A Sweet Baby Inc. employee named Camerin Wild, who claims to be non-binary, admitted that his goal is “burning the games industry to the ground.”
Source: Sweet Baby Inc. Employee Admits Goal Is “Burning The Games Industry To The Ground”
If you follow the gaming industry, you can’t escape the ideological war that’s being fought about wokeness in modern games. It mirrors the fight about wokeness everywhere, but it’s a much more compact world, and easier to keep tabs on. The wokes have succeeded in education, government, news, and movies, and are moving to the last “safe space” for white males: video games. And, boy, have they done some damage!
Most recently was Concord, a squad-based shooter from Sony, which failed so hard, they forcefully refunded everyone’s money and closed down the servers after just 2 weeks. It’s estimated that development took 8 years and $400M. Almost all of the triple-A releases of the past couple of years have been complete failures, and when you dig around in the credits of these flops, you keep finding one company in common with all of them: Sweet Baby, Inc.
So here’s a GDOC — a game developer of color — who works for Sweet Baby — giving a talk about how to “burn the games industry to the ground.” Now, I get it. Yes, those words are literally on one of his slides, but I understand the larger context. He wants to see the games industry as it has existed to be destroyed, and rebuilt in his image. Which means he wants to see any and all stories about straight, white, male protagonists eliminated in favor of anything and everything else. The forthcoming Assassins Creed Shadows is the picture-perfect example. It features a black, gay samurai in feudal Japan. I don’t think you can get any more removed from context or expectation in favor of an anti-whiteness narrative.
There are plenty of good stories that don’t center on a white male. It’s not even uncommon. Lara Croft in “Tomb Raider” and “Rise” is an amazing character. Pretty and well built, yes, but skilled and clever. Her femininity is never used against her. Her physical attributes are never a plot point. Aloy in the Horizon series is similarly amazing. You can play as Alexandria in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, and the story is interchangeable. I like FPS games, so these are what I’m familiar with, but there are a lot of other examples.
The difference here is that Sweet Baby have taken a concept centered around straight “white” males — laying aside that Japanese people are not “white” — and they’ve simply substituted the main character with something that’s the antithesis of the concept. For people who are strutting around trying to tell other people that they’re the experts in how to write “engaging” stories, they don’t seem to understand what they’re doing at all.
I watched some of the video, looking for the problem, and found it pretty easily.
Oops! Brooks did not write the jokes to come “at the expense of whiteness.” He didn’t write it to simply offend. He wrote the jokes to come at the expense of racists and racism. This is a massive, critical flaw in reasoning and understanding. Gene Wilder is the co-star. His character is white. He’s “us” in the movie. He’s showing white people how you can be white and not be racist. No one denigrates or humiliates or makes fun of Wilder’s “whiteness.” To say that the jokes took white people to task simply for being white is to miss the entire point of the movie. This logical fallacy presumes all white people are racist. Not only is that wrong — which I’m sure this GDOC would admit — but it’s also being racist yourself.
It’s not an incidental matter that the movie is hilarious. That’s another thing these “woke warriors” seem to miss. It entertained! It succeeded, not because of the message, but because it was well-written, and had talented actors and a talented director. These people think they can just “put a chick in it, and make her lame and gay,” and pat themselves on the back for a job well done. They forget it still has to succeed on its own merits.
The biggest miss, however, is that the movie shows that people can change! That’s the brilliant subtext: the moral arc of the townsfolk, wherein they throw off their racism and embrace the sheriff. The jokes that come at the expense of the townspeople attack ignorance, and ask the viewer to reflect on historical attitudes and the things they have been raised to believe that need to be abandoned. The movie doesn’t just beat people up for being white. It demonstrates growth. This is how you persuade with art, whether it’s a movie or a video game. You give people a shovel, and show them where to dig. You don’t just hit them over the head with it to make them feel bad, and make yourself feel superior.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone be so blithely ignorant while presuming to be taken seriously as an expert before.
The bottom line is that 73% of the US is still white. I know George Soros and his NGO’s are working overtime to bring as many non-whites as possible over the border in as little time as possible, but we’re still a majority-white country for now. Also, current estimates are that 90% of the population is straight. If you want to make any money in popular entertainment, you’re going to have to at least make it palatable to straight white people. That’s the majority of the market. That’s where the money is. You can’t just insult people for the sin of having been born white and straight, and then expect them to grovel in penance, and give you money. Well, I mean, you can, but then you don’t get to act surprised when your projects fail, and you and all of your friends get laid off. If you want to succeed, use your art to illuminate the future you envision. Show how it’s better. For everyone. Don’t condemn people. Give people a way out of the sins you are accusing them of; a path of redemption. That’s the lesson of Blazing Saddles.
Look no further than the past couple of years of Star Wars and Marvel programming from Disney to see how well Sweet Baby’s approach works. They’ve desecrated the canon of both of these universes, and changed the fundamental elements that made them popular to begin with. Both of these billion-dollar franchises are circling the drain thanks to these kinds of ham-fisted efforts to force all characters and story lines to come “at the expense of whiteness.” They’ve spent loads of extra money on expert advisors and a small army of the “right” writers, and they still can’t even manage to make new installments entertaining!
Blackrock, Vanguard, and State Street are leading all of this charge to eliminate “whiteness.” (Which is kind of funny, since the CEO of Blackrock is an old white guy, but I digress.) These three own controlling interest in every media company. They’re destroying the very vehicles that give them an audience in the name of trying to eliminate “whiteness.” Many customers have fled to “the long tail” for their entertainment. Soon, there will be no more worldwide franchises left to continue to preach the message with. (Mark my words: they’re coming for Harry Potter next.) Critics of this multi-media, multi-company scorched Earth campaign seem to always want to talk about how much money new, woke projects lose (as I admit that I did, above) But it’s alright; they have the money. They’re extracting it from the US economy, and will continue to burn it to reprogram society.
