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Jan. 15th, 2019 04:02 amMaria Tsukumoto did not go to college in California to be some piece of meat. She'd made games! Actual video games, too, not the visual novels she secretly looked down on. They were well-received, got a little bit of buzz, and her being hired by some big corporation to 'direct lower budget titles for download-only platforms' had been a fairly big news piece. Lots of talk about how cool it'd be to see her work with a bit more money and polish behind it, talk about how well she understood ~game design~, all that. She'd been proud of it. And for the first couple months, things had even gone well.
Then her and her team had been drafted to work on the stupid games-as-service shtick that kept the lights on. Just temporarily, they said. They liked to push out a lot of content around the holidays. Come on, be a team player. She'd gritted her teeth and gone with it, even if she was the only woman on the entire floor and her boss was a jackass.
Then she'd been brought in to talk to her boss. She'd made some tweets, ages before being hired, talking about how much said game-as-service sucked, how sexist its character designs were, how anyone who played it was a dumbass. That kind of thing. She'd been twenty-one and still thinking she was queen of the world. Even if, secretly, she still agreed with all of that. She'd apologized, her boss had said that wasn't good enough, he pointed out that her performance wasn't anywhere near enough to justify keeping her around - (because nobody wanted to teach the girl how their insane spiral of janky-ass code and quick band-aid fixes made back in 2009 worked in the year 2019) - how she was just another programmer, not anything special.
So she'd swallowed her pride and begged. Rent around here was crazy high. She needed her medical insurance. Her parents had already turned her old bedroom into a lounge. She'd talked up how successful she was to them, to her old friends, online - she couldn't get fired.
And that was why she'd spent the last four hours posing under way too hot lights in barely anything at all, a few pieces of cotton fluff and a black thong, showing off the hot new character that was of course wearing exactly the same stupid outfit that she was. It was a big trade show, and she couldn't help but remember showing off her own game here last year, reading all the glowing reviews of it during people's coverage of the show.
This year, she has to lean, pose, and wink at cameras, endure guys copping a feel as they take pictures with her - and not just a quick little brush, but a big handful, fingers sinking into her ass. She imagines it's a little red by now. More than that, she has to play things off like she isn't the one who managed to get her stupid teleport skill working, like she's just some idiot in a costume.
The whole thing's humiliating and seems to last forever. She's red in the face, at the very least, by the time it's all done, storming to the back - whatever private room they're planning to show big journalists a trailer in later - once the guy in charge of the booth (who was definitely hired after her, and who definitely didn't know why the character's mechanics were designed the way they were) told her she was free to go.
Maria slams the door shut behind her, glaring up at her boss. Mercifully, she's caught him alone.
"There, I'm done with this stupid thing. Haha, let's put the feminist in the slutty outfit, okay, good one. Are we done? Half my work on this stupid character's still not done, and we both know you aren't gonna give me the rest of today off, so -"
This was humiliating, but nobody recognized her, between the wig and the outfit, and the fact that she really isn't THAT high-profile. She - has to imagine it'll just be a thing that happened. She can get back to work basically as soon as she's changed. Maybe she can even check out a couple of the booths here on her own time.
Then her and her team had been drafted to work on the stupid games-as-service shtick that kept the lights on. Just temporarily, they said. They liked to push out a lot of content around the holidays. Come on, be a team player. She'd gritted her teeth and gone with it, even if she was the only woman on the entire floor and her boss was a jackass.
Then she'd been brought in to talk to her boss. She'd made some tweets, ages before being hired, talking about how much said game-as-service sucked, how sexist its character designs were, how anyone who played it was a dumbass. That kind of thing. She'd been twenty-one and still thinking she was queen of the world. Even if, secretly, she still agreed with all of that. She'd apologized, her boss had said that wasn't good enough, he pointed out that her performance wasn't anywhere near enough to justify keeping her around - (because nobody wanted to teach the girl how their insane spiral of janky-ass code and quick band-aid fixes made back in 2009 worked in the year 2019) - how she was just another programmer, not anything special.
So she'd swallowed her pride and begged. Rent around here was crazy high. She needed her medical insurance. Her parents had already turned her old bedroom into a lounge. She'd talked up how successful she was to them, to her old friends, online - she couldn't get fired.
And that was why she'd spent the last four hours posing under way too hot lights in barely anything at all, a few pieces of cotton fluff and a black thong, showing off the hot new character that was of course wearing exactly the same stupid outfit that she was. It was a big trade show, and she couldn't help but remember showing off her own game here last year, reading all the glowing reviews of it during people's coverage of the show.
This year, she has to lean, pose, and wink at cameras, endure guys copping a feel as they take pictures with her - and not just a quick little brush, but a big handful, fingers sinking into her ass. She imagines it's a little red by now. More than that, she has to play things off like she isn't the one who managed to get her stupid teleport skill working, like she's just some idiot in a costume.
The whole thing's humiliating and seems to last forever. She's red in the face, at the very least, by the time it's all done, storming to the back - whatever private room they're planning to show big journalists a trailer in later - once the guy in charge of the booth (who was definitely hired after her, and who definitely didn't know why the character's mechanics were designed the way they were) told her she was free to go.
Maria slams the door shut behind her, glaring up at her boss. Mercifully, she's caught him alone.
"There, I'm done with this stupid thing. Haha, let's put the feminist in the slutty outfit, okay, good one. Are we done? Half my work on this stupid character's still not done, and we both know you aren't gonna give me the rest of today off, so -"
This was humiliating, but nobody recognized her, between the wig and the outfit, and the fact that she really isn't THAT high-profile. She - has to imagine it'll just be a thing that happened. She can get back to work basically as soon as she's changed. Maybe she can even check out a couple of the booths here on her own time.
