Bomb the Videogame Industry!

Note up-front: I’m genuinely referencing a band that Jeff Rosenstock was in. This is not a call to violence. Everyone just fuckin be cool.

After news broke this week that Sony Interactive Entertainment is being sued by a former IT employee for gender discrimination, and that she is pursuing a class-action lawsuit against the company, it might finally be time to haul a giant concrete sarcophagus over the entire industry, seal it off, blow it up, and then post signs around the perimeter that say shit like “This place is not a place of honor. No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here. Nothing valued is here. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us.”

It’s clear after watching the Activision-Blizzard board of directors – two of which, including Bobby Kotick, are referenced in Jeffery Epstein’s little black book, btw – basically shrug off reporting by the Wall Street Journal that firmly centers Kotick as the source of the company’s toxic workplace culture, that firmly report him leaving a voicemail on an assistant’s phone threatening to kill her, no gradual reform is possible. It’s clear that after following this script or the one where execs work their employees to death with Riot Games, with Epic Games, with Ubisoft, with Telltale, with Quantic Dream, with CD Projekt Red, with Rockstar, with multiple indie developers, at work, at conventions, at fucking home – that you can’t just fix this by unionizing and hoping everyone who participated in shit like Cosby suites exited the industry.

What are we as critics supposed to do here? Simply keep on reviewing the games themselves, business as usual? Keep on consuming, but with a little warning label: “The company that made this game made its designers work 19 hour days for six months just to make deadline?” Are we supposed to keep working under harmful reviewing conditions ourselves just to make sure we write an embargo-term-perfect, “spoiler-free” essay about why a game is good, middling or bad so that our invariably alt-right readership who thinks we’re all bought off anyway can send a new version of their form death threats to our emails?

Last week PC Gamer posted an article about Riot Games’s sudden success relative to Activision-Blizzard’s series of worsening events, and people had to literally remind the outlet on Twitter that they themselves covered Riot’s harassment lawsuits recently. Either our institutional memory is horrifyingly small, or the worse truth is that we are in fact a part of the industry’s PR “cloud.” Either way, it’s been fucking time for our come-to-Jesus moment. We need to figure out what we’re doing as a media industry to combat this bullshit, or maybe we should just drop the pretense toward actual journalism and criticism and simply embrace public relations as our genuine careers. That seems like a cop-out to me, though.

I keep hearing that we’re all here, doing this, because at the end of the day, we all love video games. Something about them captivated us on a fundamental level that we couldn’t shake, even after years or decades of playing them. And maybe that’s true for some folks. The thing is, though, we’ve all witnessed people who were incredible writers and critics and journalists stop writing about games entirely after a certain point. Games may have drawn them in but something else made them leave. Was it just burnout, or was it no longer being able to stomach being so close to an industry that explicitly condones monstrous behavior? I mean we’re at the point where even staunchly pro-capitalist rags like Bloomberg Businessweek and the Wall Street Fucking Journal are looking at us like “yo what’s wrong with you?”

And, fuck, I mean? It’s a great question! These issues aren’t new; someone was reminiscing to me just the other day about how a former GameDeveloper.com editor would do a little nanojab at Bobby Kotick by slightly rotating his image to the right every time he used his headshot in a story, like seven or eight years ago. Meanwhile, Kotick was pulling $130m bonuses and authorizing the firings of hundreds of people a year en masse, so ooh, gottem, I guess? The problem as I see it, from my limited view, is that we have a critical apparatus that by and large stays silent, or, if we mention systemic industry abuse at all, it is as an aside in an otherwise glowing review of one of their new titles, the 46th sequel in some drab-gray military shooter set in space or some shit. That simply can’t fly anymore.

I don’t want to be cynical. I want to be able to say with confidence that I believe in the games press to stand up to this bullshit industry. And the fucked up part is, I know that at least some folks in this industry are capable of it and want to push back with force! I know that Uppercut Crit, for example, led by Ty Galiz-Rowe, is fixing to take Activision-Blizzard down by itself if nobody else gets the fuck on it. I know that a website literally called “The Gamer” is fucking sick of it, and that their editor, Stacey Henley, is particularly done. I know that there are reporters and editors at Polygon and Kotaku, like Nicole Carpenter and Luke Plunkett and Chris Plante and Patricia Hernandez, who are also tired of fucking around with these companies and are using a combo of reportage and commentary to punch up. I know that outlets like Waypoint never let these companies have a shred of a benefit of the doubt that their shit was together in the first place. But a couple big outlets and a cadre of small ones isn’t the sum-total of this media industry. And like the employees struggling to organize for a better Activision-Blizzard and a better Ubisoft, having a unified voice in opposition to all this radioactively toxic bullshit isn’t going to fix everything permanently, but it is a necessary step in a better direction. We just need to actually use that voice.