Every so often there is a post that I end up not making, largely because I was not really certain how to approach it. Essentially for me this has been a year without Blizzard games. This is due in part to some intentional and some unintentional avoiding of anything that comes from the Battle.net launcher. Recently I had thought about beginning to lay down my sword and accept that change was happening, because from the outside it seemed like things were beginning to move in the right direction. Then a few things happened, firstly the resignation of Jen O’Neal and the Wall Street Journal article expanding on that action and the fact that Bobby Kotick, the CEO of Activision Blizzard has been complicit in everything up to this point. As part of everything coming out we find out that Kotick actually wrote the awful Fran Townsend letter, which brings into question if Jen O’Neal had anything to do with the public resignation letter in the first place.

This has been a journey that began with the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing lawsuit in July, and has been a ride of various bits of information coming out from that process. As a reaction to all of this a group of Activision, Blizzard, and King employees have banded together to create the ABetterABK movement, and held a number of walkouts. They have some pretty straight forward demands:

• An end to mandatory arbitration clauses in all employee contracts, current and future. Arbitration clauses protect abusers and limit the ability of victims to seek restitution.
• The adoption of recruiting, interviewing, hiring, and promotion policies designed to improve representation among employees at all levels, agreed upon by employees in a company-wide Diversity, Equity & Inclusion organization. Current practices have led to women, in particular women of color and transgender women, nonbinary people, and other marginalized groups that are vulnerable to gender discrimination not being hired fairly for new roles when compared to men.
• Publication of data on relative compensation (including equity grants and profit sharing), promotion rates, and salary ranges for employees of all genders and ethnicities at the company. Current practices have led to aforementioned groups not being paid or promoted fairly.
• Empower a company-wide Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion task force to hire a third party to audit ABK’s reporting structure, HR department, and executive staff. It is imperative to identify how current systems have failed to prevent employee harassment, and to propose new solutions to address these issues.

Activision Blizzard has taken some half measures namely ending binding arbitration in regards to sexual harassment cases only… which gives them a loophole to claim anything is not specifically sexual in nature. They have also implemented a “Zero Tolerance Policy” towards Sexual Harrassment, which leads ABetterABK to their final demand… that Activision Blizzard act upon this policy and remove Bobby Kotick as CEO. Thing is, it has gone far further than just the Activision Blizzard Employees… we have calls from Shareholders, Sony Entertainment, Microsoft, and Nintendo to leave the company. This seems like a pretty resounding vote of no confidence but in spite of all of this the Board Members continue to back him.

So I have been thinking for awhile, what action it would take in order for me to return to the fold. In truth it is a lot of actions, not all of which are even related to this current situation we find ourselves in. I bounced off Shadowlands for example long before knowing about any of this, and all of the problems I had with that game still exist today. However when it comes to avoiding games that I do love like Diablo 3… I was trying to figure out what pound of flesh would be enough to make me feel like change actually was possible. The single action that I have landed on is the removal of Bobby Kotick from the company entirely. I don’t just want him to step down as CEO, I want him completely gone from the decision making structure entirely. This happened under his reign and there is no question he was not only aware but supported the cover up. He needs to leave in order for the healing to begin in earnest.

The other things I would like to happen is to completely remove the board of directors, but that is a much bigger ask and one that I sincerely doubt is ever going to happen. What I do think is within the realm of possibility however is for the Activision Blizzard King to formally unionize. They have made a lot of strides with the ABetterABK Movement, and I would love to see it formalize into a proper union with all of the rights and protects that it has. Ultimately that is part of why I have been less vocal is because I have a lot of friends who work for Blizzard right now and are trying to make things better behind the scenes. I am constantly torn on how my own personal boycott ultimately impacts them.

I’ve also never made broad sweeping demands for folks to stop playing Blizzard games. Everyone has to arrive at this on their own terms, and for many Blizzard games are their coping mechanism for other things that they are going through at the same time. Many of us use games as a refuge from the troubles of our own life and the last few years have been absolutely brutal. I feel the constant pang of loss of Diablo 3, because that was one of my comfort games that I knew every three months I could return to with friends and get a dose of dopamine from it. That said the single action that would tell me that things are going to start moving in the right direction is going to be the act of removing the man who’s name is synonymous with Activision.

It is time for Bobby Kotick to leave.

Good Morning Friends! I have been flailing around a bit game wise. My brain still wants me to be playing New World, but my frustration levels are to the point where that seems like a very anger filled proposition. Since I don’t have a lot of gaming discussion this morning I thought I would talk a bit about Ghostbusters Afterlife the continuation of the original Ghostbusters movies and by reference I guess the cartoon series. I have some thoughts about the movie but first I think we need to get something out of the way.

There has been a lot of vitriol about the 2016 Ghostbusters reboot, and this post is not going to be bashing that movie. I wrote my thoughts in August of 2016 and was probably less generous than I would be today if I wrote a similar post about it. As that movie has aged I have actually liked it considerably more, especially as I have come to realize that they are completely different products. Ghostbusters 2016 is far more the “Scooby Doo” interpretation of Ghostbusters, and it works and is carried in large part by the phenomenal comedians in each of the roles. I love Scooby Doo and I think Ghostbusters works in this more over the top interpretation.

If the 2016 movie is Scooby Doo, the original movie is more akin to Pop Cthulhu. There are some deeply serious and scary things going on, with some really interesting lore pulled from eldritch tomes of knowledge… that gets watered down by the comedic performances taking place when confronted by what would otherwise be deep horror. The tone is just different and as a kid it made me want to read Tobin’s Spirit Guide, Spates Catalog, and even the Necronomicon. What pulled me in was the universe filled with possibilities and the general cosmology of Ghostbusters, that thankfully was fleshed out and continued in “The Real Ghostbusters” cartoon series on Saturday mornings.

We’ve seen so much necromancy involving trying to resurrect a popular movie series from my childhood… aka the 80s. So many of them fall short of what my general goals for this sort of movie are. Essentially I am looking for it to do the following things:

• Pay Homage to the Original Material
• Connect the New Material to the Original Story
• Set Up a New Generation of Characters
• Introduce a new Threat that is a Call to Action
• Pass the Baton from the Old Generation to the New Generation
• Give the Old Generation a Meaningful Send Off

This is Phoebe, she serves as our point of view character for most of the movie. I’m going to be pretty shallow on plot points because I don’t really want to dive into spoilers nor do I really feel like I need to. Shocking to no one and largely explained in the trailer… Phoebe is the Grand Daughter of Egon Spengler. Like Egon she is a science head and genius and also very clearly on the spectrum, which is lightly touched upon but not really treated as some magical power like too many shows seem to. Essentially the family is destitute and when Egon passes, he leaves them his home and land in the middle of nowhere… aka Oklahoma. I know that this was filmed in Canada, but based on the look of things and knowing my state I am guessing it would be somewhere around Weatherford.

One of the things that this movie does extremely well is it blends the feeling of the original Ghostbusters with that of a coming of age adventure like The Goonies. You care about the kids that are largely the ones driving the plot forward and the adults that care about them. These take the form of the form of the Mom played by Carrie Coon and a Seismologist played by Paul Rudd. Rudd’s character is very reminiscent of Science Teacher from Gremlins or the later derivative character from Stranger Things. The story felt more real to me as an Oklahoman because the plot as discussed in the trailer centers around this small town being impacted by random earthquakes every single day. We went through a similar cluster of earthquakes largely blamed upon the fracking industry, and the movie does a good job of latching onto this unknown and turning it into something darker.

This bit is going to be a little bit spoilery so you might want to skip it if you are bothered by such things. So there are also some plot holes that I am a bit confused by. In the original Ghostbusters Ray Stantz accidentally chose the form of “Gozer the Destructor” by thinking of his childhood love of Stay Puft Marshmallows. Per lore each time Gozer manifests a new form is chosen… so when Gozer manifested in 1984 you have a Giant Marshmallow Man. So why exactly would packages of tiny marshmallows be turned into tiny Stay Puft Men? I mean it makes for some cute and disturbing scenes, but also makes no real sense in the grand scheme of things. The only thing I can think is that since the Original Ghostbusters effectively kept Gozer from coming into the world… maybe they just got a stay of execution or some such?

Much like The Force Awakens feels like a remix of A New Hope, in some ways this movie feels like a remix of the original Ghostbusters film. There are a lot of plot points that follow a similar pattern, but do so in a fresh enough way that they feel like an event happening again and less a remake of the earlier film. The big payoff for me personally is how neatly everything fits into the larger narrative of the Ghostbusters universe and a continuation of the mythology set up in that first film. Lore is one of those things that I just eat up and part of the reason why I dove so heavily into games like Destiny and even more recently New World. I like the world I am experiencing to make sense within the context of the film and it to feel like the events are part of something larger than the narrow view port that I see on the screen. Afterlife pays off in this aspect in spades.

Afterlife is also a movie that resolves itself pretty cleanly. There are no obvious dangling plot threads that feel cheap if not continued in a sequel. However there is enough meat left on the bones that if they wanted to create a new series of movies involving these characters that it would totally make sense and be welcome. Ultimately I guess the performance of the film will determine if this is the final chapter of a beloved story, or the start of something new. I am on board either way and would honestly love to see more of the characters in the future.

The only real regret I have about the movie is that you don’t really get a good action shot of the new cast of characters AS the new Ghostbusters. For me at least I had two characters that I absolutely fell in love with in the form of Phoebe and “Podcast”, but Trevor and Lucky don’t really have a lot of plot development other than “romantic interests”. I guess we get to briefly see that Trevor is a bit of a mechanic, but it feels like maybe some of the more specific character development for them was maybe left on the cutting room floor. That said I am completely on board with a brand new series of movies surrounding these characters and their new adventures resurrecting the Ghostbusters.

If you ever loved Ghostbusters, then I highly suggest you watch this new entry in the series. If you love the 80s “horror comedy” tropes like Lost Boys, then I also highly suggest you watch this film. If you were deeply passionate about the 2016 Ghostbusters Reboot, then I still suggest you watch this film because it spends zero time disparaging that movie and is a really enjoyable ride even if you don’t care much about the classical Ghostbusters. On a personal level, this is pretty much as close to a perfect resurrection of a franchise has seen and ultimately checks off all of the boxes on my list of requirements for a good outing in an old series.