BAFTA pulls game trailer over ‘themes that may be a trigger’ even after developer revision

Silver Script Games founder Alyx Jones had planned to roll out a trailer for her studio’s new game, The Quiet Things, at last night’s BAFTA awards—but as Jones shared in a LinkedIn post yesterday, she received a phone call the night before telling her the trailer had been pulled due to sensitive content.

“It was meant to be shown during the awards show and reveal our release date,” Jones posted. “For the last two weeks I’d been working hard to cut this trailer together while already badly burned out, because I believed this was the biggest opportunity we were ever likely to get.”

This wasn’t the first time concerns had been raised about the trailer, which introduces the game’s themes of childhood trauma, but Jones said she believed the issue was resolved to BAFTA’s satisfaction.

“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.”

She continued that she offered to revise the trailer even further, but “was ignored,” with BAFTA allegedly maintaining that “there wasn’t enough time to put the appropriate warnings in place for the audience.”

In a statement to Kotaku, BAFTA responded to Jones’ post. “We 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,” the organization said. “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.”

You can check out the new trailer on YouTube, and while it clearly evokes themes of abuse and trauma (mostly through dialogue and nonviolent, abstract visuals), it’s certainly less shocking than, I don’t know, any Larian trailer in recent memory. It’s hard not to think of Horses, a game banned from multiple major digital storefronts for visuals and themes that, while perhaps uncommon in the videogame space, seem no more shocking than what you’d see in a mildly transgressive horror flick.

“Art should make people feel something,” Jones continued in her post. “The Quiet Things 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.”