Anonymous Guest asked: Hello! I was wondering if you were going to say anything about the Sweet Baby Inc drama. I know when the first GamerGate happened, you had written on GiantBomb that it would be a minor disruption at most, and in many ways, it was. Is that your take here as well? That some subset of the gaming population is just dumb and it will pass? I was just curious about your thoughts. I also respect if you’d rather just stay silent on the topic.
I don't know that I have anything "new" to say about this because it's another flare up of an ongoing problem. Sweet Baby doesn't actually matter in any of this, the people who started this latest round of shit aren't interested in any kind of factual information about how and why consultants exist and how they do the work that they do. This is just another smokescreen for the right-wing grifters and racists who want to try to make things difficult for oft-marginalized groups. It's an ongoing playbook that has been around in various forms for years and anyone who thinks this is actually about some actual issue with a consulting firm is being fooled.
I found myself wondering at first if this was something that was coming back because this was an election year and there was some desire around that to try to rile up another crew of morons into thinking that evil leftists are somehow ruining the world. But this isn't a "coming back" thing and it's not necessarily just a "gaming" thing, either. There are people out there who want to drive women, people of color, and the LGBTQIA+ community out of various pockets of various cultures and there are content creators who make a living riling that crowd up as much as they possibly can. These scumbags are continuing to do this. These same sorts of scumbags are trying to drive conversation points like calling the mayor Baltimore a "DEI" hire, as if mayors are hired instead of elected. Bright people, really.
I think the main difference for gaming this time is that I remember last time around having people at publishers were slow to understand any of it, so they'd ask me if this was something that was going to stick around and if this was something they needed to care about. This time, from conversations I've had about it, everyone in gaming pretty much sees this bullshit for what it is, so the only people being fooled are the poor dopes out there who are probably already in the existing audience for the right-wing YouTubers desperately trying to keep this thing going. I don't know that I have much more of a read on it than that, mostly because I don't read Twitter anymore and that's where the vast majority of the dumbest shit has been happening.
