Hey everyone. Parker here.
As some of you may know, I am a big fan of the video game MLB The Show (I’m not necessarily very good at said game, but I enjoy it nonetheless). This, of course, in addition to being a fan of baseball and the Cubs, generally. Well, MLB The Show 24 just came out, and I just wanted to say how hyped I am for one of its new features.
For the first time in the game’s history, you can play its “Road to The Show” career mode as a woman, and I think that’s really neat. Someone on Bluesky asked me why I thought this was neat, so I figured I’d talk about it in today’s newsletter.
As I told the person on social media, it’s neat to be able to play as a character that looks a bit more like me than in past versions of the game. For the first time, I actually tried to create myself in the game.
In past years, when only given the option to play as a man, I’ve made up characters with names like “Soup Spooner” and modeled them after a shopping mall Santa Claus. That’s all good fun, but it’s not really immersive. And at its core, isn’t having the ability to feel like you’re actually in the game the whole point of these career modes? Like, I’m playing this video game because I’m not actually a baseball player but want to put myself in that world for an hour or two at a time.
You wouldn’t think so if you looked at some of the comments left on the game’s Twitter page after announcing the new feature. “This is unrealistic” was a common sentiment. Yes, but any game where I’m playing as a professional athlete is unrealistic. That’s the point. A few people raged about “wokeness” and “forced diversity” in games, acting antagonistic at the thought that people other than themselves could possibly want to play these games and have the ability to model their characters after themselves.
But it’s a fun new feature, and I just wanted to say that.
I bring this up because it seems like there’s a new push to create a new “Gamergate”-style harassment campaign targeting inclusive games.
Specifically, the people pushing this are targeting a narrative development company called “Sweet Baby Inc.”
I’m not sure if it’ll go anywhere, but it seems worth having on the radar. Here’s some background:
“How A Small Video Game Narrative Studio Wound Up At The Heart Of A Massive, Anti-Woke Conspiracy Theory” (Aftermath, Nathan Grayson, 3/7/24)
Sweet Baby is a 16-person narrative development and consultation studio that aims to “tell better, more empathetic stories while diversifying and enriching the video games industry” and “make games more engaging, more fun, more meaningful, and more inclusive, for everyone.” Since its founding in 2018, it’s worked with a wide range of high-profile clients including Sony, Xbox, Remedy, and Rocksteady on games like God of War: Ragnarok, Spider-Man 2, Alan Wake II, and Suicide Squad, as well as indies like Goodbye Volcano High.
Nobody outside the industry cared until late last year, when users on sites like 4chan, KiwiFarms (yep, they’re still around), and Gamergate subreddit r/KotakuInAction (yep, they’re also still around) – incensed by developments like the presence of Saga Anderson, a Black woman, in Alan Wake II – took notice of Sweet Baby’s involvement with multiple big games. This suggested to them that companies were letting a diversity-focused firm take the wheel on writing, resulting in games that played it too “safe” and felt homogenous, which is rich when your fundamental argument is that there aren’t enough white characters in games anymore.
From there, the conspiracy theory metastasized. Sweet Baby, users not just on the aforementioned sites but also Twitter and YouTube began to suggest, was ruining games with its woke agenda, which is why Suicide Squad (but conspicuously none of the other triple-A hits I just mentioned) flopped. People claimed Sweet Baby was weaponizing a culture of fear and intimidation, bullying otherwise apolitical studios into accepting its terms. This line of thinking led to the formation of numerous anti-Sweet Baby initiatives, including a Discord (which Kotaku’s Alyssa Mercante gamely braved) and a Steam Curator page called “Sweet Baby Detected” that lists every game in which Sweet Baby has been involved and advises players to steer clear. In the past handful of days, that page has jumped from around 40,000 followers to over 200,000 after calls from Sweet Baby staff and game developers to report the account, as well as videos from big content creators like YouTuber SomeOrdinaryGamers and OTK founder Asmongold that credulously platformed the conspiracy’s ideas and ringleaders. Predictably, all of this has resulted in ample harassment of Sweet Baby employees.
“Sweet Baby Inc. Doesn’t Do What Some Gamers Think It Does” (Kotaku, Alyssa Mercante, 3/6/24)
Sweet Baby Inc. isn’t forcing diversity, it’s happening naturally.
Though these kinds of social media posts argue that companies like Sweet Baby Inc. somehow “force” game studios to include diverse characters and storylines, the reality is vastly different. Sweet Baby Inc. is a narrative design company, meaning most of its work is focused on writing stories and dialogue—they are not a DEI consultancy firm. That means they ensure a game’s plot points make logical sense and are satisfying to players, and that characters speak and behave in consistent ways. Narrative designers may also provide a final round of polish, like a Hollywood “script doctor.” For example, the team worked on Suicide Squad long after the story was written—and even then they joined just to write in-game ads, audio logs, and NPC “barks,” CEO Kim Belair tells me over video call. She continues:
Sweet Baby is, at its core, a narrative development company. That means anything from script writing to narrative design to narrative direction, to story reviews. One of the things that we do offer is cultural consultations or authenticity consultations. For us, that generally means that we might be asked to look at a story if there’s a character in it who is marginalized in certain way, and [the studio] wants us to connect them with a consultant who can bring a little bit of authenticity…But the perspective is never that we’re coming in and injecting diversity…For the most part, it’s the reverse. It’s that a company has created a character and they want to make that character more representative and more interesting.
Sweet Baby cofounder David Bedard adds that, contrary to popular belief, the people making these games want to make the experience better for all players—and that more diversity and representation is a byproduct of that. “[Detractors] would rather believe that there’s a shadowy cabal of people forcing them to put that stuff in…they would rather believe a make-believe fairytale than accept that,” he says. “Making something more representative and more joyful for a marginalized person in a video game is not a zero-sum game. It doesn’t make anything worse for the male character in the game, for the white character in the game.”
“It’s 10 years since Gamergate – the industry must now stand up to far-right trolls” (The Guardian, Keza MacDonald, 3/8/24)
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.
That’s it for me today. I’ll be back tomorrow with a new edition of The Present Age.
Parker
P.S. Please enjoy this clip from the game where my player hits a home run.
1st off, Parker... nice work creating your likeness in the game! I don't know about you, but whenever I try to create one in my likeness on *any* game, I strike out (pun intended). It's gotta be so much more rad to play the game like this. I'll likely check out the new version of The Show when it hits Game Pass, though, like you, I am definitely not good at it. But, I do have fun playing it!
2nd of all, I wasn't paying attention too much during the whole Gamergate thing. I have since read up on it, and I find the whole thing abhorrent, naturally. But, given that it's an election year, and also because Bannon/Milo/(insert other terrible far-right'ers) were paying so much attention to Gamegate and have said openly about it's connection to inspiring more "dudes" to get into politics to make it even more dirty, which was one of the keys to getting Trump elected... don't you find Musk's comments a bit more sinister, as well as troubling?
Let's face it, the Gamergaters are with Musk. There's no question about it. But, if he were to influence his cult into more of a Gamergate crowd with bigger numbers this time, I feel it could have worse ramifications than in 2014-16. I'm not much of a conspiracy theorist, but this does have a feeling of intent to it. I fear this anger and outrage could definitely seep into the mainstream much easier than last time.
In closing, the age old question: why can't people just play the games they like, how they like? Why should it be threatening that you can take a *video game* character, mod said character to your actual physical likeness of race, gender, or size and play the game how YOU would want to? I just don't understand it. Why do there people get SO heated about it? It's just a game, after all.
And they don't have to play the game the same way everyone else does!
And that right there is a maxim that is true to video games, as well as real life.
I'm always thankful to have your analysis now adays for these sort of escapades. I don't have the time to really dive into them like I used to. They frequently seem to be the catalyst for bigger issues, so it's good to be in the know.