More games now include diverse characters, so losers are trying to start ‘Gamergate 2’

Over the past several weeks, you may have heard rumblings about something called “Gamergate 2.” Given that the original Gamergate online harassment campaign happened in 2014, a full decade ago, you might understandably be confused to hear that term being thrown around again.

And if you heard about “Gamergate 2,” chances are you also came across a company called ‘Sweet Baby.’ The small 16-person Montreal-based narrative design consultancy firm has been repeatedly trending on Twitter X as of late. As with most trending topics, though, online algorithms tend to push the most inflammatory takes to the forefront, so whatever you’ve likely seen about this topic has been heavily skewed at best and flat-out false at worst.

So what’s the gist of all of it?

Last October, people took to a website called Kiwi Farms — known for being a hub for kickstarting harassment campaigns — to start a ridiculous conspiracy theory about Sweet Baby. According to these smooth-brained folks, the Montreal firm has been making gaming “worse” by “forcing” diversity into the titles it works on.

They specifically cited Remedy’s Alan Wake 2, Insomniac’s Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 and Sony Santa Monica’s God of War: Ragnarök as examples, given that all three games have prominent minority characters, particularly Black women. Alan Wake 2 co-stars FBI agent Saga Anderson, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 co-stars Afro-Latino Miles Morales, whose romantic interest is a Black deaf woman, and God of War: Ragnarök features Angrboda, a Black teenaged girl, in a supporting role.

Angrboda and Atreus in God of War: Ragnarök. Image credit: PlayStation

But things truly boiled over on January 29th when a Steam group called Sweet Baby Inc. Detected (and accompanying Discord) was formed to, according to its official description, serve as “a tracker for games involved with” the titular Canadian company. Chris Kindred, who works for Sweet Baby, discovered this tracker weeks later and asked people on X to report both the group and the Steam account of its founder, KabrutusRambo. In response, Kindred received a slew of reports against his own account and, eventually, a message from X stating that he broke the platform’s rules and access to his account had been limited.

For many of these people, “Kindred started it” and, therefore, this has justified the flurry of online attacks against him, his Sweet Baby colleagues and anyone else defending them. That includes publications like Kotaku and Wired, which, in doing proper journalistic diligence, actually spoke to several Sweet Baby employees, including CEO Kim Belair (a Black woman), and put together comprehensive pieces. This, in turn, led to rampant harassment against those journalists, both of whom, also not coincidentally, are women.

Image credit: Sweet Baby Inc.

To be clear, there are many issues with this whole situation beyond the blatant racism and sexism. First and foremost: the people getting mad at Sweet Baby are woefully ignorant about how games are even made. Everything you need to know about Sweet Baby is in the word “consultancy.” One shouldn’t even have to explain this, but “consultancy” simply means giving professional advice. For Sweet Baby, this means acting like a Hollywood script doctor; someone brought in to offer feedback on what’s largely a finished product.

Having a third party who’s removed from the game in question is a useful asset for developers, as they can spot general issues related to plot holes, inconsistent characterization, and other narrative problems that may have otherwise gone unnoticed. In other cases, consultants can help with ensuring authentic representation of diverse characters, although that is far from the only thing that Sweet Baby does.

But regardless of Sweet Baby’s exact involvement in a given game, what doesn’t change is that ultimately, the company has no control over the game itself. Contrary to what people online may think or try to illustrate through short out-of-context soundbites, Sweet Baby can’t force a developer to make a game more “woke” — it’s the developer who has the final say over what is and isn’t included. Mary Kenney, a writer at Spider-Man developer Insomniac, explained this in detail in a lengthy X thread. “If the dev team disagrees with them on something? The dev team doesn’t take the note. It really is that simple,” reads one of her posts. Kyle Rowley, Alan Wake 2 game director, also stressed that Sweet Baby is the reason Remedy made Saga Black.

It's absolutely not true. https://t.co/0EIMDuoMtQ

— Kyle Rowley (@TimePirateNinja) March 4, 2024

So, the entire basis of these gamers’ so-called “arguments” is straight-up wrong. But even if you took issue with Kindred’s original pushback against Sweet Baby Inc. Detected, that doesn’t warrant the immense hatred that has been sent to either him, the rest of Sweet Baby or the likes of the Kotaku writer, Alyssa Mercante. Do a quick search of “Sweet Baby” on X and you’ll mostly just see a lot of “us vs. them” style inflammatory posts against the company and its defenders with nothing concrete about why they’re supposedly the villains. When YouTuber MightyKeef shared a tweet saying video games are lecturing about how “why being a white man is bad” and asked for an actual example, nobody could provide one. These “anti-woke” folks, regularly hiding behind anime profile pictures and fake usernames, immediately take it upon themselves to relentlessly attack people like Mercante online and send death threats simply because they don’t like the video games they’re working on. It’s reprehensible.

What’s more, these keyboard warriors can’t even explain why they don’t like these games. As Wired notes, the creator of Sweet Baby Inc. Detected admitted he’s never even played God of War: Ragnarök, despite it being what initially got him so fixated on Sweet Baby. “Why is this game like this?” he asked, without even being able to expound on what “like this” even means. Ragnarök, as well as Alan Wake 2 and Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, was overall received very positively by both critics and consumers, so it’s not as though there are some commonly-known problems you can quickly point to as you would with, say, the much-maligned Gollum. Of course, there are valid reasons to dislike anything, but it says a lot when these people have never played the games they’re mad about or even give a reason as to why they’ve been put off from playing them.

And as Wired astutely points out, these games don’t even have “political agendas,” contrary to what KabrutusRambo and his audience might believe. God of War: Ragnarök is an epic Norse action game about a murderous father and his angsty son, Alan Wake 2 is a David Lynch-inspired horror-thriller about a troubled writer and FBI agent investigating a deadly cult, and Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 is a superhero fantasy about two young men who dress up in spandex to fight criminals.

What, exactly, is the “political agenda” in these games?

Game Rant’s “Average Male Protagonist” Image, but with names and dates (Thanks to the community for helping me find the names)
byu/penmaster3000 ingaming

It’s quite telling that these detractors can’t answer that question. Instead, they simply see a character who doesn’t look exactly like the countless white guy protagonists in gaming and get angry. It’s almost like they’re so horribly racist and misogynistic that the mere glimpse at a character who breaks from the status quo is so upsetting. Never mind that God of War‘s Angrboda is a sweet and charming girl whose endearing friendship with co-lead Atreus is, in many ways, the beating heart of the game — she’s apparently a bad character simply because she’s Black.

People like Mark Kern, a former World of Warcraft designer turned grifter who’s been leading the harassment campaigns against developers and media, have been arguing that they simply want games to be “better.” In their minds, these “woke” characters do the opposite, even though that’s based on nothing valid. In fact, Rami Ismail, a veteran game maker and consultant to countless developers, outlined in a lengthy thread how so-called “forced diversity” hasn’t done anything, and it’s instead “hypercapitalism, shareholder culture and mismanagement” that “makes games shit right now.”

And that right there highlights how full of shit people like Kern really are. Besides their complete failure to explain how a Black character in God of War somehow makes the game worse, their inability to talk about anything else shows they don’t genuinely care about the quality of games. Indeed, there are many legitimate things happening right now that could quickly lead to games becoming tangibly worse — namely, the string of mass layoffs plaguing the industry that will, unfortunately, result in so much talent being lost and plummeting morale among those who remain. But naturally, you’ll never hear this “anti-woke” crowd talk about that. They’d rather direct their ire towards innocent game creators and their media partners who simply want to celebrate and uplift this wonderful medium instead of the callous heads of the billion-dollar companies who lay thousands off while continuing to line their own pockets.

The handful of woke cancel pig devs defending Sweet Baby Inc. and trying to take down @kabrutusrambo and myself are just the Karens of gaming.

You can bet they are on first name basis with their HR department heads.

— Grummz (@Grummz) March 14, 2024

Clearly, these naysayers don’t actually care about games; they simply want to use “concerns over declining game quality” as a smokescreen for their bigotry.

So what can we do?

Something needs to change here. It’s been well-documented by researchers, like the gaming mental health non-profit Take This, that the toxic effects of the first Gamergate have long persisted, even if gamers pretend otherwise. As Take This writes on its website:

As scholars and journalists have noted, the targeted harassment, hate, and cultural norms that were at the heart of Gamergate in the mid 2010’s never went away. People in game spaces, especially marginalized developers and content creators, face hate and harassment daily. In fact, research conducted by Take This has outlined an entire spectrum and typology of extremism and dark participation in games that is bigger than any one movement but underlies all of them. It can be scary or uncomfortable to think about, to talk about, and to understand. 

However, Take This argues that what’s most important is that we do talk about all of this. Citing its February 2024 report on “Strategies for Addressing Hate, Harassment, and Extremism in Online Communities,” the group encourages people to speak out against the people spreading this online abuse. As one developer told Take This: “Without an explicit statement from the studio that toxic, misogynistic behavior was not welcome, the studio found that pro Gamergate individuals assumed the studio’s game was a safe space for them to build community.”

So far, we’ve seen some media partners and developers speak out, particularly Insomniac’s Kenney, who commendably decried the Sweet Baby harassment campaign while praising Sweet Baby in her thread. But the onus to do this shouldn’t be on individual developers, especially those who are already getting so much abuse. (Insomniac, for the record, was also just hit with an awful hack that exposed developers’ private information.)

“Many have long argued that the gaming industry failed women with the first Gamergate due to its silence. Let’s make sure that doesn’t happen again.”

Instead, the companies that have worked with Sweet Baby and their colleagues need to say something. A simple tweet from an official company-run social media account has weight; it can push back against these gamers while also helping to protect individual game makers from being put further in the line of fire. Sweet Baby told Kotaku that partners have been supportive behind-the-scenes, but without public backing, that does little to help circumvent the abuse they continue to face online. Valve and Discord can also step up to prevent groups like “Sweet Baby Inc. Detected” that are helping single out people for harassment.

Sadly, this toxicity isn’t going to suddenly go away and, quite certainly, will only increase in the coming months amid a particularly polarizing 2024 U.S. election between Donald Trump and Joe Biden as well as the ongoing “culture wars.” Therefore, those in the gaming industry, especially the publishers, need to do better in standing up for the likes of Sweet Baby and Mercante.

Many have long argued that the gaming industry failed women with the original Gamergate due to its silence. Let’s make sure that doesn’t happen again.

Image credit: Remedy/Epic Games