“It’s something that I’ve been thinking about a lot,” says
Dale. “There has been a wide range of layoffs across the videogame industry and across the tech sector in general, and no one is asking any of the executives at any of the companies ‘What are you going to do about the fact that your decisions at the top led to this many people losing their jobs?’” Whether it’s crunch due to management not allocating enough development resources, or layoffs because sales targets aren’t met, “None of that ever seems to stick to individuals, or doesn’t seem to impact the individuals who are actually making the big overarching decisions that lead to those impacts. It’s all written off as ‘overall industry trends’, or ‘the company’ has done this. There are very well paid human beings who are making these decisions, and they are largely shielded from the consequences when those decisions go poorly.”
SERIOUS FUN As serious a reflection of the games business as the book is, Who Hunts the Whale is intended to incite a few chuckles and to that end it’s clear the authors enjoyed themselves when it came to coming up with some of the companies and game titles. We’ll leave to your imagination as what popular franchise the book’s Prophecy of Zepto might be riffing on, and there are countless others that will cause the reader to pause to see if they can make out any links between the studios in the book and those in our reality, although for obvious reason the authors have had to be careful in covering their tracks. “We just had a lot of fun coming up with parody names
for various video games,” says Magnet. “It was a lot of fun just coming up with random ideas. A lot of those just came as we were writing; ‘Okay, we need a name that fits this genre of game. It’s a bit like Silent Hill and Resident Evil. …Okay, it’s called this now. Cool, let’s go.’” For a lot of those more jokey elements,” adds Dale, “we
would sit down and throw ideas back and forth until we found things that stuck and were memorable between ourselves – those were the ones that moved forward.” Aside from achieving some unspecified level of critical
and commercial success, what are the hopes for the book, especially in terms of who might read it and the questions they might raise about the gaming industry in 2023? “My hope is that people who don’t know a huge amount
about the realities of big budget game development will read it and perhaps go and start doing research and asking questions,” says Dale. “I hope that their takeaway from that is ‘Okay, this is parody, but it’s really not as much of a parody as I might have thought.’ If this book can lead to some people realising there is more harm [being done] to people making games than they are aware of, then I think the book will have done its job.”
Magnet agrees and hopes to see more people question
their assumptions about what working in games is like. “Our development editor came back to us a couple of times and said, ‘You’ve made this company cartoonishly evil, nobody’s going to believe this.’ So we just sent her several articles of things that turned out to be much worse than the things we’d written. Actually, maybe we didn’t go far enough.”
“The number of things that have come to light since
[publication], I think, speaks to the state this industry is in,” adds Dale, recounting the time the book’s editor questioned a fictional talk about monetisation being given at the book’s equivalent of GDC. When the authors linked them to an actual talk that was given, she was shocked. “Being able to point out that a lot of what’s in that talk is based on a real talk someone gave about predatory monetisation in their own game is being able to start those conversations about some of the things that really are happening.”
GET TOGETHER Despite the issues the book raises and the reports that continue to appear, more likely these days around the latest round of redundancies, the authors of Who Hunts the Whale are hopeful that change is coming, regardless of how influential the book might be in steering the conversation. “People within the industry are realising that they don’t
have to be alone,” says Magnet. “They don’t have to have these fights on their own. There is power in solidarity,” and that collective action can “become an unstoppable force against an industry that has just treated people awfully for years.” Dale is heartened by those that have banded together
to successfully form or join unions. “We’re seeing greater degrees of strike action, we are seeing workers publicly stating what they want from the executive leadership within game development studios and not backing down from those demands of what they need to see for workers to be respected in their workplace. I think it’s an uphill battle, but I think that we are in a very promising time for change.”
April/May 2023 MCV/DEVELOP | 47
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