by Suzanne Park
Because my launch date didn’t magically get pushed out due to the BetaGank incident, I still needed to get a ton of work done that day. I messaged one of the lead developers, who was also one of Asher’s buddies, to see why Asher hadn’t shown up at work yet. He wrote back, Out sick brah, says he’s gonna work from home. Right. He’s “sick.” More like he was too terrified to come into work and deal with the spiraling vortex of racist and sexist shit he’d instigated with his BetaGank leak.
Against Ian’s wishes, I peeked into the “DO NOT READ: HARASSMENT” temporary folder Damon had created in my inbox. The messages directed to this folder would auto-send to legal after five minutes. There were sixty-two new messages in the five-minute harassment repository.
@nastymasta82 Us REAL gamers are sick and tired of you stupid feminists ruining everything. Not everything is sexist. Attention whore
@BigSky22 Feminism has taken over our society and people like you want to punish men for just being men. You want more girls in games? More games should have neh-kid girls characters
@fellasquad It’s pretty clear to me that this Melody person got special treatment just for having a vagina. Affirmative action at its worst. Dumb bitches
@GoBackToIndia Go back to China. Never mind. Just die
Some idiots had sent pictures of other random Asian women (named Melody Joong, Melody Jung, and Melody Joon), mistaking them for me. Yeah, I wasn’t supposed to read those messages during work hours, but shit, I couldn’t help it. That got me worked up, with people calling me a bitch, making fun of my ethnicity, and calling me an attention whore. Me? Had they ever met Jane? They called me stupid, too, which really struck a nerve. Those assholes knew nothing about me. And no one who knew me would ever call me stupid. You know who was stupid? Someone who would blindly pass judgment on another person they didn’t know at all. I was not stupid. I could out-calculus any one of those troll motherfuckers. Was I clumsy? Yes. Awkward? Absolutely. Did I do stupid things sometimes? Um, yeah. But that didn’t make me stupid.
Messages had also escalated in severity: I saw death and sexual assault threats, and hundreds of requests for nude pictures and graphic sexual propositions. My stomach knotted as I read these vile words. How could people make snap judgments about me based on tidbits of information they gleaned from the internet? It was like racial profiling with uninformed stereotyping and armchair psychoanalyzing. This practice always led to misinformed conclusions, and potentially dangerous results.
I wished this was all just a bad dream, but it was very real. My full-body numbness prevented me from ugly crying in my office.
Wild-eyed, jittery publicist Joe slammed my door open just as I finished my email skimming. Sue trailed a few steps behind him. Since that morning he looked like he’d walked into the eye of a tornado and aged five years.
“Hi. Sue and I need you to look over these new rules of engagement as soon as possible, drafted by Ian, our lawyer, and a few members of the board.” He paced around while I read.
Per these new rules, I was not allowed to talk to the media about the Ultimate Apocalypse game (“hereby in this document referred to also as ‘UA’”—ugh) or about the company itself. This included but was not limited to: information about the people, the culture, and the male-female ratio. I couldn’t respond to any of the email or social media harassment; this was being handled by our legal and PR team. Playing any online games was prohibited, in case someone figured out my gamertag. And last, I needed to refrain from any public discussion about these ongoing developments. There was a chance we may need to file criminal charges if this ballooned even bigger, and the fewer people involved, the better.
Joe said, “I am so sorry about everything. We’re trying to figure out how to handle this on the fly. This is uncharted territory. And all these restrictions, the dos and don’ts, are overwhelming. It’s like drinking from a fire hose, I’m sure.”
Not quite accurate. It was more like I was trying to drink from a fire hose that was actually on fire, while spraying out fire.
And then, just as I hit an ultimate low point in my life, Jane texted me.
I booked a wedding dress appointment at six bridal boutiques this Sat. I’ll need you to tell me if I look amazing or not. Then we need to look at shoes. Btw I’m going to start on the Whole 30 diet thing tomorrow. Maybe you should too?
I was, without a doubt now, so clearly and utterly fucked.
And to make my utterly fucked state even more fucked, Nolan, Mr. Worst Timing Ever, stopped by my office just before I was leaving for the day. Today he had on a brown-and-black-checked shirt, not my favorite on him, but still hugged his body nicely. “You doing okay?”
I nodded. Barely okay.
“Um, do you want the bad news, or even worse news?”
Sighing hard, I melted into a blob in my chair. “I don’t care. You pick.”
“Ian imported the graphs you sent him and accidentally broke all the formulas.”
Okay, that was bad, but that wasn’t horrible.
“He also changed some of our retail pricing for the holidays, so some of our assumptions need to be updated and accounted for in the new graphs.”
I nodded slowly. “You mean, the graphs with the broken formulas.”
“Yeah.”
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.
I pointed at Asher’s empty chair and beckoned Nolan to bring it over. He sat and wheeled over to me. Here we were again, right next to each other, me breathing in his intoxicating Nolan scent, faintly woodsy with a top note of fancy hotel soap. He leaned over my laptop to pull up Ian’s files from the hard drives, his muscular arms distracting me from all that had happened in the last twenty-four hours. Instead of staring at the line graphs, my gaze traveled down his body, craving for him to touch me again.
A sense of unease swept through me as I remembered Asher, sitting over at his desk, reciting excerpts from that stupid handbook. How smug he looked when he thumbed through the pages, spouting off all the reasons why I couldn’t be thinking about Nolan this way. And Asher had been right: I was a supervisor, and Nolan was an intern.
Jumping to my feet, I paced back and forth. This was getting dangerously close to overstepping boundaries. Companies turned a blind eye to some people breaking the rules, but I wasn’t one of them.
“You keep doing that and you’ll wear a path through that carpet,” Nolan joked. He continued to input numbers into the spreadsheet while I paced to and fro in the background. After a half hour passed, Nolan squinted at the monitor and said nonchalantly, “I think I’m finished. Want to grab a bite to eat?” He saved the file and uploaded it to the shared drive.
Worst-case scenario, this was one of those misconduct simulation scenarios in the making. No thanks, I couldn’t afford the risk. “Nah, I better get home.” I didn’t bother to elaborate. He didn’t need to know Friday nights it was just me, a frozen pizza, and more Shark Week reruns.
“Maybe a rain check then?” He stood up to stretch, his shirt lifting to reveal his firm lower abs. Oh my god.
I replied, “Maybe.”
But most likely not.
Chapter Twelve
For the first time ever, I got the prime parking spot directly in front of my apartment garage elevator, which opened immediately as soon as I pressed the button. Could the universe be signaling to me that my life wasn’t all gloom and doom? I unlocked my door and exhaled quietly, comforted by my messy, lived-in apartment, with its familiar smell of Bounce dryer sheets and old coffee grounds. Home at last.
Firing up my laptop before dinnertime turned out to be a terrible idea. Out of morbid curiosity I searched my name online and HOLY HELL. My appetite disappeared, boom, just like that.
I found hundreds, maybe even thousands of disparaging messages and comments about me. A chunk of them were about the shittiness of the Ultimate Apocalypse game concept, and the widespread hatred of it, but most of the posts and comments were just personal attacks on me. The “fucking feminazi.” The “stuck-up
asshat ho.” And my favorite, from @alfredfem: “cunty fuckign slut.” @alfredfem needed to spellcheck that shit before he put it online. Also, was ‘cunty’ even a word? And, me . . . a slut? That word was so contemptuous, and if any of these people actually knew me, they’d get why that was so fucking ridiculous to say. I had NO sexual game. Those fucking ignorant, vocal assholes.
Chewing my nails was a nasty habit I had stopped in high school and resurrected again during my current life crisis. My life derailed overnight, without any warning, and I couldn’t manage to get it back on track. It had already really taken a toll on my mental health and my body. Skipping lunch that afternoon, I needed more nourishment than a bowl of cereal from breakfast. I poured myself a wine, grabbed some baby carrots from the fridge, and nuked a Trader Joe’s corn dog. It felt like a corn-dog kind of day. Quite possibly a two-or-three-corn-dog kind of day. All these racist, sexist, homophobic messages and comments hit me where it tore at my soul and I needed some hot-dog-wrapped-in-cornbread sustenance to shoulder this torment.
While settling into my meal, Ian sent an email to Joe, Sue, and me at 8:53 P.M. “Joe, please draft a response to the online petition calling for action to fire Melody and boycott of Seventeen Studios. Let’s meet 6 A.M. tomorrow to discuss.—I.M.”
What online petition? I searched for “Melody Joo petition” online and fucking hell, a crowdsourced document with hundreds of signatures was the first search result, demanding my removal from Ultimate Apocalypse, as my involvement in game production caused “tangible detriment to the entire gaming industry.” The consequences according to the ranting petition, if the request was not met, would be a worldwide boycott of my game when it launched.
Anti-Melody online discussions were everywhere and I couldn’t stop reading all the angry and bitter commentary surrounding my femaleness. These misogynists were all over the globe, spewing vulgarities toward me at all hours of the day. Some cloaked their hate with anti-left-wing feminist arguments, hearkening back to the good old days when games were all about men, for men. This seemed to be about the categorical hatred of women by certain men, and these jerks finding an outlet to vocalize their opinion. I group-messaged with Candace and Jane, to vent.
Jane: WTF is wrong with everyone? Why all the hate?
Candace: Yeah, WTF???
Jane: Seriously! I took tons of art history classes in college (4.0 GPA!) and studied Western classic art, and men used to CELEBRATE women in their artwork. Even ugly women. Remember Leonardo’s Mona Lisa? She was like a four out of ten on a bombshell meter.
Me: That’s a funny way to describe the Mona Lisa.
Candace: Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, also celebrated. She was pretty though.
Jane: I did a sr. thesis on Monet. Women in the Garden. Very pro female. And Matisse’s Woman w/a Hat. The Dance. All pro XX chromosomes!
Me: If angry trolls got to rename these masterpieces: Bitches in the Garden. Feminazi with Hat. Nekked Hos Dancing.
Jane’s point was on point, though. Women used to be depicted positively in art. Centuries ago, women in distinguished works of art had been portrayed with reverence and tastefulness, even those presenting nude female subjects. Well, except for Picasso. He created some pretty jacked-up, abstract paintings featuring women. But Picasso didn’t create portraits of women with glistening DDD breasts and raunchy attire, à la the game industry.
After venting to Jane and Candace for a few more minutes, I got back to revising production timelines and taking notes from one of the game production books Kat had lent me.
A buzz from Candace’s text shook me awake. Maybe you should quit. I want you to be safe. It’s gotten really bad. I’d fallen asleep on my new laptop keyboard. I felt the side of my face: my fingers traced the key imprints across my left cheek. Thank god my pool of drool on the keyboard didn’t short out my computer.
It was the safest way out of this, quitting. The controversy would die down if I threw up my hands and yelled “You win!” But then, well, the bad guys would win. And bad guys should never win.
I wrote back. This game might bomb, but I’m not quitting. I’m staying and fighting these bullies. And my game is going to launch on time, damn it. And it will be profitable. I’m going to make this happen because I’m not standing down!
I’d invested so much time already into it. I couldn’t back out now.
Candace wrote back. 100% here for it . . . I have no doubt.
I wished I could say the same.
AT 6:00 A.M. sharp, I met the others in Ian’s office. Everyone looked so haggard, including me. More nights with troubled sleep, tossing and turning with worry. I tried to add some early-morning humor. “What, no catered breakfast?” Joe and Sue looked up at me with dead eyes. Note to self: no breakfast jokes to add levity at 6 A.M.
Ian, on the other hand, snorted. “If you can get us out of this mess, I’ll pay for your catered breakfasts for a whole year.” A pretty tempting offer. Too bad I had no idea how to make this problem go away.
A shadow moved outside of Ian’s office, triggering all the automatic lights in the executive hallway. Asher, in the office at 6:10 A.M. with a goddamned Starbucks again. I’d need to confront him later about his role in this whole fucking fiasco. But now I needed to focus on the crisis at hand: the online petition.
Joe said, “Ian and I consulted our legal team. We could go out with another official statement against the petition, but sending another one out so soon after the previous one would look incompetent from a PR standpoint. I think we could post a statement on our website, but not necessarily blast it out in any of the gaming outlets.”
Ian furrowed his brow. “That seems sensible.” He added, “This type of controversy has never happened to me before. I never thought the gaming community would come after me like this. The game community loves me.”
Sue chimed in. “Well, to be frank, it’s because you’re a man that you’ve never dealt with this before. How many other female production leads did you have at your last company?”
He struck The Thinker statue pose. “None. So let’s suppose you’re right and it’s all about bashing women. Isn’t this game launch a no-win situation? Aren’t we going to fail because no one will buy this game?”
BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!
The loud, rapid-fire knocking made my heart stop. Kat threw the door open and almost knocked Joe’s coffee mug out of his hand. “Sorry I’m late. My kid projectile vomited Cheerios all over the kitchen and I had to get an emergency babysitter.” She met my stunned stare and waved at me. I wasn’t expecting Kat to be here. What a relief. A familiar, trustworthy face.
Joe said, “I asked Kat to join us for three reasons. One, she is a core team member of the Ultimate Apocalypse project and is integral to its success. Second, there’s a leak at this company so I want to keep our circle of trust to just us. Kat knows a lot of people here and might be able to help HR home in on the culprit. And third, she’s a chick. I mean . . . a woman. Er . . . female? And she’s been in the gaming industry for a long time. We could use her advice and street cred to aid in digging us out of our hole.” I scanned the room for any dissent. Nope. None. Even Ian nodded in agreement. If I went down in flames, it wasn’t just my career that would be destroyed. Seventeen Studios and Ian MacKenzie would go down too. Ian’s life and mine were intricately intertwined. He had all the incentive in the world to make this situation better.
Ian cleared his throat. “Okay, can we focus here and get back to my question? Isn’t this game inevitably going to fail, with all this bad press?”
This was my chance to jump in. “Well, I worked in advertising for a few years, and what I do know is that this game has gotten a ton of buzz in a short period of time. It’s gone viral. There have been over five thousand mentions of the Ultimate Apocalypse game in the last week, most within the past two days. I say we take advantage of this.”
Everyone asked me in unison, “How?”
“I don’t have a ton of ideas right now, but with
a proper brainstorm, I bet we could get more. The first thing we need to do is to collect newsletter sign-ups on our company website and create a game website to allow people to sign up for a newsletter there, too. We can send exclusive updates, announcements, and insider scoops to all the subscribers. Even if people hate the game, and they hate me, they might subscribe just to share the intel, so they seem ‘in the know,’ and they’ll still buy the game just to play it and complain about it.”
Kat raised her eyebrows. “Hmm, this is something we’ve never done before. It’s a good idea. Remember, there are also a ton of nonhater people who will want to buy the game to support women in gaming too.”
I chimed in. “Yeah, this morning on my drive in I was trying to think of ways to turn this situation around. Make lemonade out of lemons. Polish a turd. You know.”
All eyes swooped over to Ian, who had gotten up to stride in a loop around his office. I had nothing more to add. Neither did Kat. We waited for his verdict on the newsletter idea.
Ian stared at me, and then at Joe. “The marketing team’s pretty stretched as it is. But hold on.”
He picked up the phone receiver and punched a four-digit extension. “Can you come by my office?” A beat. “Now, please.”
Within seconds, Nolan burst through the doorway, panting heavily. Trying to smooth out the untucked gray-checked shirt he wore the other day, he asked Ian, “What’s so urgent?”
“Nolan, I need you to set up a marketing newsletter, and get a game website spun up this week. Drop everything you’re doing.”
My face fell instantly at Ian’s suggestion, just as Nolan sent me an excited look. There was no way he misinterpreted my deep frown of disappointment. But I had good reason: Nolan had zero marketing experience outside of his MBA coursework. Damn it, why’d they assign my marketing idea to an intern? I steadied my breathing, pushing down the anger rising within my chest.
