
Riot Games is violating California employment law - pavel_lishin
https://zedshaw.com/2016/06/10/riot-games-is-violating-california-employment-law/
======
yummyfajitas
In this article, Zed demonstrates one of the tremendous screwups with the
academic human trials system: actions that are perfectly acceptable normally
suddenly become a problem if done for science.

I.e., if I personally want to pay people $5 to play a video game, and then pay
them $10 if they win, there is absolutely nothing preventing me from doing
this. I can also gather statistics on the result. But if I were a scientist at
a university doing this, I'd suddenly need to get permission from an IRB.

This is a flaw with academia, not Riot Games.

The comparison to the Stanford Prison Experiment is nonsense. That experiment
literally _locked people in jail_ , an action that is generally illegal in
general. This experiment literally involves nothing more than a group of
people statistically accessing records they have legal permission to access
and then doing some math.

Note that I say this with no positive feelings whatsoever about Riot Game's
PC-police behavior. I don't generally favor "no-asshole rules", or any of the
other feelings-over-facts policies currently favored by the PC-left.

[edit: since folks reading this clearly think I'm criticizing Zed's entire
post, Zed has 8 arguments against Riot. I'm disputing (3) and (4) only.]

~~~
vonklaus
I like Zed Shaw, his writing and learncodethehardway. I am not sure I agree
with someof his conclusions here but I am not sure yours are correct.

One of the key issues for me, Shaw and many others based on comments, is lack
of explicit permission. Most academic studies get explicit permission but they
also _anonymize the data_. They also are objective researchers who do not take
negative action against their subjects based on the results of their
paper/findings.

For me, this hinges on how much was communicated to the employees and how it
was handled internally. I do not have information about that which is broad
and reliable so I won't speculate on the actual decision.

However, Zed is a hilarious and prolific writer and always has an agenda. If
his rhetoric was an overreach or not entirely sound, it doesnt discount that
the area between playing a competitive game with assumed privacy and
professiomal overlap as an employee at the company is pretty gray.

tl;dr

* Academia is flawed

* Riot games decision making process is flawed

* neither of these have a causal relationship

* Rails is a ghetto

~~~
yummyfajitas
So if you run some statistics and then _use the result_ , that's somehow
unethical?

Riot's decisionmaking process may be flawed - I have no evidence of this, but
my prior is that it's likely (same as Zed). If this is true, they are firing
good employees and costing themselves money.

But the fact that they didn't obey ridiculous university IRB requirements is
NOT really a good argument against them. And that's all I'm criticizing.

~~~
vonklaus
I took his article and the analogies to point out that these studies must get
approval before engaging subjects. He also states that the law requires
explicit permission unless it is on or using company property.

Idk the legal requirements, but I thin, to underscore my previous point (and
how I interpreted zsfa) that the issue is in how counterparties agree and the
obligations they owe to one another.

I also find myself agreeing that it would be difficult to charchterize snarky.
Although, I suspect that they say _snarky_ but mean using racial slurs and
other threatening language. Clearly, saying horrible things to people is not
positive but free speech is more important. I find in super reasonable that
someone with a tagged Riot employee un shouting racial epithets gets fired.
However, a private personal account without explicit consent should probably
enjoy the expectation of privacy.

super complicated issue, however, I believe many people would look at this
differently if it came out that every employee was told, signed paperwork, and
was aware that it would be company policy to monitor and enforce known
etiquette with known repetcussions

edit: also there have been studies that show people behave differently when
watched. It seems reasonable simply telling everyone about this policy would
bring about the desired results.

------
karmajunkie
California is an at-will employement state.[1] Riot can terminate those
employees for any reason not protected under federal or state law, such as
being a member of a protected class. Being a gigantic dick does not grant
protected status. The only liability Riot has here is for their unemployment,
unless they can show cause for termination, which is probably more of a gray
area.

[edit: forgot the link]

[1][http://business.ca.gov/StartaBusiness/AdministeringEmployees...](http://business.ca.gov/StartaBusiness/AdministeringEmployees/EqualEmploymentOpportunityLaws/AtWillEmployment.aspx)

------
markisus
If the IQ test anecdote about the horse is real I'd like to see a source. It's
extremely hard to believe that even a malicious scientist could convince
himself that a horse cannot be ridden into town.

> One question in the early test asks, “A man comes into town but his feet do
> not touch the ground. What is he riding?” The story goes that a young Native
> American boy responded, “A horse” to which the tester yelled, “Wrong! It’s a
> bicycle!”

~~~
Turing_Machine
Yes, indeed. The stench of bullshit is quite strong there, as is with the
claim that the tests were adopted with the _purpose_ of "resegregating the
schools".

The closest I've been able to find is a claim (without references of any kind)
in Gould's _The Mismeasure of Man_ , where the actual question involved a man
"walking without his feet touching the ground". Clearly "bicycle" is a better
answer for that question than "horse" (because your feet move in a quasi-
walking motion when you're riding a bike, but not when you're riding a horse).

The "yelling" part appears to have been invented out of whole cloth. Also, I'm
not sure where the notion that Native Americans were unfamiliar with wheeled
conveyances in the 1920s came from.

~~~
hyperpape
I would not comment on that particular anecdote, but the entire structure of
literacy tests in the South during segregation was that an ambiguous or
downright impossible test was written, and the testers applied it
inconsistently.
[http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2013/06/28/voting_right...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2013/06/28/voting_rights_and_the_supreme_court_the_impossible_literacy_test_louisiana.html)

Don't assume good faith.

~~~
Turing_Machine
This particular test was created in France, and modified for American use by a
Jewish professor at Stanford University in California.

It has no connection whatsoever with the "South".

~~~
hyperpape
I thought it was clear enough that I was making a general point about how
tests can be applied, and illustrating it with an extreme example from the
South.

In general, I think asking for clarification is better than being
condescending.

~~~
Turing_Machine
Got it. Of course, your mini-lecture about "not assuming good faith" wasn't
condescending at all.

I spent a fair amount of time researching this urban legend earlier today. I
wasn't "assuming" anything.

~~~
hyperpape
Fair that it was abrupt of me to put it that way.

But to make clear what I was saying, I really should have responded to the
parent, who says: "It's extremely hard to believe that even a malicious
scientist could convince himself that a horse cannot be ridden into town."

My point being that a malicious test-giver could certainly deny that as a
valid answer. I don't know that I believe that anecdote happened, but it is
assuming good faith to think that it couldn't happen because no one would ever
reject "horse" as an answer.

------
ineptech
> I've never played their game...

It shows :( I have a number of issues with this article.

First, the "I don't know what methodology they used but I bet it's bad" is not
something you can credibly say about Riot. They famously hired a big team of
academics and they've been studying the issue for several years now. They have
more data to analyze than any academic could dream of, they've had time to
iterate (institute a new policy or algorithm, punish players based on it, and
see if it reduces bad behavior by some metric) multiple times, and at this
point it's likely that they know more about what constitutes bad behavior in a
video game than any other organization on Earth.

Second, if Riot's analysis of player behavior constitutes an illegal trial on
human subjects (which sounds dubious to me), their EULA certainly inoculates
them for it. Riot has been very publicly doing this kind of analysis on
players and using it to punish them (up to and including deleting the stuff
they've purchased in game) and if that was actionable it seems like it
would've been tried by now. Maybe the EULA isn't good enough or would fail at
trial, but it's a little presumptuous to just casually assume that such a
novel claim would be a slam dunk.

Third, I'm no lawyer but it seems to me that CA 980 is irrelevant. It pertains
to employers demanding access to social media they wouldn't otherwise have
access to, not just social media in general. Under 980 it's illegal to demand
an employee's Facebook password, but AFAICT perfectly legal to fire them for
something they post on Facebook publicly. In this case, not only was the
speech in question made publicly, it was made in a way that Riot indisputably
has a legal right to access.

Finally, the author repeatedly refers to the behavior that got these people
fired as "being snarky," when a much more reasonable assumption is that the
behavior was significantly worse, e.g. racial slurs and death threats (both of
which are very common in LOL chat). The source article tells us that, once
Riot had identified the group of problem players, a committee examined the
cases individually and decided which ones to reprimand and which ones to fire.
Do you really think that "would we lose if this person sued us" wasn't one of
the criteria? Is it not reasonable to assume that each of the people who got
fired did or said something so bad that Riot felt legally justified in firing
them?

tl;dr: "I don't know by what methodology these people were measured or by
whom, or what they signed, or what they did to get fired, but I'm dead certain
they have a case" does not sound persuasive to me.

------
stephenr
> In addition to this, the employees are most likely expected to play the game
> or have to play it to do their jobs.

It is an expectation, and the vibe I got from how they described it (albeit as
a visiting contractor) it seemed like anyone who says "you know what chuck, I
don't think I want to play the game" would basically "not fit in".

Honestly it seemed like a kinda weird place to work, but maybe that was
culture too (I'm not American and was just there for a few weeks)

------
alwaysdoit
This is nonsense. The employee usernames are RiotSoAndSo or RiotNameHere, so
they are clearly representing the company with their behavior.

In fact one of the explicitly listed common bad behaviors is abusing their
position with the company:

> the use of authoritative language, sometimes using their authority as a Riot
> employee to intimidate or threaten others

There's no reason to think this shouldn't be a fireable offense, especially if
there's a pattern of this kind of behavior.

~~~
dogma1138
People that work for Riot do not usually use their riot accounts when just
casually playing.

To put into a perspective this isn't about someone using a "GM" or some
community manager account, it's about people using their own private account.

This is a bad precedent, it's not even about people trashing the company, or
even doing anything "wrong" it's about people participating in a behaviour
that the company doesn't like.

Let me put it into another frame of reference for you would you support an
employer that fired or did not hire someone because they liked, or even wrote
a political post on facebook?

Keep in mind that most of the political speech on facebook doesn't exactly
look like an Aaron Sorkin script draft.

We already had a CEO of a company having to step down for donating to a
political cause, and no matter how vile that cause might be, it's still a
horribly regressive thing, not that they've donated to an anti-gay cause but
that they had to step down over it.

Now CEO's and other fiduciary roles might be the "exception" rather than the
rule, but let's face it employers datamine the hell out of your "online
footprint" and it's a bad thing, I know people that weren't "hired" not
because they had a bad social presence but because they didn't had one and the
hiring manager thought that they were untrustworthy because of it.

What you say in public and in private should not have any bearing on your
employment unless you wave the corporate flag at the same time, what Riot is
doing is Philip K. Dick level of shady, and there are sadly way too many
employers especially in the tech business that do the same thing and even
worse.

We've already came to a point where your right to employment conflicts with
your more important rights of privacy and free speech and we should strive to
revert these changes not hail them as something good and somehow a victory for
liberalism and social justice.

~~~
karmajunkie
> Let me put it into another frame of reference for you would you support an
> employer that fired or did not hire someone because they liked, or even
> wrote a political post on facebook?

It doesn't matter whether I support this or not; its legal.

>We already had a CEO of a company having to step down for donating to a
political cause, and no matter how vile that cause might be, it's still a
horribly regressive thing, not that they've donated to an anti-gay cause but
that they had to step down over it.

I'm assuming you're talking about Brenden Eich. He stepped down as a result of
the PR optics of his politics, which made him untenable as the de facto head
of the Mozilla community. He was not fired. I do not agree that it is
repressive. If your views are so vile as to convince the majority of your
users/customers that they no longer want to do business with you, then maybe
the problem is your views.

> We've already came to a point where your right to employment conflicts with
> your more important rights of privacy and free speech and we should strive
> to revert these changes not hail them as something good and somehow a
> victory for liberalism and social justice.

One does not have a right to employment. You have a right to not be
discriminated against for status as a member of a protected class. These are
not the same thing.

------
jetcata
I know of other companies that have similar policies - e.g eBay - it's part of
the application process to provide your username and background checks are
done on it.

If you think you can be a jerk on the Internet and have it not potentially
affect employment then you're being naive. Most interviewers will do an
Internet search on your name and dig up as much as they can about your
behaviour on platforms and social networks.

~~~
alexandercrohde
If true, I'd argue this is evidence the problem is more widespread than
realized (rather than "normal." Just because something is common doesn't mean
we should accept it).

I think this issue is particularly daunting because free-information seems
good, but having been to ridiculous interviews before we are all aware how
biasing a small amount of irrelevant data can be.

------
smoyer
I'm not sure I see anything illegal in there (from the perspective of PA
employment law anyway). His biggest beef seems to be that they mined data
without their employee's consent, but most of the places I work explicitly
state that emails, chats, electronic and physical documentation (work
products) all belong to the organization.

On one hand, this feels a bit scummy - on the other hand, I'd rather work
somewhere that's not toxic. I think the biggest issue is that I doubt their
technique is good enough to a) find all the toxic people (one of the most
toxic people I ever met was outstanding at never putting it in writing) and b)
will exclude people that could have improved the company.

------
gravypod
When I get to the point in my life where I'm ready to start a company I'll aim
for the opposite of what Riot seems to be doing.

I don't feel as an employer I'll own my employees. Thus, I cannot control what
they do outside of my office.

If it's off the clock, I don't care. I'll be hiring by ability, not by other
traits.

------
benbenolson
I'm not sure if this is illegal, but it's certainly cause for privacy concern.
Did they have to willingly hand over their chat logs to be hired?

------
yahyahyahs
Not sure anyone would want to work for riot now.

------
tomnipotent
I respect Zed for his many contributions, but this is among the most
ridiculous diatribe I've read all year. We'll ignore the whole at-will and
protected class thing which is all that matters (legally).

> Their use of statistics to bucket employees into “reprimand” or “fire”
> buckets is incredibly dubious

Do you really think HR looked at some bin graphs and said "Ok lets fire these
a __holes! ".

Software helped surface specific data from a larger data set based on specific
rules. This was then reviewed by humans - remember them? - that decided some
examples of behavior were so horrible that they felt compelled to confront
specific individuals. I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt [1].

> ... using data based on their behavior without their knowledge

Anyone have a Riot employment contract handy? Even if it doesn't explicitly
mention data collection, I'm willing to wager the LoL terms of service has it
covered. Every employment contract I've at looked at in over 15 years in tech
has had some sort of clause around data collection/monitoring being an open
option. Does it give me the Orwellian chills? Sure. But it's not illegal or
unethical. Some industries like finance are legally required to in many
situations. Boo hoo.

> I’ll bet you $100 the second this study was discussed all the managers went
> and deleted their history.

Riot centrally logs chat deemed (subjectively) toxic. Middle managers at a
company this size do not just walk up to someone with production access and
ask them to delete data in a complex system, especially not en masse.

From the original re:Work article:

> Riot identified the 30 most toxic employees (all of whom were more junior
> Rioters, new to the working world) > While these logs did factor into the
> exits of a couple employees who had already had serious problems

Let's set some context. Smart folks at Riot had a hypothesis that ended up
identifying 30 out of some ~2,500 [2] employees (~1.2%) by legally analyzing
chat logs. Riot discovered, unsurprisingly, that all of the employees
identified happened to be new to the workforce and the company and used this
opportunity to meet with them individually to work out a plan to improve their
behavior.

Unfortunately a "couple" with past incidents were let go. The question is
whether or not these specific employees would have been terminated if not for
this hypothesis. Bigger question is what Riot will do so that the problem
doesn't escalate to this level again (new hire orientation sounds like a good
start).

Great job Riot for using human process and technology to try and make a
workplace better. Poor job re:Work for over-romancing the software involvement
in the process and turning an awesome example of work place improvement into a
bad PR puff piece on "people operations", and worse job Zed for turning this
into an emotional appeal of fear of an authority state. "But what if they use
your chat logs before you worked there?! Or recorded headset audio?" It holds
as much intellectual merit as the mob responses we see when Facebook or
Instagram make changes to how stories are sorted. Sorry pal, I've lived in
California too long waiting for "the big one" to buy into world-ending FUD.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity)
[2] [https://www.linkedin.com/company/riot-
games](https://www.linkedin.com/company/riot-games)

------
trump2016
Can't really judge the employees tbh. I'm pretty sure I'd be pretty antsy if I
was forced to play that crap game for a living.

~~~
anthony_james
Since the employees are working there voluntarily, it would be logical for
them to actually enjoy playing the game rather than being forced to.

So yes, we can judge the employees.

------
GFK_of_xmaspast
As the saying goes, I'm not sure I agree with that policework, Lou. A bunch of
things stood out but this one in particular:

>>> The probability that you’ll have bad things in your Riot Games past is
proportional to how much you play

and I'm not sure I buy that at all. "Not being a toxic asshole" is the easiest
thing in the world.

~~~
learc83
But how easy is it to avoid an automated sentiment analysis system flagging
you as being "passive aggressive"?

~~~
colorrose
You can just choose not to speak in the in-game chat, although you might get
reported for lack of communication.

------
hugh4life
"To understand how this happens you have to understand that the Stanford-Binet
IQ test was explicitly created to re-segregate the California school system
and prove that whites were better. "

This is nonsense... the IQ testing came out around the first world war. It was
first used to test disabled children and then used to test military recruits.

\----

Two people without the courage to actually respond voted me down... sorry, but
Zed Shaw is talking out of his arse... the idea that the "Stanford-Binet IQ
test was explicitly created to re-segregate the California school system and
prove that whites were better" is just incredibly stupid.

