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The video games website IGN.com just dropped a big new investigative piece by Rebekah Valentine headlined “How Hidden Nazi Symbols Were the Tip of a Toxic Iceberg at Life Is Strange Developer Deck Nine.”

Life is Strange is a video game franchise beloved, in part, for its progressive themes and storytelling. I actually have the original game on Steam — I think I got it for free when I wrote a video game column for The Boston Globe. I want to play it, but like a bunch of other games, it simply got caught in a hopelessly huge backlog.

If, in fact, someone tried to smuggle Nazi symbols into a Life is Strange title, that would be an undoubtedly big story in the world of video games. Did it actually happen? Having read this piece twice, I have no idea. And the broader article, which centers on “narrative director and eventual Deck Nine CCO Zak Garriss,” painting him as a likely key villain in the studio’s meltdown, has a bunch of similar issues that can point us to some important lessons about how to do journalism, and what journalists owe readers.

The accusations against Garriss center on him “forming close relationships with a number of younger women, often in situations where he had some sort of mentorship or other power over them, including at least one of the women on his team,” and he is accused of “love bombing” by multiple anonymous accusers (there are also a lot of anonymous allegations in this article). Mallory Littleton, a narrative designer who has worked on multiple Life is Strange games, explained it thusly:

“He would walk me to my car, I’d open the door, say goodbye, and he’d sort of linger,” Littleton recalled. “We’d keep talking, I’d sit down, and he’d linger again next to the open door. He never made a particularly overt move, it was always subtle enough. It felt like it was maybe always just a vibe that I was getting. I felt stupid, first of all, for ending up in that situation with him in the first place. But because he never clearly made a move, maybe I was just reading too much into the whole thing. It wasn’t until I explained it in great detail to others that someone clued me in.”

There doesn’t appear to be any smoking gun on this front, just multiple instances in which Garriss is accused of being a bit too familiar with female subordinates. At one point a named accuser says “she went to HR repeatedly about Garriss’ behavior during his time there, but was simply encouraged to try and see things from his point of view.” We’re not told exactly what “behavior” she reported, but given where it occurs in the story it appears to have been about a narrative dispute we’ll get to shortly, as well as Garriss “refus[ing] to trust” “senior, queer people on his writing team,” as this accuser puts it.

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These aren’t the sorts of things that would traditionally be reported to HR. “Another source, closer to leadership, was aware that Garriss had been instructed by HR to stop taking young women out to dinners; he did not.” Garriss, for his part, denied in a statement to IGN he had done anything improper and said he had had difficult teammates: “In all of my career, I have never worked with writers who were as creatively inflexible, antagonistic toward difference, or less inclined to listen or compromise as a select few of this group.”

So it’s hard to know exactly what to make of the Garriss accusations, I would argue. Your mileage may vary. But let’s dig into a couple specific allegations from the article.

First, on the Nazi symbols, here’s all we get:

Initially, developers noticed a reference to the number 88, and flagged the issue to their bosses assuming it was an innocent mistake. But in the ensuing weeks, others found more problematic signs and in-universe labels, such as references to a racist meme, the number 18, and the Hagal rune. As the number of possible hate symbols mounted, staff grew increasingly concerned that someone was putting these items in their game deliberately as a dog whistle to white supremacists.

Then, later:

Near the end of 2022. . . someone noticed something odd in the in-development new Life Is Strange game. It was an in-game sign that incorporated the word “Sheeeit” in what seemed to be a reference a racist meme. The individual flagged the asset as problematic, and was reassured at the time that it would be changed.

But the meme soon surfaced again. A few months later, another person saw the same scene and noticed a problem with a different asset: the number 88, which is widely used as a hate symbol referencing Hitler. This person flagged the issue to their superiors, presuming it was accidental. But as word spread around the studio and more people looked at the scene, even more symbols were found. These included (among potential others) the number 18, an apparent Hagal rune—widely used in Nazi Germany to signify devotion to Nazi philosophy—and the same apparent racist meme reference before, albeit shortened to “Sheee.” Developers flagged these to various team leads and managers, and received reassurances that it would be looked into. But weeks turned into months, and the assets remained unchanged. By the end of June, employees had been told an HR investigation was ongoing, but had received no other feedback.

Meanwhile, concerned staff were forced to contend with the notion that a coworker was using Life Is Strange to promote hate speech. Multiple people told me that while they could easily believe someone might accidentally and innocently use the number 88 or 18 without knowing what it meant, the sheer number of racist and Nazi items in that one room made it difficult to believe it was all just a big coincidence.

“I have tried to hold space for the idea that one person made a bunch of extremely unfortunate coincidences,” said Elizabeth Ballou, a former narrative designer at Deck Nine, when I approached her about the content. “It is really hard for me to believe that. Especially because we asked them to remove the sheeit meme, and they kept it on there but smaller. So either this was a case of the worst miscommunication known to mankind. . . or Occam’s Razor, simplest explanation is that someone was trying to see how many of these things they could get away with before someone noticed.”

At no point in the story is the reader given any information to help them determine whether they should share Ballou’s suspicions. It would be quite easy for Valentine to simply explain where and in what context the numbers 18, 88, and the sheeeeeeeeit meme appeared. We get a fleeting reference to a “room,” which presumably means a single in-game room. 

The “sheer number of racist and Nazi items in that one room” appears to be three, but two of those three references aren’t particularly well-known. I’m pretty online, for example, and I only knew about 88 (the eighth letter in the alphabet twice, or “Heil Hitler”) — not 18, and prior to reading this article I understood sheeeeeeeeit not as a racist 4chan meme, but a reference to a famous and beloved line from The Wire (which is where the racist version apparently originated). I also don’t get why Valentine couldn’t have have provided more specifics about an “in-game sign that incorporated the word ‘Sheeeit,’” since there’d be a pretty big difference between a random sign displaying that word for no reason and a sign “incorporating” it in some other, potentially more innocent-seeming way.

As for Occam’s razor, yes, one possibility is that someone kept trying to stick Nazi symbols into a game well-known for its progressive storytelling because they are a secret Nazi or a troublemaking edgelord. Another possibility is that because, as the article details, the studio was in a state of chaos and uproar at this point, certain individuals became a bit hypervigilant. I raise this possibility in part because there have been so many social justice blowups in academia, journalism, and other liberal-dominated fields that ended up being more smoke than fire. 

To take a weirdly parallel one, my podcast co-host once interviewed a graphic designer who worked for a theater company that had a meltdown over someone mentioning the N-word (it was in a script). The company brought in some DEI trainers, including, for part of the program, Robin DiAngelo before she was super famous, and that appeared only to exacerbate the meltdown and the toxicity. Katie’s interview subject was subsequently accused of trying to smuggle swastikas into a poster for The Odyssey (her social justice–lovin’ colleagues thought they saw the symbols in a design element on some pottery or something), and was at one point told that it might have been her unconscious white supremacy bubbling up.

I guess one way of rephrasing all this is, well, Life is Strange™. People are strange. One day you’re a graphic designer on good terms with your colleagues, and then the next day you’re being accused by them of subconsciously inserting swastikas into a poster for an ancient Greek play. You cannot always take exactly what people tell you at face value, not necessarily because they lie (though they do do that, sometimes), but because a lot of situations are simply more subjective and complicated than you might realize if you hear only one side of them.

The solution, journalistically, isn’t necessarily to give every side of a dispute exactly equal weight, which is almost always a bad or impractical idea for one reason or another (one side has more facts on their side, another side is facing legal problems and can’t speak publicly, or whatever). But you do need to give readers as much context as you can to help them decide what to think for themselves. 

I don’t think this article does that. Like, what is an “apparent” Hagal rune? Here is what that rune looks like, according to the Wikipedia page IGN links to:

So there was something in the game that sort of looked like this, but the resemblance wasn’t obvious enough to leave out the “apparent”? What are we supposed to make of this? It looks like an asterisk. Because we have no idea exactly where in the game it popped up, or what it looked like, it’s impossible to know what to think. At the very least Valentine should have shown her work by explaining why she couldn’t provide more details.

Another thing that ratcheted up my skepticism a bit was the way Valentine seemed to take some of the accusers’ very particular artistic and political beliefs at face value, and to conflate potential violations of those beliefs with genuine workplace issues. 

For example:

Many people told me about a scene Garriss wrote for True Colors that the writers felt they had to fight him excessively hard to change. In the final script of True Colors, the main character Alex is taken into the woods by Jed, who she thinks is a friend. He betrays her, shooting her and missing, causing her to fall into an abandoned mine shaft. However, in Garriss’ original version, Jed spikes her drink at a bar and takes her out to the woods for an attempted murder. When they saw this version of the scene, a number of people pushed back, arguing that the scene would unintentionally trigger associations with date rape. Multiple individuals, including a number of women, recalled having to fight extensively with Garriss about this scene before it was eventually changed.

“It took a three hour meeting in the writers room and one of the writers sharing an extremely personal story to get Zak to agree to get the content out,” said [Mallory] Littleton [the aforementioned narrative designer]. “It wasn’t about us not wanting to have difficult topics in there, but Life Is Strange shines because that type of content is chosen extremely deliberately and it’s given runway, it’s given space to breathe. This detail is irrelevant to the plot, it would have been traumatic for players, and there was no space to unpack it. We don’t have time to talk about what it means for Alex to be roofied by a man she trusted.”

Of course an individual player might have a strong reaction to a particular story element — I really wouldn’t throw around terms like triggering or traumatic this lightly, because the vast majority of people simply aren’t meaningfully “triggered” or “traumatized” by even difficult content — but the assumption here seems to be that you just can’t use a date-rape drug as a story element. It could definitely be that the manner in which it was deployed here was insensitive, but again, we don’t know. If the goal is to make this Jed character look particularly devious, or to have him take a particularly shocking turn in that direction, then maybe a roofie is an effective storytelling device? I’m just spitballing here, but I’m left with spitballing because the article gives me so little to work with and so clearly broadcasts its sympathy for Littleton’s position. I don’t understand exactly why I, the reader — someone who doesn’t necessarily have the same preexisting, very strongly held political commitments and beliefs about art and trauma as these employees — am supposed to think that it’s okay to do a story about a woman being lured into the woods for an attempted murder, but only if she isn’t roofied first. 

The possibility that Garriss had roughly the same reaction I did to the request to de-roofie that scene opens up other possibilities, because, again, life is strange: if there was disagreement on the team, and it led to a three-hour meeting in which each side felt like it was talking past the other, that would make things only more toxic, and would only increase the possibility of more accusations, more negative interpretations, and so on. But instead the article presents this to the reader as straightforward evidence of Garriss’s wrongdoing, when it may have been a more legitimate narrative dispute. 

I want to be able to trust an interesting, in-depth story like this one, and the rigors and potential abuses of the games industry are a subject ripe for investigative reporting. But I just got the sense throughout that Valentine’s thumb was a bit on the scale, because seemingly every opportunity she had to provide more important details or show her work, she failed to do so. 

Questions? Comments? Investigative articles about Blocked and Reported’s culture of rampant abuse? I’m at singalminded@gmail.com or on Twitter at @jessesingal.

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