Unfortunately for the culture war, leftist elites are not the only public figures that miss the ball on key cultural issues.
Conservative media is finally waking up to a crisis in one of the world’s most influential fields: the video game industry. The disgusted response from players of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League launched a massive investigation into and online battle against Sweet Baby Inc., a Canadian narrative development and consultation studio that has incorporated DEI into various games over the last several years. Many are calling this “Gamergate 2.0.”
The full power of this battle station
SBI is largely responsible for the increasingly woke elements of modern gaming, and it has its tendrils in several AAA gaming companies. Its website says its mission is to “bring in diverse voices to solve diverse problems, and it seeks to be additive rather than strictly corrective.” It continues, “We’re part of an inclusive and knowledgeable community of diverse consultants, able to cover a wide range of cultural and sensitivity topics.”
The gaming industry is far more powerful and influential than most people realize. In 2022 it made over three times more than Hollywood and the music industry combined. Leftist investment behemoths own an alarming amount of gaming company stocks, one example being BlackRock owning 9.5% of Electronic Arts.
These investigations have sparked consternation and frustration from all corners of the gaming community. It has gotten so loud that even Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh jumped into the fray. However, his coverage of this issue received equal heat. He was correct to call out this crisis.
This battle is not a new one
Walsh claimed that SBI has spread its tendrils far “precisely because it hasn’t received much attention.” This assumes that gamers have only just realized how woke games have become. For years, gamers have been calling out attempts to restrict and censor games accused of bigotry.
The greatest battle in gaming has centered on women. In 2014, in an event now called “Gamergate 1.0,” activists peddled the idea that video games and their players were sexist for liking attractive female protagonists. In response, gamers of all demographics went to extreme efforts to condemn and expose them.
This battle is ongoing. It was revived recently with the soaring anticipation for Stellar Blade, a South Korean game striving to return to a time when women in games were feminine. Groups like SBI have worked with gaming companies to deliberately make women look masculine, to the dismay of both men and women.
Ironically, entertainment publication network Geeks + Gamers collaborated with DailyWire+ to discuss the growing problem of DEI in gaming on its YouTube channel in 2022.
Gaming is for all ages
Walsh’s coverage of “Gamergate 2.0” is a reflection of his long-standing views on the gaming medium. In a reposted tweet from 2018, he said, “Video games are a sacred cow because our country is filled with adults who are obsessed with them. That’s why we all pretend, insanely, that there’s nothing wrong with or disturbing about a child spending all day killing people in a virtual world.”
But video games are not exclusively for children, nor are they always a detriment to children. Only 20% of the 3.32 billion active gamers are under 18 years old.
The argument that children playing video games makes them violent has been disproven for decades now. Those who make it do not play video games, as Walsh admitted in his coverage. Children have been exposed to violence since the dawn of humanity; do they all become dangerous? Guns have existed since nearly a millennia before Grand Theft Auto was invented. Do all sons shooting and gutting game with their fathers become dangerous?
Whether you like to admit it or not, video games are an art form. Like books and films, they are simply another method through which compelling stories can be told in immersive settings. They are often used to convey deep, adult, and mature themes: the moral ambiguity of tribalism in The Last of Us, the effects of loss in Final Fantasy 7, and the importance of fatherhood in God of War, to name just a few. These are important themes for children, yet they are not condemned for learning about them in violent books or movies.
“That is a particular frustration, how conservative media has handled this aspect of the culture,” a professor in game design told me. “This is a cultural blind spot I feel that we’ve always had.”
“The problem with that thinking is the assumption that the time you spend gaming you would otherwise be spending doing ‘something better.’ You don’t see that argument for other things people do,” the professor added.
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“These are intense private experiences when you play these games.”
This is a battle in the culture war that we can win. However, it requires conservative figures that respect the art form. The longer we reject the importance of video games, the faster we will lose the culture.
Parker Miller is a 2024 Washington Examiner winter fellow.
