If you have been exposed to any film, play, book or TV series produced in the West in the last decade, you are at least somewhat aware of the cultural shifts that have taken place.Western entertainment producers have placed the issue of “representation” at the heart of their content. I am sure you have heard discussions such as “Why does Netflix make everyone black? As you know, even in our Generation Z, terms such as “cancellation culture” or “sjw” (social justice warrior) have emerged. This is not surprising, because in a globalised world it would be naive to think that trends in the West would not find their direct counterparts here. Especially when there is such a culture war going on!
I’ve written a lot about these culture wars, so I won’t repeat myself. But something has happened recently in the West. And this event is very similar to point 0 of the culture wars. Therefore, it would be useful for Turkey to understand an issue that can upset all cultural balances in the West.
If the little fish swallows the big fish…
Now prepare for a bombardment of corporate terms. The hero of our story is Sweet Baby Inc (SBI), a small consultancy based in Montreal, Canada. Its aim is to advise the giants of the games industry on how to comply with DEI (Diversity, Equality, Inclusion) guidelines. DEI can be explained as a set of rules that companies have developed in recent years to ensure gender and racial equality among their employees and services. SBI specialises in story design. In other words, this company makes sure that the stories in new games produced by industry giants are sufficiently diverse, equitable and inclusive. If ‘racist’ or ‘sexist’ characters or stories appear, they intervene and help to fix them.
Depending on your point of view, such a service can be seen as an egalitarian effort to ensure fairness, or as a chore that leads to boring work by setting artificial limits on human creativity. But SBI is not the only company doing this. Let’s talk about why we’re hearing about it. There is a platform that is undoubtedly on the desktop of anyone who has ever played games on a computer; Steam. This platform acts as a digital library. It is the most popular platform for collecting games and various software that you buy from the internet. Steam is also home to communities that critique games. One such community is “Sweet Baby Inc. Detected” or “SBI Detected”. The purpose of this community is to identify and flag games that work with the company SBI.
According to the community, which was created by a Brazilian teenager, games that work with SBI prepare their stories with the aggressive expectations of the company rather than the creative design of the producer. This results in boring games. The whole thing came to light when Christian Kindred, an SBI employee and Twitter user, announced a “shut this community down” campaign. Are you familiar with the Streisand Effect? You know when something you don’t want to be heard is heard even more after you intervene? This is exactly what happened. The community, which had only 40,000 members at the time, grew to 280,000 within a few weeks of Kindred’s tweet!
SBI had caught the public’s attention. Was a tiny company teaching industrial giants how to write stories? A little digging revealed an even more interesting picture. The public speeches made by the company’s CEO, Kim Belair, were shocking. Belair said: “If you want to change a story, put pressure on the bosses of the company you work for. Back them into a corner and threaten them with cancellation on Twitter!” In other words, the CEO of a tiny company was able to hold industry giants hostage for fear of being labelled racist or sexist and lynched on Twitter.
Think of it like the mafia. If you don’t want to be cancelled, make the changes we want! And who’s going to cancel you? Us, of course!
Then came the testimony of another SBI worker. In addition to SBI, Dani Lolanders was also a story designer at industry giant Electronic Arts. In one of her speeches, Lolanders said that she did not favour white people when hiring for her side projects. According to Lolanders, the presence of white people in the office made him uncomfortable. So he only hired people from minorities. This was not only a racist act, but also a federal offence. Under US law, it was illegal to consider race or gender in hiring.
After the scandalous posts by SBI employees were revealed one by one, the silence of the mainstream gaming media did not last long. Almost on the same day, major media outlets such as Kotaku and IGN published articles targeting the SBI-discovered community, especially those who had complained about SBI. These articles claimed that the hostility towards SBI was a far-right conspiracy, and that it stemmed from the fact that minorities and women were not wanted in the industry. Of course, they did not offer much in the way of rebuttal. They just said that SBI was not as influential in game design as they thought. The Kotaku article mentioned that Suicide Squad’s storyline, which was much mocked in its final stages and dropped to 300-400 players within days of release, was only tweaked after development was complete. This was not true.
Sweet Baby Inc. had three employees who wrote the story for Suicide Squad. One was the company’s CEO, Kim Belair, and the other was Grand Roberts, who carried the title of “lead writer”. If SBI were only making minor changes, what was the lead writer doing all this time?
Furthermore, Kim Belair admitted in all his interviews that they were pushing for more identity diversity in the stories they were working on. In short, the game media defence was stillborn.
SBI is a grain of sand
Now you might say, “What should we do if a small company does this? Why should it affect us?” Wait, it’s going to get bigger: when the number of members of the SBI-discovered community reached 300,000, the mainstream media got involved. Many Western newspapers, including the Guardian, reported on the scandal in the gaming world. The media portrayed the whole thing as a pathetic “far-right extremists running a harassment campaign against SBI because they are a minority”.
But this time it was different. The “Community Note” feature of Elon Musk’s X platform left messages under many of the shared articles saying that the incident was not a harassment campaign. Then it emerged that Take this, one of the companies defending SBI, was funded by the US Department of Homeland Security. It turns out that a significant number of such companies are supported by the federal structure to “combat extremism in the gaming world”.
Elon Musk weighed in directly on the news. He said that companies like SBI were a cancer on the entertainment world and wished them a quick demise. He continued to share developments about SBI on his X account.
Let’s get to why this event is being called Gamergate 2.0.
Gamergate, like SBI, is a very long story, but I will try to summarise it as briefly as possible. It all revolves around a game developer called Zoey Quinn. In 2014, after a stormy break-up, Quinn’s ex-boyfriend claimed that Quinn was having an affair with a game critic in exchange for positive reviews of her game. The incident quickly escalated into a culture war. Feminist groups claimed that Quinn had been subjected to a campaign of harassment because she was a woman, while Gamergate supporters argued that feminists and liberal progressive groups, particularly feminists, were exposing unethical relationships with the media. Whatever you think of Gamergate, it would not be an exaggeration to say that it was ground zero in the culture wars that began in the West. The protagonists of Gamergate have been appearing in the mainstream media for years. They even spoke at the United Nations. After Gamergate, Western states, especially the US, began to allocate funds in the name of “countering extremism”. This has given rise to companies such as SBI, which adds diversity to films, series and games.
Meanwhile, it should be added that Zoey Quinn has remained a controversial character over the years. She used her fame in the Gamergate scandal to raise money for her new game, which was never made. She also accused another friend, Alec Holowka, of sexual assault on social media. Holowka, a game developer himself, committed suicide following the allegations. We never found out if Holowka, who committed suicide after the social media trial, actually committed the crime or not. Even stranger, Holowka’s sister Eileen Mary Holowka’s company Baby Ghosts, which sided with Quinn after the suicide, is one of the companies funding SBI today. Who’s with who, eh?
A turning point in the culture wars
SBI is not a large company. The number of games in its sphere of influence can be counted on two fingers. But the emergence of a company like SBI tells us a lot about the direction of the culture wars. Until now, the financier of cultural change in entertainment content produced in the West has been the ESG investment system and the company Blackrock that supports it. The ESG system labelled companies with environmental and egalitarian policies as ‘safe’ for investors by giving them high scores. This pushed companies that did not want to spend money on environmentalism to become egalitarian. Think about it: is it more expensive to make an ad with an identity salad? Or to become a truly green company? That’s why even a wafer company wants to reiterate how much it cares about gender equality. The social engineering efforts of ESG and Blackrock deserve their own article. For now, let’s move on to SBI.
SBI and companies like it are the implementers of a structure whose financiers are Blackrock and the US federal government, and whose theorists are liberal academics. In this way they impose social changes that have no public resonance. The explosion of the SBI scandal could be a turning point in the ongoing culture wars. Compared to the first Gamergate, the group of those who oppose this change is larger. The fact that the former Twitter is now owned by Musk completely changes the balance. If working with companies like SBI distracts the public from some entertainment tools, manufacturers may start to fear working with these companies. Of course, the issue is still up in the air. It is too early to say who will win.
However… at the end of the day, there is a serious public reaction against the pressure on works of art. Yes, there is a need for an environment where women and minorities can work comfortably in the entertainment world, especially in the games industry, and there is a need for companies to produce content for them. The problem with the industry in the past has been the lack of that. To be honest, it would be unrealistic to say that far-right elements and people with ulterior motives were not involved in movements like Gamergate.
However, the solutions to these problems have turned almost the entire entertainment world into a factory churning out the same boring characters. Superficial minority characters added to tick off corporate expectations, villains who are reluctant to utter a phrase that might be considered offensive, white men deliberately designed to be stupid and incompetent as the price for the “privileges” they have enjoyed for years, women designed to be as ugly as possible to avoid objectification, and many other boring modern design rules have surrounded the entertainment industry. People like George Lucas and Stan Lee, whose main motivation was passion, were replaced by upper-middle-class liberals who wanted to impose their own political message in a laboratory environment. And those who criticised this dark age of entertainment were hounded morning and night by the media. Media outlets that write masterpieces such as “The sexiest men of 2023” with their mouths watering and scream “objectification” when they see a single attractive woman in the games, naturally find no response in society.
This is exactly why the entertainment tools produced in the West are slowly losing their appeal. Marvel and DC comics are being replaced by Japanese manga, which do not succumb to such pressures. While the productions that big game companies spend millions of dollars on are crashing, simple games from small studios are taking their place.
Frankly, I can’t imagine corporate chains on the creativity of legendary works of art from the past. Who would sit and watch Lord of the Rings with a company like SBI as a consultant? Who would take the time to read a book that Dostoyevsky or Hemingway would have written for fear of being cancelled, with attention to racial equality, environmentalism and gender equality? These productions were masterpieces created by passionate creators who took a pinch from themselves and their surroundings.
If they had drowned their work in such institutionally bounded political messages, they would have been applauded by those who championed those messages, but soon forgotten, just like many films, TV series and plays that have emerged in the last decade…
