Funny how all the mainstream gaming media (+ this 2-paragraphs long blog post [?]) only now decided to cover this story, when the curator list on steam exceded 200.000 subscribers and so SBI run to Kotaku to do damage control, and these mainstream media are only quoting PR slogans from SBI website, or interviews with SBI from fucking Kotaku, or try to ridicule the whole idea by calling it conspiracy theories, or calling hundreds of thousands of players haters, white misogynist, racists and all the usual stuff, but none of these mainstream media actually reported on this story in depth, show what SBI management have been actually saying before all of this came to light, what their founder and employee have been tweeting (tweets now conviniently hidden or deleted) or how THEY (yes, they - Sweet Baby Inc) have been trying to weaponize their followers to ban not only the curator’s list on steam (even while publicly admitting knowing it doesn’t break any steam rules) but also trying to ban the list creator’s account (in spite “because he loves his account so much”).
I know lemmy is not a place to argue such stuff because it seems even woker than reddit and everyone is in this little bubble, but if you’re curious then look up those who’s been covering this subject from the beginning, for example:
The mainstream media picked up on it when actual intelligent games producers chimed in to try to defuse the situation you fragile little man babies were trying to stir up.
It is nothing but conspiracy theories.
If you buy into the bullshit conspiracies then you are a hater. Or a moron. Or both. All 200,000 of you.
If you think the curator isn’t a bigot and/or racist and/or misogynist you’re a fucking idiot.
The CEO of SBI being full of hyperbole doesn’t change any of that.
You say you can “decide for yourself” and then list a handful of links to people pushing their own agenda.
Judging by your post it seems both sides of this issue are toxic. This seems to just be a microcosm of US identity politics at play, with you just hurling insults and outrage at each other over… not a lot it seems?
A boycott of games that a diversity consultancy was involved in, some low quality journalism from Kotaku, and a lot of outrage on both sides?
Firstly I’m not American. Not even in the northern hemisphere.
Secondly I could care less about the article, nor the boycott in and of itself. My issue is with the massive man babies trying to turn every attempt at levelling the playing field of life a little as a sinister attack on freedom, justice and the continuation of humankind.
Fence sitting is all fine and dandy but in the end it just means you’ve got a pole up your butt.
Open YT write sweet baby inc and you get tons of videos giving you some examples. But in case you are that lazy, here you go: www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4p_O9dSJHw
Finally someone who tries to present an actual reason for avoiding SBI! The difficulty in trying to get someone to clear this very low bar is not a good sign.
To start with we have some tweets from @legobutts from 2016. The tweets are bad, I will not try to defend them. Deleting them was the right call, you say something stupid or bad or should delete it. I have no idea where in the SBI hierarchy @legobutts works, but he appears to be a consultant, not an employee. I suppose the argument is SBI should not have them as a consultant, but should SBI be searching the internet archives for everything someone has ever said in the past before working with them?
I will note: The tweets are from 2016, SBI was founded in 2018, so they were not working with SBI at the time. I will also note that @legobutts worked on Tunic, Untitled Goose Game, and Firewatch. I do not see any of those games mentioned on the SBI detected group, so whatever the curator’s issue is with SBI it is not this person’s past tweets.
Then, we have the reaction from SBI to the SBI detected group. Yes, their reaction is bad and was full Streisand effect. However their reaction to SBI detected is not the reason SBI detected was created in the first place, so we can strike that reason as well.
Moving on he didn’t like some of the things said at GDC, but the clips don’t seem problematic to me. They never said they were trying to eliminate all “white male” characters from games, and she gave a story about a cast full of white people and got push-back when suggesting making one a POC. I don’t see the problem with that story.
So the reason’s the YT leaves us with for people not liking SBI is because of DEI and bad writing. Bad writing doesn’t require a curated list. Reviews will tell you if the writing is bad.
This leaves us with, surprise surprise, DEI being the reason. Anyone boycotting a company because of DEI is a bigot. Even if you think DEI is pointless and wasteful, then the company is wasting money on it. Companies waste money on stupid shit all the time. To be so opposed to the idea of DEI to boycott companies speaks volumes about the type of person they are.
The first half of the video is about context-less tweets that a consultant for the company made a decade ago, and the second half is about how they don’t like how some things were phrased at a GDC talk. The guy in the video also talks a lot about Sweet Baby Inc supposedly wanting to exclude straight, white, male characters, but one of the anecdotes they play from the GDC conference was about how some game studio had made a cast of all straight, white men and were thinking of diversifying by making one of those characters very stereotypically french, and so SBI consultant tried to get a little more diversity out of them by also making that character black.
I’m not seeing a lot of hatred or discrimination against white people, or men, or heterosexuals in this video you linked.
But there is the end segment, in the last 3 minutes or so, where he doesn’t understand that there’s a difference between being a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion consulting firm, and a narrative/writing consulting firm that helps promote diversity and inclusion, so that’s fun. He also ends the video by saying that the consultant with the bad tweets from a decade ago is one of the company’s leaders.
All in all, not a lot of evidence that Sweet Baby Inc is doing anything wrong, really.
Seriously now, why don’t you provide some clearer evidence showing what SBI is doing and why it’s so bad? And why respond to my short summary of the video when @CileTheSane did a much more thorough breakdown?
We all know it’s because you don’t actually have any proof or solid reasoning for thinking these things, and you probably responded to me and not them because you’re too lazy to read their longer post and think up a lie. But Cile watched a half hour video because of you and put some thought and effort into applying it to your fake arguments, you could at least try to defend your bigoted views.
some game studio had made a cast of all straight, white men and were thinking of diversifying by making one of those characters very stereotypically french, and so SBI consultant tried to get a little more diversity out of them by also making that character black.
Oh no! They had a cast of 12 straight white men, considered making it 12 straight white men with one who might not be American and in the end its 11 straight white men and one who is not white! Wont someone please think of the poor white children!
It is a state of awareness achieved by intellectually sensitive individuals who have empathy for the plight of others, especially those suffering from injustice and oppression such as racism or systemic bigotry.
This term is also used by people without functional empathy in an attempt to insult and mock those people with empathy.
But “woke” does not mean “persecution”. “Woke” just means that casual racism, sexism, religious and gender bigotry, and general lack of human empathy are no longer acceptable in polite society.
It originally meant “awake” in English, kept that meaning in the American black community after it fell out of use among whites (e.g. “I was having trouble staying woke on the drive”), and was repurposed as slang. The slang meaning was “to be aware of prejudice or racism”, with the implication that many blacks were “asleep”, i.e. accepted excuses for racist systems, believed that racism wasn’t a big deal anymore etc.
I’m not sure whether the word was adopted seriously by leftists generally before the right, or immediately became a catch-all label on the right, but either way, it’s become the latter.
Conservatives and some left-critical leftists now use it as a broad term that refers to things like DEI initiatives, anything trans, etc.
The term as it is defined today was invented by a militant black terrorist group called the Nuwabian Nation, a subsect of the Moors (sovereign citizens focused on their African heritage).
The word has been used by black Americans for at least a century as a synonym form"awake", but its definition as a political concept was first used publicly by the founder of the nuwabians, Dwight York.
The word “woke” as a political term predates that group- York started trying to found a group in 1967, and “woke” was first used to warn black men of threats from racially motivated whites in 1931, by a singer named Lead Belly, then even more directly as a political term in 1971 in a play called “Garvey Lives!”
Whether York used it that way or not, it’s clear that he didn’t invent the usage.
I’m pulling most of this info from Wikipedia and Google to save anyone else reading the effort.
It's not a story when it's a couple of conspiracy theorists making horrifically inaccurate deductions. It's a story when it's hundreds of thousands of people led on by a bunch of horse shit.
show what SBI management have been actually saying before all of this came to light, what their founder and employee have been tweeting
And you don’t show that either. As someone who is trying to understand the issue people have with SBI, can you show something the founder / employees have actually said? I’m not going to search through a random webpage / Youtube page to see if they actually have something relevant.
You are trying to convince people that they said inappropriate things. Again, I am not going to go somewhere to do your job for you and dig through some random archives in case there might be something relevant. Especially if I think you’re making it up.
Internet archive is your friend, if it’s as easy to find as you claim then it would make your arguments significantly more persuasive if you just included a direct link to an archive of whatever it is you are concerned about.
I have better things to do fortunately. It’s pretty clear from other posts that you already made up your mind. So there’s no use. We can end the conversation here.
Also I’m not trying to convince anyone. I just wanted to help you.
Can you reference how exactly I hold the burden? Did I state anything that I have to back up? I only said their twitter is locked. I never said anything else. Looks like the room iq is quite low here.
For the people downvoting. I’m not op. I never claimed anything.
Can you reference how exactly they said you hold the burden? The only said you don’t understand burden of proof, (due to your statements implying that the person making bold claims doesn’t need to provide any evidence of those claims.) They never said anything else.
Where did I say or imply “the person making bold claims doesn’t need to provide any evidence of those claims”.
Right here:
They locked their twitter account. So internet archive is your friend.
OP made them vaguest of all claims (“SBI leadership said awful things”) and I simply asked them for specifics and a link. You know, to “provide any evidence for those claims.”
Your reply to me was basically “look it up yourself”, which is not how the burden of proof works.
Lmao. I’m losing braincells here lol.
Some of you behave so chronically online. Get a life.
How did I imply it? Can you also reference where I refer to OP. I replied cause op’s comment was posted 2 days ago and it was clear they weren’t going to reply.
This is just a misunderstanding in my opinion. So let me make it clear that I’m not on op’s side. I don’t care if sweet abby inc is in a game I play. I do care about Kotaku tho. I have a hard time believing their stories.
I only called you chronically online because you have at least 50 comments on this topic in 2 days.
So I’ll end the conversation here. Idk why it was even dragged on this long.
I only called you chronically online because you have at least 50 comments on this topic in 2 days.
I only called you chronically online because you’re laughing like a lunatic every other sentence, and apparently going into my profile and counting each individual comment I’ve made on a given topic. That’s not the behaviour of someone who touches grass.
That’s not what chronically online means. It’s the internet , people say “LMAO” a lot. Scrolling a profile for 5 sec thread is not that hard and 50 is a guess. You seem quite troubled using the internet. You don’t need to take everything here to face value. I get the feeling that you don’t know when to stop so I’m just gonna block you for now.
I’m not trying to convince anyone. I just wanted to help you.
Pro tip: dO yOuR rEsEaRcH!!1! Has never convinced or helped anyone.
I am willing to have my mind changed if someone were to actually show me any evidence of SBI being bad for some reason. The Steam group says nothing other than “SBI worked on these games,” implying they are bad but not even making the step to say why. When I try to ask people why I should care if SBI is involved I get:
“I don’t have to explain myself” which is true, but does nothing to discredit the claims of bigotry.
“SBI is woke” which we all know is the dog whistle of the bigot, and
"Do your own research" which is the desperate cry of people who believe things without evidence or sources.
Showing me one of these “terrible” tweets by SBI would sure shut me up if it was anywhere near as terrible as claimed.
If this does indeed happen it’s likely to lose The Walt Disney Company millions of dollars as seen with Lightyear.
I don't know whether to laugh or cry.
Yes, it is perfectly possible that the studio's writing work might be a bit shit, I dunno. If you find they are consistently involved with writing you don't enjoy, then sure, whatever. The point of this article is the absolute insanity this kind of stuff gets taken to, like it's a massive conspiracy rather than just the work of another studio managing the struggles and interests of our age.
To quote the 2+n paragraph article:
It’s a conspiracy theory that checks all the boxes: It conveniently explains pretty much everything happening right now, ties it back to organizations of which people are understandably suspicious, links it to a much larger ongoing panic (DEI), validates preconceived notions like “go woke, go broke,” sprinkles in a few kernels of truth regarding powerful interests, and – most importantly – provides a clear and identifiable enemy. It’s also almost entirely bullshit.
Pethaps it has some ads or paywall which causes adblockers to hide remaining content.
skimming through their articles and you get stuff like this
Why referring to other articles and not the ones releated to this subject? I honestly didn’t know any of the linked authors before but it’s great they did talk about the stuff the mainstream media failed to mention.
when the curator list on steam exceded 200.000 subscribers
They have a discord too.
These are the same people who say things like “I don’t care if someone’s gay, just don’t make it your entire personality.” Meanwhile I don’t know what the fuck these people talk about in a “SBI worked on these 16 games” Discord group.
Oh, and apparently they had to delete every post in their discussion forums and lock them to make sure they didn’t break Steam’s rules. Because that’s a sign of a group of reasonable people…
Don’t forget the employee who led a harassment campaign against the curator, came back from Twitter suspension just to disrespect Akira Toriyama’s legacy.
I was being genuine since the comment read to me like it could have had some tongue in cheek, didn’t mean to cause any harm and did not mean to have these kinds of votes attached, sorry.
Fair enough. I see the thread is definitely controversial, and with the salty ones coming out the woodwork, it’s hard to tell what’s what. To be fair, it was a bit fanboyish. I probably deserved that :P Still think he’s a good journo, even if I don’t agree with everything he writes. We need more like him and less like Kotaku.
Open YT write sweet baby inc and you get tons of videos giving you some examples. But in case you are that lazy, here you go: www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4p_O9dSJHw
Did you know it’s possible to acknowledge social inequality and historical (as well as current) racism and use that knowledge to produce positive results for everyone?
Did you know it’s possible to build policies that are mutually beneficial to both straight white male people and those who are not straight, white or male?
Yes that is the ideology. Sadly in the real world the people who hide behind those ideals are actually racist.
Did you know it’s possible to acknowledge social inequality and historical racismYes and I would like to expand that racism itself does not discriminate. Members of minority groups are not immune to being racist,sexist,homophobic,… or any other deranged behavior. That is my only point here.
beneficial to both straight white male people and those who are not straight, white or male?Now this was racist as fuck. You could say ‘for everyone’ but you had to discriminate one of many colors we have. I would really wanna know who those ‘white’ people are. Please explain so I can avoid those racist assholes.
Now this was racist as fuck. You could say ‘for everyone’ but you had to discriminate one of many colors we have.
Pointing out the majority, the intrinsic traits that would give an individual the most ready access to power for the last 3 millenia if not longer is not racist, it’s acknowledging your own privilege, your own luck when being born. Or if you’re not a straight, white, male, it’s acknowledging the extra hurdles of discrimination (intentional or not), and the limited access to famialial resources that you might have to overcome for which the straight white male would not.
As a straight white male you will probably never be denied a loan, a business license, a job or access to college due to discrimination. If you are not straight white or male you very well may have been multiple times over by the time you’re reading this
Members of minority groups are not immune to being racist,sexist,homophobic
This is true, but it’s also extremely important to separate equity from equality, as well as acknowledgement of yours and others traits from discrimination. It’s also extremely important to remember that celebrating your traits that remove you from the majority is not about saying you’re superior but is about building pride and appreciation where previously one may have had to hide these traits from the world or have their options limited by simply having these traits.
if you’re not a straight, white, male, it’s acknowledging the extra hurdles of discrimination (intentional or not), and the limited access to famialial resources that you might have to overcome for which the straight white male would not
Assuming you know something about someone only due their skin color is pretty fucking racist. That includes assuming a white person has familial resources, or assuming that a non white doesn’t.
It’s odd sitting here having to explain that stereotypes are bad.
No if the “intrinsic traits” are skin color. It is the same as being person of darker skin color makes you a latent criminal, rapist etc. You see my point here?
We can talk about social and political background of a person or a group but if you mix skin color into accusations you are an actual racist.
No they don’t, silly goose. You’re only listening to con artists who tell you that: which they do because you’re easy to fleece for cash if you’re angry and afraid. Woke is about becoming aware of inequality and how privileged white people are in western society. It isn’t about hatred or tearing anybody down (except maybe the rich). It’s about building up those whom society has kept at a disadvantage.
But you’ve been told that equality is a zero sum game, and that any rights someone else gains come from rights they’ve taken from you. But it isn’t like that at all.
Stop listening to people who tell you to fear. It isn’t courage. If someone calls you an asshole, maybe consider the possibility that you’re being one?
The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination
“The Paradox of Tolerance” is easily solved if you stop thinking of Tolerance as an imperative, and instead as a social contract. Those who do not abide by the social contract of Tolerance are not protected by it.
Therefore Racists, the anti-tolerant, will not be tolerated.
Are you implying “anti racist discrimination” is justified by your quote? I agree with your quote, but it is not supportive of Kendi’s quote in the slightest. To discriminate is to “unjustly treat categories of people”, so if someone is acting racist and you don’t tolerate them, that is not discrimination at all because you are judging them for their actions, not their looks.
so if someone is acting racist and you don’t tolerate them, that is not discrimination at all because you are judging them for their actions, not their looks.
So what is the difference between that and “anti-racist discrimination”?
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