Nut Ink. Mini reviews of texts old and new. No fuss. No plot spoilers. No adverts. Occasional competency.

Friday, January 10, 2025

Who Hunts The Whale (2023)

 

Author: Laura Kate Dale, Jane Aerith Magnet | Pages: 251

    "Heroes are for fairytales and video games. It's easy to sit around a campfire and spin a fantastic story of a lone hero and their great victory over a powerful foe. Some would call that inspiring, but what's more inspiring is when normal everyday folks unite to overcome their shared troubles."
    A fresh faced new hire, Avery Paige, gets a job at a AAA gaming studio that makes some of her favorite games thinking it will be a dream job. She notices some irregularities but brushes it off at first. There's the usual low pay, long hours and just odd requests made of her as a personal assistant to the top floor executives; 2 tech bro wannabes who know nothing of the actual requirements to make a product and who are in a constant competition to one up each other in both how strong they take their coffee and who can think of more predatory ways to monetize the company's games. The job starts to wear on Paige as the executives treat her with disregard or outright misogyny. Moreso, she notices the working conditions of the developers go from bad to worse to human rights abuses and begins to make a plan to right some wrongs given her privileged position on the top floor.

    The book is written as if reading Avery's journal and each entry laid out in chronological order gives a good view of the sequence of deterioration. Some of the more outlandish events described make the reader fear they aren't even exaggerated in their horror as the authors' have taken from their and others experience in the real games industry and range from disrespect and theft to physical harm and sexual assault. Gotta put that "any resemblance to actual persons or events" warning label to good use. A quick and robust read that gives good insight into the human cost of what goes into making games and whether or not it is really worth it. The message seems to clearly fall on "No". Also gives a good breakdown on industry practices like what they are and how they are implemented to milk consumers in predatory ways that are often so obtuse the players won't even know they were scammed. Has a nice message about community and solidarity. One can't do it alone unlike a fictional video game protagonist.

4 Morale building exercises resulting in PTSD out of 5