If you don’t feel like p🌟oisoning your mind with game industry conspiracies championed by the worst peopl🐎e on the internet, look away now. Part of me doesn’t even want to bother shining a light on this ridiculous Pizzagate-for-gamers nonsense, just out of fear for my inbox. But I can’t help myself when the anti-woke crowd is being this hilariously transparent. If they want to make the claim that diversity is ruining games, maybe they shouldn’t target beloved and critically successful games like Alan Wake 2.
If you’re not already aware of the discourse, first of all I’m sorry for exposing you to this flavor of online brain rot, and secondly, I’ll keep this explanation as brief as possible. Sweet Baby Inc., a Canadian narrative development and consultation studio in Canada, is that believe it is using DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusiജon) to ruin games. Essentially, the narrative is that big studios like Insomniac, Sony Santa Monica, and Remedy hire Sweet Baby Inc. as consultants and Sweet Baby encourages these studios to make their characters and stories more diverse, thus ruining them. This is the woke agenda, and they’re doing it becaus🧸e they just hate gamers and want them to suffer, I guess.
Grand Theft Auto 5's Michael Calls Out Gamers Saying GTA 6 Is Woke
Michael actor Ned Luke called ouℱt gamers who said that GTA 6 has "g🀅one woke".
How do I say this politely? There might be a couple of problems with the theory. For one thing,𒅌 diversity hasn’t ruined any of the games Sweet Baby Inc. has supposedly consulted on. You can use any metric you want, and nothing suggests these games are failures in any way. The most popular targets of criticism are God of War Ragnarok, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, and Alan Wake 2. These are all games that have Black characters (which is what ‘woke’ is code for in this conജtext), and they are all games that have been massively successful either critically or commercially. Or both.
It’s especially silly to try to stick this kind of ‘go woke go broke’ narrative to Alan Wake 2, a game that has sold over a million copi🎶es since it launched last October, and has at least 30 award nominations, including three wins at The Game Awards last year. If Sweet Baby Inc. is trying to ruin all games it’s doing a terrible job. It seems like all the games it has consulted on are beloved by fans and critics.
The theory is that the consultant is somehow forcing diversity into 🍎games, but even that isn🐓’t true. The belief that Saga Anderson, the co-protagonist of Alan Wake 2, was ‘race-swapped’ after Remedy received feedback from Sweet Baby Inc., stems from a teaser from Quantum Break where Saga is portrayed by Malla Malmivaara, a white actress. In response to a thread on X claiming as much, , “It’s absolutely not true.” Remedy cast Melanie Liburd to play Saga because she’s a great actress and was perfect for the part. The fact that the anti-woke folks think there has to be a reason there’s a Black person in a story is pretty telling.
The thing that really drives home how ludicrous this entire thing is is the fact that, even if it were true, there’d be absolutely nothing wrong with it. In a world where a consultant told Remedy “I think your story could benefit from having a more diverse cast”, and then Remedy went out and found the perfect actress to play Saga, and she♒ did a great job, and the game was phenomenal, where would the harm be? You’d have to argue that Alan Wake 2 would somehow be an even better, more award-worthy game if Saga had been played by a white actress, and I don’t know how else to say this, but that’s just an absurdly racist thing to think.
