A Senior Narrative Designer for Bungie chose to defend Sweet Baby Inc. and even parroted comments made by the company’s CEO telling gamers they “need to grow up.”
A screenshot from Destiny 2 (2019), Bungie
X user THICCEST_YOSH, whose profile claims he is a Senior Narrative Designer for Bungie wrote, “If you’re mad about ‘DEI ruining games’, you need to grow up.”
He continued, “You need to stop wasting so much time on grifters who are only there to manipulate you and milk your anger for engagement. You need to talk to people who aren’t like you a bit more.”
“You need to stop falling for this,” he concluded.
THICCEST_YOSH on X
THICCEST_YOSH’s commentary echoes what Sweet Baby Inc. CEO Kim Belair had to say back in 2019 about straight, white, male gamers. She compared them to “picky babies.”
In a presentation at the Game Developers Conference Belair said, “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.”
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 doubled down on the metaphor later in the presentation, ““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.”
Kim Belair via GDC YouTube
A little bit later she claimed straight, white, male gamers stand in the way of her “progress” and “innovation.”
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.’”
Kim Belair via GDC YouTube
On top of echoing Belair’s comments about gamers, Sweet Baby Inc. has made it abundantly clear what their company’s objectives are. Their website states, “Our mission is to tell better, more empathetic stories while diversifying and enriching the video games industry.”
Sweet Baby Inc. About Us section
READ: Sweet Baby Inc. CEO And Co-Founder Kim Belair Compares White Male Gamers To Picky Babies
Emily Goldstein at Thought Catalog explicitly detailed what diversity means back in 2015. Her article is titled, “Yes, Diversity Is About Getting Rid Of White People (And That’s A Good Thing)”
Within the article she states, “One of the more common memes that I’ve seen white supremacists spread around recently has been “diversity is a code word for white genocide”. The concept here is that diversity is only promoted in white nations, and that the end goal is to eliminate white people altogether by flooding all white countries with non-white people until there are no white people left. Well, guess what, white supremacists? That’s exactly right. Diversity IS about getting rid of white people, and that’s a good thing.”
She even concludes the article writing, “So, yes, white supremacists: diversity is indeed white genocide. And white genocide is exactly what the world needs more than anything else.”
A screenshot from Destiny 2 (2019), Bungie
Interestingly, Belair admitted to not liking that a video game developer wanted to add a Frenchman to their game in her presentation back in 2019. Instead, she wanted the character replaced by a person of color.
She said, “I once worked on a project where they had an all-white cast where they expressed their desire, ‘Okay, we need to mix it up a bit. How about this character’s like stereotypically French.’ So they have a beret and they have like a striped shirt. And I was like, ‘Okay, if you need to do that, can we at least make them a person of color?’ And they said, ‘Oh no, that would be weird. They’re already French.’”
“So I want to do better than this,” she asserted.
A screenshot from Destiny 2 (2019), Bungie
What do you make of THICCEST_YOSH’s comments?
“You need to stop wasting so much time on grifters who are only there to manipulate you” oh that’s rich.
People should remember which studios supported SBI – it’s a wonderful self-report of being anti-customer SJWs.
This is so tiring. Just avoid DEI completely.