Factual reporting has shone a spotlight on a number of industry workplace issues, but there are shadows still to be illuminated. Richie Shoemaker spoke to the authors of Who Hunts the Whale to see if a healthy dose of fiction might better reflect the workaday reality of making games
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t feels like – and therefore is probably the case – that more unpleasant stories about the games industry have come to light over the last couple of years than
that at any point in its history. There’s no need to go over the charge sheet here, but it’s worth mentioning that even though we haven’t seen too many reports recently of enforced unpaid overtime or blatant sexism in the workplace, it doesn’t mean these things aren’t going on. Sure, most would recognise that the situation is getting better (and it coming to light that things were much worse is part of that process, of course), but relative calm does not mean a storm isn’t about to blow in from somewhere. We all know it’s just a question of when, not if. While we wait for the inevitable toxicity headlines
to supplant the more recent spate of redundancy ones, how about a fictitious account of recent events in the
form of Who Hunts The Whale? Co-authored by Laura Kate Dale and Jane Aerith Magnet, the novel recounts the diary entities of Paige Avery, a young university graduate who secures something of a dream job as a PA at a triple-A games publisher in New York. Her job takes her from the boardroom where the decisions are made, to the darkest corners of the building where the effects are most keenly felt. It is, as you might imagine, a damning and darkly funny indictment of executive decision making, but also reflective of the kinds of intense rank-and-file friendships and personal rivalries that are fostered through adversity. While the company at the heart of the book,
Supremacy Software, is made-up, the way it goes about its business championing its popular microtransaction- driven FPS franchise is very much based in reality.
“Our editor came back to us and said, ‘You’ve made this company cartoonishly evil, nobody’s going to believe this.’ So we just sent her several articles on things that turned out to be much worse than the things we’d written.”
Jane Aerith Magnet, co-author Who Hunts the Whale April/May 2023 MCV/DEVELOP | 45
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