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You know what we didn't have in a good while? A proper gamer drama.
All the actors from the past decade are basically defunct: Sarkeesian largely ceased publishing after the parted ways with McIntosh (my long-standing belief is that he was the brains behind the operation, and she alone just couldn't make enough quality material to stay relevant), Zoe van Valkenburg's last claim to relevance was an accusation against another of her exes in 2019, resulting in his suicide soon after. Youtube continues to steal lunch money from written articles about games, so Polygon and Kotaku are shells of their former selves. Vice's Waypoint has come and gone, and the only thing of note they did was having to apologize after posting a 9S forcefem fanfiction on main.
There has been some occasional flareups here and there, but nothing that could possibly rise to the 2014's heights of in(s)anity. Dare I say... until now?
You probably haven't heard of Sweet Baby Inc.. It's a "narrative consulting" company that specializes in retooling the game's scripts to better represent historically underrepresented groups. Notable releases with which they worked in the past few years include God of War: Ragnarok, Spider-Man 2 and Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. For those of you who don't play often, the former two were generally favorably received, while the latter was a critical and commercial bomb that was dead in the water for years before its launch and probably killed the development studio.
The broader public (by which I mean the narrow, extremely online subset of the fandom) learned about its existence some time last year. People have been coming up with some wild conjectures about what exactly SBI's involvement was with those games. Like for example many western AAA titles in recent years struggle with modeling female faces for some reason, and the in-game models look uncanny valley-ish and quite unlike the people they're modeled after, and the conspiracy-inclined are saying that the characters are deliberately made ugly to challenge the patriarchal standards, or something. I am of two minds - most of the examples usually provided seem to be deliberately taken in-between frames, but still it's a bit weird how Japanese devs like Capcom, Platinum or Kojima Studios don't have those issues.
But let's put aside speculation about technical issues and focus on what is SBI's department: writing. Well, thing are not looking so good there either:
Oh, and as you probably expect at this point, SBI's members have been occasionally seen on twitter gloating about how the hold white male gamers in contempt. I've given up twitter and tumblr for Lent, so I won't be providing specific examples here, sorry.
A few days ago, a steam curator was created listing all the games that have SBI's involvement as "not recommended". The situation is played out predictably: some employees claimed harassment, the steam group got Streisand Effect'd and grew to 200k over the last two days, it has been mass reported, people are trolling in the fora claiming to have insider info, the forum got wiped... Kotaku has written an article about it, the article's author claims that you can't be racist against white people. It's all 2012-2015 discourse frozen in amber, time is a flat circle. The only difference now is that because it's Musk's twitter, the statement gets stamped with a community note. Contrary to what I wrote at the beginning, it'll probably blow over in a few days, but I decided to do a writeup just in case.
Myself, I haven't bought a western AAA game since 2017, and I wish all of you the same.
I wonder how the media reaction to this will be, compared to what happened in 2014. I was a much more avid user of Twitter back then, as well as a much bigger gamer compared to now, and I was able to watch in real-time as various gaming media outlets formed their narrative about misogynist gamers harassing women which was about as close to the exact opposite of the situation as one could get if one actually intentionally tried (which I suspect was the case). Even back then, media outlets had been losing readers in favor of social media, but they still seemed to have enough credibility that plenty of more casual gamers just naively took them at their word. 10 years later, and social media has continued to rise and media outlets have continued to lose credibility, and I believe the viewership/readership numbers have reflected this.
That means that if people sympathetic to SBI want to set the narrative again, then doing the same thing as before, where some sympathetic writers at a handful of media outlets rewrite the narrative (most likely in uncoordinated fashion, I'd guess) to flatter the people they like and denigrate the people they don't, might not be enough to achieve the same level of success in convincing people. I primarily learned about this situation from a YouTuber/Twitch streamer who regularly gets 6-7 figures in views on each video, where he was just straight-up shitting on SBI for being ideologues trying to sell something that customers don't want to buy and calling out one of the media outlet authors as racist for stating the very standard - downright cliche at this point - modern "progressive" line "you can't be racist against white people." And there are plenty of smaller "content creators" similar to him saying similar things who still get 5-6 figures per video. That kind of ecosystem wasn't really around back in 2014.
Now, this ecosystem also definitely produces people who are sympathetic to SBI. And, who knows, maybe there are YouTubers who get 7-8 figures per video who basically parrot the lines Kotaku and Polygon spit out? But even if that's the case, I think the presence of the ecosystem of more diverse viewpoints would make it harder for the SBI-preferred narrative of "oppressed minorities being harassed by bigoted gamers who want to exclude them from their spaces" to take hold. It's not a true marketplace of ideas, but it seems at least half a step closer to one than what it was in 2014, and that half a step could be enough for contrasting ideas from diverse viewpoints to win out.
To take a more bird's eye view of this, I think the past decade since the affair of reproductively viable female worker ants has shown that the Anita Sarkeesians of the world had a complete victory in that time period. SBI has been around and modifying games for a while, and it's only now, after plenty of damage has been done to multiple formerly well-regarded franchises, that fans have even begun to notice them to any significant extent, much less push back. And more to the point, the very fact that devs and/or publishers see enough value in SBI that SBI can survive as a company shows that the ideology has taken a pretty firm root in the industry. The future is not yet set, of course, and this particular episode seems to be at least a blip in the other direction, but what I'd expect right now is that the people sympathetic to SBI will come up with some new technique that I don't even have the capability to imagine right now to continue to subvert the industry in ways that paying customers are even less able to notice or control.
Grapevine says it is due to ESG investment monies, by involving SBI they get access to more funding from institutions that demand woke capitulation.
I've seen people claim this a lot, but as best as I can tell, this is a naked claim without any actual evidence. Are there any documents anywhere showing what scores different companies have, how putting in uglier women or more pathetic men into their products changes the scores, or how much investments into these companies get affected by that score? And is investment from institutions that demand woke capitulation that big of a factor in financial success in the gaming industry when compared to simply putting out a good product?
In any case, assuming every single claim about ESG scores being the driver of this phenomenon is true, that would explain how the ideology has taken a pretty firm root in the industry.
It's not ugly women and pathetic men that makes the score go up, it's just interacting with SBI, and corporate decision-makers see no reason NOT to chase ESG, since to them "quality" is a vague untrackable nonsense term uncorrelated with the financial success of a product, but ESG rating IS trackable and legible
"Seeing like a State" continues to stay relevant.
Interesting stories, fandom goodwill, and developer reputation continue to be the illegible benefits of the varied forest biome. All sacrificed for a cadastral map of Norway Spruce accessible to investors who can only work by algorithm.
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