Jessica Price Speaks Up Again on her Recent Firing

The Jessica Price controversy continues to barrel along for the time being, although largely the discussion has been continued by the fans and fighters that surround it: Arenanet has largely remained silent (of course), while Jessica Price herself has only talked about it on and off, and has mostly been keeping her Twitter feed full of unrelated things.

That’s all changed, however, and Jessica has once again gone onto her favorite social media network to lay down a few more lines before heading on an extended vacation – which she probably needs, considering everything that’s been going on.

The tweet chain is pretty long, but there are really only two parts that warrant highlighting:

[Arenanet] framed an interaction on my personal social media in which I told a few individuals who (I thought) were being assholes that I wasn't on the clock and wasn't going to feign affection for people who are being assholes as 'attacks on the community.'

They knew—or at least had a responsibility to know, in 2018—what would happen to a female game dev who was fired in response to an exchange about sexism. It would have been bad enough if they had just fired me and announced I was fired. But they *escalated.* They pointed to Peter and me as Enemies Of The Community. That wasn't just firing us and, oh well, if they get harassed, them's the breaks. That was active solicitation of harassment. And their silence in condemning the harassment is profoundly telling.

I’m not sure that’s what was going on, considering Jessica continues to be the only person who made that specific interaction about gender. So you can take that however you’d like, but the next bit has a bit more meat to it.

Oh, one more thing. Mike O'Brien's most recent statement reduces my contribution to GW2 to one scene from one episode. Given how often women's work is erased or minimized, that's especially egregious. So, for the record: Everything in GW2 is made by a team. There's no content that's made by one person. But in terms of *influence*: the entire season is mine. I led the season story breaking meetings, I led the episode outlining meetings, and every line of dialogue went through me. Everything you've seen of the story so far this season is my work, and you're going to be seeing my work in it for a long time.

A bunch of the content you'll be seeing is also work led by women: female team and game design leads, female writing leads, female cinematics leads. It's the best content GW2 has produced. Women in this industry lead, and aren't going anywhere.

Of course, no one here was in the room where it happened, so to speak, so it’s impossible to know for sure if she really was as big a deal as she claims, and I doubt anyone will want to get their hands dirty by either confirming or denying. All the same, it would be pretty scummy of anyone to try to belittle someone's contributions to the team...

Anyway. My opinion on the matter still stands, so this is just an update for the interested.