BAFTA Pulled Trailer Last Minute Over Trigger Concerns
Indie developer Silver Script Games received devastating news that BAFTA pulled trailer for their upcoming game, The Quiet Things, at the last minute.
The founder, Alex Jones, was excited to see her trailer at the BAFTA Games Awards showcase, but was left in tears, according to her LinkedIn post. “Last night, on my way to the nominee’s party, I got a phone call telling me that the trailer for my indie game The Quiet Things had been pulled” due to its contents, she wrote in the post.
“I believed this was the biggest opportunity we were ever likely to get. I was so hopeful that this tiny indie game might actually be seen by a huge audience. Finally, a break.”
Jones continues, saying, “To have that pulled from under our feet the night before the show was devastating, especially after revising the trailer to remove imagery BAFTA flagged as potentially reading as ‘weapons and violence’ (an object inspection of a craft knife and a statue breaking out of a mirror), and being thanked for my speed and the quality of the trailer.”
Jones indicated that the reason behind the trailer being pulled is that there wasn’t enough time to put the appropriate warnings in place for the audience. Jones said that she offered to change more to fix this issue, but she was ultimately ignored.
The Quiet Things is an autobiographical adventure game that follows a “fractured 2000s childhood in the South of England.” The story follows Alice, who tries to understand the world around her while dealing with an abusive environment. Silver Script says, “It’s about giving survivors a voice. Alice’s story is also many people’s stories that never get heard.”
In the LinkedIn post, Jones says the story is “deeply personal to me. It’s my story. It’s about trauma, abuse, survival, and giving survivors a voice. It’s about people being shut down and silenced, and what that does to them. So there is something deeply painful about reliving that again now.”
According to VGC, a spokesperson for BAFTA said that they “made a compliance decision not to show a trailer of an unreleased game that contains themes that may be a trigger for some, in consideration of our guests as we were not in a position to sufficiently warn them. We fully support games that engage with difficult subjects, and we made the decision in relation to our event only and with the wellbeing of all guests as our priority.”
The trailer is now posted and can be watched above, and fans can wishlist the game now on Steam.
