We Are Watching Eliza Bright

Attributes: adult fiction, novel, dark comedy/thriller

Tags: unreliable narrators fight for chapters, gamergate, toxic fandom, IT'S ABOUT ETHICS IN GAME JOURNALISM!!!!!

Quick note: I received a free copy of this book from Grand Central Publishing via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. That did not influence the content of this review.

We Are Watching Eliza Bright is about video games. And memes. And jokes. And it's also about none of those things. It paints a picture of how all those things feed into culture, and narrative, and belief, and values.

“It's not just games” echoes through the core of a book as it tells a tale where sexual harassment escalates to physical assault, and where game culture escalates to gamified gendered violence. At points, the book gets uncomfortably close to recent events, clearly drawing inspiration from actual episodes of harassment during Gamergate.

Personally, I loved every second. It's a emotionally difficult: Horrible things happen to the titular Eliza Bright. Eliza starts her first week of her dream job as a developer on one of her favorite video games, a superhero MMORPG. Her new coworkers mess up her code and write “boobs” all over it. Her company mishandles Bright's harassment report, so she goes to a journalist. The responses, of course, vary: She's taking things too seriously, it's just a joke, she's a feminist hero, would she like a new job with us, etc. Then one of the coworkers doxxes her. Eliza's blip in the news cycle turns into a barrage of harassment and stalking (much of which comes from actual things that have happened to actual doxxed women). Things get much, much worse from there.

In some ways, the plot takes a backseat to its telling. The thing is, we don't really know what happened with Eliza Bright. Dueling narrators fight over the chapters. On the one hand, we have toxic fandom, the obsessive players of the MMORPG that Eliza helps develop. On the other (slight spoilers), a group of queers who live in a commune that helps Eliza hide later in the book.

This book is a telephone game, and a conspiracy theory. Most chapters follow the twisted fantasies of the internet stalkers who imagine entire scenes based on a latitude-longitude code placing two people in the same room. They put pieces together from digital leftovers. As their information decreases in quality, they'll recast three versions of the exact same scenes, taking cues from hackers and public records and data dumps.

But they've never met Eliza, or her boss or her coworkers. And as they tell the tale, it becomes increasingly clear that the fans are living in a crass drama of their own making.

(It's basically reading a book narrated by this guy:

Image of Charlie Day as Charlie Kelley in popular Pepe Silvia meme pointing at a serial killer conspiracy board

Meanwhile, the author is carefully constructing a story that shows all the ways said guy's talking points become literally dangerous – and relentlessly making fun of him.)

It sounds disorienting. In the hands of a lesser author, this could have gone horribly wrong. But this was one of my favorite parts of the book. Osworth handles it phenomenally – they balance readability, unreliability, and maybe-clues-about-reality. It's always extremely clear when the narrators are backtracking, and their biases are right on the page.

(Worth a mention here that Osworth has tackled similarly complex topics in their essays, often while messing with form, and I've loved those as well. See some standouts on bisexuality and thirst traps and gender in VR.)

If you're a reader who wants to definitively, actually know “what happened,” you might have some trouble with this book. The queer commune narrators do shed some actual, probably-more-accurate light on the proceedings later on. But a huge portion of the story is still filtered through others who are, you know, watching Eliza Bright, and not very kind about it. At the end of the story, you very likely know what happened – especially about certain key events that most definitely did occur – but you also have no idea about some tidbits behind the scenes. But, again, what actually, definitely happened every step of the way is, in some senses, beside the point.

A lot of fiction that takes this type of approach uses the ambiguity of the events, and the unreliability of the narrator, to avoid committing to a point of view. “We're just asking questions!” is the general energy. But Osworth does the opposite. Every bit of ambiguity in Eliza Bright's story builds to a larger point and structure. The book is full to the brim with a point of view, and that is not ambiguous.

Instead of distracting, these narrative lenses end up making a host of powerful points about paths of disinformation, how “harmless jokes” connect to more literal harms... and they also make a compelling argument that it matters who gets to tell a story. (A lot of recent books have had the thesis “stories matter.” Very few have really articulated why as clearly as this one.) The gamerbros straight-up on-the-page get mad that queer people get to take over the narrative, and it's fantastic. You can practically hear the same talking heads screaming “it's about ethics in game journalism!!!!!!!!!!” on Twitter.

This book has a sense of humor about most of its contents – but it's still deeply humane, sympathetic to its characters who do no harm and unflinching from the realities of its nastier occupants. This one's heftier at 420 pages, and a bit denser of a read if you want to pick out all the details. But it's well worth the mental energy.

We Are Watching Eliza Bright is somehow systematic and slippery at once. It follows the titular character through a hard-fought promotion as a developer at primarily male-staffed Fancy Dog Games, where she is instantly met with demeaning misogynistic attacks from her coworkers and faced with the struggle of whether to speak up. Will anything change? Will it be worse after? Does she owe it to all the uncelebrated, hardworking women in games to call it out? Unfortunately for Eliza, she chose to find out.

Told from two opposing perspectives, Osworth cloaks the reader in anonymity so we too are watching Eliza Bright. We are not quite her, but not quite them either. We're first submerged in an obsessive, incel troll echo chamber that felt realistic enough to make reading difficult early in the text. We're subject to their pervasive assumptions and outright lies spreading like wildfire to fit their narrative and keep their world under (their) control. We get the small breath of relief of temporary shelter within a queer art commune, doting on Eliza with unquestioning love and community support. We eavesdrop on perspectives from both the antagonist(s) and protagonist(s). We are allowed to choose (though, if you truly see a choice, you've perhaps missed the message here).

Osworth's writing was thoughtful and detailed. I was not surprised to read that they worked on this text for half a decade. The care showed. There was a surprising mix of tender and analytical. Humor and disgust. Cyberspace and meatspace. Ambiguity and clarity. Several of the secondary characters received enough detail and story arcs that they felt fulfilled instead of an untied thread. Most importantly, the story moved along and maintained its suspense while providing enough detail to created a virtual reality not completely unlike that which got Eliza into this situation in the first place. All in all, a very fun and thought-provoking read from a promising voice.

Published by Grand Central Publishing on April 13, 2021

It’s early, but We Are Watching Eliza Bright might be the most inventive novel I will read this year. From its prose (“Suzanne twitches and wonders how a room without a door can smell so Strongly of anything let alone the ephemeral subtle stench of depression”) to its structure to its surprising plot, A.E. Osworth has crafted a timely American original.

The novel’s point of view might be its best feature. For the most part, the POV is collective. As the title implies, the novel is narrated by the “we” who are watching Eliza Bright. The narrators “watch” Eliza with their eyes when she is in their line of sight, by hacking her computer or phone, by tracking her online presence, by monitoring the location of devices belonging to people who have contact with her, and through crowdsourced surveillance. Some of the watchers are Eliza’s co-workers, including Leaky Joe, who feeds information to the collective that he gleans by watching Eliza from a distance with his “mad lipreading skills.” Others are members of the gaming community.

Members of the collective often draw different conclusions about the facts they are narrating, usually because they are speculating about events that occur outside of their physical or virtual presence. Sometimes the collective narrates alternative versions of things that they imagine might have happened. In one version of a visit to Eliza’s apartment by her boss, they have sex; in another, the boss doesn’t even take his coat off. Either version makes for a good story.

The “we” who read about Eliza on Reddit have a perspective that they believe to be more civilized than that of the “we” who read about her on 4chan. While the collective shares diverse opinions, we know that it is unified in its disdain for Eliza. Most of its members view her friend and co-worker Suzanne as a “social justice warrior,” the idea of social justice being particularly abhorrent to those who benefit from its absence.

The collective is dominated by males; few women remain “who have not been driven away.” The males in the collective generally view themselves as victimized by females. They believe “the world isn’t safe for normal white men anymore.” They presumably hang out on Reddit for affirmation. Suzanne belongs to a female collective counterpart, allies of Eliza who call themselves “the Sixsterhood.” They interact in person and presumably stay far away from Reddit.

The story initially centers on a relatively mild instance of sexual harassment that quickly escalates when Eliza complains about it. Eliza works for Fancy Dog Games. Her boss is Preston Waters. Preston co-created a popular game called Guilds of the Protectorate. Eliza is a gamer whose avatar is called Circuit Breaker. Eliza is not a coder but she gets promoted to a position that requires her to develop coding skills. Other (mostly male) coders resent her presence and mark her lines of code with 80085, which looks like the word boobs if you squint just right. Eliza complains to Preston, which makes the coders, led by Lewis Fleishman and Jean-Pascale Desfrappes, go ballistic. How dare she? Doesn’t she have a sense of humor? Preston, who portrays himself as woke and open and is very into deep and meaningful Conversations with employees, pretends to be concerned while he — with the utmost display of sensitivity — encourages Eliza to drop the whole thing so everyone can return their focus to helping Fancy Dog make money. Meanwhile, the coders who watch through the office windows assume that Eliza is shagging Preston because why else wouldn’t he have fired her for complaining about them?

Eliza wants Fancy Dog to change the male-centric culture that characterizes the tech industry and gaming. When she doesn’t back down as a good “team player” should — when she in fact shares her concerns with the media — the coders decide to punish her. Soon the entire word of gaming joins in the fun, which isn’t fun for Eliza. In fact, they want to instill fear in Eliza, from which they derive the equivalent of sexual pleasure that they probably can’t get in any other way. The worst of them, a sadist who calls himself The Inspectre, sets out to terrorize her. The Inspectre is much admired in the collective for having the courage to do things in the real world that others only fantasize about. More timid members of the collective content themselves with raping Circuit Breaker inside Guilds.

The novel’s form is occasionally experimental, but not drastically so. Periods are sometimes omitted from sentences. (I imagine that’s a statement about a generation that grew up writing periodless texts.) Important words are capitalized; words in phrases are capitalized as if they are titles. Many chapters consist of text message chains.

The novel explores physical and psychological threats to women in the workplace, the use of NDAs to silence wronged employees, and the team-building style of business management that pretends to be more humanistic than traditional heirarchical companies. On a more philosophical level, We Are Watching Eliza Bright asks whether there is any longer a difference between the virtual world and the physical world. Eliza argues that online encounters, in gaming environments or other virtual settings, are just as important as encounters in meatspace. We convince ourselves that “things that happen in games and online aren’t important” when they might be just as psychologically consequential as in-person interactions. Eliza contends that it is dangerous to “fragment our society even further” by living in a virtual world without human interaction, a world that breeds incels and white nationalists in the absence of the civilizing influence of community.

It could be argued that online communities are not much different from physical communities and that people who think alike will seek each other out, in physical space or in online communities. That certainly seems to be true of white nationalists. Perhaps online life is different for nerdish guys (and I say this as someone who was once a nerdish kid), who might develop a resentment of women who dismiss them as undesirable. Perhaps their resentments are reinforced in online communications that encourage hostility to women in the workplace. Whether or not the reader is persuaded by Eliza’s argument, the story makes clear that the discussion is worth having. In any event, the story is worth reading for its literary and entertainment value apart from the book club discussions it might inspire.

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