Gimme summore lore

[Written by Mr Lore himself, Alexis.]

We’ve already intimated that Hush House is one of nine notable libraries, each of a very specific foundation that ensures the attention of the Hours. That foundation is sometimes called the Watchman’s Tree (or occasionally, in Britain, the Covenant of the Rood). At one point I wondered whether we might some day release DLC to allow librarians to manage each of the other eight. I think now that will never happen. Hush House drips with history. I’ve drawn on months of research and years of reading around UK history and mythology to make it fit together satisfyingly. The thought of trying to do something like that for a library in China or Indonesia just ain’t realistic.

So there’s centuries of material available for the librarian to explore, but we want players to be able to enjoy it without feeling like they’ve been given homework (5% of you want a fifty-page downloadable PDF, but for well-rehearsed reasons, it ain’t gonna be that way). It’s better, ultimately, for it not to be visible at all than to feel like homework. It still affects the game. An iceberg only just peeks out from under the water; the motive force of a swan is rarely visible; most of the universe is dark energy.

But it is going to be visible. As Reverend Timothy has already intimated, Hush House has grown up in layers, like a coral reef or a complicated personality. The game board reflects this. It’s the opposite of the Cultist Simulator board, which begins as a tabula rasa until card arrangements form their own set of layers. With one exception, of course – there is a part of the CS board which isn’t a tabula rasa at all.

Lottie tells the story of how she met Ian Livingstone on a train, he advised us to put a map in Cultist Simulator, and that’s why the Mansus is in Cultist Simulator as a new screen.

BOOK OF HOURS is all map. Some things go in your hand at the bottom (making that hand usable with potentially dozens of cards is its own challenge, but we’ll get back to that). But most things go on the board – for example furnishings, visitors, weather, and, of course, books. Most of the map begins locked and dimly visible. Hush House was, after all, abandoned seven years before the Librarian arrives, in the wake of a mysterious fire. That fire, of course, is part of the history you’ll explore.

But the primary board isn’t the only map. There’s also the Tree of Wisdoms, which we’ve already shown peeks at. It’s one part character upgrade system, one part history crafting workstation, and one part endgame planner. More about that soon.

Art and UI

You saw BOOK OF HOURS’ situation window designs in an earlier blog, but we also need a way to manage a CS-number of cards and objects (there’re about 700 individual cards in Cultist Simulator, to give you an idea of the scale) with the much more visual approach in BoH. You need to have a clear view of the whole of Hush House while also being able to zoom in and manage individual rooms, be able to open multiple situation and/or information windows, AND be able to easily find and select whatever resources you like from an inventory.

These designs will almost certainly evolve before we actually launch, but it gives you an idea of the mechanics going on behind the scenes if nothing else.

I hope it also gives you the same sense of a hygge little window on a magical world of books and Secret Histories that you control, which is how it feels to me! Also, you can stare at a little Neville portrait all day if you keep inviting him round. Do. His favourite snack is Assam tea and pistachio éclairs, and that is officially canon.

(And yes, Monsieur le Grand-Duc du Jambon is one of the many, many names belonging to Chi, our resident scaredy cat.)

I also have some new room mock-ups to share with you! You may have seen #1 if you’re on our mailing list, but it’s the first chthonic room carved deep in the foundations of Hush House, and shows the Chapel Calcite – the Minoan-inflected sanctuary dedicated to the Red Grail, consecrated centuries ago by the mysterious Sisterhood of the Triple Knot. #2 is our first external ‘room’ which is, of course, actually a garden – near the pantry and kitchen gardens, but one of the more unusual ways to descend to the underbelly of Hush House through a secret set of stairs within the well itself. Like a sort of jolly reverse-version of The Ring, with Gothic architecture. And #3 is our first look at Nocturnal Branch’s lonely, sea-damp cells. Sparse, cold and infested with things you hope are spiders, but at least you get a jaunty portrait of a certain Mr J. C. to keep you company (or to judge you, implacably, with those icy blue eyes).

Finally, we can also share some new element art from our most excellent freelance artists over at Clockwork Cuckoo, the same team who worked for us on Cultist Sim. This batch are all skills, some of which we’ve already mentioned in previous updates. Any guesses which images represent skills you’ve heard of? There’s so much MEANING in all of them…

Into the future

We’re now finally in a position to announce a release date for This Damn Library Game. DRUM ROLL PLEASE:

📚🎉 BOOK OF HOURS will launch in June 2023! 🎉📚

We’ll confirm a specific date nearer the time, and are now are working towards a public, playable alpha/beta/whateva later this year. More on that in our next update – we really see BoH coming together, and AK and I are incredibly stoked by its future design and improvements.

Oh! And one more thing – WE GOT MARRIED! Finally. [AK adds: we’ve been together for six years, and trying to get married for three of them. We finally did it, and we did it under a ship. Worth waiting for even if I’d married her under a bin, though.] We’re waiting on the professional photos, but here’s proof! Anyway – more BOOK OF HOURS soon, Beloveds. It’s gonna be swell. ♥

So in self-defence, we’ve published what you’re about to read. If they want to keep behaving like this, they’ll have to do it in the open where everyone can see what, little by little, they’ve become. Not monsters, or even really villains: just ordinary people who were given power, yielded to the temptation of spite, kept doubling down when challenged, and lost their way back. It reminds me of kids who’ve egged each other on to paint an ugly word on a neighbour’s door, and then can’t bring themselves to admit it was wrong.

FAILBETTER’S ONLINE HARASSMENT

First, the Failbetter Report: a collaboration between a veteran investigative journalist and a team of data mavens, following a similar approach to the analysis of the networked harassment of Carole Cadwalladr. It describes in detail, with evidence, the malicious behaviour of the execs at my old company –  how they were unmistakably the prime movers of the smear campaign against Lottie and me. The headline findings: just how much of the ‘spontaneous’ Twitter assault came directly from Failbetter; the grossly misogynistic abuse that Lottie was subjected to; the total absence of evidence for the horrible things said about both of us, and about our families.

You might remember that Failbetter have resolutely tried to block any formal investigation into the whole business. You can probably now imagine why.

“Failbetter Games employees, past and present, accounted for nearly a quarter (21.93%)
of all the tweets directed at Kennedy and Bevan, including employees who had never worked with [Kennedy…] We identified 339 tweets specifically targeting Bevan which were sexist, misogynistic and/or sexually explicit […] Our data analysis shows that the abusive content is found to be cross-pollinated through significant retweeting and quote tweeting by various individuals associated with Failbetter.”

…

FAILBETTER’S MISTREATMENT OF WOMEN

This is an employment tribunal complaint made against a game development studio by a woman. The complaint is of sexual discrimination, direct and indirect, against her and others, and of a years-long campaign of bullying. The studio didn’t deny a word of it. They just got their corporate lawyers to intimidate the woman in question into withdrawing it. The woman was Lottie Bevan. The studio was Failbetter Games. Our experience suggests they’ll already be reaching for a lawyer to send us yet another letter (we’re on #12, I think). They might reconsider if I point out that we would both be happy to testify under oath; the execs, less so.

‘What would a kind, progressive, benevolent company who cared about women do, if a female employee complained of mistreatment? What if she said their actions had really damaged her life? Most would investigate her claims. Some might apologise. Others might ask if they could discuss it informally over coffee, like humans. Alternatively, they could hire expensive lawyers to block information requests, suppress employment tribunals and threaten repeatedly to sue her. Wait.’

Lottie has written about this in more detail, and summarised the most important claims.

…

FAILBETTER’S MISUSE OF PERSONAL DATA

Third, this is the evidence we compiled for a complaint about Failbetter’s breaches of data privacy law.  Their CEO, Adam Myers, has fought for years to prevent us accessing the evidence that would prove him a liar – but as the saying goes, it’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up. The Information Commissioner’s Office upheld complaint after complaint. Adam has responded with contempt and spent tens of thousands on corporate lawyers to slow the ICO’s roll and to intimidate us. It began when he used his power as CEO to snoop through our private messages and use carefully selected quotes, mingled with outright lies, to smear us – while keeping us from accessing those private messages ourselves, on the pretext that he’s protecting the privacy of others.

“In 2019, Adam Myers leaked a phrase from a private DM conversation between Olivia Wood and Alexis Kennedy, where Wood came to Kennedy for advice on a raise. The phrase is ‘holy shit’. Myers characterises this as evidence of abuse. He omits to mention that Wood was requesting the biggest pay rise in the company’s history…. or that Kennedy took her request to the board, and fought to secure the pay rise, on the grounds that she was worth it. Myers repeatedly refused GDPR requests to turn over any of Kennedy’s other statements from that conversation.”

But it also shows how the privacy of others only mattered when Failbetter could use it as an excuse to keep our own data from us. It details how they eagerly sent us almost a hundred screenshots of remarks about us from the ‘moderated’ Failbetter Discord, because they knew the many nasty ones would upset us. (They didn’t ask consent of any of the people making those remarks, or tell them about it. If you said anything about me on the Failbetter Discord before March 2020, I’m afraid Failbetter harvested it and sent it to me personally, though I probably haven’t read it.) It describes how when I asked for my own photos, they inexplicably sent me photos with clear, unredacted images of literally every female employee from my time at the company, including the one they pretended I’d ‘abused‘, and ignored our incredulous query about that. (Failbetter didn’t ask their employees’ consent or tell them about it, either.)

‘Lottie Bevan and I made a Subject Access Request follow-up to Failbetter Games on Friday 12th June 2020. In the early hours of Monday 15th June 2020 we both began to receive anonymous, threatening, violent, sexualized emails. These emails included clear references to information in our DSAR follow-up message.’

I wouldn’t often recommend you read a colour-coded spreadsheet, but this one is astonishing. Have a scroll through. The appendix about their CEO rooting through Lottie’s email exchanges with other Failbetter employees, so he can snoop on them too, is particularly unsettling.

…

HOW FAILBETTER RETALIATES

After I left Failbetter, they used the likeness of my little girl on a Steam trading card without my permission. Here’s me trying to get them to replace her image with something else. Her grandmother and mother both wanted the image removed too. Failbetter refused, and the very next week, two execs retweeted a new and horrible smear that I’m a paedophile. They later deleted it – perhaps from some vestigial impulse of decency, perhaps just concern that it might be actionable.

Six months later, Failbetter are still refusing. The ICO upheld our complaint, after requesting a signed letter of authorisation from my daughter herself (she’s twelve now) but that didn’t work either. I don’t know how far down the rabbit hole someone has to go before they think this is okay, no matter what beef they have with a kid’s family. Failbetter have also established a nasty precedent: if you back a Failbetter Kickstarter at a level that allowed you to get your likeness in the game, it’s now their property and they will refuse to remove it.

“Your client is claiming that the inconvenience of replacing one of several hundred images in a seven-year-old game outweighs the rights and freedoms of a little girl and her family. My daughter is as yet unaware of your client’s paedophilia smear and of their highly specialised fantasy of targeted post-mortem defecation, but she is an Internet user who knows my name. As and when she stumbles across these or other accusations, I hope I can rely on Wiggin to explain to her why her face still appears in this company’s products.”

[Just as I was writing this post, the ICO had a letter from Failbetter. They are changing their story again for the ICO’s benefit. Among other things, they’ve started claiming it’s impractical to remove my kid’s image because Failbetter no longer develops software for iOS.]

…

FAILBETTER’S CRIMINAL NEGLIGENCE

For years now, it’s been the two of us against a multi-million-pound business. The imbalance has made them careless and arrogant. They have the money; they have the power; they thought our reputation was so sullied by the false accusations they endorsed back in 2019 that no-one would ever listen to us. If you’re wondering, as you might well be, “what the hell is their problem?”, I talk about some likely motivations here – but the short version is they had a CEO with a crush on Lottie, grudges against us both, and a lot to hide.

So they’ve heedlessly let the evidence pile up. They think they’re invulnerable. They might even be right. More about that in a moment. But first: why are we making a noise about it now?

We posted last year about the more public attacks, and about Failbetter’s refusal to allow an investigation or to meet us for mediation. As soon as we did that, the public attacks stopped as if a tap had been turned off. As with a tap, there’s still the occasional drip; but Failbetter couldn’t, and didn’t, deny anything we’d said in that post. They wouldn’t even give a comment to the press. After that, no-one who was paying attention could really believe they were credible.

But behind the scenes, Failbetter stepped up the pressure. In the last post, I described how we unexpectedly tripped over the silliest plot twist ever: that I still legally own Failbetter. Instead of using that to go on the attack, we naively let Failbetter know about it as a show of good faith, back last year when we were pleading for mediation and investigation. Unfortunately that just made them aggressive. We started getting letters about it, trying to pressure me (and my mother!!) to sign documents of dubious legality.  Let me be really clear. I didn’t chase them about the company ownership issue. I let it go. They wouldn’t.

Eventually it came down to a conversation between their and our lawyers, and here’s where it’s got interesting. Lawyers, like Le Guin’s dragons, might misdirect but won’t actually lie. So their lawyers admitted, repeatedly, in writing and on the record, that actually yes, because of Failbetter’s criminal negligence, I’m the legal owner of Failbetter Games Ltd.

…

FAILBETTER’S LEGAL BULLYING

This meant they had to change their line of attack. They now agree I do own the company, but also claim that I signed a contract, back in 2016, which commits me to selling the shares. This contract was actually drafted, but because we were all on very good terms back then, we never got to the final signature version (this is part of the reason the sale of my shares failed). After a whole year, and a complaint upheld by the Information Commissioner, they still can’t produce a signed copy of the contract, even though they still insist one exists somewhere (the suggestion is that it fell down the back of a filing cabinet, or into a shredder). They do keep hopefully sending us a Word document that they say they definitely printed out and I definitely signed. To be fair, although the title of this document seems a little fluid, it always includes the word final:

But whatever the title is on any given Tuesday, it also always includes tracked revision requests from Failbetter asking for further edits. They evidently hoped we wouldn’t notice that, and have been unable to come up with an explanation for it.

The last threatening lawyers’ letter announced, quite explicitly, that they’re going to sue me. They didn’t specify what they’re going to sue me for, and after three months the lawsuit has failed to materialise. So it looks like a SLAPP to intimidate us – again, shades of the Cadwalladr case, where this kind of intimidation is the next escalation after harassment. But every day for the last three months we’ve had to worry that this might be the day we get served.

So it was the last straw for us. We won’t be bullied any more and we can’t live in fear like this. We’ve spent those three months putting everything in this post together.

…

SURVIVING FAILBETTER

The next steps: the publication of this information, and one final attempt to have a reasonable conversation. I’m requesting that they call an extraordinary general meeting of the company to resolve the situation. As directors in dispute with the majority shareholder, the Failbetter execs should hold that meeting and work things out with me. It won’t be much fun for either side, but it’s clearly the right thing for me and them to do. I have to try.

But we tried to appeal to their better natures last year.  It didn’t work then. And the idea of any of those execs having the guts to look Lottie in the eye, and say the same things to her in person that they have over email – that’s almost funny. Here, then, is what I think will actually happen next.

Failbetter will read this. They’ll ask their lawyers: can we get away with this? Their lawyers will say: it’ll cost some money, but probably. So probably, they’ll ignore the general meeting request, maybe even send us another threat. They’ll dare us to sue them. Fallen London is still printing money. They can outspend us in the courts.

The games press will read this. Some of them will have pangs of conscience when they remember how they printed the rumours in 2019. But it’s too complicated and low-profile a story to get clicks. If Lottie or I were properly famous – if Failbetter were less ready with the legal threats – if we had some ham, we could have ham and eggs, if we had some eggs. Failbetter have shown more than once how effectively they can wield a Twitter mob. I wouldn’t go up against them if I could avoid it. A few of the smaller sites might print something. The rest will pass. Failbetter will be counting on that.

The Information Commissioner’s Office will continue to pursue Failbetter. Failbetter will keep on fighting a rear-guard action and paying lawyers. Finally, when they’ve made it as difficult as possible for us, they’ll grudgingly make enough concessions to pacify the ICO. If my daughter and I are lucky, they might even take her picture out of Sunless Sea.

This article will sit on the web like a scar, and every so often someone will happen across it and send us a sympathetic mail. Or send Failbetter a disappointed one. A Failbetter staffer will read the mail, feel briefly conflicted, remember what their management does to troublemakers, and quietly close the ticket without saying anything. From time to time, one of their execs will retweet something viral about how shameful it is when studios deny credit to ex-employees. “Like Lottie Bevan,” someone will ask, “or Alexis Kennedy?” The exec will snort indignantly and block them.

But with any luck, the publication of this information will deter future attacks. All we can realistically hope for at this point is that Failbetter will leave us alone.  I do think now that we can realistically hope for that.  So I can’t give you a happy ending, but I can give you an upside.

They really tried to end us. They’ve been trying for years. We were outnumbered and out-resourced. They hijacked and perverted the #MeToo movement at its height. They shredded our reputation and they drove away our team. Dealing with their lies, their threats, and their harassment has been like a second job. But we’re still here. We are going to go right on making games and books and tarot and stupid cat tweets. We don’t have to win. We just have to survive. On a good day, making art with people you love is as good as it gets.

‘Go scorched earth,’ the peanut gallery once advised me. I’m not doing that. This is the real world, not Twitter. Real people, real lives, real consequences. People who cry, lose their temper, fight with their friends, hug their kids. It’s been difficult to remember that sometimes, these last few years, but it’s true, of the execs at Failbetter just as much as it’s true of me and Lottie. When all this is done, whatever the outcome, we have to live with each other in the world we’ve made, and you can’t log off from the world. Or at least, not twice.

“At Failbetter, there are no bad apples.”

Narrative Director Chris Gardiner said these words to me over a plate of sushi in 2017. It was our one and only lunch together – Failbetter’s content team didn’t particularly get on with Failbetter’s production department, for reasons anyone who’s ever worked in games can imagine. But Chris, being a genial guy, wanted to improve the relationship, so invited me to the Japanese restaurant around the corner one sunny Thursday afternoon.

He was right. There are no bad apples at Failbetter, because there are no such things as good or bad people. There are just people, doing people-y things. People can be kind and thoughtful and people can be spiteful and poisonous. Some people can be all four of those things in one conversation. I happened across a Reddit comment years ago by one Failbetter board member sweetly supporting a couple going through IVF treatment. Years later, this same executive retweeted a man suggesting, out of nowhere, that AK was a paedophile. At Failbetter, just like everywhere else, there are just apples.

Over the last two years I’ve tried desperately to get my old company to talk to me so we can resolve a bizarre and unprofessional dispute played out for the titillation of the good apples of Twitter. “We’d like to resolve the issues between us amicably and professionally,” I wrote to the Failbetter board in March 2021. “We’re confident that you would, too.” Six months later, I found myself writing things like this:

“I’d like it on record that this is the third time you‘ve ignored complaints by a woman in games about her continued bullying and harassment, and the continued sabotage of her business, by Failbetter employees.”

By October – after several more disappointing rebuffs – it was clear Failbetter did not want to resolve the issues between us amicably and professionally, and were committed to selective blindness over the more difficult parts of our correspondence. These were bits where I said annoying things like please could you stop destroying my company and oh, all right, if you really must continue to smear me in public, perhaps you could let me know why. I finally realised no amount of emails, however genuine or compelling, would convince my ex-company to talk to me. So I turned to a legal employment tribunal claim, the process specifically set up to fix unpleasant and complex employee-employer disputes. This, I thought, would do it. This would force them to realise how much they’d hurt me, and they’d finally stop. There are no bad apples at Failbetter Games.

Reader, I was a moron. Failbetter didn’t want to talk to me over email and they certainly didn’t want to talk to me as respondent in a tribunal. Instead, they spent several thousand pounds instructing Wiggin LLP, their expensive corporate lawyers, to threaten to sue me. Wiggin suggested that when I said that lots of men kept getting promoted and women kept leaving because they weren’t, I was being ‘vexatious’. They declared that when I said Failbetter’s repeated behaviour had made me consider suicide, I was being ‘unreasonable’. Lawyers, amirite?

In this case, as in so many, the lawyers won. My claim hinged on convincing a judge to extend the usual time frame for bringing a tribunal, because my claims ranged over such a long period. I had a 50/50 chance, and those weren’t good enough odds to risk being sued for all I was worth by Wiggin LLP. So Failbetter successfully killed a woman’s tribunal claim against them for sexism and bullying by paying big lawyers big money. So it goes.

Failbetter recently told us they’re going to sue us again, in another attempt to bully us into doing something else – this time, helping them out of their own defective paperwork. So I’d now like to share my tribunal claim with you, to get it out in the open where it would have been if Wiggin hadn’t threatened me into withdrawing it. (All completed tribunal claims in the UK are posted to a public government website, alongside their outcomes, for all to see.)

Having tried every other approach at my disposal – polite emails, GDPR requests, tribunal claims, press interviews – I’ve failed utterly to get Failbetter to engage with their treatment of women in games. In one of our earliest emails – all the way back in July 2020 – they talked about “the wider #MeToo movement”,  “the importance of the gaming industry coming to terms” with poor behaviour, and their “determination to play our part in putting things right”. So I’m sure they understand.

Please read my redacted tribunal in full, or the summary below, and tell me if I’m being – as Wiggin LLP suggests – unreasonable.

Tribunal claims against Failbetter Games

1. I was discriminated against on the grounds of sex.

This includes instances where senior male staff privately discussed whether or not I had been ‘flirtatious’ at a Christmas party, where board members wished to eject difficult women from the company, where managers recoiled from ‘gendered’ pay rise requests from women, where the CEO (not AK!) publicly belittled me when he could, and where men are promoted multiple times and women leave because they never are.

You can read the details in the first half of my tribunal claim. If you don’t have the time, here’s an example.

“Since 2015, five men have been promoted, one of them several times:

• ████████ was promoted from Deputy CEO to CEO in or around July 2016
• ████████ was promoted from Analyst to Analytics Director in or around July 2016, to Deputy CEO in or around October 2017 and to CEO in or around March 2019
  
• ████████ was promoted from Head Writer to Director of Narrative in or around July 2016
  
• ████████ was promoted from Artist to Senior Artist in or around May 2018
• ████████ was promoted from Writer to Senior Writer in or around October 2021.

In the same time frame, three women have chosen to leave after frustration at the lack of advancement:

• myself in December 2017
• ████████ ████████ in February 2019
• ████████ ████████ in September 2021, who wrote publicly that ‘there isn’t much room to change roles, especially upwards’.

A fourth woman was made redundant after accusing the company of sexism (████████ ████████) in January 2018… In redundancy meetings in January 2018, ████████ ████████ accused Failbetter of sexism and discrimination, particularly singling ████████ out as discriminatory towards women. ████████ was made redundant and no investigation was made into her allegations.”

2. Malicious bullying, harassment and unfair process; indirect discrimination against women, in contravention of the Equality Act 2010; failure to take action or investigate grievances, in contravention of the Acas Code of Practice.

This claim is much more wide-ranging, and includes instances where Failbetter employees spread rumours about me while I was still at the company, where Failbetter’s CEO (still not AK!) published a blog about my sex life without my consent, which was then used to lobby Creative Europe to give my €150k funding to Failbetter Games, where Failbetter sent me threatening copies of my own articles from Wireframe, where Failbetter appear to be encouraging the bonkers stalker who sends us weird emails from time to time about bombs and bones, and where Failbetter have repeatedly refused to engage with any of the complaints I’ve made to them about their – for want of a better word – piss-poor treatment of women in games. I’m beginning to think they’re not so determined to play their part in putting things right, after all.

You can read all the detail in the second part of my tribunal claim. If it’s too much, here’s an illustrative extract:

“In a one-on-one meeting in September 2017, I told my manager, ████████ ████████, that I was concerned that two Failbetter Games employees (████████ ████████ and ████████ ████████) were spreading false and malicious rumours about me. ████████ had already suggested I be asked to leave and refused to discuss her concerns and, as a member of the board, had a direct impact on my job.

████████ told me not to worry and did nothing else. There was no mention of Failbetter’s bullying policy, if they had one, and no investigation or further action was taken… These unaddressed rumours ultimately contributed to my decision to leave Failbetter Games in December 2017.”

The aftermath

Failbetter never responded. But, as you know, their lawyers did. I can’t share Wiggin’s letter for reasons of copyright infringement (law be cray), but here’s a quote from it that stuck with me: “following an orchestrated and sustained assault that you have administered against the Respondent… [there is] little doubt your claim has been made unreasonably, disruptively and vexatiously”.

The orchestrated and sustained assault in question seems to be that I sent them several GDPR requests for things like my own HR records, and that I emailed them privately suggesting there were alternative and possibly more effective ways to resolve problems than shouting at people on Twitter. “I’d like it on record that I reject in the strongest possible terms your suggestion that any part of my conduct is ‘vexatious, disruptive and unreasonable,” I emailed Wiggin back, disruptively. “I’d like to draw your attention to this section of my claim:

The unsubstantiated rumours repeatedly promoted by Failbetter, their refusal to address them when they were raised when I was an employee, their hostile tone over emails, and their repeated disregard for fair process or reasonable response have been utterly devastating to my life. I considered suicide in late 2019… because of the frustration, humiliation and injustice I have received from the actions of Failbetter Games.”

To this, I received no response at all.

Kind, spiteful, thoughtful, poisonous

What would you do if you received a complaint from a woman? What if she said it constructively in a one-on-one? What if politely over email? What if you were notified of an official employment tribunal, and a nice Scottish man phoned you up from Acas to discuss their free, semi-mandatory arbitration service to resolve issues with minimal fuss and unpleasantness?

What would a kind, progressive, benevolent company who cared about women do, if a female employee complained of mistreatment? What if she said their actions had really damaged her life? Most would investigate her claims. Some might apologise. Others might ask if they could discuss it informally over coffee, like humans. Alternatively, they could hire expensive lawyers to block information requests, suppress employment tribunals and threaten repeatedly to sue her. Wait.

Failbetter are cynically taking advantage of public trust, trading as progressive defenders of women in public while happily bulldozing the reputations and stifling the careers of women they don’t like in private. I’ve tried to get them to stop for years, but they won’t. If there’s one person who could stop it, it’s the guy in charge, Failbetter CEO Adam Myers. But he’s involved in several instances in my tribunal, accused of sexism and bullying by others as well as me, and has mysteriously been my only point of contact at the company while trying to resolve these issues. I repeatedly asked to speak to one of the four other directors because of the obvious inappropriateness of talking to him. He repeatedly refused, and the other directors repeatedly ignored my emails.

I’ve amassed so much evidence since 2019: emails, screenshots, GDPR results from nearly thirty institutions, the independent Failbetter Report which digs into the nauseating stats of a bullshit Twitter cancellation, where Failbetter employees account for nearly a quarter of thousands of vile and baseless tweets… It throws into sharp relief the echoing void of evidence around the nastiness levelled at AK and myself. My claim against Failbetter Games is a detailed and documented issue going back for years, and I’m happy to share that documentation with any investigators who ask. In contrast, the idea that AK behaved badly while CEO of Failbetter Games – or the later escalation that I’m a criminal “enabler of serial sexual abuse” (!) – has no evidence behind it at all. Nothing journalists could find at the time, nothing widespread GDPR unearthed since, and nothing Failbetter Games could produce since AK founded the company way back in 2009. All we actually have is Failbetter paying thousands of pounds to hush things up, Failbetter knowingly misleading their community about us, and – inexplicably! – spikes of Twitter vitriol that map directly onto our commercial successes.

I don’t remember what sushi we ate at that sunny lunch in 2017, but I can’t forget what Chris said. I wish Failbetter would take the issues above seriously and prove him right. Because despite all the nastiness, there really are no bad apples at Failbetter Games. Not when AK was there, not when I was there, and not now. There are just people, doing people-y things. Kind, spiteful, thoughtful, poisonous. Every morning, people at Failbetter wake up and choose who to be.

The sea frightens me. I know I’m not alone in this.

It frightens me for numerous reasons. One is just that the sea is bigger than anything else on the planet, and it contains any number of hungry, poisonous or simply revolting creatures. Another is that I saw Jaws at an impressionable age. A third is that, because of the first two, I’m not a particularly strong swimmer.

A fourth reason is that on the 25th of June, 1973, a little before midnight, my father flew his Phantom FGR.2 fighter-jet into the North Sea. He evidently didn’t do this on purpose, but because neither he nor his navigator survived, the details remain unclear. Much of the aircraft was recovered, but their bodies never were.

I was a year and a half old at the time, and I have no memories of him or of the event, but I think it’s safe to say that it had an influence on my development. When I decided to make a game about a black sea which eats captains, where death is telegraphed as the likely end of every voyage – even when I decided that one of the core story-lines was about the recovery and disposition of the protagonist’s lost father’s bones – none of this was at the front of my mind. I caught on pretty quickly, though. I think I slapped my forehead and went ‘GAH’.

Sunless Sea is not a tribute to my father, nor is it an autobiographical game. But the writing is influenced by my experience, and some of the themes are important to me. It’s one of the reasons I’m scared of the sea, and that’s one of the reasons that the Unterzee is such a menacing place. It’s the reason that the core story-line is about a father’s bones, not a generic mentor’s or parent’s bones. It’s why The Tempest and Peter Grimes stay with me, although I’ve never lived by the sea, and why you’ll find fragments of them here and there throughout the game.

A player tweeted me yesterday and asked if a Fallen London dream-card called ‘Night Flight’, about a dirigible crash, was a tribute to flight QZ8501, the AirAsia flight on which 162 people died last week. It wasn’t, because it was written several years ago. I don’t really have any insight into the pain of the people who lost someone on that flight, or on MH370, earlier this year; as I said, I have no memories of my father’s death. But if by an unlikely chance you’re one of those people and you ever read this, you have my sincere and heartfelt sympathy. Pain fades with the years; I hope you find yours survivable.

I’m casting about for a conclusion to an unusually personal post. I think I want to say that death is the only thing that everyone experiences – the only universal. Parenthood isn’t, the love of parents isn’t, even birth isn’t. I think one of the most important things that stories do is prepare us for our death, and for the death of others. I think that goes double for games. I think that death and the sea are hungry, but that doesn’t mean we have to wait for them to come to us. In the meantime, we’re alive. Happy New Year.

I’m Alexis Kennedy. I run a tiny video game studio, Weather Factory, with my partner, Lottie Bevan. In August 2019, Lottie and I were cancelled on Twitter. Our networks were destroyed, our business was devastated, our mental health was shredded… you know this story. Everyone who’s heard of us knows this story. But very few people have seen what’s been going on behind the scenes since then.

Our cancellation, bluntly, was an intentional attack on us by a larger competitor. In an unusual turn of events, this was a studio I had founded, run for seven years, and had then left on very good terms in 2016: Failbetter Games.

We mentioned this obliquely last year, but we didn’t name Failbetter, and we didn’t go into the details. Initially, we were hoping that if we didn’t provoke them, they would leave us alone. Later, we’ve been hoping that we might be able to resolve the issue by talking to them. That may sound absurdly high-minded. It was actually pretty pragmatic. Let me explain why.

When you get cancelled, it’s like someone’s detonated a dirty bomb in your personal life. It wrecks everything, and then it leaves a lingering contamination for years. We’ve been dealing with this contamination and trying to rebuild our lives. Most people who were involved in our cancellation have moved on, or realised it’s A Bit More Complicated, or even emailed us to apologise. Unfortunately, Failbetter, with backing vocals from what I might diplomatically describe as ‘a determined rump of enthusiasts’, won’t leave us alone. There’s a constant patter of background nastiness, and every time we have a small success, they come back and have another go.

But it has also become apparent to us that there was never any kind of master plan. It’s just stupid beef with the management over there – based partially, we think, on genuine misunderstandings about what’s going on. So we hoped that maybe we could deal with this like adults. We knew that a lot of the information circulating on social media was false; so we sent Failbetter a GDPR request to try to get hold of the data from our personal records that would disprove it. They refused to give us that data (and called us names, and made a couple of legal threats).

We gave it some time. The attacks kept coming. So we mailed Failbetter again, as politely as we could. We proposed that both sides attend formal mediation – especially because we reckoned by that point there were some genuine misunderstandings. They refused, again.

We also proposed that I submit to a formal third-party investigation into the allegations, and that I abide by the findings and make amends if anything came out of it. (We offered to pay half the costs.) The allegations were about my time at Failbetter, so we can’t do that without their co-operation. They refused that, too.

All this has taken more than a year, and it’s left us at an impasse. We’ve been trying to address the allegations in private. But the people who made the allegations won’t let us. And because the allegations haven’t been publicly put to bed, we still get periodically monstered.

So we’re going public. We mentioned some of this in an interview last month, but here for the first time is the whole story.

Let me start with an email we sent Failbetter four months ago, in March. My annotations in [square brackets].

from: lottie@weatherfactory.biz

Thu, Mar 18, 9:59 AM

Dear Adam, Chris, Emily, Hannah, Henry and Paul,

[The management of Failbetter and, broadly speaking, the owners of Failbetter. Adam is the CEO these days.]

Alexis and I are writing to you in the hopes of resolving the difficult relationship between our two companies. We were greatly distressed at the concerns raised on social media in August 2019 and in correspondence with yourselves in July 2020. We’d like to give both companies an opportunity to discuss and resolve those concerns in a professional and respectful way.

[July 2020 was our GDPR request.]

We were saddened that no one spoke to us, during or after our time at Failbetter, as we’re confident that open and honest communication is key to resolving the issues between us. With that in mind, we’d like to suggest one or both of the following:

– Mediation between Weather Factory and Failbetter Games, where all issues of concern can be discussed with the objective of reaching some common ground. We’d suggest involving the Failbetter board, ourselves, and any Failbetter employee who would like to attend. We’d also suggest splitting the mediator’s fees between our two companies.

– An independent employment investigation into Alexis’s conduct during his time as CEO of Failbetter Games. We would of course abide by the findings of such an investigation. Again, we’d suggest splitting investigative costs equally between Weather Factory and Failbetter Games.

We’d like to resolve the issues between us amicably and professionally – we’re confident that you would, too. We believe that meeting to discuss the issues in good faith is the best way to move forward.

Our memory of Failbetter Games is of a good company that cares about its people. As such, we’re sure you’re as keen to end the tensions as we are. Please let us know if you’d like to go ahead with mediation or an employment investigation and we can get started. We look forward to a peaceful resolution and happier years to come.

Sincerely,

Alexis and Lottie

A month passed, and finally, we got a brief negative response from Adam. He did only call me one bad name, and didn’t make any legal threats. Righto, we thought, that’s progress, sort of.

So for another three months, we engaged in a correspondence of sorts – largely us expanding on the offer of mediation or investigation, and Adam repeatedly giving us the brush-off. We also got a couple of desultory social media attacks from other Failbetter employees, though more because they were bored than because of our mails, I think.

We weren’t really getting anywhere… but we had stumbled across something unexpected. Here the story goes from ‘basically nutso’ to ‘implausible in a film script’.

Here comes the science bit

I founded Failbetter; and by the time I decided to leave, I still owned most of the company. This made things complicated, so I made sure of a clean break by selling my shares to the company. I was a bloody hippie idiot and I wanted to make sure everyone’s jobs were safe. So I sold the shares for a fraction of their value – about 15% of what I could have reasonably asked for. (You can check the numbers yourself at Companies House.) It was still around 360K GBP – not much for selling a multi-million-pound business, but far more than I’d ever expected to see in my personal bank account, so it’s not like I walked away empty-handed.

I had also created the original IP for Fallen London, both technical and creative, in my bedroom, a half a year before I ever founded Failbetter. I’d never got around to assigning it formally to the company. So when I left, we made sure (with my enthusiastic co-operation) that the possibly-complicated IP rights would be assigned to Failbetter in my severance contract.

Now the plot twist.

(i) The laws on this kind of thing in the UK are extremely strict. Failbetter didn’t follow those laws, and so the contract they gave me to sign was illegal and void. I didn’t realise this, because I trusted everyone completely and I didn’t take legal advice (I know, I know).  [EDIT: I was never permitted to see the legal advice that the Failbetter board received, which in hindsight I really should have worried about.] When Lottie and I, much later, stumbled across this, we checked with a fancy corporate lawyer who said, yup yup, the buyback seems to be defective.

(ii) But here’s the kicker… the contract was never actually executed. I queried a few of the details on the day I left (like giving up my moral rights as author), and my co-founder and I agreed to come back to it later. Then we never got around to completing the process (because good terms, total trust, etc). I forgot this. For years, I forgot this. But when I looked a few months ago, I didn’t have a signed contract, and when we pestered them, Failbetter eventually grudgingly admitted they didn’t either.

So (fancy corporate lawyer has confirmed), I’m still probably, technically the legal owner of Failbetter; and their rights to their core technical and creative IP are shaky. Also, everyone still on the board of Failbetter might be guilty of a corporate crime that carries a two-year prison sentence. Possibly me too. (I also owe Failbetter 360K GBP – about a half-million USD – which is more of a bummer).

This is what you and I would call a giant rolling ball of clusterfuck for everyone involved, and what expensive lawyers call ‘interesting’. If Failbetter decided to fight, it would need to be resolved in court. I’ll be honest, I have been rather tempted to go that route – surprise attack!! – but at this point, above all, Lottie and I just want our lives back. So we just shared everything we’d learnt with Failbetter, as a show of good faith, and suggested we fix the issue together as part of a mediation process.

Unfortunately, as soon as Failbetter realised what we knew, they stopped replying to our emails entirely. I assume they were embarrassed, and I assume they were concerned about what I might do. I think the original situation was an honest mistake (‘criminal negligence’ if you’re feeling uncharitable) but I sometimes wonder how long they’ve known about it. Regardless, it needs sorting out, and it needs sorting out sharpish (see ‘giant rolling ball of clusterfuck’ above).

A week ago, we sent them this final email. My annotations, again, are in [square brackets].

from: lottie@weatherfactory.biz

Mon, July 19th, 9:54 AM

Dear Adam, Chris, Emily, Hannah, Henry and Paul,

We’ve been trying to resolve the dispute between Failbetter Games and Weather Factory since March. It’s now July, and we haven’t had a response since the critical issue with Alexis’s severance contract was identified.

This is something both sides are legally required to fix, so the situation is now quite urgent. Additionally, as we pointed out in March, neither side has a full picture of everything that’s happened. Mediation is the most reasonable way to address this. We can’t force you to talk if you don’t want to, but this is our last attempt to convey why it’s vital that we do.

Below are the most urgent points that need to be addressed. We might have the wrong end of the stick with some of them: if so, please explain the situation so we can let them go or otherwise resolve them. It’s possible that not everyone on the board knew about all these issues: if so, it should be relatively easy to iron them out. Here goes.

1. In August 2019, @failbettergames on Twitter endorsed some false, and very serious, accusations about Alexis. Publicly available evidence later contradicted those accusations. We’d like to understand what Failbetter’s official position is, and to give you an opportunity to disassociate the company from statements that have turned out to be false.

2. Your official accounts have been silent since then, but some of your employees have continued to attack us personally. Sometimes they’ve been explicit that they’re speaking personally, but later walked that back and suggested they’re speaking officially. Candidly, either the accusations are real or they’re frivolous. If they’re real, we want to address them and, if appropriate, make amends. If frivolous, your employees should withdraw them.

[Through back channels, I’ve learnt that the @failbettergames tweets weren’t exactly officially sanctioned. They went out at half ten at night, UK time, when Paul Arendt, my original co-founder at Failbetter and still the most senior director, was out of the UK, on holiday and off the internet. Someone with access to the account apparently took the opportunity to stick the knife in, before the board could discuss properly.

That put them in a tricky situation, as their lawyers apparently pointed out to them. They were legally exposed, but if they deleted the original tweets that would be an admission that they’d lied. So they just never mentioned it officially again, ever, at all… although either through poor message discipline, or because management was turning a blind eye, some of their employees did.

‘explicit that they’re speaking personally, but later walked that back and suggested they’re speaking officially’ – in particular, a bizarre post by Adam Myers, which is sometimes unofficial and sometimes official depending on who’s asking and whether they might have spoken to a lawyer lately. More on this in a mo.]

3. Last year, when we secured funding for our next game, senior employees endorsed a Twitter drive to get that funding withdrawn. Failbetter’s position seems to be that we shouldn’t be allowed to receive funding and/or that we shouldn’t be allowed to continue making games. Please clarify things, if we’ve misunderstood – or we can discuss in mediation.

4. Some of your employees made and/or endorsed insults and untruths about Lottie. You know that there was never a complaint or concern raised about her conduct or character, and we suspect she comes in for a drubbing because of her continued association with Alexis. Please either confirm that Failbetter thinks this behaviour is acceptable, or ask your employees to apologise and stop.

5. You’ve given Lottie cause for serious complaint about the way she was treated as an employee – especially after Alexis’s departure. For instance, you repeatedly assured her that her relationship with Alexis wasn’t a problem, but later claimed it was evidence of Alexis’s professional misconduct; you also did nothing to address the concerns that she’d raised about Adam’s behaviour toward her. Again, if Failbetter is sincere about protecting women in the industry, this needs further discussion.

[If you don’t know the circs, this sounds a bit like Lottie’s accusing Adam of sexual misconduct, which, to be clear, she isn’t. But if you skim the bizarre post I mentioned above, you can draw your own conclusions. The post is about 20% disingenuous, 20% outright dishonest and 40% sanctimonious hogwash, but that leaves 20% residual truth. So it is indeed true that he saw me and Lottie flirting – flirting consensually! not even kissing! – at the Christmas party. It’s also true that he was so enraged that he fired off a rambling complaint about it to the second most senior person in the company, immediately before he disappeared on holiday for two weeks, without talking to either me or Lottie first.

Which put me in a pretty weird position when he got back, let me tell you. And Lottie, who didn’t like male colleagues discussing her personal life without talking to her first, in a weirder one. Adam and I did have a meeting, although the way he describes it is – how shall I put this?- ‘inspired by a true story’. One of the bits he left out is this: I told him that Lottie didn’t like men talking about her sex life behind her back, that it was her and my business, but if he had any questions he should address them to her. He never did, but evidently he hasn’t stopped talking about her sex life either.]

6. When we requested personal data under GDPR, you refused to provide it. When we pointed out that a senior manager at Failbetter had intentionally leaked our personal data, you dismissed our concerns. We’ve already had one complaint upheld by the Information Commissioner’s Office, but we’re holding off on the more serious complaint in the hope that we can address it in mediation.

[The ‘senior manager’ was Adam, obviously. In the Medium post I linked above, he’d fudged up some ‘receipts’ to smear both Lottie and me. Our GDPR request included things like our HR records, our chat logs, and our emails, which we knew would disprove his claims. (And the notes that I wrote up of that meeting, though I think he had a fair argument that this was mixed personal data.) Not entirely surprisingly, he wouldn’t hand any of it over.

But we also complained about the way Adam, specifically, had treated our personal data, because most companies would be less gung-ho about selectively and misleadingly leaking the HR records of a junior female employee. Adam blew us off there, too. The surreal thing is that he kept answering on Failbetter’s behalf, and we never got a reply from anyone else. I assume he doesn’t actually have the rest of them locked in a cupboard over there, but that was rather the vibe.]

7. In 2017, you told Alexis that due to an accounting error he was still owed a substantial sum in unpaid dividends. He asked you to donate it to a specified charity. The donation was never made, and when he raised the matter, you refused to explain why. We need to sort this out.

[The ‘substantial sum’ was 1043 GBP – about 1400 USD – which is either a hell of a lot, or an accounting blip, depending on where you’re standing. I think Failbetter forgot to make the donation and then, when I asked them about it three years later, were embarrassed, and tried to bury the matter. Still needs sorting out.]

8. One or more senior Failbetter employees appear to have intentionally passed sensitive information to Alexis’s stalker. They must have been aware that she would use this information to further her harassment of both Alexis and Lottie. We’ve asked for some remaining personal data (e.g. scans of our passports) to be deleted, and you’ve refused those requests. This has to stop.

[This is nearly, but not quite, as bad as it sounds. For at least three years, Lottie and I have had a stalker. She appears to be the person behind the @abuseindustry account that kicked all this off in August 2019. She’s posted my personal data and pictures of my house (my old place: we keep our address confidential these days), tried ineptly to hack our site, and bombarded us with malignant nonsense via social media and email in a style I would describe as “Enraged English Lit Undergrad”. Some examples further down.

The one saving grace – the reason I say ‘very nearly as bad’ – is that Failbetter might not know everything our stalker has been doing, and might think that they’ve been cosying up to a genuinely injured innocent, rather than a poisonous nut-job.]

9. A Failbetter employee seems to have subverted the BAFTA jury process in March 2019. At the same time, Failbetter began removing Alexis’s name from blog posts and other credits, including Fallen London and Sunless Skies. Alexis’s work (including a very personal post about the death of his father) is now presented as the work of later hires.

[re: subversion. This was Olivia Wood, on the Best Narrative Game jury. To explain: before you can be on a BAFTA jury, you have to sign a statement declaring that you don’t have any conflicts of interest that might prevent you from being fair and unbiased. For instance, if one of the shortlisted games was made by a man who jilted you, and the woman he jilted you for…. people you’re still so angry with that you spearhead a cancellation campaign against them six months later.

I might never had known about any of this. But in another odd twist of fate, I was originally on the BAFTA Best Narrative Game jury, and I had to recuse myself because of a conflict of interest, when I found out Cultist was on the shortlist. (We did get two other nominations, for the other two categories we’d been shortlisted for, which would have added to the frustration for Olivia and for anyone else at Failbetter she’s told.)

UPDATE! we’ve been discussing with BAFTA, and they want me to correct this. They say ‘[…]we have looked into this and concluded that the jury process was followed and that the outcome of the voting was conclusive and not impacted.’ They have been coy about the details, but as far as we can make out, Olivia told BAFTA that she and I had a former romantic relationship, but assured them this wouldn’t affect her judgement, and didn’t say anything about any ‘abuse’. They okayed her involvement on that basis.

On balance, I think this is likely true. I think Olivia didn’t claim ‘abuse’ to BAFTA, because there hadn’t been any. In which case there was no subversion of the jury process. In which case, of course, she was obviously lying four months later when she claimed I’d ‘abused’ her four years previously. In either case, Failbetter has some explaining to do.

re: the removal from credits. The WayBack Machine confirms that Failbetter took my and Lottie’s names off the blog posts the same week as the jury. Perhaps Olivia went through and removed the blog attributions herself; perhaps she broke BAFTA confidentiality rules and told someone else there, and they did it. I guess one is weirder and one is worse.

I’m not sure about the timing of the credits removal. The Sunless Skies thing is more funny than annoying, honestly, since I didn’t actually work on it. I started up the top, with ORIGINAL CONCEPT, and every time I did something to annoy them I got moved further down, until eventually I was just below DEVELOPMENT BABIES, and then I finally disappeared altogether.

The Fallen London thing, on the other hand, I don’t find funny at all. I created the game; it was my first ever commercial project; I worked on it for seven years; you can go through the entire site and not find one reference to me.]

10. You and Alexis are embroiled in a serious legal issue. You presented Alexis with an illegal contract, that contract was never executed, and your CEO has attempted to conceal these facts. This leaves the ownership of the company, and the IP, in dispute. It leaves Failbetter’s directors open to criminal prosecution. It’s essential that we all resolve this as soon as possible, but it’s difficult to do so without addressing the other issues above!

All that was pretty upsetting to set down, so we imagine it’s also upsetting to read. Thank you for taking the time to do so. You almost certainly have points of your own, which, again, we want to listen to and answer in a regulated and respectful mediation session.

Finally, we’d also like to urge you again to join us in conducting a formal, professional third-party investigation into Alexis’s conduct as CEO of Failbetter Games. We expect him to be exonerated, but we must, in good conscience, be open to the possibility that he caused pain that neither one of us saw. We’d commit to abiding by the findings of the investigation and remedying any wrongs. We’re sure you would too.

Here’s hoping the above makes the last two years of unpleasantness clear from our point of view. Let us know if you have any thoughts, and here’s to a happier future.

Yours sincerely,

Lottie and Alexis

Okay, that’s a lot, and we thought it would shake loose a response if anything would. But you know how this works by now: we didn’t get even get a form reply. I rather think they mistook courtesy for cowardice.

It’s very possible that we misunderstood something, and that I’m missing information that would make their actions look reasonable. If so, I’ll update this post with any response that Failbetter cares to send.

The backstory: why the hell even?

Things always get weird after a founder leaves a company. Various Failbetters, some of whom had liked me more than others, were now competitors but had to keep working in the IP I’d built, in the shadow I still cast. (I learnt that one person actually pitched a game internally over there called – I swear to God – Crone Simulator.). Then there were just years of rivalry, gossip, and people not talking to each other.

But we stayed on good terms for a fair while. I had lunch with Paul Arendt (co-founder, then CEO) every month. Failbetter boosted the Cultist Simulator Kickstarter. I was invited to the SUNLESS SKIES Early Access launch party. (‘It’s a very beautiful game’, I told a jittery Paul. ‘You’ll be fine.’)

There was one thing specifically that created the beef; and there was one thing, I think, that pushed them over the edge.

Where it began: the Great Failbetter Purge of December 2017

I’d left all that money in the company to make sure everyone’s jobs were safe. I went and spoke to Paul Arendt, my then friend and former co-founder, in August 2017, to check their jobs were safe.

Paul told me, and management later told everyone, that their jobs were safe.

Then in December management told everyone their jobs weren’t safe, two days before the Christmas party. Which they then cancelled.  Later, they posted a handsome profit for that year. Their biggest ever, I think.

I was incandescent. I wrote an open letter to Paul and to Failbetter, to urge him to look for another way… but I thought it over, and in the end never actually sent it. (It’s remained buried and unsent until now – check the last edited date – but here it is. It’s still a decent summary…. though a couple of my predictions were naïve.)

But then some of the people whose jobs were at risk went to Eurogamer. Eurogamer came to me and asked me about it. I told them what I thought, and I went on the record rather than be an ‘anonymous source’. The other aggrieved employees stayed anonymous, for obvious reasons. (Though many of them, in states of desperation, invited themselves round for Chinese takeaway and sympathy, and specifically asked me for employment advice – in one case, for a bit of emergency contract work so that they wouldn’t have to leave the country. This seems an odd choice for the vulnerable junior staff to make, if I were the abusive tyrant CEO Failbetter have since implied me to be.)

Talking to Eurogamer was a hard decision, but I was faced with a choice between two sets of friends, and I sided with the friends who’d been fucked over. I can see that this whole business must have caused some cognitive dissonance for the Failbetter management, who were evidently coming to terms with maybe not being the good guys on this occasion.

(For fairness, I’ll link here to Failbetter’s account of what happened. It’s a clever PR response and it won them a lot of sympathy… especially since you wouldn’t realise, unless you look closely at the timelines, that it was published before the Eurogamer article, but after Eurogamer had approached them for comment.)

This was the point at which everyone grumpily unfollowed everyone else on the Twitters, and this, I think, was the point at which Lottie and I were marked. For a long time I thought I was being paranoid about this.

Oddly enough, it was Adam Myers who confirmed that I wasn’t being paranoid.

I mentioned above that we requested our personal data under the GDPR. They didn’t give us anything we’d actually wanted, but what they did hand over included two alarming items:

• A PDF of issue 9 of a print magazine, WIREFRAME, for which Lottie was writing a monthly column. They’d only kept issue 9, in which Lottie’s column was about studio layoffs. Read it closely and you’ll notice one sentence halfway down about the Failbetter layoffs, though it doesn’t even actually name Failbetter. This was evidently enough to attract the Eye.

• A chat log from the Cultist Simulator fan Discord, of the one and only time I ever talked about the Eurogamer article in there. So just to be clear, Adam or someone else was lurking in our fan Discord the whole time, just in case, or else combed through the logs to find any possible conversations of interest. Here’s the only conversation they found interesting enough to record.

I wouldn’t absolutely swear to it, but I believe those were the only two times in two years that Lottie and I even mentioned the layoffs in public. We certainly were very close-mouthed about it. I gave an hour-long GDC talk about my experiences running Failbetter, and never said a word on the matter. It was a pretty crawly-back-of-the-neck feeling to see those items in Adam’s response and realise how closely they must have been watching us. I gotta assume that’s why they were sent.

(Hi, Cultist Simulator Discord members! This is one of the reasons you don’t see me in there any more.)

Where it ended: ‘People have killed for less’

In July 2019, we – Weather Factory – got four nominations for the Develop Star Awards. So did Failbetter. Uh oh, you might think. You’d be right.

Lottie and I didn’t go to the awards ceremony. Mostly, we wanted some time alone together and a romantic meal. Partly, honestly, there was clearly beef between us and Failbetter, and whether we did well or badly, we didn’t fancy potentially sitting opposite them dealing with the old stink-eye (or resisting the temptation to stink our own eyes).

Failbetter did go. They turned up en masse. You have to purchase a ticket for everyone you want to bring to an award – that’s how the awards racket works – and it must have cost them a few grand, all told.

As we sat in the restaurant, our phone started pinging like crazy. We kept winning the noms: three out of four, as it turned out, and the press led with us being the ‘big winners’ of the night. One site couldn’t get a picture of me, because I was off eating monkfish curry with Lottie, so they led with my daft Twitter avatar. Our marketing rep had to pick up the plaques for us and make three (apparently very charming) spontaneous speeches.

And Failbetter didn’t win anything. I had mixed feelings the day after. It’s bloody nice to win awards, but I’ve been at a fair few ceremonies when I’ve won nothing, and I know what that’s like too. I could imagine horribly clearly how it must have been to see the targets of one’s beef walk off with all those prizes. I was a little sympathetic… and I was a little worried about what might happen next.

I was right. The following month, we got hit with viral allegations of misconduct tacked on to the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements, scheduled to land on my daughter’s tenth birthday, the week before we launched our long-trailed Kickstarter for BOOK OF HOURS.

BOOK OF HOURS… we had to abandon the Kickstarter. I nearly gave up on the game altogether. But Lottie, with typical determination, secured funding from Creative Europe. But then Twitter, with the enthusiastic endorsement of Failbetter, tried to get Creative Europe to rescind the funding. We had a grim month waiting to see if that would happen.

They didn’t rescind it. We still have the funding. The allegations don’t stand up to any kind of scrutiny. We’re still making the game. But we don’t want to sit around waiting to see what form a third attack might take. That, above all, is why I’m writing this now.

Exhibits from the Museum of the Horrible

I’ve been reasonably polite for most of this post, especially considering the context, but I have spent a lot of the last two years being very cross indeed (non-Brits, plug that into Google Translate for more swears). I’m about to share a few more things with you which I still find very difficult to stomach. So I hope you’ll indulge me, here on the home stretch, if my tone becomes more robust.

Exhibit A from the Museum of the Horrible is this Twitter exchange between one of the loudest voices in the original allegations, and a very well-known and successful male game developer. I do have a little sympathy for Mr Very Well-Known, etc, because he’s plainly terrified out of his mind, and he has, at some point since then, deleted his side of the conversation.

Exhibit B. I also mentioned our stalker. Here’s an excerpt from one of the emails she sent us, a year after the whole cancellation thing. I’ve spared you the whole thing, because good crikey she does go on rather, but you’ll get the idea.

And so on and so on and so on. If you want more, I have you covered.

(‘Leaping Jesus!’, remarks Lottie. She hadn’t seen all of that.)

Exhibit C. Here’s that blog post Lottie mentioned in the Failbetter letter – the one about how the death of my father influenced Sunless Sea.

As Lottie also mentioned in the letter, it’s not credited to me any more. I comprehend, though I abhor, the temptation to take people’s name off game credits – either because you don’t like them or because you want to steal their rep. But I’d like you to take a moment to imagine how you’d feel if someone took your name off a blog post about the death of your father, and then, when you asked them about it, gave you the brush-off. I could have lived with them deleting it; but I guess they just didn’t want to lose any SEO content they didn’t need to.

My point is: this is not normal. None of the other Museum of the Horrible items above are normal. None of the stuff we described in the letter is normal.

What is going on here? Assume for a moment that all the accusations Failbetter has made about me and Lottie (and Lottie’s mum) are true. Then try to fit your head around the stuff above, again. It’s fucked up.

Finally…

I’ve gone out of my way to say that not everyone at Failbetter is involved, that probably not all of senior management knows everything that’s gone on, and that there was no master plan to destroy us, just a series of acts of spite. I still believe this. Take that blog post above. Perhaps someone took my name off in a moment of thoughtless pettiness, and then didn’t care enough to walk it back.

But everything I’ve described is something they’ve unleashed, endorsed and in some cases been directly involved in. They’ve made no effort to address it or even distance themselves from it.

So now I want to take a moment to address myself to those at Failbetter who did know what was going on.

Take some damned responsibility. You all have your excuses for what you’ve done, and what you’ve permitted. Some of you have grudges and grievances. But you’re adults in an extraordinarily fortunate position. You were handed secure jobs in control of a multi-million pound business. You’re there because I sold it to you for a fraction of its value, so that the jobs of our friends would be safe. You abandoned the responsibilities I’d entrusted to you; when I pointed out that wasn’t cool, it hurt your feelings and you started trying to mess with me and with my family.

Lottie and I worked side by side with many of you for years. I’ve known some of you for much longer. If you had really believed I was behaving badly, you chose to do nothing about it for years. You didn’t contact me, you didn’t warn Lottie, you didn’t do anything to fix issues or protect people. Either these accusations are frivolous, in which case you’ve tried damned hard to ruin my life for no good reason, or they’re serious, in which case you’ve shown no responsibility whatsoever. No leadership, no reforms, no truth-and-reconciliation, just some fire-and-forget accusations and some nasty gossip.

You ruined my daughter’s tenth birthday by picking that day for your callout. I sometimes pretend I think that was an accident, but enough of you had made a big deal of her previous birthdays when, I guess, you still cared about being in good odour with me. One of you chose that date because you thought I’d be out of town and distracted. A ten year old kid, for Pete’s sake.

Lottie’s mother. She’s a semi-retired special needs English teacher who had to protect her Twitter account because your god damned employees are prancing about the internet accusing her of being a racist aristocrat.

And, let’s not forget, Lottie herself. You blew up her feminist initiative and you did nothing to replace it. You pissed all over her career and you came damned near to driving her out of the industry altogether. You gloated about it publicly. ‘Protecting women in games… except the ones in AK’s family.’ Give me a break.

And take a look at the bigger picture. You took advantage of the #MeToo movement to make false allegations in pursuit of personal grudges. You’ve not only hurt me and my family, you’ve damaged the future credibility of every woman with a legitimate complaint.

So grow up. Show some leadership and some responsibility. We can still fix this. You owe it to Lottie, you owe it to me, you owe it to everyone you’re setting a bad example to.

I kept the leaving card you gave me the day I left Failbetter, five years ago:

Mediate, investigate. That’s how we resolve this. If we could determine in mediation that I (or Lottie!) had misunderstood the situation, we’d apologise and address it. If an investigation showed that I had done things I should make amends for, I would make them.

If you don’t want to do either, then look yourself in the eye, in the mirror, and say with a straight face: “Protecting women has been the real reason for everything we’ve done. We’re only refusing mediation and we’re only blocking investigation because it advances that noble goal.” I dare you.

Thanks for reading. If we hear from Failbetter, or if we learn anything else relevant, we’ll update this post.

UPDATE. This is what happened next.  (Plus some minor updates at the end of this post if you’re really curious about the detail.)

Links

Unsent open letter to Paul Arendt, then CEO of Failbetter, December 2017

‘Behind the Sunless Scenes’, 2018 Eurogamer piece on the Failbetter layoffs

Failbetter endorses misconduct allegations against me on Twitter, August 2019

My response to the misconduct allegations, September 2019

Lottie on the problems with cancel culture, September 2019

State of the Factory, Year 2: Why the Kickstarter Didn’t Happen, February 2020

Lottie on the ongoing attacks, June 2020

Twitter drive to get our funding for BOOK OF HOURS withdrawn, August 2020

Transcript of a Diabolical interview where we share more background, June 2021

A Selection of Stalker Activities, ongoing

UPDATE 13/09/2021: Seven weeks in. Failbetter still haven’t denied or contested any of this. But privately, they did contact us to negotiate.

Behind the scenes, they finally agreed that there had indeed been a ‘procedural issue’ (‘criminal negligence’, tomato tomahto) that left share and IP ownership unclear. They got a big IP law firm to put together a document that would assert I had no claim on the company, and asked me to sign it. Here’s how we responded.

—

“Hey Adam,
Thanks for your response. It’s wonderful to be talking practically about how to resolve our disagreements.
Alexis is willing to honour your request once we’ve worked out more details. But obviously that can’t happen until we’ve addressed the allegations by both sides.
Alexis has his own concerns, and we’ve repeatedly attempted to address yours, but you’ve once again sidelined my concerns, engaging only with the interests of the men in this equation. I’ve described in detail my continued harassment, and the continued sabotage of my business, by Failbetter employees. I understand you might not wish to discuss these in writing or in public, but how can we move forward if you won’t address them in mediation either?
We just want a fair hearing and a fair resolution, for both our grievances and yours. If you find it awkward to speak to me in person, I’m more than happy for another director to attend in your place. We’d recommend mediation with [redacted] who’s managed conflicts similar to ours in the games industry and comes highly recommended, or [redacted], a larger organisation with impressive credentials. We’re happy to do the legwork setting up dates and managing the admin – what would it take for a Failbetter representative to attend?
All the best,
Lottie Bevan”

—

(Meanwhile – very suddenly – Olivia Wood left Failbetter. We don’t know if she jumped or was pushed, but presumably Failbetter were worried about her actions bringing them into disrepute.)

A month passed. We heard nothing. Lottie did remind me that the last time Failbetter stopped responding was also the last time she raised the issue of her being harassed. But then at the end of last week we saw one of Failbetter’s senior people joining in another pop at us, and at our supporters, on Twitter.

Depressingly, it looks like they’re not going to talk but they’re also not going to leave us alone. So if we want our lives back, we’re going to have to escalate further.

UPDATE 13/08/2021: Three weeks in. Failbetter haven’t responded to press enquiries or made a public statement. But they have now responded to our email, and we’ve begun negotiations. So we’ll leave off the updates unless the negotiations break down, or both sides agree we should post something.

[edit: gi.biz have told us that Failbetter didn’t pressure them to remove the post. More on this below.]

UPDATE 02/08/2021. Two weeks have passed since we sent Failbetter management that final mail; a week since we published it. We were expecting that they would contest some of what we’d said; or disavow some of the odder statements made by employees; or at least put out a holding statement. They haven’t, either privately or publicly. But they do appear (I can’t quite believe I’m typing this) to be leaning on the press to squash the story.

The biggest site to cover us was gamesindustry.biz. This is the now-dead link to their article, and here’s the original article, plucked from the Google cache. We emailed to ask what was happening. GI.biz told us they’d taken down the article pending comment from Failbetter. We followed up a couple more times over the course of the week, but they’ve stopped responding, and the article now seems to be gone for good. The only explanation I can see is that editor-in-chief (who wrote the article) came under pressure to remove the piece. But if we’ve somehow misunderstood what’s happening here, we invite Failbetter or GI.biz to let us know.

[We went up the chain to the MD of Gamer Network. This got us a response from gi.biz:

"Apologies for the delayed response - been caught up with the Activision Blizzard lawsuit and fallout. 

We've been discussing this on the team and opted not to republish the article at this time. While we understand there is a call for an investigation, the situation as we have covered it does not appear to have changed. If an investigation begins, we will indeed cover that as news but at this time, we do not believe it is quite right to report on this.

With regard to the balance of our reporting, I'll reiterate that all articles we have run do include Alexis' denials. This is not an instance of us picking and choosing what to cover, but concentrating only on covering the developments that advance the situation (hopefully to a resolution at some point). The long-form denial posts, while giving plenty of arguments in Alexis' favour, do not significantly change or expand upon what we have already reported, i.e. that he has denied all allegations. From what I can tell, the posts were published long after the original articles, and we do not tend to update old articles after an extended period of time. Instead, we wait for a new development in the story, as I hope I've managed to explain.

We reached out to Failbetter to comment. They did not comment, nor did they pressure us not to run the story. The suggestion, as I've seen on your blog, that we have been coerced into not republishing the article is in no way accurate - and if anything your coming to this conclusion  highlights why we need to be so cautious when reporting on this issue when only one side is offering comment.

Please do keep me posted on the situation, and when it is appropriate to cover this again, we shall do our best to do so."

[They say unequivocally that Failbetter didn’t, in fact, pressure them to remove the post. I believe them, and I retract that suggestion, though I am sceptical about their rationale for the rest of it.]

The other development is that we heard back from the ICO about our GDPR complaint. They upheld it, but so far Failbetter management are ignoring them, too. I can’t help remembering the Wolf of Wall Street scene with Jonah Hill weeing into a bin full of FBI subpoenas. If anyone over at Failbetter is reading this, please, let’s not go down that road. We’re ready to talk when you are.

One more update. Read it if you have a strong stomach. It’s quite something.

Society is opening up about mental health, destygmatising something that affects a huge number of people. But you don’t hear about their lovers and supporters, their family members or their best friends. There must be millions of people out there supporting and coping with seriously depressed loved ones. Weirdly, Millar’s piece is the first article I’d ever seen about it.

Loving someone with depression is a common experience. Talking about it isn’t. Here’s what I’ve learned from loving a depressive partner – it may sound familiar to you.

.         .           .

Alexis, my fiancé, is a professional writer. He’s eloquent, loquacious and fiercely intelligent. But when he’s depressed he can barely communicate. It seems to cause him physical pain to talk about his feelings, and anhedonia makes him bored and disinterested in the world. So he can’t tell me, his fretting girlfriend, how bad he’s feeling, and it’s difficult for me to judge how worried I should be.

He can rate the severity of the episode on a scale from 1 to 10. 1 is ‘having a bad day’. 10 is ‘suicidal’. Or he can tell me where the Black Dog is: at the far end of the garden; prowling around the front door; glaring down at him, right next to the bed. This sort of communication helps connect Alexis to the world and helps me understand what he’s going through. One of the nastiest parts of depression is that insulating isolation that descends around the sufferer, separating them from the love and support of the people around them. Our odd couple’s language stops that isolation from taking over completely.

When our relationship was new, I tried to ‘fix’ Alexis’s depression. Trying to cheer up a depressed loved one is a natural response, but it’s also – I know now – naïve. Being particularly nice to someone isn’t going to rewire their brain. Tea and chocolates can’t dismiss a pervasive existential sense of hopelessness. You can’t ‘fix’ mental health.

You can help, though. One of the most useful things I do is anticlimatically boring: I just stay near him. His worst moments usually last no more than twelve hours, when he’ll stay in bed, curled up in the fetal position with his back to me. Sometimes his depression is so severe that his skin hurts if you touch him, so I can’t even rest a reassuring hand on his arm. Sometimes it helps to put music on. Other times that hurts him, too. But however bad the episode, he always says afterwards that it helped not to be alone. It breaks that crippling depressive isolation. These days, when it gets bad, I just sit next to him in silence and read.

I’ve also encouraged him to seek external help. I’m not a doctor or a psychiatrist, so I’m woefully underqualified for anything other than unconditional love. Depression makes people less likely to seek help or reach outside their comfort zones. So encouraging your loved one to look after themselves, see a therapist or consider anti-depressants can really change their life for the better. It also takes the pressure off you – you don’t have to be lover, parent and therapist. You can just be you.

.      .      .

Alexis’s depression is for life. I know that part of being with him is accepting that three or four times a year he’ll have a serious depressive episode, and I will be correspondingly miserable. This is what it means to love a depressed person.

Over time, depression can ruin relationships. We spoke early about the effect it might have on us: his biggest worry was that it would eventually drive me away. Six years later, I’m confident it won’t. But I can absolutely see depression being the end of many otherwise lovely relationships, and don’t blame the partners of depressives for getting out. I’ve thought about it myself, and I suspect if you gave a depressive the option of a total cure at the cost of ending their relationship, many would leap at the chance.

Our more alarming discussions were about depression and suicide. Alexis’s brother killed himself when he was twenty-one, and Alexis has had several periods in his life where he’s been in the final stages of suicidal ideation (planning the method, carrying around a suicide note – the end-game things). I knew nothing of the disease when I first met him, so worried that every time he was depressed he might want to die.

I know now that your suicide risk from chronic depression is much more like metal fatigue, where small fractures over time build up to a breaking point. Alexis often talks of ‘wrestling the angel’, referring to the active effort he has to put in to thwart a depressive episode. You really have to rage against it, time and again, like battling your way through dense jungle. Over time you get tired. I can imagine that many sufferers who find themselves in an acute depressive crisis after years of wrestling the angel just don’t have the energy anymore. I can see the attraction of making it all stop.

Alexis struggles to talk about suicide when he’s very low. So like the Black Dog, suicide has a nickname: the Salesman. In particularly horrible moments, the Salesman comes round and tries to sell Alexis death. The Salesman’s vilest feature is he’s as smart as the person he’s trying to convince, and he knows his weak spots. It’s difficult to win an argument against yourself. But the moniker makes it easier for Alexis to mention it, and I’ve made him promise on everything he holds holy (his mother; freedom of speech; gin) to tell me whenever the Salesman appears. It gives me a sense of security to know that even if my partner is fleetingly thinking about ending his own life, I’ll know. One of the most common regrets I’ve heard from people who’ve lost loved ones to suicide is not seeing the signs in advance. If Alexis keeps his promise, I will.

.      .      .

The brilliant nineteenth-century poet Gerard Manley Hopkins suffered from chronic depression. He wrote a number of poems – the ‘Terrible Sonnets’ – during particularly black moods, and this always stuck with me:

“O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne’er hung there.”

– “No Worst, There Is None” (1885)

I have never hung there, in depression’s frightful chasms. But I don’t hold depression cheap. I’ve watched it closely for six years. It’s fantastically malign and brilliantly coercive. I respect and despise it equally.

But this leads me to my final, painfully simple conclusion. You, the partner or family member or friend, matter too. Depression is a proper illness. It has physical symptoms. It can change the person you fell in love with so much that, for a time, you hardly recognise them. And it’s contagious. It affects everyone around it. So you need to look after yourself.

The cosmic roll of the dice which decides which brains misfire and which don’t is unfair. So I like to think I’m evening the odds, even a little, by supporting my partner through his black moods and loving him in spite of them. I wish he didn’t have to suffer, and I wish I didn’t either. But you have to treat reality as it is rather than you’d like it to be. There are millions of couples living with the Black Dog, just like us. The ones that stay together develop their own individual coping strategies. It’s hard work, but so is living together, long-term relationships and having kids. “Nothing worth having comes easy”, and a good relationship with a person you love is the thing worth having most of all.

I woke up one morning in August 2019 as Lottie Bevan, a thirty-year-old video game developer. I owned, along with my long-term fiancé, a small indie games studio that had just scaled up to five people. I’d made Cultist Simulator, an indie success story that had won a bunch of awards and made more money than expected. I was a current BAFTA Breakthrough Brit, and a month earlier we’d won big at a high-profile British awards ceremony. I was the happiest I’ve ever been.

That day, we’d finalised the most in-depth mentorship scheme in British indie games and were a week away from launching a £100,000 Kickstarter for our next project. It was also the first anniversary of a feminist meet-up I’d started, Coven Club, which organised monthly meet-ups for women in the industry to counteract sexism and female isolation in games.

By the end of that day, I was crying on a pair of London constables as they wrote up ‘malicious communication’ case notes from literally thousands of tweets which said my partner was ‘an abuser’, my company should fold, my employees should leave, my mentorship scheme should shut down, and my career was a front for harming women.

Two ex-lovers of my fiancé, who were game developers associated with his ex-studio, had tweeted that my partner’s historic consensual relationships with them had actually been abusive because he’d been head of a studio. One person had never been his employee, the other had been a casual partner who’d accepted a job at his studio while they were dating. But that was enough. Their friend, another developer who’d never had any sort of non-professional relationship with my partner, tweeted her support. The ex-studio, with whom we were not on good terms, tweeted in solidarity.

It snowballed. None of this has any real-world counterpart – no complaints or allegations outside of social media – but here’s what just some tweets can do.

This had direct and immediate professional repercussions for me. All employees resigned; we had no choice but to cancel the Kickstarter; I had to shut down Coven Club; we lost our publishing deal. We still lose business deals, even today, because of those tweets.

Over the next year, as we dealt with the fallout and more rumours came to light, I began to realise something. The attack on my fiancé had been deliberately public, but I had privately been a target too. As a young(ish!) up and coming woman in the industry with prominent feminist initiatives, I wasn’t a credible target for public movements like #metoo which gave those tweets about my partner such resonance. So the attacks on me were subtler.

Here’s a sample, from the several hundreds of messages I’ve received over the past ten months. They appear regularly and consistently across a range of sites on social media. Some are from anonymous or encrypted accounts. Others were written, said or done privately by the same people who publicly attacked my fiancé.

• People emailed conferences where I was speaking to pressure organisers to disinvite me. Some organisers gave in and cancelled my slots with unlikely excuses like late-stage budget cuts. Others didn’t, but I still don’t have a clear picture of how many conferences over my six-year career received requests to cancel my invitations.
  
  
• I’d been volunteering at a feminist games fund for some months. People began spreading ‘nebulous rumours’ about me, which culminated in people saying ‘they wouldn’t apply while I was part of the team’. The fund looked into the rumours and came up empty, with what they apologetically described as ‘just this sense that you’re kind of a bad person’. My choice became to dig my heels in and damage a cause I cared about, or to step away. I chose the latter.
  
  
• People said my feminist initiatives were a deliberate front to give my partner an air of respectability, or that no other feminist initiatives ‘would have me’.
  
  
• People tried to undermine my credibility by simply calling me names. ‘Grima Wormtongue over here,’ read one tweet from a prominent indie games journalist with over 100,000 followers, who followed up over the next few months with several other unpleasant comments which have all since been deleted. ‘Ah, I see AK has sent his woman shield,’ read another, from a newly set-up and since deleted Twitter account called ‘@abuseindustry’. One person just called me ‘a racist’, for reasons I still don’t understand.
  
  
• People sent me private messages telling me I’m a bad feminist. I made it ‘hard to be here for you’ because I’d had the temerity to say that call-out culture is bad. ‘Seriously?’ read one private message from another prominent journalist with nearly 200,000 followers. I didn’t respond, so she later tweeted publicly about how I used ‘the language of feminism to pathologise women and queers’. There were many follow-up comments from many different people expressing similar sentiments.
  
  
• People sent me private messages telling me I’m really bad at my job. ‘The only things you’ve made clear are that you don’t have the constitution to do your job, and that you’re committed to circling the drain’, said one.
  
  
• People sent me threatening emails, talking about having ‘someone to point a gun at our face’ and ‘dead wives’ and that another public attack was imminent: ‘surely you didn’t think it a one-time engagement?’. One email just ended with: ‘Pervert.’
  
  
• People accused my mother of abuse when she tweeted to argue in our defence. In a since deleted post, one person wrote a hit piece about her and my father in the style of Gossip Girl. Another wrote on Reddit: ‘The whole time her mother has been cyberbullying all these people on Twitter. Did Lottie help organize this? Is this all how Lottie feels, too?’
  
  
• People left bad reviews on our game’s Steam page, saying my studio mistreats employees. ‘If you stand against work-space exploitation, please don’t buy this game,’ reads one from just a few weeks ago.
  
  
• Cultist Simulator was shortlisted for a number of BAFTA Games awards, the highest award in British games. One person who’d go on to spearhead the nastiness sat on one of the juries. I’ve sat on BAFTA Games juries myself, so I know you have to sign a written contract and confirm verbally on the day that you have no partiality for or against anyone you’re judging.

I am a non-confrontational person who, with the exception of being successful and dating my fiancé, has never inspired the vitriol of the internet before. If the above could happen overnight to me, without me doing anything differently one day to the next, it could happen to anyone.

I want to make two points that I haven’t seen elsewhere. Firstly, that you can be someone who isn’t powerful, who isn’t a man, and who isn’t even actually accused of anything – and if someone has it in for you enough, you can still wake up one morning to a new reality of sustained, inventive online harassment and bullying. This applies to game developers, it applies to children, it applies to anyone with a social media account. My experience put me in trauma therapy, and it certainly freaked my therapist out: she relies on good reviews for clients, which could easily be destroyed by even one or two people deciding they want to hurt her.

Secondly, nobody over the past year fitted the usual profile of a ‘troll’. Harassment on the internet is closely associated with MS Paint-avatar accounts that tell women they’re ugly and that people should kill themselves. I didn’t get any of that. Almost all the nastiness I’ve experienced has been from actual people: people who play my game, people I worked with, people I met at a conference years ago, people I follow(ed) on Twitter.

We are all, every day, offered opportunities to join a public dunking we know nothing about, or say something mean about a celebrity we know we’ll never meet. But I can tell you first hand that the person at the centre will notice what you say. They might not see your particular comments, but you contribute to a tapestry of hate that makes the subject of it think that everyone – everyone – has decided they are the worst thing that has ever crawled across the face of the earth. If there are any exacerbating circumstances in their life – mental health, financial concerns, professional ramifications, lost friendships – those non-troll-y comments can and will make people want to die.

There are only a few people who actually want to hurt me. Most of the people involved were just joining in on Twitter, or expressing an opinion that got them upvotes, or engaging with the particular topic of the day. But these sorts of interactions on social media point the infinite hate machine of the internet at someone forever. You cannot control what the hate machine does. Whether you think someone’s done something bad, whether you know someone’s done something bad, whether you heard a rumour or got a weird vibe from someone or just have some personal beef: nobody deserves large-scale, endless, uncontrollable harassment online.

I am not the first and I will not be the last person who’s attacked, privately or publicly, from behind a screen. Cybersmile have a lot of resources on the various types of online harassment you might encounter, and I’m writing up a list of my own resources and advice from a year of dealing with this new world. But the bottom line is this: this behaviour is not normal. No one acts this way in real life apart from school bullies and stalkers. Don’t let a screen dissolve your empathy for another human being. Online harassment is humans, at scale, at their most vicious. Please don’t ever join in.

The story so far:

My name’s Alexis Kennedy. With my fiancée, Lottie Bevan, I run a very small game development studio out of our London flat. I used to own and run another studio, Failbetter Games, which was a little bigger (about half a dozen employees for most of my time there, ballooning to seventeen by the time I left in 2016) but was also generally indie and cash-strapped. We’ve done some good work and made some waves, but we’re not powerful people.

Three weeks ago, an anonymous Twitter account (@Abuseindustry, below) began making false allegations that I’d abused women in the games industry. Over the next day, a number of other people picked up the allegations and began to retweet them or add their own.

The allegations were that I have been working for years to recruit, gaslight, blackmail and abuse women – an unspecified number, but I’ve seen ‘a multitude’, ‘many’ and ‘dozens’.

I still can’t quite believe I have to say this, but all these claims are nonsense. I made an immediate denial; at our lawyers’ advice, we both got off the Internet; then, as often happens to people who’ve gone through something like this, I completely fell apart.

I’ve spent the last few weeks recovering and reflecting, and now, I’m ready to talk about what I actually did and didn’t do; and then I’m going to talk about what I think happened here.

All of this was a really nasty shock, but not a complete surprise to either Lottie or me. Since 2016 we’ve heard, repeatedly, that one or more people have been determinedly spreading ugly but non-specific rumours about me, and this seems to be the culmination of that. At least now we have some daylight on it, I can respond.

The rest of this post goes into a lot of detail about my private life. I don’t like that at all, but I can’t see any other way to respond to these vague, horribly damaging allegations except being extremely damn open about it all. And I want to be able to post this and then just link to it any time in the next ten years that someone asks about it.

But that means the post is going to be really long. So here are the headlines.

• I haven’t engaged in any kind of abuse or predation, ever.
• I did have a romantic relationship with Olivia Wood while we were working together, and while I was her direct manager. This was a real mistake on my part. I owned that at the time and I own it now.
• But the circumstances were very different than Olivia has publicly suggested. We started a relationship over a year before we worked together. She suggested that I hire her. She explicitly requested that the relationship be kept secret. All of these facts are provable.
• Again, all allegations of abuse, including any I haven’t yet seen, are false.

What I actually did and didn’t do

I’ve had a number of messages along the lines of: ‘perhaps you may have thought you weren’t doing harm, but you should take some time to consider it and perhaps work through it.’ This is a good and fair point. 

So over the last three weeks I’ve done just that: I’ve reflected, I’ve considered, and I’ve talked frankly to my friends and family, including my ex-wife, who describes herself as ‘neither a friend or fan’ of mine. Here’s my conclusion, and I am indebted to my very directly spoken ex-wife Ana for its phrasing. She read all the allegations, snorted, and told me:

“Look, you’re a bit of a dick, but you’re no abuser. And you can quote me on that if you like.”

A little bit more detail on how I’ve been a bit of a dick, and how I haven’t been an abuser

At Failbetter Games, the studio I founded and then ran, I did have an affair with a direct report of mine, Olivia Wood, as she announced on Twitter. This was quite a serious error of judgement on my part, and it ended badly, as relationships sometimes do. I take responsibility for my part in the bad ending. But Olivia left out some important details.

First, the relationship began in summer 2013, a very long time before we ever worked together, when Olivia was in a completely different industry – as an on-off, casual, explicitly and consensually non-monogamous relationship that was purely platonic for long periods. I didn’t initiate or engineer a relationship with her while she was my report, as she implied. I only became Olivia’s line manager in March 2015 and the relationship unambiguously and completely ended in October 2015. 

I hired Olivia at her suggestion. She wanted to cross over from publishing to games, and when we used to go running together every Sunday, she would say ‘Give me a job’ and grin, and I would tell her I didn’t need an editor; but then in fact one day I did need a bit of freelance editing resource, and she did have the necessary skills, so I offered her the gig. Later it made sense to upgrade her from a freelance to a permanent position, so I did.

About the secrecy of our relationship. Olivia specifically asked me not to reveal the relationship to anyone, because (she said) she didn’t want anyone to have the impression she’d slept her way into the job. After I ended things, she made it explicit that she still didn’t want the relationship to be public knowledge, to avoid giving that impression. So I didn’t reveal it.

And look: she really didn’t sleep her way into the job. I never have and never would hire that way and I don’t think she would have accepted a job on that basis. She’s a good editor and I needed an editor and the suggestion of bringing her in was a good one.

I do want to own up to a couple of significant mistakes. 

First, of course I should have unambiguously and permanently cut off any sexual element to the friendship when she became my direct report. But before I was her line manager, she started working with Failbetter as a freelancer, on one day a week, and freelance work didn’t seem enough reason to either of us to end things. Then over the next couple of months she did a little more work, and ultimately we offered her a permanent role.

Even then the relationship was so casual and intermittent (until right at the end) that it seemed benign. The company was at that point a half-dozen people in T-shirts in one corner of a shared office, and everything was very informal.  So I’m saying this partly to explain myself, but also because I bet that someone who reads this will be having a benign-seeming secret thing with someone at work. ‘Someone’ – who am I kidding? Hundreds of you will. People meet in workplaces, relationships are messy. I’m not going to tell you what to do, but I am going to say this: imagine what would happen if, a half-dozen years from now, your lover decides to bring it up on social media.

It wasn’t predatory or abusive, but it was an irresponsible blurring of professional and private boundaries, and it was my mistake.

Secondly, Olivia had always been definite that we were friends first and we could just ‘delete the aspects that were datey’ if we went back to being just friends… but her one clear condition was that I didn’t get involved with anyone else at work. And as the whole world now knows, what happened next is that Lottie and I fell hard for each other, and I embarked on an emphatically monogamous relationship with Lottie (and changed the line of reporting straight off, because I wasn’t going to make that mistake twice). We’re still together, four years later. I broke things off quickly and clumsily with Olivia, and I broke my explicit commitment not to date anyone else at work. Both of those things were wrong. But that’s my business and Olivia’s, not Twitter’s.

It’s fair to say there was tension on both sides afterwards, but I apologised, I made amends, and Olivia let me know that I was forgiven. I didn’t abuse Olivia or belittle her. It’s difficult to prove a negative like that, but I can say that I transferred her to another manager very quickly, and I approved a promotion and a pay rise for her later that year. Everyone was trying to be as professional as possible.

As it happened, I left the company (which I owned) only six months later, in May 2016.

Meg Jayanth’s allegations

The only person besides Olivia Wood who has claimed that I abused her is Meg Jayanth. I can’t actually find any specific allegations of abuse from Meg, only vague claims of general predatory behaviour, and the fact that we had fully consensual sex. We did have sex; there was nothing coercive or abusive about the relationship.

So here’s our whole sexual history: I slept with Meg twice, in 2011, during my first separation from my ex-wife. Both times were casual and good-natured. She is or was in a polyamorous relationship with her partner, and I understand he was aware of our encounters.

For what it’s worth, I wasn’t ‘senior’ to Meg in the industry. By a quirk of fate, we’d both started out in mid 2009, two years before – that was why we started talking. By 2011, she was a BBC games producer and I was running a struggling startup of four people. Our careers have generally paralleled each other since then.

We remained friends, and kissed perhaps twice more over the ensuing years; she and said partner invited me to their ceremony of commitment (not a wedding, but like a wedding); eventually when she tried to kiss me, I demurred because I was back with my now-ex-wife at the time, and that was the end of it. Then I introduced her to Lottie. She’s done a couple of bits of freelance work for Failbetter, both while and after I worked there, but that was long after we slept together. 

Emily Short’s allegations

The last set of allegations that I’ll mention are Emily Short’s. She’s accused me of behaving in a way that isn’t abusive or predatory but that made her feel uncomfortable.

I don’t think this is a fair accusation. But when someone says, of conversations five or six years ago, that you made them feel uncomfortable, it’s a really difficult thing to respond to. So I’m going to try to talk about the context, and then to respond.

Emily did bits of freelance work for me, on and off, for six years. We often saw each other socially – the last time, months after I’d left Failbetter, was when she and her husband came to a dinner party at my place. I never had any authority over her at all.

For all this time, from my perspective, there was never even a hint of anything remotely sexual or romantic. For years I profoundly admired her work and talent, but in an undeviatingly platonic way. She was an early creative influence on me, and my talks and blog posts all through that time are peppered with references to her work. I liked, and was a little intimidated by, her.

But in 2016, I thought I had begun to sense a chilliness in the tone of Emily’s emails. I asked her (over email) if something was wrong. She didn’t say anything about the allegations she’s made now, but she did say among other things that she thought I found her ‘mockable’, mentioned a couple of (emphatically non-sexual) things about our interactions that she hadn’t liked, and asked for ‘a greater distance in our interactions for the time being’. I sent a mortified and apologetic response assuring her that I found her anything but mockable, and I never contacted her again. I hoped I’d hear back from her, but I never did.

Then over the next three years I started getting similar chilliness from people who’d started to work with Emily. All non-specific, none of it anything I could respond to or talk to anyone about, but it looks now like I really wasn’t imagining it.

I know men sometimes do things that make women uncomfortable, and I know it can be difficult for women to say that to men, and I think it’s fair to expect men to examine their behaviour. But I also think it’s fair that if you have a six-year friendship with someone, if they’ve met your child and eaten at your table, and you email them and ask really carefully whether there’s a problem, it’s reasonable to expect them to raise it. 

So the only guess I can make is this: in 2016, someone told Emily something untrue that made me sound irredeemably dangerous and vile, and she re-interpreted everything I had done in light of that. I don’t understand what has happened, but that is the closest I can get to making sense of it.

Every other allegation about me that I have seen is total nonsense

The claim that I have been methodically seducing and abusing ‘a multitude’ of young women, like some sort of Svengali Dracula, and threatening them with retaliation if they go public – this claim is so daft that I find it difficult to grapple with seriously, but here we go: 

I have some professional reputation in the industry for the work I’ve done, but I have no power to speak of. I run a microstudio out of my living room with my partner. I couldn’t get anyone fired, let alone end anyone’s career. Portraying me as a shadowy cult abuse mastermind would be silly if it wasn’t so horrible.

I’ve seen claims that there is a much larger number of women ready to come forward, but that I am known for my retaliatory behaviour, and they daren’t. This is also nonsense. I think the most retaliatory thing I’ve ever done is ‘write a slightly pointed subtweet’, except in Olivia’s case, where my retaliation was ‘approve her promotion and then leave the company.’

My departure from Failbetter Games was entirely my choice

I’ve seen insinuations that I was forced out of Failbetter by the current board because of some sort of cloud related to all this business. This is false, provably so. I owned the company and I appointed the board.

But in my last year there, the company grew to the point where I was doing very little creative work. One day I decided I wanted to give up managing people and go be a writer again, so I sold my majority stake in the company for a small fraction of its value and walked away, surrendering all rights to the IP. At a stroke I voluntarily gave up all of my power and, overnight, became a freelance writer with a cash lump sum but no authority over anyone. It was unusual, quixotic, and I think now rather naive of me, but there is a really solid paper trail to show that this is exactly what happened.

I’m not planning to sue anyone

Lottie and I did report this incident to the police, because that’s what the Metropolitan Police website told us we should do. We literally got in an Uber and went to report it in person because we were frightened out of our minds by what was going on, and we wanted to talk to a flesh and blood police officer. We phoned our lawyer for advice, too, because that’s what you do in this situation.

But I’m not planning to sue anyone. I never have sued anyone, or even threatened to.

Any other allegations I might not have seen

There might be other allegations of abuse that I haven’t seen. I am going to deny them, now, confidently and pre-emptively. They’re false.

I saw tweets from some people along the lines of ‘I’ve been hearing these rumours for years, so I believe it’. Of course they did. If someone – perhaps more than one person, I’ll never know exactly – has been spreading rumours about me for years, everyone will hear them in the end, and they’ll hear them echoed back from however many directions. That’s how echo chambers work. That’s what makes rumours so dangerous, and the last few years have been a good time to be spreading this particular kind of rumour.

I’m not going to talk about any of the rest of my sexual history at all, because it isn’t relevant. I’ve had some relationships or encounters sometimes with some other people. I’ve parted on good terms from some of those people, and less good terms with others. In every sexual encounter I have ever had, my partner enthusiastically consented to everything that happened. Beyond that, my sexual history is private.

“Then why did they do this?”

To paraphrase Jon Ronson, everyone involved in a social media shaming thinks they are doing the right thing. And I imagine that a lot of the people who participated, either in passing on rumours about me or in cluster-bombing me on Twitter, genuinely thought that I was a powerful and dangerous man engaged in a widespread abuse campaign. After all, they’d heard rumours from people they trusted. Who had heard rumours from people they trusted.

But here’s the most important thing: why not say anything to Lottie? For four years no-one has said anything to the woman most at risk from me if I were actually a predator. Not a message, not a whisper, not a single anonymous email. Even if someone was worried she might tell me, where’s the anonymous warnings? Anything at all? As Lottie rather bitterly remarked, so much for the sisterhood.

If I start speculating about motives, I’ll be moving from things I know to things I’m guessing. I’ve been on the wrong end of a lot of unfounded assumptions myself recently and I don’t want to get into that game. So the last thing I want to say is this:

It will take a long time to recover from what just happened. My reputation is shredded. I’m angry, I’m sad, and I’m still in a pretty fragile mental state. If you’ve read this far and you’re sympathetic, you have my sincere thanks. But nothing good ever comes from a social media shaming. So please, if you sympathise with me, please don’t be horrible to anyone on social media or elsewhere. Good people in mobs do bad things, and Lottie and I want to take the high road on this as much as we can. This has been a hideous waste of life for everyone involved, and this is where it should stop.

Thanks for reading. The slightly expanded tl:dr;

• I haven’t engaged in any kind of abuse or predation, ever.
• I did have a romantic relationship with Olivia Wood while we were working together, and while I was her direct manager. This was a real mistake on my part. I owned that at the time and I owned it now.
• But the circumstances were very different than Olivia has publicly suggested. We started a relationship over a year before we worked together. She suggested that I hire her. She explicitly requested that the relationship be kept secret. All of these facts are provable.
• Again, all allegations of abuse, including any I haven’t yet seen, are false.
• I’m just a nerd in a flat. I don’t have the power to get anyone fired or ruin anyone’s career. Even when I was running Failbetter years ago, it was a little indie shop that nearly went bankrupt twice.
• If the purpose of this is to defend women, why has no-one ever approached my partner Lottie, ever?

UPDATE: My ex-wife Ana read this post. She reminds me that she actually said something general about how she was happy to go on the record with the quote about me being a bit of a dick, rather than specifically ‘you can quote me on that’. She points out that ‘you can quote me on that’ makes her sound like ‘a third-rate TV show character.’

UPDATE 2: We post yearly reports on how each year has gone for Weather Factory. 2020’s report includes some more information on why all this happened, and the effects it had, that you might find useful if you’re ever in a similar situation.

UPDATE 3: I’m not on the Internet much any more, but a year on, Lottie still gets threatening emails or public attacks most months, though not most weeks. She’s talked about her experiences here.

UPDATE 4: The current CEO of Failbetter subsequently went after me and Lottie in a Medium post where he fabricated some evidence that I’d been a bad boss – I won’t link to it, but you can dig it out. Lottie and I sent SARs to try to get hold of the real documents. The CEO responded by paying a top-tier law firm to draft a twenty-page legal threat, and by taking my name out of the credits of Sunless Skies. So we dropped it.  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ For a while.

UPDATE 5: We’re coming up on the two-year mark, and the nonsense continues. Creative Europe awarded us a grant towards Book of Hours; some Failbetters and others organised a petition to get the grant withdrawn. It didn’t work, but we’ve finally realised we can’t just leave this alone and hope it goes away. We’ve approached Failbetter and proposed (a) formal mediation (b) a full third-party workplace investigation into my time at Failbetter. They’ve refused both, but we’ll keep trying.

These last few weeks have been intense. It’s been a wake-up call for me, and a confirmation that some popular forms of feminism are actively hurtful to women. The biggest offender is cancel culture: people piling in on each other on social media with unverified and viral claims. This is what happened to Alexis last month, and it’s horrific.

I’m not going to talk about whether Alexis is a bad dude, as he’s already done that, and he’s simply not. I am going to talk about the impact of cancel culture, using this experience as an example. Here’s what happened to people who weren’t Alexis last month.

1. Weather Factory’s reputation tanked. Weather Factory had nothing to do with any allegation, but a bunch of people aren’t comfortable working with us anymore.
2. My reputation tanked. If we’re going to judge women on whom they sleep with we’re all pretty terrible feminists. I also had nothing to do with any allegation
3. We lost two female employees. The PR stink was too much and could have damaged their careers, so they resigned. Two women are now out of secure jobs. They had nothing to do with any allegation.
4. We lost our mentees. As above, the PR was awful and could have damaged new studios’ reputations. They had nothing to do with any allegation.
5. Coven Club, my personally-created and personally-funded women in games meet-up, was tainted. Some women now won’t want to attend, especially as some people said it was a deliberate cover-up to conceal Alexis’s evil. That’s either a conspiracy theory or a deliberate attempt to undermine a women in games initiative. Coven Club had nothing to do with any allegation.
6. The industry salary spreadsheet I set up was tainted. Again, some claimed it was pseudo-feminist cover for Alexis’s dreadful ways. It was, actually, entirely my idea, before Alexis knew he needed to cover anything up in the first place. The spreadsheet’s aimed at helping people know and secure their worth across a totally unregulated industry. The salary spreadsheet had nothing to do with any allegation.
7. I had to step back from a feminist fund I was helping, as some people wouldn’t apply if I were involved. The fund can and will replace me with someone else, so they’ll be fine. But this has kicked out a woman from a women’s initiative because of accusations against a man. Again, I had nothing to do with any allegation.
8. BOOK OF HOURS is on hold. A lovely peaceful game about books and all the work that went into making and planning it is for naught. It had nothing to do with any allegation.

(Additionally, Alexis nearly killed himself. I don’t care what anyone has done or is accused of having done: driving people to suicide is wrong.)

Everyone on the above list who isn’t Alexis was punished for the five year old alleged sex-life of a guy they didn’t know at the time. If you think that’s an acceptable amount of collateral damage, it’s probably not worth reading the rest of this piece.

I don’t think it’s acceptable. I don’t think it’s fair. I don’t think it had to happen. I think there were other ways of dealing with allegations of one guy being a dick, and that people chose cancel culture because it makes a lot of noise and makes a lot of people feel good and it’s a really easy way to pretend that you’re making a difference.

But I don’t think making people feel good or pretending you’re making a difference is justification for losing some women their jobs, nearly convincing a guy to top himself, or – in a separate, more serious case – actually convincing him to do it.

There are other ways. But let me first highlight some of the problems with cancel culture, as someone who’s seen them first hand.

Call-outs are a Catch-22

Imagine someone says you did something bad on Twitter. It’s being retweeted left, right and centre, lots of people are joining in, you’re getting nasty comments from total strangers, and people are saying things like:

• “Lots of people are saying this! It must be true!”
  
  
• “This guy’s a liar!”
  
  
• “He deliberately does good stuff, to cover up his bad stuff!”

Think about how you’d defend yourself in that situation. Firstly, there’s a pipeline problem. Twitter preferences single messages that are shared by lots of people. It’s a spotlight on a darkened stage. It’s terrible at getting messages out to viral claims about you which have been shared by thousands of people. That would be lighting up the whole stage at once. So even if you have something that utterly proves you’re innocent, it’s very hard to get that in front of everyone unless you can get even more retweets than the allegations did. #metoo is a powerful motivator and you probably won’t.

Secondly, someone’s called you a liar! That means anything you say is probably a lie.

Thirdly, people are happy to believe allegations against you even if you’ve behaved well in the past. The trope that abusers deliberately do good things to cover up their bad acts erases all the reputation you’ve built up over the years not being an asshole. By doing good stuff, you’re engaging in classic asshole behaviour, which only proves you’re more guilty than you were in the first place. There’s no ‘win’ here for an accused person: it’s immediately and irrevocably a fail state.

Modern systems of justice – and I’m talking proper justice, like juries, judges, the law – often fail women because they put the burden of proof on the accuser. This means successfully punishing people for things like sexual assault is difficult, because by the very nature of the offense – usually committed in private, between two people – there isn’t a whole bunch of evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the accused did the thing the accuser says they did. This is shitty, and it needs to change. But it’s tipped towards the defendant deliberately: Blackstone’s ratio, the idea that “it is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer”, is a vital founding principle of modern justice.

Cancel culture is the opposite. It thinks it’s better that ten innocents are brought down than one guilty person escapes. It’s designed from the ground up to remove people’s ability to defend themselves. It isn’t justice. It’s a lynch mob.

Call-outs erase women

Ironically, the only absolute that seems to be true is that there are no absolutes. The world isn’t black and white. But one of the most common responses to a #metoo Twitter shaming is the rallying cry to ‘believe women’. One woman says one thing and she must, she must, be right. I look forward to #metoo revelations from Ivanka Trump.

‘Believe women’ only makes sense if you think – if you really, genuinely think – that women are perfect and could never be misinformed, make mistakes, or be vindictive. People subscribing to ‘believe women’ must not know a single woman in the history of their lives who has ever done something wrong. I’m a big ol’ feminist who runs (well, used to run) a bunch of well-intentioned women in games initiatives because women are amazing. But I know just as many flawed women as I do flawed men. ‘Believe women’ is a weird gender absolute that doesn’t engage with the real world and therefore doesn’t help.

The experience I’ve gone through in the last month is a good case study. Three women of good standing have said one thing. I and Alexis’s ex-wife of ten years, two other women of good standing, have said something else. How can we reconcile Believing Women here? In this Twitter shaming – and I suspect in many others – dissenting voices were happily ignored. Those women shouldn’t be believed. They’re bad actors. Misled by men. Working for the Other Side, like some emotionally compromised Uruk-hai. But believe those first women for sure.

Call-outs silence and erase women who say the world is more complicated than a catchphrase. Call-outs silence and erase anyone who doesn’t play along. Movements which rely on absolutes, repress criticism and seek to erase people who disagree with them tend not to be the best movements in the end.

The ability to discount female voices which aren’t saying the right thing is a rather convenient safeguard. It’s a rather convenient way of silencing women who don’t agree with a very contentious way of enacting social justice. Silencing women doesn’t seem like a particularly good outcome for a progressive feminist social movement.

Junior women joining the industry will be led by the culture and systems we set up to manage the very many and very real wrongs done to women by men. Teaching them that the solution is making a stink on social media is infantilising, dangerous and unhelpful. It will discourage them from making real, practical and actionable changes to this industry, under the misapprehension that the fix has already been found. We are ruining women’s chances at a fair and equal existence in games before they even get here.

Call-outs rely on whisper networks, and whisper networks are bad

Whisper networks are clandestine conversations between women about men. Apparently, they allow women to safely share information about who’s bad and who’s good among themselves. They protect women by telling them who’s safe and who’s not. I wouldn’t know, because despite being the long-term partner of a guy who’s just been called out as a dick, no-one ever whispered anything to me.

You may be thinking: Lottie! You’re engaged to this guy. You founded a studio together. Nobody’s going to tell you that he’s bad, because you’ll tell him and then he’ll summon his legion of terror-bats and set them on the wimmins. And that’s logic of a sort (though this is another easy erasure of a woman who complicates things).

But the allegations leveled at Alexis are from 2015, when he was CEO of Failbetter Games. I was the most junior woman at the studio then, one year into games and working side by side with the people who’ve recently come out against him. When I was just starting to date him, that information would have been useful. When I moved in with him, that information would have been useful. When I left Failbetter to co-found a studio with him, that information would have been useful. In this instance, I have been the one woman in the direct firing line of a so-called abuser for nearly five years. I have never heard a single thing about him, but apparently, hundreds of other people have. If whisper networks are so ineffective that they can’t warn the one person most likely to be harmed, they aren’t a viable system of protection.

Whisper networks are also arguably the worst possible way to reliably communicate anything. Part of my job as a games producer is designing processes for game developers to pass information back and forth between each other. The idea of producing a game without documentation, stand-ups or design notes and instead with a secret system of individuals occasionally telling each other what their neighbour told them is, frankly, insane. I would make a grave expression at the producer who suggested it. I would ask them if they could Walk Me Through Their Reasoning Here. And a process that fails abominably in theory is not going to succeed in practice, especially when scaled up to accommodate thousands of people at once. Whisper networks are a terrible, terrible system for what they appear to want to achieve.

Call-out’s confused

So we come to the crux of the issue. What does cancel culture actually want? The long-term goal in this instance is to get rid of abusive men in the games industry. I also would like to get rid of abusive men in the games industry. That sounds like a brilliant idea. But what exactly does this mean, in practical terms?

Does cancel culture want, like much of the judicial system, to punish wrong-doing and reform wrong-doers so they can rejoin society as assets, not assholes? At the most basic level, call-outs are international public humiliation. That is a famously terrible way to teach people things. Humiliation turns people into serial killers and suicides. So as cancel culture relies on public humiliation, reform can’t be its end goal.

Does it want abusive men to just disappear? If so, where do they go once they’re outed? It doesn’t feel terribly feminist to say we’re cool with abusive people leaving games and going to work in other industries, preying on the women there. So does cancel culture want men to never work again? In which case, are we cool with that economic shock affecting their spouses and children? Do we want them to starve? Do we want them to live on the street? Do we want them to actually die? For all the noise it makes at the start, cancel culture is strangely silent at the end.

When I don’t know someone’s motives I look at the outcome of their actions for a guide. A thief is more likely to steal because they want money than because they get a sexual thrill from pawning jewellery. In this case, cancel culture achieved:

• the near-death of Alexis Kennedy
  
  
• a bunch of enjoyable online outrage
  
  
• a net movement of Twitter followers from some accounts to others
  
  
• a bunch of press
  
  
• the loss of two women’s jobs
  
  
• the cancellation of a Kickstarter
  
  
• harm to women in games initiatives
  
  
• harm to a separate games studio
  
  
• making me really miserable
  
  
• making some people really happy
  
  
• making some lawyers a lot of money
  
  
• making a big old mess of people’s lives.

You will note that it did not achieve the end of sexism and/or abuse in games, the promise from all men never to be mean to ladies ever again, or the safeguarding of future women from future male threats. It’s a confused list. I don’t believe this call-out had a particular end goal in mind. It just sort of exploded, spilling itself over everything and letting the stains sink in where they liked.

Cancel culture will not fix entrenched, systemic sexism in games. Cancel culture will not mete out targeted or fair communal justice. Cancel culture is thousands of retweets in an explosion of hate which utterly fails to protect women in games, current or future. Hiding behind a #metoo hashtag doesn’t conceal the fact that this histrionic, vicious and aimless act of violence has about as much hope of making games a better place as a t-shirt saying ‘why can’t we all just get along?’. The sooner we realise cancel culture is a blood sport and not a moral movement, the sooner we can work on actually fixing our problem.

Actually fixing our problem

There is clearly an issue with women being mistreated in games. Cancel culture is part of that issue. If you’ve read this far, I hope you’re less keen on it than you were before.

Here are some alternative ways to solve problems between men and women in the games industry, which don’t cause a wide variety of unnecessary pain or drive people to their deaths. This is specific to the UK: there are different organisations and different relationships with police elsewhere.

• Talk to the person responsible. They might have done something so awful that you don’t feel you can, in which case, skip this step. But in most circumstances, communicating directly is the best way to resolve the problem and/or change bad behaviour.
  
  You can approach this in a variety of ways: face-to-face, a mediated meeting at work, a phone call, an email, a lawyer’s letter. You don’t have to do it on your own, either. Bring a friend. Bring your whole family. You don’t need to be in danger to talk something out.
  
  
• Contact HR. Some small indies don’t have HR, but if your company does, this is the department specifically set up to help you. I’ve heard some people say that HR serves the company and not the employee, but this feels like a very uncharitable way to approach professional colleagues who are literally employed to assist you. At least consider HR.
  
  
• Contact ACAS. They’re specifically set up to help with workplace disputes and sexual assault allegations, among a bunch of other useful things. ACAS are the go-to neutral workplace mediator. They are your friends.
  
  
• Contact the police. They’ll confirm if you have a pursuable case, what specifically it is (e.g. harassment, assault, stalking) and pass you on to appropriate support networks. They’ll also listen and provide a neutral third-party point of view. This is the best way to resolve a serious issue that goes beyond a workplace misdemeanour.
  
  
• Contact a lawyer. This option isn’t available to everyone, because lawyers are expensive. But women in games groups like WIGJ may be able to put you in touch with lawyers who can offer pro-bono advice.
  
  
• For sexual assault, contact support groups. Like Women’s Aid, Victim Support or The Survivors Trust. Alternatively, phone Rape Crisis‘s national helpline (0808 802 9999) or NHS 111. They’ll be able to suggest appropriate next steps, too.

Resolving an emotional, angry situation with a colleague is hard. It’s really, really hard if there’s a personal or romantic side to it as well. So this list may not hold the solution to your particular problem. If it doesn’t, help make this list longer. Help women by adding to it. Set up what’s missing, by founding something yourself or speaking to UKIE or WIGJ or G into Gaming or whoever else you can think of. If you’d like, email me – I might be able to help connect you, or help set something up. Weather Factory might even be able to fund it.

We are wasting our energy with cancel culture. It doesn’t solve our problem. It doesn’t make things better. It eats up our time and our empathy and hurts people, lots of people, and pretends it’s doing something good. We need structure and accountability and justice to make this industry a better place for women. Structure, accountability and justice are all things cancel culture’s left behind.

There’s a trope that comedians are all miserable people and that their sadness contributes to the success of their jokes and how relatable they are. In a way, pretentious as this sounds, the same can be said for marketers, especially those that work with social media.

I often joke that I hate social media, but I always preface that with acknowledging the pros both for business purposes and spreading messages. Maybe I hate myself for constantly being on social media and that’s not really Twitter’s fault, but the cat rulers of the world probably have something to do with it. Overall social media is engaged with by millions, every second of the day. There are obvious cons with that, but just happening upon a tweet about a really funky cafe you never heard of, that does geeky froth coffee might negate them.

My approach to social media is a mix of business and pleasure. I use my personal platform primarily as an extension of my career-related branding and to make people laugh. Or to help people by connecting folk or sharing links that support events, job seeking and exposure. Sometimes I post about tough issues that mean something to me, but that’s rare. But we’ll get into that further down in this blog post.

Apologies to Star Trek

So social media has its merits but mah lawd it’s a bit crazy and despite this being an area of expertise I still don’t always understand some of the why’s. To decipher what works on social media is a bit like cracking the code of an ancient puzzle.

To give you an idea of what I mean, here’s an example of a personal viral tweet.

This is an edited gif of Deanna Troi farting. I’d like to apologise in advance to Marina Sirtis who by all accounts is a wonderful human and was in one of my fav games of all time, Mass Effect. I’d also like to apologise to Lottie for reasons she knows.

5k likes and 1.9k retweets. The comments were gold too. A few days later I posted a link to a charity fundraiser for a child. I got 3 likes and one of them was me accidentally hitting the heart.

Why did this go viral? Because it’s really funny in a general sense and easy to share. Why did the charity tweet not go viral? I can only guess that it’s due to the fact that when it comes to sensitive topics, people are less likely to engage unless they have a connection to the content. That can be that they relate to the situation on some level or they will help you out if it’s connected and they’re not just followers but friends.

Is there anything wrong or shocking about this? No, not really, but it is a little bit grim, that some content needs sharing to make an impact on people’s lives and it just fades away.

Then there’s social posts that hit an impressive amount of shares and can lead to an ENTIRE GAME BEING MADE BUT WE KEEPING IT HYGGE 100 THOUGH!

Memays

“Claire, your life is a meme and your GIFs are so fresh and on point. How is this so?” The answer to this question I often get comes in the form of a meme, which might make some of you reading this cry or reach for the wine bottle. I’m doing both.

Memes are such a common everyday occurrence now. They should ultimately be humorous and harmless. But their power is such that they’re a vital part of marketing and engaging with communities. There’s no real twist as to why this is. Humour puts people at ease and if it’s relatable without being hellofellowkids.jpg it reflects on the accessibility of your brand.

Indie games haven’t succeeded as well as they have, just because of their art style or versatility. It’s because the barrier between creator and consumer isn’t as thick as with the AAA genre. If you can’t find a good meme, then shove a cat in there. I’m very serious.

It sounds like something to say for a laugh, but in all honesty, if you can inject your social media with a chonky dose of memes I swear your reach and engagement will skyrocket. Or at least perform somewhat better than without that spicy addition. Just look what the mothlamp meme did for this Cultist Simulator Tweet.

The Dark Side of the Tweet

There are many negative sides of social media that we could discuss but let’s focus on its use for professional interaction and promotion. A few publications have touched upon the stress that those handling social platforms endure. From Vice:

” Social media can be a toxic place—especially for those of us who work in that space. Angry users on social seem to forget that a human being is behind the brand’s account they are screaming at or the story they are criticizing.“

When you are involved in anything that requires daily interaction with humans online, especially in the gaming industry, you’re open to abuse and uncheery interactions. Even if you’re presenting as the company brand and not your direct name. It’s your eyes being exposed to and your brain having to deduce replies if any. The veil is thin enough.

Different people will experience different levels of negative feedback and text-based abuse and will handle it in their own way. Some may not be phased but plenty are. Who can blame them?

Social media didn’t exist 20 years ago and in 10 years has evolved into an entirely different beast.

It’s worth noting that Weather Factory accounts have not suffered any tirades of abuse. We primarily get people asking questions or posting critiques in a manner that isn’t offensive. Do we get comments that sometimes hurt? Yes but it’s not frequent enough to impact and it’s never directed personally. I hope that remains and given how lucky we are to have a very lovely and active community, I’d be surprised if it changes.

Disclaimer: Just because I said this, if you’re listening Sod’s Law, please sod off.

Social media has now become a vital organ in promoting video games. It’s top of the list of what you need to set up, keep active and learn how to properly use. I appreciate its value, I love the variety of content, the way it can help people and I enjoyed every Game of Thrones Season 8 meme more than most of the episodes. We are truly blessed by this aspect of social. It makes sense and it doesn’t.

I like it but I also hate it. Maybe I hate it because it’s popular to say that. But I don’t believe that’s the case. I think I hate how it can tangle itself up in our lives in ways we sort of let happen without consciously consenting to. I hate that people are beholden to the physical representation of how well a post did, via a heart or whatever button.

To sidetrack a bit, analytics can help show that on the face of it, your performance may have not been great but behind the scenes, it did far better. So never focus purely on the aesthetics of a social post to determine its success.

In all honesty, the main reason I made this blog post is to vent at the fact that only 7 people liked this beautiful collage post of Jessica Fletcher in her various forms.

Based on that, social media is full of riff raff and that’s how I’m ending this elongated hot take! Good day to you sirs and sirettes!

If you’re reading this in June 2019, it’s Pride month which means everything gets a lot more colourful. So happy pride to all our LGBTQ+ cultists and any newcomers to the Weather Factory universe.

In our last sprint update, which you should have read as Lottie put a lot of effort into making it shiny and memetastic, you’ll see we have had quite an intense month.

We launched the Anthology Edition of Cultist Simulator alongside new DLC with Priest and Ghoul. A worldwide announcement of BOOK OF HOURS went live. Plus cat drama ensued. But that wasn’t enough to make our calendars squeak as Casual Connect hit London and I attended as part of two panels, Diversity in the Workforce and LGBT in Gaming.

For the work environment focused panel I was alongside the power force of progression Liz Prince and inclusion hero Paula Whelan. We discussed the trials and tribulations of increasing diversity in the workforce and more importantly what can be done to make getting that bread more inclusive and healthy for everyone.

“I wrote something down that I read that made absolute sense to me: Diversity is being asked to the party, inclusion is being asked to dance, and belonging is dancing like nobody’s watching” – a brilliant quote by Liz Prince.

It’s important to always keep multiple dialogues occurring regarding these subjects but we do need to start pairing actions with talking. G into Gaming is certainly an example of that. To get a more in-depth look at the topics discussed and what I had to say (which isn’t nearly as impressive as Liz and Paula’s contribution), Games Daily Biz covered the panel here.

After a quick lunch and drinking tap water from a can, because apparently, that’s the world we now live in I was on to my next panel. It was moderated by Richard Franke a game dev whose alter ego is the fabulous Kitty Powers. The main topics were, our experiences in the industry so far, how companies can create realistic LGBT characters for their games and what titles stuck with us over the years.

I was in the good company of Ed Fear from Mediatonic, PR Freelancer Izzy Jagan and Gaymingmag founder Robin Gray. We were sat beside what was essentially a magnifying glass, allowing the sun to lick our faces. It was hot you guys, so hot.

These sort of panels are useful for those in the industry looking to get advice on how to steer the creative side of gay character creation and inclusion in games. They’re also important for those within the industry, especially starting out, who need to know that there are folk to reach out to and to support them.

But the good gay times didn’t stop there, as the next morning Gayming magazine went live and I was featured in the inagural launch of the digital magazine. I gave some harsh but fair words about the issues facing diversity in the esport industry, and my career so far.

Somehow I wasn’t asked what character I had a crush on but it’s Bastila from Knights of the Old Republic or Suvi Anwar from Mass Effect. So now you know!

I once did an article about how Suvi Anwar was the first character I ever encountered that represented me in many important ways. You can read it here if you want. But essentially I never knew how important a relatable gaming character was until I encountered her, a Scottish (ok I’m Irish but it can’t be too perfect), lesbian space scientist who believes in God.

In hindsight me also saying I fancy her sounds super narcissistic but I can’t fix all the problems in the world!

To round this all off I’ll state what is probably obvious to many but helpful to reiterate for the few. No matter who you are, who you want to be or who you love, you’re very much a valid human being who deserves respect, kindness and safety. Pride month is a time of showing solidarity to members of the LGBT community, but every month should be about showing that and an abundance of empathy to everyone.

Finally, I hope you can find time to spare some empathy for me as I fully intend to send myself into a diabetic coma inhaling all the rainbow themed food I can get my hands on! I’M COMING HOME LAWD!

We like to have fun at Weather Factory, but cults are serious business. While knowing your eldritch monstrosities from your treacherous tomes is all well and good, you won’t get far without a special element. Beguiling willing acolytes takes more than charm and instilling fear.

You see it’s all in the headgear. How can you be taken seriously as a potential Long, if your noggin isn’t presented fabulously?

The power of a good hat is not meant purely for fashion statements, but to denote hierarchy and sheer pizzazz. One of the earliest examples of head coverings includes this 27-30,000-year-old Venus of Willendorf figure. Archaeologists believe this depicts a wearing a woven hat, which might be a bit of a stretch but we’ll play along.

Let’s look at how some of the best gaming characters are adorned by incredible hats. Some of these might not even be that memorable character-wise, but if from their forehead and above is stylin’, they’re on this list!

Professor Layton

Hershel Layton does not mess around. He’s a world-renown detective and let’s face it, would not be too pleased about what you get up to in Cultist Simulator. But it’s clear that this distinguished beast wants you to know that while he’s solving crimes, you’ll want to be arrested for even glancing at his tower-top hat.

Hat Kid

A Hat in Time is about a little girl trying to return home in a spaceship. Every facet of the game is cute and cuddly. Hat kid is much more humble in comparison to Layton. She’s ascertained her brand colours, gone with a twist on the standard angles of a top hat and somehow installed balancing mechanics so it doesn’t fly off her head. Style, practicality and high levels of kawaii. 10 hats out of 8!

PaRappa

There are days when you need to unwind and relax. Being the best cult leader doesn’t mean that you exert yourself constantly. PaRappa beanie serves as your cheat hat. Cosy and luminous, yet featuring what could be a simple frog but the more you stare at it, the more you feel its eyes boring into your very soul.

Dough nose fuzz lip man

Came across this hat and really like it. Anyone got the source on the game? Cheers.

Cerebella

Skullgirls is a fun fighting game and it knows that style and function are paramount, especially in the arena. That’s why Cerebella decided to have two massive sentient fists for a hat. Standard really. How does this help a budding leader of the forbidden arts? Simply put, who would dare defy your orders, when one whip of your neck would lead to them being kamehameha’d. The Mansus has no walls, but one whack from your hat and your foes will meet brick!

Link

Iconic. Trailblazer. Ceramic pot smasher! Savior of Hyrule. All these titles and more befit our hero Link, but the first two are the most important because his hat is a definitive fashion statement in the video game world. In a world where turmoil seeks to reign, having a bright fairy tale green hat is a bold move and one that shows true leadership qualities.

His hat even has different titles, such as Cap of Time, Cap of Twilight and Cap of the Hero. Who better to dawn the mantle of a Cultist Leader than someone who has headgear for every season.

SPOILER: SECRET CULTIST SIMULATOR HOUR REVEALED BELOW!

With that, you’ve all learned some valuable lessons about what truly matters when you endeavour to form and lead a cult. You don’t need to thank us!

In a previous episode of Claire Shouts about Irish Badass Saints and Heroes, I mentioned Queen Maeve. She was a very formidable woman in Irish history and lore. CDProjektRed have released a store and featured some merch just for Queen Meve. Now you might have noticed that this particular character has not had her name spelt the same way so far. The beauty of the Irish language and random anglicizing of it.

Before we get into the history of the real Maeve, let’s break down some spellings of her name. We have Maeve, Meve, Meadhbh, Medb and Barry. For the purpose of this post I’ll stick with the modern day Irish version of the name Meadhbh.

In the Witcher series, Meadhbh was a queen of Lyria and Rivia and known for her wisdom, strength and beauty. When the Second Nilfgaard War broke out and her small realm was conquered, she led guerrillas into many battles wearing her iconic white armor. In one such battle her face was wounded and she was left with disfiguring scars. After the war with Nilfgaardian Empire, she was one of the negotiators of the peace treaty.

In the real world, mostly, Queen Meadhbh of Connaught, shared the fame of beauty, strength and royalty of her gaming counterpart, but was a far fiercer entity.

Etymologist have deduced that her name means “mead-woman” or “she who intoxicates”, which is both amazing but also plain rude. But not as rude as Meadhbh.

Meadhbh sought power and would do anything to achieve it. She married not out of love but for land (this I can get on board with to be fair). She killed potential wives that got in her way with nabbing the King of Ulster, Conchobar mac Nessa. Tinni mac Conrí (the human version of a tin of gone off beans) was not a very nice person. He was installed as King of Connaught but conspirators favored Meadhbh to rule. She had many lovers, one of which was her bodyguard, Ailill. Remind you of anyone?

Now lets get to one of the juiciest more epic tales involving Queen Meadhbh. Táin Bó Cúailgne or The Cattle Raid of Cooley. I could try and give pronunciation tips on all these Irish words but you’d need to be full of whiskey.

Yes a battle for a bovine became one of the most glorious Irish stories! Here’s the tldr; version:

Meadhbh didn’t just want to be Queen, she wanted to be wholly equal and that also meant in terms of wealth. Her husband Ailill had a great bull that was worth more than her, which again means this woman has had her fair share of insults. But then the pregnant potential wife killing kind of evens it. Someone else had a bigger better bull and she had her eyes on it. So naturally the country went to war.

She rallied forces from across the province to raid Ulster and seize the majestic bull but there was one thing standing in her way. Cúchulainn, that lad from our previous post on Marvelous Games Fate/EXTELLA. Cúchulainn and the army of Ulster eventually defeated Meadhbh and she went home cowless. I did say tldr.

Meadhbh has many other tales, but this is the one taught in school. As far as I know she’s never been featured in a video game, which is frankly ridiculous. Imagine the Cult of Meadhbh or a Mass Effect style game where you have to hunt through the galaxy for your favoured cow in order to restore the balance and take your place as ruler! In fact I’m going to have a word with Alexis and Lottie…

Last time I wrote about the badassery of Saint Bríd and this time I’m going to push the Irish history agenda more, but it’s prompted by an unlikely source.

I was scrolling through twitter trying to find the dankest of memes for…marketing purposes, when I came across a trailer for Marvelous Games Fate/EXTELLA

Yes a character trailer for a Japanese Single player action game reminded me of one of Ireland’s greatest heroes. If you check their tweet you can see the character is called Cu Chulainn, the unrivaled Hunter of Ulster.

In Irish folklore, we have different ‘cycles’, which can be likened to saga eras and this hero comes from the Ulster Cycle. To further educate you all against your wishes, because I’m on a roll now: Ulster is one of the 4 provinces of the island of Ireland and the only province that is split between the country of Ireland and Northern Ireland.

A smith named Cullan, decided to have a big old party, inviting esteemed guests such as Conchobar mac Nessa, the High King of Ulster. The King’s nephew, Sétanta was playing hurling and HERE’S ANOTHER FACT TANGENT DON’T TRY TO STOP ME LOTTIE!

Hurling one of the 2 national sports of Ireland, alongside Gaelic football and is one of the fastest sports in the world that isn’t some sort of running nonsense. There was a really bad game on Playstation 2 a few years ago that tried to give gamers the experience of playing these sports.

Back on course and long superhero name origin story short…Culann unleashed his fearsome dog which attacked Sétanta. Someone got their wires crossed, it was super awkward. Sétanta had to defend himself and so fired a sliotar (the ball in hurling) at the hound, where it went right down his throat and instantly killing the poor but angry beast.

To repay for this slight, Sétanta offered himself to take the dogs place as Cullan’s guard, thus becoming the “Hound of Cullan” aka Cú Chullain.

But his story doesn’t end there, in fact he went on to be involved in many great tales, and legendary feats. Maybe one day I’ll tell you about his battle with the notorious Queen Medb, who is connected to the Celtic character Morrigan (not in a fanfic way, least not that I know of). That battle is really interesting because it’s all over a big cow.

There’s been many comic books and other adaptations of Cú Chullain over the years and he’s appeared as a random character in games such as Smite. I’ve no idea if any of this history will cross over to Fate/EXTELLA, though I suspect not. But it’s still cool to see more games take inspiration from Irish Lore, so good on ya Marvelous Games.

Oh hi there folks, I’m interrupting your usual blog broadcast from Lottie and Alexis to introduce myself. I’m Claire and I support the Marketing and PR for Weather Factory and have been slowly using techniques I learned off the telly, to convince Sulo and Chi to run away with me.

So I thought I might kick off with giving some juicy insights to the world of marketing and PR for game studios, but given that the fans of Cultist Simulator have a penchant for lore, mythology, religious text and just interesting stories as a whole, I thought I’d break the ice with the Story of Naomh Bríd or Saint Brigid if you don’t speak Irish.

Now I happen to be Catholic and a lover of bread. The latter isn’t relevant at all, I just really like bread. Despite the themes of CS and a fair amount of the community being probably not Catholic, I’m mentioning this because I think it’s cool that everything about what Lottie and Alexis have founded and the human beans that enjoy their games, is not at all ostracising (despite people crying because CS has ground them emotional to a pulp) and we all have a shared love of great writing and stories, regardless of whether people believe them to be real or purely set in fantasy.

This brings us to Bríd, who fyi is not the pagan Goddess Bridget, (there are more than one person with that name) but rather a badass Irish nun, who was canonised after a life of being a badass.

Bríd, or in Old Irish Brigit, is one of the patron saints of Ireland, alongside the likes of St. Patrick (you may have heard of him) and St. Columba. Every February 1st, Irish people,usually the small children folk, go and collect rushes and make Bridget crosses.

Now Patrick is infamous for telling all snakes to feck off out of Ireland and for other miracles, but Bríd has always resonated with me, because some of her acts were rife with sassiness. I won’t go through all the tales here, but my favourite story is how she acquired land in order to build a monastery and it’s usually referred to as The Legend of St. Brigid’s Cloak.

In Harry Potter you can use a cloak to turn invisible and that’s great and all but unless you’re using the cloak to overtake queues at gaming conventions, what’s the point? Brigid’s Cloak skills were far more impressive. She requested a plot of land from the King of Leinster in a serene part of Kildare, which had a lake surrounded by forest and on fertile plain on which to grow crops. The King refused her request, boo!

But Brigid was like “hmm ok cool cool, let me ponder on this”. She prayed that the King’s heart would soften and came back to him and offered a deal. “Give me as much land as my cloak will cover.”

The King rolf’d royally and said “sure you can have as much land as that cloak covers”. So Brigid removed her cloak and draped it fabulously across the land. The cloak begun to expand and expand, as did the Kings shocked face no doubt. After a moment the cloak had covered the entire plot of land Brigid had desired.

She won her land and the King had won a bag of humbleness, becoming a patron of Brigid’s monastery, assisting her with money, food and gifts that she dispersed amongst the people. I like to think that if sunglasses had of existed back then, she would have been the first “deal with it” meme or something akin to

I think Bríd and her shawl of sass could fit in well within the Mansus. Next time I’ll give some Marketing do’s and don’ts and maybe talk about some bread I like!

Happy Friday, beloveds! Here’s what we’ve been up to, this fine August sprint.

Firstly, we went on holiday to Wales. It was totally rad and Alexis practically melted on the drive down into a soft, gooey glow of remembered happiness. Yay!

And then of course we came back and did work. Most of Alexis’s week was taken up with Sekret Projekt #2, a non-Weather Factory freelance gig we’re not allowed to discuss yet. But it’s a pretty big deal, and I suspect the majority of Cultist fans will fan-out when the news finally drops. (It doesn’t sound like that’s going to be until next year, though, so talk amongst yourselves…)

Chris Payne, our ghostly third arm who regularly provides us with his UI/UXpertise (ha ha) has made strides with localisation. We’re translating Cultist into Chinese and Russian, though our petty western minds find Chinese particularly mindboggling: did you know there are 20,000 unique characters? You probably did! But here’s what a mere 13,000 characters look like when you render them graphically into Unity…

UNITY DOESN’T KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH ITSELF. (For non-font-rendering people out there, you basically want the characters in the right of the window to be as big as possible.) But Chris does know what to do, and hey, doesn’t this (WIP) look amazing?!

This sprint we also announced a bunch of stuff we’ve been working on for a while. The highlights are:

Lovecraftday competition

HP Lovecraft’s birthday is coming up on Monday 20th August, and as he’s the grand daddy of Cultist’s family tree, we’re running a week-long Lovecraftday giveaway. It’ll launch this Monday 13th August and you can win a bunch of OFFICIALLY COOL THINGS. No, really! #marketing

Keep your eyes peeled from Monday onwards. 🙂

New social: Instagram and Steam dev

We started our Instagram account this week to hilarious effect (the first three posts I made were pixellated beyond recognition and/or borked in other ways; Alexis had to pull me shrieking from my iPhone). We’re also up on Steam with a developer page, so follow us for notifications about Weather Factory’s future game launches/discounts/whatever. If you’re reading this, there’s a high chance you might be interested! Go go go!

Monthly design streams

Taking place generally on the second Thursday of each month, we’re going to start doing live design talks and Q&A with Alexis (myself behind the camera, heckling). Tech willing, we expect to stream ’em live on Caffeine.tv and upload them to our YouTube later on. We’ll advertise the links and the times across our social media beforehand, so if you have any burning questions about Cultist, design or our previous life with Fallen London/Sunless Sea, this is your time! Alternatively, just eat popcorn while watching two devs try to learn how to stream.

Our inaugural session, on WOUNDS, ROMANCE & DAMNATION, is here.

The CHURCH of MERCH

Yep, it’s an actual Weather Factory online shop full of all the occult things your heart desires! Well, all the occult thing my heart desires cos I appear to be blindly selecting what to sell and then wondering if anyone’s gonna buy it. We’ll initially only have small runs of products to test what stuff people actually buy (see: blind selection, above), and we’ll be selling Orchid Transfiguration USBs, cult stickers, posters, Iris pins, and badass cultist’s notebooks to start with.

I’m hoping to open the store next month – we’re all set up, I’m just waiting for the actual stuff to get here so I can play Where Can I Fit That Box with my office. Woot!

Aaaaanyway, next sprint we may have some more Cultist-specific updates for you. But I already have two draft posts lined up for posting next week, so… stay tuned. 😀

Highlights from GDC include:

• Alexis took what we must presume to be the World’s Worst Photograph of Weather Factory…
• …and was punished with the World’s Most Illustrative Video of living with him
• we got to meet up with a number of our fellow Humble publish-ees, from the charming cat-centrism of Mineko’s Night Market to Brit-bbzes’ whistleblowing stealth-sim, The Occupation
• John Walker, of RPS fame, called Alexis ‘Mr Words’, like some renegade character from Sesame Street who’s fallen off the wagon one too many times

So the above may tell you that we didn’t get quite as much done as we normally do in a sprint, because we only had half a sprint. But here’s what we got up to, in brief!

Clockwork Cuckoo completed another round of excellent icons, focusing on our newly-added tools and ingredients. I hope these’ll add a great deal to the game, so you can actually see what specific things you’re combining (rather than an incrementally increasing set of designs, like we use for lore fragments!).

Along with the ongoing battle against bugs, AK wrote the majority of locations in the game, ready for our Explorer’s Build. These are some of the most evocative snippets in the game, I think, which is like saying they are particularly delectable croutons in the primordial soup of God’s original creation. In short, I think they’re rather good.

I created some new burn images for the game, so keep your eyes peeled the next time you reach one of Cultist Simulator‘s endings.

We now have a Humble store page should you wish to wishlist (I would love you to wishlist on Steam, too). Finally, we’ve been fortunate enough to be accepted into Indienova, a Project Gutenberg operation for translating indie games to Chinese so the vast cosmic gap between western and eastern games can slowly be closed. So I’m delighted to say that Cultist Simulator will be localised into simplified Chinese (!!!), and hope to bring you further localisation (and, fingers crossed, platform) news later down the line.

And your final human interest piece! Something exceptionally lovely may have occurred out in the winterish sun of San Francisco…

Illopoly’s disquisitions on fire and the Unburnt God are interrupted by passages of distractingly erotic poetry addressed to ‘Baldomera’.

(Guess who that makes Christopher Illopoly, ‘the only readable occultist’. Ha ha ha.)

Anyway, next up is the Explorer’s Build, due out on Monday 9th April. That’ll contain a host of new locations to explore, hazards to overcome (or, you know, be horribly defeated by), an avalanche of new tomes and manuscripts, and perhaps – just perhaps – a well-oiled door to the House itself… Stay tuned!

Anyway I possibly didn’t realise until this morning how fundamental the influence of her work – not exclusively the Earthsea books, but particularly those, because I read them early – has been on me. I have occasionally mentioned her in interviews, but not often, because I don’t think about Le Guin when I’m writing, and I do think about Peake and Renault and Zelazny and Hambly, whom I read later, and whom I have to work not to imitate consciously. Le Guin (like Tolkien and Lewis) gave me the whole landscape. Magicians are like this; death works like that; here is the nature of things. The canniness of the everyday and the sudden intrusion of the numinous and the gifts of aphorism and the awareness of nuance and consequence in everything. And of limitation: “Bright the hawk’s flight on the empty sky.”

And some of it is bloody obvious. Sunless Sea is an archipelago, for flip’s sake.

I just wanted to acknowledge the debt. If you’re looking for a graceful ending, this blog post doesn’t have one, but I hope she did.