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Notes -
Gamergate 2
A week or 2 ago, someone made a Steam group called Sweet Baby Inc Detected. This group exists to let people know which games have involved the consultant company Sweet Baby Inc.
Sweet Baby inc is a company that seems to be dedicated to adding more diversity to video games, and many people believe their involvement makes games worse.
This heated up when an employee of Sweet Baby Inc tried to get people to report the group and it's founder in hopes that they get banned
This has been in my youtube and twitter feed quite a bit in the past couple weeks. Mostly it's accounts of employees behaving in similar ways as the above tweet.
I don't really play AAA games very much, so the actual effect of Sweet Baby on those games is not very salient to me, but when reading and hearing about it, I can't help but notice that they usually aren't giving many examples of of aspects of these games that people really think are bad because of Sweet Baby. In fact, before this controversy, the main thing gamers were complaining about was in-game transactions.
What people are mostly talking about is how their employees conduct themselves on social media. And even though the way they often conduct themselves is unprofessional and dumb, It's also understandable when there's a hundred thousand people telling you how bad your work is and trying to stop people from doing business with you.
What are your thoughts?
I didn't know Sweet Baby Inc existed before a post about the new Suicide Squad game was on the front page of /r/all on reddit which was a dossier in the game written by Lex Luther praising the Amazonian culture of Wonder Woman for not having "toxic masculinity" and the comments were talking about Sweet Baby Inc as the reason this kind of writing exists.
That aside people complain about "woke" writing in videogames all the time. It's just that the people that do it usually either do it very badly or the ones that do it badly are very heavily exposed and then completely dismissed. The Last of Us Part 2 was heavily criticized for bad writing and injecting woke themes to the detriment of its plot aside from people not liking the plot itself or the way it was told. That was huge in the gaming sphere and was a much bigger bone of contention than Sweet Baby Inc is now, mostly because the culture war was used as a cudgel to deny any merit to criticism of the game.
From what I've seen, on reddit at least, there's nothing like a culture war touchstone like gamergate, everyone just shits on the writing of Sweet Baby Inc and there's not even any pushback at all which is really rare. Probably because it's like that diversity tool that blizzard made, people who don't care or like woke content will defend it at all costs if they think it's real artistic intent but the fact that it's counterfeit corporate checkboxing to make sure the game is woke probably pushes any defense the people who would defend the games woke content would have away. Naked corporate manipulation for profit (though, I can't imagine how this is profitable, but I also can't imagine how to spin these things any other way that's not them nakedly saying they're paying people to create propaganda tools/writing) is on the same level as being generally right wing. Which is a long way of saying I don't think people are heavily invested in this because most people are at the very least vaguely aware this was happening already, they just maybe thought it was from agenda pushers involved in the game dev process, the reveal that it's ingrained at a corporate level doesn't change much for people who didn't like the fact that it was there and definitely isn't a damsel that people need to rescue like Zoe Quinn or Anita Sarkesian.
I was just perusing /r/kotakuinaction to look at what they were saying about it and one of the comments was "might as well call it Jan 6 "Insurrection" part 2 since they have as much in common."
It feels like outlets that got a lot of traffic from gamergate are trying to push the name again to generate more ruckus for clicks or attention on both sides.
We're supposed to believe Lex Luthor, of all people, wrote this? Instead of a plan about how to invade and conquer Themyscira, steal its tech, enslave the Amazons as his personal army?
Frankly, I don't think we are. I think we are supposed to praise it, and whether or not we believe it isn't really a consideration.
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