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“Abominable company”, “bunch of degenerate wokes”, “video game gravediggers”. For several weeks, many conservative gamers have been harassing online employees of the company Sweet Baby Inc. (SBI), which specializes in editorial consulting for the writing of video game scenarios. The supposed crime of this company of barely fifteen employees? Manipulate the video game industry to make it more woke.
The conspiratorial offensive finds its roots in the fall of 2023, when Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, the highly anticipated new adventure of Spider-Man, on PS5. Very quickly, some players pointed out the presence of an LGBT flag graffitied on one of the game’s buildings and the choice of an African-American Spider-Man. On certain conservative forums, mainly American, Internet users are convinced that they see evidence of a woke conspiracy. According to them, the characters from minorities are more and more numerous, the white male protagonists less and less strong and the silhouettes of the heroines less and less sexy… and they must quickly find someone to blame.
A week after the game’s release, on the very controversial Kiwi Farms forum, at the origin of numerous harassment campaigns, an Internet user shared his discovery: Insomniac Games, the studio behind Marvel’s Spider-Man, reportedly asked a consultant to help him write his script. Its name: Sweet Baby Inc., a small Montreal company specializing in editorial consulting and invested in issues of diversity and inclusion.
Phantom evidence
Since its creation in 2018 by screenwriters Kim Belair and David Bédard, it has collaborated with several industry players and appears in the credits of major productions (Assassin’s Creed, Alan Wake II…) as more independent games. In other words, it is a subcontractor. But this Internet user is convinced: this is the woke cancer that is plaguing video games. Sweet Baby Inc. is, however, just one of the many editorial consulting companies that have played a little-known but important role in this sector for several years.
Gregorios Kythreotis, co-creator of the multi-awarded game Sand, testifies to this. “The release date of our game was approaching and we were overwhelmed, he explains. The script was written, but not integrated in the form of dialogue. SBI took care of it, with professionalism and respecting our artistic approach. » Using phantom evidence, however, the company’s detractors assure us: it would have taken advantage of this to introduce non-binary pronouns.
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