Brass Lion Entertainment Lead Gameplay Designer Osama Dorias decided to weigh in on Sweet Baby Inc and claim “you can’t be racists to whites.”
Osama Dorias via Game Thinking TV YouTube
In response to a lengthy thread by Insomniac Games’ Associate Narrative Director Mary Kenney, who is currently working on Marvel’s Wolverine, Dorias defended the actions of Sweet Baby Inc. and declared, “You can’t be racist to white idiots, like yourself. But you can’t be racists to white non-idiots either.”
He then concluded, “You can’t be racist to whites, period.”
Osama Dorias on X
Dorias’ comments came after YouTuber La Reina Creole criticized Kenney’s defense of Sweet Baby Inc. by sharing a clip of Kim Belair from her presentation at the Game Developers Conference in 2019 informing AAA video game employees to terrify their higher-ups in order to diversify games.
Last time I checked, consultants don’t use ‘threats’ like this to sell their product 🙄 I know—I used to be one. https://t.co/JCBi24zfvS
— La Reina🇺🇸Creole🇩🇴🇯🇲🇵🇷🇹🇹🇨🇺🇭🇹🇲🇽🇨🇴 (@LaReinaCreole) March 6, 2024
Belair says, “If you’re creative working in AAA, which I did for many years, put this stuff up to your higher-ups. And if they don’t see the value and what you’re asking for when you ask for consultants, when you ask for research, go have a coffee with your marketing team and just terrify them with the possibility of what’s going to happen if they don’t give you what you want.”
“Because they have to consider– I say that out loud as a joke, but it’s actually very, very true because if you start to consider the people who are player and audience facing and you have to deal with mitigating harm and with keeping the sentiment around their game and their project positive, there’s like a genuine value that you could impress upon them both ethically and financially. You could say this is important,” she said.
Belair elaborated, “It’s also a valid discussion to have because if you’re working with a thin narrative budget and you work in AAA, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised or dismayed by the amount of money that marketing can give you.”
A screenshot from Sable (2021), Shedworks
Kenney responded to La Reina Creole by gaslighting her, “She’s talking about *warning the marketing team how players will react to the game.* Scaring the shit out of them with her assessment. Which is her JOB as a consultant: telling people uncomfortable truths in the hope that they fix it.”
Mary Kenney on X
Creole wasn’t having it and she responded, “100% wrong. That is a pure threat not to mention unprofessional. You can tell people uncomfortable ‘truths’. Hoping they will fix it is not part of it.”
100% wrong. That is a pure threat not to mention unprofessional. You can tell people uncomfortable ‘truths’. Hoping they will fix it is not part of it.
— La Reina🇺🇸Creole🇩🇴🇯🇲🇵🇷🇹🇹🇨🇺🇭🇹🇲🇽🇨🇴 (@LaReinaCreole) March 6, 2024
Kenney retorted, “That is literally what the GDC talk is about. It’s available for free. It’s a presentation she gave at a professional conference.”
Mary Kenney on X
X user OldManBobb then responded to Kenney, “What about the racist stuff she said about white people or are you one of those ‘can’t be racist to whites’ idiots?”
OldManBobb on X
READ: Sweet Baby Inc. CEO And Co-Founder Kim Belair Compares White Male Gamers To Picky Babies
OldManBobb is referring to more of Belair’s comments at the 2019 Game Developers Conference where she instructed developers to terrify their higher ups.
Belair compared straight, white, male gamers to picky babies saying, “I think in our industry and in so many creative industries — if you want to look at film, and, television and any art form — we start treating our core demographics as a fixed and static value something that does not want to change and something that is locked in place.”
“So despite the changing face of audiences, despite the changing face of conferences like this one, we still look at our core demographics and say, ‘Okay, they’re white, cis, hetero males.’ And we cater almost exclusively to them. And the problem is that we don’t just cater to them like, ‘You know, here’s something that we think you’ll enjoy.’ We cater to them like a picky baby.”
Screenshot from Tales of Kenzera: ZAU (2024), Surgent Studios
She elaborated, “We feed them the same thing that we know that they love and we keep on feeding it. We’re like, ‘Here you go. We know you love it. Eat this. Eat this. Eat this.’ So then when they get anything else they react as a picky baby would, which would be like, ‘Oh! No thank you. I do not want this.’”
“And we’ve actually done this so long that what we’re doing is creating an entire nation of picky babies and they make us scared to deviate from what we actually want to do. Just in case these picky babies don’t want to play our games,” she said.
Miles Morales and Spider-Man in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 (2023), Insomniac Games
She doubled down on the metaphor later in the presentation saying, “I do like to imagine that when we look at white guys and there’s several of you here. I think when we look at you we say, ‘Okay, you can’t possibly enjoy this.’ But I think they want also and maybe you want also to experience new and different stories. I think we need to step out of this rule that like white men can enjoy fantasy worlds, aliens, sci-fi, monsters, anything so long as its through a lens that looks exactly like them.”
“Because if that’s the kind of person that we’re always going to cater to, you’re never going to innovate, you’re never going to change things, you’re going to keep feeding the picky baby,” she continued. “And we cannot continue to try to create art under a system that is going to bar innovation for fear of a picky baby throwing a tantrum.”
A little bit later she said, “I don’t think it’s pie in the sky thinking to go like, ‘Hey, maybe we can invite white dudes to play as other people and experience different things through someone else’s eyes.’ And if they don’t like it, we have to start thinking, ‘We’re not losing. They’re losing, and we’re losing because we’re going to let them stand in the way of our progress and our innovation.’”
Superman in Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League (2024), Rocksteady
Following OldManBobb’s post is when Dorias made his claim that you cannot be racist towards white people.
What do you make of Dorias’ comments while discussing Sweet Baby Inc.?
White is a race, therefore you can be racist to white people. (Not that you should)
Women have xx chromosomes, therefore you can define a woman. (You definitely should)
One great consequence of the SBI debacle is that number of devs who self-report on being anti-white bigots. Onto the blacklist they go.