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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?
Let me illustrate by talking about a game that I was very interested in, bought, and turned out to be shit. This has nothing to do with SBI directly.
For those who don't know, the Payday series is co-op crime shooters, think first-person GTA without cars and with friends. You get heists, objectives to complete, you can do stealth or go loud etc.
Payday 2 was excellent, it still has a strong playerbase despite being released over a decade ago. I played quite a bit of it.
So they announced Payday 3 and I was ready. The initial guff I got from beta testers was that teh game was a bit janky (somewhat to be expected) and the female models had gotten ugly. There were a couple people whining about "diversity" and shit, but nobody really cared if the game was good.
Narrator voice: The game was not good. They made it permanently online, meaning you had to be connected to their servers, even to play alone. You needed a new launcher and a special Starbreeze account. And their servers didn't work. And the whole structure of the game was just......bad. It wasn't fun or engaging. Just a joyless grind-fest with no rewards. If you could even get in to play it, which you couldn't for the first three weeks of release. The relative fatness of the female characters was the least of anyone's worries. Frankly, the models weren't that bad.
The playerbase cratered after an initially decent start. Within a few weeks, the number of people playing had dropped 99%.
The CEO of Starbreeze just lost his job for his role in this abortion.
And yet, lots of people who didn't play the game defend it against people who did by claiming that they just hate diversity.
It's not about the uglier female models. That's just a symptom of a deeper problem. When you see that in a game, it indicates that the game wasn't meant to be good, it was meant to tick the DEI boxes. IDGAF about the female models in isolation, but I have a very strong association between obvious political choices in games and shit games. I gave the game a shot, ignoring the trolls whining about unimportant things like how fat the females are now.
Now I'm out forty bucks and I have a game that is worse in every single playable way than its predecessor. Because the studio decided that chubbing up the female models was more important than making sure the servers were functional for a permanently online game.
DEI, not even once.
https://www.ign.com/articles/starbreeze-ceo-out-after-payday-3-disaster
I think this is why people are really using DEI. It’s a great way to deflect attention and criticism from your story or game because any time someone says they don’t like the product, you can always default back to “the fans are just mad about inclusion.” Which means you don’t have to spend time producing something fun or good — which takes time and costs a lot of money — and still get people to buy it and even defend it.
I honestly think you're impugning too much intent behind this sort of thing. I suspect a few people might be self-aware and cynical enough to do this on purpose, but given how such a defense is only good for the ego and not for profit, I think the people making these decisions are mostly doing so out of a genuine desire to intentionally manipulate the audience into being more friendly to their ideology. And when it backfires as it so often does, in part because time and resources on that inevitably trades off against time and resources for crafting a good game with good mechanics and good narrative, they have a convenient way to deflect attention. And at this point, in 2024, this way of deflecting attention has become not just common, but downright cliche, and so they have a neat playbook to follow that they see fellow ideologues in the field turning to to protect their egos. I doubt it goes any deeper than.
Except that there’s no reason not to make the game good (or movie, or TV show) actually good at the same time if they were actually interested in doing so. The new ugly women in the game don’t take so many resources that they can’t make the rest of the game work as a game. It doesn’t cost so much that they then can’t afford servers for the game (or couldn’t simply make the game playable offline).
And I think honestly this kind of thing is doing more to turn off audiences to “diverse” choices because they’ve been so often used to deflect from bad entertainment and media that people see it as a red flag for poor quality. And it doesn’t have to be that way if they’d simply make a good product around the DEI. Benjamin Sisko was widely accepted and considered a badass in 1990. He was certainly a “diverse” casting choice, but because they show around him, and the character himself were both very well done, it was a popular show. Nobody was upset by it. Wonder Woman has been a popular character since she was created. We had She-Ra in the 1980s. It wasn’t seen as a bad thing until studios got lazy and decided that wha5 audiences cared about more than quality was diversity.
Indeed, some games that are criticized for things like unnecessarily masculine women are well received by many gamers for being otherwise good, such as the Horizon games and The Last of Us: Part 2 (neither received anywhere near universal praise or disdain). But it's not as if making a good game is just something someone can choose to do; even if every resource in the company was directed with laser-like focus on the goal of "make a good game," I'm doubtful that the odds are good that they'd create a good game. If priorities are split between that and injecting messaging into the game - and particularly the perspective is a "woke" one where the ideological messaging is considered to supersede other factors when determining how "good" a game is - then it becomes that much harder. Who knows how much the "woke"-ish messaging of the Saints Row reboot contributed to its many issues both with bugs and just basic game design, but given how much the entire narrative and tone of the game was steeped in it, I imagine it had a more parasitic effect than what the character models in those other aforementioned games did.
This is true, but the entire point that they're pushing is that they're already making a good product by injecting DEI and other "woke" messaging into the games. If players don't consider it so, then that means that they are wrong, and we need to put in more messaging until they get it. At their core, the ideologues who push this stuff truly believe that their ideology can never fail, it can only ever be failed. As ideological and political proselytizers, they see themselves as having no responsibility to check how effective their messaging is and to make adjustments based on that checking; rather, their only responsibility is to spread the message in the way the ideology tells them to, and if that doesn't work, then it's everyone else's fault.
It is a cliche at this point, that people labeled as sexist/racist keep pointing out that there are plenty of great works with diverse characters from yesteryear in gaming as well as in TV and film. "Woke" is a response and rejection of that; the idea that, in order to be praised, a work with women or minorities should also be good by traditional measures such as "entertainment" or "thought provoking" is, in itself, sexist/racist/White Supremacist/bigoted/etc. Rather, because we've now "awakened" to how the most salient way humans relate to each other in our society is through power dynamics between different demographic groups, we should realize that simply having these people represented in a positive way in entertainment works intrinsically make the entertainment works better. And, again, if the audience doesn't buy it, then the beatings will continue until morale improves.
I think we’re talking past each other. To be blunt, my thesis is that these people know they cannot release a good product, and have been wrapping their rather poor offerings in Woke to cover it up. Benjamin Sisko was a badass. The show was entertaining and actually did deal with racism during its own time. It wasn’t exactly subtle when they had a story about a show very much like DS9 not being able to be published if it were known that the author was a black man. I don’t think they’d be able to write a story like that today — and the story itself is pretty woke — because it requires skill to produce a story like that. It requires skill to show rather than tell, it requires thought to make a woman an actual badass (Sara Conners) without having her whine about sexism.
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