Yeah, someone I know was at that, he said he felt like he was gonna vomit when he had to listen to a lot of the speakers. It’s the epitome of cringe. But that’s what happens when someone has never been challenged on their previous bullshit, they just continue creating vocal diarrhoea and act like it’s everyone elses…

Xbox tentacle monster, next GDC.

That if they were trying to throw a party to impress developers, they should have had a room full of ancient video game consoles or something. It’s just another example of Microsoft misidentifying the desires of their audience.

Hey, thanks, now I don’t even have to look at the comment section on Kotaku. You've summarized it succinctly!

Would it be extreme of me to demand that any marketing/communications type degrees have at least a couple of credit hours in women’s studies and diversity training as requirements?

I’m disappointed but not surprised. Seems like every year some company pulls shit like this at a GDC party, they get called on it, there’s some bad press and yet apparently the party planners still haven’t learned it’s not cool to do this, for whatever reason. Although I have to say it’s extra embarrassing for…

I have a fair few friends and acquaintances (including one mentioned in this article) who were at GDC this year and were at this event - all of them are pissed off and upset at this, and are completely disgusted at Microsoft. A few left almost straight away after walking into the event, apparently, but several said…

You know, sometimes I think I wouldn't mind this this much if there were also semi naked attractive men around them, like, eye candy for everyone. But no, this is clearly just to mark this as a boys club.

But of course when I show up to an actual workplace in a sexy schoolgirl outfit sensually eating a banana, it’s consider “unprofessional” and “inappropriate” and “stop dry humping the water cooler.”

How many are they hiring? One, or two? One... or two?

“If you’re good, you’re good for a girl and if you ever make one tiny mistake, it’s because you’re a girl and not because you’re human.”

Yiiiiikes....

Honestly, this is ALSO an insult to many male game developers - in that it reinforces the stereo-type that game developers are socially-cluless losers who would: 1) think this was appropriate for a professional event, and/or 2) be unable to speak with a woman who was NOT paid to entertain them. Many, many game…

Unrelated to this incident but relevant: CanSecWest (an information security conference) was held this week in Vancouver. One of the organizers opened the conference by talking about “Slut Checks”, a term he invented to refer to checking for “promiscuous” (non-secure) wi-fi access points. Then he handed out little…

Sadly, this is all too typical for large corporate events. They are very professional until the afterparty.

Jez had an article a few weeks back on the same thing happening at a biotech conference.

Wow. What's next, MS? Going full Hentai?

It’s about ethics in afterparties, man!

Wow. Same shit, different industry. I was at an ophthalmology conference a few years ago and at one pharma event, someone had hired sexy cheerleaders to...socialize? with the surgeons. Funny story! It was a conference specifically targeting women in ophthalmology.