Draft:Who Hunts The Whale

Who Hunts the Whale: A Satirical Novel Set in the Exploitative World of Big-Budget Game Development is a 2023 satirical novel co-written by wife-and-wife writing team Laura Kate Dale and Jane Aerith Magnet, published by Unbound Digital. Who Hunts the Whale is Dale's fourth published work, and Magnet's first. A summary on Unbound Digital's website reads, "Who Hunts the Whale takes a witty, satirical look at the human cost of a rapacious market that must constantly be fed new content."

Plot

The story of Who Hunts the Whale is told through the diary entries of the protagonist, Avery Paige. The book is divided into twelve chapters and one epilogue, each of which roughly corresponds to a calendar month.

Q1 (Chapters 1-3)

Avery Paige, a young university graduate, secures a job as a personal assistant to the executives of the AAA game studio Supremacy Software. The executives, Rick, Chad, and the elderly CEO, Edwin, are arrogant, cruel, and obsessed with short-term profits. As the new instalment of Supremacy’s flagship game series, Call of Shooty, enters production, the executives each award themselves a $15 million bonus. Avery befriends two members of the dev team, Fidget and Ez, but is off-put by the militancy of the head of human resources, Hannah. It is revealed that many members of the dev team, including unpaid interns, are pulling all-night shifts to meet Hannah’s high targets. At a games conference, Avery meets Gareth, a journalist investigating corruption in the games industry, and deflects his request for an interview with her employers. Rick and Chad give a presentation on how to emotionally manipulate whales, gamers that spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on in-app purchases. To Avery’s disgust, the talk is received with rapturous applause. When she returns from the conference, Avery learns that one of the middle managers, Roger, is notoriously “handsy” towards younger women. Fidget has a panic attack in the office after being doxxed by Call of Shooty fans. When she receives little to no support from HR, Fidget leaves Supremacy Software, never to return.

Q2 (Chapters 4-6)

As the executives order the devs to add more and more features to the build, the game falls behind schedule. After one of the female devs complains to HR, Roger is quietly shuffled to another department. Despite Avery’s objections, Edwin orders her to start adding activated charcoal to his health drinks. In the build-up to X₃, one of the biggest trade shows of the year, Rick organises a team-building exercise of paintball between the devs and management, leaving a single senior developer, Jeremy, to work on the demo. The game stretches into the early hours of the morning, and several devs sustain painful injuries after Rick and Chad secretly load their guns with frozen paintballs. At work, Edwin is hospitalised after the activated charcoal interferes with his heart medication. During X₃, Avery is irked by Supremacy’s disingenuous pandering towards the LGBT+ community. When Rick and Chad learn that Roger’s sexual harassment has been leaked to the press, they angrily demand that every member of the dev team has their emails swept. The Call of Shooty demo is generally received positively by the fans, but the executives chastise an exhausted Jeremy for not meeting their expectations. Furious, Avery makes a plan to send covert audio recordings of the executives to the press.

Q3 (Chapter 7-9)

After a single negative review of the demo is published, the executives wipe the build from the servers, forcing the devs to rewrite it from scratch. Supremacy buys out a rival company and absorbs its previous employees on zero-hour contracts. More and more microtransactions are added to the game, to the point that it becomes near-unplayable without spending hundreds of dollars on in-game items. To help them meet the release date, caffeinated crystals are distributed amongst the devs, causing tooth decay and bleeding gums. When the senior devs tell management they are too short-staffed to finish the game on time, Rick and Chad suggest organising a contest where fans can submit their work, with a hidden clause giving full copyright to Supremacy. As Avery is deciding who to send her hidden recordings to, she receives a company-wide email from Gareth, asking for anyone that has suffered abuse at Supremacy to act as anonymous whistle-blower. Avery decides to tell Gareth everything she knows, and she starts covertly recording her meetings with the executives.

Q4 (Chapters 10-12)

While Gareth and Avery work on the Supremacy exposé, the crunch culture grows more intense. Rick and Chad, irritated by Gareth’s digging, make a veiled threat to his employers that they will be sued for libel if they publish Gareth's work. Brandishing a cane, a furious Rick tells the devs that overtime will be mandatory until the game is released, and that anyone not pulling their weight will be struck from the credits. Avery makes a covert audio recording of Rick’s outburst and sends it to Gareth. Two days before the launch of the new Call of Shooty game, Gareth’s exposé is published. While Avery is thrilled that the truth has come to light, she is crushed when she realises how little an impact it had. Edwin, who was already preparing to retire, voluntarily resigns as a scapegoat, leaving Rick and Chad in charge. The audio recording of Rick is dismissed by HR as a deepfake. Due to Supremacy's connections with major review outlets, the unfinished and buggy game receives a final aggregate score of 8.7. As the managerial target of 9.0 was not met, most of the dev team is laid off without a bonus. Avery receives a Christmas bonus of $150.

Epilogue

After publishing his exposé, Gareth is blacklisted from mainstream games journalism outlets, but he does not reveal the identity of his source. Avery decides to stay at Supremacy Software as Gareth’s mole, vowing to bring the abusers to justice. At the first Q1 meeting, Chad decides what the company will work on next: “Same thing as last year!”

Background

Who Hunts the Whale is a critique of the pervasiveness of crunch culture in the gaming industry. In an interview with MCV, Dale highlights the unsustainability of the business models used by AAA game studios: “The book definitely does skew towards the human cost of those kinds of practices and very specifically toward the kinds of stories that have become depressingly commonplace in the videogame industry over the last couple of years.” James Stephanie Sterling, a journalist and YouTuber that has ran several stories on workplace abuse and predatory monetisation in the gaming industry, is credited in the Acknowledgements section for "fighting the real fight against this monstrous industry."

The novel also highlights the shallowness and insincerity of rainbow capitalism. Fidget, one of Supremacy's only visibly queer employees, is harassed by the Call of Shooty fanbase for her appearance. During Pride month, Supremacy mistakenly uses the five-coloured flag of the Republic of China instead of the Pride flag. Both of the authors are transgender. In 2021, Dale organised a protest for trans rights outside 10 Downing Street "to address the government’s failure to protect and empower marginalised people."

Most of the games and events mentioned in Who Hunts the Whale are bastardisations of video games and trade shows from the real world. Supremacy's flagship franchise, the first-person shooter Call of Shooty, is a parody of the Call of Duty series. Prophecy of Zebdo (The Legend of Zelda), Penultimate Legacy (Final Fantasy), and Hyper Grimaldi Sisters (Super Mario Bros.) are briefly mentioned in Avery's diary. The eXtreme electroniX eXpo (X₃) is a play on words of Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), one of the biggest video game trade shows of the 2000s and 2010s.

Reception

On Goodreads, Who Hunts the Whale has an aggregate score of 3.79. In a mixed review, Cole Rush of The Quill to Live commended the book's messaging as a “call to action” for the games industry, but criticised the prose and the heavy-handedness of the satire: “The dialogue is stiff and robotic, with characters over-explaining everything. [...] It’s not awful, but it could’ve used some line editing to spruce things up and make the book more punchy in its delivery.”