Three years ago, on this very day, I quit my job.

I feel a kind of importance in that timing, almost as if it's a moment for doing some solemn magic; a window for a particularly significant and potent ritual. It feels fitting, to me, as a time to break my silence.

There are times when breaking a silence is akin to breaking a curse.

This particular bit of emancipation has been a long time coming. I've debated a lot, for those three years, about whether or not to even do this. For a long while, it wasn't the right choice. But I think, now, the time has come; to continue to try and guard this story, to hide specifics and details, to only ever speak in vagaries about my own past... it all no longer serves to protect a lingering wound in my heart. It has, instead, become something that feels like a poisonous secret - a toxic reticence that festers inside. And to heal the rest of that heartbreak, I need to tell the whole thing.

This is the truth of my old professional career, what I did there, and why it all ended. It is also some of the background of my own life, and a key part of why things happened the way they did.

I will be naming names. I will be describing details. This will not be an easy read, and it will be quite long. I'm also probably going to swear a lot, because that's how I do things.

Please also be advised that this needs to carry a content warning: many problematic things are going to come up in the telling of this story, including sexism, ableism, racism, anti-fat hate, anti-queer hate, and interpersonal abuse. These themes are, sadly, inextricable components of the reality of my old career. As such, they will be ever-present throughout this piece. In addition, please be aware that this story will also lead into other parts of my own personal life, outside of anything that ever happened on the job. I want to be explicit up front that those discussions are not meant in any way to imply a comparison with what happened in my professional experiences, nor to draw any parallels between the perpetrators of any of these actions; those experiences are part of my life, however, and one of my goals here is to explore how those events affected and informed what did happen at work. Those particular mentions will be contained to the section titled "Healing." This specific warning will be repeated at the beginning of that section, but that portion will make mention of my experiences with sexual assault, including child sexual abuse. Please skip that portion if you need to do so.

I've split this work into many sections, to help break up the massive amount of text that will be involved, and make it easier to navigate and read in multiple sessions. Some parts are addressed to specific audiences; please feel free to skip any you feel do not apply to you, if you like. However, none of this is meant to be gatekeeping; even sections that are addressed to specific groups of people are freely shared with everyone, because that's how I do things. Nothing here is secret; that's really the point, in the end.

Why - and Why Now

I think I want to start with a little bit of context. Over the past three years, I've thought a lot about whether or not to ever say any of this stuff publicly. As I said, for most of that time, I wasn't expecting to do this at all. To say I've had a lot of complicated feelings around the entire matter is the flimsiest understatement. Ultimately, while I know I need to do this for myself in order to move forward with my own life, there's a lot more going on that I want to at least acknowledge before getting into the thick of the story itself.

A lot of my hesitation has stemmed, quite frankly, from fear. I've been afraid of a lot of things, the past few years - afraid of not being believed if I did ever speak up; afraid of finally saying something, only to find that nobody would actually care; afraid of retaliation and reprisal. I've been afraid that someone might use my story as an excuse to do something horrible - never anything I could place details or specifics to, just a shapeless anxiety about what "might" happen. I've been afraid that saying something might cause more harm than good. Beyond even all that, I've been afraid that somehow this revelation would cause people I cared about for so long - who I still care about - to get hurt.

I don't know what will happen as a result of publishing this. I have no idea what the outcome might be. But I am no longer interested in trying to control the results. What will happen will happen.

I need this - in order to move on, in order to resolve my own lingering pain, and in order to find some sense of confidence and solidity about what I'm trying to do with my own future (we'll get to all that, eventually). I want this, too; I want to be free of it all, to know that in the end, I wasn't defeated by any of it. If there's any chance this might help others in some way deal with their own experiences, then I want that, too.

I know that the perpetrators of the abuse, mistreatment, interpersonal harm, and bigotry that I endured all rely heavily on the silence of their victims. They need people like me to not talk about it, because that's a core element of maintaining their veneer of acceptable behavior. They count on the fact that nobody ever names their offenses as a way to "prove" that they must not be doing anything wrong, and to gaslight and besmirch anyone who tries to suggest that maybe they're not the paragons they advertise themselves to be.

This is my opportunity set the record straight. It is also my opportunity to ensure that I can tell my own story, in full - nobody paraphrasing, nobody redacting, nobody adjusting things to accommodate their own agenda, nobody contesting or protesting my version of events. Nobody to tell me, yet again, that I should shut up and stop making such a big deal out of it.

But perhaps most of all, what's motivated me to do this all, now, is a simple matter of principle.

In the old days, I taught the people I led that it was important to never willingly suffer in silence. It was a major theme of how I did things, for a long time.

And so it only makes sense if I, too, refuse to keep my hurt quiet.

I need to talk - about the harm itself, about the pain of recovery, about the lingering stress and heartache and damage, caused not just by overt and direct acts of malice, but by over a decade of constant erasure, minimization, and devaluation of my emotional and relational labor. I need the truth to be known.

It's time.

This Is My Story

My name is Amelia Laumann. My pronouns are she, her, and hers.

I had a 20+ year career in the game development industry. From June 2011 to September 2022, I was an employee at ArenaNet, developer of the Guild Wars franchise. In my time there, I primarily worked on Guild Wars 2, although I had involvement in other things that I am not able to discuss because of non-disclosure contracts. I was hired to work on the legendary network server infrastructure of ArenaNet, one of the most incredibly resilient and effective systems in the world - not just in games, but in any kind of distributed network technology in general. Over time, I filled a range of roles in the studio, including senior leadership positions. I'll have a lot to say about what I did there in a moment.

I was ultimately forced to leave, via a combination of discrimination, abuse, targeted harassment, and overt hate. I will have more to say about that, too.

There are two perpetrators in particular I need to name, and one notable enabler. However, there are a lot of other people involved in this - both good and bad - over the years, who I've chosen not to single out at this time, for various reasons. Suffice it to say the three I'm identifying here are representative of a larger, endemic problem in the company itself, as well as ArenaNet's parent corporation, NCSoft West. These were not isolated incidents, nor were the bad actors involved a rare or even particularly egregious set. The whole place is riddled with this stuff. The former head of the studio during the closing years of my tenure, John Taylor (who generally went by "JT"), inherited a long legacy of misogynistic and prejudiced executive managerial culture. Despite my repeated efforts to convince him to try to change things, he consistently refused to acknowledge or get involved in anything that he considered "HR problems." This happened at the expense of numerous wonderful people in the studio over the years - generally legally protected minorities and marginalized people - and ultimately led to the collapse of accountability that ended in my departure. Even though JT didn't create the problem, and even though he left the company six months after I did, he was responsible for failing to address it in even the tiniest way, and he was personally responsible for bringing on board the two people who directly harmed me the most: John Corpening and Colin Johanson.

To properly explain all of this, I'm going to need to tell a pretty long story. Long partly because it spans 11 years, and long partly because there is a lot of intricacy and complexity that needs to be explored in order to do justice to this entire debacle. It's also long because there's no way I will be able feel like I'm truly out from under the forced silencing of the mistreatment and abuse unless I talk about all of it.

Corporate Structure

Before diving into the whole sordid tale, I want to provide a little background on the organizational structure of ArenaNet. Even by typical corporate standards, it was a bit Byzantine and confusing. Much of this, as it turned out, was intentional obfuscation; but for the sake of making this whole thing a bit easier to follow, I'll short-circuit the years-long struggle it took me to wrap my head around how the company actually worked.

The game development studio proper is ArenaNet. This is a corporate entity unto itself, but it is a wholly-owned subsidiary of a publishing and holdings company that I will call NCSoft West. (The NC entity changed names a few times over the years; I'm simplifying the continuity of that legal entity to make this all easier to follow. The formal, legal company name is something slightly different.) NCWest, as it was often referred to in internal shorthand, also at times over the years owned and managed other game development studios. However, only ArenaNet was ever consistently successful within the NCWest umbrella. For the most part, NCWest did very little to pay attention to what ArenaNet was up to, with some exceptions after 2019, as we'll get to. There are rampant misconceptions about how much interference and control of ArenaNet comes from NCSoft in general; the reality is that there was actually surprisingly little meaningful involvement at all, at least during my era.

One final wrinkle to complicate this is that NCWest is actually also connected (in ways I have to confess I'm still somewhat unclear on) to a Korean company called NCSoft. NCSoft in Korea is a very successful and fairly well-off company, having business ventures across Asia, and is a publicly-traded corporation there. Their overall annual budgets are measured in billions of US Dollars. Some of this money was routinely used to invest in game studios in the US and Europe, generally via the NCWest entity; ArenaNet was one of those investments. Most of this has fairly little to do with my story directly, but the context will hopefully help make some of the details a little clearer.

Within ArenaNet itself, organizational structure was also a bit blurry at times. For the most part, the company followed a traditional hierarchical power structure. There was a singular cisgender, heterosexual white man in charge of the studio at all times; although the person in that role changed a few times, the general structure did not. He was always directly responsible for reporting to NCWest about the studio's operations... a task some studio heads were more honest about than others, but we'll get to that, too. Since ArenaNet is a wholly-owned subsidiary of NCWest, there was no board of directors, CEO, or other similar structure within the studio itself. All of the classic "executive" and "C-Suite" type roles existed under NCWest only, and those figures rarely appeared on ArenaNet's radar until after 2019. Everything was handled by the studio head. Under this man, the leadership of ArenaNet itself was relatively straightforward. Since NCWest rarely involved themselves with the day to day affairs of ArenaNet, a cluster of people existed under the studio head, who were effectively the internal studio executives, despite not carrying such official titles.

The studio was divided into departments, generally organized by professional skill-set (the common industry parlance for this is "discipline"). These departments came in many shapes and sizes, ranging from a small handful of people, to a few dozen. For some examples, there was a department that handled creating art and graphics, a department for audio and music, a department for storytelling and narrative writing, a department for translation and international/intercultural localization, a department for coordinating and scheduling between all the other departments (referred to as "production"), a department for quality assurance (testing the game, and finding and monitoring bugs), and, of course, a department for programmers. (I sincerely apologize to anyone I've managed to forget; this list is not meant to be exhaustive. The point is, making an enormous game like Guild Wars 2 involves a lot of people, and a lot of different skills.)

Although Guild Wars 2 is the only title to have emerged from ArenaNet (at least as of this writing) since I started there in 2011, a number of other projects did exist at various points in time. Of course, the original Guild Wars maintained its own team for a long time, and continues to have a small number of people who work on it on occasion as needed. There were unannounced projects as well, about which I will be very intentionally vague in the interests of not breaching any non-disclosure obligations I am still under. However, for organizational purposes, it is worth understanding that each game acted like its own kind of bubble in the company - departments did not span across game projects, but rather had similar branches inside the hierarchy of each game's development. A game generally had a singular person in charge of its overall development, although that person rarely had managerial responsibility, in terms of ability to hire, fire, promote, or issue raises and bonuses. Game heads reported to various different bosses in various departments over time, compounding some of the confusion about who was actually responsible for what.

Each department typically had a single director, a person who was loosely in charge of the entire group, and responsible for the group's successes and failures. In larger departments, directors would often have "managers" or "leads" who reported to them; most of the staff of the department would then report to those leaders. So a typical department (except for the smallest) had three layers of people in its hierarchy. This allowed the studio head (and, occasionally, NCWest executives) to interact with a relatively tiny group of people, i.e. the directors. Like many companies, this is done in ArenaNet and NCWest ostensibly as a way to promote efficiency. However, as is likely also common in many companies, it provided a lot of opportunities for miscommunication, lost communication, and even deliberate manipulation (and we'll get to that, too). Even though I was aware of the overall corporate structure fairly early on in my time there, it was not until much closer to the end that I realized the full extent of how much malpractice was done under the cover of that hierarchical structure.

A large chunk of my experience at the company happened in the context of the programming department (which at times also likes to refer to itself as "engineering" - a habit I was personally rather fond of encouraging, in an attempt to help self-doubting programmers appreciate the complexity and intricacy of the game we worked on together). However, it also crossed over into other areas, including not only the operations of other departments and their respective leadership, but the corporate structure as a whole. So at this point it's probably best to just start telling the actual story.

Beginnings

I suppose the place to start is the spring of 2011. I'd been working remotely for a different game company, based out of Europe, for about 9 years at that point. For about four years, I'd been in treatment for a variety of difficult mental and emotional challenges. At the time, I hadn't even begun to try to explore where they might have come from. I was mostly interested in avoiding the unpredictable and debilitating pain that came with those experiences, things that seemed pointless and arbitrary... things I felt I had no way to understand at all. For the most part, this strategy worked well enough. Throughout those years, I worked with doctors who helped keep me more-or-less stable and able to continue working.

Unfortunately, early in 2011, that approach started to falter. I began once again feeling overwhelmed by the emotional turmoil I couldn't seem to really attach to anything in my day-to-day life. Exhausted and worried, I negotiated a slightly reduced workload with my employer to try and give myself space to recover a bit. While I remained fully committed to trying to work on the project I was involved in at the time, my employer became less than committed to continuing to issue my paychecks. After a few months of effectively working for free, and being completely ghosted any time I asked about pay, I decided it was time to move on. Even though losing a job was a scary risk, I knew I wasn't going to have any luck recovering if I was also dealing with being actively exploited. In the worst case, I figured having some downtime between gigs would give me a chance to bounce back - and, thankfully, it did... at least a little.

That window of time gave me my first real opportunity to contemplate something that would go on to be a key part of much of my future. At that point, I still very much thought of things like "violence" as meaning some kind of physical injury, or at least a bodily clash of some sort. This is completely reasonable, since our culture generally normalizes and encourages this understanding. Even today, the word isn't often used to refer to anything else, and back when I was growing up, it was even less-so. But the combination of not getting paid, and realizing how many years I'd spent getting literally screamed at on a regular basis by my bosses, certainly seemed like it was some kind of harmful. So as I watched my paltry bank account dwindle and tried not to worry about it, I also thought a lot about what other kinds of violence might exist: things like emotional and relational violence. No marks are left on anyone's bodies, but we end up hurt all the same. I didn't know it at the time, but that idea would come to be a major theme of my life, especially once I realized how connected it was to those sporadic moments of emotional distress I'd been so busy trying to escape.

I started shopping for new jobs. A few years prior, I'd begun attending the annual Game Developers' Conference (GDC) in San Francisco and had a few connections there, so I brought my resume to GDC 2011. There wasn't a ton of traction at first, and only a handful of scattered interest from prospective employers; but there was a place I knew was hiring, in a city I'd always fantasized about living in, and I was ready for not just a new job but a whole new place to live. Half on a joke, convincing myself it was "just practice anyways," I sent a copy of my resume to ArenaNet, and applied for an intermediate-level programming job.

At the time, I had little idea what I was doing. I'd been recruited directly for my first two programming jobs, and had never applied for anything before. I had no idea what salary ranges to expect, or even that my 9 years of existing experience meant I was well beyond the range of candidates usually sought for intermediate postings. Instead, I fretted that the fact I had no degrees (or even a high school diploma) might be a deal-breaker. I didn't expect to get called back at all, but I was glad I'd at least put myself forward for the ArenaNet job.

So needless to say, I was shocked when they offered to fly me to the Seattle area for an all-day on-site interview, all expenses paid. It also went completely over my head that this was not a normal arrangement to extend to an intermediate-level candidate. Nor did I register that it was unusual that my interview loop consisted of literally every single one of the most senior programming staff in the company. It took me many, many years to realize the significance of that interview trip, in all honesty; but we'll get into more about that, too. In the end, what mattered was I flew out, loved both the company and the area, and was excited about the prospect of moving here to work. I returned to my home in Atlanta, still pretty convinced I hadn't gotten the intermediate-level job I applied for, but proud to have tried, and intrigued by the idea of trying again with other studios in the Seattle area.

I received a formal offer in April of 2011 - not for the intermediate-level job I'd applied for, but instead for a much more senior programming role, and for more money than I'd even imagined I could ask for (but, ironically, had no clue was a severely below-average offer for the industry and the region). In May, I left behind a group of very dear and important friends, and started a whole new chapter of my life in Seattle. My first day at ArenaNet was June 6th, 2011.

For the first year or so, I worked feverishly along with the rest of the Guild Wars 2 team to finalize and release the game. There were a number of critical pieces of infrastructure for the game servers that needed some attention, and I was immediately put to work digging into both esoteric performance bugs as well as sweeping systems architectural upgrades. There are details I cannot freely share, but suffice it to say that the handful of people who were involved back then know full well that the game would never have been able to break even without the cost-saving work I helped get into place that year. That was just the beginning.

When I joined ArenaNet, I arrived in a decade-old environment that was built upon some of the most sophisticated and impressive technology in the world. There were things being done at ArenaNet in the mid and late 2000s that didn't even get onto the radar of "scalability" or "distributed systems" folks in the mainstream until a decade later. There are to this day expectations of uptime, availability, and robustness that are everyday normalcy for ArenaNet tech, but well beyond the banner-year records of most online services. I want to be very clear that in a lot of ways I inherited some truly awesome toys and tools when I joined that team.

I also want to be very clear that, atop that heady and momentous legacy, I significantly raised the bar. I was a key part of establishing the legend of what Guild Wars 2's tech represents today.

Before the game even launched, I was responsible for inventing and introducing several significant bits of technology that helped not only improve the game's availability and robustness, but gave us unprecedented new options for becoming aware of (and responding to) unexpected situations - everything from datacenter hardware failures, to game bugs, to security attacks and exploits from malicious actors. I presented at GDC 2012 on the challenges of handling game NPC logic at the sheer scale of a game like GW2, and the complications of needing to support both phenomenal stability and efficiency. Over the years, I continued to expand those capabilities, and added plenty of other new ones; but even by the time the team was getting ready for the official release in August of 2012, I'd been pulled aside and asked if I was willing to explore a career path in leadership. I accepted, with some mix of nervousness and excitement. When Guild Wars 2 came out, a little over a year after I joined the team, I was listed in the game's credits among the eleven Programming Leads.

Leadership

At first, my new job was slightly informal - a kind of trial run for a "full" managerial role. I was tasked with working on improving various aspects of the game's security, to shore up some minor bumps that were inevitably revealed by putting the product in front of millions of people for the first time. I don't actually remember how long I did the "Security Coordinator" gig, but after a few months, things calmed down, and I was offered a permanent promotion into a Lead role on what was, at that time, called the Gameplay Programming team, a sub-section of the programming department.

What I do remember is that, from the very beginning, I spent a lot of time thinking about how I wanted to approach the job. My very first boss, years before, had treated me with abysmal disrespect and shocking cruelty. (In all fairness, it wasn't especially personal - he was a lifelong asshole to pretty much everybody, including his wife and children.) My second boss, in the prior game studio gig, had been unpleasant, volatile, egotistical, unpredictable, and frequently abrasive and abusive. At one point, in the mid 2000s, I'd worked 100-120 hour weeks for several months in a row to help him launch a project - something that severely harmed my health and left me with a permanent and vehement distaste for worker exploitation. I also still hadn't gotten over the feeling of betrayal from him choosing to quit paying me in the middle of a very vulnerable crisis.

It wasn't just bosses that were on my mind, though; it was company cultures in general. I remembered the bizarrely cold and inhumane treatment I'd gotten from countless recruiters and hiring managers while changing jobs, heightened by the incomprehensible juxtaposition of people cold-calling me frantically, months after I submitted an application, who were seemingly devastated that I was no longer interested in a job with them... even though I'd gotten nothing but complete silence in the interim. I remembered traveling to on-site team gatherings for my job in Europe, only to encounter coworkers who wanted to keep their distance from me and offered me no support or even company in an unfamiliar country. I remembered how I'd once worked in a place that normalized harassing and mistreating colleagues out of jealousy, insecurity, or just plain boredom - an activity the bosses not only tolerated, but frequently started themselves.

I didn't know exactly how I wanted to be a leader, but I knew I wanted to not be like any of that.

Nothing like that had been happening to me at ArenaNet, and so I assumed that there was simply nothing to be concerned about. I knew there were things that could be improved, but that's to be expected in any human endeavor. To me, at that point in time, ArenaNet felt far less hostile and hurtful than either of my prior two jobs. That alone made it nigh-impossible for me to recognize how wrong I was... but we'll get there, in time. My assumption of being in a healthy, supportive baseline environment didn't turn out to be the only thing I was wrong about.

When I first started out as a lead, there was a kind of a fad going around the studio's management contingent in general. A lot of it was simple, commonplace corporate copy-catting - the kind of things managers in all companies do a lot of, where some other successful, enviable business publishes something in a fancy magazine about their way of doing things, and suddenly everyone feels a strong need to imitate them. That particular fad was an obsession with what people liked to call "flat organizational structure" - and they talked about it a lot, revering it as if it was a sacred and holy principle by which they wanted the company to operate. On the surface, the idea was ostensibly about removing power imbalance and hierarchy from the team's processes and day-to-day procedures. I loved the idea of this, and assumed (naively) that leaders were sincere in wanting to embrace this model. Ironically, I didn't fully realize until after I'd left the company what they had really been pushing for: a way to make decisions and then never have anyone know who was really responsible, as a means to avoid accountability. This all went well over my head at the time, so I began my time in management assuming that everyone else around me shared my desire to eliminate unfair power dynamics and establish a culture of equity and structural justice.

In those early days, I was still very much a junior among the other programming leads, but that gap closed quickly. I had a lot of strong feelings and ideas about how to do things better, and while I mostly encountered apathy or even outright resistance from the (overwhelmingly cis, straight, white, and male) leadership cohort at the company, I did manage to slowly start influencing little bits and pieces of the culture. Early on, there was one incident where I was pressured to fire a (perfectly competent, effective, and frankly quite pleasant) programmer that a couple people high up in the company had some kind of grudge with. I hated doing it, regretted it, and immediately swore to myself I'd never fire anyone again, and especially for such shitty reasons - a promise I am proud to say I kept, and that shaped a huge amount of my philosophy and approach going forward. Over the years I had a major impact on the recruiting practices at the studio, the way that I treated my staff was nearly unmatched anywhere else in the company, and in time it became apparent I was doing a disproportionate amount of the actual heavy lifting of running the Guild Wars 2 programming team.

I continued to represent the studio's accomplishments in venues like GDC, attending the conference every year and presenting more years than not; most of the time I still felt a bit like a faker, like I wasn't actually really supposed to be there, alongside higher-profile people or more famous projects and companies. If the game industry had celebrities, I wouldn't have placed myself anywhere higher than the "C list" at best. But in 2013, a friend of mine presented a really cool idea that I liked at the conference that year, and I took it home and started playing around with it. We were early in the process of deciding what the game's first expansion would become; and so it was that I had a hand in trying to alter the direction of what eventually was released as Heart of Thorns.

After a while, it became clear that really exploring the concept needed more time and attention than I could give it by myself while also managing programmers on the team. So I floated the idea of hiring my friend in as a contracted consultant - the first time in the studio's history that such an arrangement had been made for that kind of work. I still remember the surreal feeling of the company's lawyers coming to me to ask how I wanted to draft a contract for the gig. I pitched the idea to him in a San Francisco hotel bar (eternal love to The Death Star, for other GDC-going veterans) just before the conference started in 2014, and he agreed to come in and work with us. The next year, we headlined a section of the conference to talk about the work we'd done together on NPC behavior in Heart of Thorns, after a complicated wrangling with company executives about "not saying too much" before the expansion had officially launched. We pulled a few punches to protect the surprises, but by the time the game's update released later in 2015, that conference presentation was already something of a niche legend. I continued to receive questions and feedback about it many years later.

As the years came and went, other leads on the programming team did, too. The studio quietly began trying to start other projects besides Guild Wars 2, and a lot of people drifted onto those teams over time. Others simply found greener pastures elsewhere. I continued to slowly expand my influence, not just among the company's programmers, but among other leaders and managers. I identified a number of places to improve both the game itself and the way the company operated. At first, it was a hard sell; I was considered too junior and green to know what I was doing, and most of my suggestions got ignored. But gradually, as I managed to get people to try things my way, attitudes shifted. My results were unarguable.

Probably one of the single biggest turning points for me was my invention of a hybrid role, where a programmer would voluntarily elect to spend a chunk of time (initially it was a few months) explicitly doing game design work as a member of the design department. The purpose of this exercise was to help break down some of the cultural silos that had been built over the years in the studio, and improve communication and understanding. The goal was to identify places where the designers could benefit from improved technology support and better tools, and to bring back cultural competency so the rest of the programmers could better understand what the design team was doing and wanted to be able to explore. We started the experiment with a single intrepid volunteer. It was such a resounding success that I had requests for more hybrid programmers from almost every department in the company within a few months. That was when I started to realize I could improve on the corporate infrastructure and culture that I'd been handed - much like I'd already grown comfortable improving on the technology the company created and relied on every day.

Once the "Content Programming" role became an official permanent job title, I felt emboldened to press for even more improvements. I was central to raising the quality bar and internal standards for huge swaths of what became the "Living World" updates for Guild Wars 2, especially in Seasons 3 and 4. I set the tone for the development team and carefully nurtured the people who made the magic of the "mounts" feature (added in the Path of Fire expansion) an instant, wild, best-in-genre success. I remain particularly proud of the way I repeatedly interceded to prevent random executives from meddling with the culture, including refusing to fire or demote programmers who for whatever reason found themselves under the gaze of "the Eye of Sauron" (as we not-so-secretly called one exec's hazardous attention behind his back).

For a long time, I was at the forefront of establishing recruiting practices for the studio's programming department. I streamlined a highly problematic and bias-ridden entrance test that had been used to select candidates from the very beginning of the company. Eventually, years later, I would manage to get rid the test altogether. This led to a surge in both the number and quality of applicants who were able to interview for programming jobs, and over time, directly affected the quality of the team itself.

I took over running an "apprenticeship" program for the programming team, where we would hire students and recent graduates into a one-year, full-time job, with the promise of helping them get real world job experience and valuable training. It wasn't a guarantee that we'd offer them a permanent job at the end, but quite a few of our long-term programmers (and some of our best) came in through that program. Historically, the arrangement had been toxic and exploitative; many of the other programming leads and managers made no secret of their disdain for "pre-entry level" employees, and jokes about "getting interns to do it" were frequently made about unappealing or unfulfilling tasks.

I was the first one to intentionally shift the culture of the program away from a "paid in exposure" style "benevolent handout" to a genuine effort to invest in and nurture the people we hired. I made the same promise to every single one of them, when they started: "my job is to make sure you have a successful career in the software industry. That doesn't end in a year, and that doesn't depend on whether or not you work here." Some of them have gone on to hold high-level roles themselves in the tech industry. I upheld that promise, and still stick by it to this day; nobody has ever reached back out to me after parting ways, but I'd still be delighted to talk to any one of you, any time.

The game industry is not a huge business, and people tend to talk to each other a lot, even across the company boundaries. It did not take long for the atmosphere of authentic caring and investment that I'd created to get attention in the industry at large. The studio began getting a reputation as a good place for programmers to work - largely because of things I'd been doing, and efforts I'd put into place. As a result, it became even easier to attract high-quality candidates, and especially people who other companies were willing to overlook, or even intentionally excluded. Progress was slower than I would have liked, but undeniable all the same. In time, the Guild Wars 2 programming team, from a hiring standpoint, got more positive attention than almost any other part of the company.

My recruiting successes caught the attention of other departments, and I was frequently asked for ideas about how they could replicate my results. With few exceptions, nobody really acted on any of it; but in the process, I attempted to help educate a number of other hiring managers at the company about things they did that perpetuated sexist and racist biases. I pushed for a long time to try to extend our recruiting and talent-cultivation outreach efforts to avoid replicating class and race-based exclusions. Most of this went nowhere, but I wasn't yet in a place to understand that most of the hiring managers didn't want more women or people of color in the studio. (Honorable mention to the writing/narrative department, whose own approach to better hiring diversity was so impressive it spawned a well-regarded GDC talk of its own; I think I just assumed everyone else was also like that team, or at least interested in trying to be.)

In fact, I frequently found myself confused by the seemingly glaring gaps in skill and training in most of the company's managers. Quite a few people asked, many times over the years, for additional management training - including both managers and employees adversely affected by these issues. Executives never seemed to find any money in the budget, or time to send people to training, so actual investment in the company's leaders was extremely rare and flimsy. In that era, I did my best to fill in the gaps using informal conversations, hallway mentoring sessions, and just spreading things as best I could. I was a long way from realizing that executives didn't want to train the management cohort at the company, because actual training would have made it undeniable how badly most of them were doing at their jobs - a harsh truth that would have, in turn, reflected poorly on the nepotistic executives who'd promoted them into leadership in the first place. What I thought of as oversights, regrettable lapses in judgment, or even ethical managerial failures were, for many of the men in leadership roles there, perks of the job. They didn't want to do better - and they suppressed the efforts of the ones who did want to improve.

Over time, I encountered many other indicators of the vast disconnect between the best interests of the actual company, and the decision-making habits of the most powerful executives and leaders there. One common issue surrounded allocation of resources: money, time, and the attention of people with relevant skills. There were countless opportunities to improve the situation there - to refine our approaches and processes, to make our proprietary internal technologies easier to deal with and less error-prone, to reduce the cost of operating the business in various ways, to make things better for our ultimate customers: the players of Guild Wars 2. For all this opportunity, one of the most constant patterns from senior corporate leadership, both within ArenaNet and NCWest, across all eleven years of my time there, was apathy about such things. As long as they could continue to take money from players, they didn't really care; they were happy to blame the rest of us if things went poorly, but never acknowledged the direct link between their refusal to invest in us, and the outcomes of those decisions. For most of my early years at the studio, I just assumed they were under-informed, and just a bit more communication would resolve everything; and I operated under that misconception, for a long time, before realizing the truth.

Early on in the lifespan of Guild Wars 2, there were some truly excellent decisions made in terms of how the game was to actually make money. Unlike the vast majority of online games of its time, GW2 has no subscription fee; initially it cost a single up-front purchase, but eventually we even made a fully free version available, with no time limits. To support the long-term viability of the game, we sold small convenience and cosmetic upgrades, for nominal fees; and of course expansion packs and additional bits of story came with a modest price tag as well. Guild Wars 2 remains frequently cited as one of the few existing examples of a game that does so-called "microtransaction" monetization well, and reasonably ethically. Much of this was architected by a woman, who ran what was called the "Commerce" team for a number of years. When she left, there was both a power vacuum and a skill vacuum in the Commerce group.

A series of not-particularly-competent white men ended up running the monetization show, for many years. For a while, there was another woman who was ostensibly in charge; but her decisions were constantly undermined and even defied by the men on the team, and so for a long time, the very core of the company's sole revenue stream was held in a stranglehold by a group of guys who didn't have any clue how to do their jobs. They routinely ignored player requests, treated the artists and designers assigned to them poorly, and made a non-stop stream of baffling and ineffective decisions, year over year. For a long time, I made occasional efforts to help them out - things like teaching basic statistics, such as: if 10% of the players buy a thing in a given year, and you stop selling the thing, it's a net loss of income - it's not a profitable decision, and the thing was not a failure because the "sales rate was too low." You know... the kind of elementary math that the people in charge of making the company money should not have struggled with. Mercifully, by the time I left, they'd finally managed to install a guy who at least understood arithmetic and was open to actually making good decisions. From what I can tell, things have improved notably as a result; but I've never forgotten how much worse it got because there was a contingent of white guys who just had to have the final say... and who somehow managed to always escape any kind of accountability for their demonstrably poor performance. The Commerce team, much as I failed to recognize it at the time, was illustrative of the company's leadership style as a whole.

Dissonance

There were other indications that my understanding of things was out of alignment with the true intentions and beliefs of the other leaders I found myself surrounded by. Late 2014 was a fraught time to be in the game industry. The decade-long campaign of hate, harassment, and violence known as "GamerGate" spawned that fall, rapidly turning into one of the single largest industry-wide crises to ever occur. Some companies rapidly tried to escape association with the hate movement, pledging to support added diversity efforts in their work - often with mixed follow-through in the long run, typical of corporate PR moves, and foreshadowing the industry's responses to Black Lives Matter (both in that decade and in 2020, but we'll get there soon enough). Most companies simply tried to stay out of the crossfire, with varying degrees of success.

At ArenaNet, a number of senior leadership figures (mostly - but not entirely - men) openly aligned with GamerGate, citing feminism as some kind of insidious disruptive force that corrupted game making, or something. Mostly they felt emboldened by the constant fear and panic ripping through the business. After all, in that era, women in the industry were bombarded with harassment, death threats, even subjected to militarized police invasions of their homes due to false reports by GamerGate agitators (a violent act that became colloquially known as "SWATting" in reference to paramilitary "SWAT" teams used by many police forces in the country.) If being in the business was enough to risk getting subjected to traumatic violence or even potential murder-by-cop, of course potential victims were stressed. But the men who never liked them were having a great time.

I'll never forget the group of men, all in varying leadership roles, who huddled in a corner of the studio with dour looks on their faces whenever a prominent feminist guest speaker was invited to come talk to the studio, during the worst of those years. Many of them eventually went back under the radar with their openly sexist views once the furor died down a little bit, but some of them made a point of resurfacing again, especially as the longer-term legacy of GamerGate's orchestrated hate work spilled over into political radicalization efforts, and became part of the country's current-day headlong plunge into full-mask-off fascism.

I still remember who some of them are. Some aren't easy to forget. We'll get back to that, too.

Somewhere in those years, I honestly have trouble remembering when, other things started going awry in a big way. There was a scandal at ArenaNet involving the firing of a woman for simply defending herself from online harassment; there was a long list of varied excuses given for her summary termination, but the truth under it all was simply that a guy at the top of the company didn't like her, and found an excuse to jettison her along with another long-time employee who had the gall to stick up for her in public. Some of the pro-GamerGate execs made it clear, behind closed doors, that they'd willingly participated in stoking hate groups against both of the victims; of course they publicly denied this, and I was only privy to it because I was - at that time - considered "one of them." Even without admitting anything, they made sure their views were felt by the entire studio. It was a clear message: you can either be silent about working here, let assholes like the GamerGate crowd have their way with you, or lose your job. It became the cornerstone of the entire company's "social media policy" and up until the day I left it remained the de facto reality of publicly identifying oneself as an ArenaNet employee - something many were, understandably, extremely reluctant to do. Knowing that one's own "leaders" would willingly sic a massive, well-organized hate group on you at a moment's notice over the slightest provocation is a hell of a deterrent.

In the wake of that mess, execs at ArenaNet began stepping up active surveillance practices. They spied on employees, under the guise of "monitoring the use of company resources," seeking out dissidents and dissenters. They started actively instructing managers to collect "information" on employees who were caught discussing labor unions. On more than one occasion, I have credible evidence that certain high-placed leaders intentionally "leaked" confidential information to news outlets (particularly Kotaku, which had a messy and storied role during GamerGate), then used such "breaches" as justification for crackdowns on employee interest groups and yet more increased surveillance. I was asked on numerous occasions to participate in these things, and generally refused - or, a few times, said I would comply in order to avoid immediate punishment, and then conveniently never did anything. After my early managerial experience of being used to fire someone an executive didn't like, I was wary of giving the senior leadership any ammunition for further mistreatment of anyone at the company.

The invasive behavior didn't stop there. Another incident involved spying on players. There was some concern for a while about malevolent players taking advantage of certain bugs in the game to unfairly rig the outcomes, frequently tied to selling that "service" to players who were willing to cheat (or who didn't realize they were effectively doing so). Illicit markets have always been a part of such online games, and Guild Wars 2 has never been an exception. Its own underground trade has grown and shrunk at various times over the years, but at one point, it was bad enough that the execs started to meddle.

The best option - which I repeatedly pushed for - would have been to identify and fix the issues being exploited, and (in relevant cases) selectively remove rewards and prestigious items from players who got them unfairly. Instead, the leadership of the studio wanted to make threats. They decided, against my strenuous objections, that the best option would be to place some hidden spyware in the game, and invade players' privacy to collect information on alleged wrongdoers. Over the course of several days, in several very tense closed-door meetings, I stressed again and again that it was a bad idea. When it became clear they would not heed my warnings, I realized they would gladly go around me and order a programmer to comply with creating their spyware - so I decided, on the spot, to volunteer to write it myself. I didn't want anyone on my team to have that on their conscience. I also knew I was one of the few who was comfortable saying no to the executives involved, and that they'd have no trouble finding someone who would do it out of fear of their power. I didn't want anyone to be subjected to that, either. So I built their spyware for them.

Unbeknownst to them, though, I intentionally did a bad job of hiding it. The game has a long legacy of being explored and modified and enhanced by creative fans and players, and there's a considerable set of "add-ons" and extensions that are unofficially provided by the community to enhance and customize the game in various ways... much to the irritation of many of the same execs, who wanted to believe that "their" creation was "perfect" and not in need of such improvement. I'd long held a quiet sympathy and admiration for the creators of such extensions - reverse-engineering and "modding" games has been of great interest to me since even before I joined the industry. So I not only knew exactly what those creators were capable of, I knew I could count on them to find the clues I left them.

I have never openly acknowledged the incident before, even within the company, but when add-on programmers found the spyware (literally the same day it was added to the game - good on them!) it was because they were supposed to. I wanted the strategy to fail. I didn't expect, however, for it to fail as dramatically as it did. Despite immediate player backlash, and despite me continuing to warn execs not to misuse the capabilities I'd given them, someone went ahead and used the spy tools to identify a bunch of players he had a personal grudge against. Instead of doing things to protect the game, he banned a swath of effectively innocent people he happened not to like - exactly the kind of abuse of power that men in the company's leadership considered to be their "right" by way of being "in charge." The scandal blew up even more, and eventually the company was forced to retract a bunch of the punishments, and remove the spyware from the game. I don't think there was ever an actual apology, although there should have been - for what very, very little it could possibly be worth, I'm sorry. I did my best to keep it from being much, much worse. (The particular person who misused the spy system was eventually fired, much later, after numerous other such abuses; my guess is that his termination had more to do with leadership getting tired of covering for him, since a lot of the rest of those guys continued abusing their power all the same.)

Sadly, most of this was still going over my head, in large part if not entirely. I still struggled to try to teach my team "not to suffer in silence" - I knew there were issues all over the studio, but I was confused and stymied by the mysterious air of silence and secrecy that most people maintained about those problems, even though we all knew they existed. It wasn't until years after I left that I understood: the pervasive fear and silence were part of the leadership's intentional approach to ruling their perceived domain. It was nigh-on impossible to ask people what was bothering them and get real answers, because the cultural norm - in many corporate environments, especially in the tech sector - is deeply hostile and abusive. Most managers asking "is there anything I can improve for you" are not asking genuine questions from a place of wanting to make things better - they're threatening people, daring them to answer "yes," implicitly reminding people that if they complain they can and will be punished for it. Nobody had any way to tell that when I asked, it was a different question from when their other bosses over the years had asked. I wanted to know if I could help. Other managers wanted to hear everything was fine, as validation for their insecurity. No wonder I didn't understand why everyone told me things were OK.

Apex

Shortly before Path of Fire was released in September of 2017, the director of the company's overall programming department pulled me aside, said he felt like I needed a new job title to recognize what I'd been doing for years already at that point, and asked me to create a job description for myself. And so it happened that I created the second official role that became part of ArenaNet's structure, this time one I would occupy directly. I became the first Project Technical Director for Guild Wars 2. My self-described role was such a hit that several other groups within the company almost immediately created similar positions. Other game teams had been started by this point in time, and their programming teams rapidly moved to adopt the structure I'd created. The previously three-layered hierarchy became four, with project-level directors reporting to the overall studio directors for various departments.

With my newfound (and now formally recognized) scope of influence, I set about actually changing even more. Some things I can't talk about because they are still protected secrets. Some things I genuinely can't remember, it's been so long - and I did so much. Some things I'd love to expand on, but I'm going to try to summarize for the sake of not making this thing any more massive than it already will be. Suffice it to say, once empowered, I made even more substantial changes - to technology, to team practices, to culture, to norms and expectations, to standards and requirements, even to terminology and lingo used within the studio. I honestly did not fully know at the time how disproportionate my impact was, versus pretty much anyone else there. As far as I knew, I was just doing my job, and trying to do my best.

Doing my best meant, to me, caring about other people - in a way that I struggled to realize was different from the other managers and leaders around me. I did not understand until much later just how rare I was. All I ever cared about was helping people - so we could all do amazing things, make magic together, and make our fans and players happy. I lived for the stories I got from the GW2 community - making friends, meeting lovers, sharing cherished memories with dear family members, finding hope in difficult circumstances, finding inspiration to keep trying to live in the midst of the bleakest of struggles... all because of an online video game. To me, caring about people was an assumption so deep and integral to my work that I never even imagined that I was not surrounded by other people with the same goal. I missed a lot of the friction and push-back and passive-aggressive rejection and criticism and disparagement that I incurred during those years... things that never registered to me at all until later. I had no clue that, even as I was making a lot of friends and eager supporters among the "individual contributors" of the company, I was also making serious enemies among the power-holders.

One of the many contentious areas I pushed against was the overall culture across the studio - a soul-crushingly cis, heterosexual, white, male culture. It was, to be clear, a lot less overtly toxic than almost anywhere else in the game industry - certainly better than any company that had similar levels of success, money, and general recognition. But the poison was always just beneath the surface - hidden enough to be deniable if anyone ever asked questions, but potent enough to still cause a lot of harm over time. The art team's senior leadership had a long-running habit of blatant sexism and anti-fat hatred, which affected huge amounts of the creative work from the art team. It was not uncommon for artists to be told to redo work to fit more in line with the whims of straight white guys. One senior leader in the art team was regularly referred to by women in the company as "the walking No Fat Chicks sign."

To make this situation worse, executives frequently alluded to "interference" from the studio's parent company, NCSoft. Sometimes it was aimed at NCWest, and with a few notable exceptions, it was baseless. Usually, however, this blame-shifting included vague references to supposed criticism and directives coming from the Korean headquarters of the company. I cannot attest with certainty that this never happened, but I can say with confidence that the anti-Asian racist bias of the leadership was frequently used to shift blame onto "Korea" for things that they themselves decided entirely on their own. So pushback, from most of the studio, was constant on things like the sexism in the art department - but it was also just as consistently squashed and swept under the rug, the blame pinned on people who in all likeliness had never even been aware it was going on.

Over the years, I repeatedly offered my own extensive personal experience with cross-cultural interaction as a resource, hoping to help repair what seemed like a straightforward clash of communication styles and cultural expectations. I grew up in Southeast Asia, and spent nearly a decade working remotely for a European company; I knew I had more than enough skill to navigate whatever was ostensibly going on. I had developed a reputation, within my first year at the studio, of being able to foster mutual understanding and collaboration across differences of perspective and experience that had, prior to my involvement, been considered intractable - a reputation I was not only well aware of, but had been cited multiple times by senior leadership in their reviews of my performance, and during job promotions. So I was naturally a bit confused that nobody ever took me up on my offers to do the same thing with both NCWest and NCSoft in Korea; and it wasn't until long after I'd left the company that I realized that they didn't want anyone mending those fences, because it would have cost them one of their favorite scapegoats.

This wasn't the only buck-passing exercise that happened frequently at the studio. A popular tactic, whenever something didn't seem to land well with players, or didn't sell as much as expected, or failed to generate or retain public interest, was to blame the players. It was never designers' fault that their work flopped - always the players. One of the political quirks of ArenaNet, for much of the time I was there, was a kind of bitter us-versus-them rivalry between the programmers and the game designers - something I worked tirelessly to try to mend over the years, albeit with limited results. Over time, I learned that this split had its origins in the original Guild Wars days, when programmers basically were the "top" of the social hierarchy at the studio. Somewhere along the line, designers had come out on top; and as a result, many of the attitudes of the Design department leaked into the most senior decision-making processes of the company. As a result, there were moments when the CFO of NCWest would present to the entire company and blame poor quarterly earnings on "player behavior" - as if there was no possible way that those players were responding to actually not liking what the "infallible" designers had put out.

The game design team was only slightly less sexist on average than the senior art execs, but while the art team (and most of the studio as a whole) pushed back consistently on the misogyny and body shaming tendencies there, the entire studio's design culture was rampantly ableist. Players who struggled to learn the game (due to its inscrutable design and poor interface choices, most of the time) were openly mocked by design leaders and staff alike. There was no secret among the Guild Wars 2 team that the designers held immense disdain for a lot of the players. A lot of this was readily evident to those players - many of whom protested and offered genuinely useful feedback over the years, only to be met with repeated silence - or, worse, open derision. The concept of making the game accessible was constantly shunned and openly rejected. Whereas people had been historically fired for small infractions, like accidentally revealing minor information in breach of their non-disclosure agreements, designers were caught multiple times over the years shit-talking players in public spaces, and never faced any meaningful repercussions for it. To the people who did most of the game's design work, for many years, Guild Wars 2 was supposed to be for the select elite, and everyone else could - in actual words used by more than one designer over the years - "get good or fuck off."

Design's prejudices and superiority complex, especially given their relative political clout within the company overall, led to a lot of stubborn refusal to engage with certain things. I truly lost count of the hundreds of times when some embarrassing bug, design flaw, oversight, or just generally bad decision was not fixed, entirely because "designers don't want to." This behavior remained entrenched in the culture until I left, and I can still recognize signs of it peeking through in the most recent updates for the game. While I was working on Guild Wars 2, it was a non-stop source of frustration - not just for me, but for every department in the studio. A significant required skill for anyone at ArenaNet who wanted to get things done with the game was to learn how to bypass the recalcitrant whims of Design.

To be clear, this wasn't something that afflicted every designer on the game. In fact, a lot of design roles were staffed with genuinely kind, caring, thoughtful people. Unfortunately, their ability to contribute and affect the tone of the design team overall was rather limited. They faced a non-stop uphill battle against a combination of toxic leadership and peer pressure. Many of the best wins they produced - for players and the company alike - came at the cost of unnecessary resistance and recalcitrance from the worst elements of their department. This was one of the long-standing issues that began to shift - very slowly - shortly before I left, but remains a difficult challenge that will take the company considerable time to repair, especially without significant and intentional changes to the leadership and culture of the department itself.

Another complicated department in the studio was what is known as production. The Producer staff, in a typical game studio, exists as a kind of squad of facilitators and communicators. Their usual role is to make sure everyone knows what's going on, help identify risks to things like schedules and budgets, and generally maintain good flow of information and awareness. Game development, especially on something as large and intricate as GW2, is an immensely collaborative project. At a time when we had over 200 people actively working on the game full-time, communication was priceless. The role of producers, in general, also tends to be deeply relational work - getting to know people, learning to genuinely care about people, and being able to have vulnerable and authentic conversations on a daily basis. In other words, it's a lot of emotional and relational labor - the exact kinds of skills that tend to be coded as "feminine" in our fucked-up backwards society, and therefore targets of devaluation, derision, and even disgust for the guys who imagined they were the important ones at ArenaNet. The misogyny was so bad that even male producers sometimes ended up getting labelled as pejoratively "effeminate" (as if that's a bad thing somehow) just for doing their jobs well - subjected to insults and ostracization from other men across the company for being good at caring about human beings. The cost to the effectiveness of the company, over time, was incalculable; the very skills that guaranteed the company had a chance at succeeding were constantly undermined and countermanded, in the interests of the "real leaders" and their delicate egos.

I made observations, at several points over the years, that the way I wanted to do my job - especially after moving into the Technical Director role - was a blend of "programmer work and producer work." I was frequently met with confusion and even insistence, from men in the leadership cohort, that I was "doing it wrong" and I should "let the women in Production handle the talking" so I could do the "important" engineering work. I of course rejected this, and my refusal to operate this way was neither secret nor short-lived. I've written extensively before about how things really work in tech projects, so I won't retread that ground too much here; suffice it to say, this attitude cost ArenaNet a lot, too, over time.

Departments like Quality Assurance were openly considered "inferior" and "non-essential" on a daily basis, despite being some of the most pivotal participants in the game's creation; various developers and leaders routinely elected to ignore important feedback from QA for little or no real reason aside from ego; and execs chronically refused to put real resources or money into fixing the long-term systemic technical issues that QA had been pointing out for years. Some even maintained a habit of pretending to value QA in "mixed company" settings, while then secretly trash-talking and insulting QA staff as "not real developers" in private. (This notably included several people over the years who held programming leadership roles, targeting people from QA who were better programmers than the arrogant, toxic leads in question.)

Outside of my team on Guild Wars 2, there were other issues with the programming culture. One group in particular got a widespread internal nickname for being "the grumpy programmers" - a cluster of mostly angry, bitter, and unpleasant white men who hung out with each other and made a sport of talking shit (unjustifiably) about other programmers in the company, and other people in general. The misogyny, ableism, and even racism were palpable from this group - and yet senior company executives insisted on protecting them, as they were "senior staff" with "high value" (i.e. they were white men). Even knowing how much damage the group caused to the company over time, execs never managed to quite bring themselves to do anything about it; a kind of "boys will be boys" fatalism was thrown back at anyone who suggested that maybe leaving this group intact was a bad business move. The great irony was that most of them did notoriously subpar work. I don't think, in retrospect, it was a coincidence that none of them were on my team; they were left to fester outside of my purview in the company, since they didn't work on Guild Wars 2. Neither their behavior nor their inadequate performance as programmers would have been left unchecked under my leadership... and I think everyone involved knew it, deep down.

Even though my position in the company afforded me a fairly significant amount of awareness about the more-hidden aspects of how the studio worked, the truth is that my perspective kept me from fully recognizing the scope of some of the worst aspects of the company's culture. It took many years of repeated incidents before I realized that there was a pattern - and an intentional one - to the way many of the powerful men there operated. In fact, the company had an entrenched habit among the leadership of never communicating much at all - internally or publicly - about much of anything, frankly. Decisions were often felt, by the company at large, as arbitrary, sudden, and mysterious; the reasoning for things was never shared, questions were often waved off or met with accusations of undue prying or unacceptable dissent; and both employees and fans alike frequently found themselves confused, surprised, and disappointed by the whims of the decision-makers.

For a long time, I interpreted this as merely a lack of skill at communication. I frequently volunteered my own communication skills (which were heavily bolstered and honed by my own decades of personal experience with cross-cultural interactions, public speaking, and formal writing) in an attempt to remediate what I thought of as a reasonable and understandable gap in the collective leadership's skill set. As it turned out, the silence, arbitrary whiplash-driven decision style, and general caginess were in fact intentional properties of the leadership's culture. They kept people in the dark as a matter of undocumented policy - precisely to avoid anyone recognizing the patterns that I eventually pieced together, and to avoid ever being held to any kind of accountability, both internally and in the larger sphere of their customers and fans.

A favorite refrain among the leadership cohort was to refer - usually very derisively - to what they termed "the rumor mill." What they were actually describing was people's natural, reasonable, and important desire to understand what the fuck was going on, ever - a drive many pursued by talking to each other, comparing notes, and pooling information, all in an informal and ad hoc attempt to counteract all the silence and avoidance from leaders. When the "rumor mill" was invoked, however - either in response to internal company conversations or even aimed at fans and business partners of ArenaNet - what the men in charge really meant was that they wanted to discredit and undermine any such communication, or any kind of collaborative attempt to deal with leadership's stubborn refusal to meaningfully talk to anyone. Over time, this brewed into a kind of pervasive distrust between the supposed "rumor mill" contingent (i.e. everyone who was just trying to do their damn jobs) and the guardians and gatekeepers of the sacred truth, who of course never shared any of it but still insisted on blaming everyone else for not knowing it. And frankly, most of those men shouldn't be trusted, at all. For a long time, HR routinely instructed managers in the company to report and immediately try to fire anyone who even mentioned the concept of a labor union on the job - that was how far the leadership was willing to go in order to prevent anyone from figuring out what they were truly up to.

There have been some minor shifts in this in recent years, including some small bits of traction before I left, but I suspect progress will be sluggish and limited; for a very long time, the unwritten policy of the company's authority figures was don't communicate. Leaders set this pattern up deliberately, after some stark experiences in earlier years with having been actually called out on their bad decision making. Their solution, from then on, was to simply be inscrutable, and wield their authority like a giant "because I said so" cudgel. They knew full well, for all those years, that if anyone knew what they were really doing in making their decisions, it would go badly for them - between the mixture of incompetence, nepotism, mutual enablers, and outright malicious behavior. And so, without me realizing it, my attempts to explain how leadership worked at ArenaNet ended up making me a lot of quiet enemies.

Generally speaking, the company's leaders and power-holders shared another pervasive and important pattern: systematic denial. They pull from an extensive playbook of techniques, always ready with an excuse or a way to cover their asses and insist that no kind of bigotry or other harm was ever happening. This behavior directly overlaps with victim-blaming as well as gaslighting - which is not merely the act of being untruthful, but a specific form of psychological manipulation (and, in truth, a form of violence) which is specifically designed to undermine someone's ability to believe their own perspectives and memories. It is much more than simply claiming things didn't happen, it's a mechanism for asserting that such claims could not be based in reality at all - a kind of company-wide mechanism to discredit anyone who spoke out, to convince victims they weren't actually being mistreated in the first place, to create room for perpetrators and enablers alike to weaponize what Jamila Bradley explains as Deferred Accountability to claim that they "just needed some time and understanding" (from their victims, usually) and then things would get better. A large number of the company's targets of abuse and prejudice - including myself - have moments where we struggle with feeling uncertain that anything is actually wrong; or, worse, come to believe that it really is our own fault and we're the ones who need to change.

A popular technique, used frequently to cover misogyny and other gender-based abuse and violence and mistreatment at the company, was inventing pointless semantic distinctions. Drawing on general social norms in this part of the world, even the idea of describing such things as "violence" was rejected outright - because there were no physical altercations happening. If there was no physical "violence," the reasoning went, nobody was actually hurt. Such dismissal was even more potent because it was paired with (again, a socially normalized) patriarchal devaluation of emotion as "irrelevant" and "inferior." Someone's "feelings getting hurt" wasn't real hurt - so it didn't really matter. This tactic alone was used to erase and dismiss a considerable amount of damage that, nevertheless, really did occur there.

The company, as one might expect, has a formal policy prohibiting sexual harassment; which is reasonable, considering that's also illegal in this country in general. But as everyone from the heads of the studio to the HR team maintained, the line was drawn at sexual harassment specifically. If no mention or allusion of fornication or procreation was involved, they would dismiss any complaints - thereby using the lack of explicit sexual context as a cover to deny, erase, and perpetuate a rampant culture of sexist harassment and mistreatment.

Weaponizing the HR department (and even occasionally hiring "outside mediators" to do the same dirty work) was a key part of protecting the abusers in the company; the way victims were treated by HR frankly comprised its own additional layer of abuse. This was even worse during the era when ArenaNet maintained its own independent, internal HR staff - which was, yet again, run by a cishet white man, who had a reputation for day drinking at his desk. That structural arrangement gave cover to a lot of messed up behavior from the studio's leadership, for many years.

The management culture's offenses included a long-running pattern of intentionally passing over women (and frankly anyone who was not perceived as a cis male) for promotions and raises; refusing to acknowledge those people's work and contributions, and/or stealing credit for that work to assign it to a conveniently-available man who probably did very little; fast-tracking severely under-qualified men into important positions of responsibility, while deliberately ignoring highly-qualified women who had been seeking such opportunities for a long time, even years; and of course nepotistic hiring which (conveniently) almost always meant that a man got a job based on a referral from an employee, whereas women did not get put forward, or were subjected to far more intense scrutiny and rejected for far less than a man would have been. A lot of this was pointed out, often, but got dismissed as "that's just the way companies are" - as if "everyone" being sexist somehow makes it acceptable to be sexist. Such illogic was used to deflect many complaints about a wide variety of things, frankly. Most of the time it was effective at silencing people, but not always.

To counter-balance this, the leadership culture made a point of occasionally placing certain "tokens" into notable roles - including leadership and public-facing jobs. This spread well beyond just gender-related placements and sometimes included other characteristics like race and sexual orientation. These token "representation" roles were, of course, mostly reserved for people who didn't rock the boat or challenge the patriarchal power structure in any real way; those who did were quickly revealed to be "a poor fit" and disposed of, often with some noisy hand-wringing from the white guys about their "mistake." These "accidental poor placement decisions" would then be used as fodder, often for years to come, to justify not hiring or promoting other similarly marginalized or minoritized people - after all, the men would say, "we tried that a couple times and it didn't ever work out." Anyone questioning the demographic skew of decision-makers in the company's leadership would be pointed towards those token figures. Some of those tokens are willing participants in the structure, content with the minor boost in quality of life that comes from being used in such a way; some are not truly aware that they're being used at all. None of them are actually safe, and many have been chased out or discarded once they outlived their usefulness as "proof" that the rest of the leadership "isn't problematic."

I was no stranger to the mess of all this as I stretched into my new capacities as a manager-of-managers. But I wasn't connecting all the dots, yet; and I was certainly not expecting the extensive awfulness of what would come next.

Changes

Path of Fire released in September of 2017, and I spent the next year or so as the Project Technical Director mostly keeping my head down and trying to do anything I could to improve life on the Guild Wars 2 project. I'd started spreading my influence even further than the programming department, working with other directors and managers one-on-one to help them make their own cultural and structural improvements, advocating for better policies and practices within the company, and generally just sincerely wanting everyone to be able to have a good time making a great game. In an era when most of the studio's senior and high-level leadership (and pretty much all of the executives) had decided GW2 was uninteresting, I recognized that it was the only thing actually keeping the studio alive. I had serious misgivings about the other projects that were in development... so much so that as far back as late 2015, I'd drafted a letter to the executive leaders of the company suggesting that they were making grave mistakes and that the outcome was likely to be disastrous. I showed the draft to my boss at the time in confidence, and he quickly (and, frankly, wisely) advised me to destroy it and never mention it to anyone, since it was the kind of thing that the execs would have instantly fired me for saying.

So it was to my extreme dismay, one February morning in 2019, that I got the news that the studio was about to lay off a huge portion of its staff later that day. There are times in my life, and this was one of the most poignant ones I've ever been through, when I really hate being right.

The grim details of this event are not mine to share, not in full. There are things I wish I could talk about, but they're beyond the scope of what I set out to do in writing all of this, and to be honest I'm not sure there's really any good to be had in digging through that muck so many years later. I will say just this, for now: every decision that led to those events was not only 100% avoidable, all of the consequences were foreseen. There were those of us who'd been warning about this possibility for years. And there were a few of us who had quietly resolved to try and keep Guild Wars 2 alive and healthy, even as interest in keeping the game alive waned internally, and while our resources were stripped away and given to doomed projects we feared would never make it to the light of day.

It's a damn good thing we did. ArenaNet would not have survived 2019 if not for a few of us. You know who y'all are, even though we're all mostly scattered to other places these days. I will never forget working alongside you and fighting to keep that place intact and turn things around after the worst year any of us had ever been through together. For a lot of us, "2019" will forever be its own special kind of four-letter-word. I want to be clear that I was not alone, but I was definitely in a tiny minority that year - in holding on to hope, in doing everything I could - with almost no resources at all - to keep things operating, in relentlessly trying to put a future in front of both the game and the company, and in resolving to keep caring for my people.

I remember vividly, walking out of a tiny one-on-one meeting room on the fourth floor, that February morning, having just been warned that the layoffs were happening in a few hours. I silently made an oath, to myself as much as anyone, that I'd do anything I needed to in order to make sure people were ok. Job references, resume review parties, personal loans for making rent, anything that had to happen so that my people would make it out the other side. If the ship was going down, I was going to be the last one off. I covered a lot, that year, not just for the programming team, but for the entire company. It was an effort that took more than I ever imagined I had in me. Even as I was intrigued by the opportunity to recenter the company's culture with a more caring and compassionate tone, I knew I was in for a tremendous amount of work.

Of course, 2019 was also the year I was spending doing a lot of personal changing as well... which made the entirety of that saga incredibly complex, difficult, and draining.

On Wednesday, August 7th, 2019, I stayed home from work, waiting for HR to send a company-wide email on my behalf. That was the day I came out as trans, and the very next day I returned to work, as my full and true self, for the very first time in 8 years of working at the company.

My first day back was a rough one for me. I barely remember the morning, aside from doing a lot of crying and hugging with various people in the office, and just feeling kind of surreal and overwhelmed. I remember going home for a long lunch, and seriously considering taking the afternoon off to handle my sheer exhaustion. I was about to call out when I got a cryptic, urgent text from a coworker, saying only, "you need to get back here. Right now."

That same day, a massive internal scandal had broken, involving sexual harassment of one of the prominent female leaders in the company by a senior executive. It was hardly the first time something had happened in the studio - they're not my stories to tell, but suffice it to say that as awful as it was, the news itself was less than shocking to me. What did stun me was how different it all suddenly felt - now that I was no longer considered part of the cohort of "men" but was regarded as one of the "women." (Strictly speaking, I am neither one, but that's a nuance that was beyond lost on most of the men in question.) I remember joining the walkout protest that was organized the day after, and remarking to a colleague that I'd picked a hell of a week to come out.

I'd been unsatisfied with the lingering air of vague sexism and misogyny in the company for a long time, but that incident - and the subsequent years-long chain of colossal failures of the company's leadership to handle the problem at all - really pulled my attention to the issue in a new way, compounded by my new positionality in the entire dynamic. I felt appalled, confused, dismayed, and betrayed by how rapidly certain men changed, from - at the beginning of that month - being friendly and easygoing around me, to suddenly acting as if I wasn't even in the room, talking over me, dismissing my ideas and suggestions as useless or wastes of time, even questioning my technical abilities. I hadn't even begun to look any different yet. All that had changed was the name and pronouns I used in front of my coworkers... and just like that, I stopped being a respected leader and intensely skilled technological expert, and became... well, I'm still not even really sure. Less than nothing, to some of them.

I can still feel the icy, plummeting feeling in my gut from the time I was pulled aside after speaking at a large meeting. It was the kind of thing I did a lot of over the years; I was quite accustomed to addressing a big group of people and passing along my thoughts. A month prior, it's the kind of thing people would have told me was "encouraging" or even "inspiring." When I talked about my ideas and suggestions and dreams as myself, though, that all changed. I was told I was "too intimidating" and that I should consider not acting as competent or intelligent in front of my colleagues, so they wouldn't be afraid of me. It was one of the single most overt bits of sexist violence I faced after coming out, but it was representative of a complete change in the overall nature of my entire professional life. To make it all worse, the person who delivered the "feedback" genuinely believed they were helping me succeed in my job by doing so.

It took time for that shift to really sink in, for me. I half-noticed it immediately, but I was too overwhelmed with the pace and intensity of everything else changing in literally my entire life that it didn't click until much later. My memories of the closing months of 2019 are blurry - a mix of fighting hard to turn the studio around and get momentum to start what would eventually become the End of Dragons expansion, indescribably turbulent changes outside of work, and a complicated tangle of consequences and fallout from other interpersonal events from earlier that year. Ultimately, I started feeling like I had some traction by late fall, which proved to be fortunate timing.

Sometime late in the year, one of my brilliant colleagues and someone I dearly loved working with told me she had accepted another job at a different studio, citing the long history of underpayment and mistreatment she'd experienced at ArenaNet. (She was quick to add that she appreciated what I'd done to combat those issues in the company's culture, but after a year full of post-layoff budget tightening, everyone was feeling the financial pinch a lot at that point.) I was irate that someone so exceptionally capable and with such an unarguable track record of fueling the company's success could still feel neglected and underappreciated. So I pulled the metaphorical fire alarm: I emailed the CEO of NCWest directly.

In a several-page document, I told her the story of my coworker, the poor pay and iffy working conditions with other people in the company, and how her departure was emblematic of serious problems in the studio's culture. Moreover, I named it as a harbinger of even more inevitable loss of skilled people, if the cultural and pay issues remained unaddressed. After a harsh year, with morale dangerously low, we couldn't afford to lose anyone else with valuable knowledge about how to work on the game - the only thing generating any revenue at all for the entire company.

At this point in time, there were a lot of lingering issues between NCSoft and ArenaNet, stemming from many years of bleak history - things I am personally privy to, but will not disclose here. Communication was abysmal, and most of NCSoft had zero insight or understanding about how the ArenaNet entity worked - a bitter irony, considering (to the best of my knowledge) ArenaNet continues to be the only stable, profitable venture ever operated by NCSoft outside of Asia, to this day. So emailing the CEO of their "western" division to talk about underpayment and talent bleed was a carefully calculated move, even though it was also a bit politically extreme: my goal was to directly address the rift in understanding, get some much-needed operational clarity between the two corporate entities, and fix some serious problems that jeopardized everyone's ability to keep running the business.

To her immense credit, the CEO replied to me less than seven minutes later. I've kept that number in my head for all these years, because it made a genuine impression. After asking if it was too late to save my colleague's job (it was, sadly), she directly tapped several people to work with me on fixing salary issues across the company within ArenaNet. One of those people was the recently-installed head of the studio, John Taylor.

I worked with the HR department and directors and managers across the studio, for more than two years after that moment, striving to address rampant problems of wage theft, under-recognition, far-below-average pay, and incorrect job descriptions that erased enormous amounts of work being done by people in the company every day. Many of the abuses and problems had persisted systemically for more than a decade. For the duration of that effort, I still operated under the mistaken impression that everyone else in leadership was - like me - interested in being ethical, fair, and properly caring for their people. As it turned out, that was wildly wrong; the "mistakes" I spent years trying to help correct were, in actuality, mostly the results of carefully crafted and intentional gatekeeping decisions. In the course of that effort, I was part of a loosely organized group that, collectively, surfaced data showing decades of sexist discrimination in the allocation of both job titles and promotions, as well as base rates of pay, across all of ArenaNet and parts of NCWest.

I'm proud to say I did what I could to fix the Engineering department (as it had come to be called under my leadership in those years). I was never given the title officially, but several people pointed out long after the fact that once the layoffs hit in 2019, I had been the de facto director of technology for the entire studio. I made sure that I trained up and nurtured people who carried on that tradition. I've lost track of things since I left, but at least as of 2022, I know things within Guild Wars 2 Engineering were a lot more fair than they'd ever been. Sadly, aside from one particular case, I never had much success convincing anyone else to address their own departments, despite repeatedly offering to spend my own time sitting down with any lead or director or manager who wanted help, to redraft job descriptions and fix salary bands. I specifically worked to move multiple people out of other departments and into Engineering roles just to get them paid fairly - against constant and strenuous opposition from other managers. From what I do know, most departments remained fairly inequitable and still tended to seriously lag industry averages when I left.

At some point, NCWest's CEO (who usually kept her distance from day to day operations) sent a surprising email to the entire company, acknowledging sexism and even direct harassment and abuse had happened in the past, and offering to support anyone who wanted to come forward with complaints or problems. Most of the company received it as fairly out of touch; to them, these issues had gone unacknowledged for so long that the thought of anyone paying attention now just felt like too little too late. Maybe even a little insulting. What I knew - what very few people there really understood - was that the historical rift between ArenaNet and NCSoft made it virtually impossible for such information to have reached the C-suite of NCWest; for a long time, unbeknownst to most of the studio, the former studio head had actively lied to and hidden information from NCWest. I to this day suspect that the CEO had truly never known, and was acting on what was - in her perspective - a quite recent revelation. Sadly, I'll probably never know the truth. Not long after that email, the CEO - a Korean woman - was removed unilaterally by the NCWest board of directors, and replaced with a stunningly unqualified and inept white man, who wasted no time setting about trying to run the company into the ground, to everyone's great displeasure.

There was plenty of corporate lingo and plausible-sounding nonsense shrouding the change of leadership. If there's one thing the men running that show are good at, it's covering their tracks and convincing people they're being innocuous and harmless. I'll never be able to prove that sexism is what ejected her from her long-standing role; but I'll always suspect it.

Disaster

Near the close of 2019, I spoke with the then-head of the studio at ArenaNet, John Taylor, about my future career plans. At that point, I remember being interested in getting official recognition for the studio-wide work I'd been doing, and specifically asked JT (who I reported directly to at that time) about solidifying my role properly. In my mind, I was already running the entire studio's programming culture - and everyone knew it, whether they'd say so aloud or not. JT, under the guise of being newly installed in his own role, and covering with the urgency of keeping the business afloat by starting development on what eventually became End of Dragons, promised he'd get back to me about that later. When it happened, I felt like I had no reason to doubt him, so I agreed to revisit it once the End of Dragons project was spun up and no longer needed my constant involvement. It was not until far, far later (after I'd left the company, in fact) that I realized it was the beginning of a pattern with JT. At the time... I shrugged it off, mostly stayed focused on the job at hand, and figured it was worth picking my battles right then anyways - 2019 had left me deeply exhausted.

If I'd struggled to handle the intensity of 2019, though, I was utterly demolished by the events of 2020. Up until March of that year, ArenaNet had maintained a quaint refusal to permit any kind of remote work. Everyone was expected to be on site, or using time-off hours; sanctioned exceptions were virtually nonexistent, even though a number of higher-ranking people bent the rules regularly. (For that matter, I also defied policy routinely, on behalf of my own team - ensuring people got actual time to rest, to heal from injury or sickness, to have true vacations, to deal with various levels of disability and other needs that the company "officially" refused to support. Funnily enough, HR never had the guts to confront me about it, even after years of openly flouting official company policy in order to do the right thing for people - yet another example of how the company gladly exploited people's ethical behavior when it benefited their whims, but would betray and abandon the same people in a heartbeat given half an excuse, often citing their "breach of policy" as a "justification" for the back-stabbing.)

When COVID-19 landed on the scene, everyone's working arrangements had to change, and in a hurry. In one of the only actual examples of good decision-making I ever witnessed from their executives, NCWest declared the studio's physical location closed, several days before the state government of Washington declared a shutdown emergency. My suspicion is that this was informed by the Korean arm of NCSoft, given that (generally speaking) Asian countries handled COVID vastly better than any white-majority place on earth. But that's a rant for another time. Bottom line was, we had to figure out how to operate remotely, 100%, and fast.

Thankfully, I'd already been part of pushing for "emergency snow day" policies to enable remote work for a few months, and so some of the necessary conversations were already happening. But by and large, the entire company was unprepared and caught almost entirely off guard by the sudden change. There were a lot of heroics in the first couple of months there, pressured by the reality that we needed to get End of Dragons out the door relatively quickly to avoid completely losing the entire business. A lot of unsung heroes deserve credit and appreciation for getting us all through that mess, but the fact is that even as it happened I knew I was personally carrying an unusually large amount of the burden.

What fascinated me was that my work wasn't being acknowledged or recognized anymore - even though it was utterly vital to the company's survival. The problem is, it was all emotional and relational labor - caring for people, talking people through rough days, teaching people to set boundaries on their home-office hours and actually seed good habits for leaving work and getting rest, spreading advice and suggestions and helpful hints, collecting documentation and formulating "best practices" policies, teaching people skills for maintaining communication and connection with their colleagues now that walking down the hall to chat was no longer an option. As far as I know, I was the only person in any major leadership role in the studio with any significant amount of experience working remotely. I quickly found myself acting as impromptu therapist and sounding board for people all across the company, helping dozens of different friends and coworkers navigate the messiness of the time. A lot of people thanked me - many times - for helping them make it through 2020.

But my ostensible "peers" - the other leadership cohort of the company - by and large seemed mystified by this. They ignored it, rejected my pleas to learn to do it themselves, seemed utterly baffled that I thought it was important... and also openly resented me for "somehow" running the most successful team in the entire company through the entire debacle. I was simultaneously envied and regarded as a delusional whiner who talked about caring and ethics way too much. Most of the leaders treated me like a nuisance even while striving to conceal how insecure I made them feel. I saw countless rolling eyes, exasperated grimaces, and conspicuous camera shut-offs during leadership meetings those days. Believe it or not, though, it was still almost entirely over my head. I assumed everyone was stressed out - because of course everyone was stressed out - but still, deep down, believed that everyone around me was one or two insightful suggestions and supportive conversations away from "Getting It Right."

I still believed everyone there was like me.

In keeping with that assumption, I cultivated strong ethical habits from the managers who worked "under" me (a hierarchical framing I constantly resisted and continue to find distasteful; I preferred to say I worked for my team, despite "officially" being their boss, because I always felt like my true responsibility was to help my team grow and succeed, not order them around). Because of that, there were numerous occasions when I directed them to push forward a particular decision - usually involving insisting on ethical, fair, and kind treatment of employees and/or players. They'd come to me with reports that others in the studio were resisting doing the right thing, and I'd tell them to go back and say they were doing it anyways, because I had said so; if anyone had a problem with it, they should come challenge me. I knew that nobody there was willing to stick up to me - they all were well aware they'd lose any arguments with me when it came to such matters. And in point of fact, despite using that leverage for years, nobody ever did second-guess me to my face, not a single time.

This was, in retrospect, a very mixed blessing. On the one hand, I successfully used my position to do a lot of good, and to protect a lot of ethical principles that otherwise management would have gladly eroded or outright discarded. The flip side was that I had no idea exactly how much opposition I really had, or how much resentment was brewing about me in the leadership cohort without my knowledge. I wouldn't be surprised if that legacy was used by the power-holders of the company to quietly brand me as some kind of bully... or worse, knowing their affinity for demonizing anyone who refused to swallow their orders.

There were other indicators that I was an anomaly, over the years; but I missed all of them until long after. I remember the summer of 2020 very vividly, as people across both the continent and the planet began speaking out in protest of the constant, pointless executions of Black people by "government law enforcement" murderers. For me, it was a profound moment of hope - an indicator of growing awareness of how intentionally cruel and unfair this society really is. I'd been dissatisfied with American society since a young age, my formative experiences living in Asia providing a perspective I found sorely lacking in the general culture here. I was excited to witness that gap start to close, even a little bit. My coworkers, on the other hand, largely had a very different experience that summer: most of them seemed afraid. I didn't understand until much later that, for them, the idea of a reckoning against class and racial inequity implied that they would be the next victims. Rather than being aware that they, too, were actually mostly oppressed by the same systems albeit in different ways, they assumed they were the "rich and powerful" that would be dethroned should any meaningful kind of upheaval really take place.

And so while I felt an enormous burst of excitement at the idea of Black Equity and national reparations and restorative cultural transformation, the company around me hastily slapped "BLM" stickers on everything in sight, as if to say "please don't kill us if you do actually burn the country down." Which, of course, is a pretty fucking racist attitude in and of itself. There were "listening sessions" scheduled by HR, for employees to talk about their feelings. The white staff showed up in droves. Nobody seemed to realize that the tiny handful of Black people we worked with every day might have had some feelings to talk about, too. I missed the overall tone, still assuming that everyone just needed one or two good quotes from the right Black activists to come around. Of course, like pretty much every other major white capitalist institution, as soon as the open protests quieted down, the entire company went back to "business as usual." It was yet another example of the company's long-running trend of saying the right PR phrases, while doing less than nothing to actually make a meaningful difference. Later that year, in a presentation to the entire company, HR proudly announced their data suggesting that non-white employees "only" experienced a double-digit-percentage pay gap versus their white counterparts in the studio... as if that was an accomplishment.

Another stomach-turning tale from those years was the ill-fated "ArenaNet Values Committee." For a long time, we had weekly meetings of all the senior leadership from across the studio. Those conversations constantly surfaced issues and pain points that deserved serious attention; however, the people who were supposed to make decisions often failed to act on much of that information. The studio head, John Taylor, had even taken it upon himself to bring in an outside consultant to help identify ways to solve some of the long-standing problems that everyone knew plagued the business, and yet never seemed to get addressed. This resulted in the creation of a number of committees, made up of volunteers from across the leadership cohort, who were tasked with fixing specific challenges.

The Values Committee was one such effort. I was immediately (and widely) nominated as an obviously important member, and agreed to work with the group. Of those in the final committee, I was the only person who was not a cishet, white, middle-aged, affluent man - something that should have, in and of itself, been a massive red flag to everyone involved. Instead, I thought of it as an opportunity to be sure that I represented the other groups of people who actually - by and large - did the bulk of meaningful, effective, quality work at the company, despite numerically being in the minority. We had a handful of very tentative video meetings, and one entire actual in-person session (everyone duly wearing a mask and sitting several feet apart in the company's largest meeting room).

In that session, I remember repeatedly arguing with the consultant that his emphasis on certain "values" was actually a huge signifier of toxic masculinity, white supremacy, and class exclusionism - I was assuming, of course, that he "just didn't know" and was not, in fact, suggesting those things for those reasons. After successfully making the case that we needed a different perspective if we really wanted to talk about the ethics and principles of the company, I proposed a set of values that pretty much paralleled my own, and which I knew directly lined up with what the bulk of the employees of the company had openly been asking leadership for, in many cases for years. We concluded the session and agreed to finish drafting the "Values Statement" together asynchronously. I remember two or three of the guys seeming very grateful for my presence in the conversation - outliers who proved, over the years, that they actually did care and were, in fact, pretty decent people. That, of course, only reinforced my assumption that everyone else was just a good conversation away from coming around.

In reality, nobody besides us ever touched the Values Statement project again. Several weeks later, without warning, the Values Committee was quietly and unilaterally disbanded by JT. Yet again, I thought very little of it. I certainly didn't realize I should have taken it personally.

Another illuminating moment in 2020 involved one of the only Black people who held any meaningful position of responsibility in NCWest at the time. He'd risen to a significant role in 2019, just before the big scandal broke with the sexist ArenaNet studio exec. Unfortunately, he was too new and unfamiliar with ArenaNet in particular to handle the situation well, and that left a lingering bad impression on a lot of people in the company. This became part of a long-running excuse for surfacing anti-Black sentiment, especially from other execs and senior leaders. Many of the top echelon of both ArenaNet and NCWest talked shit about this poor guy endlessly, often citing his supposed "incompetence" - despite ignoring far more egregious failures in their white counterparts. I don't know what happened to him, after I left, but I'll never forget the stunned shock I felt when another coworker confided in me that they had "never thought about" this person being Black. It was illustrative of the way that a large contingent of well-meaning, self-imagined "progressive" white centrists and liberals acted like a kind of ballast for the company's ethical failures. This coworker imagined themself to be "colorblind" and "post-racial" and in so doing failed to register the blatant racism done in front of them every day. And that conversation was over a year after the uprisings in response to the state murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020.

This exact same imaginary "progressive" status concealed a lot of issues in the company in general - not just racism, as in that specific example of anti-Blackness. It also formed the underpinnings of how the bulk of the company's employees (and leaders) were able to largely ignore and overlook patterns of sexism and misogyny, and to normalize the pervasive culture of ableism, as well as other forms of inequity and injustice. By presuming themselves to have already transcended such biases and patterns of harm, many people within ArenaNet and NCWest became incapable of recognizing how they, themselves, enacted those exact harms on a daily basis. Very few were willing to do the proverbial Hard Work and actually confront their beliefs about their own ethical integrity, no matter how many times they were presented with contradicting evidence.

I had a couple of other major projects, mainly in 2020, that reflected the increasingly unavoidable truth that most of the rest of the company's leadership was ethically bankrupt. One incident involved a particular piece of legislation (a U.S. law called the Communications and Video Accessibility Act, for the curious). This law is designed to prevent intentional exclusion of disabled people from certain kinds of technology. It's arguably not particularly effective, but even still, it was famously challenged by certain elements of the game industry as being "too hard" to comply with. Despite becoming law in 2010, the game industry as a whole successfully managed to avoid being required to comply until the beginning of 2019. This law crossed executives' desks at ArenaNet in 2020, and along with a couple of other people, I was tasked with determining if Guild Wars 2 was compliant, and how much it would cost to fix the game's accessibility issues.

Along with the tireless contributions of the other people in the working group, I helped build out a comprehensive analysis of where GW2 did (and did not) follow the law. It was bleak, frankly, in most respects. But my part of it wasn't just to find out if we were legal - it was to determine how much it would take to address our shortcomings. After weeks of intensive work, we presented our final results. My analysis was that there were a few areas that would indeed be enormous projects to comply with, and arguably weren't particularly important to the legal requirements (the law itself is notoriously blurry about what qualifies as "undue hardship" when identifying acceptable exceptions to its requirements). However, the vast majority of GW2's glaring accessibility problems - just from the standpoint of this single law - I determined were easily fixable. In the end, it would have only taken a couple of months, and less than a hundred thousand dollars, to dramatically improve the game's accessibility. The project pitch I outlined included a number of requests that, to this day, continue to be sore points for disabled fans - and have been on player wishlists since the game first debuted in beta form in early 2012.

In the end, the executive decision was to shove the entire thing aside, and I was denied permission to use any resources to address accessibility in the game, then or any time after. The execs justified this decision by saying that spending the money wasn't worth it; "even if they got caught" breaking the law, they felt confident that the fines they would face would be less than the cost of actually doing anything to fix the situation - despite having hard data suggesting it would significantly increase revenue from disabled players, including bringing in new sales from players who couldn't enjoy the game at all without the fixes being discussed. It was emblematic of the ableist culture of the studio leadership as a whole, and deeply disgusting. I was told to stop talking about it and focus on shipping End of Dragons.

Another ill-fated effort was my gender inclusivity work. Many years prior, the studio had introduced a purchasable item called a "Makeover Kit" that allowed players to alter their characters' appearances, including changing between the two offered body types, "male" and "female." Prompted by years of player requests, and no small amount of personal curiosity, at one point in late 2020 I did some analysis of the game's core technology and setup to determine if it was possible to allow even more flexibility. As it turned out, I found that it would have taken less than a month of total work to add options to the game allowing characters to freely mix and match their physical body types, voices, and even selection of pronouns and gendered addresses (in languages where such things are common), thanks to the existing multi-language localization support in the game. Internally, it generated a huge amount of excitement, especially among other queer developers at the company; I couldn't say anything about it publicly, but I did some quiet research of what longtime queer players were saying about the game, and it would have been a major hit with them, too.

Again, executives dragged their feet and repeatedly ignored my ideas and tried to get me to focus on "more important" work (which they never seemed to actually be able to specify). I went as far as implementing about 90% of the feature aside from some minor elements that needed attention from a couple of other departments - less than a week of work was left to get it ready to ship to players. Other departments were instructed not to do the work. The senior studio execs refused to even discuss it. Nobody ever told me "no" outright, but nobody would acknowledge that I'd done it, either. Even though over a dozen other people at the studio kept asking for it to get finished, leadership - most notably including John Taylor - simply changed the subject and acted like it didn't exist. I ultimately gave up on it personally, too exhausted to keep fighting, but left it in a state that I knew anyone could finish it, along with detailed instructions about how to do so. It should have taken two or three people less than two weeks to get it into players' hands. It remains untouched 5 years later.

(It was hardly the first time something I'd done had been undermined by senior decision-makers, which I think is part of why it didn't register as more of an appalling thing for me at the time. Way back during the development of Path of Fire, for one relatively silly and harmless example, we'd had a big team-wide brainstorming session to come up with ideas for things we could offer to players as a bonus for pre-ordering the expansion to the game. Guild Wars 2 has an in-game map feature, which is often used to communicate between players, for example when coordinating groups to move across large distances. Players who have chosen to group up with each other can "draw" on this map, leaving behind little white scribbles for their companions to see. I implemented a feature that, in keeping with the "Path of Fire" theme, would put tiny little decorative flames on the drawn paths of players who had pre-ordered the expansion. A bunch of people expressed excitement about it; but when the time came to ship it, I was asked by leadership to turn it off, and eventually to remove it entirely. Players never knew it existed, and I was never given a reason for why it was suddenly axed from the game. I can only surmise that someone high up wanted to tell me to stay in my lane... for all the good that did.)

Weaponized silence was something of a common strategy from John Taylor in particular. He had a way of avoiding any conversation that involved anyone who wasn't male. He often used tactics like silent-treatment, pretending to be too busy to talk, and playing up his "reluctant leader" status whenever we wanted to avoid being on the hook for certain decisions. He usually used this to escape accountability around the experiences of minority employees and players. He never seemed to struggle with being decisive unless there was some kind of ethical consideration involved - and then suddenly he just "wasn't prepared" to do anything, even when people brought him explicitly clear suggestions.

I remember, in late 2019, a woman at the company confiding in me that she had trouble trusting JT, after seeing him palling around on lunch breaks with the exec who'd been outed as a sexist abuser that summer. I confronted JT about it privately, explained that his choices of association carried weight to the people he was supposed to be leading, and suggested he stop doing so. His response was almost comically intense confusion, as if he couldn't fathom why any of it was an issue. I mistakenly believed, for a long time, that it was genuine overwhelm and ineptitude on his part; but frankly, the long-term pattern is a bit too convenient to have not been intentional. It also took witnessing the same faux-exasperated bewilderment on the faces of a couple other white guys in the studio, years later, for me to realize it was part of a shared playbook from the more covert and insidious bigots at the company - but we'll get back to that.

Another favorite tactic of JT's was to surround himself with tokenized people - carefully selected "senior leaders" who were chosen less for their work and more for their ability to offer reputation-laundering to the men in the top ranks of the company. These tokens were frequently used, by many of the execs in ArenaNet and NCSoft alike, to "prove" that there was equity in the leadership staff - and particularly that women were included. Of course, the women who were allowed to hold leadership roles in the company were only kept around if they didn't rock the guys'-club boat. Women and femmes (myself included) who dared to actually make leadership decisions with gender equity in mind tended to get shoved out quite quickly - with the men falling back on their tokens as "proof" that the women they fired were "bad at their jobs really honest pinky swear" because "look we didn't fire this woman!"

A classic moment where this strategy was revealed as a disingenuous farce involved the company's internal text chat channels. We had one channel in particular for the "DEI group" - it was a freely open channel for anyone to participate in, focused on issues of diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice. It was quiet most of the time, but I tried to keep stoking some life into it here and there, especially in 2020 and 2021. At one point, I posted a link in the chat to a video essay about the ways in which sexism affects company workplaces. The video included a handful of pointed illustrations of issues that eerily mirrored stuff going on every day at ArenaNet, despite the company's pretense of being forward-thinking and inclusive. I left the link without comment, hoping to spark recognition and conversation from my colleagues. Instead, the very first response - within minutes - was from a woman who had been (with far too much fanfare) recently hired into a senior leadership role. She said she had "learned not to care what people think" and, as such, didn't need to waste time thinking about things like feminism. And just like that, one of the token female authority figures managed to completely shut down a possible conversation about workplace sexism - exactly the kind of patriarchal pandering she'd been hired to do. Nobody else responded to the video.

Changing Gears

In the midst of all the wildness of 2020 and 2021, JT had started quietly setting up a new project - which, at the time I'm writing all this, remains officially unannounced. This is a common practice in the game industry, despite being ill-advised on several fronts; but that's a discussion for another time. The idea was to keep Guild Wars 2 chugging along and engaging with its player base, while slowly creating something new for the longer-term future of the company... precisely the strategy I'd been stopped from recommending to the former studio head back in 2015, long before the layoff debacle. I was cautiously excited.

Initially, I helped start trying to recruit specific people for the new team - an effort I actually began in early 2020, but which had been derailed by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Unbeknownst to me, JT had secretly been exploring bringing some other people back, including Colin Johanson, who had serious cache from his time on Guild Wars 2 years before. I believed in the overall strategy, perhaps a little too eagerly to push back on the specifics - most of which were begin done outside my awareness anyways, as JT began a long-term pattern of intentionally cutting me out of discussions I should have been in the center of. Besides, I was busy getting End of Dragons off the ground.

Somewhere along the line, JT approached me about being the technical director of the new project. Worried about splitting my already-thin time away from GW2, and also not ready to abandon the team - who I knew still needed a tremendous amount of support - I told JT I wasn't sure what the right move was, and asked for time to consider. Rather than ever talking to me about it again, he went behind my back and hired John Corpening to run the new game's programming team - a move I didn't recognize for the enormous slight it was at the time. Despite having had several bad experiences working with John Corpening years before, I also completely failed to predict the other, bleaker implications of that hire. I simply had too much on my mind and too little support to catch it as it happened.

By the end of 2020, it was clear to me I was burning out. The ongoing pandemic situation was taking a heavy toll on me, not to mention other personal events in my life. Work had somehow gotten exponentially harder and more draining. Without fully understanding it, I'd basically been working the equivalent of six or seven full-time roles... except, because of misogyny and general patriarchal apathy, I was getting credit for only one of them... and constantly undermined and second-guessed in that role, even by people who had absolutely zero qualification and who knew damn well I was still the same person they'd regarded as a brilliant technologist before my coming-out back in 2019.

I decided it was time to shift away from my role as the Technical Director for ArenaNet at that point. The new game was finding its footing a little bit, and it was clear that the project would need a good server programmer. I remembered, very fondly, my early days at the company, diving deep into esoteric and bleeding-edge, world-class networking technology. I imagined it would be a welcome respite. I decided to shift onto that project and do some server architecture design for them, fully expecting that after a year or two I'd recharge enough to get back into leadership roles again. I wistfully remembered how energizing and nourishing it was to spend hours a day in code and packet traces and socket throughput profiles and scalability extrapolation spreadsheets.

I did not remember that, way back in 2011, I'd asked my former employer for a gentler workload with the intent of recuperating for a while, only to eventually lose my job.

But then, that was only one of many patterns that I didn't connect until far too late.

At the end of my time with the Guild Wars 2 team, I was desperate to make sure my people were ok and well-cared-for once I left. On one level, I worried about the impact of my absence; on another, the treatment I was getting from senior leadership in the studio made it impossible for me to feel like I could stay, without it taking an unacceptable toll on my health. So I did what I could to try to balance the two - I didn't want to just leave my team, so I wanted to leave something of myself behind for them. I had always selected my team leaders very deliberately, and spent months mentoring and preparing them for the changes that would come when I stepped down formally. I wrote nearly a thousand pages of detailed technical documentation, explaining everything I'd learned and knew from nearly a decade of being immersed in every last corner of the tech that powers Guild Wars 2. I wrote extensive notes about what still needed love, what my fears were for the game's future, how I practiced leadership, my philosophy and beliefs and ethics, even ideas for continuing to improve and heal the company's culture, and face some of their bigger challenges.

I wasn't quite sure if anyone really cared about what I had to say, or what I was doing. I figured that, if nothing else, I could produce an artifact that my team on GW2 would get some use out of eventually... even while wondering if the company's leadership just wanted me to disappear. They grew more and more impatient with me, and John Corpening in particular began to pester me to quit "wasting" time and effort on GW2. I felt torn between what I regarded as my duty to my old team's wellbeing, and the pressure to move on. I wasn't able to fully process the consternation my coworkers expressed about losing me; all I could feel was the judgment of the people who wanted me on their team instead, who had begun berating me for "taking too long" to switch.

Even while I started spinning up with the new research and development group, I split my time for months, doing anything I could to make sure my exit was smooth and uneventful. Eventually, at the beginning of April 2021, I "flipped the switch" and fully left my role on GW2 officially, concluding that I'd set up my old team for success as best as I could, and promising to be available for any impromptu conversations as needed - about obscure tech things that nobody else remembered, about nearly-lost trivia about the game's development history and why things were the way they were, about life in general, about how to be a good manager... meetings that still dotted my calendar when I ultimately resigned from the studio late in 2022. My impact was being felt, but the way I was treated by most of the rest of the leaders in the company outside of GW2 Engineering made it impossible for me to know that. I vanished into my new architecture job, feeling profoundly alienated, unwanted, unappreciated, and unsupported. At the time, I just chalked it up to nameless "burnout" struggles, placated by the assumption that I'd figure it all out once I'd gotten a few months of rest.

When the End of Dragons expansion finally shipped, I'd been off the project for over 80% of its development cycle. I remember - with no small amount of wry embarrassment, now - arguing that I shouldn't be credited in the final release since I'd "done so little for it." Thinking back on it now, it's a stunning contrast from how I'd understood my contributions as the leader of the entire company's programming culture, at the end of 2019. In open defiance of my feedback - a behavior I'd encouraged in my time on the team, and a gesture which utterly thrilled me with pride and still warms my heart when I think about it - the remaining GW2 Engineering leadership overruled me. Instead, they insisted that I be listed in the expansion's credits as the company's Technical Director. It was the first time, after nearly two decades in the game industry, that my work was published and credited under my real name.

The Flood of Bullshit

Starting in the spring of 2021, my daily routine changed dramatically. No longer involved in the operation of Guild Wars 2, or beholden to its pressures and timelines, I was on a completely new game project for the first time in nearly a decade. Like a lot of early development efforts, it started with huge amounts of very open-ended creative dreaming - brainstorms, wild idea sessions, experiments, prototypes, concept art, endless hours of "oooh what if" conversations. I loved it. It was refreshing and helpfully slow-paced, after years on the breakneck "ship every two weeks" release schedule of Guild Wars 2's live operations. I met some new people - and got to work again with a few people from years before at ArenaNet - and I loved it. The joy of it all was enough to conceal the struggles that marked my presence in that group from the very beginning.

There were other conversations happening, too - ones I had never witnessed in a project before, and ones I was delighted were even taking place. We talked about culture, about intentionality, about doing things right, and learning from past mistakes, and what we wanted our ethical lines in the sand to be. I was so pleased to finally get to talk about this stuff at work - after over a decade of nonstop advocacy for exactly such things - that I didn't notice what was actually happening in those meetings. I did not process, until after I'd left the company entirely, that I was the one who did most of the talking in those conversations. I had the most to say, the most resources to refer people to, the most excited dreams about doing things differently and better. And I certainly did not process that I was not supposed to do that; from the perspective of the men running that project, I was no longer a leader, and my incessant desire to help create something good and beautiful with a truly principled leadership culture was deeply unwelcome.

In front of the rest of the team, they pretended to welcome my prolific input, often expressing excitement and agreement in the open. When there was an audience, they often reached for effusive (and even excessively dramatic) praise and appreciation for me, and also for other people who weren't white guys. It was a calculated (and, sadly, effective) way to allay any notions that they were actually bigoted behind the scenes. But time and time again, once the meeting was over, they quietly chose not to act on anything I'd said. On a number of occasions, I was subtly warned in one-on-one conversations that I might be pushing things too far - a warning that I didn't actually manage to understand.

This was, in part, compounded by another complicating factor - which flared up intensely by the end of 2021, and created plenty of friction into 2022. Specifically, I was increasingly open about being autistic - something many expressed gratitude towards me for, but which earned me a lot of ire from management. It wasn't a new thing - I didn't change how I behaved, just started being able to offer people explanations for my unusual and unconventional ways of doing things on the job. But, having left the relative shelter of a "position of authority," I was newly vulnerable to a force I - again - didn't fully process until I was gone: ableism directed at me.

I remember one of my first conversations with my new boss, John Corpening, about what it was like for me to work in an intensely collaborative environment like game development as an autistic person. At first, he seemed strangely excited; he said he'd worked with some autistic people before, and learned how to be an effective manager for them. I was comforted by this initially, and even a little hopeful; but after another conversation or two, it became clear that what had actually happened was he had taken it upon himself to essentially try to do amateur ABA on his autistic employees. (For those unaware, ABA is sold as a "therapy" for autistics, but is in fact a system of abuse and violent mistreatment designed to traumatize autistic people into compliance with societal norms. Outside of its tragically large cult following, ABA is generally considered a form of psychological torture, and is often compared with "conversion therapy" used by religious extremists to similarly traumatize queer people into "acting straight.") His idea of "success" as a leader was to actually terrify his staff into never reminding him they were autistic at all. For a long time, I shrugged it off and just resolved to try and patiently educate him about what is actually good for autistic workers. Sadly, I missed the fact that it was an indicator of how the company's managers and executives in general had begun to feel about me.

Another early clue that things were going wrong was John's habit of making allusions to his "extensive experience" and "training" as a manager in general. He frequently made snide remarks about the management of Guild Wars 2 - something I had a lot of difficulty not taking personally, given my own long years of investment into that game team's culture. But he also made some observations about problems I agreed could be fixed, so I let it slide, unfortunately. Attempting to model good collaboration and healthy relationship, I repeatedly offered to introduce him to people I knew from the GW2 team, so he could pass along some of his wisdom. Somehow, he always managed to duck these invitations, with a long line of excuses. I eventually gave up, and assumed he was just too busy to want to do the extra work; I didn't notice the fact that he was avoiding being put on the spot, to cover for the fact that his claims of expertise were unduly exaggerated.

One of the specific insults he threw around a lot still sticks with me. He picked up the phrase "learned helplessness" from somewhere or other, and for a brief time, loved to throw it at the Guild Wars 2 developers as an insult to their ability to organize and make decisions effectively. A very small amount of this criticism was accurate, although deeply uncharitable; he slung it as a personal slight, lacking the compassion, insight, or curiosity necessary to recognize that for most people, the situation was not one of learned helplessness, but rather one of conditioned paralysis due to fear of leadership's capricious thirst for punishing people. I tried to explain it to him, once, but he changed the subject and refused to discuss it again. The great irony was, even though he stopped using the phrase to insult people from other teams after that, he eventually began actually weaponizing the real behavior of learned helplessness to duck responsibility and accountability for his own managerial mistakes. It took quite a while for me to realize he was actually just a good liar and an incredibly poor leader. For the time, I went back to just trying to shape the culture of the team I was on.

In years past, men in the company regarded my insistent habit of defying convention as a respectable indicator of my leadership vision and prowess. But on that team in particular, that was completely gone: I was now an uncontrollable, dangerous, unfixable problem. My combination of gender and neurotype squarely moved me from the "inspirational and aspirational" bucket into the "untouchable anathema" bucket. Thinking back on my overall career there, I have no doubt I only rose as far as I did because most of those years, all of the company's gatekeepers assumed I was just another cis, straight, white guy... like them.

It didn't help that nobody said this stuff explicitly to me, or (I'm guessing) to anyone else, either. If there's one thing that marks the class of men who run companies like ArenaNet, it's a sinister ability to seem harmless, innocent, blameless. Always polite and courteous in public, always careful to say just the right amount of positive things to avoid any obvious pattern of bias without seeming to be too tokenizing, always ready with a quick excuse if anything slightly off-key was ever pointed out, and yet never actually quite doing anything right in terms of how they treated others. For a long time, I assumed I was still just burned out; but as it happened, I'd chosen to spend my time outside of work in 2021 focusing on serious trauma therapy, addressing the aftermath of a violently abusive domestic relationship that I'd ended in early 2019, and a childhood of horrific abuse and neglect being raised in an extremist religious cult.

And it was that trauma work - combined with finally being in the first truly and profoundly accepting, supportive, and loving relationships of any kind I'd ever had in my life - that helped me realize what was going on. I - very slowly - began to scrutinize what had been happening with John Corpening and Colin Johanson on this new project.

When JT had first moved to bring the two back to the company, there was a lot of excitement; Colin in particular had been a very charismatic and high-profile figure in the history of Guild Wars 2. Some people still remembered Colin with a little more hesitation, knowing of some of his more significant failures in that era; and an even smaller number remembered John Corpening. His particular legacy was of being placed in charge of the Guild Wars 2 "Competitive" features shortly after launch, and subsequently mismanaging them so severely that even to this day the "player-vs-player" and "world-vs-world" portions of the game retain a reputation for being abandoned, under-supported, poorly maintained, and rife with both bad game development decision-making and toxic player behavior. Some of this reputation is justified, some not; but despite efforts from many others over the years to turn things around, those game modes continue to writhe under the specter of John Corpening's leadership. I myself was uncertain about John when I first heard he was coming in for the new game; but he and Colin both made a big show of talking about their "growth" and "learning" in their time away from ArenaNet. And so I, naively, chose to give them a chance to prove they were different.

On the surface, John was adept at saying the right things at the right time. He had a way of dropping choice jargon in just the right context to seem like he was progressive, caring, interested in the wellbeing of his team, and forward-thinking. In reality, he frequently used his own position of "authority" (alongside appeals to his "experience" which he never elaborated on in any meaningful way) to shut down any kind of feedback, criticism, or concern that didn't immediately align with what he wanted. Combined with a prolific use of gaslighting, he concealed his actual treatment of people (exploitative, inconsiderate, demanding, and frequently utterly unfair) under a sleek, smooth air of just being super easy-going and wanting everyone to get along and be OK.

At first I didn't know enough to doubt his act, so I spent time talking to him privately - about my years leading ArenaNet's programming team and large swaths of the company's culture, about my desires to continue shifting the studio towards a more equitable and social-justice-focused environment, and about concrete ideas I had and things I'd done to support those goals over time. From one of those conversations, I introduced him to the phrase "psychological safety" - a concept which he then proceeded to frequently parade around in front of the entire new game team as if it was something he'd always known about, and something he felt was supremely important, making sure to never credit me for teaching it to him in the first place.

The actual purpose of the concept of psychological safety is that, when people know they are not at risk of being punished or harmed for speaking their minds or advocating for their values, they are more likely to do excellent work together; the very knowledge that we can differ without creating damage to each other is, in fact, a deeply important ingredient of any creative group endeavor. Despite paying lip service to this idea, it eventually became clear that John's actual interest was in creating an environment where he never felt like anyone disagreed with him - quite a different goal. With time, John's actions revealed that even though he was constantly talking about how much he valued "collective wellbeing," his real goal was to surround himself with people who would never challenge him, remind him of his rampant insecurities, or threaten his fragile grasp on authority.

John also made a big point of claiming to be supportive about his team's needs, while in practice being dismissive of any challenge he didn't personally share. Several people on the team had very real difficulty surviving in pandemic conditions - which was reasonable, because a lot of people struggled with that reality. Some, including myself, have never had the luxury of pretending the COVID-19 pandemic ever ended. I remember once, when a couple of us were trying to explain to John that it was difficult to be expected to perform certain job responsibilities on his whims and schedule, when we also needed to handle all of the domestic labor of keeping our homes functioning, on top of other relational and emotional labor responsibilities both inside and outside of work. He repeatedly shrugged this off, revealing his actual perspective, and habit of erasing the reality of such effort - a classic patriarchal move, with clearly sexist roots. He maintained that these challenges were not real, or at least, a kind of simple-minded delusion that he would "benevolently" indulge to get us to shut up and quit asking for grace. Naturally, all of this was done without ever saying anything so overt, direct, or obviously damning; the subtlety of it formed an added layer of punishment and psychological mistreatment, atop the effective camouflage of the behavior itself.

In direct contradiction of his claims about wanting to create a safe team, John had a persistent habit of being very slightly shitty to the women in his group. One of them came from a less-common background for a game programmer, and he made a point of making subtly negative remarks about her skills whenever she wasn't around - despite the fact that she was actually quite good, and the reason I myself had excitedly voted to hire her was that she had a fantastic grasp on certain technical complexities that were crucial for the work we were doing.

There was another woman on the team who had a very endearing habit of responding "you're welcome" any time anyone thanked her for something - a lovely, thoughtful bit of reciprocal respect and caring. It also happened a lot, because she had a way of doing a lot of things that people were grateful for. Without fail, every time this happened, John would react with a slight eye-roll and a loud, mocking scoff - a small, easily deniable thing, but also a clearly derisive thing. Sometimes he'd even un-mute his microphone in the middle of a meeting, when he had nothing to say, just to be sure his reaction was heard. It was a dogwhistle: meant to be ignored by everyone but the intended targets, but an inescapable reminder that anyone feminine who regarded themselves as a peer within the group deserved to be scolded and told to return to the metaphorical kitchen. We were supposed to know our place; we had no business acting as if our contributions mattered and the men of the team weren't entitled to our ceaseless deference and labor.

Another similar issue with John was his attitude towards the Quality Assurance department. In the wake of the 2019 layoffs and the subsequent shift in company culture I'd helped push for, QA was better-regarded than any time before in the studio's history, at least as far as I am aware. This was met from John's side (accompanied by vigorous head-nodding from Colin Johanson) with an outward-facing enthusiasm. QA was supposed to be a pivotal part of this new game, and it was considered "non-negotiable and critical" that certain infrastructural investments were made to ensure that QA could do their jobs easily. Thoroughly testing a game, especially a complex game, is immensely difficult and highly skilled work - a skillset I'd insisted for years needed to be better valued by the studio overall. I like to think that my programming team on Guild Wars 2 got the memo, as it were.

And so at first, I believed John was truly on board. It wasn't until much later that I realized he had a pattern: cordial and even earnest-seeming respectfulness when talking to QA, followed by subtle insults and disgust when they weren't present. In one conversation, we'd just finished meeting with a QA programmer who was helping design some automated testing infrastructure for the project - an area the studio had a long history of not being good about, much to my irritation. While the programmer was on the call, John was all smiles and gracefulness. As soon as it was just "real" engineers hanging back afterwards to compare notes, his mood changed. I remember trying to talk him into something or other that the QA engineer had suggested; his protests made less and less sense, until finally he just gave us all a look, and said "well, he's from QA" - with the very clear (but, of course, deniable) implication that that meant we didn't need to feel obligated to take him seriously. As was too often the case, I didn't register the pattern until it was too late.

The new game creation project proceeded; despite some head-scratching moments, I still had no real idea that things were as bad as they were. We started needing to hire some more programmers, and John asked the programming team to look over some job postings he was about to make. I suggested a massive overhaul of the approach he'd used (a pretty classic corporate template full of bullet points and "requirements") in favor of a tailored, personalized, and emotionally-informed short story - a technique I'd used to get some fantastic people onto GW2 late in my time on the game, and one which was backed by huge amounts of research into hiring bias, employment inequity, and ways in which job recruiting pipelines reinforce exclusion and oppressive sociocultural dynamics. To help explain the approach I'd used, and to share it with other hiring managers in the company, I wrote a long internal article, citing that research and detailing the strategy I was recommending.

He chose my variant of the job posting to actually list publicly, and in fact went on to steal the overall style (albeit getting the relevant bits of the strategy quite wrong) in all of his future job postings he made for the team. He openly mentioned this in front of the rest of the team and said nice things about my approach and feedback. In private, however, he told me he wasn't interested in any more of my input on hiring, told me to leave it alone going forward (despite having originally asked for my opinion), and outright stated that he "didn't agree with" the research I'd cited on hiring bias and employment prejudice. His response baffled me, but I wasn't yet deterred. It wasn't until long after that I realized that he wasn't claiming I hadn't done my research - he was saying he didn't share my goals of fixing the injustices.

This particular exchange was emblematic of his overall style. In front of others, he made sure to cover his tracks and never offer any hints of what he was really doing. But privately, he often resorted to cryptic, vague, and even self-contradictory "feedback" to people he wanted to control, and to me especially. He would simultaneously suggest it was "very important" to listen to what he was telling me to do, while completely refusing to be specific or explain himself at all. It was a technique designed to instill confusion, uncertainty, and self-doubt; most importantly, it was designed to elicit fear of his authority, and to attempt to coerce meek compliance from the people he considered himself "in charge" of. For most people, the natural reaction would be to just try to fade back into the scenery a bit and try and avoid his scrutiny, even without ever knowing what he was supposedly disapproving of the whole time. I, however, just felt lost; and when I feel uncertain, my tendency is to double down on what I feel most strongly about... things like my ethical principles and values. In other words, John's attempts at corralling me had a tendency to make me even more insistently uncontrollable, in his mind.

At one point, the name of another former ArenaNet employee was floated around as a potential programming hire. Unfortunately, this particular person was well-renowned for being a sexist, abusive, toxic, intolerable jerk and a true misery to work with. The first time I heard about it was when John asked me privately one day if I had thoughts about re-hiring this man. I told him, as diplomatically as I could, that I thought it would be a huge mistake and his presence would be unsafe for every single woman and femme on the team. John's reaction was to immediately reassure me that he'd already asked several women outside of the programming team (who'd also had history with this guy) and they had all vetoed hiring him back on. At the time I was just confused why he was still asking around, but didn't really dwell on it much. Long after the fact, I realized the absurdity of the entire exchange; it was as if, in John's mind, bringing a known sexist abuser into the team was only going to be an issue if his prospective victims were going to complain about it.

During one interview, we got a candidate who immediately made crass and unacceptable remarks to me and my co-interviewer, and repeatedly behaved awfully throughout the entire hour-long conversation. I never gave any indication of my stance in the meeting, but as soon as we got together as a programming team to debrief about the interview sessions, I hard vetoed hiring him. Everyone else had been leaning towards declining for various reasons, but it was my description of his egregious conduct that sealed the deal for everybody. Out of curiosity, another coworker asked how I'd managed to land on such a strong conclusion within minutes, even while sitting through an entire interview without tipping my hand. I explained that the way that most abusers and bigots survive in collective environments is to try and find the "threshold" where their behavior goes unacknowledged and unnoticed; this guy just happened to guess wildly wrong out of the gate. But if he'd been given a chance, he would have figured out exactly how far not to go, so that nobody suspected he was problematic. It's a common technique for covertly being allowed to harm and mistreat people while maintaining plausible deniability; everyone who isn't a victim tends to end up telling a lot of "but he seemed like such a nice guy and he was always cool to me" stories. I concluded by saying that I've got a very reliable radar for that kind of bullshit and the candidate had thoroughly wreathed himself in red flags.

What I didn't catch (and, yet again, only realized long after in retrospect) was the way John Corpening ended the meeting. We had plenty of time left in our scheduled window for the debrief conversation, and there was no real sign anyone was in a rush to leave. I finished what I had to say about covert abusers and sat back, muting my microphone to symbolically yield the floor back to everyone else. John waited exactly long enough to make it seem like he wasn't trying to shut me up, and then promptly and unilaterally said the meeting was over, and closed the room for everyone without giving anyone time to react. When I first recalled that incident, about a year later, I was vividly struck by my memory of John's expression for the final minutes that I was talking - he seemed intensely uncomfortable and nervous. In time, I'd come to realize that his body language often belied his true discomfort with being caught in problematic behavior, even as he studiously tried to cover it all up. Still, I was a long way from realizing that his hasty hang-up was ironically self-incriminating.

Some time later, the team interviewed a Black candidate for a programming job. I, along with many others, was very excited - not just by this person's skills and much-needed experience for the specific work, but by the prospect of getting some desperately-missing color added to the distressingly pale staff lineup on the game. We were told that an offer had been made; it was great news, for the entire project. The role was vital for the overall game's progress, and central to the long-term plans we'd been coming up with together. Weeks went by with no further news, until one day, John announced at an all-team meeting that the candidate wouldn't be coming to work with us after all. The words he used told a sad story of unexpected complications, life events, something unfortunate but unavoidable.

I will never forget the smug, delighted smirk that played across his face the entire time, as he told the entire game team that a person we sorely needed wouldn't be coming after all. Yet again, I couldn't quite place anything consciously at the time, but combined with my memory of his attitude about hiring bias from earlier, I belatedly realized he was overjoyed at not having to hire a Black person. It wasn't until I was nearly finished writing this piece that I remembered the other time I'd seen him wear that exact smirk. Once, in a casual team conversation, someone had asked him about his time working on the original Guild Wars. With the same sickening smile, he talked with great pride about his contributions to a particular bit of add-on content for the game - and although he only referenced his technical interest in that project, I don't think it was a coincidence that the main story theme of that content was the enslavement of "inferior" species and the use of brutal authoritarian methods to coerce compliant behavior from the enslaved. I'm sure if anyone had commented on his demeanor, he would have had a long line of "good" excuses for the grin he wore in those meetings. If I hadn't had his own words about his disinterest in designing recruiting processes to stop excluding women and minorities, I may have never caught it myself. But knowing what I know now, I can have zero doubt.

John Corpening's dubious hiring practices continued to cause issues over time. Eventually, it became clear the team needed a producer - someone to help with coordination, communication, and keeping things organized. John immediately and loudly put forward a recommendation for a guy he'd worked with before, who was eventually hired. I don't know how much work went into evaluating options, but it was immediately clear when the guy started that this was a nepotistic hire and his actual qualifications were rather overstated. In his very first conversation with me, this guy had the gall to play the "stop me if I make you uncomfortable" card (a move right up there with such classic bullshit like "I'm not racist, but" and "don't take this the wrong way" as a clarion indicator of upcoming intentional misbehavior) and immediately compared himself to a sex worker, using tasteless and harmful language. In a single sentence, he managed to telegraph his disdain for women, for me, and for being asked to behave himself in a group setting - a veritable masterclass in misogynistic domination behavior.

This tactic is a common one, the kind of thing I'd warned against after the ill-fated hiring meeting where I'd vetoed a candidate for similar behavior. It's designed to preemptively shut down protest. As a bonus, if anyone does complain, they can be subjected to an added dose of victim blaming - "you didn't stop me" generally being the excuse given. Over time, this has a way of ratcheting up the bar for what gets ignored and tolerated. Left unchecked, this kind of treatment of people leads to groups becoming increasingly toxic and harmful. It's a parallel issue to the infamous "don't let Nazis in the bar" parable - leaving these kinds of "small" harm alone inevitably paves the way for additional, more overt harm to follow later. Worst of all, the longer this goes on, the more likely perpetrators are to retort "you never complained before" as a way to stifle any pushback at all, no matter how tentative.

I left that conversation deeply uncomfortable with the guy, and avoided him as much as I could ever after. I'd already realized I had my doubts about John, but after witnessing how hard he fought to bring this person in to influence the team's development and culture, I began to seriously question if I could stomach working with him much longer.

At some point while the team was growing, the subject of peoples' pronouns inevitably surfaced. The game team had already developed a practice of listing everyone's name, contact info, and a short "getting to know you" bio on a shared internal web page. I, along with many of my colleagues, advocated for simply adding pronouns with each of our names; a few people had already been referred to incorrectly a handful of times, and it seemed like an easy way to keep everyone informed. John took it upon himself to not only insist we shouldn't do such a thing, he basically told the entire game team (well outside his realm of authority as lead for the programmers) that we shouldn't normalize sharing pronouns. The bullshit excuse he gave was that doing so "might make it hard for closeted trans people who didn't want to write down the wrong pronouns for themselves." Never mind the fact that he was overruling multiple openly trans people in the conversation, all of whom had stories of how it would have helped us to have such a practice normalized by the people around us. There was no further discussion of pronouns after that.

Something I'd done quite a while before on the Guild Wars 2 team was phase out the common tech-team lingo of "standup meetings." In typical corporate jargon, these are short, fast meetings, where everyone speaks more or less exactly once, designed to get a quick update about the state of things. They're often done early in the day and include summaries of the previous day's work, and expectations for the upcoming day. However, the terminology had long bothered me; I imagined that (someday, hopefully!) we might have disabled coworkers, perhaps even full-time wheelchair users, for whom being asked to "come to standup" would almost certainly feel a bit insensitive and rude, if not horribly alienating. On GW2, we'd had a smooth and successful switch to just calling them "sync meetings" and everyone had seemed pretty cool with it. So I pitched the same idea to John and Colin once, in front of the entire new game project. I don't have a particularly clear memory of the results, but it was very clear that neither of them had any interest in indulging this idea. They rejected it without explanation, refused to allow further discussion, and effectively said "we'll never do that."

Additional friction popped up around the subject of trauma. At one point, John and several other men on the team were making frequent jokes about "being traumatized" by things like getting incorrect items in their delivery food orders, or being asked to do extra work because of a miscommunication (which often also ended up being their own fault, ironically). I pulled John aside at one point and mentioned to him that I am a survivor of extreme personal violence and actually do have PTSD, and that I found this joking deeply insensitive and that it made me feel unsafe and unwelcome on the team. Hoping he would actually practice the vaunted "psychological safety" principles he spent so much time claiming to care about, I left my vulnerability on the line. The jokes stopped, more or less; but John and a couple of the other guys who'd liked making those jokes shot me a lot of bitter looks for a couple weeks after that.

None of that was quite so vicious as one of Colin's insidious moments, though. Several years before, during the "Values Committee" era, John Taylor had resurrected a particular slogan that had at one time been a popular phrase from one of the highest-up people in the studio. (That man had since left for other reasons, much to the relief of... almost everyone.) It was defended as a way to think about the attitude we should have towards players, a kind of reminder of our responsibility to treat them well; but the phrase itself was a very graphic and needlessly callous rape joke. JT threw it around frequently in senior leadership meetings for a while, and several other men caught on and liked saying it, too - all making a performative point of immediately saying "it's a bad phrase" as if that negated their use of it to begin with. Several other people asked them to stop, with no results. Finally, after one stressful and draining multi-hour meeting in which the phrase was used repeatedly yet again, I sent an email to the entire leadership team of the studio at ArenaNet.

In that email, I explained that I am a survivor of sexual violence. I stated flat out that using such language was inexcusable, set a horrific example for the company they were all supposed to be leading, and indicated that myself and several other people had repeatedly asked for them to stop with no results. I don't actually remember if I said it in the email or not, but I was prepared to quit if I didn't get an apology and an immediate stop to the disgusting behavior. JT made a rather tepid reply promising not to say it again, and indicating that everyone else should stop, too. I'd thought that I had heard the last of that particular line.

Somewhere in the haze of 2022, Colin was addressing the entire team, talking about some tidbit or other of the studio's history as a kind of primer for new hires. It was a participatory thing, and he knew full well I was in the meeting; I liked attending them as a bonding exercise whenever new people joined the group. Just like before, he made a big show of saying "this is an awful phrase, but..." before speaking it aloud - without any sign of remorse or hesitation. I wasn't prepared to process it at the time, but it became a nasty portent of his actions to come: he knew how much it hurt me to hear that phrase, he knew I was the one who had vulnerably brought up considerable personal pain with a group of men including himself once before in an effort to get its use stopped, and he chose - even in defiance of JT's half-assed injunction - to say it anyways. I can only guess that he wanted to remind me of my "proper" place.

Colin's usual brand of abuse was more subtle and intricate. He had a knack for making very-slightly derogatory and dismissive remarks about people who he wanted to undermine or discredit. His delivery had a telltale quality, a kind of quiet, fake-sad, almost apologetic tone; as if he was unhappy to have to say such things. And from the midst of this protective air of sensitivity and softness, he'd say downright hurtful (and even false) things about anyone he didn't like, or didn't want to have sway on his audience's opinions. I noticed a lot of this from him when he first returned to ArenaNet, as he told stories about his first stint at the studio years before. In the bulk of those situations, I was one of the few people present who had also been there, and knew a different version of the story. Of course, between his affectation of "not wanting" to disparage people, and the vagaries of what he would say, it was all but impossible to contradict him; and so I left his slights unchallenged, at a loss for how to respond, except for to hope that perhaps someday I could tell people another side of things away from Colin's influence. As it turned out, this was one of the most effective features of his particular style of control and harm: like, I suspect, many of his other victims, I often left the scene of the crime uncertain anything had even happened... just feeling vaguely gross and confused.

Part of his ability to do this unchallenged relied on his weaponization of tokens. Much like JT, Colin often surrounded himself with a set of people carefully curated to embellish his image as progressive, inclusive, and welcoming; women and people of color alike. He'd frequently defer to them in public, making a show of "respecting" their positions. Meanwhile, in private, he'd often use his same "I wish I didn't have to do this" act to cut them off at the knees at key moments, resisting their actual work while propping them up as "evidence" of his support for them (and, by extension, for social justice and decent ethical behavior). This two-faced act was always carefully choreographed to reinforce his own public image, while leaving the targets not entirely sure he'd even done anything to them - it was always easy to just brush it all off as maybe a misunderstanding, or an unfortunate choice of words, or whatever else. But not abusive, surely...

One instance of this happened back when he first rejoined the company, while I was still the director of technology for Guild Wars 2. In a small meeting of a handful of senior leaders, he presented some of his ideas for the game he'd been hired to direct. Before the presentation, there were a few minutes of "catching up" with people he'd known before - including myself. He made a pointed remark about how he'd "heard about" my rise to the director position, and that he was very happy about it - intentionally playing off the implication that he was excited that a trans femme was in such a role at the company. The PR move resonated with everyone, and I clocked a lot of knowing nods and smiles via other peoples' cameras, as if they wanted to share in the political credit by affirming his statement in the group setting. At the time, I took it for the compliment he'd pretended it was; it wasn't until long after that I realized that there was no way he meant what he'd said. I knew the chain of relationships by which he would have heard that news - and it would have happened long before I came out in 2019. In a twofold stroke, Colin managed to undermine my identity and assert that my only value to him was professional; all the while making it seem exactly the opposite to everyone in the meeting, thereby gaining him points for being "supportive." That particular one went over my head at the time, but there was plenty of other shit from him that I just couldn't quite shake, even while not knowing how to understand or process my vague unease.

Collapse

Things progressively felt worse and worse to me. I started developing serious physical health issues. I had a couple of scary episodes in the spring of 2022, after particularly fraught interactions with John Corpening. My blood pressure was averaging more than 160/90 most days, I had constant severe migraines the entire summer of 2022, and I rarely slept through the night most of that year. His abuse was bad enough to have started damaging my body, even though we only ever interacted over electronic messages and video chats. It wasn't until much later that I understood the totality of it, but that spring, I started to recognize the patterns - that he reserved the worst of his gaslighting, psychological abuse, and emotional undermining for when it was just the two of us alone.

I cited my health challenges and asked that, going forward, he and I would only communicate directly via email rather than video meetings. I also asked that if I was required for any group conversation, I be given at least 48 hours notice, and the opportunity to try and resolve any questions or concerns with my colleagues via email first. Video was supposed to be a last resort. On the surface, I blamed stress and autistic overwhelm. Deep down, I knew it wasn't about being on camera; if we'd still been working in a physical shared office space, I would have been refusing to be alone in a room with the man. Even deeper down, I knew that I needed to start gathering a paper trail of what he was doing.

That seemed to work ok for a few months. Like most chronic abusers, John was careful to back off when he sensed me resisting his mistreatment. He was also careful to ramp up his glowing statements about me in front of everyone else, even while increasing the degree of neglect and punishment he reserved for me in private. In early July of 2022, I specifically asked him if he was satisfied with my ability to do my job, and if he felt like the arrangements we had made were working. He made a point of claiming to be very satisfied with the overall situation. Sadly, his lying was effective enough to convince me. I started feeling hopeful again, and for several weeks actually began thinking about my long-term plans for the team some more.

I decided, early in August, that I wanted to go ahead and get back into leadership. For a long time, at the beginning of the game project, John had regularly asked me weirdly probing questions about whether or not I still wanted to be a lead. For months, I'd honestly told him I wasn't sure; then eventually I settled on not wanting to mess with it, at least for a long while. I didn't remember, until much too late, the bizarre demeanor of relief that he exhibited back when I'd first said I was fine with letting him run the whole show. More recently, he'd been talking a lot about being stressed by his workload, so I figured he'd be glad that I wanted to step back up and help out. At that point, there was a substantial project milestone coming up - long enough away that it still gave me time to rest a bit more, and plenty of time to be sure I was leaving my new team well-equipped to work with the system architecture I was designing for them. I told a coworker one afternoon that I was excited about returning to a more direct leadership role; and, bolstered by their positive response, I told John Corpening I wanted back in once we made it to that particular milestone.

The next day, he scheduled a meeting - marking my attendance as mandatory - with several other people. None of us actually knew what it was supposed to be about. Conveniently, John also failed to attend the meeting himself, and instead suddenly vanished into dealing with "vacation plans" that he'd alerted nobody about. When the meeting started, it became immediately clear that nobody there actually knew why we'd been told to meet, and the entire situation was in blatant defiance of the arrangements I'd had with the team for months at that point. Exasperated, I told everyone I had no idea why I'd been forced into it, reminded everyone that they were free to ask me things via email (or set up meetings with fair warning if necessary), and hung up on the call.

In the wake of this, one of my coworkers (who generally made a big show of performative "allyship" and "feminism" and other things, entirely to get credit and applause from people who didn't realize he was grifting) took it upon himself to ask everyone else that had been there if they were "hurt" by the fact that I'd dared to do such a preposterous thing as to calmly but firmly assert my own (well-established) boundaries in a meeting. He, too, played a common sexist card when I did so, acting shocked, confused, and uncertain. His literal reaction to me, when I was done slowly and clearly detailing my stipulations for respectful interaction (all of which were well-known to everyone there), was to literally roll his chair backwards a bit, throw his arms in the air, and exclaim "I really don't know what to do with this!" - a genuine case of intentionally weaponized learned helplessness.

Apparently, the tale he spun for everyone else was that he felt threatened by my insistence on being treated the way I'd repeatedly asked to be treated - something that had, to be clear, received exactly zero push-back of any kind for months prior. (Meanwhile, the men of the company routinely screamed at each other in meetings all the time, and nobody batted an eye.) The aftermath of this incredibly sexist move apparently turned into rumor quite quickly. By the end of the day, John Corpening finally gave me the paper trail I'd been dreading needing the entire year - a wildly unprofessional, inappropriate, scathing email threatening to remove me from my job and questioning my credibility, skills, and ethics just to add insult to injury. To make it even better, he then disappeared entirely for several days, again citing his "vacation" that he'd told nobody about prior.

My first impulse was to try to talk to Colin, who was John's boss. I still assumed Colin actually meant any of the stuff he'd been saying in team meetings about ethics and doing culture right and treating people well, and so I was shocked and confused when he refused to talk to me, and instead told me to go work with HR.

I knew the history of NCWest's HR department, far too well. I knew talking to them would almost certainly mark the end of my career. I agonized over the decision for a day or two, and then ultimately realized I wouldn't feel satisfied if I didn't do absolutely everything I could to advocate for myself - doomed or no.

Endings

And so I reported John's misconduct - nearly two years of it by that point - to HR, offering the email as the only concrete evidence I could provide of what had been going on.

Initially, the HR representative I worked with presented a kind, caring, understanding front. I actually started believing I had a chance to get some justice... or at least some reprieve from the abuse. She seemed concerned by the email evidence I brought with me, and assured me that John would be dealt with appropriately... once he got back from his sudden absence. Once she had time to confer with the head of HR, she came back with an offer of two free paid weeks off from work. I gladly accepted the offer, as I'd already been planning to use some vacation time to recover from the ordeal; at the time, I interpreted the gesture as a caring act. Much later, I recognized the actual motivation: the HR department had chosen to try and get me to go away and "forget" about everything. They literally hoped I would stop caring about being abused in those two weeks off, and since it was a "generous" offer (for a company notoriously stingy with time off) I think they expected me to be grateful and meekly come back to my job.

I took my time away, and came back and immediately met with her again. In that time, any pretense of support or caring had completely evaporated. Gone was any shred of compassion or willingness to believe me. While I was gone, John wove his own version of the tale, making up excuses about my erratic behavior and emotional instability (which he'd been carefully stoking all year to provoke exactly that kind of outcome, which is a classic abuser strategy) and all the while insistently claiming his own innocence. It was a song and dance I knew far too well from my four years living in terror with a violent, abusive domestic partner. Of course, the other feeling I knew from that experience was the fear of nobody fucking believing me.

The HR representative suddenly started claiming that John couldn't have hurt me, because that was against company policy; as if she sincerely believed (and expected me to believe) that merely putting together a policy against doing bad things would somehow magically guarantee that bad things could never occur. Instead of following through with her promise to address the matter, she began insisting that nothing had happened, I had no cause for complaint, that John was faultless, and that I should (and I directly quote her here) "either get over [my] issues with him, or just quit." The whiplash of her betrayal compounded my already-shattered state of mind and heart.

To add insult to injury, she tried to start having a conversation about "severance arrangements." At that time, it had recently become illegal in this state to pay people money in exchange for silence in such situations - something I was keenly aware of. I don't actually know if HR was planning to try to ask me to sign a non-disclosure agreement about the incident as part of those terms; I wouldn't put it past them to have either not known about or straight-up not cared about the law. The truth is, I refused to even talk to the HR person after that. I was (and still am) deeply offended at the notion that giving someone enough money can "make up" for workplace abuse - as if it was OK all along for John to do what he did to me, so long as I was paid enough for it. As if I was supposed to be his property, given a suitable price tag. I refused to be bought, and I especially refused to be given money to shut up and go away and not make any more trouble for a serial abuser. I never interacted with that HR representative again.

Stunned and distraught, I resolved that even though HR had (unsurprisingly) failed me, I was going to try and fight via other channels. I still, at this point, believed that I had allies and supporters high up in the company. I reached out to everyone I could. Word of this spread fast, and HR tried to forbid me from talking to my old coworkers on Guild Wars 2. John Taylor straight up ghosted me, despite my hope that he'd help try and resolve the issue, or at least let me transfer back to GW2 where he knew damn well I was a significant contributor. That didn't surprise me much; after all, he'd blatantly refused to talk about sexism issues in the company for years at that point, and ducked many of my own personal and direct attempts to get him to engage with the subject. I had yet to fully understand the extent of his personal habit of leaving me out to dry, but his silence wasn't too shocking. Via back channels, I learned that he'd justified this decision by claiming it would be "weird" for me to return to a project I'd once led, since it might "undermine" the man who had taken over for me (never mind the fact that I'd spent years training and mentoring the man in question, and recommended him for the job). The strangely protective attitude towards men in leadership, at others' expense, would prove to be an ill portent of what was coming.

After several weeks, I exhausted every last contact I could try to ply. Of the few who had the power to do so, nobody seemed willing to help me - everyone was afraid of retaliation from HR if they backed me, and (with varying degrees of apology) chose to leave me alone to my fate instead of helping. People I had, in some cases, over a decade of time in the trenches with. People who knew me, who knew damn well - and probably better than anyone else in the company - how much impact I had there over the years. Every idea I suggested for how to fix the problem - transferring to another team, creating a new role that would let me serve as a "consultant at large" to any active development project in the studio, even spinning off from the company staff and working as an independent contractor - was met with flat rejection and refusal. I still couldn't understand why people didn't seem to want to keep me around... unless I continued to work directly for John Corpening and endure his abuse.

During that time, I struggled to fully name the reality of what was going on, even privately. This is tragically common for survivors of abuse. There is a very real difficulty in fully understanding just how much danger we're in, especially when it happens in a situation that we're deeply emotionally invested in. I'd had an awareness of this before, due to my time in the abusive domestic relationship, and having been survivor of extensive child abuse as well; even still, I found myself having immense difficulty telling people how bad things really were. I remember one conversation in which I insisted to a colleague that "John isn't a monster" - partly as a side effect of the kind of emotional confusion and bewilderment common in the final stages of an abusive situation unraveling. But in working through the ordeal, I've also come to realize that a large part of it was actually an attempt to avoid punishment from the rest of the company's leadership. I knew full well they had no regard for the wellbeing of anyone who challenged their regime, especially not anyone they perceived to be a woman. On some level, I still hoped that I could convince them I was still willing to play ball, as long as I didn't need to do it with John around. Inevitably, that failed; I think perhaps they remembered - even better than I could, at the time - my own legacy of defying their mistreatment of people over the years.

In my final act of desperation, on the morning of Monday, September 12, 2022, I scheduled one last meeting with Colin Johanson. I laid out the situation, and pleaded with him to intercede and do something about it all. In response, he looked me dead in the eye over the webcam in our Microsoft Teams meeting, and said - and here, I directly quote Colin Johanson - "I will never do anything that might affect the reputation of a man in a leadership position."

I remember little else from that conversation after that point. I do remember that he pretended to be very sad about forcing me into a bad spot. I told him my choices were fix the issue with John, or leave the company; he did a very convincing job of faking tears about the whole thing, for a brief moment. It was another act I knew from my time in hell with my violent ex. Much like him, Colin could cry on cue... right up until I refused to accept the bullshit, and proved I wouldn't cave to the manipulation. I will always remember the identical expressions on both men's faces in the moments after I stood up to their tactics: a split second of deep disgust, and then petulant anger.

Colin told me, shortly before I hung up the call, that "there is no place in ArenaNet for people like you." I don't know what characteristics he meant, specifically - trans people? Queer people? Feminine people? Autistic people? Disabled people? Any/all of the above? People with actual ethical principles and a willingness to live by them? People who refused to be cowed by his particular brand of abusive control and lying and manipulation? I'll probably never know.

It will also never matter.

The instant I witnessed that reaction from him, and was able to connect it to his tearful charade a few minutes prior, I realized he'd offered me a very rare gift. By fully going mask-off in his hate, he revealed a pattern of his behavior that - the more I thought back - had spanned many years, including his first stint at ArenaNet. It was the clue I needed to begin to piece together the entire puzzle, and recognize not only his own pattern of covert violence and prejudice, but the tactics used by others as well. In reflecting on that last fateful meeting, I started to remember a particularly telling (albeit subtle) expression that had been a perennial favorite of John Corpening's - a minute twinge of disgust and loathing, hidden under a sigh and thoughtful frown and a shift in posture, as if he'd just remembered something important he needed to think about... a mannerism that seemed to pop up with suspicious frequency whenever topics like sexism or racism came up in conversation. And with time, all of the signs I'd missed all those years started, at long last, to make real sense.

The great irony of Colin's hateful remark to me is that I'd spent much of the past several months putting together a comprehensive projection of the long-term impact of the technical research work I'd been doing. I cannot be overly specific without risking breaching confidentiality agreements that I am still bound by, but suffice it to say, he (and everyone else involved in chasing me out) had been briefed in great detail. Every single one of them knew, full well, that the work I'd been doing wasn't easy - nobody else in the business, let alone the studio, could have done it. It was truly groundbreaking, paradigm-shifting work. It also was projected to impact the company's profitability dramatically in the long term. At a time when studios were folding up and vanishing left and right, and economic turmoil was beginning to rock the entire tech industry (it's only gotten worse since), they chose to force out the one person who gave them a strong chance of long term success, and resounding success at that. The ten-year predictions for the combined reduction in operating cost and increased revenue, for the project they killed by ejecting me from the studio, measured in the billions of dollars. Colin knew this, even as he told me to get lost. Part of me wonders if that's what he drew upon to muster his fake tears and pretend-distress about my leaving; he wanted the money, but he wanted me gone more, and for him it was ultimately worth burning a massive pile of potential cash just to be rid of me.

Five minutes after I hung up on him, I sent an email to Colin (the head of the project), to John Corpening (my direct manager), and to HR, announcing my resignation from the company. I cashed in the last of my vacation days and showed up to work only once again after that before the end of my two weeks' notice, to drop off a box of company-issued equipment at the office. I barely even checked my email, those final days; although at one point, I did get a message from Colin. A few months prior, he'd made a big show of getting an order of custom-designed "Pride" merchandise made, with the ArenaNet logo rendered in a stylized rainbow. I'd been a vocal participant in both internal queer-related activities and a player-organized in-game event called Tyrian Pride for several years, so I'd asked for some things from the order. When the items arrived, Colin asked me for my home address to mail them to me, adding "I understand if you don't want these anymore" - as if he had nothing to do with driving me out, and seeming to totally miss the irony of acting as if I was just another departing employee and not someone he'd flat out told shouldn't be allowed to work there.

I deleted the email without ever acknowledging it. It didn't seem worth the effort to tell him that I had no interest in letting him know where I lived, after his hateful outburst to me; nor did it seem worth the time to explain that I wasn't rejecting my involvement with ArenaNet so much as reeling from heartbreak at finally being unable to deny the truth of what the company had always been... despite how desperately and deeply I'd wanted to make it something better.

And at the end of September 2022, I closed a chapter of my life that had begun over eleven years before, to unspeakable grief, confusion, and heartache.

Healing

Content Warning: this section will touch on my own personal experiences with violent abuse, trauma, and sexual assault, including child sexual abuse. No details of any kind will be included, but I will be talking frankly about the effect those experiences had on my life. Please skip to the next heading if you need to.

I knew, almost immediately after I quit, that I had just left a nightmare. I remember remarking to one of my partners that I felt like I had just left an abusive relationship - a feeling I knew all too well. I knew something bad had happened, but the truth is, it's taken me almost the entirety of the past three years to piece it all together... and to realize how connected everything was to other, even earlier experiences I've had.

Back when I left my prior game studio job - when I ended up joining ArenaNet in the first place - I'd been struggling with severe emotional challenges. I'd have bursts of panic, terror, anxiety, and sadness that I could not explain. They would appear suddenly, seem to take over my entire body and mind for a time, and then vanish, leaving me utterly exhausted and dazed. Sometimes they would last for days or weeks at a time. I first started seeking help for these issues in the summer of 2007; it was a relapse that had led to my work struggles in 2011, and ultimately, what put me on the path to moving to Seattle to work on Guild Wars 2.

I'd continued trying to address those challenges in the years since then, of course. Most of the time, I'd been successful; I even felt I'd been moving forward - so much so that, in the spring of 2015, I began a domestic relationship, something I'd been wanting to do but felt was out of reach for years. I met my new partner at GDC, in fact - an audience member who approached me after I delivered the presentation about the NPC decision-making technology I'd created for Heart of Thorns. Even though it felt like a major accomplishment at the time, I had no idea what I'd gotten into; that relationship ended up becoming a constant source of emotional abuse and sexual assault for nearly four years. I'd been healing from that relationship for a while by the time I moved off of GW2 in 2021, so I felt like I had a pretty good idea of what being hurt on a daily basis was like. And it was precisely that experience that made it difficult for me to recognize that I was also being hurt by John Corpening's behavior. Part of the reason I'd struggled to even call him abusive in front of trusted colleagues was that it wasn't anything like what my ex put me through.

But much like the effect of our cultural norm of treating "violence" as though it is only ever a physical kind of harm, my fixation on particular kinds of interpersonal damage made me unaware of the other kinds of damage I was sustaining. I was still being emotionally, psychologically, and relationally abused and neglected - for most of my time at the company, in fact - but it was too far below my own threshold of detection to truly notice and understand it.

It's actually quite common for survivors of abuse and prolonged harm to need time to understand our own experiences, once we have reached a safer situation. I hadn't realized how bad either of my first two jobs were, until I'd left them; I needed months after splitting up with my ex to realize how much he'd been hurting me; and my departure from ArenaNet was no exception. Even still, I struggled often throughout 2024 and the bulk of 2025, trying to figure out why my experiences at the company still haunted me so much. I knew it was bad, but then again, I'd healed from worse... so why wasn't it going away?

I had actually begun drafting this open letter, back in late July, in an attempt to explore that very question. I assumed I'd find some pattern or connection in all of it, if I could just write out the whole story in one place. And sure enough, plenty of other details and memories began to resurface once I'd started writing. But what I hadn't anticipated was the connection between ArenaNet and those same strange, haphazard bursts of emotional agony I'd been wrestling with for 18 years. That was when I started to realize that there had been a consistent pattern across my entire career - of leaving one harmful environment, only to enter another one and assume I was fine because it was less harmful, and then eventually having to realize that it was still bad, just in a different way.

And then, at long last, the full pattern became clear: it wasn't just about what jobs I'd had. The same exact phenomenon also occurred with the transition from childhood, when I moved out on my own to start working in the first place. I'd left an unhappy, lonely, miserable childhood and felt like getting into a professional career was a huge relief. I hadn't known at the time that my childhood had been abusive and fraught with violence of its own; that didn't begin to occur to me until much later. I'd started doing trauma therapy work in the fall of 2018, convinced that there was some connection between my ongoing (but largely stabilized) struggles and something from my upbringing. Through that work, I'd known, even while I was at ArenaNet, of some of the incidents and patterns that had scarred me as a child.

But it wasn't until this summer, when I was trying to explain this entire story and figure out why it all still felt so stuck in my soul, that I realized what had been connecting everything all along.

I'd been haunted by strange sensations and memories, even as far back as 2007, that had never made sense to me. I'd actively resisted them - they didn't seem like they could be real, and anyways, they were so awful I didn't want them to be real. I tried to believe it was leftover recollections of some bad dreams, or maybe a movie I'd seen but tried to forget because I didn't like it, something, anything to explain them away as anything other than my own experiences. I never wanted to explore them, spend time thinking about them, even acknowledge them to myself. But one night, at the beginning August, I realized I had reached a point in my ability to address my own traumas that I needed to try and face up to some of these long-buried things.

In doing so, I was able to fully remember - details, impressions, feelings, even things people said. I remembered two distinct times, in my childhood, when someone had literally tried to murder me - and the adults who had watched the whole thing unfold around me, and yet refused to believe me, and told me to shut up and stop making such a big deal out of it. On both of those occasions my own parents had refused to acknowledge that anything had happened. As devastating as that recollection was, it was just the prelude to an even bigger realization.

Things I'd tried to avoid and ignore, for eighteen years, finally emerged in their full horrific specificity... and I finally remembered how, when I was a toddler, I was subjected to a kind of corrective rape, presumably to suppress my "overly feminine" tendencies before they had a chance to take root. I remembered how my own mother was forbidden to have a genuine relationship with me, lest her femininity "corrupt" me somehow. I remembered my father, fully aware of and even involved in the sexual assault, tearfully telling me that it was all for my own good, that it'd help me "be better" in some vague, non-specific way. I remembered the visceral spasms of fear that would wrack my body any time I realized he was approaching. I realized that I'd spent my entire life terrified - afraid that, if I managed to make the wrong white man angry enough, he would make good on the threats I'd been subjected to as a very young child... and break into my bedroom in the night to rape me to death.

This entire thing still horrifies me to the point of tears. It is intensely hard to write about this at all. I know, from past experience, that recovery will take time. There's a lot to feel, and a lot to process. But I also know, from that same experience, that one of the most helpful things I can do to help myself recover is to refuse to stay silent. The more I keep these things quiet and secret, the more they eat away at me - alienate me from people who want to care about me and support me. Shame is corrosive, and keeping it inside will ultimately only ever destroy us. I will not be eroded by this. And so I have chosen to tell my story - all of my story.

I again want to be explicit about one thing: I am not comparing what happened to me in my jobs to what happened when I was a child, or even what happened in my home as an adult. My point isn't that there is some kind of equivalency between those things, or the men who did them. My point is this: I couldn't even tell I was being hurt for so much of the time as an adult, precisely because my expectations for what "being hurt" even means were wildly distorted by what happened when I was young. This led me to deny my own experiences for many years, and left me susceptible to further abuse. It is tragically common for survivors of childhood violence, and especially sexual assault, to go on to be repeatedly victimized as adults. In this, I am not unusual.

Implications

There are so many different factors that can lead to an inability to recognize real harm when it happens. My own past didn't just give me trouble understanding various types of mistreatment I faced over the years - it made it hard for me to accept other people's experiences, even despite sometimes witnessing them unfold around me. I genuinely hope most people aren't carrying anything like my past in their own lives, but there is no shortage of other ways we can miss what's really going on. I've mentioned before how our culture focuses on only physical damage as being "violent," at the expense of our ability to name and understand other kinds of wounds: emotional, psychological, relational, and so on. Our culture also loves to prize "intellect" over "emotion" - and in so doing, links this with the supposed inferiority of "more emotional" people (which is frequently understood to mean "women").

In addition to hiding forms of harm, our society has invested great effort into the erasure of degrees of harm. A classic example of this is the category of so-called "microaggressions" (despite the fact that, as countless Black women have attested to over the years, there's nothing "micro" about any of it). By normalizing "small" slights, injuries, and cruelties, we collectively dismiss the relevance of them - and thereby become unable to conceive of their true damaging effect, especially when considered in total across long spans of time. This is used to conceal sexism, ableism, racism, and any number of other forms of discrimination, prejudice, bias, and bigotry. None of us wants to think of ourselves as bad people, so we often fall back on this illogic as a justification for believing that we aren't hurting anyone - not really. As I've recounted, even the most "well-intentioned" people can, through these avenues, end up perpetuating and upholding patterns like misogyny and anti-Blackness.

And of course, there's always the fact that some people are intentionally concealing their harmful behavior, always being sure to keep it just "under the radar" so as not to get caught - using techniques much like the ones I had once explained were being deployed by the sexist jerk I was refusing to hire. This doesn't just happen on the level of specific people's actions, either. It is woven through every aspect of how our society operates, patterns often "hiding in the open" simply because it's all so large it seems like the entire story of reality rather than just one particular way of understanding things. This truth is at the core of why regressive political extremists like to do things like burn books and ban the teaching of ideas like Critical Race Theory. It's much easier to go on denying that bad things are happening if we're not given a way to recognize how much better things could be - should be.

It is not a coincidence that I have had more progress in my own recovery and healing in the past three years, than in the fifteen prior years combined. Continually being subjected to ongoing mistreatment not only was its own source of damage, it prevented me from being able to truly reckon with the pre-existing wounds I carried in my life. And yet this is not a linear process; it was only by trying to grapple with some of my trauma that I had been able to recognize the pain I was in from how I was treated at ArenaNet. One thread of recovery became a vital foundation for the other... and then, in time, they began taking turns reinforcing each other.

As I've worked to connect the dots scattered across the decades of my own life, it's also given me a lot of perspective on how these sorts of insidious patterns affect the rest of the world as well. We may not all be dealing with things as awful as my own personal traumas, but everyone who's lived in our contemporary strife-ridden world has some unexamined scars... and that examination, while scary and difficult and painful, is the way out of our collective nightmares of oppression, injustice, conflict, and turmoil - big and small alike. Our culture loves to normalize suppression and silence; we have variations of the phrase "too awful to talk about" that get rapidly and preemptively attached to experiences like mine. We're taught to believe that keeping terrible things quiet is a way to avoid creating more pain. But keeping secrets does not protect people.

Back in 2011, I was still trying to run away from my demons. Fear of our own pain leads so many of us into long-term avoidance, and that evasion may seem to give us some protection... but in reality, it does the opposite, and only creates opportunities to be subjected to even more hurt. Numbness is not the same thing as the absence of pain. It is only by summoning the courage to support each other in facing our pain that we can truly, finally, be free of it.

Interlude

The aftermath of my time at ArenaNet was indescribably difficult. I will forever be profoundly grateful to the tiny cluster of people who supported me through the first few months of that nightmare. Like often occurs when leaving a violent, abusive situation, my initial experience was primarily one of intense relief. I knew the bad was over, even as I was heartbroken about the good I had left behind. But the all-too-familiar pattern absolutely played out for me: soon enough, relief gave way to realization. More and more surfaced - about what had happened, about how long everything had been going on, about how much I'd ignored or suppressed or simply not noticed. The memories continued to trickle in over time, slowly adding detail to an increasingly nauseating picture.

In time, I began to recognize just how damaging the entire experience had been - all eleven years of it. Even to this day I'm working through the implications, a tiny bit at a time; continuing to realize areas of my life where I've become wrongly convinced that I'm bad at dealing with certain challenges, entirely because I had similar things pop up while working at ArenaNet... and struggled to deal with them then, unable to realize how much additional strain I was really under. The effect of being under constant, unrecognized abuse and violence is impossible to explain fully. So much of my own concept of myself was distorted by the lies, mistreatment, and casual covert violence I endured there, especially in the final years. It's taken an enormous amount of therapy work to untangle it, and to recognize that I've been unable to appreciate a lot of my own competence and accomplishments as a result of being in that environment for so long.

Frankly, it has taken a tremendous effort for me to be able to write so many good things about myself here. I have struggled for the past three years to consistently recall myself and my time at ArenaNet in any kind of a positive light. Most of the time, I still wrestle with feeling like an incompetent, fucked up failure. These feelings did not originate with me, nor are they based in any kind of fact - they are entirely the fabrication of a handful of men who wanted me to feel this way about myself. To reclaim my own perspective, and to heal from the effects of their malice, will also be a collaborative process - I did not get here alone, and I will not leave here on my own, either. In all honesty, a huge part of why I wanted to write all this was to embrace the possibility that maybe other people remember those days, too... and can reassure me that I wasn't as forgettable and useless as my abusers tried to convince me I was.

In any case, in the autumn of 2022, I had no idea how much longer I would continue to wrestle with the aftermath of that nightmare. After a few weeks, I thought (incorrectly!) that I'd mostly dealt with everything, and decided I needed something to occupy my mind and my time. I had been wanting to do a bunch of writing anyways, so I decided to spend a while focused on publishing essays that I'd never gotten around to starting before. It was a prolific couple of months, and I put out some things I remain deeply proud of to this day. Most of all, I began seriously working to connect some dots - little bits of information, ideas from here and there, weaving together a more comprehensive, planet-scale analysis... of systemic injustice, of cultural patterns both large and small, of why people do shitty things to each other.

The waning months of 2022 became a kind of incubator for some of my most important ideas. I read voraciously - Black and Indigenous thinkers, radical social justice workers, people at the forefront of the myriad struggles against human oppression. I started developing extensive theoretical frameworks, hoping to explain not only what had happened to me in my career, but other aspects of my life as well. More than anything, I wanted to know why this shit happens at all. I've continued working on all that quite a bit ever since, and it's spawned a handful of projects I'm quite excited about - including a repository of the "dangerous" ideas at the root of it all. There's a lot I'm proud of from that time.

But in early December 2022, I published something that ended up becoming the seed of my life's work.

Futures

Bolstered by my newfound abundance of free time, and spurred into a righteous rage by the fact that I'd lost two consecutive jobs to pointless bigotry and ableism, I started dreaming about doing things differently. And not just a little bit different - as radically, wildly, insistently different as possible. I wanted to imagine a world where nobody else ever got put through the kind of bullshit I did, ever again. I wanted to imagine what would happen if, rather than constantly being pushed aside, ignored, overruled, undermined, and flat out punished, marginalized and oppressed people could bypass the entire power structure of the "tech" world at large, and just... make our own stuff, by and for ourselves.

I wrote the essay Disability-Driven Development to put all my ideas into one place, and to act as a kind of invitation for others to get involved. Then I wrote even more. What started as an idea became a prototype, became a project, became a cause I've now dedicated my life to. I started a tiny collective called SpoonStack, riffing on an idea from one of my early disabled collaborators. The group is small, for now, but always interested in adding new friends and colleagues. I have a lot of ideas cooking, here, including stuff that I hope will transform a lot more than just the world of software and video games and online interaction.

I learned a lot of things from my years at ArenaNet; but perhaps most of all, I've learned that nobody will ever be in a hurry to make life better for anyone they think of as lesser, inferior, or just plain undesirable. For those of us who dream of life beyond the ravages of capitalist greed and the senseless waste of incompetent, insecure, bumbling "leaders" with more authority than capability, we need other options. And the best way to be free of that kind of meddlesome, inhibiting, stifling nonsense is to simply create our own systems that don't involve those shitty people to begin with.

It won't be an easy project, and it'll take a lot of us coming together to make things happen. But I have every confidence that it can - and will - be done.

In some ways, there's an irony to the final rejection from John Corpening and Colin Johanson. I'm sure, on some level, they both felt like they "won" when I left - the uncontrollable, persistent, obnoxious person who insisted on actually practicing meaningful ethics and good interpersonal relationships was finally gone.

The truth, though, is that they didn't eradicate me - they set me free.

And with my final disclosure of the depth of everything they put me through, my truest hope is that this can become freeing for you, too.

To Fans and Players

Some people may be surprised to learn that, even after everything, I still actively play Guild Wars 2. It was something I debated about a lot, early on; part of me figured maybe it would be best to be free of any reminders of some of the hardest years of my life. But the truth is, I've loved that game since the summer of 2011 when I first joined the internal play-test sessions for it... even before it became anything like what launched in August of 2012, or what it's grown into since. The people who hurt me at ArenaNet took a lot away from me; but they will never get to take this. I don't think it's any kind of exaggeration to say that my soul is woven in and through that game - and vice versa.

Hell... I titled this entire thing as a direct reference to the elaborate, branching, customizable "personal story" system that originally shipped with GW2 vanilla. There are tiny references to the game sprinkled all throughout this piece. I still regularly play a human Engineer, with my own real name, sporting a Jade Mech named "Anette" as a cheeky reference to my time running ArenaNet's technology teams (if you see us in game, say hi!). And Guild Wars 2 has showed up in other parts of my life as well - the site hosting it has recently shut down, sadly, but for many years, my main presence on the "Fediverse" social media system was a Mastodon account named Mordremoth, after the Elder Dragon of Plants.

For all the bad that happened at ArenaNet, there was a lot of good, too. I've never been in a place that was such a stunningly effective incubator for self-discovery - I was hardly the only person to come out as queer while working there, and even to this day, that studio mints a bizarrely high number of wonderful, non-normative people... especially considering that it's led by some of the most secretly regressive and dishonest cishet white guys I've ever known.

Even to this day, I will occasionally bump into stories from people who talk about how much GW2 has affected their lives. There's a lot of really touching, amazing stuff going on out there. Thank you all for sharing your own stories - and thank you for giving meaning and purpose to all the years I spent helping give you that world to play in. Y'all have a well-deserved reputation for caring for new players and struggling veterans alike - keep it up. Just remember, there may not be a Player Down icon over anyone's head in real life, but we can still make a huge difference by popping over and giving each other a quick hand.

There's a long-running joke in the fan community, that "the C in ArenaNet stands for Consistency." Frankly, there's a lot of truth to that sentiment. The design department in particular had a long-running habit of actively refusing to write down or document any of their decisions. To actually do so would have opened them up to even a tiny shred of accountability for their choices, and they simply wouldn't have it. The reality is that the vast majority of awesome stuff that's come out of that game's development has happened in defiance of the company's topmost leaders, not because of them. There are notable exceptions, of course, as I've alluded to before in this piece. I'd like to think I was among the foremost of them. But without a complete and radical transfer of power, Guild Wars 2 (and anything else ArenaNet ever manages to publish someday) will always be a mixed bag of near-brilliance, constantly hampered by the ones who fancy themselves in charge.

The bulk of the people on the ground there are pretty alright. Given the turmoil and upheaval going on in the game industry in general right now, I especially don't wish any further mess onto any of them. They've already got their plates full working for the people they work for. Be kind to them, too.

If anybody wants to hang out in-game, maybe run a raid or two, do some Fractals, or just hang out and Fashion Wars at each other, come find me. I'd love to keep sharing this amazing creation with other people who enjoy it.

To Other Developers, and to Other Victims

I wish this story was some kind of weird outlier. I wish, so desperately much, that I was an anomaly or even alone in what I've been through. The awful truth, though, is that I've only shared what happened to me - and I know of many other stories from within ArenaNet over the years. As awful as my treatment there was, I have had various levels of direct knowledge of far more egregious and violent things being done to other people. Those aren't my stories to tell, at least not in this space, and I've tried to be careful to navigate around any details that might jeopardize the privacy of other victims of that company.

Bleak as all that may be, the tragic fact is that ArenaNet is still one of the less horrific places to work in the game industry, in terms of how people are treated - and especially people who aren't white dudes. For every single one of the horror stories I can tell from ArenaNet, I can probably tell a hundred more from around the rest of the business, or from the software development sector in general. In a way, this makes things even more complicated; it's largely because other companies are much worse, that so many of ArenaNet's victims leave feeling not quite entirely sure anything bad actually even happened. It's also a core part of how the perpetrators ensure themselves a steady supply of fresh people to abuse.

There are some common misconceptions out there about how corporations work; and to be clear, even I didn't fully realize a lot of this until after I was out of the scene entirely. We are all taught to believe that career success is about skill and excellence, and that the fundamental purpose of capitalism is to make money. In truth, as ArenaNet's leadership exemplifies, profit is - at best - a distant secondary concern. The real point, of all of it, is to make a tiny group of people feel important. Money is very helpful to that end, but if a financial sacrifice can preserve the power structure, they'll do it in a heartbeat. And being skilled and competent are, at most, annoying distractions for the powerful... after all, if one is powerful enough, one can simply force actually capable people to do all the real work... and, of course, pad the profits by not paying them what they're actually worth.

I understand, in my own way, how hard it is to want to push back on this. When a precarious job is all that's between us and the very real danger of hunger and homelessness, sometimes it just doesn't make sense to rock the boat. But I know, too, how many people are comfortable - and unwilling to risk that comfort. It's far too easy to convince ourselves that it isn't really that bad, or maybe we imagined that thing, or it's ok not to stick up for that person because really their conflict with their manager is none of our business. But the truth is that silence is not just staying out of the mess. It adds a very real layer of pain and harm to the suffering of those being most affected by these corporate systems. We doubt if we're actually in the wrong, we worry that maybe we are making it all up, and maybe we should stay silent, too. Maybe we don't deserve anything better. And over time, everyone else's silence becomes violence - every time nobody says anything, it gets that much harder to believe in ourselves. We're told if we just did a good job we'd be accepted, supported, and successful; so maybe it really is our fault that we feel like shit every time we think about work. We lose ourselves in the lies we're told.

Past the very lowest rungs of the corporate ladder, with few exceptions, people are not promoted because they're good at what they do; people are promoted because they're good at making the powerful feel comfy and significant. Conversely, failure, incompetence, misbehavior, and even outright malfeasance are not actually cause to remove anyone from positions of power. That only happens when it's clear that there's enough mass dissatisfaction with a person to jeopardize overall willingness to tolerate the power system. The more powerful the person, the less their actions matter. This is why exceptional people are sacrificed in cases like mine: our contributions are only welcome insofar as we uphold the happy feelings and public image of insecure, pretend-important men.

It's not like nobody realizes or cares about all this; but we're trained to "work within the system" and "follow proper channels" - things we are pushed to do, societally, precisely because they will not work. Petitioning a power structure to do better is ultimately always a losing game. Power will capitulate, rarely - but only ever to blow off pressure from the dissatisfied, and always with the goal of continuing to preserve the system of power itself. Some degree of mutation is built into this overall state of affairs; and indeed, power often points to their moments of "reform" or "learning" to justify dragging their feet on other things. It's never to actually fix anything, just to disguise the fact that the problems are fundamentally unchanged even as the trappings morph.

The only way to stop being mistreated by those in power is to stop participating in arrangements where some people have power over others in the first place.

We are culturally trained to believe we can't possibly survive without such systems of control, but the ironic reality is that those systems cannot survive without us. I spent my years in leadership at ArenaNet earnestly trying to model what it's like for people to move together in a group, to wield power with each other rather than over anyone. I know fighting back is hard, and scary. But it makes a real difference. And for anyone who has even the tiniest bit of leverage in an environment like the one I left behind at ArenaNet, I will say this: please do what you can. It'll matter more than you think, and even after everything I've had taken from me... it was all worth it. Doing the right thing was worth it. You can do it, too. The tyranny of awful leaders does not need to be left unchallenged or unabated, but to get there, we have to do something.

It is not a coincidence that the groups I led consistently outperformed not only all of ArenaNet or NCWest but also NCSoft Korea - by metrics of NC executives' own choosing. They suppressed this information, of course; I certainly wasn't supposed to know it, and they went to great lengths to keep anyone else from finding out either. But the fact is that my defiance was a large part of their "mysterious" abandoning of the "OKR" (Objectives and Key Results) push they started back in 2020 - I completely wrecked the grading curve, even while refusing to subject my people to the dehumanization of being reduced to a test score. Nobody was supposed to know that. I'm sure that to this day they'd still scramble to deny all of it, if the notion ever came up again.

I was a phenomenally effective leader for many reasons, but the single biggest one was the fact that I refused to not care. I've never believed in the corporate cultural norm of "separating work and personal life." To me, everything we do blends into the rest of our lives, in or out of "the office," and often back again. I made a point of caring about - and caring for - whole people, not "professionals" or "skilled workers" or "critical employees" or any other euphemistic, dehumanizing, violent reductions of the souls around me. The pain we endure on Saturday night doesn't vanish magically at the start of business on Monday morning. And the hours we spend at work don't somehow happen to transfer zero effect onto our evenings and holidays. I refused to regard people as partial beings in order to further business exploitation - and, ironically, we did vastly better because of that philosophy. For my heresy of caring about people, and my unforgiveable crime of succeeding in doing so while simultaneously proving that it was possible to improve on their regime, those with the most power there decided that I had to be eliminated.

I've said for years now that the game industry is headed for its own "MeToo"-style reckoning - not that that movement, for all it has affected, has had nearly enough impact in fixing things yet. But a widespread, genuine moment of change is long overdue. When I started my career, back in the early 2000s, the big scandal of the game industry was about appalling working conditions. (I will forever have vivid memories of the saga of "EA Spouse" as all of that unfolded.) Now, over two decades later, things are a little better on that front, but only for the white devs who live in places like the United States and Europe. Similarly awful conditions are simply hidden now, in small countries in the Global South, full of Black and brown people that it's considered "ok" to not care about. And even here, in the affluent parts of the world, there's plenty of awful shit going on every day.

As much as it pains me, I know that there will be many other people out there who have stories similar to my own, and worse. I hope that perhaps having all this detail, having all the patterns laid out and connected plainly, might help you with your own process of getting out - and getting healed. None of us deserves any of this. You deserve to be surrounded by people who treat you well, who care about you, and who actually help you succeed and flourish. Whether you decide to speak out or not is entirely up to you - I've never been a fan of telling people what to do. But know that you are not alone, and better is possible.

I launched the concept of Disability-Driven Development from a place of deep disillusionment, and from an equally profound refusal to leave any system of power and abuse and exploitation unchallenged. I truly believe we deserve to fight back against what's been done to us. I truly believe we will change things, together... so long as we're willing to actually come together and support each other. If you ever want someone to talk to who gets it, please reach out to me. I'm available. If you're interested in banding together with other people who understand, in order to create a different world... definitely get in touch.

To My Former Coworkers at ArenaNet

Way back in the haze of 2021, when I was working with the ill-fated "Values Committee" to try and decide what the core principles of ArenaNet should be, I remember sending an email to the other committee members suggesting that maybe we should think of leadership as a love letter to our teams, and of game development as a love letter to our fans and players. Thinking back on it now, I'm of course not surprised that nobody ever even acknowledged that email.

But I still feel that way; and frankly, I always have.

Whether you're still there, or have found other places for yourselves; whether we actually overlapped in time or just happened to get paychecks from the same place... please know I'll always love y'all.

To those who took it upon yourselves to unofficially dub me "the ArenaNet Engineering Mom" - thank you, for that silly but still-touching honor. To everyone I ever led on GW2, thank you all for being amazing to work with, for going along with my weird and unorthodox ideas for how to be a team together, for sticking with each other and keeping the life going in a project that means more to me than probably any other single act of human creativity on the planet. I'm sorry things dissolved the way they did. Y'all deserved better, too, than what I could provide with everything that was happening to me. I hope I did ok setting y'all up for the long term without me - but please know I'm always around and would still love to chat, any time, about anything.

I had an amazing job, and something of a prestigious career and position at the height of it. But none of that mattered to me. It was never about influence, or power, or status, or recognition. Fuck the money. Fuck all the hierarchy and titles and social jostling and competitive foolish empty bullshit. All I ever wanted was to make a bunch of friends and create cool shit together.

For all those years, all I could ever really feel was the relentless opposition. I couldn't feel like I mattered or was making any meaningful difference, because problems still existed. In a way, my detractors weaponized my own unhealthily perfectionistic desire for excellence, to preclude me ever feeling even the smallest bit of lasting accomplishment or success - because, after all, they could always "find" another problem to send me chasing after. I lost track of a lot of what I did manage to improve there, because there was always someone willing to push another hurdle in front of me. And I know, now, that this wasn't just hurting me.

To anyone who asked me to fight for them, who I turned down over the years... I'm sorry. To anyone who ever felt less safe, accepted, heard, or celebrated because I defended someone who shouldn't have been defended, I'm sorry. Nothing can make that ok, but hopefully this story can help explain why. I did everything I could, and so much more than most people will ever know - even this piece, as long as it is, is missing a lot of details of what I worked so hard to accomplish there, in changing things for the better. I know it wasn't always enough. And I know, in the end, the shittiness won out... at least for now.

To anyone who's still putting up a fight, still hoping to alter the trajectory of that studio towards something less slimy... thank you. I was proud to fight alongside everyone in that cause all for those years, and I'm immensely impressed with how much we did pull off, especially considering that our opposition was constant and stubborn and continues to be entrenched all the way to the very top. Please understand that the problems you're struggling against are not temporary, or accidental, or the byproduct of one of those randomly chosen, hand-wavy, corporate cliches I'm sure you'll hear in every single quarterly all-hands until the end of time. The people who actually make the biggest decisions want things this way. The shitty stuff is intentional, and some of them are scary good at lying about it. Frankly, there's a lot of people still in power there that would want things to be even worse, if they could get away with it. I love y'all and support your ongoing fight - just know what you're up against.

As strange as it may seem, this entire project is an act of love for the guys "in charge" too. How else can you learn to stop treating people the way you treated me, if you're never faced with any meaningful repercussions for your actions? How can you become better people if you always choose to let someone else quietly pay your victims to leave you alone forever? Running from your mistakes and poor choices doesn't actually fix any of them, or help you as a person. You can grow, and change, and even repair some of what you've done - if you choose to genuinely put in the effort, and stop hiding behind your usual excuses and pleas for patience and understanding. I won't speak for anyone else you've harmed, but as far as I'm concerned, if any of you ever decides to make an earnest, sincere effort at repairing the damage you've caused, I would welcome it - just be warned I have a good nose for your bullshit. I'm saddened by the fact that you probably won't ever try. This may never work... but I'll always offer.

(I have no idea if this entire piece will get any attention, or if Colin or John will ever know about it. But for the rest of the studio: if either of those two men attempt to address this, or issue some kind of "apology," whether internally or publicly, and I wasn't the very first person they made sure to reach out to and make things right with... well, you'll know as certainly as I do that it's a lie and not to accept them at their word. Keep in mind dishonesty is a central part of the M.O. for both of them.)

For everyone there... take care of each other. Real, supportive connections and relationships are the way through - both inside ArenaNet, and in life in general.

In August of 2019, after that other scandal had broken about an executive doing shitty sexist things, I remember attending a small meeting - the handful of women and femmes who worked in the studio at that time. It was a grim and charged gathering, and for obvious reasons; we left, more than an hour later, with a lot on our minds. As we dispersed and waited to find out just how disappointingly inept the senior leadership of the company would be with their response, I wrote a letter to everyone who had been in that room that day. I talked about the importance, in moments like that one, of truly and earnestly taking stock of who we can trust. In the hardest moments, it's the people who we know we can rely on that get us through.

While I got a lot of quiet acknowledgement and private gratitude about that letter, I only got one written response - a colleague thanking me, not just for saying what I'd said, but for being someone that she felt she could trust.

That memory was part of what kept me going - not just for that year, or the conclusion of my time at ArenaNet, but to this day. It's a bright and moving reminder that, no matter how lost I myself felt while enduring everything there, I didn't go unnoticed, or unappreciated.

(You know who you are. If by any chance you're open to rekindling that kind of trust with each other again, come find me - I miss you.)

I know staying in touch is hard. I know we're taught, by our culture, that at some point it has "been too long" to try to reconnect. I know day to day life in our society doesn't make it simple to find time to reach out. Hell, most of y'all are guys - and I know, perhaps more keenly than most, that our culture doesn't exactly do a great job of teaching men to feel comfortable doing emotional-labor type things... like chasing down and catching up with an old colleague or long-lost friend. All that said, I hope each and every one of you knows it'd make my entire year to get to hang out with you again.

Once upon a time, I used to promise my new hires that I was there to support them in their careers, even if they ended up someplace besides ArenaNet. That promise is still open, for all of you I overlapped with, in any way.

I hope we can all find it in ourselves to keep on caring for, supporting, and fighting for each other... even if we'll never share ArenaNet again.

To Everyone, Everywhere

I know this has been an incredibly long read. Even if you skimmed it, or skipped some sections, I appreciate you being here at all - thanks for taking the time. I have no idea how you personally might have arrived here, or why, but I'm glad you're around.

For as horrendous and painful as the story was, I hope you can also share my sense of growing hope, at the way things are now. Other stories can and will be told, someday, about what it's like when groups of people get together to create things, and it all goes right. I know there's a better reality coming, where our insistence on truly caring for each other and doing the right thing unleashes a whole new level of inventive brilliance, the likes of which has never been done before - in video games, in digital technology, perhaps in human culture, period. There is deep magic in tending to our relationships with ourselves and those around us. As one of my favorite authors, Robin Wall Kimmerer, likes to say: "all flourishing is mutual."

If you have questions, about making personal connections, about making friendships that work in today's world, about creating more compassionate and gentle and caring environments - please, ask me, any time. Curiosity is a phenomenal conversation starter, and I'm always delighted for a chance to share what I know, and to dream together.

Life is a weird experience. Travel well.

I love you all.