Investigating Three Indie Superstars Accused of Emotional Abuse (Transcripted from Youtube) | Otter.ai

Investigating Three Indie Superstars Accused of Emotional Abuse (Transcripted from Youtube)

Javiera Cordero (she/her)40min

Speaker 1

00:00

Over the last few months, I've interviewed 24 game developers from across three different highly prestigious indie studios about the emotional abuse they've experienced at work. In all cases, this abuse has come straight from the top from high profile founders, typically known for their inclusivity their activism, or for having worked on some of the most heartfelt video games of recent years. I think together, the stories make a fairly compelling argument that this isn't just about free game studios at all. But instead, something bigger, a problem of the way in which power in the indie game space is distributed, because as well as being a story about abusive bosses. This is also about how those bosses have been protected. But perhaps I'm getting a bit ahead of myself there. Let's start at the beginning. Our reporting started here with a set of tweets written in 2019 by Tony Hawk luzie, a former employee of mountains, the game studio best known for creating Florence. Here's my story, he writes about how I was abused to the point of depression and suicide for two years by indie superstar Ken Wong, I posted that all that information publicly the day I was getting married, it was just the thing that was constantly weighing on me, you know,

Speaker 2

01:16

for just with everything I did in my life, and I was just like, you know, I want to get I need to get this off my chest, I need to move on from

Speaker 1

01:23

it. In this spread, Tony described being constantly undermined by Ken, who is not only the founder and creative director at mountains, but who's also a renowned figure in the games industry at this point, thanks to the success of Florence. But also, prior to that while working at another studio, he'd been the lead designer on Monument Valley as well. Tony's tweets about his experience are pretty raw, let me read just a couple. Within the first week, I was doubting my decision to work for him, every contribution I've made every idea every opinion was not only wrong to him, also stupid. This was how he slowly started to wear down my self worth I was being gaslit and didn't know it. And when you mentioned to everyone at work, that you're starting to struggle with depression, and he laughs about how he stole your friends. And now you don't really have anyone to talk to, that's when you should have quit and called him out for health, for person he is it paints a picture of a workplace that clearly left its mark on Tony, and the response from the wider games industry was immediate. I didn't expect it to blow up, I didn't expect it to be get so many eyes on it and have such a huge response, like I had hundreds of people reach out and say, you know, they're so sorry that this happened. And then they would tell me about other people and other people in the industry especially

Speaker 2

02:32

like higher up, you know, kind of superstars. It was never intended to be, you know, like, big.

Speaker 1

02:42

However, as I've heard from several people who still worked at mountains at the time, these tweets were published, the ramifications of a moment like this can be complicated, for a start Tony to refer to another person who he felt had suffered because of Ken, but in a way that quite clearly identified them. And he was still working at mountains at the time. And also, when so much of the studios reputation is attached to one person's great division, as was the case with mountains. And can there's also a worried that the rest of the team might end up being tarnished with the same brush. Florence wasn't made by one person, and neither were the studios new games in development. But suddenly, as a shadow over all of them, I feel like now would be a good time for me to say that people make games is aware that the media can also be an imprecise tool. In these moments, I'm talking about us here. Although we're going to be talking about free individuals in particular, who were of course, intertwined with the studios they helped create. These studios are more than just those free people. And that's something we should all try and remember for this video. In fact, thinking of the studio and the founder as the same thing is actually where some of these problems seem to originate from. So yeah, more on that later. And let's get back to the tweets. Ken Wong responded to Tony's allegations the following day, saying this was my failure as a leader and as a co worker, to the person who wrote this Fred and to other people I've heard through my career. I'm sorry, I don't know if there's a way to make up to my former employee for how I hurt him. Ever since he left I've worked harder to contribute positively to Martin's work culture, and take better care of my team. That message was posted on the 29th of August 2019. And it does suggest some amount of self reflection was taking place. However, just one year later, mountains had completely fallen apart, falling multiple resignations. The remaining staff would vote unanimously for Kenton, he stepped down from his leadership position in order to protect the team from the impact they felt he was having on them. And so starting in November of last year, I've now spoken to a significant portion of the people who've ever worked in mountains since it first opened in 2016. And aside from Tony, these people agreed to be interviewed under the condition of total anonymity, as they were concerned about the impact it might have on their career, or in some cases, feared legal retaliation. And although we will be including quotes from those interviews with hired voice actors mostly from Melbourne, which is where the studio is based to read them on their behalf. And again, to protect the identity of our sources, the gender of those voice actors weren't necessarily matched the gender of the person who had been interviewed.

Speaker 3

05:13

Working at mountains was great. I loved the team, I loved what I was able to achieve. I love that we could all work together and support each other. It was just one person that dragged the entire thing down.

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