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Sweet Baby Inc., a narrative consulting agency for video games, is facing harassment and conspiracy theories from individuals who believe the company is responsible for games becoming too inclusive. The harassment is similar to the Gamergate movement and is directed towards employees and developers associated with Sweet Baby. The critics complain about women protagonists and characters of diverse backgrounds. However, the company's role is to provide consultation and authenticity to game narratives, not to impose an agenda. The hate and harassment are baseless and misdirected, causing harm to innocent individuals. This incident highlights the ongoing existence of these negative sentiments within the gaming community. It is important to address and condemn such behavior to create a more inclusive and diverse industry. Speaking of the internet, I did not know much about this next story until you guys brought it up, but what is going on in the world of Sweet Baby? How do we even start this off? So Sweet Baby Inc. is a narrative consulting agency that has worked on a wide variety of video games in recent years, doing varying levels of work on aspects of game stories. I have not been entirely able to track exactly how we got from that to where we are now, but somewhere along the way, a number of people, who I'm just going to say, if they are not specifically people from the Gamergate movement, they are people that certainly found some common cause with it over the years, have decided that this company is in some way responsible for video games becoming too woke. So I read this story you guys sent me, Sweet Baby Inc. doesn't do what some gamers think it does. It was on Kotaku. Yes, this is described to me as at least Gamergate adjacent. It is a similar campaign of harassment that is being directed at both the people who work for this company and also the developers that have worked on games involving this company. It has essentially spiraled out into a flare-up, I would say, of the exact same kind of grievance-oriented acrimony of what Gamergate was all about. Yes, very, very similar in form and tactics, and it's basically just another reactionary conspiracy theory about who is ruining video games this month. So when I first started reading into this and kind of looking into this, this feels very nakedly... They have thrown away the kind of facade of the, quote, ethics in games or whatever other facades were going on in the beginnings of Gamergate to... Sounds like to me, and again, I'm not that exposed to this on the regular, mostly coming from what I've tried to read about in the last 24 hours, just saying we don't want inclusivity in these games or we are... This is what is ruining games. Yeah, they are grousing about women protagonists, those women protagonists not being, you know, their idealized vision of, you know, sexualized women in video games. They are complaining about characters being black. You know, like it is basically just every, you know, I'm not, video games aren't what I want them to be, you know, whining complaint kind of intermingled into one very ill-informed conspiracy theory. And then the reporting on this that I read says that is then being directed or misdirected, according to the reporting, at Sweet Baby, who does not necessarily go in to take over a development or narrative to then drive an agenda, because that's not what a consultant does. Right. This is the part that always kills me about these stupid fucking things is that you could only propagate this if you have absolutely no idea how anything works in the world. No, the other way you can propagate this is if your entire existence hinges on, you know, whipping up people to agree with you and get in these kinds of campaigns, because there are a couple of people who probably should know better that have attached themselves to this, but obviously do not. And so but yes, the vast majority of this is being driven by people who just have no functional experience or knowledge about how video games are made, and are using this as a cudgel to basically scream about the stuff that they are pissed off about, which is, by and large, all just a bunch of wretched whining. Yeah, or even games aside, just how consultancy works generally, you know, like, yeah, consultants work at the whim of the of their clients, you know what I mean? Like game like developers and publishers are the ones who decide to bring these people in for, you know, script doctoring, or just like general feedback on narrative direction, you know, like the type of stuff, the type of advice they offer, but like, then then the developers, publishers choose whether to take that advice or not, you know, yeah, forcing anything on anybody is like, so deranged, I don't even know how to approach it, it could not be more of the opposite of how that power dynamic actually works. So this quote from Sweet Baby in the Kotaku article says, 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, it generally means that we might be asked to look at a story if there's a character in it who is marginalized in a 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. Yeah, I mean, I know I shouldn't be looking at this from a rational point of view. This one just seems like a very hard one to even understand what the complaint is, other than you're making games that feel more inclusive. Unless I'm missing something. No, you're not. I mean, the reality is, this is just a temper tantrum from people who don't want video games to be a certain way. That's it. That is really what it boils down to. And unfortunately, you can't just dismiss that out of hand like your natural response might be because people are being harassed. People are being targeted by this stuff. There's an aspect of this that unfortunately just cannot be ignored. But the reality is, there's no substance to any of this. There's nothing in their argument to actually take seriously. The only part that you have to take seriously is the part where these people are directing hate and harassment at people who are not doing any of the things that they are saying they are doing. I consider myself lucky I haven't really been exposed to this. It sounds like it is. Well, you don't hang out on social media. I mean, the real thing is that like the way you know about this before the reporting started really coming out on it is you see this stuff in drive by posts now and again and just the awful replies that get attached to it. And that was the only knowledge I had until people started really digging into it. But now that I've seen the actual substance of what's going on here, it's just formless hate. It is just a lot of anger and deeply misdirected anger for reasons that are incredibly just self-centered and awful. That's all it is. Yeah, you're starting to see it grow tendrils in every different direction as conspiracy theories tend to do, seizing on other currents in games right now. For example, lack of funding, layoffs, the contraction of the business, there's now this idea floating around that there's all this extra funding that you can now only access if you go woke. What? It's basically the idea that's being propagated. It's just like, again, these things are just... It's rooted in no version of reality. Like, what? I just... I don't know. I don't know. I really don't know. If anything, all this really is is a potent reminder that a lot of those just ill feelings from GamerGate never went away. Those people never really went away. They just kind of stopped being as publicly visible as they were during the duration of that awful shit. But they were always there, bubbling onto the surface. They were still there playing video games and complaining about them in the corners of the internet that allowed them to exist. And this is just an example of that bubbling back to the surface in a way that it hadn't, at least in a major way, in some time. And unfortunately, when that happens, people get really nasty stuff directed at them. It's not just a, oh, well, I saw a bad post. No, people are being actually targeted and harassed. Like a business is being targeted here for things that, again, they are in no way responsible for this deranged thinking. And it's like, I don't... That stuff never went away. And now it's just like, it's a reminder that, hey, it's still there. This industry has expanded to the point where the people that were marginalized are now, hopefully, making more of these games, want to see representation in these games. Companies want to bring in all of those people into a bigger, wider game industry. With that also comes people who want advice on how to do it. Even if we maybe were giving that advice and trying to steer people into it, like, if you're actually trying to reach these people, here's a better representation. I think that's an extremely positive thing to celebrate instead of condemn, right? The games that traditionally these groups seem to be clamoring for are still out there. And I just don't know if it's a thing. This is going back to the Gamergate days of the argument that like, they're taking your game away, right? And they're sanding off all the edges, and it just doesn't hold water as any kind of argument at all. It never did. It never did. And it especially doesn't now, but I mean, now they're not even trying again to couch this sort of stuff in any sort of like, you know, ethics and game journalism bullshit. It's just the open racism and misogyny and all that shit just splayed out for everyone to see. It's just so naked. It is. And the thing is, it can be now because nobody moderates anything on Twitter anymore. And seemingly, you know, Steam's approach to this is we don't get involved in these kinds of things. We don't tell people what kinds of Steam groups they can make unless they are doing something really rotten. And in this case, I guess this does not meet that criteria. So there it is, you know, it can just sit there and continue to exist. I can't say I feel better about knowing this existed, but it's a good thing to be aware of that this is bubbling around out there. I hope it goes away and I hope the people that are directly involved or targeted by this make it through okay without too much damage. At bare minimum, I feel like I'm seeing a lot fewer seemingly well-meaning people glomming onto this thing as like something legitimate. It seems like it is really just a collection of very aggrieved people who have no idea about anything, just kind of feeding each other over and over again. Look, I hope this shit stops today, but it probably won't. But I don't know that this is going to be, hopefully, nearly as much of a explosion of bad shit as the last time this kind of thing happened. Is there crossover in these, and again, I'm painting with a wide brush here, but like, do you feel like there's crossover in these groups of people that also are the diehard free market folks that are like... I'm just thinking about that, and the answer is no. Is it no? Because like... I don't think so. Wouldn't the market self-correct if this were... And again, I'm not talking about the conspiracy theories of banks aren't lending money and people can't get money and that's the actual reason contractions are happening for studios. But like, if this were bad for business, the market would probably self-correct, right? Yeah. I mean, my feeling is that the free market ideologues fell out of favor quite a while ago at this point. Okay. And the people who were ascendant now are much more in favor of using things like state power or other forms of authority to heavy-handedly correct things like this they don't like. Yeah. Like, letting the market decide is not a thing anymore. The market decided and they didn't like how it decided. We live in interesting, dangerous, and weird times. I feel like I wake up every morning saying exactly that to myself. I don't know what else to say about this. Again, I don't know too much about it. Sounds like there are fires happening on social media. Yes. Absolutely. But yes, I have had the same thought you have of like, again, this is not a small, like, what is it? 16-person consultancy firm dictating all this stuff. It's again, it's like developers electing to do this and then bringing in somebody who they think can help them do it, right? Yeah. And it's happening naturally because whether it's what the market wants or it's what developers want, you know what I mean, like, it's a real card before the horse kind of view on things. All right. Let's move on from that.