Ground Zero

This is a more fluffy, personal bloggy type thing I wrote this the day after we walked off set of GAME_JAM, two days before today when we posted our articles.

For more context, see Jared’s coverage, Adriel’s thoughts, Robin’s thoughts, and My thoughts.

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I like to do this thing sometimes with other gamespeople when we’re doing something games adjacent and things get really surreal - I just say “because videogames”. Acknowledging that I’ve ended up in extreme situations due to what a lot of people consider a silly pastime for children fulfills my love and respect of exactly how absurd the universe is. Get fanmail that thanks me for someone turning their life around while I’m drinking sake in a hot tub in downtown San Francisco? Wow. Videogames, man. Receive a photoshopped image of a map of every place I’ve ever lived carved in blood in the back of my current partner with a link to an mp3 file attached? Holy shit. Videogames. Stuck in the middle of the desert on a train with no power at 4am, lit up by the glow of dozens of laptops and christmas lights? V-i-d-e-o-g-a-m-e-s.

This is one of those moments on crack.

In this moment, I am sitting in a messy apartment in LA. I’m physically, mentally, and creatively destroyed after one of the most batshit experiences of my life, which I am legally bound to not talk about. I’m watching the only journalist who was there, who saw everything, pace back and forth in his messy apartment, retelling the story on the phone. He wasn’t expecting me over - I had to escape a bad situation several days before I had anticipated to leave, and he’s an old friend so we’re weathering the gathering storm together. We refer to this place as our bunker from the wrath of a major company, and we stand on the precipice of something major.

I’ve been involved in a big enough games scandal before, the twitter-issue-of-the-day, the kind that blows up everyone in games’ feed for about 2 days and is quickly forgotten about thereafter. I didn’t see it coming then - I lost my cool and ranted about online harassment candidly and next thing you know it I’m seeing friends of friends talk about me on facebook and have since gained a permanent twitch response to people using my full name like I’m a google search word instead of a person.

It’s different this time. We know it’s coming, even if we’re not sure exactly what “it” is. There’s a deadline and between myself and him we can see most of the moving pieces. At least most of the ones we think are there, who ever really knows. It keeps escalating. We know this is going to be big. It’s already big.

It’s strange being in this space with him. I can’t say anything but I can watch him do his work and get insights from what’s happening on the other end of things. We get emails saying things like “MAJORBRAND is on the warpath.” and “Three more people got fired”. I’m right now covering him covering us. Partly just because I can’t speak for myself without summoning multimillion dollar lawsuits into my life and I need to say SOMETHING. But it just keeps seeming to get bigger and bigger like a tidal wave approaching shore, and I’m staring up at the massive tsunami with a resigned look on my face because it’s gone so far off the charts in terms of size and weirdness that I can’t even process it.

Because videogames.

“It feels like every time we go to sleep this week it’s like ‘ON THE NEXT EPISODE OF DRAGON BALL Z” he says, and I giggle through my failing voice because it’s oh god so true.

The next morning we wake up to his phone ringing from some very, very nervous higher-ups. He paces in the kitchen while I tell an old friend that there’s a nonzero chance that I get sued for close to one billion dollars soon. I also tell him that I’m so happy to be surrounded with people willing to risk so much in the pursuit of doing what we feel is the right thing. I’m so inspired by the other woman who is standing up and telling her story, by my normally pixie-like friend who has used the phrase “waves of blood” in an email earlier and aggressively pursuing speaking out when I contractually can’t, by my journalist friend not pulling a single punch when his fists are aimed at the people who pay for the apartment we’re hiding out in.

This feels like the calm before the story. I don’t know what the day after tomorrow is going to bring. I don’t know what the next few months of my life are going to look like, or any of us for that matter. I’m not sure anything like this, at this scale, has ever happened in games before. He’s resigned to losing his job, I’m worried I’ll end up getting sued back to the stone age by  what are likely some of the most powerful lawyers in the world when I already am destitute. But I don’t regret what I did. I don’t regret any of this. I’m normally so anxious, but I have this weird calm about the subject. I know that standing up for myself, my friends, and my medium was the right thing to do and I wouldn’t change any single bit of it. Maybe even if they do fire him and come after us it’ll get some good conversations going about how to keep this from happening in the future, or what doing the right thing in this medium is, or even just draw attention to the fact that indie exists and is wonderful who knows. And I’m ok with that. And so is he. Because it’s the right thing to do. Because we care about this medium we find ourselves in, and the people who work in it.

Because videogames.