Bungie Writer Says She Was Not Promoted For “Not Good Enough In Destiny 2”

There’s a big inside report on Destiny 2. One author of the game tells how badly the employees of the story team were treated. For example, she was refused a promotion because she was not good enough at it. Her job didn’t require that.

Which employee is it about? The US side IGN spoke to current or past employees at Bungie. One woman appears there by name, Cookie Hiponia. She started working for Bungie in September 2016, first as a freelancer, then later joined Bungie full-time and joined the narrative team. She stayed with the company as Managing Editor until August 2019.

In her position she was responsible for the text in the game and has editorial oversight. She says that before her time at Bungie, there wasn’t much focus on the story being coherent and the continuity right.

That would have meant that there were hardly any professional standards in the team: “There were only a few people who wrote things and managed the thing.”

No promotion because she “wasn’t good enough at the game”

That was the problemlem with promotions: Hiponia says: The chronically understaffed writing team would have been consistently criticized. They were told that they were “difficult to deal with”, that they “did not support their bosses well enough”, that they were aggressive, rude and that they could not handle criticism.

These arguments would also have come up every time it came to promotions. They have been rejected again and again.

Hiponia says she was specifically told she couldn’t be promoted because she “wasn’t good enough at the game.” Her job wasn’t about gameplay design at all. When she then asked to give her more time to play so she could get better, it was rejected.

This is how it is discussed: On reddit the whole insider report is discussed. The point that an author was not promoted because she allegedly plays too badly, however, triggers a lack of understanding among the players. Because in her opinion, practically all Bungie employees who have been watched playing so far are pretty lousy in Destiny 2:

• “I’ve seen these guys play during shows and raid-alongs. They play like it’s the first time, like they’ve ever touched any game. So the hell with it! “
• “If you just don’t want to promote someone, you come up with some kind of excuse so it doesn’t seem like you have them in your sights.”

Apparently, some writers “didn’t fit” into Bungie’s culture

This is behind it: The problems with continuity at Bungie that Hiponia mentions could be seen in the fact that Luke Smith, the boss of Destiny 2, once confessed that he had no idea what “darkness” actually was, a big concept from Destiny 1.

Obviously, it was sorely necessary that someone address exactly the issues for which Hiponia was responsible. But from the report it becomes clear that the author and her team apparently had a lot of conflicts with the “ancestors”. It is also said that there was cultural conflict because writers like Hiponia, a native of the Philippines, struggled with how the bosses at Bungie portrayed the women in the game.

The statement, “We can’t promote you because you’re too bad in Destiny 2” seems like some kind of code for saying, “You don’t fit in here – you’re not a gamer.”

This also explains why Bungie’s CEO Pete Parsons emphasized so strongly in his response to the insider report that women and members of underrepresented groups have been given much more focus and that a lot is happening here. Because with just one person, Cookie Hiponia, the integration in Bungie apparently did not work at all from 2016 to 2019.

We have covered the Insider Report extensively on MeinMMO:

Terrifying inside report on Destiny 2 explains the story’s many problems