The thing they say they’re mad at never actually matters

Ten years ago, a bunch of bigoted fascist assholes used false pretenses to terrorize women, queer people and people of color in the video game industry, in games media, and even in academic games studies. These false pretenses – proven false at the time and repeatedly many times over in the years since – do not matter. What matters is that they were enough to shift the discourse in their favor. Suddenly everyone – including me, sadly – was talking about “ethics in games journalism” like it was anywhere remotely an issue worth discussing.

That campaign never ended. The people responsible for pushing it were in many ways rewarded for their bullshit, whether through the laundering of “legitimate” press jobs in conservative media outside games or they were straight up installed into positions of political power. That tactic has proven successful repeatedly in the years since. We are now on round eleventy billion of it, and it’s still working. One of the people who has perfected the tactic, Chris Rufo, just straight up announces his next target when it’s time for the right-wing Lynch mob to move on. They went from freaking out about cultural marxism to critical race theory to drag queens to trans kids in sports to – today – DEI. Diversity, Equity, Inclusion. “DEI must die!” they exclaim. And we’re seeing them launder that bullshit right now.

Before this week, I didn’t know what Sweet Baby, Inc. was. That’s likely true for you as well. It’s a “narrative development and consultation studio based in Montreal.” They get contracted by larger games studios to punch up characters, often of marginalized backgrounds, and make them more relatable to marginalized audiences. From what I can tell they work on a “nothing about us without us” philosophy. They worked on Saga, the main character in Alan Wake II. She was great. I don’t know what else there is to say about this company, the people working for it, or the games they’ve worked on.

The reason we’re even talking about this company is because a Brazilian Steam curator (or whatever, I don’t actually give a shit, this isn’t a journalistic piece and to be honest I’m already wasting enough words on these shitheads as is) set up a page dedicated to “warning people” about games SBI worked on, because of woke. Because of DEI. Because that’s what is ruining the games industry according to these pieces of shit, not ravenous, shortsighted executives cutting studios apart at the gut to save profits. Not destructive game development practices or processes like crunch. It’s the woke!

We can talk about developer transparency until we’re blue in the face. We can talk about corporate supplier networks and distribution chains often requiring big companies to reach out to smaller ones for consultancies and contract work. We can talk about how changes to game narrative are not set in stone by consultants and are still ultimately signed off on by game directors, etc until we’re all fucking dead. But it doesn’t matter, because the situation behind it all is quite simple.

For a certain section of people, “Gamer” is synonymous with only one thing: white straight cisgender men. The attempt to include others, to make others feel welcome, to represent others in all kinds of stories, is a threat to them. It is part of a broadbased cultural conspiracy to eliminate straight white men from society. It is the great replacement, white genocide, globohomo, the scary trans, and so on. It sounds crazy because it is crazy. It’s fucking bugshit. But it’s also a coherent political ideology represented by a guy who committed major federal crimes – including an attempted coup d’état – in plain view and will never be held accountable by a single judge or jury for them. The guy who runs one of the websites this post will be shared on also believes these things, and actively shapes the site to respond to them even as other vital online infrastructure crumbles. A lot of credulous “centrist” and “liberal” writers have fallen for this bullshit hook-line-sinker, too, to the point where they’re willing lapdogs for fascism.

I don’t have a call-to-action here, except to ask the folks who are unfortunately keyed into this story to tell your offline friends that this shit ain’t got legs. That might be the best thing we’ve got at the moment. What is important to understand is that it isn’t ever the target of their garbage-slinging that matters. If it wasn’t Sweet Baby it would be another company with a similar mission. Or even just a game dev with that mission. But what actually matters is combatting their bullshit bigotry.