A Gaming Grift Guide

Exploring the anti-woke swindle, and the people it so cynically targets

They just love games, see. That’s what it’s all about. They love games, more passionately than you could possibly understand, and so are driven by this devotion to fight for them, to protect gaming from malevolent external forces, that they have no choice but to forcefully campaign against anyone who might perpetrate these offences. It’s all about love.

I find the anti-woke gamer grift so fascinating because it’s so wanton. I suppose, in the end, all grifts are, but at least some swindles are at least imaginative. When it comes to the anti-woke, it’s so drearily obvious, so woefully uninspired, that it’s utterly demoralising to see it still work so effectively.

A game is announced, released, promoted—whatever it may be—and then a few self-appointed arbiters of acceptability feverishly look around for the most negative reactions on X, Reddit, etc, and then declare themselves the dispensers of this truth. The game features a woman without showing her tits? The game has a person of colour in a lead role? The game represents different sexualities or expressions of gender? Then something terrible has happened. They’re taking your games away from you.

For a while, there was at least some attempt to pretend it was more complicated than that. This latest wave of post-GamerGate hucksterism began with the deluded belief that a company called Sweet Baby Inc was somehow forcing games to be more woke (rather than just simply providing developers with requested advice on how their games can be more inclusive—the horror), and on this imaginary foundation, built the argument that games were being artificially changed, likely against the developers’ own wishes, to meet an unwanted, imposed agenda. Someone has to fight back! Someone has to protect the games!

It’s an effective beginning, because it builds on the notions of censorship that most people interested in artistic expression would not want to see. These games are being censored by the people imposing the agenda, and what you’re paying for is not what was intended, not what you deserve! Who those people are, what the agenda actually is, how the imposition is occurring—none of that’s important. Just be angry at the concept of censorship! Demand it end!

The irony that it has become the most ardent, furious campaign for censorship is exhausting, of course. It always was, is, and will be for as long as it proves profitable, about trying to stop developers making games the way they want to. It’s censorship through fear, or as Alyssa Mercante and her legal representatives put it in her recent litigation against one of the more prominent grifters in the field, stochastic terrorism. Endlessly provoking an ever-growing mob of disaffected marks to become angrier, more threatening, more dangerous.

They and You

They—the mysterious and never rationally explained They—are trying to take something away from you. Something precious, something that’s especially, uniquely yours, and They want you not to have it any more. They, in fact, hate you, and They want you to be sad, alone, and rejected from society. They want their games progressive and inclusive in an attempt to alienate you from the the one place that would still have you.

(Of course, the “You” in all this is equally ill-defined. Obviously it’s most broadly intended to mean “normal people”, where “normality” is defined by majority, and in the countries and cultures in which they operate, that means “white, straight, male.” But it’s never defined as that, for two extremely important reasons. Firstly, that would rather give the game away. And secondly, it would reduce the pool of your potential marks. People of colour, women, and LGBTQ people are all capable of being bigoted too! It would be bad business to openly exclude them. How inclusive it proves!)

Young white men aren’t OK

So who are the Yous, really? Well, clearly, it would be silly to say “They are all X,” because that’s not how reality works. But in the main, based on the accounts I see liking, supporting, and joining in mobs, they’re mostly young men who feel disaffected by a society that they feel is abandoning them. And, in a specific way—although not the ways usually thought by or told to them—it is. The number one cause of death in men under 50 in the UK is suicide (in the US it’s the second biggest cause after accidents), and men of all ages make up 70% o all suicides. Men in the Commonewealth make up 75% of all people with substance abuse problems, and over 80% of deaths caused by suicide.

However, when you break those statistics down by race, in the UK, white and mixed-race men show vastly higher rates of suicide than black or Asian men. In the US, the same is true, although here there is also the tragic number of Native American suicides to factor.

If we crudely put aside every other factor, all the crucial realities of institutional racism, the grotesque inequalities faced by people of colour in the US and UK (and in so many other places too), and indeed the misogyny and inequality that gruesomely affects women, we also have to acknowledge that something is really, really wrong for young, white men.

I’m certainly no sociologist, and I do not understand the causes of this beyond the most crude level, but what I do know is that this makes young, white men an incredibly wide target for grifters. No matter the cause, there is a malaise that is causing epidemic levels of deaths, and of course those figures only represent the tip of a mountain of pain.

(If you are similarly struggling, no matter your sex, ethnicity, age, sexuality, etc, please reach out for help. This site has support links and numbers for every country in the world.)

It’s that mountain of people the grifters prey upon.

The Grift

Over the months since the SBI nonsense, the grift has drawn in as many games (and films, and comics, and table-top RPGs…) as it can, employing the age-old “throw enough shit at the wall, see what sticks” technique, then pursuing anything that gets traction. Ignore the revolting pile of faeces on the floor—just fixate on the morsels of poop that stuck, and act like that’s all you ever cared about. But of course, even the sticking is faked (they’re putting glue on the poo, people).

The Stellar Blade example is by far the most egregious, although the same model is employed almost every time. I obviously cannot do a better job of explaining it than YouTuber’s Shaun’s exhaustive and entertaining recent video:

But in case you don’t have two spare hours right now (although you should find them, it’s so worth watching), let me summarise:

• Stellar Blade was announced, and the likes of Mark Kern excitedly announced that the woke gaming press would be coming for it

• The woke gaming press rather failed in its duty and didn’t come for it, but there was that one French licensee of the IGN brand that wrote an article where if you took one paragraph out of context it looked a bit like it was

• Therefore the woke gaming press HAD come for it

• The game released with slight tweaks in the teeny outfits worn by the voluptuous main character from those in the pre-patched version

• The grifters declared that these slight aesthetic changes were as a result of the woke gaming press’s unrelenting campaign against the game

• #freestellarblade was declared, encouraging people to furiously campaign for the proper, original, UNCENSORED costumes to be released

• The developers explain that the costume changes were made “for quality”, and entirely of their own volition

• Some already-planned DLC was released with other, new costumes

• The grifters declared this proved their campaign had been successful, the woke gaming press defeated, and Stellar Blade saved from censorship

• (A small schism occurs within the mob, between those just falling for the whole lot, and those who’d fallen for the first half, but noticed that the costumes they were cross about still hadn’t been changed)

• #freestellarblade becomes yet another example of their unstoppable success in TAKING BACK GAMES, written in stone as proof of their power and victory

At every stage, it’s bullshit. It begins in bullshit (the developers tweaked the costumes a bit during development to get them how they wanted them), it swims in bullshit (the press actually writes lots of articles about how it’s looking forward to the game, and even celebrates how sexy she looks), it swallows bullshit (something utterly unrelated to their campaign occurs and they believe, like the superstitious pigeon, that they caused this), it celebrates bullshit (nothing they wanted occurs, and they declare victory), and it stands on bullshit (this victory is proof that what they’re doing works, and they must keep doing it).

This is still maintained by the grifters as their greatest victory. All the rest of that shit that didn’t stick? Never mentioned again. Didn’t happen. Tweets, extremely often, are just deleted. It’s selection bias as sport.

The white undercoat shows through

Over the months, as the pattern became established, the grifters got lazier. This was most starkly demonstrated when their attentions turned on Obsidian’s upcoming Avowed, when they forgot the step of establishing the thing that had been artificially changed or censored, and just went straight to screaming that a single picture of four different fantasy characters didn’t include a white man. (I wrote about this here, so won’t retread that.)

The game, which features white men as far as the eye can see, alongside black men, white dwarfs, blue-green men, and so on, and indeed allows you to create a character of any race, letting you play as a man so white as to be translucent, was condemned forever as unacceptably woke, and the real reasoning was just there, exposed to sunlight.

They then became even more outraged when November’s previews revealed that the character creator allows players to pick “they/them” pronouns for the godlike being with mushrooms growing out their face they play as. Previewers were asked not to show the game’s prologue section if recording footage, as it was far more unfinished than the section that immediately followed (there were some placeholder graphics, some voice dialogue wasn’t yet added, and the character creator felt unfinished). This, the grifters then decided, was in fact a conspiracy to hide the character creator and its evil pronoun options, which is so fantastically untrue. I have the preview guidelines here, and they say,

Capture of the Character Creation and Prologue is not allowed in the previews window. You will know when you’ve reached Dawnshore when your character arrives on the docks. This restriction only applies to visual assets; the Prologue can be discussed in written editorial or verbally.

So yeah, absolute rubbish, and indeed most previews absolutely did discuss the character creator, and many talked about the pronoun options. But, as ever, this is a grift, a con, a swindle—it’s always lies. The lie is told, and then the grift built on the lie. It’s now just an accepted fact, often repeated in videos and articles, that Obsidian tried to hide the pronoun options because they knew they were bad, and tried to stop journalists reporting it and the public finding out.

The marks of the grift will mostly never check. Not least because they’re incessantly instructed not to “give the clicks” to these heinous sites that perpetrate the crimes. So, when you uniquely consume the content created by the swindlers, and the sites they create or endorse, you’ll only ever read the lie. If you’re the sort to go check, then you’re just not the mark for this con.

Intergalactic

Which brings us up-to-date, and to The Game Awards.

Once again, the laziness of the conmen prevailed, and the plain nature of the grift was laid bare.

During the endless hours of awards, adverts and trailers, so very many games were revealed, shown for the first time, or further promoted, offering a huge range for people to look forward to. This, you might imagine, would be the most wonderful moment for celebration for these people so dedicated to their love for games. Right? There’s Geoff, and he’s telling you games are great and everything’s great, and here are all these commercials for games! It’s your night!

So looking through the feeds of the grifters-in-chief this morning, what did I see? A nervous mention of The Witcher 4 having a female lead (uh-oh!), and… FURY! So much FURY! Because, and get this, among the seven hundred billion trailers, there was one from The Last Of Us developer Naughty Dog, and its main character was (try not to vomit) a woman! But wait, a woman of colour! AND SHE HAD SHAVED HER HEAD!!!

The lead character of Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet is played by Tatiana Gabrielle, an actor with an African American father and a half African American, half-Korean mother. She, I must break it to you, is a person. An existing person. The character she plays in Intergalactic looks like she looks in real life. Gabrielle, that existing person, often wears her hair very short.

In the game she plays a bounty hunter called Jordan A. Mun, who also wears her hair—in this portion of the character’s life at least—very short.

I swear to god, the feeds of these grifters (I’ve used that word a lot, they hate it, but it’s the most accurate term) are just filled with hatred toward this game because it features a woman of colour with short hair. She is, in their estimation, not attractive enough. Pictures are posted comparing her to bald men. She’s described derisively as a “Space Lesbian” (a term I think people should immediately adopt). “Looks like I may identify as non-buy-nary for this one,” says another guy quoting a “joke” he saw someone else make a few days ago.

And that’s it. They’re not celebrating other games. They’re not delighted to see, I dunno, Turok and Virtua Fighter coming back. They’re so cross about Intergalactic that they seem to have missed that the trailer for Borderlands 4 from those long-time purveyors of all things woke, Gearbox, mostly featured black characters!

They don’t love games. They love hate. They love the financial rewards of their hate, and the attention their hate brings them, and they were only ever going to watch The Game Awards (which no one should watch, for goodness sakes) to find the thing they could object to, and monetise that objection through their socials, YouTube, games they’re never going to release, legal defence funds for their constant slander, and so on.

Chasing the white whale

Because, and you might have noticed I’ve not been saying the obvious: they’re just massive pricks who recognise there’s money to be made in racism, homophobia, transphobia and misogyny.

They’re bigots, whether cynically or at heart, who love the money bigotry brings them, and must maintain that constant firehose of hatred in order to keep their grift going. They know how the disaffected young men are looking for targets, searching for reasons for their suffering that exist without, never within, and are pointing them toward one. “It’s Them. Those people. They’re the reason. They’re why you feel so alone, so rejected, so despondent. They want to take away that one thing that makes you feel secure, the gaming safety you can retreat to when all feels so bleak, so hopeless. They don’t want you to have even that. They just want you left, exposed to the horror. Go get them.”

That’s dark. That’s scary. There’s a reason to speak up about this. It can’t end there, of course—it can’t be about pointing and furrowing one’s brow. And clearly here I’ve (deliberately) centred the targets of the con as the victims and perpetrators, when there are so many others being harmed, driven from jobs, their reputations torn apart by lies, and left living in fear, because of those victims and perpetrators. I do not minimise this in any way by the angle I’ve taken here.

That mountain of pain: it’s hurting, and it’s hurting everything around it too. It requires systemic change, from parenting and education through to the broad culture that it creates to perpetuate itself. It’s not at all easy. But in the short-term, calling out those who seek to use it for their personal, financial and egotistical advantage, at least stems some of the flow.

This doesn’t wrap up usefully. I don’t have a lovely answer. I know that it requires love, and teaching people that they are worthy of love, and I wish I had a way of making that happen. But I think exposing the grift is vital, spreading the methodology to others such that they can spot it before it catches them. I think loudly calling out those who perpetrate the con is crucial too, and I think the games industry is letting itself and its audience down horrendously by staying silent.

So, for the sake of a circular summary, those people don’t love games. They hate them. They want to destroy any that isn’t something they want to play. They hate the people who want to play them. They are a force of hatred.