“I want women to not have to fear retaliation from a powerful ‘auteur’ figure for speaking up,” one ex-Fullbright dev told Polygon in a recent report on the studio’s toxic workplace culture. Said report largely pertains to alleged claims of harassment against Fullbright co-founder Steve Gaynor, who recently stepped down from the position of creative lead to focus on writing for the studio’s next game, Open Roads.
While Gone Home, the studio’s first game, tells the story of a woman revisiting her childhood home and learning about her younger sister’s lesbian identity, Open Roads focuses on the relationship between a mother and her daughter. Both games are written by Gaynor, a cisgender straight white man who, despite insisting on telling women’s stories, has caused at least ten women to leave Fullbright in the last year alone. According to these women, the degree of micromanagement they were subjected to is disproportionate to how much scepticism the work of their male colleagues received. While this is in and of itself a grave issue, it also points to a wider cultural problem in the games industry: auteurism, or the belief that one person is responsible for the creative vision of an entire and, in this case, supposedly diverse team.
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Jessica Howard recently spoke to a similar issue for Paste Magazine, importantly noting that the games industry’s co-option of the term “director’s cut” only reinforces what is already a misrepresented and frankly toxic depiction of how games are made. While Sucker Punch doesn’t necessarily have a face-of-the-company figure for Ghost of Tsushima, Hideo Kojima – whose infamous Twitter bio purports that he is “70 percent made of movies” – certainly sees things differently. For the sake of transparency, I wrote in favour of the Death Stranding director’s cut not that long ago. I like Kojima, although I too can see that the way Kojima Productions centres itself around him – right down to the name – is detrimental to offering a realistic view of video game development. Aside from maybe Yoji Shinkawa, how many other devs can you name from KojiPro? Can you name a single woman who works there? Remember that these are the devs who wrote Quiet in MGS 5, a woman who will literally die if she wears clothes.
Kojima is undoubtedly the worst offender in terms of portraying himself as an auteur – he’s the auteur-in-chief of an industry already obsessed with auteurism. While the repeated instances of “directed by Hideo Kojima” throughout his games often become the subject of memes, they are seriously harmful when considered from a wider industry perspective. Likewise, people often associate The Last of Us Part 2 with Neil Druckmann, failing to realise it was co-written by Westworld and Snowpiercer writer Halley Gross – not to mention 2,000 devs worked on the game. Cory Barlog, despite being probably the most vocally supportive triple-A director of recognising video games as collaborative, unwieldy projects that only survive because of the teams behind them, is synonymous with God of War to the majority of people who do not consciously immerse themselves in the games industry. David Cage has been at the centre of fuck-up after fuck-up at Quantic Dream, which successfully won its case to throw out a lawsuit alleging the toleration of sexual harassment in the workplace back in 2018. Peter Molyneux has been accused of being a pathological liar who tends to over-promise and under-deliver. People still credit him for Fable, despite a Wireframe report clearly highlighting that Fable was largely the product of Ian Lovett and the Carter brothers. Even icons like Fumito Ueda, Tetsuya Nomura, Yoko Taro, Naoki Yoshida, and Shigeru Miyamoto work as part of extraordinarily large teams in order to make your favourite games a reality – not one single person living or dead is the video game equivalent of Stanley Kubrick, Akira Kurosawa, or Andrei Tarkovsky.
Yet this pervasive presence of auteurism – this hangover from what should, but is evidently not, a bygone era of male-dominated game development – continues to perpetuate systemic harassment in the industry. Despite the fact that every modern job listing touts diversity as a core tenet of its respective company, reports of harassment – almost always targeted directly at marginalised people – are not only commonplace, but worryingly so. In the last two weeks alone, the government lawsuit filed against Activision Blizzard has revealed horrific and dehumanising accounts of misogyny, sexual harassment, and systemic racism. All of these issues were, until now, swept under the rug by rosters of predominantly male members of the games industry old guard. When asked by a female fan if Blizzard would ever consider creating female characters that don’t look as if they would appear in a Victoria’s Secret catalogue, an entirely male panel of developers publicly laughed at her suggestion, attempting to embarrass her for making a completely reasonable request in front of an enormous BlizzCon audience. They then asked what catalogue she’d prefer them to step out of. Not one of the reports on workplace misconduct against female developers is singular, and yet too often they are laser-focused on instead of being considered in tandem with every prior and subsequent report of the same abuse and toxicity. This, again, is compounded by the concept of auteurship – the man in charge calls the shots, even when the shots in question have nothing to do with a man’s perspective.
The Fullbright case is no different – in fact, it is perhaps even more sinister than many others. Despite publisher Annapurna Interactive having to independently intervene in the development of Open Roads by contracting an external human resources firm, Steve Gaynor has not been taken off the project. This is, after all, the man whose own Twitter handle bore the company’s namesake for over a decade, only recently having been changed from “Fullbright” to “SteveGaynorPDX.” – at the time of writing, searching for @Fullbright will still offer you the choice to be redirected to the studio’s actual handle or Gaynor’s new one. In this instance, Gaynor didn’t just see himself as the auteur behind Fullbright games behind closed doors – he was, publicly, Fullbright itself, with his social media presence juxtaposing his own personal views with those supposedly intended to represent the entire studio. Even the statement he released in the wake of Polygon’s report merely states that his “leadership style” was “hurtful,” implying that it’s a subjective, stylistic issue as opposed to yet another example of a decades-old problem. How can people speak out against their self-proclaimed auteur boss when he has full control over the company’s relationship with the world? Yes, they can be granted anonymity to speak with journalists, but is that enough? No.
The issue here lies solely with the auteuristic hangover from ‘90s and early ‘00s game development. Magazines may not feature sexualised shots of Lara Croft on the front cover anymore, but away from the public eye, the same problems persist. If anything, they are becoming ever more insidious because of the omnipresent gaslighting articulated to the world via social media. In the eyes of many fans, the auteur is not just the fact of the company – they (read: he) are the company itself, made infallible and immaculate by the games it makes.
Gaynor, despite having cost at least ten women their jobs, is still working on Open Roads, a game that tells a story about women. While it’s true that his contributions are now passed to the team with Annapurna acting as mediator – which, let’s be real, what the fuck? – this seems more like a cosmetic reshuffling than an actionable stance against real toxicity. In spite of his actions, and in spite of his altered Twitter handle, Gaynor is, and at the time of writing will still be, the auteur he sees himself as. That is not conducive to creating a safer, more comfortable, and more diverse industry. It is the same thing that has happened time and time again as reports of misogyny become increasingly prevalent – by that metric, things are getting worse, not better. If things are to change, we need to reckon with the problematic nature of games’ male-dominated history repeatedly rearing its head. We need to reckon with auteurs if we want to see true equality across diverse teams, and, once and for all, put an end to the currently necessary assembly line of misconduct reports that, almost always, come at the expense of women working in an industry that continuously attempts to kick them out of it.
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