DEI no game for developers
Gamers angry over Montreal firm’s wokeness
WE ALL KNOW NORSE GODS ARE SCANDINAVIAN, NOT AFRICAN. — SARKONAK
Video games are the distraction of choice for many people, offering a temporary escape hatch from cost-of-living challenges, transgender bathroom debates or United States election discourse. Naturally, this made games a ripe target for opportunistic firms to shove their social politics.
A reckoning was bound to happen — and in the past month, the hammer has come down. Specifically, on a Canadian company named Sweet Baby Inc.
The Montreal-based firm does everything from game writing to diversity consulting. You will have come across its work if you ever played God of War: Ragnarok, a 2022 release for Playstation consoles, which follows the Greek god Kratos as he navigates the world of Norse mythology. Among the characters is the Norse goddess Angrboda, whom the game depicts as Black.
In an interview with an industry publication, Sweet Baby co-founder Kim Belair explained her reasoning for the race swap.
“For me, looking at a Black character in a game where she feels that same way, it will absolutely be seen and resonated with by people of colour and by Black girls who identify with Angrboda,” she said. It’s certainly one way to approach story writing — if historical accuracy and respect for source material isn’t an issue.
But, for a lot of people who play these games, a degree of realism remains important even in fiction, and forced immersion-breaking diversity is an annoying reminder that today’s politics can’t be escaped. (Keep in mind that the gaming industry is worth $184.4 billion annually; far larger than film and music, which are worth just under $30 billion each, so the impact of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) is going to be widely felt.)
Sweet Baby’s contributions can also be felt in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and Alan Wake 2, as well as a number of titles in the superhero genre: Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, Marvel’s Spider-man 2, Gotham Knights and the upcoming Marvel’s Wolverine.
Community frustration has followed. On the online game store Steam, more than 300,000 users have followed a list named “Sweet Baby Inc detected” to avoid any game that shows traces of the company’s influence. A community of the same name exists on Discord, where sleuths vent their frustrations about the state of the industry, and search for more titles to add to the no-go list.
What are they frustrated about? Take Marvel’s Spider-man 2, one Sweet Baby project “filled with distinct LGBTQ+ representation everywhere you look, from walls of street art to smaller side quests” according to a reviewer with Thegamer, an industry publication. The story includes a nonbinary scientist, and the game world has “an entire street in Manhattan that is not just home to a rainbow pride flag, but the transgender, bisexual, gay, ace, pan and lesbian flags too.”
The Spanish version of Spider-man 2 also reportedly uses gender-neutral grammar, which, like gender-neutral French, is an activist project that isn’t recognized by most day-to-day speakers.
Recent weeks have seen mainstream gaming media come to the defence of Sweet Baby, to no avail. Wired characterized the firm as a victim of irrational culture warfare, the target of too-online racists. A report by Kotaku took a similar tone, dismissing concerns that identity politics in games feel suffocating to some. Interviews with staff downplayed the company’s role in pushing DEI.
That would make sense — if Sweet Baby for years hadn’t marketed itself as political correction service for games.
Speaking to a developer conference in 2021, Belair aired her frustration that the industry caters “almost exclusively” to “white cis hetero males” even though audience demographics are changing.
“We cater to them the way that we cater to a picky baby. We feed them the same thing that we know they love and we keep on feeding it . ... (We’re) creating an entire nation of picky babies and they make us scared to deviate from what we actually want to do, just in case these picky babies don’t want to play our games,” she said.
“We cannot continue to try to create art under a system that is going to bar innovation for fear of a picky baby throwing a tantrum.”
Sweet Baby isn’t alone in promoting DEI in games, so it certainly can’t be blamed for all the built-in politics. World of Warcraft and Diablo developer Blizzard’s character creation screens have swapped “male” and “female” options for gender-neutral “Body type 1” and “Body type 2,” while Bethesda brought pronoun choices into last year’s Starfield. Some character casts increasingly have the perfectly diverse palate of a Netflix ensemble, and certain trendy diverse female leads are written to be so strong and independent that they end up just sounding rude and annoying.
It’s fine to have a gay character in a game who has relevance to the story, but using the index of queer iconography to shoehorn a political message into a story that didn’t need it takes things too far. Many of us don’t believe non-binaryism is real. In the same vein, we all know Norse gods are Scandinavian, not African. Don’t force it.
A DEGREE OF REALISM REMAINS IMPORTANT EVEN IN FICTION.