On January 30, 2024, a page titled Sweet Baby Inc. Detected appears on the internet, a Steam curator that currently has 300 thousand fans. For those who don't know what Steam curators are, they are individuals or groups of individuals who recommend (or not recommend) titles based on production or genre characteristics, allowing followers to discover works in line with their tastes.
Rather than reporting experiences of a certain type, Sweet Baby Inc. Detected was born with the aim of “tracking the video games involved with Sweet Baby Inc.”, a Canadian company which presents itself as follows on its website: “Founded in 2018, Sweet Baby Inc. is a narrative development and consultancy based in Montreal and active around the world. Our mission is to tell better, more empathetic stories, diversifying and enriching the video game industry. Our goal is to make games more engaging, more fun, more meaningful and more inclusive, for everyone.”
What is Sweet Baby Inc?
In the projects section we find titles such as Alan Wake 2, God of War: Ragnarok, Sable, Spider-Man 2 (here is the review of Marvel's Spider-Man 2), Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, but also companies such as Valve, Electronic Arts , Ubisoft, 2K and Raw Fury. The company offers consultancy services on history, narration, characters, representation and inclusiveness, also making use of professional figures such as sensitivity readers, whose task is to analyze a text in search of potentially offensive phrases or concepts towards a minority .
According to the accusations, Sweet Baby Inc. forced development studios to pursue its own political agenda, contributing to the inclusion of ethnic minorities and LGBTQIA+. “They want you to believe that our work surgically removes the things they like,” says Kim Belair, co-founder of the company, “but that's not the case.”
In an interview that appeared in Wired, Belair is keen to point out that the final decision always lies with the firm that requested the consultancy, which can decide in total autonomy whether to take into account the indications given by the company. “Very few people have any kind of decision-making power, and that is certainly not in the hands of people who work in a consultancy firm.” The game director of Alan Wake 2 Kyle Rowley, for example, declared that Saga Anderson's change of ethnicity has nothing to do with Sweet Baby Inc., suggesting that the decision was made within the Finnish studio.
While the followers of Sweet Baby Inc. Detected continued to grow, a clip of a 2019 conference, hosted by Kim Belair himself, began to circulate on the web – GDC: Representation as Innovation, this is the title of the talk. In the offending clip, Belair states: “And if they don't see the value in what you're asking for when you're looking for advice, go have coffee with your marketing team. And just terrify them with the possibility of what it will happen if they don't give you what you want.”
As we will see shortly, this is a statement extrapolated from a much longer and more detailed discussion; a technique that the ideological extremist fringes have perfected over the years, in an attempt to legitimize a certain type of narrative.
Here's the extended statement: “If you're a creative working in the AAA industry, which I've done for many years, bring these things up with your superiors. And if they don't see the value in what you're asking for when you're looking for consultancy, go have coffee with your marketing team. And just terrify them with the possibility of what will happen if they don't give you what you want. I often say this as a joke, but it's actually very true, because if you start considering the people who care about the players and the public, and who deal with mitigating harm and maintaining a positive feeling around their game, there's a genuine value you could instill in them.”
What Belair seems to suggest is to take the necessary precautions to mitigate possible damage due to poor awareness, and not to include minorities in a forced manner.
343 Industries is an example of the damage that a clumsy approach to sensitive issues can generate: in 2022, the US studio decides to celebrate Juneteenth on Halo: Infinite, giving its users a customizable emblem with a skin called “bonobo” (the skin name has since been replaced). Juneteenth is celebrated to celebrate the freeing of African American slaves in Texas.
Gamergate 2.0
One thing must be clarified: Sweet Baby Inc. Detected does not express a qualitative opinion on the works. Its function is more similar to that of a banning list, where users can decide against whom to direct their hatred with review bombing.
How was Sweet Baby Inc. Detected born? Said Kabrutus, creator of the page: “Actually, it was a few months before the release of Suicide Squad. I started noticing patterns in some games, such as ugly women and weakened male characters to make the female characters seem stronger. The The first game Sweet Baby Inc. worked on where I noticed this kind of thing was God of War: Ragnarok. I think anyone who played God of War III finds it really strange that Kratos decides to spare Thor and then says, ' We have to be better.' It just didn't fit the character” (here is our special on the end of God of War Ragnarok).
Santa Monica has been trying to give greater depth to the character of Kratos for at least six years; a circumstance that must have escaped the watchful eye of Kabrutus, but let's go further. The user repeatedly repeats that he has begun to identify patterns, which in turn have been noticed by exponents of the alt right. Any attempt to include characters who are not male, white and straight is delegitimized on multiple fronts, exposing minorities to attacks ranging from death threats to cyberbullying. According to the alt right, the West would be threatened by so-called cultural Marxism, which would spread woke ideology to question concepts such as God, the homeland and the traditional family.
The tentacles of Marxism would extend into the culture industry, leading development studios to pepper their products with political subtext. As explained by Matteo Lupetti in the article The end of the internet began with Gamergate: “The existence of cultural Marxism is a theory born from the need to invent a new Bolshevik threat after the end of the Cold War – an idea particularly loved by Andrew Breitbart […] According to the theory of cultural Marxism, cultural and academic institutions aim to undermine Western society by promoting the spread of Marxist thought in the form of feminism, anti-homobitransphobia, anti-racism – in general everything that is politically correct. […] Bannon saw Gamergate as an opportunity to spread the ideas of the US alt-right to a message-sensitive audience.”
Concepts such as woke ideology and political correctness have become part of the common vocabulary, to the point that even people outside certain circles make extensive use of them. The violence with which the alt right managed to break through the Overton window is so disruptive that it has contaminated public discourse, in what is defined as a real cultural war: it has become completely normal to find paragraphs on the pages of newspapers or entire editorials dedicated to yet another case of cancel culture, without these being analyzed in a broader and more complex context. Some of these strategies were born even before Gamergate: in 2014, some 4chan users decided to invade Twitter by passing themselves off as “angry feminists”.
The attack involved using the #EndFathersDay hashtag, which within a few hours went viral to the point of attracting the attention of the media and politicians. The plan was executed with military precision, so much so that the US channel Fox News fell into the trap, dedicating an episode of the talk show Fox & Friends to the event. Nothing to worry about, except that Fox News is one of the most watched programs in the United States.
A few months later, it was Gamergate's turn. What started out as a request for greater transparency from some players towards the gaming press turned into an excuse to attack, threaten and harass people the alt right didn't like. The programmer Eron Gjoni accused the developer Zoe Quinn – his ex-girlfriend – of having obtained a positive review on Depression Quest from the journalist Nathan Grayson in exchange for sexual services; a real casus belli that led the players to unleash a war that continues to this day. The review, of course, never existed.
Da dove nasce Sweet Baby Inc. Detected?
Even before Sweet Baby Inc. Detected, the internet had already begun to discuss the company's negative influence on the world of video games, leading to the creation of real conspiracy theories. On the Kiwi Farms forum – which Margaret Pless of New York Magazine defined as “the largest stalker community on the web” -, we find a thread dated October 28, 2023, more than two hundred pages long. In this thread Kim Belair is defined as “a Jew who is destroying the world of video games”, while for the company, whose logo depicts a newborn, the hypothesis of possible links with pedophile networks is put forward.
The comments that follow are so nauseating that they go beyond the limits of human decency, which is why we do not consider it appropriate to mention any others in this article. Kabrutus never directly mentions Kiwi Farm, and we have no reason to believe that he was inspired in any way by the thread. The timing with which he noticed these “patterns”, however, is rather curious. On November 17, 2023, the YouTuber Griffin Gaming published a video on his channel entitled Sweet Baby Inc: Why Modern Gaming has Become Woke Political Garbage, helping to make the name of the company go viral which, let us remember, is only one of many to offer consultancy services in the world of video games. The video currently has 185 thousand views. Platforms like YouTube have become fertile ground for the alt right, with thousands of channels uploading videos daily about the dangers of woke ideology and political correctness.
These are real echo chambers enhanced and magnified by the YouTube algorithm, programmed to always recommend the same content to its users. It was enough for me to watch two videos on the mysterious woke ideology to push YouTube to offer me videos similar in both tone and content.
A month after the birth of Detected, the narrative developer of Sweet Baby Inc, Chris Kindred, invited his followers on Twitter to “report the f**king page”, starting what is called Gamergate 2.0. As the industry press began to talk about it, Kotaku senior editor Alyssa Mercante “infiltrated” the group's Discord chat.
“On March 5, I managed to spend an hour in the Sweet Baby Inc. Detected Discord before I was kicked out of the chat, probably because I identified myself as a Kotaku journalist. Members shared posts referencing Feminist Frequency founder Anita Sarkeesian, quotes from Marcus Aurelius and images of idealized female bodies in games. One image showed several photos of the protagonist EVE from the upcoming action game Stellar Blade […] paired with female characters from Overwatch, Forspoken and Life is Strange.
“Embrace tradition. Reject modernity” reads the collage. In an interview published on The Shortcut, Kabrutus defended himself by stating that “My Discord server has moderators who are constantly trying to implement scripts and automatic ways to filter this type of thing and also ban people who insist on doing so. Everyone We do our best to prevent this from happening and will continue to do so.”
In short, Sweet Baby Inc. quickly transformed itself into a scapegoat, the origin of all the evils that afflict the videogame industry, but as we know the crisis in the sector is certainly not to be attributed to marginalized groups of people, nor to their legitimate requests.