Stop calling it a 'reset' when it's an amputation

Asha Sharma wants to call the recent layoffs at Xbox-owned game studios a "reset". This is because of the connotations the word brings - a reset is a mildly disruptive way to solve a problem. When your PC is being glitchy, a reset is kind of annoying, but it fixes things. When you have over-complicated a spreadsheet, a reset will take everything back to the start. A reset has the feel of icy water splashed on your face during a difficult day, a dive into a cold pool when your week is going bad. A clean slate. A fresh do-over. A reset is a brief but ultimately freeing moment of discomfort or inconvenience, followed by excitement at a new start. 

This is not that. The wrecking ball currently crashing through Xbox is anything but cleansing. If we are to use a word or phrase to describe the ongoing layoffs, why not reach for words which truly reflect the human cost, impact and intent of the action. How about "bloodletting" or "demolition job"? What about "slash and burn"? This is an act of cutting, violent in its method, drastic in scope and ultimately a form of self-inflicted loss. It is not a "reset". This is an amputation.

I have written before about how language becomes mangled by corporations seeking to avoid scrutiny, guilt, or repercussions when cutting jobs. Businesses are loathe to use plain descriptive words that accurately explain what they are doing. This is not new, and it's not unique to the games industry. Job cuts become "restructuring". Studio closures (or project cancellations with the accompanying layoffs) become "sunsetting". 

A reset is quick and painless.
An amputation is a traumatic loss. 

This is always annoying, but let's take it as an opportunity to be better wordsmiths than the sellout hacks who work in the damage control departments of big tech. If publishers and megacorps are free to use poetic license to obscure an ugly act, then journalists, commentators, and the public are likewise free to use the same laws of lyricism to drag that ugly act back into plain sight. 

Don't say "restructuring". Say massacre.

These people did not get "let go". Their monthly paycheck got blindfolded and shot in the head.

Xbox is not undergoing a "reset". It is performing an idiotic act of auto-cannibalism. 

Maybe you think this is hyperbole. Nobody has died, you might say, so calm down with the gory metaphors. But that's the thing. Bloody analogies are more accurate than the crisp, clean propagandising of Microsoft's marketing department. In their metaphor, the corporation is a cute machine that needs a little tap of a tiny switch round the back. Oopsie! Let us just ctrl-alt-del our way out of this silly mess, ha ha. What are we like! But in a more emotionally correct metaphor the corporation is a human body. To fix what the company considers a sick body, they are taking a hacksaw to its shins. 

Already Microsoft has framed its actions as a necessary dose of salts following the over-indulgence of previous leadership. Even some in the games media seem eager to adopt this narrative - that Phil Spencer and his Game Pass strategy was an ill-advised spending spree which has come to a head and now requires correction. Corporate consolidation under Spencer was never a good thing, and it probably was unwise from a bookkeeping perspective. But I don't think it's the core reason a business still making huge profits must put concrete boots on one-fifth of its workforce and dump them in the nearest LinkedIn feed. You have probably already guessed the grander reason. Yes, I'm sorry, it's AI again.

Aside from the fact incoming regimes love to lay all blame at the feet of previous regimes, it's easy to see why Asha Sharma and her team find corporate revisionism preferable to the much more obvious bullshit that is stinking up the entire boardroom. The former head of AI at Microsoft is cutting money in one part of the company, while an even bigger amount of money is being pumped into Microsoft's efforts to keep the AI bubble inflated. Is this significant? Who can possibly say. 

This is why I hyperbolise. A freakish monster indulging in a sanguinary act of self-breakfasting is the defining image of Xbox today. The beast is eating its own legs to drive a hunger that cannot be sated. The craving for capital to pump into AI is driving corporations to hawk their stock and sack their best. Xbox is slicing off its own limbs, extracting its own kidneys, taking out its own eyes, feeding long-helpful (and profitable!) parts of its body to an adjacent machine that has not yet made anyone on earth, except stockbrokers and CEOs, a single penny. 

I'm not interested in interrogating the financial rationale behind all this (for that please listen to Jonty on our podcast - the level-headed voice of reason who has probably seen Microsoft's spreadsheets). I have no interest in forecasting how good or bad the profit margins will look now that they don't have to pay all those pesky human beings. I only want to extend my metaphor to its conclusion and encourage other writers to avoid linguistically shilling for the shitcanners, even if it is mostly by accident. This is not a reset. Xbox might survive this desperate frenzy of gobbling its own intestines for sustenance. It will hobble about and put all its weight on a single straining Fallout 5, trying to pick things up with one fingerless Halo remake. It won't wake up tomorrow clean and refreshed, ready to start over again at some undefined save point in the past. A reset is quick and painless. An amputation is a traumatic loss. 

Even for those who remain, the psychological fallout of losing half your co-workers to the slop compactor is coupled with the ever-dangling axe threatening to fall on you next (the company still plans to cut 1600 jobs and nobody knows whose payslips are going to get disappeared in the night). It will be hard under those conditions for many workers to make good art when they think at any moment they may find themselves struggling to pay the rent. What about this feels like the quick, sharp flash of black and the hopeful boot noise that accompanies a reset? Nothing.

I don't think many of my co-blatherers in games media are actually convinced by Xbox's propagandistic word use, but some keep using the word "reset" nevertheless, enshrining it in those protective quote marks, because it has become a handy shorthand to refer to the ongoing mass enfuckenating of livelihoods (it's also short, which works well in a headline, like, uh, the one on this article). But as you can see from the paragraphs above, it is far more fun to find a new way to describe the layoffs in language not endorsed by Microsoft's slopmaster-in-chief. So please, don't use Sharma's shitty little trinket word. When you see a bonesaw severing away at people's lives, dip your pen in the blood and write brutal truth. Xbox is dismembering itself.