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Leslee Sullivant walks up to the camera curiously. Her hair is pulled back in a ponytail and she is wearing an olive green button on a bar background. “Are you one of the new hires?” she asks. “Oh, you are the intern!” She offers you a drink when she finds out that you are a minor and asks about your boyfriend. You’re not like his wife, she said. The woman doesn’t quite understand the whole game. “If you’re looking for a mentor, I’m your guy,” she concludes. The caption of the TikTok video is “grooming”.
The games industry struggles with # MeToo-style calculations every few months, and Sullivant’s video is a perfect impression of one of the many insidious ways of these issues. On TikTok and Twitter, where she later shared the video, people can relate.
As one woman said, “raise your hand if you’ve met this person.”
Sullivant’s TikToks are more than a way to pass the time – they’re little performances of digital activism and education. “I’m still trying to find a way to do [the industry] better, ”she said The edge, citing stories of endemic abuse and harassment on the ground. “I don’t know how to fix it. In the past, I have raised issues internally only to be punished for them. I wrote an article about my time in games, and it’s not going to move the needle. It’s really hard for one person to do anything about it. Stop me from raising funds to start my own studio, who will do what? Impact on 10 people in 10 years?
“I am desperate to change the industry for the better. This seemed like one of the ways it could have far-reaching reach and impact. ”
Thanks to TikTok, Sullivant, a producer with a long career in games, has a chance to reach new audiences she would never find on other platforms. It’s less effort than a YouTube video, allowing it to edit in the app and get its point across in less than a minute. The app’s algorithm presents videos to users in a more organic way than a place like Twitter, where Sullivant will repost its content to its followers. And the playfulness of TikTok makes it easy to solve these problems in a straightforward, albeit ironic way.
In one video, Sullivant plays a pair of writers interrupted by an executive with terrible advice and impossible standards. In another, she gives two employees, Todd and Amy, performance reviews. Todd gets high ratings and reviews. Amy not so much: “Said here you’re a huge bi-” Video cuts out.
“I think a lot of these things are happening and there aren’t a lot of good leads to talk about it,” says Sullivant. “I think a lot of these discussions are discouraged or need to be conducted in secret.” This can make it difficult for people to speak out, let alone find support.
“A lot of these videos are about actors or people in power,” she says. “God forbid you to talk about this at work, otherwise you run into this stuff. I hope it provides an outlet for that kind of emotion and validation. ”
Sullivant’s early TikToks were all about fashion – they motivated her to dress even while working from home in a pandemic – but she was interested in making videos about millennial work culture. It just took courage to put her face in front of the camera. “I want to do something that really talks about my actual work experience and how I like to deal with my experiences in games, and that’s making fun of what happens in game development.” , she says.
It aims “for self-mockery and also tries to highlight the weird issues” that come with a career in game development. And although she says some of its content contains internal discussions about baseball, it’s still accessible to someone who doesn’t work in the industry – and maybe even still accessible to someone who doesn’t. not. “People don’t need to be familiar with how the games industry works to understand the impact of what is explored in these videos,” Sullivant says.
Her videos aren’t based on any specific experience, she says, but rather some sort of conglomerate from her 11 years of development. “I was very scared at first and I still have that feeling of regret immediately after posting a video,” she says. “Is this the one going to make me doxx?” His goal is not to discuss the players or the gaming community, but rather to keep him in his industry and what his peers – or future peers – are going through. “The number of people like, ‘Oh, I didn’t know this was a problem,’ or even the more experienced game developers who were like, ‘I can absolutely see it now, but I didn’t. in my twenties, and I want other kids to see that, “opened her eyes,” says Sullivant.
“We can do a little education and hopefully make things better for the better.”
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