Today, the employees of Activision Blizzard are staging a walkout in the wake of the allegations raised against the company in a recent lawsuit filed by the state of California.
Content warning: this article contains descriptions of sexual harassment and discrimination.
The allegations include women being subjected to conditions and rules male employees are exempt from, people passing naked photos of an employee around at a holiday party, and men participating in a “cube crawl”, where male employees get drunk and crawl around the cubicles of various female staff. The allegations are shocking, and they can make you feel a little powerless. What can you, as a player, do against a billion dollar corporation like Activision Blizzard? The answer, individually, is ‘not much’. But collectively we can make a difference. Today, as the Activision Blizzard employees brave the ramifications of a public walkout, we need to show them our full support.
Do not cross the picket line. Do not play Activision Blizzard games.
Related: If The Activision Blizzard Lawsuit Shocks You, You Haven't Been Paying AttentionThis is a protest with purpose. It’s not in reaction to the lawsuit or the allegations as punishment or revenge. The employees have released a collective statement explaining why the walkout is taking place, and what they need to see change within the company and the culture now that this has been brought to light.
“As current Activision Blizzard employees, we are holding a walkout to call on the executive leadership team to work with us on the following demands, in order to improve conditions for employees at the company, especially women, and in particular women of color and transgender women, nonbinary people, and other marginalized groups,” the statement reads. Click here to read the full letter and the list of demands, which include publishing data on the salary inequality, hiring a third party diversity coordinator, and calling for an audit of the HR department and company executives.
It’s important to note the response from Activision Blizzard to all of this. While Diablo co-creator Chris Metzen and Blizzard co-founder Mike Morhaime – both no longer with the company – each separately admitted to “failing” the women involved, those still at Activision Blizzard have been less forthcoming. In the company’s initial statement, it claimed the lawsuit contained “distorted, and in many cases false, descriptions of Blizzard's past.” Meanwhile, an internal email from Blizzard president J. Allen Brack called the allegations “extremely troubling” and encouraged anyone affected to speak to HR, which is unhelpful given the lawsuit specifically states a lack of support from company HR. This was followed by a second email from chief compliance officer Frances Townsend – a former terrorism advisor to the Bush Administation who once defended the use of torture methods such as waterboarding – who labelled the allegations as “distorted and untrue.”
This adds an extra layer of vulgarity to everything. It takes tremendous courage for these women to speak out – and we’ve since had many men allege sexual harassment as part of the game ‘gay chicken’ – but Activision Blizzard has completely dismissed them. There was no acknowledgement of failings, no pledge to improve, no roadmap for culture change put in place. This is why TheGamer.com has elected to no longer cover Activision Blizzard games – the complete lack of humility, culpability, and acknowledgement that conditions need to change. Activision Blizzard employees called the response “insulting” in an open letter, adding “we will not be silenced.”
CEO Bobby Kotick has since admitted this initial response was “tone-deaf,” but this only came after continued negative press for the company and a significant dip in share prices. When World of Warcraft senior system designer Jeff Hamilton wrote on Twitter that work on WoW had effectively ceased, he said it benefited nobody, “not the players, not the developers, not the shareholders” – businesses are motivated by their bottom line ahead of everything else.
I’ve talked a lot about the various developments in the Activision Blizzard case here, and that’s deliberate. It’s important to keep in mind that even in gaming – an industry with few unions, heavy reliance on crunch, and a high burnout rate – these allegations go way beyond the usual horror stories. But we as players still have our part to play, and our part is easy – don’t play Activision Blizzard games.
I know there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, but there are always degrees to that. If you play an offline Activision Blizzard game, say Spyro or Tony Hawk’s, it’s easy to make the argument that you aren’t hurting anyone – but these employees are putting their livelihood on the line with this walkout. All they’re asking you to do is to play a different video game.
For online games, it’s much more clear cut. Bobby Kotick’s statement came in the wake of the share price falling, and with so many Activision Blizzard games being online based, a big drop in player count could sink the share price even lower. This, more than any other factor, will motivate real and effective change. If Call of Duty, Overwatch, and World of Warcraft all report their lowest player counts ever, then we as players are doing our part to support the Activision Blizzard employees demonstrating today.
I could be glib here and argue that it's easy. Think how many video games there are – just go and play with another toy. But I get that it's difficult. These are games that players have thousands, maybe tens of thousands of hours in. It's hard to walk away from something like that, especially when there may be so many memories attached to them. But read the lawsuit. Read the reports. Absorb all the allegations around the "frat boy culture." Those things happened to the people making these games. These experiences, that have given you thousands of hours of joy, were made by people who were routinely being abused, humiliated, and ignored. Even now, with everything out in the open, they’re still being ignored. All they're asking is for you to step away from the game to help them. It's not forever, it's just until they feel safe enough to go back to work.
Do not cross the picket line. You can always cancel that WoW sub as well.
Next: If We Want To Talk About Diversity In Gaming, We Need To Be Intersectional