Sweet Baby Inc. and “Gamergate 2”

So, today I wanted to talk about the situation surrounding Sweet Baby Inc. and what is essentially being dubbed “Gamergate 2”.

Please also go read this article from Aftermath to learn more about the conspiracies and the wild claims made against SBI. It’s a great read! It goes into stuff that I won’t talk about, so if you feel like reading more about the situation, before, during or after my post here, then that’s a great place to start.

Aside from that, I’d also recommend reading this article by TakeThis about targeted harassment.

No matter where you stand on the topic, I’d appreciate it if you’d read the post before leaving any mean comments. Similarly, I’d appreciate it if any and all discussion that happens in the comments was respectful and civil without any harassing, attacking and insulting folks… and without anyone accusing others of anything they cannot prove.

If you have thoughts, feel free to share them but be civil, essentially.

Site Note: There’s a lot of text here, so I added a bunch of images (with alt text), some less fitting, some more so. While there are a bunch of images of cats here as well as poorly-done art by me for purely decorative purposes in places, I also have some screenshots of vile stuff from different platforms in here but I censored the names and certain words/slurs/etc. for obvious reasons.

CWs for mentions of bigotry and political stuff.

Since this post is fairly long, I’ll include a table of context here. I get that not everyone has the time to read everything in one go, so if you need multiple sessions to go through everything, hopefully, this table of contents helps.

1. Why not split this into multiple posts?
2. Why am I writing this post?
3. Gamergate
4. Sweet Baby Inc.
5. Chris Kindred and Incited Harassment
6. Who needs context anyway?
7. Some Ordinary Gamers Is “Awful”…
8. SBI doesn’t have the power you think they do
9. “Everything is political”
10. Bad Faith Actors and Tribalism
11. No Group is a Monolith
12. Conclusion: Be kind.

Why not split this into multiple posts?

The reason why I didn’t want to split it off into different posts is because I know for a fact that most people will only read one article and not pay as much attention to the others but I do find all the topics discussed here equally important and as such wanted to have it all in one place.

The first topic of Gamergate just talks about the events from ten years ago from my perspective and based on my knowledge of it but I’m sure that my thoughts on it are quite controversial.

Then, I’ll explain the situation, talking about Kindred’s incitement of harassment which I’m criticising, then I’ll talk about some claims made by folks, and then I’ll critique Some Ordinary Gamers’ video on the situation, mostly because I respect Mutahar’s work typically and this one video really disappointed me.

After that, though, the sections get much shorter and talk about more general stuff in the gaming industry and how I believe that we should not tolerate any harassment no matter what “side” it comes from and well, the conclusion is… simple… and it should be just that simple but for whatever reason it really is not.

Lots of bad-faith actors, lots of assumptions being made, reading between the lines when there is nothing between the lines, acting based on feelings rather than logic, taking things at face value while not taking other things at face value, and just a general lack of nuance…

There are lots of factors that make this entire discourse incredibly toxic and I just couldn’t really find the right points in the post to end a part and start another if that makes sense. More than anything, I don’t have the spoons to do so. This post already took a lot out of me, especially with how much negative and downright hateful “content” I had to consume to get a perspective of what “the other side” thinks.

Why am I writing this post?

I have a platform, for better or for worse, and I find it important to use it to protest things I dislike or think are bad.

In this case, harassment is bad, hate campaigns are bad and tribalism is a huge problem in our society, so maybe this post sheds some light on things, maybe it changes minds or at least raises awareness, maybe it does none of that. Nothing I’ve said hasn’t been said before in the past ten years but hey, maybe some alt-right person out there will see that I, as a “lefty”, also don’t like it when people incite harassment, even if they are on “my side” of the political spectrum.

To put things into perspective, I don’t think anyone with a platform should tag a user and ask their followers to report them. I’ve talked about it before.

But I also don’t think that the hate campaign that is in motion at the moment is justified in any way, shape or form. I do believe that not all and not even most of the haters and bigots are part of or affiliated with that curator page in question. It’s something I talk about later, too.

So, I’m writing this post because I believe that it’s something I need to do. After all, if I tolerate bigots and haters like that, I’ll eventually become a victim of them myself. It’s only natural to oppose the hatefulness in this community I love and adore.

I wanna make a difference and use my voice while I can… even if it means painting a target on my back.

And just to combat that one specific argument before it is uttered, it isn’t about clicks. Heck, this post is so SEO-unfriendly, I doubt it will get many views. If it does, cool, but it wouldn’t matter anyway. As it stands, I’m paying money to keep the blog ad-free and the reader experience pleasant. I don’t make a profit from this whatsoever. So, no, I’m not chiming in because of some sort of “get rich quick” type of idea.

I’m just here to add my own two cents.

Gamergate

For starters, ten years ago, a developer’s ex-boyfriend published this accusation that his former partner traded sex for positive reviews of her indie game. That was then picked up by 4chan – and other places on the internet – and inevitably the “alt-right” folks on YouTube and other platforms leapt at this chance to attack, dox and harass not just people involved in the situation (which is bad enough) but also all women and all sorts of other minorities in the industry.

This was a hate campaign fueled by misogyny and bigotry, falsehoods and conspiracies. Initially, at least. Eventually, something called “post hoc justification” happened and people, including TotalBiscuit, tried to justify the movement’s actions by stating that “the movement was about Ethics in Journalism this whole time”.

“The movement” in question was largely just an angry mob using this one instance of alleged unethical behaviour to bully, dox and attack people. They used it as an opportunity to send rape and death threats to journalists, developers, content creators and gamers alike, and the flames of that absolute dumpster fire of a shit show are still burning bright to this very day leaving a nasty stench in the nostrils of all gamers in the form of stereotypes and tropes that harm not just the people involved but all people in the gaming community.

Sexism, toxicity, bigotry and hate speech are rampant in the gaming industry – and it’s not like Gamergate started it all but it definitely didn’t help the festering problem and if anything it really added fuel to the fire. Gamergate Subreddits like r/KotakuInAction and forums like KiwiFarms are still active even ten years later jumping at every opportunity to attack marginalized folks in the industry.

Sweet Baby Inc.

Sweet Baby Inc. (SBI) is a 16-member team based in Canada that works as a consulting agency working towards more diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in games and media. They are a small team that gets hired by studios who want to make sure that their writing is up-to-par and that their writing doesn’t misrepresent marginalized people.

Back in October 2023, they attracted the attention of Kiwi Farms where a user claimed that this company’s involvement in Alan Wake 2 is “possibly one of the biggest scandals in gaming history”. This sort of story was also spread onto other platforms. According to this accusation, SBI made Alan Wake 2’s protagonist female and black. Proof? Not needed.

In January 2024, someone created a Steam curator page that essentially lists games whose developers have worked with Sweet Baby Inc. in an attempt to stop people from buying those games because they’re “woke”.

And well, last month, one employee of the studio called this out, telling others to report the curator page and their discord server for breaching the terms of service of Steam and Discord respectively… but they also incited harassment indirectly which I’ll talk about in a bit.

The “report this page” tweet, however, led to the group garnering a lot more attention (see Streisand effect) resulting in more and more people suddenly starting to buy into the conspiracy theories that were being perpetuated.

Remember how I mentioned that Gamergaters have been constantly looking for an opportunity to dogpile onto people and attack them as a mob? Well, this was that…

Chris Kindred and Incited Harassment

So, as I previously mentioned, there is a “Sweet Baby Inc. detected” curator page that one of the employees of SBI called out on Twitter for reasons. I should explain that curator pages aren’t just curator pages but also forums where people express views and discuss topics, there are group chats, and in this case, there is a Discord server, too, where people say wild stuff.

Anyhow, Chris Kindred (who is a game writer, editor and sensitivity reader at SBI) shared screenshots of this group and wanted people to report their page for breaching Steam’s Terms of Service.

You can find these ToS on any discussion page embedded to the right of the comment/discussion thread btw or you can click this link here.

On its own, I don’t think that the curator page itself and the idea behind it are all that problematic. If people want to boycott games that were made with certain parties’ involvement, that’s a personal decision and anyone can choose to do so. Curator pages like this are inherently okay to exist, in my opinion, as long as they follow Steam’s terms of service and as long as they do not incite harassment or attacks.

The issue, however, with this one, in particular, is that the discussion forums were poorly moderated (well, barely if at all) with many people spreading misinformation and conspiracies about SBI, developers and journalists, as well as Jews and other marginalized people.

There was a fair bit of hate speech being spread in there – and that stuff is reportable, of course. Similarly, the group’s Discord server also received plenty of purges in light of these reports because a lot of the stuff being spread there was against Discord’s terms of service.

So, just to make clear: I’m not saying that these curator sites need to be taken down for the curator page themselves. It’s just that those pages need to abide by Steam’s rules since they’re on Steam… Duh. If you cannot moderate the page, lock the threads and stop people from creating more hate speech.

Anyhow, given the amount of attention that page has gotten, the creator decided to purge it all, removing all of the pages but a few by himself. If there was no issue with the page, they wouldn’t have done that. People claiming that there was nothing wrong with the discussion forums cannot explain why they got deleted – but they also don’t care.

With all that said, Chris Kindred handled this really poorly. They tagged the person leading the group on Twitter which incites harassment.

In my opinion, this is unacceptable!

Reporting the page itself is totally valid and okay because reports only do something if there was actually harm caused or rule violations, right? Tagging the person in question, however, is something that any person in public should never do in a situation like this because it incites people to harass them. Chris Kindred went a step further, though, and also told their followers to “report the creator since he loves his account so much”, showing the account of the person leading the group.

The thing with statements like that is that people won’t just report them. A ton of unhinged people exist who will take this as a chance to attack someone “for a cause”. They just need justification to enable them. As such, they’ll go out of their way to harass people and attack them.

You cannot in good conscience make such statements, especially when you have a big platform, and then expect all of your followers to be reasonable and perfectly normal folks who won’t do this. That’d be naive, to say the least.

Who needs context anyway?

Now, with that in mind, there are also a lot of people out there who will bring up past statements made by members of SBI that – out of context – will appear horrible.

Some of those statements are more recent, I guess, whereas others are from ten years ago, quite literally dating back to 2014, which should not really hold much weight in any situation today, right?

Well, SBI is all about diversity, equity and inclusivity, right? So, a lot of people take tweets from personal Twitter accounts that didn’t age well and that don’t look great to prove that the company is hypocritical because a single person employed at a company is, of course, gonna contradict the whole company’s morals and values. It’s a stupid argument to make, of course, because reality is a lot more nuanced.

The issue with the tweets in question is that if you just take them at face value and believe every single word there, you’ll end up thinking that one of the employees is racist towards white people or a raging antisemite… or at least they were ten years ago, maybe, possibly.

Today, I talked about this stuff in a discord server and someone I know who works with TakeThis took a look at these tweets made, the context of the climate around them, the comments in her circles, and just this person in general. According to them, she’s a “vicious sub-tweeter who has a poison-dripped sense of communication but there isn’t a bit of hatred there”.

The person in question who I’m not going to name because they’re already going through stuff is a person who uses extreme language to make points, subtweeting people, making fun of people or using their language but with a different example attached to show how stupid said argument is. 

Is this stuff vile and poorly communicated? Yes, I’m not a fan of it personally either… But we cannot just judge such statements without context, especially the added context of the time and her circles and stuff going around… especially if the context was deleted.

One such statement said “Abort all the Jews”, for instance, and it was in response to two tweets that were deleted after she made the reply. So, in bad faith, one could paint her as an antisemite. Objectively speaking, one could look at this and say “I have no clue what the context is and out of context this looks wild but we don’t know”. But in good faith, they could make fun of the person they replied to who also deleted their original tweets.

Based on her appearances on podcasts, blogs and comments, though, one can tell that her views are quite different. Heck, there was a tweet about rich straight people kissing being gross or something that was posted without context, so clearly that was them subtweeting. Based on my own behaviours when I do stuff like that, I’d imagine someone said that about gay people kissing or something and they just swapped out the roles to prove a point.

My point here is that any statement made can be taken out of context and turned and twisted in a way that isn’t great for you. Any screenshot can be edited. Any context can be deleted to blur the line between actual opinion and satire further. Without it, we’re just speculating in bad faith.

Whoever has not been cringe in their past, shall throw the first stone! – Judas, probably.

We all said stuff at some point. We all did stuff at some point. If someone did dig up all the things you said and did in the past and then held them against you to discredit your employer, would you like that? No, probably not, right?

Anyhow, there is also a GDC talk held by Kim Belair from 2019 where Belair talks about her experiences as a minority creator and as someone working at SBI, offering solutions to help craft stronger narratives and recruit new voices. It’s a great presentation, in my opinion, that talks about a lot of very valid things if you watch it in good faith. 

And yet, some people will take 20-second statements out of the 29 minutes of context to paint her in the worst possible light. Why? Well, because that’s much easier than to find a good argument against anything she says.

Some Ordinary Gamers Is “Awful”…

Mutahar from SomeOrdinaryGamers made a video that I find badly researched and incredibly concerning. It made me lose trust in SOG as a channel because it felt like Mutahar was just here to pander towards Gamergaters…

As a side note: I did enjoy watching his video but after this one, I’m quite disappointed and honestly, I expected more of him than this. Hence, the title of this section is just referencing the title of his video. Don’t read more than that into it.

In that video, Mutahar does talk about specific statements made in the speech but he does his utmost to paint a narrative that SBI is making games “woke” somehow even when the statements don’t say anything of the sort. His video talks very briefly about the Kotaku article over here but he only talks briefly about a semantical error at the beginning of the post and not about the rest because the rest would make his narrative look bad.

He also talks about some of the bad stuff that is being discussed on the SBI-detected forums on Steam – but he only shows the memes and tasteless jokes, not the actual hate speech that got removed after the reports came in and after that tweet, I talked about earlier was published.

Kim Belair talks in a section of her speech about how representation is seen amongst investors and how we spoon-feed people exactly what they want to see which makes them incredibly picky. She says that developers are still looking at their core demographics as white cis hetero males, like fixed values, catering almost exclusively to them even when the audience of games these days is much more diverse than just that.

This section of the speech talks essentially about how limiting yourself to just one target demographic is not a good thing because any innovation or any good game that is ever-so-slightly different from previous releases is seen as a risk.

There are a lot of women who play games nowadays. There are a lot of queer folks that play games. There are a lot of people of colour that play games. To completely disregard those parts of the gaming community to play it safe is a bad thing, inherently, but to pander towards them requires consulting to make sure that you don’t upset people with insensitive writing. You don’t want to create just another token character, after all.

Mutahar plays that section up to a point and then starts talking about how Kim Belair is “isolating” this group of people, namely “white cis hetero men”, and that they’re not inclusive because they are “targeting these people”. In reality, though, she isn’t targeting them or isolating them. She talks about how a lot of developers will think this one specific group of people is still the only audience for their games when there are more.

To put it into simpler terms: She says “We need to look at all the people and not just white cis straight male people” which is the epitome of “Let’s not exclude anyone! Let’s include everyone!” but Mutahar doesn’t get that. He’s either very hung up about it or he genuinely doesn’t have a better argument against her, so he creates a strawman argument to then fight against that strawman.

Then he cracks a joke and brings up GTA VI which has a female lead. Then he talks about badly written characters that are just there to virtue signal or pander to communities which is a bad thing and actually what Belair is against…

Then he says “I get what she’s trying to say but it all falls flat when you’re excluding people as an inclusive company”. But nobody said that in this whole context. This is a whole lot of nothing. 

At this point, after going on a tangent and everything, most people won’t bother to check what she actually said because most people are lazy.

She didn’t say that we should not make games anymore for white cis hetero male gamers. She said that we shouldn’t look at that group as our core (and only) demographic to cater towards. Rather, there are other demographics worth considering.

Either way, I was disgruntled to see this. If this was intentional or if he looked at this and thought it was actually good work, then I’m just unhappy. If he was just lazy, it’s the same. Mutahar from SOG calls out strawman arguments a lot in videos, so his using it himself feels very disappointing.

SBI doesn’t have the power you think they do

So, at last, I wanted to talk about the conspiracies that come from a very misinformed and misguided place. I mean this in the best possible way, btw. I believe most of the people criticizing SBI are misinformed and misguided if they actually think that SBI’s employees are the reason why people are being laid off, why games are failing and why characters are black in games these days.

As previously mentioned, SBI does help out with writing good characters and good narratives, fleshing out the world and being more inclusive. If you create a game with a black lead, you want to not come across as if you only included them in the game to pander towards black people, after all. You want to actually have a compelling character of colour, right?

So, developers hire SBI to help with writing that. They get advice on where they can improve, what they could or should change, etc. By the end of the day, though, none of this is a command. SBI doesn’t have the power to force authors to do anything they don’t want to do. SBI just helps and provides counsel.

Now, people out there are of the impression that Alan Wake 2’s protagonist Saga Anderson is only a black woman because SBI helped with writing the game… but the developers have denied this. Remedy wanted to have a black female lead as the other protagonist in their game for the other campaign. So, they hired SBI to provide counsel on dialogues and the narrative design as well as the character. If SBI said anything and Remedy disagreed, Remedy would still be able to say “no” and go through with what they actually want.

In God of War Ragnarök’s world, black people do not have the same history as in the real world, so Angrboða wasn’t necessarily a “Black” character but just a character. Still, GoWR’s developers got help from SBI to make this character believable, relatable and fleshed out. Just because it’s a fantasy world, that doesn’t have to mean that racism doesn’t exist inside of it, after all.

Not so similarly, SBI did work on that failed Suicide Squad game but they only got on board when the story was already set in stone. They had nothing to do with the story of the game, contrary to popular belief. Rather, they just did little gags in between cutscenes and added some audio logs to flesh out the world. You know, stuff that most of these people do not care about.

Suicide Squad didn’t fail because of SBI’s involvement with them. The Suicide Squad game just failed because it was a bad game and yet another live service title. Meanwhile, Ragnarök didn’t succeed because of SBI but SBI’s involvement did help flesh out the character of Angrboða, making them feel alive and not just like a token. Similarly, Alan Wake 2 didn’t fail either, as far as I know, and most people I’ve talked to have enjoyed the second campaign as well, many of them relating to it, too.

People out there believe that SBI has the power to change a character into a black woman which just isn’t true. They also believe that having these people of colour or women or queer people in their games makes these games political… and that’s because the very existence of marginalized people is political to these people.

If Samus had been revealed to be a woman in this day and age, people would have started to shout about forced diversity. It’s wild.

“Everything is political”

If we talk about the white cis hetero man for a bit, we’ll notice that all of these traits are oozing with the concept of privilege. Acknowledging that there exists such a thing as privilege doesn’t mean hating on this group of people, and yet, there are a lot of people out there who do think this way. I don’t see how. They just see this enumeration and suddenly start “malding” (that’s when you’re balding because you’re “mad” or upset).

So, to create diversity, equity and inclusivity in games means to get rid of the conception that all gamers or most gamers are white cis hetero males. We need to take a look at other people who play games and cater towards them as well. Most white cis hetero males will play any game no matter the contents. I doubt that there are too many people out there who will get actually upset that a gay black person or an ace Asian woman exists in their game.

In fact, it’s on the contrary. There are lots of people that do not care at all about that stuff and there are lots of people that do care, so let’s cater to them both! Let’s have strong female characters in games (like HZD, for instance) as opposed to the damsel in distress! Let’s have meaningful character development in titles that make us think about things!

Hidden Machine has a lovely thread on the situation but in this specific tweet, he quotes from a dev interview where the developer wasn’t allowed to create a black main character because their publisher was afraid that white kids wouldn’t want to play as black kids. That’s 1992 for ya, I guess… but people treat games the same way to this day.

It’s just safer to have a shooter with a very bulky male lead, like Duke Nukem or Serious Sam, instead of Twinks or not conventionally attractive women… but safer doesn’t mean better. You can re-tell the same story dozens and dozens of times and eventually, people will complain that you’re just remaking the same game every single time and that you’re just a money-hungry company. But if you stop spoon-feeding your audience (to quote Belair), you’ll probably have much more success in the long run.

To get back to my point about “everything being political”, some gamers out there are exclaiming that they play games to escape reality and politics, not deal with it, which is a valid stance and opinion to a degree, I believe. My issue with it, however, is that these statements imply that the mere existence of marginalized people is already political in games which is problematic.

Marginalized people aren’t political. They’re just humans. Nothing about their existence is political.

Earlier, I was pointing at that “Is it woke?” curator page that labelled Helldivers 2 as “not woke”. That game might seem apolitical to people because… honestly, I’m not sure why that is. It’s a game where you invade other planets, destroy the alien lifeforms’ homes, kill their children and you do it all in the name of “democracy” but the reality looks different… Duh!

Helldivers 2 is a game that makes it abundantly clear that we’re not just the bad guys but that the people who employ us and give us orders are manipulating the truth and using propaganda.

Heck, there are nazi-looking uniforms in Helldivers 2 in case you weren’t sure yet about you being the bad guy.

But as the “is it woke” curator page showcased, just having pride flag cosmetics in the game is enough to make the whole game “woke” whereas criticizing fascism makes a game not woke at all. I wanted to point out a sense of hypocrisy here because these people do not actually know what “woke” means.

Anyway, I digress. My point here is that anything can be political but the mere existence of a character or a human being shouldn’t be what turns you away from a game if you live by the “live and let live” ideology that you claim to live by.

I’ve seen lots of people exclaim that they want to mind their own business and live in peace – and that “the progressive left” is terrified of that idea… I even have a screenshot of one person making that claim alongside other stuff… but for people criticizing others of being “terrified of letting others live in peace”, these people are weirdly upset about others wanting representation in their games and wanting to live in peace, getting immersed as a character that matches their own skin colour, sex, gender, sexuality, age or other feature.

I saw this video some time ago by “wakeupjacob” where he talks about representation in games as part of a media literacy video essay he had to submit, and the video has this incredibly cool personal example of how Jacob essentially felt validated and immersed in games because of a very tiny thing that made him identify with the character in question.

Jacob’s left-handed… and so is Link from The Legend of Zelda.

I recommend watching said video because it’s not that long and it talks about an important subject. Go watch it, it needs more views! But, in essence, Jacob mentions how because of the fact that Link was left-handed, just like him, he enjoyed the game even more. Finding representation as a white dude isn’t hard because practically all the main characters in games are white dudes. Finding representation as a left-handed person is harder. So that little thing made the experience much better for him.

Personally, I haven’t seen many games about Albanian people yet or games about Muslims but when I see a game that lets me queer or when a character is queer, I feel heard and validated as if I’m allowed to exist. Most games I’ve played portrayed Muslims as the bad guys, as terrorists and whatnot, but don’t go into detail about why that is. I do realise that the US especially has a bad history with certain groups of Muslims… but I feel like there isn’t enough done to explain the US’ involvement with certain countries during the Cold War… or the Brits’ involvement with the Arabs during the First World War… and how those events influenced the relationship of the Middle-East and the West.

The Civ games did bring good Muslim representation, though, in my opinion, showing us influential people and not portraying them as the devil or whatever. I wish more people would do that… I sometimes wonder why the US uses Arab numbers if they’re so scared of Muslims. Odd.

Bringing it back to other games though, in a lot of RPGs, we can create whatever character we want to play, and yet, people get hung up about pronouns because the English Language doesn’t have pronouns, apparently. Weirdly, people are hung up about that when according to their own logic, people should only be allowed to play as the sex they’ve been assigned at birth. But that stance is hard to defend given how many male gamers play as women due to the overly sexualized nature of female characters and models in games… so they go for the words instead.

If there is any way to add immersion to a game, developers should tackle it and try it out and give all sorts of players the option to play the game and fully immerse themselves. Pronouns are incredibly easy to implement and give lots of folks visibility. Again, digressing.

What the people who find adding a black character to a game political don’t know, however, is that contrary to popular belief, you can vote with your wallet. You can boycott games you dislike without attacking others and without being a horrible human being.

Bad Faith Actors and Tribalism

With all this in mind, I do believe that there are more than “two sides”. Tribalism sucks. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, we shouldn’t give in to populist rhetoric and buy into stuff like the whole “us versus them” analogy.

Thinking in black and white, 0s and 1s, good and bad, or any other pair of values is a really stupid thing to do because it’s not that clear-cut of a case most of the time. Binary thinking and tribalism oversimplify matters and remove all sorts of nuance from any kind of discussion. It’s incredibly bad faith and toxic, frankly… I’m not saying this to criticize just the alt-right, btw, but rather as a pointer towards all of society.

There are a lot of people out there that will act in bad faith, on “both sides”. See? I used it myself here but I put it into quotation marks because it’s a spectrum.

Some folks believe SBI did nothing wrong, some people believe SBId deserves any harassment that was incited and there are people like me who don’t think SBI handled this well at all while also criticising SBId and the adjacent groups for their bigotry and stuff. You can change out the names here and get the same sort of spectrum for “the other side”. Get my point?

It’s not as clear-cut as people make it seem. I mean, multiple things can be true.

In this case, SBI has been harassed for much longer than the existence of SBId. Ever since October’s Alan Wake 2 Kiwi Farms post, harassment has been on the up-tick, but it reportedly existed beforehand, too. The creation of the Steam curator page added to that because the creator didn’t say anything about or against harassment. If you have any sort of belief or message, any sort of truth or movement, any sort of cause, you need to lay out these terms. “Don’t harass others as it taints our truth” or something. Rookie mistakes happen.

Anyway, SBI’s Chris Kindred then wrote that tweet which ended up giving much more attention to the group and hence even more bad-faith actors joined the group’s “side”. Lots of people harassing lots of folks talking about it on social media, not just the people involved.

Obviously, these folks aren’t Kabrutus’ or anyone’s responsibility but you could easily see how any sort of journalist or media person might see this as harassment coming from a lot of people, like we had ten years ago.

Now, speaking of which, I dislike how a lot of media outlets are not mentioning what SBI’s Chris Kindred did. I’ve seen some articles make mention of it but play it down or shrug it off. No matter what “camp” you’re a part of, inciting harassment is a sin. Don’t do it. >:(

So, the formation of various “camps” and tribalism could be attributed to Gamergate, ten years ago, as well as the rise of bigots and “anti-SJW” viewpoints in the early 20s and the early 10s. The whole point I’m trying to make here is that this doesn’t help the situation. People strictly believe in their camp and do not think about themselves.

It’s a meme on the alt-right that their political opponents are all programmed drones or “NPCs” or whatever… but they all behave like that themselves. Tribalism is the root of the problem here with many folks acting like that.

Hence, think for yourself and don’t just believe what other people say. I remember seeing screenshots a while ago about “accidental allies” to trans people who want to be transphobic and hateful but who accidentally end up affirming their target’s gender by saying “You’ll never be a woman” when they’re talking to a transman.

Those instances really show you that these folks don’t know anything about transpeople and that they’re just parroting words someone else said, not because they think so themselves but rather because they think it might hurt the other side.

To bring it back to the topic at hand, though, most of the discourse about this is being done by bad-faith actors. If you actually care about harassment victims, then stop thinking in camps, defuse situations and stop insulting folks or using bad-faith arguments.

Again, “both sides”.

Kabrutus, the leader of the Steam Curator page, ended up purging their Steam discussion forums and the Discord server because of all the unhinged and degenerate people who posted hateful stuff on there. People think they’re justified to hate the SBId people since their group is a cesspool… but the difference here is that Kabrutus actually said something about that incitement of harassment or rather they precisely said something against any sort of harassment… on March 1st (last edited March 4th):

“I want to emphasize that this is not a place for those who want to practice bigotry or racism towards any specific group of people or praise any kind of authoritarianism be it from the left or the right. […] You’re welcome to join and stay as long as you respect our position and don’t try to jeopardize this community.”

Seems like a pretty normal take even if it was posted months after the founding of the group. Had this been posted at the start of it, perhaps the situation would have looked differently and discourse could have been better.

Still, I do think that this is a good thing to do.

Meanwhile, Chris Kindred’s account on X is locked/protected and I can’t see if they have apologized for inciting harassment. I can’t see if they feel bad at all or if they aggressively subtweeted about it, doubling down, again.

I wish we could just not incite harassment and not omit the fact that this stuff is bad or that it’s happening at all. Acting in good faith would be pretty good for the sake of discourse and for the sake of letting people speak with their wallets or letting people have representation.

Yes, of course, there are bad-faith actors out there that will say outrageous and vile things. I’m not saying that harassment isn’t happening but as it stands, the people defending SBI are using this curator page’s existence as some sort of justification for any sort of harassment that is aimed at the group whereas the people who are against SBI are using this instance of Kindred inciting harassment to justify the harassment SBI and groups adjacent to them are getting… and were getting before Kindred incited the harassment.

Even now, there are people out there adding their two cents and offering the most lukewarm takes in the history of takes… and before long, people are swarming in on them acting in very disgusting ways towards them, arguing in bad faith, playing devil’s advocate, overgeneralising or attacking others.

I remember leaving a comment on Mutahar’s video stating how I didn’t like his strawman tactic – and someone immediately jumped the gun on me and stated “How does this justify the harassment the curator group’s members are receiving?” – but I didn’t even mention any sort of harassment. It was about Mutahar’s arguments and logical fallacies used.

It’s a case of “So, you hate waffles?” when the original tweet was about pancakes being cool. People forget that multiple things can be true at the same time.

Bad faith actors will make this about teams but in reality, there are no teams. It’s not Super Earth versus the planets they’re colonising. (Sorry, I’ve been playing a lot of Helldivers 2 lately.) The world is much more nuanced than that.

No Group is a Monolith

I forgot to say that just because someone follows or posts to that Steam curator page, that doesn’t mean that they are part of the harassment campaign. Similarly, just because someone harasses the SBI employees or other people in the industry, that doesn’t mean they’re a part of the curator page.

There are a lot of shitty people out there, especially on KF, Reddit and other platforms, and people tend to oversimplify stuff.

In this case, acting as if all those haters are one singular entity, a monolith, a giant mob with hive mind mentality is a lot easier than accepting that there are a lot of shitty people out there that will take any reason out there, no matter how trivial, to incite harassment or to attack others. The SBI employees might just get attacked by someone who is genuinely hateful despite being a complete outsider to the situation.

Similarly, people on the far-right and alt-right will often also oversimplify things and act as if all people criticizing them are part of some “woke anti-white” agenda. It’s easier to believe that everyone is “Antifa” and that “Antifa” isn’t a stance but an organisation (when reality is anything but)… and it’s a very common tool used in populism and for the sake of tribalism.

Anyhow, just wanted to insert that here because I didn’t know where to put this little addendum that I found very important.

Conclusion: Be kind.

To conclude this post, I’d like to say, hey, stop being a dick.

Treat others kindly, respect others, and be good to each other. Live and let live. A game character having a different skin colour or different genitals from you doesn’t make the game worse or unplayable. The game isn’t political all of a sudden just because those people exist. Maybe go touch grass if you think so. Hope it helps.

If you already agreed with me on everything, please go and support people who are being attacked right now, like the folks at SBI and TakeThis, for instance. Don’t attack anyone. Stand up to harassment but take care of yourself. Report offending posts but don’t engage too much with the trolls. Lead by example. Kill them with kindness.

More than anything, if you know someone who is getting harassed, not just because of this but because of stuff in general, be there for them. Reach out, lend them an ear, and assure them that they’re appreciated and heard and that they matter. It goes a long way.

And well, at last, TakeThis is a great organisation that has some other advice in their article here. Aside from that, you can also check out their page for mental health resources to possibly forward to anyone who needs them. They’ve helped me in the past, I hope they help other people out there that are going through stuff.

This post was originally written by Dan Dicere from Indiecator.

If you see this article anywhere else other than Indiecator.org… then this article has been stolen. Please let me know of this via E-Mail. Other than that, feel free to stop by my Twitch streams!