The way you've chosen to frame this has me uncertain if you're aware of the larger outbreak of stories in the games industry this past week. To clarify the context, a number of women have come forward with allegations of abuse against some developers with profiles varying from low to high. The most reported of these are
Jeremy Soule, the composer for Skyrim among other things, Holowka, and one of the guys behind the Fallen London universe.
EDIT: The first 27 minutes of this podcast have a more thorough discussion of the reporting from last week:
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bjwm88/we-talk-about-this-weeks-allegations-on-todays-waypoint-radioI think the sequence of events is that Quinn was inspired to share her story about Holowka Monday night after seeing Soule's victim post her account. Benson and the rest of Infinite Fall took a day or so to post
their statement, where they severed ties with Holowka. Following that, another victim came forward, someone who has been working with Holowka on a current project who said she had suffered emotional abuse from him.
Yesterday morning, his sister shared the news of his passing.
So, what are my thoughts? I've learned over the years that when stuff like this happens, I'm better off not saying much. It's more important to elevate the voices of those who have been marginalized than to add my own take to the discourse.
That doesn't mean it doesn't hurt. I feel hurt having just recently come to this work and coming away from it touched. It's true what Benson said, that my experiences with the game are my own, that those can't be taken away. I liked the music, though, and that was Holowka. The music is important to the game's ethos. It's hard to separate it. So the game is forever compromised.
The situation reminds me of when I finished watching Car Boys and was high on Nick Robinson right before it was revealed that he was a serial womanizer. It's a similar hurt, and in my initial response, I was quick to rush to defend the work. I was hasty to mourn what could have been if only Robinson wasn't scum, what he and McElroy might have gone onto create together. And that's the trap. That's the hole that fans fall into when then pedestal crumbles. Because when you focus on the work and what you, as a consumer have lost, you ignore and diminish the real pain felt by the victims of the abuser.
It's this false analogue to the Trolley Problem where there are two tracks. On one is an abuser and their game. On the other track are ten victims of abuse and the games they might make if they aren't chased out of the industry because they don't feel safe or supported. It's a false dilemma. You have to pull the lever every time, but most of the time it's too late. Women and victims of abuse have to be believed in order to normalize the practice of exposing their abusers.
Nick Robinson lost his job at Polygon. After the fallout had blown over, he went back to creating content, and I think he has a Patreon. He goes to E3 and GDC and other industry events. He tweets. He's still around. I don't follow him anymore. I don't know what he's done to change, or if he is someone that people should be comfortable working with. I know there are plenty of people who are not happy that he's still around.
Alec Holowka couldn't see a road back. His sister said as much. It sounds like he he himself was not healthy. I think that's probably true of most abusers, and maybe there's a caustic irony that they would benefit from resources taken up by their victims. I was watching a video the other day that talks about hyperproblems, a bunch of seemingly disparate issues that are actually interrelated in complex ways. Our society's lack of an institutionalized mental health system looms large over this.
It's all so damn complicated.
I don't think it's unreasonable to say that more should be done to support and protect victims of abuse and at the same time say that thought needs to be given to the road back for the people who perpetrate that abuse. What does rehabilitation look like for them? They can't really make things right, so what can they do? How do you convince someone who has just had all their professional and creative ties severed -
deservedly so - that there's a reason to go on? I don't think anyone knows.
The solution most definitely does not involve victim blaming or victim shaming. Eileen Holowka, after saying she was walking away from everything in her statement, had to immediately post a followup statement urging people not to harass Zoe Quinn. I don't know about you, but I don't know who Zoe Quinn is without Gamergate. That's one hell of an asterisk to have attached to your name, a name that a lot of easily frenzied young men know. And now this.
It's easy to say "Well maybe they shouldn't have posted this on Twitter, maybe they should have done their whistleblowing through a different channel." What channels, though? People in their situation often don't think they have access to other platforms, and they don't feel respected or taken seriously by existing institutions. Look at what happened when allegations of harassment rose up at
Naughty Dog. Like, yes, they shouldn't have posted her story on Twitter, one of the worst websites on the internet (in large part because of harassment techniques popularized by GG), but what else are their options? Keep in mind that they want to make sure this story gets heard so that other victims can feel emboldened and to prevent other people from falling victim.
I can feel myself starting to circle back around, and that's how this conversation tends to go. Endless spinning in circles while progress comes in tiny steps.
You asked me what I thought, and this is what I've been thinking about throughout the week. It makes me ask a bigger question, to what extent is the space around games healthy? I really don't know. There are a lot of problems. Would that it were just a hobby without all the qualifications, but this is what we have to deal with. I think it's well worth having the conversation and working toward a better culture.