The following article is based on Janet Ebsen's "Crisis and Opportunity" GDC talk. Shortly after I became Kongregate's community manager, Kongregate had one of the biggest community crises in our history. One of our games had a cascading series of problems involving last-minute changes to events, insufficiently described odds of winning a very rare item, and some support missteps. By the time players came to us, their community was in chaos. None of us had any real idea about how to handle the situation, and so we made a lot of mistakes. Quite a few of those mistakes made things worse instead of better. Nonetheless (this is key), not everything we did was a mistake. We figured out what worked and then kept doing more of that. It was expensive and took a lot of effort, but at the end of two weeks or so we had learned a lot; in fact, the things we learned at that time have formed the basis for how we have handled every game crisis since then. Moreover, many of the players

Gamergate has brought a lot of attention to the harassment of women in the game industry, so much so that various friends and family have started asking me about my experiences. I’ve been lucky enough to escape attention from that howling mob, in part because I’ve never spoken out much about women or gender in the games industry. 100% of my time in the game industry has been as a founder, and developing a platform rather than individual games. My experience has been generally quite welcoming but I felt perhaps too atypical to contribute much to the conversation. But all the questions made me think more deeply about my experience, particularly the low-level harassment I get that I’d taken as a given, normal for a co-founder of a game site. It occurred to me to check with my brother/co-founder Jim, but he said he almost never gets hassled. Most of the harassment I receive is through Kongregate’s messaging system, and looking at my last 25 public messages mixed in with compliments and requests for help