Life is too short to play abusive games

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We’re entering the gaming holidays so once again it’s time for Ubisoft to trot out another assortment of incremental sequels. This year it’s Watch_Dogs: Legion and Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, both of which look very much like the last several entries in their respective series but I’m sure some people are excited. This is video games, repetition is what we do.

This is also the year in which Ubisoft has been at the center of so many scandals and allegations I have struggled to keep up. One in five employees have reported feeling unsafe at work. One in four have witnessed abuse and/or harassment. This isn’t a bad actor skirting repercussions, it’s a quagmire of workplace abuse that has been hurting people for years. Ubisoft says they’re “deeply concerned” about these allegations, but apparently not enough to address them in their press conference. It is difficult for me to believe Ubisoft is sincere when they refuse to even recognize these issues beyond a few press releases anyone outside of the enthusiast press is unlikely to see.

And yet, as Valhalla and Legion approach release, coverage is looking much the same as ever. Concern and support for the people hurt by Ubisoft has evaporated as gamers excitedly dig into these new open-world checklists. At most, the abuse is a footnote in a review, a dark cloud over a game that will be pointed at but otherwise ignored. No matter the allegations, it would seem, coverage is compulsory.

I am not here to tell you you’re a bad person if you’re excited for these games. I’m not cancelling games culture because a shiny new game released and people are talking about it. I know how this works, I’m not surprised. But I think we need to be honest about what is happening here: we know that these games were produced in conditions that have abused many, many people over years, and knowing that, we are choosing to buy, play, and talk about them anyway.

It is very easy to rationalize our media decisions as being inconsequential to the rolling industrial culture machine. What is it going to change, really, if one more person does or doesn’t buy Assassin’s Creed? Ubisoft won’t notice. You can get all your friends to boycott it and Ubisoft won’t feel it. With companies this large any act of consumer action is not going to materially change anything. It won’t stop the abuse, it won’t change the games.

But this kind of logic operates under the same false imperative that every game is essential. That it is our duty as gamers to experience this year’s AAA darlings, to have our takes and feed the content monster. This is the lie game marketing and criticism has sold us so effectively it seems almost heretical that we could think about not devoting our time to Ubisoft’s games. It might not matter economically if we refuse to engage with Ubisoft, but consider the media that we missing when we choose to once again dip into Watch_Dogs.

There are more games being released now than anyone could ever hope to play in their lifetimes. Instead of spending $60 on an Ubisoft game, you could instead support developers who are not abusive, are making games that push the media in new directions, and who are not sloppily endorsing state violence towards protest groups. Games like Umurangi Generation (ORIGAME DIGITAL, 2020), Extreme Meatpunks Forever: Bound By Ash (Heather Flowers, 2020), every issue of Indiepocalypse. It’s not hard to find these games, there are too many to list.

If we are going to support survivors and labor organizers we have to get out of the false belief that what we choose to play has no consequence. The media we allow into our lives impacts how we view the world, subtracts what little time we have as humans to engage with any art, and in the case of smaller devs can be the difference between making rent and having to get a new job. Obviously, boycotting a game is not enough and we absolutely have to continue to demand companies fix the structures that allow abuse to run rampant, but that is a long process and what we can do immediately is opt out of the games made under those conditions.

One of the arguments that gets thrown around is the importance of critically engaging with these games because of how big they are. And to be fair, there have been some excellent pieces digging into Legion and I expect the same will happen with Valhalla. But are these conversations worth the dozens, sometimes hundreds of hours it takes to play these games (to say nothing of the energy of actually writing the reviews)? Is it worth devoting all that labor for the sake of having a take that will no more materially impact a game's performance than if that reviewer hadn't bought it? What is the value of engaging with these games if we are going to do so without reckoning with the conditions that created them, and how do we justify doing that over the hundreds of other games we could otherwise be playing and discussing?

We are all going to die before we clear our backlogs. Life is too short to spend on games made under abuse. It’s too short to criticize Ubisoft’s workplace and then devout a week of coverage to each of their games. There is so little we can control under capitalism, but what we can do is decide what media we spend our time with. Imagine if everyone writing about Assassin’s Creed instead wrote about Extreme Meatpunks Forever. These conversations matter, and pretending they are insignificant because millions of people will still buy Ubisoft’s games is just a way to justify doing the same. Which, if that’s what you’re doing, at least be honest about it. We are all making compromised decisions under capitalism, but to nihilistically wash ourselves of any responsibility for the media we consume is just a cowardly way of calling out our cake and eating it too.