Q: In this task, you are given a text of many news articles seperated by special token "|||||". Your task is to summarize them.
Executives in the $25 billion-a-year industry are taking note. One game designer’s online call for civility prompted a meeting with Microsoft executives about how to better police Xbox Live. In February, shortly after the Cross Assault tournament, LevelUp, an Internet broadcaster of gaming events, barred two commentators who made light of sexual harassment on camera and issued a formal apology, including statements from the commentators. 
  
 Even so, Tom Cannon, co-founder of the largest fighting game tournament, EVO, pulled his company’s sponsorship of the weekly LevelUp series, saying that “we cannot continue to let ignorant, hateful speech slide.” 
  
 “The nasty undercurrent in the scene isn’t a joke or a meme,” he said. “It’s something we need to fix.” 
  
 Mr. Bakhtanians, whose actions during the Cross Assault tournament were captured on video, later issued a statement in which he apologized if he had offended anyone. He also blamed “my own inability in the heat of the moment to defend myself and the community I have loved for over 15 years.” 
  
 But the issues raised by the Cross Assault episode gained more attention with Anita Sarkeesian’s campaign in May to raise $6,000 on Kickstarter to document how women are portrayed in video games. Her YouTube and Facebook pages were instantly flooded with hate-filled comments. People tried to hack her online accounts. She received violent personal threats. 
  
 Ms. Sarkeesian responded by documenting the harassment, posting online the doctored, pornographic images of herself that her detractors had created. Supporters of her efforts, aghast, donated more than $150,000, further angering her critics. A man from Ontario created an Internet game where players could “punch” her, layering bruises and cuts on her image until the screen turns red. 
  
 “The gaming industry is actually in the process of changing,” Ms. Sarkeesian said. “That’s a really positive thing, but I think there is a small group of male gamers who feel like gaming belongs to them, and are really terrified of that change happening.” 
  
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 When Sam Killermann, a gamer in Austin , Tex., saw the reaction to Ms. Sarkeesian’s project, something “broke through,” he said. A few weeks ago, he began a campaign for “Gamers Against Bigotry,” asking people to sign a pledge supporting more positive behavior. The site received 1,500 pledges before it was hacked, erasing its list of names. 
  
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 Like Ms. Sarkeesian, many women gamers are documenting their experiences on blogs like “Fat, Ugly or Slutty” (whose name comes from the typical insults women receive while playing against others online). It cheekily catalogs the slurs, threats and come-ons women receive while playing games like Resident Evil or Gears of War 3. 
  
 The blog publishes screenshots and voice recordings that serve as a kind of universal citation in each new controversy, called upon to settle debates or explode myths. For instance, many of the site’s recordings feature deep voices captured from the chat features of online games, debunking the widely held belief that bad behavior begins and ends with 13-year-old boys. 
  
 Jessica Hammer, a longtime player of video games and a researcher at Columbia University , said the percentage of women playing such games online ranges from 12 percent to close to half, depending on the game type. Industry statistics from the Entertainment Software Association say 47 percent of game players are women, but that number is frequently viewed as so all-encompassing as to be meaningless, bundling Solitaire alongside Diablo III. 
  
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 Women report greater levels of harassment in more competitive games involving strangers. Some abandon anonymous play for safer communities or “clans” where good behavior is the norm. 
  
 In other game communities, however, sexual threats, taunts and come-ons are common, as is criticism that women’s presence is “distracting” or that they are simply trying to seek attention. Some have been offered money or virtual “gold” for online sex. Some have been stalked online and in person. 
  
 Stephen Toulouse , who was the head of enforcement for Xbox Live from 2007 until February, policed the most egregious behavior on the network, owned by Microsoft. And women were the most frequent target of harassment, he said. In that role, Mr. Toulouse experienced the wrath of angry gamers firsthand, who figured out where he lived, then called the police with false reports about trouble at his house (more than once, SWAT teams were sent). 
  
 If players were reported for bad behavior, they could be disciplined by being muted on voice chat or barred temporarily. At least once a day, Mr. Toulouse said, the company blocked a specific console’s serial number from ever accessing the network again. 
  
 But policing the two or three million players who are active on Xbox Live at any given time is hard. Just as on the broader Internet, there are people who delight in piquing anger or frustration in others, or “trolling.” For trolls, offensive language — sexist, racist, homophobic comments — are interchangeable weapons that vary with the target. 
  
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 “They treat the Internet like a vast game,” where offending others scores points, Mr. Toulouse said. But the standard advice to ignore the taunts (“don’t feed the trolls”) is now, in the wake of Ms. Sarkeesian’s treatment, being accompanied by discussions about “how to kill a troll.” And many people are calling for the gaming industry to do more. 
  
 James Portnow, a game designer who has worked on titles including Call of Duty and Farmville, wrote an episode about harassment for his animated Web series “Extra Credits.” In it, the narrator says: “Right now, it’s like we gave the school bully access to the intercom system and told him that everyone would hear whatever he had to say. It’s time we take away that megaphone.” 
  
 At the end of the video, viewers were encouraged to e-mail Microsoft’s Xbox Live’s team, asking for changes to communication tools and improvements to reporting systems. 
  
 After hearing from gamers, Microsoft called Mr. Portnow and invited him to headquarters. He met with a team of executives, including a vice president, for four hours, and they discussed how Microsoft was developing better algorithms for things like automatically muting repeat offenders. Microsoft confirmed it was working toward improvements to its community tools. 
  
 “For the longest time, people have seen games as a children’s pastime, and we as an industry have stood behind this idea,” said Mr. Portnow, who will be speaking on a gaming convention panel later this month called “Ending Harassment in Gaming.” 
  
 “But that’s not true any longer,” he added. “We are a real mass medium, and we have a real effect on the culture. We have to take a step beyond this idea that nothing we could possibly do could be negative, or hurt people.” ||||| Hey everyone! It’s been a while! Have some freshly-baked updates: 
  
 Comments 
  
 Yesterday, Disqus migrated us to the new version of their comment platform. This means that we’ve lost the colorful badges we had on the old version, and perhaps more importantly, we lost the ability to muffle trolls without actually deleting their posts. (More on our original badge/greying-out system described here.) 
  
 We held out as long as we could, but Disqus decided to migrate everyone to the new platform and discontinue the old one. 
  
 We’re still looking at what our other options are, but for the time being, please be aware that previously-greyed-out trollish posts will now appear normal. 
  
 -jon 
  
 Posts 
  
 Some pieces of life needed to get taken care of for the past little while, plus I started another side-project a while ago, so I took a sort of unannounced hiatus from posting FUoS. New posts will be back soon! 
  
 But just to explicitly Manage Your Expectations going forward, take note that the post schedule will be a little sparser. 
  
 more » |||||
A:
At first, competitive fighting gamer Miranda Pakozdi tried to laugh off her coach's comments about her bra size or body, his tendency to train the team webcam on her legs and chest, and even the time he sniffed her as a punishment. But when she heard him defend his behavior, arguing that "the sexual harassment is part of our culture," she quit. It's one of a few recent incidents that have gotten the video game community talking about the abuse it often showers on women, the New York Times reports. In another incident, feminist moviemaker Anita Sarkeesian posted a Kickstarter campaign for a video documenting sexist tropes in games, only to be showered with negative comments and personal threats—one man even made a Flash game in which players punched Sarkeesian in the face. But there are positive signs as well. Sarkeesian's video wound up trouncing its goal, and many women are now speaking up about their experiences with blogs like this one. Microsoft recently promised to revamp its X-Box Live system to better police harassing comments.