Think Before You Tweet, H1Z1 Dev Warns

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Speaking today at the 2015 Game Developers Conference, a top community manager at H1Z1 and EverQuest developer Daybreak Game Company (formerly Sony Online Entertainment) spoke about the potential danger of Twitter. Jones, who works as senior community manager at the studio, said it is essential that developers realize what they tweet is very much public.
As such, it is Jones' job, or at least part of his job, to work with developers at Daybreak to help them understand that their tweets can be potentially problematic for the company.
"Putting your teams on Twitter with no training--you might as well just hand them a loaded gun and send them out into the world," Jones said during a packed panel called "Balancing Community Management With Transparent Development."
"The ability we have on the Internet to say whatever we want whenever we want to say it is extremely dangerous," he added.
Jones doesn't censor what his team members say on Twitter; after all, he couldn't. But he stressed that developers should think twice (or three times or more) before they tweet.
"It's not like you try to restrict what they're saying, it's that you try to slow them down to think about what they're saying before they say it," Jones said.
He added that one developer at Daybreak became particularly vocal in the discussion surrounding online harassment in the gaming industry. Jones said he worked directly with this person to discuss how they should go about discussing the topic on Twitter.
Tweets have gotten developers in trouble before. In 2014, Evolve developer Turtle Rock Studios fired community manager Josh Olin after his controversial tweets about embattled former NBA team owner Donald Sterling. Before that, Adam Orth resigned from Microsoft following the outcry triggered by his comments that customers should learn to deal with a console that requires a permanent connection to the Internet.
Jones also warned developers during his GDC talk today that writing something to the effect of, "Tweets are my own and do not represent the opinion of my employer" in your bio doesn't actually mean much. If you work for a game developer, or any company for that matter, you are in effect a representative, whether you're talking about games or something completely unrelated, he said.
In February, Sony Online Entertainment broke off from Sony by selling itself to an investment firm, rebranding itself Daybreak Game Company and paving the way to develop Xbox games.
GameSpot will be reporting live from GDC in San Francisco all week long.


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