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In a more formulaic and low stakes corner of the culture War Ubisoft has announced "assassin's creed Shadow". The series is known for offering open world exploration set in various historical locations and times from the Nordic to ancient Egypt. This installment is appearantly a popular fan request in being set in fuedal Japan.
The culture War angle is that the game has two main characters, a female assassin and a disputed historical black warrior named yasuke. Now I haven't played one of these games in over a decade and am not particularly invested in this title but the response has been a fairly clean case study in marketing by controversy and I think it might be worth dissecting.
In my corner of the web I first learned of the game's existence from the preemptive "man, racists right wingers are going to hate this" posts. And indeed if one looked it was not hard to soon after find right winger racists filling their niche in this tired dance. One can always find bad takes that isn't what is interesting about how this kind of thing develops.
A trap seemed to be set, I don't know which end first broached the topic of "historical accuracy" but because it took the form of what legitimate criticism might look like the culture War quickly fell into a groove of progressives defending the historical existence of yasuke being a real samurai and pointing to other popular media depictions of him as well as pointing out that the assassin's creed series includes other widely disputed historical claims like Benjamin Franklin's possession of a magical golden apple. The anti-progressive backlash is in a hard place because I think there is something legitimate there but the shape of the discussion is not condusive to making the argument.
I think most of the anti-progressive front probably doesn't have an issue with a black sumurai in a game made by people they trust to have making awesome games as their first master. There's something itching in the back of the head of the backlash crowd that the reason we have yasuke isn't because a black guy in Japan makes for interesting segments of blending into crowds but because the people making the game have an anti-majoritarian view. The same thing that gave us yasuke is what motivates someone to put on a "fuck white people" shirt.
This is a feature of the culture War I'm seeing more and more. Proxy battles that few people care deeply about but have features that make them better or worse to do battle on. This game seems like favorable terrain from the woke angle and it's tempting to just give them it but I understand the impulse to fight on the terrain anyways.
Ah, yes, the old pretending to be retarded style of counterargument. I notice this often enough that I started bookmarking examples that I meant to get around to writing up, but it still surprises me when I bump into examples of people that appear to just obviously putting on a show of acting like they're confused about something that's simple and obvious to anyone involved. No one is objecting to Assassin's Creed being fantastical and taking a bunch of poetic license with the source material and content from history. I've played exactly one Assassin's Creed game and included the cinematically awesome leap of faith mechanic - your character, dressed in aesthetic white robes, can climb to incredibly high perches above cities and dive off, covering tons of terrain in a majestic swan-dive before plopping safely into a stack of hay. Helpfully, some physics students ran some quick math on this and concluded that diving a couple hundred feet into a shallow bed of straw will probably kill you.
Of course, this didn't really bother anyone even though there probably weren't very many Arab assassins diving off of mosques into shallow beds of straw. Why not? Because it's awesome. It looks cool, it's a fun mechanic, and it's memorable. People weren't bothered by Ben Franklin having a magical golden apple because it just sounds incredibly fun in the context of America's founding. You know what else is fun and awesome? Samurai and ninja assassins in medieval Japan. Super awesome and super cool, something that much pretty much every male grows up thinking is super awesome and super cool. So, naturally, fans of the game are excited to play out one of the classic settings for awesome sword-play.
You know what's not awesome? Injecting your stupid racial politics into 16th century Japan and then hiding behind "actually, there was a black samurai, and you weren't even upset about a golden apple, so I've gotcha you racist". Furthermore, when someone does that, you can probably rest assured that they're not all that invested in making the game awesome, so it raises your hackles in expectation that you're dealing with people that are more interested in pissing off putative racists than actually making a game cool. Maybe the game will be good and maybe it won't, but pretending to be retarded when having the argument isn't likely to convince anyone.
I think what bothers me is it feels like more and more companies are using inject racial poltiics into otherwise crappily designed media in order to blunt all legitimate criticism because then all criticism can be tarred as racists.
Ironically I feel like we are already past the peak of that particular tactic (I could be wrong). I think that time period where we got a Watchmen sequel series with a Black Dr. Manhattan, and a Lovecraft series specifically about his racism, and Amazon's Rings of Power LOTR adaptation adding in Black elves, dwarves, and Hobbits would be hard to surpass, without straight up becoming comedies.
There's also some funny irony in how Disney's Marvel fumbled (nearly) every move made post-Endgame, such as trying to replace Captain America with a black dude (no hate at Anthony Mackie, mind), to introduce a black supervillain to supplant Thanos as the big bad (maybe a little hate towards Jonathan Majors), and of course their attempt to get audiences engaged with three female heroes almost nobody cares about which was not Black Girl Magic at the box office. I can't even muster up enough interest in that to even attempt to hate it.
It is not working. Maybe they got the message after shareholders attempted a coup.
I would vaguely expect to see a bit less of this particular brand of culture warring in a period where interests rates are higher and thus projects actually have to justify their existence on the basis of short-term profitability.
On the other hand, pretty much every commercial or ad these days still does the Interracial couple thing, almost always black male, white female.
So not sure if I'm looking at the wrong bellwether.
At this point, it's impossible to deny it's ideological. And to whatever degree the CEOs of these companies "learn their lesson", the lesson won't be "Maybe it's wrong to be racist towards white people". It will be "What is the most anti-white racism we can get away with?"
Being faiiiirrrr the entire job of CEO is to try to optimize for exactly how much you can get away with in the name of maximizing profits before people will balk. Forced diversity is not the only way that media products are getting worse.
I find myself waffling between the position of "CEOs are usually coldly logical sociopaths who are pushing the woke ideology because it appears to be profitable and will change up if it ceases to be so" and
"CEOs are just as brainwormed as other lefties and are genuinely trying to push the message where-ever they think they can get away with it."
In full reality, could be a little from column A and a little from Column B, plus unnoticed variables C, D, and E, too.
My explanation for puzzling CEO behavior.
CEO's don't care about corporate profits or woke politics. What they do care about is status signalling within their elite group. They get more plaudits for woke initiatives than they do for meeting quarterly earnings targets. Therefore, they will purse woke nonsense at the expense of earnings, up to the point where they lose their jobs.
Corporate boards, also caring mostly about intra-elite status games, will give woke-presenting CEOs a long leash before they pull the plug.
However, there is a limiting principle. CEO's with extremely poor performance will lose their job. Being fired is low status so it keeps things from getting too ridiculous.
Yes, lack of accountability does end up gelling with my other theory on institutional failure
As I hinted at above, I would hope that the end of an era of low interest rates enabling all kinds of corporate shenanigans would meant that financial performance again becomes the dominant metric by which decisions to fire are made.
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The question is why does it seem ubiquitous. And maybe it is because leftist culture is the culture of PMC.
My working theory which I don't (yet) endorse is that MBA grads and SJWs actually have a lot of aligned incentives.
MBAs come into a company and try to figure out how to broaden their target market beyond whatever core demographic they have established. Regardless of what your company sells, the MBA wants to find a way to sell it to EVERYBODY.
SJWs also have a 'product' they want to sell to 'everybody.' That is, their ideology.
And SJWs can claim to be the ones who can tell the MBAs how to sell beyond their core demo. "If your product isn't selling well to women, it is probably too sexist. If your product isn't selling well to minorities, its probably too racist. If you can't get LGBT folks to buy, your product is too heteronormative. If you denounce the patriarchy and white supremacy and become known as a queer ally, you can reach out to those otherwise unattainable groups who will then buy your product."
An MBA presumably doesn't bother to comprehend the ideology or its goals, but thinks "Ah, we hire extra women, we run some ads that uplift black people, and we start openly celebrating pride and that will kick open new, untapped markets. Lets do it!"
And because SJWs have indeed done the groundwork in prepping the larger society to accept more diversity, this strategy might even pay off in the short term.
In this sense, MBAs and SJWs form a symbiotic team, with both having the similar end goal of achieving 100% market saturation for their product even if it means 'sacrificing' those things that made the product successful to begin with.
Too general.
Communists also have a ‘product’ they want to sell to ‘everybody.’ After decades with half the planet locked behind their ideology, has this co-opted MBAs into a fifth column? No, because there is a competing ideology, and it has a much more credible route to MBA-approved outcomes, like actually having markets or not getting purged.
I actually agree that social justice gains in corporations involve the motives you describe. They’re viewed as money on the sidewalk, better image with little to no downside. I argued such when the Bud Light business demonstrated the downside and when people were reading Super Bowl ads like tea leaves.
The interesting question isn’t “why do MBAs adopt social justice?” It’s “why doesn’t social justice have a credible competitor?”
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