika Bickert, head of policy management at Facebook, Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive and national director of the Anti-Defamation League, former Texas state senator Wendy Davis and and Giant Spacekat game developer Brianna Wu, who had earlier expressed hesitation at participating in SXSW 2016. The full list of confirmed speakers is here.

Wu said she was “as surprised as anyone” that SavePoint was part of the summit.

“I think there’s a real opportunity to move the ball forward here,” she said via email. “This is either going to be an extremely productive discussion or another trainwreck.”

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