Thread by @DanFriedman81

This is an incredible article, because it shows what happens if you are a woke white man. Deck Nine makes progressive games and its CCO, Zak Garriss believed in assembling a diverse narrative team. But the people he hired hated and resented him and tried to destroy him.

In 2018, Garriss gave a talk at GDC about how he assembled a TV-style writers room for the game “Life is Strange: Before the Storm,” and how he believed “diversity of representation and perspective” strengthened the work. gdcvault.com/play/1025374/P…

But when he was nice to his team, they accused him of “love bombing,” a manipulation tactic. They insinuate that he was coming on to female employees, although he is never alleged to have tried to date any of his subordinates or that he made any kind of sexual advance.

Basically, they accuse him of having conversations in the workplace that were never inappropriate, and walking a female employee to her car on a night when they had worked late, and impute a sinister intent onto this because he is a white man.

The “love bombing” ended when Garriss’s team started to make it clear that they despised everything he was and everything he represented. His junior team members got very hostile and started invoking identity when he didn’t take every one of their notes.

Garriss’s was the Chief Creative Officer and the narrative lead. He was the principal author of the narrative. He had final authority over all story decisions, and his staff’s job was to assist him. But as a white man, they believed his job was to shut up and listen.

In response to the tense atmosphere in his writers room, Garriss stopped meeting with the writers. He worked alone, made decisions without their feedback and only consulted with the staffers he actually liked, holding meetings at his home to avoid the other writers.

When the writer of this article says Garriss “quit voluntarily,” she makes it seem like he was pushed out of his positions over these issues, but he has no gap in his resume and went from his job as CCO of Deck Nine to Vice President of Story Development at Telltale Games, the much larger developer and publisher of narrative titles that was publishing Deck Nine’s next game after “True Colors.” He was promoted.

Garriss had a sterling professional reputation and produced well-regarded creative work, but the diverse staff he brought on to share their unique perspectives didn’t value his talent and resented working under him. After he left, they took over and destroyed the studio.

A bunch of woke staffers had a huge freak out over the fact that the numbers 88 and 18 appeared in places in the game. In certain far-right circles, 88 is a code for “heil Hitler,” because H is the eighth letter of the alphabet.

The number of 18 is actually symbolic of life and good luck in Jewish numerology, and I had never heard of its far-right significance, but apparently an obscure British Neo Nazi group uses the number to represent Adolf Hitler’s initials.

In response to this meltdown, Deck Nine announced mandatory diversity training for everyone. The woke staffers tried to get anyone who objected to undergoing this training fired.

Telltale Games ended up cancelling the project it was working on with Deck Nine, and Deck Nine ended up going through layoffs. Zak Garriss is now creative director for the Chinese gaming conglomerate NetEase.

The way IGN reports on the gaming industry is pretty shameful. It is pretty clear that this writer has written a major feature for this site centering the narratives of some junior staffers who were hired for their identity, refused to work for or respect a white male boss, and ultimately caused a lot of problems and did a lot of damage to the company that tried to employ them.

For all the effort these disgruntled former employees and the hack journalist have gone through to destroy Garriss’s reputation, the only concrete allegations present in the article are that he was very nice to people who behaved appropriately in the office, that he did not respond favorably to the employees who made his writers room a hostile space, and that he did not immediately take every note and incorporate every change suggested by people who were higher than him on the progressive stack.