Sweet Baby Cyanide
So why haven’t I said anything about Sweet Baby? Because to me the problem has been so self-evident for so long that I couldn’t see the forest for the trees.
Yes, I knew about it. I knew the cancer for what it was and how it spread.
I also knew that Sweet Baby Inc was not the only “narrative development studio that provides “sensitivity reviews and consultation.” Lionbridge Games is still on the grift train, Sliverstring Media is the up-and-comer. And the Narrative Department will step in and take over from Sweet Baby when they have to disband, they are already working for most of the same big names that Sweet Baby dragged through the mud.
The question you are probably asking is why do gaming companies do this to themselves?
That’s a complicated issue, combining elements of left-wing political strong-arm tactics, dread of being Canceled by the Woke mob, and corporate politics.
Let’s get digging.
It all began with GamerGate.
Well, no it didn’t. It began with decisions that the editors of PC gaming magazines made.
Back in the 1990s I had a subscription to Computer Gaming World. It was a don’t miss back then. Given what the internet was like at the time, a print magazine was an absolute necessity. At least if you were going to find out if Master of Orion II was anywhere near as good as the first game, (BTW, it was better). Is the full version Redneck Rampage as difficult to run as the share-ware? (Yes, definitely). Or is John Romero really going to make you, his bitch? (No, he wasn’t.) You would also get interviews with people like Roberta Williams and Richard Garriott. Plus, you would find out which conventions were going to have the best computer gaming room.
Here’s the big thing. There was a real sense of community back then and gaming magazines were the glue that was holding us together. The guys that wrote those articles were part of our tribe. They spoke our language, shared our concerns, and agreed with us on what was cool.
The gaming magazines were huge and I don’t just mean within gaming culture. They were physically gigantic. There was a point where CGW had 500 pages. That was where the trouble began.
When you have that many pages, you need to fill them with something. The editors of gaming magazines had run into a problem there. They could hire more gamers and teach them how to write, a longer process to be sure but in the end, you would have more in-depth articles by people who know and love gaming. However, given how fast the gaming magazines were growing and how much original content they needed month to month, a shortcut beckoned siren-like to the editors.
There was always a pile of resumes from journalism majors who were shotgunning any publication in the hopes of landing a gig. They knew absolutely nothing about gaming, but they did know how to write, (sort of, they were journalism majors after all). The view clearly was, ‘Just give them something easy to play until we can find someone better.’
So, the editors started hiring journalism majors as a temporary shortcut. The kind of temporary shortcut that stays forever. Journalism majors could write about games, but they didn’t love them. They didn’t care at all about game mechanics, what they had a passion for was narrative story structure and pretty, pretty pictures. So long as a game had those it would get a ten-star review even if the gameplay sucked.
It was obvious that these journalism majors were setting the game difficulty on Toddler Mode and playing through as fast as possible. They wanted to experience the narrative with as little interruption by gameplay as could be managed.
This temporary fix stuck around. The journalists got promoted. Then the magazines started getting bought by media conglomerates like Ziff Davis, who definitely preferred to work with journalists. Consequently, the gamers at the gaming magazines got shunted to the side and the journalists started making the hiring decisions. Guess who they hired?
You guessed right. Other journalists.
The other thing you have to remember is why college kids got into journalism. There had been a time when news media ran on an apprentice system. Papers would hire stringers who provided news tips, the best of these got taken on as cub-reporters and were taught how to write and what the rules of the game were.
Then came All the President’s Men and the myth of the crusading liberal activist journalist was created. Journalism went from a blue-collar profession to strictly white-collar college graduates. A big part of this was the fact that by the Seventies, we had too many elites and nowhere near enough elite jobs. This was the point where we first saw the plague of lawyers erupting out of law schools. But if you weren’t smart enough to get into law school, you could be a journalist. Anyone could do that. If you asked a Journalism major why she wanted to get into the field the answer was invariably, “I want to change the world.”
Forgive me for stating the obvious but if you are trying to change the world, instead of reporting events factually, then you are a propagandist.
The new breed who had taken over gaming journalism wasn’t part of the gaming community, but they did want to tell it what to like and what to think. Games with a left-wing slant started to reliably get better reviews than ones that didn’t. The game devs noticed and started adjusting their narratives accordingly.
Narrative became ever more important than gameplay.
If you want a perfect example of where this led, in 2013, Irrational Games, delivered one of the dullest games I’ve ever played. Its title was as clunky as the rest of it, The Bureau: X-Com Declassified. It started as an FPS but then Mass Effect blew up big, so it was turned into a third-person shooter. This thing was an overblown rail shooter. You were very firmly welded into a predetermined path of events that would lead from cut scene to cut scene to cut scene. Getting the player to trigger cut scenes was the real objective of this game. The game stuff that happened in the middle was incidental.
2013 was also the year that Zoe Quinn launched Depression Quest. A game that got aggregate scores of 9.0 from gaming journalists and 0.9 from gamers. It was hardly the first one with a ratio so freaking lopsided that it would have capsized a coal barge and it sure as hell hasn’t been the last. But then Quinn’s boyfriend(?) put up a post declaring that she had screwed five reviewers to get good reviews for Depression Quest.
In truth, I have absolutely no idea if she did the Five Guys, Reviews, and Lies thing. But it automatically fit in with a narrative about the state of gaming journalism that every gamer knew to be true.
The SJWs looked at Zoe Quinn, purple hair, piercings all over her face (and god knows where else), a history of mental illness, and a reputation for indiscriminate sexual depravity and saw one their own. They rushed to her defense, not at all certain what they were defending. After all, they didn’t play games but they knew if journalists were being accused of lying then they undoubtedly were and they needed to be defended.
Quinn didn’t particularly want to be a martyr to the cause but there were others that were happy to oblige. Brianna Wu, was the first in but was too given to making a spectacle of him/her/xim/xhr/themselves to be presentable on camera. It was too much work for journalists to make Wu look plausible as anything other than an insane attention addict.
Anita Sarkeesian became the feminist flavor of the month, despite the fact she knew so little about gaming she mistook Doom for Fallout.
The geriatric Left woke up, looked around and demanded to know who was the Hitler Nazi this time? A search was conducted to find a sympathetic authority figure in GamerGate who could declare a public surrender.
The choice of Intel may seem a strange one but you have to remember something very important; Intel has a shit-ton of money. When you saw Jesse Jackson (who had been trying for years to get his hooks into the tech sector) on stage to collect a part of Intel’s $300 million payout you knew exactly what had happened.
Democrat Senators had threatened to drag Intel before various committees for This and That, so the publicly traded corporation could be raked over the coals over their support of misogyny and scare the hell out of their investors. Intel caved big time and there was now blood in the water. Sharks came out of the depths.
This was about the time that the game studios started getting snapped up by major media conglomerates. These multinationals had no real idea what to do with gaming studios, so they were put to work making sequels of the titles that had made them famous or just sent them to the corporate IP mines if there was any trouble with those rights. Glob, I feel so sorry for Raven.
The kind of game dev who could thrive in that environment were frustrated film school grads who couldn’t get into Hollywood like Neil Cuckman. He couldn’t wait to drag Anita Sarkessian in for sensitivity reads. He was determined to make The Last of Us 2 the Last Jedi of gaming and… (long tired sigh) succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.
Multinationals, being multi-national view bribes being demanded of them as just another form of taxation which it basically is. All they want to know is “Who do I pay, to make the problem go away?”
Anita Sarkeesian who was initially quite in demand, is sadly now in the position of being yet another trailblazer who was forced out of the industry she created by upstart competitors. Meaning, companies like Sweet Baby Inc.
The newcomers aren’t just threatening corporations in exchange for shakedown money. Their shakedowns are offered as a product! They call it narrative development editing, which makes it at least sound like they are doing something besides saying, “Nice game you got there, be a shame if something happens to it.” Paying them to do sensitivity reviews to discover anything that could be problematic is just another form of insurance to these studios’ corporate overlords.
Your multimillion-dollar gaming product will be shipped with some seal of approval by one of these companies that declares that this game has supported Trans people, fought the patriarchy, beaten attractive female characters with a mid-stick, and will in no way offend the eternally offended.
You know what these games won’t have?
Players.
