Ten years ago, a game developer’s aggrieved ex-boyfriend published a vindictive screed accusing her of trading sex for favourable reviews of her indie game. This was leapt upon by the least savoury corner of the 2014 internet, 4chan, and kicked off a harassment campaign that broadened to include all women working in video game development or the gaming press, as well as the industry’s LGBTQ+ community. Sensing blood in the water, “alt-right” agitators on YouTube and Steve Bannon’s Breitbart jumped on the bandwagon, and soon began to steer it – and Gamergate, as this manufactured outrage became known, mutated into one of the first fronts of the modern culture wars, driven by social media, misogyny and the weaponised disaffection of young men. Many of its tactics became part of the Trump election playbook.
This week, a 16-person narrative design studio has found itself at the centre of a conspiracy theory that holds it responsible for the insidious prevalence of “wokery” in modern video games. A group with more than 200,000 followers on PC games storefront Steam, as well as thousands in a Discord chat channel, believes that Sweet Baby Inc is secretly forcing game developers to change the bodies, ethnicities and sexualities of video game characters to conform to “woke” ideology. They think that Sweet Baby has written and controlled almost every popular video game of the past five years, shutting straight white men out. As Trump once again heads out on the campaign trail, this is part of a broader far right panic about diversity and inclusion that has already resulted in proposed regressive anti-women and anti-woke legislation in the US and elsewhere.
The agency in question has of course done nothing of the sort. It is simply a narrative development studio, the video game equivalent of script doctors, that works with game developers to ensure their plots make sense and their characters aren’t embarrassingly out of touch. The consultancy’s mission statement is to “make games more engaging, more fun, more meaningful and more inclusive”. It cannot dictate that developers feature, for example, black female leads in their games. It does not have the power to dictate anything. But its employees are nonetheless bearing the brunt of an online mob’s ire. They are being doxed, threatened and abused online.
Ten years ago, it was female games journalists and critics in the firing line. This time, it’s narrative designers. But the conspiracists’ message is the same: diversity has no place in games. If you are a woman, queer or a person of colour working in this industry, you should expect the worst.
Nathan Grayson of Aftermath and Alyssa Mercante of Kotaku have both investigated the origins and sprawling nature of the Sweet Baby conspiracy theory. Its proponents draw preposterous connections between the consultancy and BlackRock, and the funding crisis affecting the wider games industry. This is far from the first time since Gamergate that such harassment has spilled over: depressingly, coordinated abuse against game developers is now somewhat routine, especially if they do something so audacious as to include pride flags in Spider-Man’s Manhattan, or take their time implementing mod support for Baldur’s Gate 3. A full 91% of devs surveyed by the Game Developers Conference last year said that harassment from players was an issue, 42% calling it a “very serious” issue.
When Gamergate was going on, the silence from much of the video games industry was deafening. Instead of standing up for the people that were being targeted, almost everyone who wasn’t being directly attacked by Gamergate’s mob stuck their fingers in their ears and tried to pretend it wasn’t happening. Media outlets, game developers and publishers alike, perhaps motivated by a fear of making things worse or of alienating what they feared was a sizeable part of their audience, failed to speak out in defence of women until it was too late, if they spoke out at all. IGN, then the most popular games website in the world, published a stunningly weak exercise in both-sidesism about “recent unpleasantness” that failed to even call the movement by name.
The games industry’s failure to speak out decisively did not calm the situation. Doing nothing did not dissuade the mob. It merely left people, who were in some cases being harassed out of their homes and workplaces, feeling alone, furious and often afraid. Back then the main targets were female developers, journalists and critics. This time, it’s a group of narrative consultants.
In the 10 years since Gamergate, the culture wars that were fermented in gamer forums have spread out to poison almost all aspects of our lives. The last decade has taught us that these people will not simply go away: there may always be those who believe that the mere presence of women and minorities in their video games, or their Star Wars, or their halls of cultural or political power, is an affront, a symptom of the “woke mind virus”.
But we have also learned that ignoring them does not help. It only makes things worse. The people working at Sweet Baby should not be left to suffer on behalf of the studios that employ them. Individual developers are braver these days about speaking out on social media: the director of Alan Wake 2 posted that conspiracy theories claiming Sweet Baby forced the developer to change a character’s ethnicity were “absolutely not true”; and Mary Kenney, associate narrative director at Marvel’s Spider-Man developer Insomniac Games, has also Tweeted strong denials. But companies themselves need to follow suit. Publishers and developers that have worked with Sweet Baby Inc include Warner Bros Games and PlayStation’s Santa Monica Studio. Where are their statements of support? Are they going to publicly defend the people they worked with on multimillion-dollar games from false accusations, or let the trolls control the narrative?
Nobody is forcing diversity into video games. It is happening naturally, as players and developers themselves diversify. Gamergate didn’t intimidate women out of video games 10 years ago, and we won’t be intimidated now. The games industry knows that a greater breadth of content, featuring a greater breadth of characters, made with the contributions of a greater breadth of people, is good for creativity and for business, no matter what some aggrieved gamers may think. This time, it must make its support perfectly and unequivocally clear.
