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. Continue reading...
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