Discover more from DARK FUTURA
I don’t usually cover games, nor have even played them in a long time, but I keep my eye on developments and recent trends have been extremely revealing of a dark streak threading its way through the industry. It’s particularly important because of how it overlaps with the cultural engineering movements currently putting society in a stranglehold. The reason is obvious, of course: the same players are ever behind it. BlackRock, et al.
The latest controversy embroiling the gaming world comes by way of a Playstation 5 game called Stellar Blade. The controversy revolves mainly around the fact that the playable character, Eve, is rendered in a putatively male-gaze-oriented and ‘misogynistic’ optic which is said to objectify women.
First, so you can get a sense for the actual argument, allow me to introduce Eve:
All the ‘Regime’ publications like Kotaku have begun trashing the game for its overly realistic and admittedly jiggly portrayal of the female form. A senior editor at France IGN—probably the largest gaming ‘journalistic’ outlet—outright claimed the game could induce women into suicide, as well as being hit and killed:
But the problem is, the game’s director Kim Hyung-tae’s own wife is a lead artist on the project:
So much for that male gaze.
And the double whammy? The woke mob has raged that the game is promoting ‘unrealistic’ beauty standards for female bodies. But the main character was literally 3D-scanned from a Korean model named Shin Jae-eun.
Here’s her in the studio being scanned:
Fans poked fun at the hypocrisy in companies like Sony openly promoting other titles featuring outright smut or sex scenes while inexplicably pulling the reins on Stellar Blade’s relatively pedestrian sex appeal:
Most shocking is how the woke gaming press showcased their own blatant hypocrisy during the ongoing affair. Kotaku, another leading gaming journal, openly flaunted the sexualization of characters and storylines in Netflix’s new Fallout series while deriding the so-called dehumanization of women in Stellar Blade:
The hostile Radfem senior editor of Kotaku went on the attack:
But in a two-fold stroke of unbridled hypocrisy, major gaming outlets like Kotaku began heavily pushing another new game called Hades II, which even more overtly sexualizes its characters, but does so in the accepted modality:
You’ll note the above Kotaku article is written by the same disgraced ‘senior editor’. Also note the scantily clad, totally objectified woman on the left, which is oddly acceptable here.
But what really makes this entry so progressively tolerable to the woke mob? Its groveling “diversity” and “representation”.
You see, that there in the wheelchair is an obese—I mean, mobility challenged—non-cishet, likely gender-fluid, person of colour. Yes, he/she ticks off all the boxes at once to fight the good fight against ableism and every other of The Man’s unyieldingly oppressive -isms and -phobias. Not to mention the bisexually-coded green-bearded demigod who would not look out of place on your local Pride Parade float.
In fact the Kotaku editor openly shills for the game’s “inclusion” of “twinks, bears, dommy mommies, scary daddies…” and whatever other degeneracy could tickle your fancy:
And a Gamespot editor named Jessica Cogswell is strangely all for sex-workers and women’s total body positivity and liberation rights—except, you know, when it comes to traditionally beautiful cisgender women, like in Stellar Blade:
“Monetize the male gaze,” she smugly preens.
When it came to Stellar Blade, however, the same editor had this perplexing reaction:
You see, it turns out that media which includes gross sexual content is totally fine so long as it pledges fealty to the DEI gods, and whose fans and creators cow in submission to the gatekeepers responsible for our cultural mandates.
Hades II bears the laurels of acceptance owing to its promotion of a narrow Overton window of approved racial and sexual perspectives, which include characters whose skin colors are—as ever—portrayed in a gray-brown mush of ethnic and racial ambiguity:
The dark secret turned up by the latest controversy centers on the gaming industry being slowly brought under heel of shadowy companies like Sweet Baby Inc., which specialize in DEI ‘consultation’ to all the major AAA game studios. A whole stable of such companies quietly worms its way through the industry, reshaping the very storylines and race/sex requirements of beloved titles.
How they do this is complex, but former Blizzard game developer Mark Kern explained that they act as mediators between larger financial interests pushing ESG, i.e. BlackRock and co. As can be expected, this ESG money comes with “strings attached”:
Mark Kern explains how ESG money comes with strings attached inside corporations and is used to make companies partner with DEI consulting companies like Sweet Baby Inc:
"Everyone needs to realize is that it's not that these Studios are funding the games out of their own pocket; that would be very expensive for them. Cash is king. They will preferably go out and get money from other sources if it's cheap enough to help spread the risk of these massive titles, and so you have a lot of quid pro quo happening, and I can tell you that developers have been approaching me and giving me some inside baseball on what's been happening, and there are funding deals out there for studios—and I can't get too specific; I don't want to out sources—that have certain strings attached like a company will suddenly sign with a developer and now that developer needs to hire a DEI director and needs to go out and hire consultancy firms to gender balance."
"Their staff quite specifically go out and hire companies like SBI (Sweet Baby Inc) to consult on their writing and do sensitivity reading and changes for that, and what does, all this does, it boosts their ESG score. It allows them access that funding so ESG is not going away entirely."
"It's [ESG] become an evil brand. People are waking up to this... You have you have a rebranding going on right now. They're not calling it ESG, but it's still out there."
This is where the saga takes a dark turn.
But first to summarize: according to Mark Kern and other insiders, big triple AAA titles require a lot of money to get made in the gaming industry, and this money comes at the behest of special middle-men companies which offer a quid-pro-quo service that essentially gives the game developers an option: institute these DEI changes into your game, and we can connect you to mega-investors to subsidize the exorbitant upfront development costs.
Here’s another example of such a ‘consulting’ company called GaymerX. If you hadn’t guessed, they specialize in consulting developers on inclusivity specifically around LGBTQIA+ content:
And if you’re wondering how exactly these companies convince the game developers to inact these often drastic ‘inclusivity’ changes, the co-founder of now-reviled Sweet Baby Inc. in fact gave open tribute to her methods:
In case it was too extreme to be believed, you can watch it for yourself:
So, as always, the method is fear. They rely on fear of backlash from the usual poisoned cultural shibboleths: the -isms, -ists, and the like. The implication is, if you don’t implement our totalitarian culture reformation diktats, you will be publicly smeared as racist, misogynist, homophobe, transphobe, ableist, and have your career effectively destroyed and your life ‘cancelled’.
Most egregious is that when these tyrannical methods are called out or generate the expected backlash, the sinister purveyors lash out with immediate hostility:
But if you thought the preceding was bad, things get much darker around the bend.
Presumably at the behest of such intermediaries, game developers are being strong-armed into making what can only be described as frighteningly overt social engineering changes to their games. You see, in the case of Stellar Blade, it has devolved into what can almost be deemed a subtle ideological pitched battle. But in the case of many other properties, the intent has been stark.
For instance, take the latest update to Pokemon Go. Fans are in uproar over what was a sudden series of sweeping changes to their characters. But you have to see the changes to believe how far the social and culture engineers are pushing the transhuman agenda.
Here is a series of screenshots from outraged gamers showing their unbidden and unwelcome avatar redesigns—look very carefully and see if you notice something:
If you noticed that all the female characteristics have been ablated and morphed into a weird sickly detransitioning androgyny, you’d be correct. Hips and curves flattened, waists thickened, arms elongated, posture masculinized with a sort of hunched, bow-armed swagger—not to mention the alluringly feminine one-hipped jut is curtailed into an ambiguously butch slouch that has the weirdly uncomfortable medicated look of SSRI-induced anhedonia.
In short: the characters have all been made to represent—or rather, promote—a misshapen trans identity.
Even jawlines were not safe:
Gone are the heart-shaped feminine chins, to be replaced with husky cleft lantern-jaws.
Nor did the males get spared, their physiques unoffendingly estrogen-ized with stringy arms and soft lesbian faces:
Remember when long ago an influx of trans porn had suddenly swept through every major -Hub site category in a way that felt surreally forced and unnatural, like they were attempting to convert viewers’ tastes? And how it just so conveniently coincided with all the other ‘Leftwing’ culture war offensives which desperately tried to guilt-trip hetero-cisgender people who didn’t find trans-folks attractive, calling them transphobic for refusing to date trans and fatphobic for having an innate preference for slim people?
And remember when people who decried such developments as inorganic and manufactured were called conspiracy theorists, despite the overwhelming evidence that a group of transnationalist social engineers are actively working to remake society into their vision of the Kalergian Utopia?
And remember when a new undercover camera investigation recently outed Pornhub employees as actually admitting on film that they do secretly target literal pre-teens with gay/transgender porn for the actual stated reason of ‘opening up their tastes’, totally proving the “conspiracy theorists” right?
Employee Dillon Rice, a senior script writer at the company, is seen arguing that pornography usage could be beneficial for preteens. “Let’s say you’re 12 years old, you’re still figuring out your sexuality, maybe even your gender, wouldn’t it be helpful to see not a celebration but maybe just a … normalization of something that you think is what you want?” Rice is seen saying.
Rice went on to specifically reference a pornography site centered around transgender individuals, remarking, “Let’s say I was 12 and I saw TransAngels … it would help me figure out what I do like and what I don’t like.”
Michael Knowles of course correctly noted:
Knowles said the attempt to steer viewers’ sexual tastes flies in the face of one of the core arguments that emerged from the sexual revolution. “The thing that is so shocking to me is that we’ve been told for my entire life by the left, by the pro-pornography people, by the sexual revolutionaries, that sexual desire is innate and immutable,” Knowles says. “Nobody becomes gay or bisexual.”
Is this any surprise then?
Here’s a CEO of another game studio exemplifying the ideological contagion’s virulent spread through the gaming industry:
Given the above, in what other possible light could we receive the recent efforts by shadowy groups to steer the teen-oriented videogame industry into totally retooling its beauty and identity standards and even attraction preferences?
It doesn’t stop there:
Microsoft urges developers not to create female characters with “exaggerated body proportions” on their official site to support game devs.
The site, titled “Product Inclusion Action: Help Customers Feel Seen” includes a bullet list of considerations they urge developers to make when working on their product. One Twitter user pointed out the language expressly condemning certain female characters as reinforcing “negative gender stereotypes”.
More eye-opening is that the above Microsoft report once again appears to take its tasking from an “institute” specializing in translating DEI mandates from ‘above’ down to the developer policy level. One of this company’s strictures even targets the classic “hero’s journey” as being damagingly un-inclusive:
But in fact what these recent developments have revealed, is an increasingly nefarious plot to outright shift the perceptions of the gaming demographic toward sexuality and identity. Gamers have noted that in the past few years, triple AAA titles have forced increasingly perverse physical-image substitutions of the most common and expected character archetypes.
For instance, just as the above Microsoft decree implores developers to avoid overly feminine characters—disingenuously couched with the misleading “curvy” euphemism—so too are studios being forced to totally do away with ‘beauty standards’, particularly when it comes to females. Female main characters are no longer allowed to appear feminine or ‘classically beautiful’ at all.
The most offensively glaring example is from an upcoming sequel/reboot of Microsoft XBox franchise game Fable, which features a “female” lead character that has confused and outraged fans of the series:
Obviously androgynous, if not outright trans; check.
Racially ambiguous; check.
Flat-chested and bodily de-feminized; check.
Disgruntled fans have taken to special software to remake the character to previously glamorous standards:
Some have even discovered that when you digitally remove “her” long hair, it becomes more than obvious ‘she’ is really a ‘he’:
For the record, the game’s trailer was heavily ratio’d on YouTube:
Popular compilation images have circulated depicting many of the most iconic female lead characters of triple AAA studio games of recent years—notice a trend?
In fact, females are now exclusively allowed to occupy a space only on the grotesquely unattractive and un-feminine spectrum; this is what ESG/DEI money gets you these days.
Just look what they did to the new Lara Croft from the legendary Tomb Raider series, though admittedly this is from a Call of Duty crossover collab:
The above article even quotes an alleged ‘seasoned video game artist’ insider as stating:
He then revealed, “From a design stand point, this is a really challenging problem. I’ve had many board meetings about how to tackle this. Trans people want ‘realistic’ representation in our games, but they feel excluded if they are represented as too masculine or too feminine. That’s why you will see a lot of designers ‘nerfing the female form’ so to speak so that the difference between trans women and cis women is a little less noticeable.”
As is always the question: WHY?
Why do we need this? Who is this meant to assuage? To coddle the tiniest minority of society we must totally alienate the vast majority, which includes the paying audience for the actual game? Isn’t “inclusive” supposed to mean to include everyone? Yet it has turned into pampering the tiniest vocal minority while excluding everyone else from the conversation. No further proof is necessary that “inclusivity” is nothing more than a fraudulent stalking horse for a massively unprecedented social engineering operation being coordinated from the highest offices of global financial and policy institutions.
The ultimate goal appears to be to disempower men, the much-hated ‘Patriarchy’, and empower a class of bitter, rootless, managerial ogre-harridans to micro-manage man’s every waking thought and impulse.
The contagion has now spread through some of the most well-known and beloved intellectual properties in the gaming world. Controversy has taken the industry by storm in recent weeks as even the Warhammer 40k series has fallen victim to the anti-human agenda:
It turns out a famed cadre of all-male troops called the Adeptus Custodes have suddenly been retconned to have allowed female members. But instead of simply admitting that these are some kind of necessary changes to keep with modern times, the developers have offensively gaslighted their core audience—as is always the case, it seems—by pretending that females were always accepted and even making quiet changes to the original lore, hoping no one would notice.
For example, the Brotherhood of Demigods has quietly become the Order of Demigods:
And as is also now standard practice, the gatekeepers and hallmonitors affiliated with the series have resorted to bashing and alienating their own core playerbase with the usual -isms, -phobics, etc., or in this case slandering them as bigots:
The firestorm has revealed a slew of uncomfortable details about Warhammer’s owners:
Fortunately, the insulting practices have appeared to hit the Warhammer creator’s bottom line:
But the sinister epidemic has spread far and wide beyond that to other beloved IPs like Battletech—home of the Mechwarrior series—which likewise appears to have been captured by ‘special interest groups’, as I’ll charitably call them:
Meanwhile, in China the standards being promoted are a little different:
The West simply continues to push this unwanted DEI sickness on society:
It’s clear that as always the agenda is highly coordinated, and it is moving on, spreading pestilentially into every quarter of our waking world. The social engineers will stop at nothing in reshaping our world to their dementedly nightmarish vision. All of it of course is coordinated for one purpose only: to achieve the fracturing of our rooted identities in order to turn us into the reprogrammable tabula rasa slaves meant to usher in the WEF’s new utopian tomorrow. For those interested, I covered the provenance of this misbegotten crusade from its roots here:
As always, stay vigilant and defiant to their subversions, as practice has shown that a strongly vocal and coordinated resistance can drive the DEI-ghouls back and make them second guess their actions. In the case of Stellar Blade, a vocal campaign from angry fans has already succeeded in wresting some concessions from the developer, at least insofar as certain censored outfits foisted on the lead character last minute by the DEI-activist-yoked distributor, Sony.
If you’re interested in this topic, please follow ex-game executive Mark Kern, who has unwittingly become the torch bearer and lightning rod in one for the latest gaming DEI controversies due to his outspoken leadership on the topic, now regularly fending off death threats and other outrages from the rabid pitchfork-wielding Woke mob. He not only continues updating the Stellar Blade saga, but also remains a top resource and compendium on developments in the gaming sector’s escalating culture war.
Follow him here: https://twitter.com/Grummz
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DEI - diversity equity and isreal.
Great read. But never forget none of this is new. Remember that kids TV show from the 1980s called "Dungeons & Dragons"? From the blog of that shows developer:
"Dungeons & Dragons was a series about six kids who were transported to a dimension filled with wizards and fire-snorting reptiles and cryptic clues and an extremely-evil despot named Venger."
"The kids were all heroic — all but a semi-heroic member of their troupe named Eric. Eric was a whiner, a complainer, a guy who didn't like to go along with whatever the others wanted to do. Usually, he would grudgingly agree to participate, and it would always turn out well, and Eric would be glad he joined in. He was the one thing I really didn't like about the show.
So why, you may wonder, did I leave him in there? Answer: I had to.
As you may know, there are those out there who attempt to influence the content of childrens' television. We call them "parents groups," although many are not comprised of parents, or at least not of folks whose primary interest is as parents. Study them and you'll find a wide array of agendum at work…and I suspect that, in some cases, their stated goals are far from their real goals.
Nevertheless, they all seek to make kidvid more enriching and redeeming, at least by their definitions, and at the time, they had enough clout to cause the networks to yield. Consultants were brought in and we, the folks who were writing cartoons, were ordered to include certain "pro-social" morals in our shows. At the time, the dominant "pro-social" moral was as follows: The group is always right…the complainer is always wrong.
This was the message of way too many eighties' cartoon shows. If all your friends want to go get pizza and you want a burger, you should bow to the will of the majority and go get pizza with them. There was even a show for one season on CBS called The Get-Along Gang, which was dedicated unabashedly to this principle. Each week, whichever member of the gang didn't get along with the gang learned the error of his or her ways.
We were forced to insert this "lesson" in D & D, which is why Eric was always saying, "I don't want to do that" and paying for his social recalcitrance."
https://www.newsfromme.com/pov/col145-2/