It seems video games will continue to be a lightning rod for culture war battles, and yet another one has kicked off in the past week. At the weekend, BoundingIntoComics reported on Sweet Baby Inc. Who are they and what do they do?
Let’s look directly at their website for their take on this:
“Our mission is to tell better, more empathetic stories while diversifying and enriching the video games industry. We aim to make games more engaging, more fun, more meaningful, and more inclusive, for everyone.
We believe that representation is key to connecting players and audiences,and we offer a few ways to help your team and project gain the perspective needed to make it happen,” their mission statement continues. “We’re part of an inclusive and knowledgeable community of diverse consultants, able to cover a wide range of cultural and sensitivity topics.
Our approach leads with the creation of joy in marginalized players, and seeks to be additive rather than strictly corrective.”
In short, they are a narrative consultation company that provides sensitivity reading services for video game companies, to help them build inclusion-focused narratives. Most recently Sweet Baby Inc. provided services to Alan Wake 2 and Goodbye Volcano High.
According to the company they also provided consultancy on narrative and character with a focus on representation for God of War: Ragnarok, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, and Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League. They are basically an industry-focused ESG and DEI consultancy.
So it was always inevitable that a pushback to this would happen, and it did towards the end of last month as a player create a public Steam Curator page, titled Sweet Baby Inc detected. This used public information, much of it from Sweet Baby Inc. themselves, to notify fellow gamers of titles that the company had consulted on.
One employee of Sweet Baby Inc., Maya Felix Kramer, took to Twitter in a multi-message thread Twitter thread unloading on the existence of this list, despite the information within it all being in the public domain:
“I get to see a lot of tweets somehow blaming ‘diversity’ as the reason for layoffs genuinely as if the economy was doing really great and capitalism simply worked before Miles Morales was Spider-Man* (*they also don’t recognize Miles as Spider-Man).
The weirdest part is when I see these takes from developers or people who have dev bios at least, idk it seems wild that a dev would see thousands of layoffs and blame not the industry giants but instead a 15 person narrative company founded by a black woman”.
She continues her rebuttal:
“These people think a company of narrative designers that freelances on projects has somehow single handedly caused the employment collapse in games, instead of, you know, the insane notion of infinite growth or capitalist greed. It’s easier to blame diversity than that somehow.
I still think it’s way more likely that they know that’s not the case and are just fine with looking stupid so long as it justifies them being loudly anti-woke whatever that means (we all know what it means).”
Leading up to focussing on the list itself, she says:
“The other part of this is it doesn’t matter if you tell them the truth. They think ‘DEI’ just steps in and changes whole games: that creators are forced by some unseen hand (The govt, blackrock?? I guess? As well as just poc in general) to make games more inclusive???
Fighting misinformation would be great! but social media + YouTube is not equipped to hold people accountable to doing real research in good faith. Just getting hits and proving their point in the absence of confirmation. it’s wild out there. Nothing has changed. Nothing.
Sorry no one thing has changed: The number of people who understand that spreading misinformation just lets them be racist in public with no consequence has increased dramatically.”
She then stated:
“For example, Steam doesn’t have guidelines for curators (as far as I can tell) that would prevent someone from starting a curation group that focuses on, say, Sweet Baby Inc. and…warns people to not buy games they’re associated with? Which could just list any game at all??”
This led to that bluntest of levelers, the Twitter Community Note, being deployed against her Tweets, noting that all information in the list is available on the Sweet Baby Inc. website or in their press releases, and highlighting that she is an employee. She clapped back to this, saying:
“It’s pretty funny to see a note on my Steam Curator post. I guess they need to defend themselves because they’re completely wrong about everything Sweet Baby (or any narrative team) does and have no interest in finding out!”
This was then followed up by Sweet Baby Inc. writer Chris Kindred who took to social media to demand a mass reporting campaign against the list, referring to it as a harassment group when demanding his followers… harrass the group.
He even named the Twitter handle of the person behind the list.
RIP Irony. Killed March 2024.
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