Well, I’ll give Jules Hardy this much: She’s now quite a bit more famous outside of her native Britain than she was one week ago.
Hardy, if you’re not familiar with her (or them; she identifies as nonbinary and uses a variety of pronouns), was best known as BBC’s go-to gaming presenter, as well as a tech reporter and a YouTube and Twitch streamer. While a key media figure in the gaming sphere, she’s largely a minor player (pun unintended) to anyone not involved in the community.
But then, the Sweet Baby Inc. scandal continued to metastasize online and she decided to offer her opinion on how to deal with gamers who aren’t down with wokeness. Spoiler alert: That opinion wasn’t particularly well thought-out.
Shocker, I know.
So, in case you haven’t been following the SBI controversy, here’s a TL;DR version of it: Sweet Baby Inc. is a narrative design consultancy that works behind the scenes with major video game developers to flesh out storylines for major titles. It also just so happens that these titles aren’t just uniformly woke in nature, but turn the DEI amps up to 11.
For instance, take “Spider Man 2,” a multiplatform game SBI worked on. The game came under scrutiny for its decision to use gender-neutral language in the Spanish-language version of the game. As anyone who’s made it through Español 101 can tell you, Spanish is very much not a gender-neutral language and attempts by wokeistas to try and change it have failed miserably. The end product was an insult both to Spanish-speaking gamers and those looking to play a title that wasn’t shoving a message in their face.
Whether that bit of wokeness was inserted in there by SBI — or SBI was hired because this was the kind of content developers wanted to create and they knew SBI would be simpatico to that mission — is anyone’s guess, as it is with other games the firm has worked on. (For that matter, they’re hardly the only company involved in these sorts of DEI shenanigans; even Nintendo isn’t immune, sadly.)
However, the point is that there’s virtually a 1:1 correlation between SBI narrative consultancy on a title and that title being woke.
(For what it’s worth, the company’s principals insist they don’t force this pap into games — although one of those principals, co-founder Kim Belair, has given a number of interviews where she’s literally implied just that.)
Do you play video games?
Anyhow, a Steam group popped up devoted to cataloging what games SBI had worked on so gamers could steer clear. The media had a predictable freakout, spearheaded by a fawning Kotaku piece about SBI which made unfounded and unprovable claims about the motivations of the hundreds of thousands of followers of the Steam group and tried to paint SBI in the most positive possible light. It didn’t work, unsurprisingly, and the boycott has continued to gain traction.
So now, Jules Hardy wants a “final purge” of the “kinds of gamers” who are pushing back against wokeness.
The statement came after a group called Black Girl Gamers quoted a now-deleted post on X which accused them of working with SBI.
“We really got you pressed by just existing LOL We’ve never worked with sweet baby inc, you all saw ‘Black’ and ‘consulting’ and decided that we all work together. Sounds like racism,” the Thursday post read.
And, in turn, Hardy quoted the group’s post, calling for the “purge” of gamers who dare to dabble in wrongthink.
“can we a agree that for round two of ‘this’ it can be the final purge of these kinds of gamers? its 2024 I’ve been arguing about this for decades,” she wrote.
“can we have a last full detox of these dude so we can get back to the positive gaming community we have been creating.”
can we a agree that for round two of ‘this’ it can be the final purge of these kinds of gamers?
its 2024 I’ve been arguing about this for decades
can we have a last full detox of these dude so we can get back to the positive gaming community we have been creating https://t.co/9ODhH4S9kr— Jules Hardy 🏳️🌈 (@itsJulesHardy) March 22, 2024
Yes, there’s nothing that says positivity like calling for a purge of people you don’t agree with. And it turns out Hardy isn’t alone. Responding to a tweet by Alyssa Mercante — the writer of the aforementioned fawning Kotaku piece about SBI in which she called the backlash “a harassment campaign” — Polygon writer Joshua Rivera argued that anyone who spoke up on social media about it should have their Steam accounts deactivated and their PlayStations “bricked,” which is to say rendered inoperable:
in a just world these clowns would have their steam accounts turned off, their PlayStations bricked and get booted from any respectable social platform but in an industry with no spine everyone has to sweat it out while just hoping they’re not next
— Joshua Rivera (@jmrivera02) March 12, 2024
That’s right: If you have an unpopular opinion and you voice it, no gaming for you. All your purchases, all your progress, gone. Sorry, bigot! Next time, think twice about having an opinion that isn’t Joshua Rivera’s.
Rivera hardly has the clout of Hardy, however, who is a gaming presenter on Britain’s state broadcaster. This has led to some comparing this to GamerGate, the 2014 online campaign against perceived feminist and liberal excesses in the gaming industry:
Gamergate 2 just got real. Too real.
The BBC are now calling for a “final purge” if you oppose Sweet Baby Inc.
The mask is off. This is the cultural revolution. It’s do or die. https://t.co/upMjsp0T4v pic.twitter.com/i7YvRWrijU
— Grummz (@Grummz) March 26, 2024
The comparison is inapt, however — and that’s because this is far worse.
GamerGate was mostly an inchoate, aimless campaign which could never settle on specific grievances or harms and seemed to exist, in large part, to make certain online provocateurs temporarily famous. In this case, the specific grievances are actively being admitted to by the companies who are perpetrating it, who then turn around and tell you to your face that if you’re aggrieved and won’t buy their product, you’re a bigot.
Their enablers in the media then turn around and say anyone involved in the backlash is a toxic malignancy on the face of gaming that needs to be purged — and if their systems need to be bricked and Steam accounts deactivated, well, so be it.
It’s all out in the open. It’s not a conspiracy theory. It’s not even a theory.
It’s the facts — and if you don’t like the facts and want to change them, you and your ilk must be extirpated. And somehow, the folks inside the gaming bubble wonder how there could be an uproar and why even liberals and minority communities find DEI and wokeness insulting. If that doesn’t tell you why a boycott is necessary, I don’t know what will.
