You’re No Good to Me If You’re Slowly Killing Yourself: On Mike Selinker and Lone Shark Games

Content warning: mental and emotional abuse, toxic work environment

My name is Gaby and I worked with Mike Selinker for nearly all of the last decade at Lone Shark Games. I’m writing this post to warn people that Lone Shark Games is a toxic workplace and that Mike Selinker is a mentally and emotionally abusive person.

I’m speaking up now because I don’t want anyone else to go through what I did (which affected me both mentally and physically while I was employed there and still affects me to this day). I believe this is a pattern of behavior that will continue, I don’t think a whisper network will effectively warn or protect others, and I’m no longer afraid of Mike.

I believe many of Mike’s actions are undertaken knowingly and at the very least, that Mike actively seeks out young women who are relatively new in the industry because (due to power imbalances) they will be less likely to push back on his ideas and behaviors and he can more easily manipulate and exploit them, while simultaneously virtue signaling and bolstering his image as a progressive crusader in the industry who hires women. This behavior extends to people who aren’t young women but it is from this lived experience that I am writing.

There are two Mike Selinkers. Many of you know the gregarious, virtuous and outspoken Mike. It’s important to me, and other minority survivors — that you also meet the serially abusive, toxic and dangerously temperamental Mike behind the curtain. After seeing the continued hypocrisy of him commenting on every recent news article and painting himself as a crusader of social justice, I felt like I could no longer stay silent.

Even if Mike is not abusive to you, he is almost certainly using you and his relationship with you to lend himself cover as he continues to harm those he considers beneath himself. We all make choices about who would be a good friend or collaborator and who to support. But in my experience with Mike, these choices are made primarily in service of strengthening his own image. If you’re someone Mike can get status and goodwill from claiming friendship or having collaborated with, there’s a good chance he’s used his connection with you to bolster his own image in public and/or in private.

I’m not saying he’s only motivated by self-protection and boosting his reputation; I think Mike does believe in some of the causes and people he supports, but I do think he’s gone out of his way to build up a shield of “but how could Mike be bad, he’s friends with X and he’s done so much for <cause/charity>?” He wouldn’t be the first person in the industry to have done this and he wouldn’t even be the first in his circle of friends to have done so. Chances are, someone is looking at you and deciding that Mike is a good guy to have around because they trust your judgment.

I started as an intern at Lone Shark in the fall of 2011, within a few weeks of my 21st birthday. I lived in Wisconsin and attended university there until moving to the Seattle area the following summer. I was thrilled to have an opportunity to work in the games industry and to get college credit for doing it. At the time, as far as I could tell, the company consisted of three people: Mike, a man who did work as a game designer who continued with Lone Shark through my time employed there, and a woman who was Mike’s business partner. After a short trial period, my job became more formalized and one of the conditions of my employment was to quit a job I detested at a gas station because, in Mike’s words, “You’re no good to me if you’re slowly killing yourself.” It’s only now that I realize there was a silent “unless it’s by working for me” tacked on to the end of that.

The following contains examples and stories from my time at Lone Shark and afterwards of how Mike has gaslit, intimidated, controlled, and otherwise abused and mistreated me and people around me. It’s not all-inclusive and I’m sure in the coming days I’ll remember things I wish I had included. I’m asking you to remember that as you read, these things which may seem small as one-off examples, were part of a larger pattern and were happening all the time, over the course of many years. Below are countless examples of this abuse and toxicity. Even all these are just a small sampling.

“Maybe I just need to work with someone younger”

Just a few months into my employment, I found myself in an ugly and stressful situation as Mike drove his business partner out of the company. She and Mike had worked together at Wizards of the Coast and she joined Lone Shark Games with a promise from Mike for a 49% stake in the company, which never ended up happening. After she left, I was the only woman regularly working in a design capacity. I later learned that towards the end of her time at Lone Shark, especially if she had pushed back on one of Mike’s ideas or disagreed with him on something, that he would tell her “Maybe I just need to work with someone younger.”

Lo and behold, barely 21-year-old intern me started at the company and soon after his business partner was gone.

“Understandably going to need help” and other attitudes about disability and mental health

In the summer of 2019, I recommended a former student of mine for an internship with Lone Shark Games. I had already been told he would be hired to help me with my projects, but Mike still wanted to evaluate him. While I was on vacation, I received the following text from Mike:

The “understandably going to need help” that Mike was referring to here is that the intern is dyslexic and that the editor had resigned earlier that week.

I immediately sent this on to the company president at the time and cited that I was unhappy with how the intern I recommended had been infantilized, I had been asked me to do editorial work on top of my already crushing workload, and how it seemed to place some sort of weird burden on the former editor because she had been pushed into “promising” to do the job she already had. I also found it incredibly troubling that the text heavily implied that if I said no, Mike would be fine with ignoring and violating the ADA.

What I didn’t know until later was that the prior week, Mike had pulled the editor into his office and told her that he had concerns about the intern’s quality of work and informed her that she was responsible for everything he did, if hired. As editor, her job was to make sure work from everyone in the company, including Mike, was ready for sharing or publishing so seeking out additional assurances that she would continue to do her job was bizarre. For her, that private chat felt like a subtle threat that if the intern, under my mentorship, failed at any part of his job, the editor would be liable.

The attitude Mike had toward this intern’s dyslexia repeats itself regarding other disabilities and mental health issues. These things were treated as a weakness and a flaw that had to be overcome so it wouldn’t affect your ability to do work for him. When Mike would talk about these issues, in general or as they pertained to myself or other employees, it was always in the context of how it affected him and his company, all while barely veiling his disdain and contempt for the person or issue they were dealing with. Sometimes the mask would slip and Mike would say he never wanted to work with someone again because of something related to their mental health.

“I’ll remember that” and other threats to people’s jobs

During an all-hands staff meeting, Mike was railing against a client enforcing part of a contract that deducted pay from Lone Shark for late work. One employee expressed her opinion that “I think they are allowed to do that if it’s a contract we agreed to and we should take this as a lesson to give the client work on time.” Mike immediately focused on her and asked, “Would you think that even if it cost someone their job?” When the employee stuck to her guns and said yes, she would still think that, Mike said extremely pointedly to her, “I’ll remember that.” It felt like a clear threat to her job and for all of us if we dared to speak up.

On multiple occasions I heard Mike refer to his ability or desire to destroy someone. If you mentioned someone saying or doing something that bothered you, he might ask “Do you want me to destroy them?” which then required you to talk him down from retaliating on your behalf. Once, when I asked for advice in shutting down a bigoted person online he told me “I simply destroy people, so that they never say dumb things again in my presence.”

When you consider how connected Mike is (famous friends, convention runners, heads of studios, publishers, venues — pretty much anything in and around the game and puzzle industry) you realize that if he wants to influence conventions you can attend or speak at, publishers who will take you on or even listen to your game pitch, and what kind of employment or work opportunities you have in the future — he has the friends and connections to get his way. He worked hard to make sure that I (and other employees) never forgot that.

Both times I left the company, I was nervous about how Mike would react and if that would impact my future career prospects. I think those fears were warranted, though I don’t know if Mike ever acted in that way regarding me. An implied or even clearly stated “I know a lot of people at <company>” or “it would be too bad if your new job was harder” have happened to me and others.

When people’s employment would end, they would be asked to work on things (unpaid, obviously) after their end date with the heavy implication that they owed it to Mike and the company. They would also have their name used after they left the company in credits or on social media posts without being asked if that was ok or even being made aware of it.

“I apologize for asking but I need your thoughts on this”

A Mexican former employee was called into Mike’s office regarding a card for one of the games that featured a brown-skinned character who was clearly meant to look like a day laborer (the person in question does not remember if this was the name of the card or if the card ended up getting pulled before printing) and after apologizing in advance, Mike asked him if the card bothered him. The employee, who was an intern at the time, told Mike that the card didn’t bother him. He remembers feeling like he was going to be in trouble when he got called into Mike’s office and is not sure he would have felt comfortable saying the card bothered him but that he hopes it wouldn’t have been printed as he saw it.

Women at the company routinely served the purpose of “being a woman who said X wasn’t offensive” or “being a woman who read Mike’s opinion before he posted it to social media so that counts as an endorsement by women.” This wasn’t limited to posts from the company or about work issues. These were posts that Mike was making on his personal account about everything — the industry, politics, entertainment, etc. If we offered any feedback about how his post centered him and treated him as a martyr or white knight, we had to deal with the fallout of his hurt feelings and he would sometimes be so fed up he wouldn’t post at all.

Repeat this pattern for any number of marginalized identities and issues ad nauseum. If you were the only person at the company, you suddenly became the spokesperson for all people you shared a characteristic with — gender, race, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, etc. For me, it even extended to things like vetting his posts about alcohol since I am open about my recovery.

Using “diversity” as armor

Being a part of Lone Shark, especially as a woman, meant constantly being trotted out as a testament to how diverse the company was and how progressive Mike’s hiring practices and attitudes were. Unfortunately, hiring women and using that to tout how diverse the company was is pretty much where the diversity ended.

Here is an example of Mike bragging about hiring two women by tagging them in a post about Gamergate:

When Mike and I were supposed to fly to DC for a single pitch meeting with a potential major client, I ran into difficulty making that work with my teaching schedule. I said that he should go and I would phone or video call in as was helpful and in trying to convince me to ignore my other responsibilities he told me “It’s important that they see we are not all people who look like me.” I couldn’t believe that he was asking me to ignore my teaching job and fight through my flight anxiety to be at the meeting so he could tick some invisible “young woman with blue hair and an undercut” diversity box off to the client.

I never came out publicly as bisexual until after I was done at Lone Shark because I didn’t want that part of my identity to be used as another thing to bolster Mike and/or the company’s reputation with some additional version of a “See, looky here at how diverse we are!”

Problematic and dangerous friends

I was no longer an employee at Lone Shark when the news about Max Temkin/Cards Against Humanity broke and both I and another non-employee woman both urged Mike to make a statement after there were multiple days of silence from him and his company. We knew that Mike and Lone Shark’s close collaborations and relationship with Max and CAH helped perpetuate the abuse happening there and we had all acted as character witnesses by association. When we asked if Mike would be making a statement, there was immediately an expectation that we would guide the substance of his statement. I declined and was made to feel bad for drawing a boundary. This was just one of many such situations regarding one of Mike’s friends over the years.

Physical fallout

In 2016, just a week before Gen Con, while working at a coffee shop, I started having physical symptoms I had only experienced once previously — right before I passed out in my dorm room during in college.

I was able to get to a nearby urgent care facility where they checked me out and sent me home with a diagnosis that amounted to extreme exhaustion and told me to rest. After months of sustained crunch and in the lead up to one of the biggest conventions of the year, I had worked myself to the point of my body failing me because it seemed like there was no other way to get all the work done. Despite sending messages that I was at urgent care I received work messages and calls and still felt pressured to attend an in person meeting in Seattle that evening which I somehow did thanks to adrenaline and caffeine.

I was then told the most important thing was for me to get better, with an unspoken “so you can work at Gen Con.” For the next several days, I was essentially too weak to leave my bed. I was sleeping for ~20 hours a day. I decided I was still up for going to Gen Con because it holds a special place in my heart and because I didn’t want to let my coworkers down and put even more work on their (very overworked) shoulders. I was also afraid of the consequences if I had pulled out of going at the last minute. I left Lone Shark for the first time a couple months after this.

Getting paid

There were many instances where paychecks at Lone Shark were late. Sometimes it was a one-off situation and sometimes there would be a cycle where several checks in a row would be late. We would be told “if you need money now, we’ll do what we can to help until the checks are deposited” which would require disclosing financial need that is none of an employer’s business, never mind that it might be uncomfortable for people to do so. If you had a partial check cut for you that day, depending on your particular bank it would take time for some or all of that money to be available (if you even had time to make it to the bank before closing). I have also heard more than one story about contract work never being paid for or for those payments to be made late. Asking questions about late pay or when it could be expected was often met with hostility.

Keeping silent about harassment

For a long time, Lone Shark employees were prohibited from making posts that called out harassment or other bad things happening in the industry.

By this same token, we were also prohibited from speaking up in support of people we knew or admired who were the subjects of harassment and other abuse. Many of us were frustrated with this policy. It hurt to not be able to support other people when they were going through something.

Calling something out that Mike hadn’t approved of put your job on the line. Of course, Mike was free to post whatever he wanted whenever he wanted. He alone controlled the decision-making power on which controversial posts were allowed. Eventually that policy changed, but we weren’t sure how much freedom we really had to post what we wanted.

Even though it was stated that the company and Mike wanted to take a more active role in speaking up in support of those being harmed in the industry, and calling out bad actors, the women at the company often had to urge Mike to post. Those same people would bear the brunt of vetting Mike’s draft and would have to manage his feelings when he inevitably took offense at some part of their feedback.

One woman at the company cited obvious sexist microaggressions in how she was treated by an official at a gaming convention in a post on her personal account and was nearly fired for it. At this particular convention, designers would receive a badge reading DESIGNER for playtesting their game in a designated area. She recounted (without naming the staffer) how when she asked for a designer badge, like the one given to her male coworker who was standing next to her after they finished running a game, the official tried to cred check her and offered her a different badge because he didn’t think she qualified as a game designer. When word of her post got back to one of the convention organizers things took a turn. In private, Mike reprimanded her and we were all trying to do damage control with him to protect her job. In public he left the following comments on her post:

I’ve gotten blowback from Mike and his desire for me to censor my language on posting criticism of a New York Times crossword that had a theme that mocked trigger warnings. This of course, predates the company publishing a crossword comic book that is all about critiquing the New York Times crossword.

Diminishing employees’ expertise

Minimizing someone’s role or expertise, especially in front of clients, was commonplace. Being called “coordinator” instead of “producer,” or being referred to as “Mike’s assistant,” or some other diminished form of one’s job title was common.

In fact, for a long time nobody but Mike had a title at Lone Shark. In part, this was due to everyone wearing “a lot of hats” and LSG had a flat hierarchy (except for Mike). After years of convincing Mike to give me and others job titles that described our roles at the company, I was disrespectfully and tackily deemed “puzzle ninja” even though I also did game and event design. Some time after that we were all re-titled as “developer” even though that title wasn’t particularly accurate. It turns out that seeking employment elsewhere is also harder if you don’t have a title (or a real-sounding one).

Mike also seems to have a sense of ownership over employees. You can see multiple social media posts (and if you were a fly on the wall could have heard it in client meetings) where Mike referred to me and others as “my developer” or “my assistant,” which always made my skin crawl and effectively positioned him above everyone else, even if he wasn’t the lead on a project. Here are even a couple written examples:

“That’s not what I meant…”

In a comment on a photo of his dog with a colorful mohawk, Mike once said, “To be fair, this hair color scheme now makes it permissible for him to be a female game designer at Lone Shark” which was deleted after someone brought up how it felt belittling because even though many of the women had rainbowy hair, it was essentially saying all it took to do our jobs was to have the hair. This was, as usual, responded to with a side-stepping “that’s not what I meant” but I tend to think Mike does know exactly what he’s saying due to his journalism background and years of working in word-based puzzles and games. As he’s fond of pointing out, like in the tweet below from just the other day, he’s a wordsmith.

Calling out something like this privately was risky. It could result in Mike taking out his anger about it on you and your work, or if you mentioned that you thought he said something out of line to someone else, he might take out his anger on them.

Calling out something like this publicly or semi-publicly was almost unthinkable. Mike has a temper, and he will unleash it on someone he perceives as a threat. Anything that threatened his veneer of being a champion of women and progressivism was untenable to him. Anything that threatened the perception that he was the shining star at Lone Shark caused him frustration and he would lash out. He always needed to center himself and his accomplishments.

A call out or disagreement with Mike often resulted in sending or a receiving a heads up message between coworkers so they knew that he might be angry or on edge. Sometimes you’d know that someone was going to work with Mike one-on-one and in order to not make that a more stressful situation, you’d hold off on giving feedback or disagreeing.

Ignoring feedback and directions

In the months before I left in 2019, if I gave Mike a task to do for the project aspects I was leading, he would ignore what I asked for and just do what he wanted. When the client or I gave feedback or made adjustments he would push back, change it back, sulk, refuse to adjust the work, and badmouth the client around the office. Sometimes all five. This was not unique to this client or this particular project but it was very apparent to me, the client, and at least one other coworker what was happening.

I was already overworked and stressed, and candid with our president that I was struggling. In this time, I did not receive support, see Mike’s behavior change (if anything, it got worse) and was chastised at least once for turning in work on the day it was due instead of turning it in early and for “not considering Mike’s mental health.” Not once do I feel like my mental or emotional health was considered. By the end of my time at Lone Shark, I was having daily panic attacks, my personal relationships had suffered, and it was nearly impossible for me to function around Mike. I’m still working on repairing these things, nearly two years later.

Psychological warfare

For years I worked to hide many of my true emotions and opinions (on both work and non-work things) because they might be used against me. It felt like Mike knowing anything real about me gave him more information on how to manipulate and exploit me or like it might be used to bolster Mike or the company’s reputation. Someone who has known Mike for decades once told me “Mike is the single most skilled person at psychological warfare that I’ve ever met.”

Beyond the comments that eroded my self-worth over the years and Mike’s constant positioning of himself as a martyr and white knight, it felt like Mike needed to have your attention when he wanted it and would ignore boundaries to achieve this. I would get late work calls and messages and be contacted while out of office for illness or vacation. If I didn’t respond, I would get more until I acknowledged him.

Once I left the company, I still got asked for opinions and feedback on work and to do emotional labor (can you help me with this difficult person, can you make me feel better about another one of my friend’s being outed as abusive, etc.).

I would get tagged in a social media post (without being asked), often placing disproportionate praise on me (you’re a hero, etc.) and if I didn’t respond to that in some way to validate what he said, I would get a text within a few days. This pattern has been repeated several times since I confronted Mike with his abusive actions about 18 months ago.

Part of this psychological warfare was knowing to compliment someone or to say thank you when they were at their breaking point. I’ve been given gifts (a funny book, an inflatable tube man for my desk, etc.) that often felt like buy-offs for having been treated poorly in lieu of an apology and change in behavior.

Driving Mike around

An unexpected part of working at Lone Shark was giving Mike rides since he does not drive at all. I lived the closest to Mike and there was an expectation of a ride from Renton up to the Redmond office or wherever in the Seattle area a client meeting was happening.

I realized that getting to Mike’s at the agreed upon time meant he often wasn’t ready so I started texting him a heads up that I was on my way. Even then I would usually end up waiting 15 minutes, often more. Sometimes he would let me in the house and I would awkwardly wait in the living room while he was on a call, went to take a shower or otherwise get ready, eat, or walk his dog. This complete lack of respect for my time was the least worst part of driving Mike.

During the 45+ minute drive to Redmond, Mike would often be working on something on his laptop or taking calls. Sometimes I would be expected to give opinions and feedback or come up with ideas while driving. Sometimes those calls would result in Mike being very angry and yelling at whoever was on the phone or venting to me after they hung up. During his calls, I would overhear things that other employees didn’t know and honestly, things I should not have known. If we were late for something, even if it was due to Mike, there was a lot of pressure on me to try and make up that time while driving, sometimes unsafely.

Those drives, especially on the way home, would often involve him bashing or gossiping about other employees and their work. Sometimes there would be an implicit invitation to join in on badmouthing my coworkers and sometimes I would be asked how to deal with them. I was in an impossible position where I felt like I couldn’t properly defend anyone without being the new subject of Mike’s anger, though I did my best to calm him down and redirect his ire, and joining in felt gross.

This affected my ability to do my job because I knew I couldn’t afford to anger Mike at the office because I would be trapped in a car with him on the way home. None of this time was considered working hours and I was never compensated for the fuel or wear and tear on my vehicle. Eventually, I started leaving much earlier in the morning or making excuses about why I couldn’t give him a ride and his sister started giving him more rides. It never felt like there was space for me to say no.

Daily office life

And of course, during all these years, there were the regular digs and implications about someone’s ability or inability to do their job, the gaslighting, the shouting, the storming out of a room, the pitting people against each other, the intense micromanaging, grudge-holding, and ignoring an opinion if someone disagreed with him.

I can’t emphasize enough how common these behaviors were and how so many of them were centered around Mike getting his way or putting someone else down.

On multiple occasions, he would directly or indirectly belittle his employee’s personal goals by telling them it was impossible to achieve, that they couldn’t do it, or that they would need his help. When I told him about a personal project I was working on he told me, “You should see if <person> will pay you in <food product> because you’ll probably get more out of it that way,” just to make sure I knew that he thought it wouldn’t go anywhere profitable. Never mind the fact that he also implied that the person who was helping me with the project was somehow in charge and would be paying me.

This behavior also affected how everyone else worked and treated each other within the company. Some aspects of Mike’s consistently bad behavior seeped their way into other parts of the office and how we all interacted or treated each other. It was rare but other people now had tacit permission to berate someone, storm out of a room, and just generally be less kind to each other than we otherwise would have been.

Having a policy that we couldn’t offer any criticism of anything in the industry publicly didn’t stop Mike from consistently badmouthing other companies, people, and clients in private. When I mentioned I was applying for a job at Pokémon, Mike said “I don’t mean to sound negative but everyone I know who works there seems unhappy” which was eerily like what he said when I applied for a job at Wizards of the Coast years earlier. Clients who asked for revisions were deemed too demanding or unreasonable, other companies weren’t as talented as us, and so on. He’s said he’ll never work with people again only to turn around and talk about their friendship publicly when it serves his needs.

Special job duties

Mike would often wander away on a phone call or to talk to someone and would leave his bag, laptop, work materials, etc. unattended in a random public or semi-public place. This meant that I, or others, would end up babysitting his stuff or carrying it. Technically, I didn’t have to do this but I wanted to avoid the trip back to the place to retrieve it if he forgot something or the meltdown that would happen if it went missing. Taking care of these things meant protecting myself from later rage.

He would bring his dog to the office (surprise, that meant it also rode in your car unrestrained and whether you were comfortable with it or not!) and occasionally Mike would go in a different room than the dog for a phone call or meeting. His dog would then often get agitated and cry or try to follow if Mike left the room, so you’d have to comfort the dog while Mike did who-knows-what for who-knows-how-long. It was very distracting and stressful for some of us but was just expected of you.

I have apologized on Mike’s behalf (and mine because I was there) for anything from doing a video conference with a client in the middle of a coffee shop and disturbing people to trying to make up for the fact that he had a giant, rude meltdown in some restaurant in O’Hare because the airport wifi was not working on his laptop.

Mike would leave messes around the office (but wasn’t afraid to berate you or treat you passively aggressively for doing the same) and would often leave dishes behind in restaurants and cafes where it was expected that customers would bus their own tables. I would be expected to leave them for the staff to deal with or to take care of them for him.

“I’m not an empath”

I thought when Mike resigned the presidency in 2019 that our new president would finally be someone who could help resolve these issues and protect employees. At the very least, I was thrilled that there was somebody with whom concerns could be shared. Up until this point, it was up to all of us figure out how to handle Mike and Mike-related issues, as well as any internal conflicts we had with each other (often brought about by dealing with Mike). When he was president, you certainly couldn’t bring a Mike issue to Mike and expect it to be dealt with professionally and without ramifications on your day-to-day job experience and potentially future endeavors.

In one of his posts about the new company president, he says “I’m not an empath and everyone knows it.” He’s used this phrase and variations of it on numerous occasions to excuse his oftentimes cruel responses to real issues. I’ve heard him express disdain for this type of work and he seemed to take an almost bizarre pride in not dealing with “ workplace drama.” I don’t remember his exact words, but I know he’s said things like being happy that he would be able to spend time on things that matter and that he didn’t have to waste time babysitting or perhaps most ironically, managing egos.

“You know that how he treats women isn’t ok, right?”

I didn’t have the courage or confidence to leave Lone Shark for my own wellbeing until I been pulled aside by clients and asked if I was ok and if I realized how Mike was treating me.

A man and a woman from the client team of one project broached this conversation by asking me “You know that how he treats women isn’t ok, right?” They cited the way Mike treated me during interactions with them, how he referred to other women, and how women on the client’s team were treated. The woman who brought this to me said she and her team were bothered enough by this that she had effectively withdrawn from working on the project until I was on-site without Mike to run their event.

After that, I looked back at my interactions with Mike and saw repeatedly how the people who bore the brunt of Mike’s abusive behavior were women. I saw how when he pushed his business partner out shortly after I started at Lone Shark that I became the only woman regularly working on the design team. How when we had a woman as CEO, some of his actions were now directed at her and I had a little room to breathe. How some of that shifted to a different young woman who became his emotional punching bag around the office (especially after I left in 2016). How finally, I again took on the role of Mike’s emotional outlet when I returned to Lone Shark.

“I’m sorry if…”

I tried talking to Mike about this before and ran face first into an “I’m sorry if…” along with an explanation that, while women have left the company, so have men. Hiring lots of women and in his words “encouraging them to be in high-ranking positions” (though I never saw this reflected at Lone Shark as his treatment of the woman who was the CEO for a while was atrocious) meant that he couldn’t have an issue here, and if there was one, that it was due to unconscious bias.

I’ve been so fucked up over all this that I doubted myself and my own experiences so at the time, I let this non-apology slide and hoped that I would see him doing and being better. But in the months since I haven’t seen any big signs of change. Even looking for small signs of change like finally internalizing “ask before you tag someone (especially if they are marginalized in some way) on social media,” which has been reiterated to him by many people over multiple years, have left me disappointed.

I hope that this time he listens to his own words, shared here from a piece he wrote nearly a year and a half ago: “I have not been a great boss or partner to everyone who’s worked with me. I should expect to get called out for it, and I expect I will after this. If that happens, I need to not just hope it goes away. I need to stand up and admit my part in creating the negative culture people work in. I think that’s a thing all of us white men in the game business ought to consider doing.”

So… what now?

1. Please feel free to share this post. I don’t want to see anyone end up where I’m at because they didn’t know what they were getting into. And for anyone who may have been impacted negatively by Mike, please know that you aren’t alone and that you didn’t imagine that harm.

2. Carefully consider your personal and professional relationship with Mike going forward. What does it say to those around you, especially those who are in abusive and toxic environments, if you continue to share his posts, give him a pass for questionable behavior, work with him? Is keeping him as a friend or contact giving him a pass and tacitly endorsing his actions? How would you react to this news if this wasn’t someone you knew?

3. Consider your own actions. We’ve all done things that suck or harm someone else, even inadvertently, but intention doesn’t matter when harm has been caused. Try not to repeat those mistakes, when you realize you’ve caused harm, stop the behavior and apologize. As you examine your own past and current actions, if you sense a toxic or abusive pattern in your behavior, please seek help to change and stop that pattern. I think there is space for redemption if you see this pattern of behavior in yourself but a simple apology doesn’t do that. It takes work on yourself and your relationships and giving those you’ve harmed space to heal. It takes time to establish a new pattern of non-abusive behavior.

4. Under absolutely no circumstances should you to take out any feelings you have about me, Mike, or this post on current or past Lone Shark employees or collaborators. If you’re supporting me but harassing people who may not be in a situation where they feel they can post or share safely, you’re not actually supporting me or anyone else. You can’t possibly know their situation. You’re becoming part of a new problem. Leave. Them. Alone.

As for me, I’m taking a step back from the industry — in fact, I’ve already done so. Since leaving Lone Shark, nearly two years ago to the day, when I sit down to do creative work, I still hear echoes of Mike’s demoralizing and biting comments, and it requires tremendous amounts of energy to try and get past. If I’m collaborating with someone on a project, certain phrases and actions can result in triggering heightened anxiety or even a panic attack because they remind me of Mike and Lone Shark Games. I have lost my self-confidence and ability trust in myself, my skills, and those I attempt to work with. I hope that in the not-too-distant future I’ll feel able to make games and puzzles again but, for now, the best way for me to heal is to step away and consider all the other paths I might take going forward. Thank you so very much for reading this.