Last week, news broke that the State of California was suing Activision Blizzard for what it called a “pervasive frat boy workplace culture" where female staff were often subject to harassment. The lawsuit included disturbing descriptions of male employee behavior that included micromanagement, naked photos of a female employee being shared at a holiday party, and "cube crawls", where male staff would drink "copious amounts of alcohol as they crawl their way through various cubicles in the office and often engage in inappropriate behavior toward female employees."
The news was so shocking and disturbing that many Activision Blizzard employees took to Twitter to share their stories. One of them was World of Warcraft senior system designer Jeff Hamilton, who admitted that work has essentially ceased on the game because of the emotional turmoil the lawsuit has inflicted on his team.
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"I don’t know what to do. I don’t have all the answers,” wrote Hamilton on Twitter. “I can tell you, almost no work is being done on World of Warcraft right now while this obscenity plays out. And that benefits nobody – not the players, not the developers, not the shareholders."
Elsewhere in the long Twitter thread, Hamilton said he was "viscerally disgusted by the horrible trauma that has been inflicted upon my coworkers, friends, and colleagues," but what really brought work to a standstill in World of Warcraft was the response from Activision Blizzard.
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"Activision’s response to this is currently taking a group of world-class developers and making them so mad and traumatized they’re rendered unable to keep making a great game."
Activision Blizzard has denied the allegations against it, saying that the suit "includes distorted, and in many cases false, descriptions of Blizzard's past." Chief compliance officer Frances Townsend went even further with an internal email to Activision Blizzard staff, at times both acknowledging past "egregious actions" while simultaneously calling the lawsuit "meritless and irresponsible."
At the end of the Twitter thread, Hamilton points to over 30 past and present Blizzard staff who also shared their personal stories online. These stories often mirrored the allegations presented in the lawsuit, describing a workplace that normalized sexual harassment and assault.
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