I don’t normally do news or politics on this blog for two main reasons, first I usually can’t muster the will to give a fuck about other people’s bullshit, sorry world, I got my own shit to worry about and it’s more important than you. Secondly, almost all modern politics are stupid and wrong on both sides lacking a moral compass, so there is no one to agree with, Liberal Democrats are every bit as corrupt and unethical as conservative Republicans. You are effectively asked to choose between two sides, both run by assholes, both lying and avoiding important context.
Today I make an exception to my no politics rule and it’s only because my hope is that somewhere out there, perhaps someone working at Games workshop, someone with an actual moral compass and a brain has some influence and can steer their company away from the idiocracy they are heading for.
My hope is that Warhammer 40k won’t be the next Disney, Marvel or D&D that catapults itself off the cliff of self-destruction in the name of fake morales designed by people who pretend to give a shit for people pretending to give a shit. As a guy who truly does not give a fuck about you, think of this as the only objective advice you will ever get.
The Fake Woke Drama In Warhammer 40k
For those of you who play and follow Warhammer 40k, you have no doubt heard about the latest Games Workshop debacle. To sum it up, basically, GW, a company that treats their employees like shit and underpays them (well documented) while obscenely overcharging for their products and taking every economic shortcut possible fucking over their community at every turn (well documented) has suddenly become concerned about diversity in the boys club they created and maintained for nearly 5 decades.
Their big public”strategic play” to fix diversity in 40k was to add a female character to an all-male faction (The Custodes) and when the community called them on their bullshit, they re-wrote their own history and pretended like “women have always been part of the Custodes” and they had no idea what the fan base is complaining about.
Now the gaslighting aside which is an issue in its own right, this is about the equivalent of a full nude strip club suddenly changing Taco Tuesday to a vegan buffet because they are concerned about the cruelty of how animals are treated in slaughterhouses. This in a place in which they facilitate vulnerable 18-year-old girls to sell their actual pink tacos.
Of all the moral concerns one might bring up and wish to address about how Games Workshop operates as a corporation and its commitment to diversity, having more girls in Warhammer lore perhaps shouldn’t be their priority if they are actually concerned about diversity.
How about instead you make sure that female employees at Games Workshop get equal pay? Perhaps focus on creating a business model that doesn’t exclude poor people who are mostly minorities? How about making sure that when I walk into a Games Workshop store, you have some actual diversity among the people running it? How about simply starting with creating some diversity in your own company so you don’t have only middle-aged white guys defining what diversity means or how its implemented?
There are a lot of ethical changes Games Workshop could make within its organization to address diversity and ethical obligations if they are actually serious about change. The simple fact that women are not represented in the company and those that do work there get paid over 10% less at GW than men might be a good start. Considering the company has a 70%+ ratio of men running the place with nearly 100% men in the executive branch, diversity at Games Workshop and as a result in Warhammer 40k is impossible. You want more diversity in your game, maybe start by having more diversity in your company!
Here is my point about the drama and the push for diversity at GW. It’s bullshit, it’s a bunch of virtue signaling while they continue to operate their company as they always have, an exclusive boys club. Meanwhile, they shake their finger at the community and call them sexist because the community gets pissed off about some irrelevant lore retcon and how GW handled its introduction into the game.
A brilliant political move designed to divert attention, I will grant you that, but, an asshole move just the same, one that doesn’t address diversity in gaming at all.
The Reality and Problem of Woke Politics in Gaming
The truth is that the fan base doesn’t really care about the fact that GW decided to add female characters into the lore of the Custodes, this is not at the heart of the problem. Women in Warhammer 40k is neither a problem or a concern for the fan base, they have always been welcome by the community. We love women in gaming, in fact, most gamers will go out of their way to make it as comfortable and pleasant an environment as we can. Gamers are among the healthiest and most forward-thinking people you will ever meet, despite media painting a picture to the contrary. It’s why women are attracted to the scene and why each and every year we get closer to a 50-50 split between male and female gamers in all genres. This happens despite, not because of the diversity push of game publishing companies and despite the fact that these white washed companies continue to maintain their organization as a boys club.
The issue is that though women are welcomed in tabletop gaming, they have never been welcome by the industry and organizations. There has never been much in the way of complaining that there are not enough women playing Warhammer, least of all by women. The complaint is that women are not welcome to work at GW and the few that exist, do so in low level, limited influence positions. It’s a male-oriented hobby because GW ensures its a game marketed boys and men because that is where the money is because that is who has the most interest in it. It’s really that simple and there is only so much that can be done to get girls and women interested in painting plastic soldiers and playing pretend war.
GW nonetheless, is solving a problem that doesn’t exist, it’s a problem they invented and are now solving in the most public and loudest way possible to ensure they maximize the internet attention and very much on purpose. The goal very clearly here is headlines, not change.
The core issue is that this very public forcing of woke politics into the game as a message to create a new truth is a method of narrative control. It’s a way to control the conversation and to paint a picture of themselves as a “morale” company in the eyes of people outside of the hobby while they gaslight the community and vilify those who disagree with them to illustrate their commitment to this new moral direction they are pretending to take.
The infusion of these politics and the method of injection of these politics is a new practice that companies that have a lot to hide employ to raise their profile, without making any actual change to their operation. By deflecting the focus of the conversation away from reality, into the realm of fantasy they get the headlines they want “Games Workshop goes woke”, but it does not require them to make any internal changes. A practice that has become the new standard for creating positive headlines for a company with an image problem.
If you want to know how this plays out long term, just look at Wizards of the Coast, the makers of Dungeon and Dragons which has been pushing diversity for over 5 years now using this virtue signaling approach. Their franchise was struggling terribly after releasing an edition of the game that sucked balls and no one bought it (4th edition) and they wanted to push better headlines for themselves for their new edition (5th edition). They however had a major image issue, D&D was seen as a male hobby, because, effectively, it was because that is how the game was marketed for nearly 5 decades.
They made all manner of gestures publicly to appeal to a vocal minority in the hobby but mostly outside media to garner as much positive attention as possible. In the course of these 5 years, however, Wizards of the Coast has made very little meaningful change in diversity, in fact, the more things changed on the surface, the more they stayed the same internally.
Below you will find a picture of all the executives at Wizards of the Coast today, the company of diversity and virtue signaling. Yes, it’s just a bunch of white dudes with a few women sprinkled into the mix into irrelevant made-up positions like head of Kids Studio. Not a single dark-colored person in the entire bunch, it’s a White-Male run company. 5 years of virtue signaling has changed nothing about how the company operates, who controls it or who is in charge. Yet Wizards of the Coast wins awards for their efforts in diversity and is praised for it by a wide range of Social Justice Warrior groups. They even invented an entire diversity organization so that they could award themselves titles like “most diverse company of the year”.
What is the point here? Well the point is that Games Workshop gives zero fucks about diversity, they care about controlling the narrative and message of diversity, and they care about the headlines. You can expect, like Wizards of the Coast and other companies like it, that the company will continue to be the white-male-run boys club it has always been. They aren’t serious about real diversity, they are interested in making sure you think they are.
You want to be pissed about the lack of diversity in gaming, get pissed about that.
How to do diversity the right way
The answer is less obvious and likely unpopular by both the left and the right because it requires that you care less about appearances and more about reality. It requires that you understand that diversity used like a machine gun targeting everything and everyone at the same time, is actually a really terrible and destructive thing that serves no one.
The problem has been and always will be that anyone who see’s unfairness and demands social justice is easy to manipulate and their targets are always the most obvious places where there is an absence of diversity without investigating why or asking whether or not there is a good reason for it.
So far as the Social Justice Warriors are concerned, this latest fiasco at GW is a win for diversity. Games Workshop forced a female character in an all-male faction in a fantasy game in which grown men paint and move plastic soldiers around, take that! The fans are pissed off, the SJW’s are celebrating a victory, meanwhile, women got a grand total of jack and shit out of it. Is the pay gap fixed? Are more women working in gaming? No, they are not and the scene is setup to ensure that GW doesn’t have to alter anything at all about their operation as far as diversity goes. They changed some text in a book few give a crap about and now they just became the diversity good guys publicly. The fact that women still get paid 10% less than men and GW is controlled by middle-aged white men, no longer needs fixing.
Ask yourself, who won here? Did women win? Did diversity win? Did the fan base win?
Real change takes place when the monopoly on power on the organizational level changes and diversity exists from a natural evolution of the company’s real desire to change, to be inclusive by handing over creative power to a diverse fan base and the audience’s desire to consume the changes.
The point here is that diversity can’t be implemented through company image and making minor changes to artwork or fiction. Unfortunately the left wants to implement diversity in this fashion strictly because it pisses off the right. This is about shallow political victories which are notably battles fought by two sides mostly made up of outsiders (people who don’t play or give a shit about Warhammer) doing little other than degrading the quality of the franchise and in the end facilitating the destruction of it. When the dust settles, these outsiders will simply move on to the next political battleground, leaving the 40k franchise a pile of smoking ash for the few fans that remain.
Exclusivity is a good thing
Games like Warhammer 40k are boy’s clubs because they have been cultivated by boys for boys for decades. This is why 40k is so successful. The people making the game are also the target audience. They know what they are making, who they are making it for.
If women want to participate in this world, they should be given the opportunity to do so but its important to understand that the reason its a boys club is because women have shown very little actual interest in it. You need female fans that love Warhammer to get involved, they need to help create a version of the game for themselves out of love for the content that they consume, that they nurture. We need content created by female fans for female fans.
Infiltrating the boys club and trying to turn it into a girls club doesn’t work. Think of it in other areas. Why is basketball dominated by primarily black men? It’s because they grow up with it, they live it and love it every day of their lives and when they become adults they are your super fans and so naturally many of them transition it into a profession. Should we have more forced diversity in basketball? You can’t suddenly say, ok from now on 30% of all basketball players have to be Asian because of diversity. Asian people don’t have the same history with the game, the same culture of playing it every day on the street courts in the sun, they don’t consume it and love it the same, its why they are underrepresented.
Do you get it now? Warhammer 40k is a boys club it has exclusivity and that is ok. There are lots of things that have exclusivity for good reason. Black History Month, gay pride parades, girls soccer, the para-Olympics and so on. There is nothing wrong with that and that exclusivity doesn’t exist to gate keep people out of it, its simply focused on a specific group of people who it is intended for because it was created by and for them.
As a straight white guy am I not allowed to enjoy and celebrate black history month? Am I not allowed to go watch the gay pride parade or enjoy watching female sports? Of course I am, but its not really made for me, these are exclusive things designed to create a space for certain groups be it black people, women, gay people or whoever. Its ok, it doesn’t make you a bad person because you want your own parade.
Well 40k is a boys club, it’s for boys made by boys and that is ok. You don’t need to fix it, you don’t need to change it. Its not broken. Does that mean women are not welcome? Of course not, but it also means you can’t enter this boys club and decide that boys clubs are bad and make it your mission to destroy it and turn it into a girls club. That is unethical and its wrong, your not creating diversity, your destroying something that wasn’t made for you simply because it exists.
I’m not against diversity, but if your going to do it, let it be a natural evolution. Don’t force diversity into the game for the purpose of showing how diverse you are as a company. You want to prove that, pay women their worth, hire more diverse talented people into the executive branch. Do that and diversity will be born naturally without any effort or publicity stunts required. Diverse creators, will create a diverse game.
You must be logged in to post a comment.