Can a video game writer do her best work at the industry's biggest scale? Well: Meghna Jayanth is fine where she is. Last year, with Outerloop Games, she released Thirsty Suitors, a fluorescent fusion of messy flirting and sick skating; coming up next is All Rise, a climate action courtroom drama. These are indie games – Thirsty Suitors' hero is a queer Desi skater and the villain is her feelings; of course it is an indie game – and Jayanth, one of the star video game writers of her generation, is perfectly at home here, where a modest budget is the trade-off for making joyful games about colonialism, identity and sexuality, with people whose values align with hers. The money is smaller, and that hurts getting the work noticed.

Over the last two years, in a protracted and devastating #MeToo movement for the video games industry, hundreds of women have spoken out about the manipulative and predatory behaviour they have experienced in their video game careers. A 2018 investigation by games website Kotaku led to legal action at California developer Riot Games, where five former employees sued the company over workplace harassment and discrimination and hundreds more joined walkouts to protest. The company promised to overhaul its workplace culture and a settlement was made in 2019. Then, last summer saw a wave of stories on Twitter about people in the games industry generally being plied with drinks and pressured into sex at industry parties, belittled and gaslit at work by male bosses, stalked, groomed, harassed, or treated with contempt when a senior man's advances were spurned. In the past month there has been another surge of allegations against men from all areas of the video game world - developers to the games media, Twitch streamers and YouTubers to competitive players.

I time my dodges carefully, angling just right to catch the boss as he lunges where I'm no longer standing. Then I jump back, down an estus flask and restore my health, staying a whisker out of reach. But this time I've miscalculated. The game forces me to watch as my outmatched, under-levelled character meets the business end of an axe in a frustratingly long cinematic sequence. I start again, this time favouring the monster's unarmed side.