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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024

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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?

For one, if Sweet Baby had no issue with what they're doing, the curator page would be free advertising, and they'd have no reason to try and censor it.

As their first response was to go on the attack, it implies that Sweet Baby wants to keep exposure of thier involvement to a minimum.

Upper Echelon did a well-researched video on the entire matter. It's fairly indepth, and goes over a few highlights, such as;

Despite claims to the contrary, the most recent example of a woke flop, the whole Suicide Squad mess, several writers(and lead script writer) work for Sweet Baby.

He also shows videos of Kim Balair, the CEO of Sweet Baby, subtly threatening triple AAA studios in a sense of 'Nice game you've got, would be a shame if a twitter lynch mob came for it'.

There's probably more, but you're free to watch the video.

There's a term called 'Mediocrity Principle', roughly paraphrased to mean 'if an item is drawn at random from one of several sets or categories, it's more likely to come from the most numerous category than from any one of the less numerous categories.' I find Sweet Baby to be the tip of the iceberg, the random sample that blew up in everyone's face, and I find it difficult to beleive the idea that they're the only organization with this prevalent attitude.

For added fun, you also have a government-backed NGO running defense and organization for Sweet Baby in the news media, calling to 'denounce gamergate'.

I know what I take away from all this. You can make your own decision.