Activision, Activism, Social Power
Nathan Schmidt, Contributing Editor
Let’s get right down to it. Everything we love is awful. The music industry is awful, the movie industry is awful, professional sports are awful, and, yes, the gaming industry is awful. Activision Blizzard recently reminded us of this predicament, not just by being sued by the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing for ruthless discrimination and serial sexual harassment, but by denying the claims brought forward in the suit as the work of “unaccountable State bureacrats.” Unsurprisingly, meetings followed in which they tried to keep everything in-house, even though the suit states that employees don’t trust the HR department. A bunch of men who (mostly) don’t even work there anymore jockeyed for moral high ground with half-assed apologies, and then the (former) sponsor of the company’s women’s network sent out a mass email calling the suit “meritless.” After failing to address most of the employees’ main concerns following a massive walkout, Activision Blizzard claimed that they will fix the everything by—wait for it—hiring a union-busting law firm.
For fuck’s sake.
So, now former World of Warcraft Senior Creative Director Alex Afrasiabi is fired and doesn’t get to have his name on WoW NPCs anymore, while former president J. Allen Brack sails off to “pursue new opportunities.” So far, this is small comeuppance for a group of people who knowingly ignored or participated in what the suit referred to as the “frat boy culture” of Activision Blizzard, which included drunken binges in the workplace, male employees gaming all day whilst “delegating” work to female employees, women being paid less than men for the same work, women being passed over for promotions “in case they decided to get pregnant,” groping, and extreme cases of voyeurism.
As gamers, we now face the same dilemma that we’ve been facing since way before a woman was publicly mocked for daring to question the hypersexualization of female characters in WoW (and that was ten years ago): What do we do about it? Where do we go from here? I like video games; the video game industry is corrupt. Am I contributing to the corruption by being a gamer? Am I corrupt?
Yup, they hired ‘em. Image from WilmerHale.
As the Activision-Blizzard story has developed, I’ve seen a lot of this kind of sentiment in the comments: “I’m never giving any more of my money to Activision Blizzard.” There’s something admirable about that. Activision Blizzard makes some of the biggest AAA titles out there, and the choice to leave a game like WoW, with all the sense of community and accomplishment that comes with it, is tough. But I think this response also highlights a fundamental problem that a lot of us are facing right now, which is that our primary relationship to games is as consumers, and consumption-based activism is necessarily limited in scope.
Now, there have been some cool collective responses, such as the WoW virtual walkout that coincided with the employee walkout last Wednesday, which included similar boycotts from devs and streamers who pulled the plug on Activision Blizzard games that day, too. But through the haze of helpless frustration with which I’ve watched my darkest assumptions about the video game industry be confirmed time and again this week, I can’t help asking: how much does it really change if I decide today that, whenever it comes out, I’m not going to buy Diablo IV?
If I were to try to answer myself, I’d say first that it could change some things—for me. Whether we like it or not, our identities as gamers are generally shaped by the kinds of things we choose to buy. I like the Call of Duty zombies mode, but no raging cavalcade of wild animals could convince me to buy Black Ops Cold War right now, no matter how cool Mauer der Toten looks. On the other hand, the personal choice to spend the cost of a single AAA game on itch.io’s 2021 Queer Games Bundle (236 games in there!) is a good decision—a just decision. There are times, though, like this past week, where I feel like it ought to be possible to do more than simply choose who does and doesn’t get my money, as if justice itself were a financial transaction. Consumer activism has its place, but it’s only part of a solution, not the end goal.
Image from Steve Kim; https://twitter.com/Fobwashed/status/1420594971883700227/photo/1
I would really like to know the answer to all this. I want to know what to do, how to be a gamer in a way that makes this community better. That’s a hard question to answer definitively, and there are probably a lot of really good answers to it. Here’s something I know for sure, though: Justice isn’t a transaction. Justice is a community. If I could keep my gamer hat on and also put on my labor organizer hat—looking a little silly here with multiple hats going at once—I’d say that collective action centered on consumption is a good start, but we shouldn’t let capitalism determine the kinds of communities that we’re able to build. For example, you can sign the Communication Workers of America’s petition in favor of the PRO (Protecting the Right to Organize) Act, and by doing so also be supporting the Campaign to Organize Digital Employees (CODE-CWA). Unionizing in the gaming industry would make a really big difference in empowering marginalized employees, and supporting initiatives like PRO and CODE-CWA is a way to support gaming unions, even for those who don’t work in the industry. There are also a number of organizations to which you can donate and volunteer, including but not limited to Black Girls Code, Women Who Code, Girls Who Code, Women in Games and Women in Games International, Women in Animation, Futures Without Violence, and RAINN.
The point is that collective action is not only for workers in the gaming industry; we gamers can work together, too, against the outrageous mysogyny and homophobia and racism and cruelty of this culture. This means thinking bigger than individual moral responsibility and finding ways to collectivize. In other words, working together can bring about system-sized answers to systemic problems. Certainly, one thing we can do together is agree that we’re going to stop buying Activision Blizzard games until they make it clear that they’re taking genuine steps towards eradicating the rot at the heart of their enterprise. That would just be the beginning, though, of building communities that demand better gender representation in games and resist the “frat boy culture” of gamers. The men on stage in that BlizzCon video mocked the woman who broached the question of female outfits in WoW, but I’m just as afraid of the male-voiced chorus of “boos” in the background from all the other panel attendees. Gaming culture and industry culture feed off each other, and in this moment of reckoning, we have the opportunity to build better communities for everyone.
Zelda can handle it on her own, thank you very much. Image from Nintendo.
Sometimes communities also start small, say, for example, me talking to my son about gender representation in video games. For example, Zelda/Sheik is one of my go-to Smash Bros characters, and the other day he said to me, “You know, dad, I don’t think Princess Zelda really needs Link’s help all that much. She seems to be doing just fine on her own.” And if he grows up with the idea that strong women in video games is the norm, not the exception, then he’ll spread that idea to his other little gamer friends and…I don’t know! Maybe something good will happen!
It’s easy to feel hopeless, like the whole entertainment industry was designed from the beginning to make everyone but straight white cis men feel unwelcome (because it was!). Honestly, sometimes I ask myself if it’s worth it to love video games, or movies, or music, or any of the things that are produced in industries that are designed to enable abusers. But things can change. Sometimes it does start with the decision to purchase something (seriously, please do buy that queer games bundle) and sometimes it starts with the decision not to. Individual purchasing choices, however, are only the tip of the iceberg of social change. The community we’re cultivating together might look a little bit different for all of us depending on where we live or who we know, but for all the gamers out there who are sick to death of this shit: we can do this. We have power together to make this industry better—power to shift attitudes and change culture, which is bigger than anything money can buy.
