Controversy erupted on X over the weekend when professional Woke Cult purity assurance coven Sweet Baby Inc. issued a fatwa against a scrappy Brazilian vidya curator.
The curator, Sweet Baby Inc Detected, describes itself simply as “A tracker for games involved with Sweet Baby Inc.”
The About page from SBI’s web site states:
Founded in 2018, Sweet Baby Inc. is a narrative development and consultation studio based in Montreal and working around the globe. Our mission is to tell better, more empathetic stories while diversifying and enriching the video games industry. We aim to make games more engaging, more fun, more meaningful, and more inclusive, for everyone.
One might think that a creator services company would welcome a third party curator enhancing the visibility of its work. In the age of digital marketing, discoverability is the key to success.
Yet SBI’s response was less than enthusiastic. Pop culture news site Fandom Pulse has the story:
Since Sweet Baby Inc. came into notoriety, they have locked down their Twitter account. Many of Sweet Baby Inc.’s projects have been left in the shadows, knowing that if anyone catches a whiff of Sweet Baby Inc.’s stench on a game, then its sales would plummet or be non-existent. Fortunately, there is a Steam user by the name of Kabrutus who has set up a Steam curator account to point out games that Sweet Baby Inc. got their claws into called ‘Sweet Baby Inc detected.’ It has become a helpful curator account as it points out which games Sweet Baby Inc. has worked on. As of this writing, this Steam curator account has 13,203 followers and is expected to climb higher. As many as 18 games are currently on this curator list, with more games added as time goes on.
Unfortunately, this curator page on Steam has attracted the attention of Sweet Baby Inc.’s Narrative Designer, Chris Kindred. Upon discovering the curator page, he made the following tweets:
Related: The Price of Fun
What motive could a “narrative development and consultation studio” have for trying to silence an independent curator shining a spotlight on its work?
Author David V. Stewart put together this video to address the question:
Video game players and professionals took to X to investigate the mystery. One clue turned up on the timeline of a self-described SBI consultant:
Legendary Diablo II and World of Warcraft co-designer Mark Kern explained.
Related: The Riddle of the Pop Cult
Readers will long memories will remember Zoe Quinn as the disgraced game developer whose questionable professional conduct ignited the GamerGate consumer revolt.
In contrast to that crusade for ethics in games journalism, the SBI vs Kabrutus controversy seems to have reached a swift and decisive conclusion.
While it’s likely that Sweet Baby Inc will continue operations despite its PR disaster, this consumer victory may be a sign that gamers are no longer willing to do business with companies that hate them.
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David did a good job explaining the situation that gamers have woken up to the BS the industry and the woke mob running it are shelling out. If the industry targets someone, chances are the person is worth supporting.
The woke culture has done this to themselves. They said either you side with lunatics or you side with “Nazis”. Now they’re angry that everyone is siding with “Nazis”.
One day, for no reason at all …
The observably insane, take no prisoners approach is an excellent way to get people to start goose stepping in brown uniforms. At this rate, they might just bring back mustaches too.
It should also be mentioned that this year is the 10th anniversary of GamerGate and that the “just ignore the corruption” group that were all about “both sides” taking blame have been proven, especially with this revelation, to have been completely wrong.
This was always the end goal, and now there is no denying that the industry is run by cultish blackmailers who hate you and want to destroy what you love.
What separate gaming from the other dying industries is that they were smart enough to detach from AAA ages ago. There is a thriving and extremely large indie scene set up and running without any influence from this crowd. While AAA implodes (Xbox leaving console gaming, Sony hemorrhaging employees and having no games for their flagship system for yet another year), middle market and small devs working outside this death trap are doing better than ever.
We need to use this industry as an example for all moving forward. They clearly understand something the rest of us do not.
One could argue that newpub figured it out first. The resources needed to make a AAA game are orders of magnitude greater than oldpub spends on any book. That lower production cost was both a boon that helped newpub get off the ground and a bane that’s given TPTB an easier time keeping oldpub afloat.
“that the “just ignore the corruption” group that were all about “both sides” taking blame have been proven, especially with this revelation, to have been completely wrong.”
It’s fundamentally true that quite often a judgement has to be made between two flawed parties. “It’s everyone’s fault”, however, is convenient and high brow way to avoid making a judgement. It’s a highly irritating argument and an even worse way to attempt to function in life.
Funny really. When the progs came for sports the jocks put up no fight. They bent the knee. When the progs came for nerds and their video games… Well, the nerds are still fighting.
The nerds watched the jocks get smashed into pulp time and time again to the Howling of the crowds in the stands, then decided that the corner they were confined to was the better place in the long run, thus worth fighting for.
“Nerd” is a manufactured identity spread by the media. The video game industry didn’t get bigger than Hollywood by appealing to a niche subculture. In reality, everyone plays video games and has since the 1980s.
As an example, look up the “Geek Culture” channels defending things like the new animated X-Men slop or Sweet Baby Inc. Corporate apparel everywhere, stereotypical unkempt beards and sloppy dress, and plenty of snark to show that caring about things is just as cringe (maybe chuds are even worse!) as soulless corporations exploiting your childhood and attacking customers for their tired agenda. They’ve been doing this for over a decade at this point, and show no signs of stopping.
Those aren’t “jocks” and they are definitely not, in any sense, Normal People. They are the people who embrace the corporate geek identity the people who hate them assigned decades ago and will defend it to the death. Because it’s the only thing they have.
Fact of the matter is that all of this would have gone away if Geeks would have just said “No” to subversion from the get-go, but they couldn’t and they can’t. They care too deeply about their weak materialistic identity and will do anything to keep their hollow world spinning.
That anyone feels the need to educate anyone on X-Men, a an irrelevant franchise that has been dead for nearly a quarter of a century and that no normal person one cares about anymore, never mind feels the need to attack anyone and snark over it, shows this issue runs deep.
Has it been ten years already? My, how the time flies. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’ll always have a little nostalgia from the 2010s because of and for GG.
On a serious note, not only is the indie scene in video games thriving, but already this year the zeitgeist topic about video games is about how this might be the year of Triple-A gaming’s “death”. Already, games like Palworld, Lethal Company, and especially Helldivers 2 (which could be considered something like a “AA” game) have been lauded as the games with all of the attention and love. Meanwhile, AAA games like “Suicide Squad” are predicted and mocked as dead on arrival (and it was), and Ubisoft’s “Skull & Bones” that they tried to hype as “AAAA” have been seemingly ignored as stale and boring. This isn’t something that should be ignored.
It could be because video games are a newer medium, with a ground zero year a decade later, with the accompanying opportunity to learn and observe from the death of books and movies. It could be that its enjoyers and creators have a sizeable “refugee” population from books and movies. It could be that video games themselves are more likely to engender some mode of thinking that combats the malaise. Whatever the final reason, gaming has found a way to keep up the good fight for meaningful creativity in the face of a cult. And since games incorporate writing and music, maybe we can hope it will have knock-on effects into that as well.
On Twitter, a black gamer noted that black characters get written better when the games are targeted at “white people.” He cited a protagonist from the Telltale Walking Dead games and CJ from GTA: San Andreas as two of his favorites. I will add that Valve customers adore Coach from the Left 4 Dead series.
Interesting. I haven’t finished San Andreas, but I recall my friends back in the day complaining about how whiny CJ was.
To add to that list, there’s also Eli Vance from Half-life 2, and the beloved Sargent Avery Johnson from Halo.
The old “chuds would say X would be woke now” canard is extra funny to consider when they keep rebooting said properties and erasing those exact things these types say chuds would hate. And it is the chuds complaining while these fanatics defend the new butchering to the death.
The longer one stays in the pop cult the more they are funneled into the death cult and start spouting “media literacy” takes about how redemption is impossible, heroes are the real villains, and those who murder innocents are not actually bad people.
If anyone doesn’t believe in entropy, they are definitely not paying attention.
In fairness, a lot of the stuff we loved would be woke if it were made now–a lot of those creators were either fully on board and just couldn’t get away with it because of the surrounding culture, or were drifting along and at the whims of that surrounding environment.
The one major ‘franchise’ I can think of that was authentically traditional/Christian in its roots is The Lord of the Rings, which is sui generis and was long-protected, and is only now being forcibly mutilated in order that ‘it’ might bend the knee to the Dragon and the Beast. (They’ll probably try to do the same with Narnia, but they’ve never been able to make that a ‘franchise.’)
The endurance of Narnia testifies to the superiority of allegories. The two truths that “clever” authors always forget are that:
1) Normies lack attention to detail.
2) Academic grifters reinterpret stories into oblivion.
Thus, the more obvious your intentions and messages, the better.