I admit, I’ve found it hard to write an article the past two weeks. Work has been exceptionally busy as we prepare for some upcoming milestones, and the overall state of the world can best be described by my increasing desire to become one with the forest floor.
Though I no longer live in the United States and have no intention of relocating there, I am still an American… Watching what’s going on there has left me feeling like a horse has kicked me in the chest.
I have, and will continue, to not make politics the main focus of this substack for one reason— I work as the Narrative Director on an overtly political video game series about war, and anything I say that feels more than tangentially political will quite likely be picked up by fans and potentially gaming news outlets and treated as a plot spoiler for an upcoming project. This is slightly frustrating as I am a politically opinionated person. I strongly believe that politics- like all things, really- is intrinsically spun through the webs of everything in this world. Everything we do and are is, unfortunately, political. The varying degrees of unease from basic malaise to full-on fucking panic attacks many of us are experiencing right now are evidence of that.
The game industry isn’t exactly having a great time at the moment, either. Layoffs have been tragically normal in this industry forever, but the past two years, they’ve happened at a rate and volume so alarming that scrolling LinkedIn feels like checking the local obituary section. Every day, there are people I know well, absolute masters of their crafts, kind, gentle humans who have been thrown into the meat grinder by companies who engaged in bad planning we all saw from a million miles away and have decided to reassure their stockholders by threatening the livelihoods of those who depend on them most.
To make matters worse, the very people we want to delight with our work, gamers, often add salt to the wound by blaming individual developers for issues with the games they worked on instead of recognising that most of those decisions came from the top.
I’ve been in the game industry for well over a decade now and have been working in entertainment for (if we count my time as a teenage actor, which I do because that was work) more than 25 years. The patterns are clear. The amount of change any individual contributor can make to a project is infinitesimal when faced with poor financial or structural decision-making from on high. Yet those individuals pay the price if the sales don’t hit suggested figures, or even if they do, but the stock doesn’t go up.
If you’ve known me for a while, you’ll be aware that I’m a staunch supporter of workers’ rights, and I’ve done quite a bit of campaigning and outreach to attempt to improve working conditions in the game industry. It’s exhausting work, and I can’t commend those who are still deep in that fight, like the brilliant Amir Satvat. I couldn’t hack it. The amount of criticism I received daily whilst barely making any incremental gains was unsustainable for my health and well-being. That’s depressing. We make games. It’s supposed to be fun.
This week, two deeply personal layoffs happened.
Ubisoft Reflections, my first game development home after moving to the UK, is going to cut some of its team. These developers could not deserve this less. They are amazing, talented, lovely humans who have done exactly what the company has asked of them time and time again despite churn and changes in company direction.
And then, Bioware announced, subtly, that they were restructuring. I won’t go into this too much as they are an EA studio and I am an EA employee, but essentially— they let go the writing, design, and production teams who had worked on Dragon Age: The Veilguard.
Bioware is the studio that made me want to work in video games. For decades, they have been a shining beacon of narrative joy and craft excellence. I can’t tell you how many pages of fanfiction I scribbled about their characters when I was younger. Caught in that layoff are narrative professionals I admire immensely and have spent my entire career attempting to emulate, as well as a few team members whom I had just welcomed to the Battlefield team on a secondment.
Gone. Poof. Fuck.
I comprehensively understand the cold business calculus of these decisions and cannot say that if faced with them I’d have been able to make a better call… but that doesn’t make them hurt less. If anything, they hurt more, because I know they’re avoidable.
Yep. It’s been a weird few weeks.
Meanwhile, my personal life has been delightful. My dog continues to be an adorable menace. A storm blew down some of the spindly trees in the park behind my house, creating new nooks, dens, and other hidey-holes to explore and sit in with a coffee and a journal, fulfilling all of my cottagecore dreams. I took a mini-cruise to Amsterdam with my husband where I slept on a boat for the first time. This was a revelation. The rocking eases you and holds you. My health wearable recorded my highest sleep HRV since I began tracking it nine months ago. And, my narrative team on Battlefield continues to inspire and challenge me in the right ways every day.
It feels a bit shit, though, for life to be so great when *gestures broadly*.
If you’re having a hard time writing at the moment… you aren’t alone. I know that some of my past articles have encouraged consistent work but that doesn’t mean your work needs to be sunshine and rainbows. What I had intended to post this week was an article about finishing things, and what it means for a work to be done. It was lush. Supportive, positive. I’ve got it in my drafts. It’ll go out at some point. But given the horrors, it felt pithy at best.
So I encourage you today, to give a loved one a cuddle. Inhale the scent of your tea and hold it for an extra moment, warm in your hands before you sip it. Pet a dog. Watch a tree sway in the wind. Do a forward bend and let your spine crack in seventy-five places.
In short: take care of yourself. Find those sparks of joy. Those little glimmers are what truly matters.
Whether you live in America or not, whether you have a job or not, whoever you are… enduring is an act of resistance and thriving against the tide is a rebellious victory.
I believe in you.