“I got into talking about video games because I love games as art, but more and more of my job became having to give weekly updates about the terrible harms being done to people just trying to make art.”
Laura Kate Dale, co-author Who Hunts the Whale “It’s a company that tries to churn out a new game
every year, with tons of low effort DLC coming out all the time,” says Magnet, before describing Supremacy’s horrorshow hiring practises: “They will basically get anyone who isn’t the type of person to make too much fuss. They don’t pay their interns. They don’t really have a QA team. Eventually [there is] massive, massive crunch to almost parody-like levels.” “Without giving too much away,” adds Dale, “the
book definitely does skew towards the human cost of those kinds of practices and very specifically toward the kinds of stories that have become depressingly commonplace in the videogame industry over the last couple of years. Definitely as the book progresses, it does take a more serious look at the kind of abuses of power imbalance that come when you’ve got people desperately trying to stay employed underneath people who are making huge bonuses and have the power to decide whether you keep a job or not.”
JUST THE FACTS While the book’s authors may lack direct game development experience, as well as being gamers and writers, they’d followed and reported on the headlines exhaustively, predominantly through their podcast, Queer and Pleasant Strangers: “We had a fairly light hearted ongoing skit that we’d
done that was a parody of executive capitalist excess in the videogame industry,” which, says Dale, “had always been a bit of an outlet for a lot of bad stuff that happens in this industry that we need to not feel quite so grim about.” The problem was that by the summer of 2021, around the time reports were circulating about the ‘frat boy culture’ at Activision Blizzard, the volume of bad stuff was deafening. “I got into talking about video games because I love
games as art, but more and more of my job became having to give weekly updates about the terrible harms being done to people just trying to make art. I needed
46 | MCV/DEVELOP April/May 2023
an outlet to address the fact that all of these stories were just mounting and mounting and, worryingly, few people seemed to care about the harm being done.” Why write a piece of fiction, though, when the facts
were so presentable? “For me, it’s two-fold,” says Dale. “I think there are
wonderful people out there who are doing very good investigative work that I very much look up to and who have the connections to do some of that work better than I perhaps could. But part of it as well is that there is a certain kind of person who plays video games, who does not want to engage directly with the depressing reality of how the things they play are created. I think there is a market for using humour and satire to get someone emotionally engaged in the real issues that are happening.” There are also those who play video games that
don’t engage with any kind of press, or that avoid fan communities completely, adds Magnet: “They don’t get involved. They don’t hear it because that’s not their interest. I know a lot of women gamers in their forties and fifties who play modern FPSs, but that would not feel comfortable or are even necessarily that interested in being involved with gamers as a community – hopefully we’ll reach some of them.”
DECISIVE ACTION One of the great benefits of fiction, of course, is that it brings to light a simple but undeniable fact that often gets conveniently ignored in factual reporting, which is that decisions are made by people rather than some vague corporate collective. When you can put a name and reasoning to a decision, even if it’s entirely fabricated, you can discern a route to accountability – however unlikely any kind of reckoning might be. Rarely is there such luxury in your typical press statement, or from a nameless representative who is duty-bound to refer to themselves and the organisation in plural first person.
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