According to Sweet Baby Inc. CEO Kim Belair, most if not all of the criticism leveled towards her company’s DEI-based consultancy work is based not on any concern for the quality of video games, but rather fear of being left behind by an evermore ‘diverse’ industry.
Belair, under whose leadership Sweet Baby Inc. has provided services to such titles as Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 and Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, offered her take on the current discourse gripping the wider video game community during a recent speaking appearance at the 2024 Black Girl Gamers Online Summit.
Taking the virtual stage alongside The Verge staff writer Ash Parrish and Black Girl Gamers CEO Jay’Ann Lopez for the summit’s ‘Breaking Down The Gamergate‘ panel, Belair was asked upon her introduction to provide a brief recap of her experience with online critics of Sweet Baby Inc’s work, to which she began, “I would say I think of us almost in in as like patient zero of this wave of Gamergate.”
[Editor’s Note: While the video of the panel is available on YouTube, Black Girl Gamers has disabled the option to embed it on third-party websites, and as such it cannot be played directly from this article.]
“When I think of where it started, it was the week that we had announced that we were [working] on both Alan Wake II and Spider-Man 2, which are two, I think popular games among the gamin community and players in general,” explained Belair. “Immediately the targeting began with this kind of like, ‘We found this secret sinister website from Sweet Baby Inc.!’ Meanwhile, we’re on Twitter like, ‘I’m so excited to let people know that we worked on these two really great games!'”
The assumption was essentially made that our work on that had not been story or narrative or character related it had been to make a black character exist in Alan Wake II [notably, between her initial reveal and the game’s debut, the character of Saga Anderson was race-swapped from white to black] and I think to put Pride Flags in in Spider-Man 2, and that was kind of like, the assumption that we had ‘wokiefied’ video games,” she added. “As a company we worked on over 80 games together so there was plenty of fodder for people to start going, ‘Oh, is this the reason that all of these games are now woke? That they have people of color, and queer people or any marginalized identities at all?’ Or even sometimes, they perceive, ‘Oh this woman’s design is not quite as it used to be and I think it used to be hotter’. So there’s a lot of stuff that’s been put on us, both things that we did work on, things that we didn’t and then we kind of just became shorthand for the wokeification of gaming.”
As the conversation continued on, Belair was later pressed by Lopez if she could detail to viewers as to “What is this idea of ‘wokeifying’ gaming”.
“I think it’s part of the greater movement right towards towards a lot of like very far right thinking and a lot of very regressive material that’s kind of just being pushed out across a lot of different [industries], at least a lot of audiences and industries are currently kind of talking about that and obviously the political landscape has kind of led to to a lot of this,” replied the Sweet Baby Inc. CEO, “but I think for a lot of people it really comes down to, ‘They see they they see a change that they themselves did not expect, they see a change that they can’t fathom, that their beloved companies or their beloved teams would ever make themselves, and so they kind of assume that anyone who comes in and who looks like myself or other members of my team are the interlopers. Like, our job can only be tied to our identity.”
“Speaking of misinformation, I think the biggest thing for us during this campaign is that I would say that you know any kind of sensitivity work or consulting work in cultural consultation probably represents about 15% of our work,” she continued. “The vast majority of it is actually writing narrative design, joining writing teams, helping support writing teams, sometimes being the entire writing team for project or helping with mission design, but the part that really, really gets everyone assuming that we can’t possibly do that other work because all we are is you know, ‘DEI’. We became labeled as this DEI company when the facts of the way that we work is that someone calls in and says ‘Hey we’re making something, we’ve made a bunch of choices, we’d love you to either help write, help look at them, help talk to us.'”
Ultimately, as the panel wound down, Belair was given the chance to offer her ‘final word’ on the discussion, to which she declared, “We talk about ‘representation as innovation’ a lot at Sweet Baby Inc., where representation is not just – nobody wants checkboxes and tokenism, which is what always gets thrown around, like “Oh you just want this, you just want that,” but no to me bringing in new perspectives, bringing in new ideas, bringing in different cultures than we’ve seen before, different experiences it creates something new and outside of that very small audience, I think largely people do want something new. People want to have new stories, people want to go on new kinds of adventures, people want to
be able to experience new kinds of game mechanics based on X, Y, or Z.”
“So, for me it’s like if representation is innovation, innovation is change, at the at the end of the day that’s all that
they’re really really afraid of,” she concluded. “They’re afraid of anything that doesn’t look like they remember. We
all we all have the Super Nintendo games or whatever, the old games that we that we cling to nostalgically, but
everything evolves, everything changes, and I think as long as folks remember we’re making products but we’re also making art, we’re going to stand by it I think that’s exactly the way to go.”