We CONTINUE to show receipts on this board, OVER AND OVER again, but people either simply shrug them off or lowkey sympathize will continue to post his content.
GamerGate 2.0? Chuds furious about a consulting company named “Sweet Baby Inc” which overviews scripts to make sure nothing offensive was written
- Thread starter Mattmo831
- Start date
We CONTINUE to show receipts on this board, OVER AND OVER again, but people either simply shrug them off or lowkey sympathize will continue to post his content.
Well today I learned this dude sucks. I'm not super plugged into streamers since I'm old.
They make their own art often but it's often times incredibly fucking lame so no pays attention to it.
And the funny thing is, a decade ago their argument was "if people want more diversity in games they should get jobs and create games" and people did exactly that and somehow that's an issue. They just hate the sight of minorities, the LBGT community, and women who haven't been designed with coomers in mind. And instead of just outright admitting that, or acknowledging that it was very wrong for a media landscape to skew so heavily towards a white cis male demographic during a time when that explicitly wasn't the only demographic playing games,, they try to tiptoe around it by going in a crusade on the daily. And making fools of themselves in the process.
He always has been and people post about him on here and we call it out and nobody listens.
If you wanna play games with their original script, maybe learn Japanese if the original intent is that important to you!
Asmongold is also a true, 100%, bonafide, in his blood grifter
The guy will do ANYTHING for content and will milk EVERYTHING
he will have any take, watch anything to react to, say anything, cause any drama and then instantly turn around and say the opposite as long as it makes him views and engagement
He is completely and utterly without morals and the only reason he puts on a show like he has some standards is because he has the business sense (and it's nothing else) to know that if he goes just that step too far it will cost him instead of just generating buzz for his content
The guy will do ANYTHING for content and will milk EVERYTHING
he will have any take, watch anything to react to, say anything, cause any drama and then instantly turn around and say the opposite as long as it makes him views and engagement
He is completely and utterly without morals and the only reason he puts on a show like he has some standards is because he has the business sense (and it's nothing else) to know that if he goes just that step too far it will cost him instead of just generating buzz for his content
This might sound strange coming from a person as queer as myself, but I highly disagree. Variety is the spice of life, As long as there is no bigotry of any kind in them games should be whatever the developers want them to be, art exists to push boundaries and ask hard questions just as much as it exists to be enjoyable, fun and elicit an emotional response. No game is for everyone and that's fine, some of my favorite games are offensive to someone and that's fine.
Like Doom and Megami Tensei will never be palatable to most hardcore fundamentalist Christians. Hell I personally wear pentagrams, inverted crosses and sigils of baphomet as necklaces with every outfit even when I was still able to work regularly, it's self expression. I'm sure plenty of people don't like it but that's fine.
On topic, but these chuds were literally telling people "if you want to see more diversity in games then make them yourself" and now that that's been happening they're really pulling the preverbial "NO NOT LIKE THAT" huh?
Haha, Warhammer? Morbidly curious to see the whining. Then you say history and mythology, and I remember these people are just miserable.
well, don't you know? Education is woke now! Because they can't indoctrinate an educated populace... seriously? I'm really shocked some random repub hasn't stated how reading is woke at this point.
Their art fucking sucks because they often personally lack many of the aspects of a great, or even decent artist. They might have the technical skills but their vision and imagination are as creatively bankrupt as they come. They're so limited by their own personal bullshit that they can't actually create anything that resonates with anyone that isn't the chuddiest of chuds. Even I don't think this "art" lands well with conservatives because its actually good on its own merits but because its just another piece of media confirming and coddling their twisted worldview.
Oh yeah? I'm starting my own business called Bitter Elder Inc to add offensive stuff to games! Take that, woke liberals!
Oh wait, chuds loathe this kind of stuff not because well they're chuds and hate anything progressive but because it "changes the author's vision" so they'd hate my "work" just as much, right?
...right?
Oh wait, chuds loathe this kind of stuff not because well they're chuds and hate anything progressive but because it "changes the author's vision" so they'd hate my "work" just as much, right?
...right?
There are plenty of conservatives that have made good art. A lot of the milkshake duck situations wouldn't have happened if that wasn't the case.
I think the bigger thing is that if you set out to put forward a conservative message first and be entertaining second, it's probably not going to land because your message is going to be fundamentally uninteresting and just existing to make an effort to impress people who already agree with you. Like those bad comic strips which just whine about young people and don't even have a joke. The people going on the internet and whining about diversity probably aren't as often the ones who keep their head down, their views private, and focus on making an accessible and entertaining product regardless of their beliefs.
Talking out of my ass a bit here, but look at James Bond. The original James Bond was basically a tract pushing an extremely bigoted view of masculinity to my understanding, you can find a ton of quotes where Ian Fleming uses the books to whine about men being too effeminate and turning gay. But, without having seen the movies myself, I imagine that the survival of the franchise occurs because the movie makers realize that people are less interested in Ian Fleming's bullshit and more in the cool spy stuff, so they keep redefining the character to suit whatever the idea of a cool depiction masculinity is at the time.
I'm not talking about art throughout history but a lot of the modern day rightwing "art". As I said they may have technical skills down but they rarely have the ability to create anything of actual artistic value beyond providing a picture at the warped mindset of a lot of these folks. That's why I said they lack a lot of what it takes to actually make art that is universal and resonates will all kinds of people. I don't think the James Bond novels are a great comparison because a lot of the views in those books were as common as they got back when they released. A lot of the shit being pushed in current day conservative art is not outside of their group.
Oh yeah. I don't think you're wrong.
But I think it's a little self-demonstrating. If these morons wanted to make good art, they'd have made some kind of effort to make art. They don't do that because they don't really want to do that. They just want to whine and shut other people down, so that's what they do.
We're basically agreeing on a lot of these points. I see conservative art like I do their comedy. Its less about actually making funny jokes or setting up a punchline or anything like that. Conservative comedy is just another pat on the back from one chud to another and little else. Same goes for their art.
Everytime Asmongold comes up, I just think about his bedroom and wonder how anyone can actually take anything a guy who lives like that who has millions of dollars seriously
I know the question is rhetorical, but the answer is that it's telling. Alex Jones still has his game up on Steam for people to buy. Racist games like Tyrone vs. Cops, Sex with Hitler, and more are still available to buy. These games have been undoubtedly reported to Steam, as they have been discussed here on Era. Hell, the Alex Jones game has also been discussed on more mainline news sites, such as Media Matters. More glaring is that, apparently, there's no way to report games for hate speech?
But yeah, Steam platforming games from bigots and also letting said bigots run rampant across the Steam community as Curators and in Forums is something that we can at this point glean as intended by Valve. The sad part is that any discussion of Valve's Musk-like everything-goes policies are unable to gain any traction that can transform into tangible pressure and change.
This mess could wind up with the staff of SBI getting hurt or worse, given that bigots such as the ones targeting SBI engage in things like doxxing and SWATting to try and get their way. This mess is one that Valve has significantly contributed to with its intentional hands-off policies, which have let bigots fester on their service. They deserve to face consequences just as much as the people targeting SBI.
I remember their being dark skinned Space Wolves (and dark skinned people native to the planet of Fenris in the lore) seemed to REALLY rattle people up, same when GW started having more women in the model sets for armies like Imperial Fists and Tau or the bigger presence of the Sisters of Battle in recent editions and their was infamous bigoted WH YouTuber called Archwarhammer that I kept getting recs years back.
one of the reasons his followers listen to him is BECAUSE he lives like that with millions of dollars
they think he is "uncorrupted" compared to the "rich elites"
There's also this:
Gabe Newell apologises for pulling Hatred from Steam Greenlight
Hatred has reappeared on Steam Greenlight after having been removed from the service, and now we know why.
www.vg247.com
Yeah, Gabe covering for Hatred and then the future rulemaking after other controversies where they said in a blog "Steam is going to have games that you will hate" or something like that should have been red flags. As someone who's been around the block quite a few times with regards to Internet arguments, the Free Speech Absolutism bromides stuck out like a sore thumb. Gabe and his buddies enabled this targeting of SBI by bigots on Steam.There's also this:
Gabe Newell apologises for pulling Hatred from Steam Greenlight
Hatred has reappeared on Steam Greenlight after having been removed from the service, and now we know why.
He also said this:
Guy is a fucking toxic germ.
Motherfucker is shameless about it too because he'll hitch his wagon to whatever "controversy" is making waves and speak out of his ass the entire time.
Asmongold is probably reason the group got as big as it is, however, he isn't the reason on why people noticed.
SBI basically did a streisand effect by pointing the group out and asking people to report it. Which had the opposite effect as we can see.
Asmongold is a symptom of the problem.
SBI basically did a streisand effect by pointing the group out and asking people to report it. Which had the opposite effect as we can see.
Asmongold is a symptom of the problem.
He literally made a 10 minutes video telling everyone that he would not bring his girlfriend to DisneyLand because it was "woke"
Such a total pathetic loser
Ha. I have a bunch of Sisters armies and the near complete Joytoy set up for the Sisters releases.
To quote Elizabeth Darko from Donnie Darko, they can go S a F.
I'll never forget the story about him using the sun's heat on a dead rat in his wall as an alarm clock
dude must fucking STINK, this is why Jordan Peterson gets followers because without him some dudes would not wash their own ass
So this is just a bunch of babies getting mad at something they don't understand? Sounds like alt right gamers all right.
Assuming you more mean "so long as a game isn't arguing bigotry is good"/"wasn't created in a bigoted way"?
Because there absolutely should be bad acts of all kinds in all forms of media, so long as it's not being argued by the creator that it's a good thing.
Like, a villain should be able to be bigoted in-game. And that villain can try to do some wack ass justification for it. And other characters should be able to poke the holes in that.
I'm still disappointed people bring him up for this alone. I'm surprised there hasn't been a rule about him yet here. He's toxic as fuck and every time he's brought up it's like no one cares.
Strong agree, you don't see party members written like Wakka (FFX) anymore as a result tbh
Yeah.
I've slowly gone insane over recent online discourse else about a few different franchises, because there's a fair amount of people who seem to think that if the protagonist has any negative qualities the author is defending them (because people think protagonists have to be good people now???), or, worse, that if there's anything bad the author actively supports it.
Like, you know, ignoring that the whole context of the story is important.
I was just thinking, would this even remotely become Gamersgate 2.0 if it hadn't been posted here. Like I'd have not even known about this and now this is going to be higher in the gaming discourse because of the thread?
Making a disclaimer this isn't an attack on OP but feeding the chuds with fame never ends well.
Making a disclaimer this isn't an attack on OP but feeding the chuds with fame never ends well.
That kind of fascism pretty much already happening in the USA. Books are being banned. Budgets are being slashed. Certain subjects are being neutered or completely dropped. Curriculums are being altered to remove history of racism/slavery or anything close to "critical race theory". Libraries are being banned from associating with the American Library Association. Republicans have been attacking education for a while. They know an educated populace is very dangerous, so they're doing everything to reduce literacy of all kinds.
Oh, they did.
Kyle Rittenhouse's Turkey Shoot Game
Play as Kyle Rittenhouse to get Revenge on every Fake News Turkey with a simple point and shoot mechanism that all ages can enjoy.
rittenhousegame.com
A lot of them play Ready or Not and military themed shooters. Also apparently GTA, the amount of people pissed that Rockstar yanked some transphobic caricature NPCs seemed high.
I didn't notice this thread.
Been watching this brew on reddit for quite a while now. Generally just making fun of the idiots that think that a consulting firm has that much power over story writing, much more so that Sweet Baby (damn, that name is horrible, can they think of a better one?) is responsible for only finding offensive things that the developers seem to not notice. Just gonna continue to make fun of them there.
Also, the fact that Asmongold is getting on it and on that side as well is... damn. I knew he was quite out there, but never thought he would be this horrible and side with those fuckers.
Been watching this brew on reddit for quite a while now. Generally just making fun of the idiots that think that a consulting firm has that much power over story writing, much more so that Sweet Baby (damn, that name is horrible, can they think of a better one?) is responsible for only finding offensive things that the developers seem to not notice. Just gonna continue to make fun of them there.
Also, the fact that Asmongold is getting on it and on that side as well is... damn. I knew he was quite out there, but never thought he would be this horrible and side with those fuckers.
OP
OP
My take personally is this was already very big and blowing up well before I made a thread about it. Personally I don't think this thread has increased the discourse you're already seeing online (outside of this thread) of this.
At least I sure hope so, I could be being completely naive. Havnt seen anything personally that this thread specifically has instigated anything outside of the era bubble.
I understand the concern however and no worries I don't think it's an attack on me at all
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If thes
Christ, me too. It just boggles the mind that people can't understand a character having a negative flaw isn't an endorsement of said flaw.
I've been following this too. I've watched some of the popular YouTubers who are commenting on this (not subscribed to them) and I thought maybe I could offer some insight into this, and particularly why they're wrong...
First, this idea that Sweet Baby is rewriting or censoring games is absurd. The way a contractor like Sweet Baby functions is that it's at the request, of the creative directors present at a studio. It's not some post-production marketing trick where they go in and adjust the script of a game, it just doesn't function like that. These types of services and consultancy work, they get used because the games creative team says 'hey, we want to write a story about a gay black man, but none of us are gay black men, how do we approach that?'
In the industry and in the EDI consulting space, there is this saying 'nothing about us, without us' and this is in part why it's always best practice to include representative stakeholders in your stories and instances of representation. Otherwise, what you create might end up being harmful to those groups of people, and game developers and creatives in my experience do not want that. As I say, this isn't some mandate that comes down on high, game developers are generally very intelligent people and while they want to write about characters and situations outside their own lived experiences, they also recognise the value in including people with lived experience into that.
Sweet Baby isn't the face of this, either. This has moved towards standard practice across media production, and I do believe the 'nothing about us without us' approach is best practice. Sweet Baby is just a consultancy firm in this area which has more eyes on them, most often this work is conducted with individual consultancy and usually this consultancy work is not substantial enough to amount to a credit towards a game (most often a consultancy pass like this might only see someone work on the game for a few days or a week, and usually that isn't substantial enough to constitute a credit, that's a different issue, but that's reality).
In broader media, you have much more matured approaches to this. For instance, Channel 4 in the UK have a 'disability code of portrayal' which outlines the code of practice around how they handle the representation of people with disabilities in their media, including the objective that their media should strive to improve and increase, disability portrayal. Channel 4's example is a good one because they have published this for other organisations to view and use themselves, but most media production organisations, whether they're big games publishers or television production houses, have some similar goals outlined somewhere.
And I think anyone with any sense would acknowledge this as a good thing. If you look at the diversity in games, and in media, it has historically been very poor. Women have very rarely been leading characters, and most often they have been hypersexualised and used to push harmful stereotypes. It's the same in other areas, like disability, for example. Most often, characters with disabilities tend to be either villains, or objects of pity. It's extremely rare that they're empowered playable characters, and when they are, they tend to manifest as some super-powered ability. It's easy to see why game developers benefit from more support and guidance, when seeking to represent disabled characters.
And again, it's not because they're being forced to do so. These elements get into games because game developers want to write interesting stories about interesting characters, and diversity offers an opportunity to do that. So it's almost always the case that these instances of representation are led by people on the development team, and these people are usually creatives.
The other thing I want to speak against is this idea that games are this pure creative process to begin with. At the earliest ideation stages of a product a large production will establish its target audiences and then with a marketing department or a firm like quantic foundry they will most often end up telling you that your target audience is 32 years old male, and likes to be competitive and collecting things (or whatever). Then throughout the development process, user research will put their vision of the game in front of people from this product demographic to steer its design. This can lead to changes to gameplay, narrative and everything else.
I'm not saying this is censorship, either. But what I am saying is that these people like to pretend that speaking to a black consultant about representation is somehow disrupting this pure creative process, preventing the developer's vision for the game getting into the hands of their players. When, in reality, predominantly white male players have always steered the creative process. This is what risk-aversive game development has always looked like and if you're buying games like Suicide Squad you're never going to get that singular, pure creative vision, it's always going to be an amalgamation of thousands of perspectives, and it absolutely makes sense that there is a conscious effort to ensure that some of those perspectives are diverse and that people in minority and underrepresented groups are included in there.
This is especially true, while game development and the industry itself has a race problem, a gender problem, a socioeconomic status problem. Game development itself is not diverse, and the demographics of the people making games do not evenly represent the demographics of the population that they are trying to sell games to. In an ideal world we wouldn't have this social inequality, and we wouldn't need this kind of consultant involvement, but that is not the reality.
I do not think these people are consciously racist, but I do think they are racist. At the end of the day they are acting to preserve what they perceive is their culture, but that culture has been built predominantly by white men, almost exclusively for white men. So it's obviously going to feel like their culture is being attacked when they see it changing, and Sweet Baby Inc is an easy target that they can all point fingers at. I don't think we need to erase the white male protagonist or make every female character unattractive or anything like that, but we want more diverse, even-handed representation and Sweet Baby is an organisation that is emerged to fill that need and desire from the industry. It's not Sweet Baby's existence imposing these perspectives on their studios, it's these studios reaching out to Sweet Baby (and many other avenues) to help them answer questions that they cannot easily answer with their internal resources.
I can't speak to any of Sweet Baby's work, I don't know anyone there, I have never worked with them. However, the demand here comes from the industry itself. It comes from the players playing games and wanting to see more characters that resemble them featured, and from the creatives making games that want to make diverse games without reinforcing harmful stereotypes and prejudice.
The final comment I want to add is even when you recruit a consultancy firm to look at your dialogue, or you get players in to give feedback on the games' story before it's released, I have never seen an instance where you allow that external involvement to have the final say in any design feature. It's always up to the creatives and designers to take that feedback and produce something that the thing is right for their vision of the game. If Forspoken is a bad game (and I'm not saying it is, I haven't played it) it's bad because of the choices the designers made. Regardless of external involvement, they are both responsible and accountable for the creative output. This isn't a book being adjusted after an author has died (which I do not take issue with either provided the original is also preserved), the creatives are always actively involved, and ultimately they determine the final output that players see.
If we're being honest, it's a certain youtuber/streamer with many millions of subs/followers that's bringing this to the widest audience and taking it beyond the typical bigoted circles. Not this thread on ERA, and yes I do think it's worthwhile that discourse exists that pushes back against the rhetoric.
First, this idea that Sweet Baby is rewriting or censoring games is absurd. The way a contractor like Sweet Baby functions is that it's at the request, of the creative directors present at a studio. It's not some post-production marketing trick where they go in and adjust the script of a game, it just doesn't function like that. These types of services and consultancy work, they get used because the games creative team says 'hey, we want to write a story about a gay black man, but none of us are gay black men, how do we approach that?'
In the industry and in the EDI consulting space, there is this saying 'nothing about us, without us' and this is in part why it's always best practice to include representative stakeholders in your stories and instances of representation. Otherwise, what you create might end up being harmful to those groups of people, and game developers and creatives in my experience do not want that. As I say, this isn't some mandate that comes down on high, game developers are generally very intelligent people and while they want to write about characters and situations outside their own lived experiences, they also recognise the value in including people with lived experience into that.
Sweet Baby isn't the face of this, either. This has moved towards standard practice across media production, and I do believe the 'nothing about us without us' approach is best practice. Sweet Baby is just a consultancy firm in this area which has more eyes on them, most often this work is conducted with individual consultancy and usually this consultancy work is not substantial enough to amount to a credit towards a game (most often a consultancy pass like this might only see someone work on the game for a few days or a week, and usually that isn't substantial enough to constitute a credit, that's a different issue, but that's reality).
In broader media, you have much more matured approaches to this. For instance, Channel 4 in the UK have a 'disability code of portrayal' which outlines the code of practice around how they handle the representation of people with disabilities in their media, including the objective that their media should strive to improve and increase, disability portrayal. Channel 4's example is a good one because they have published this for other organisations to view and use themselves, but most media production organisations, whether they're big games publishers or television production houses, have some similar goals outlined somewhere.
And I think anyone with any sense would acknowledge this as a good thing. If you look at the diversity in games, and in media, it has historically been very poor. Women have very rarely been leading characters, and most often they have been hypersexualised and used to push harmful stereotypes. It's the same in other areas, like disability, for example. Most often, characters with disabilities tend to be either villains, or objects of pity. It's extremely rare that they're empowered playable characters, and when they are, they tend to manifest as some super-powered ability. It's easy to see why game developers benefit from more support and guidance, when seeking to represent disabled characters.
And again, it's not because they're being forced to do so. These elements get into games because game developers want to write interesting stories about interesting characters, and diversity offers an opportunity to do that. So it's almost always the case that these instances of representation are led by people on the development team, and these people are usually creatives.
The other thing I want to speak against is this idea that games are this pure creative process to begin with. At the earliest ideation stages of a product a large production will establish its target audiences and then with a marketing department or a firm like quantic foundry they will most often end up telling you that your target audience is 32 years old male, and likes to be competitive and collecting things (or whatever). Then throughout the development process, user research will put their vision of the game in front of people from this product demographic to steer its design. This can lead to changes to gameplay, narrative and everything else.
I'm not saying this is censorship, either. But what I am saying is that these people like to pretend that speaking to a black consultant about representation is somehow disrupting this pure creative process, preventing the developer's vision for the game getting into the hands of their players. When, in reality, predominantly white male players have always steered the creative process. This is what risk-aversive game development has always looked like and if you're buying games like Suicide Squad you're never going to get that singular, pure creative vision, it's always going to be an amalgamation of thousands of perspectives, and it absolutely makes sense that there is a conscious effort to ensure that some of those perspectives are diverse and that people in minority and underrepresented groups are included in there.
This is especially true, while game development and the industry itself has a race problem, a gender problem, a socioeconomic status problem. Game development itself is not diverse, and the demographics of the people making games do not evenly represent the demographics of the population that they are trying to sell games to. In an ideal world we wouldn't have this social inequality, and we wouldn't need this kind of consultant involvement, but that is not the reality.
I do not think these people are consciously racist, but I do think they are racist. At the end of the day they are acting to preserve what they perceive is their culture, but that culture has been built predominantly by white men, almost exclusively for white men. So it's obviously going to feel like their culture is being attacked when they see it changing, and Sweet Baby Inc is an easy target that they can all point fingers at. I don't think we need to erase the white male protagonist or make every female character unattractive or anything like that, but we want more diverse, even-handed representation and Sweet Baby is an organisation that is emerged to fill that need and desire from the industry. It's not Sweet Baby's existence imposing these perspectives on their studios, it's these studios reaching out to Sweet Baby (and many other avenues) to help them answer questions that they cannot easily answer with their internal resources.
I can't speak to any of Sweet Baby's work, I don't know anyone there, I have never worked with them. However, the demand here comes from the industry itself. It comes from the players playing games and wanting to see more characters that resemble them featured, and from the creatives making games that want to make diverse games without reinforcing harmful stereotypes and prejudice.
The final comment I want to add is even when you recruit a consultancy firm to look at your dialogue, or you get players in to give feedback on the games' story before it's released, I have never seen an instance where you allow that external involvement to have the final say in any design feature. It's always up to the creatives and designers to take that feedback and produce something that the thing is right for their vision of the game. If Forspoken is a bad game (and I'm not saying it is, I haven't played it) it's bad because of the choices the designers made. Regardless of external involvement, they are both responsible and accountable for the creative output. This isn't a book being adjusted after an author has died (which I do not take issue with either provided the original is also preserved), the creatives are always actively involved, and ultimately they determine the final output that players see.
If we're being honest, it's a certain youtuber/streamer with many millions of subs/followers that's bringing this to the widest audience and taking it beyond the typical bigoted circles. Not this thread on ERA, and yes I do think it's worthwhile that discourse exists that pushes back against the rhetoric.
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This should be threadmarked.
Blame people's lack of media literacy for that. Casual reminder that we get memes like the "you're not supposed to idolize them starter pack" explicitly because large contingents of the audience, especially men, have trouble parsing that you aren't supposed to co-sign everything a protagonist does. Hell those very same people can't even watch something like Star Wars without saying "it would be a more interesting story if the woman became a nazi and joined the space nazi I identify with more easily"
great post, a poignant reminder of the unreality that the people behind this create for themselves and how myopic they are, even if i would be a lot harsher on them
I've been completely off all of this and regardless as of RIGHT NOW just entered on Steam to see the patch notes for the new helldivers update and the comments are just hideous -- and full of steam 'gifts' to promote the comments and create fake engagement, Twitter's Melon Tusk approach tbh. Steam and Valve should be held accountable but they won't do shit unfortunately