If this is the first time you’re hearing about Sweet Baby Inc., congratulations on your well curated internet experience. Mine is clearly in dire need of pruning, as it is all I have heard about this week. I want to dive a little into the facts of the issue, but I also think it’s important to address the underlying problems they have unearthed, and the (occasionally justified) cause of this outrage.
In short, Sweet Baby Inc. is a narrative consultancy firm. This means if developers are stuck on a narrative hitch, they call in outside experts to help. It might be that a character feels dull, or that there’s no reason provided in the story for why they do a thing they definitely need to do for the script to make sense. These firms help with character writing and overall plot, but they might also help with world-building elements as well.
What Does Sweet Baby Inc. Do?
This firm might be brought in near the start when the story is just scraps of paper pinned to a cork board, or they might arrive late in the day when most of the game is set in stone but the actors are yet to record their lines. Or any time in between. What is most crucial is that they make suggestions - they don’t take over development and throw out what the devs want in favour of their own agenda; they are asked ‘how do we make this better?’ and they respond ‘what about this?’.
Personally speaking, I’m not sure how I feel about all of this. It feels a little too close to design by committee for my liking, moving away from video games being the result of the artistic efforts of a specific few who share a vision into an amorphous team of a thousand each applying a single brushstroke to an overall painting. However, I’m aware that modern day gamesrequire the work of thousands, and have enjoyed many games made with the assistance of narrative consultants, and some specifically with Sweet Baby Inc.. On an academic level, I am curious as to what weird and wonderful results we get without their safety net. In reality, I know they have made my favourite games and characters more enjoyable, relatable, memorable, all the ables, and it’s difficult to begrudge this.
Developers Only Add Diversity When They Want To
Recently, Sweet Baby Inc. has become public enemy number one, at least for extremely hardcore gamers in specific conflict-driven echo chambers. They have been adjudged as the principal reason gaming is woke these days, culminating in an extension being made for Steam that highlights Sweet Baby Inc.’s involvement in any given game. Rather than play a game yourself and come to conclusions, or even reading a review by someone you trust, we have reached the point where we decide which games to play based on which narrative consultancy firm was attached to give the script a polish. It’s not normal to care about these things so deeply.
This article was written hours beforeKotaku published its report on Sweet Baby Inc., which is a crucial read in understanding this issue.
Keeping in mind that all these firms do is make suggestions, it’s a leap to claim they are the reason for anything in the game at all. If a dev does not like their suggestions, they can easily be rejected. Sweet Baby Inc. has been deemed a scapegoat, and a lot of the criticism aimed at the firm is around diversity in general. Because Sweet Baby Inc. does work on DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion), it wasclaimed (then immediately disproven)that Saga Anderson inAlan Wake 2was a white woman until Sweet Baby Inc. arrived on the scene. When you resort so quickly to falsehoods, your anger is probably misplaced and unfounded.
That Sweet Baby Inc. specialises in being a diversity consultant is why it has become a target. The assumption is that the consultancy they do is ‘add more Black people’ or ‘make it more woke’, but you wouldn’t call this firm if diversity was not already important for you. Yes, sometimes simply adding more diverse characters will be a suggestion, but it’s much more frequent that characters who are already diverse are offered suggestions on making them more believable in their diversity, erring away from stereotypes, or injecting more culture.
While I have reservations over the growing use of narrative consultants (and the implicit devaluation of in-house writing accordingly), if you are annoyed that a game has people of colour in it, then you aren’t annoyed at a narrative consultancy firm at all. It feels like Sweet Baby Inc. is justthe latest dogwhistle for rejecting progressive ideas, or in the case ofBlack people existing, just rejecting reality.
Diversity Consultants Are The Latest Scapegoat
However, there is some slim… if not justification, then at least explanation for where all this rage comes from. Iwrote about this phenomenon a little while ago, whenSuicide Squad: Kill the Justice Leaguelaunched. It was largely agreed that the game was not very good, and given the Pride flags on display,it was also categorised as ‘woke’. Ergo, some would have you believe, the game was bad because it was woke. Back when Harley wore a more skimpy outfit, Catwoman purred in her latex, and everything was dingy and gritty in Arkham, the series was good. Now it was bad. Wokeness is the answer.
But wokeness is not the answer.Baldur’s Gate 3, last year’s game of the year, was far more progressive than Suicide Squad. Insomniac’sSpider-Man, viewed by many as the true successor to Arkham’s crown as the ultimate superhero game, not only has a Black lead, but pairs him with a Black deaf girl and features several moments of layered representation… andalso has a bunch of on the nose flags everywhere.
The bigger issue is that games have been taken away from you.But you think people like me did it. We haven’t. They were taken away from us too.In a week where Warner Bros. confirmed that Suicide Squad’s failure as a live-service game underlined the demand for more live-service games, the problem has never been more obvious. Games, woke or not, are no longer games. They are content. They feel like they aren’t made for you to play anymore because they aren’t - they’re made for you to pay.
Sweet Baby Inc. is currently caught in the crosshairs, but this battle has been waging for a long time. It’s easy to dismiss it as a toxic waste of time that no one should pay any attention to, but a significant portion of the gaming audience (at least the hardcore online sector, if a far smaller part of the wider demographic) being apoplectic about a firm suggesting minor tweaks to a character here or a more diverse role there is not something we should ignore. They aren’t really mad at that, and we can’t grow sufficiently as a medium while large swathes of our most active online presence blows up over the prospect of a character who doesn’t look like them in a video game.
Alan Wake 2
WHERE TO PLAY
Alan Wake 2 is the sequel to Remedy’s hit survival horror game. It blends two separate stories into one, following FBI agent Saga Anderson as she investigates both a series of brutal murders and a story written by Wake himself.
