Warning: This article contains mentions of stalking, abuse, and sexual harassment.

On July 16th, FMV Future and Wales Interactive released a trailer for their upcoming full-motion video game, Gamer Girl. This announcement was quickly met with considerable backlash regarding the worrying and seemingly exploitative nature of the game’s content. This lead to rapid attempts to bury the trailer and any press announcements pertaining to the game. The press kit initially released with the announcement email is now nowhere to be found. Granted, this didn’t stop YouTubers and social media figures — among them esports personality Rod “Slasher” Breslau — from uploading copies of the trailer after it was taken down.

Still, it’s striking that the only traces of Gamer Girl coming from the game’s original sources are a logo on FMV Future’s “In Production” page, a string of comments in defense of the game from publisher Wales Interactive, and a fictional Twitter account for the game’s central character, Abicake99, used to promote the game. The account in question has not posted since May 16th.

That is all that is currently available online. It does bear mentioning that Twitter seems to have erupted in confusion over the difference between publisher and developer. This is something Wales Interactive pointed out somewhat defensively, giving further rise to critiques that they’re throwing the creators under the bus for a project they greenlit and backed.

Nonetheless, criticisms and concerns arising from the staff at Wales Interactive are hard to ignore, in terms of financial and logistical backing for a game that probably shouldn’t have been put together in the first place. This is especially the case considering Wales Interactive seems to be made up of primarily straight white men. Why do I say that? Let’s have a look at what we know about the game’s content so far, shall we?

In Gamer Girl, you take on the role of Abicake99’s moderator for her stream’s chat section, able to delete messages and remove bad actors from the chat. Not only that, you are further able to guide Abi’s real life choices “as she faces an anonymous predator in her chat.” Okay. Abi has real life friends to consult, doesn’t she? Surely she has a support system? Family? Friends? Literally anyone who isn’t given the capacity to — as the last sequence of the trailer reveals — send her to confront a violent stalker entirely on her own so they can watch her be brutalized?

To be blunt, these details combined with the trailer turned my stomach, and I was far from the only one. The insistence from Wales Interactive that Gamer Girl is supposed to raise awareness and inculcate empathy regarding online abuse of women streamers didn’t really help. Frankly, in any case, I’m often skeptical about “empathy games.” I think they often give more mainstream games a green light to be deliberately unempathetic. Additionally, unless they are written and produced by the groups they are meant to represent, I generally find they’re antithetical to the pursuit of profit under capitalism.

Of course, there are exceptions to this, though they might be few and far between. One that comes to mind, at least, is Anna Anthropy’s Dys4ia. This is an example of an “empathy game” that works, because it abandons “gamification,” and rather seeks to honestly bring players into an experience of transition and HRT from the vantage point of a trans woman. Dys4ia, unlike Gamer Girl, has no “levels,” no skill checks, and isn’t a game you can “lose.”

To this end, in an (admittedly somewhat desperate) attempt to find some kind of merit in this project, I did some research on the writing and development team behind Gamer Girl, FMV Future. I hoped, perhaps foolishly, that there would be more diversity involved in the writing and coding end of this game. I also hoped that we’d see more involvement from women, people of color, LGBTQ+ streamers … anyone in a diverse capacity.

I was not reassured. For one thing, the staff of FMV Future is (you guessed it) also comprised of three white men. For another thing, though they assert that they interviewed many female streamers throughout writing and developing the game, this process seems to have boiled down to patting themselves on the back for securing a cameo from well-known streamer CyborgAngel.

Equally concerning is the namedropping of Alexandra Burton, lead actress and supposed co-writer of the script, to defend the project. The name-dropping is often in the same breath as affirming that she “improvised all of the screenplay.” Which is it? Did she help write the script or was she simply paid to improvise her reactions to hostility being directed her way by male writers?

If the reality of Burton’s involvement is a little of both, where are the details? How much did she actually contribute, and at what stages of development? How much of her involvement was freely decided by her, and how much of it was coached by the developers?

I have so many unanswered questions, and not just about the development; the story and acting, too, has me equal parts repulsed and confused. The game invites players not to truly enter Abi’s shoes. Controlling her directly would, at least in theory, offer a chance for players to feel things with her, as opposed to for her. However, controlling her decisions and her experience as her moderator, and getting a degree of involvement in all aspects of her life is something that I can’t imagine any woman streamer allowing.

First of all, this is a classic failure to read the room. Wales Interactive and FMV Future announced this game with spectacularly tasteless timing, in the midst of many real women streamers and gamers coming forward with stories of abuse, harassment, and rape by real men in the gaming community and industry. These women have now had their damaging experiences callously tossed back in their faces, packaged with all the sensitivity and respect of a campy ‘80s slasher.

Meanwhile, players — clearly being marketed to as male gamers — will not truly enter Abi’s experience, but rather “white knight” her. This goes on while she looks up at them through the screen with doe-eyed fear and fragility. They will do this while also being given the option to falsely represent (and possibly endanger) Abi for “drama” and views, likely at the expense of her happiness and mental health.

That’s not what empathy means. Empathy is to feel with, to experience Abi’s emotions yourself as though they were your own. Sympathy is to feel for. At its most benign, it’s a desire to protect the target of the harm being inflicted. At worst, it’s an act of chauvinistic pity that reduces Abi to an object to be secured, marketed, protected, and ultimately consumed. This says nothing of the fact that volunteer mods themselves are often if not disproportionately responsible for threatening and harassing behaviors toward women streamers.

Other descriptions of the game make reference to Abicake99 returning to streaming after the “mysterious disappearance of her friend Becky.” Who is “Becky,” and what does she have to do with Abi’s streaming career? What role does she play in the story, if any? Why mention her in descriptions of the game, when there isn’t a single allusion to her in the now-buried trailer? Given the other content of this game, my gut can only tell me “Becky” exists to be a brutalized, possibly murdered, corpse. Alternately she could be another irreparably traumatized young woman for the (presumed male) mod character to rescue. Wait, what?

Last, but very far from least, on my list of concerns about Gamer Girl is the gamified mechanic at its core, itself. Although we don’t yet know whether Gamer Girl will feature Steam-style achievements, we do know that one of the central mechanics of the game is that good performance allows you to level up your “mod powers.” The concern has already been raised that players will use Gamer Girl to live out violent fantasies. This could be done by deliberately making choices that will expose Abi to danger and allow them to watch her be brutalized, only to reboot the game and start over once they “lose.”

I also worry that even those players who aren’t attracted to this game to live out predatory fantasies will dodge any hamfisted attempts at inculcating morality in the game. Instead, they are given the opportunity to simply and strategically “game the system” by accumulating power and learning nothing of import. This mechanic allows, if not outright encourages, a level of strategic detachment and disinterest from the story at its core, which fairly directly undercuts the avowed intent behind the project.

Gamer Girl doesn’t make me feel empathized with or cared about. I don’t feel seen by a game developing company that intends to call awareness to the issue of online abuse. I’ve been aware. We’ve been aware. It’s been on my Twitter feed almost every day for weeks. Instead, Gamer Girl is increasingly shaping up to look like an exploitative project created by gaming companies who are interested in “innovating” and “pushing the boundaries” of gaming for fun and profit. Companies who have since buried all their promotional material and dropped their lead actress in front of the bus to shield themselves against criticism. That’ll be a hard nope from me.

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