ranzware
Following the Republican victory in the US 2024 elections, several US companies have experimented with “pivoting away” from Diversity, Ethics and Inclusion, a collection of employment practices aimed at challenging bias and prejudice in the workplace. Facebook owners Meta, Amazon, Walmart, McDonalds and others are reportedly scaling back their DEI initiatives to stave off backlash or litigation from conservative pundits and politicians, who regard DEI guidance about discrimination as a form of discrimination in itself. Following the election, I’ve also noticed a couple of video game company executives express misgivings about DEI – misgivings that, amongst other things, illustrate that “DEI” has come to mean a lot more than just annual training about micro-aggressions.
Last week, CI Games, publishers of Sniper: Ghost Warrior and Lords of the Fallen, declared to investors and social media followers that they would be avoiding “DEI”, both in terms of their hiring practices and, more ambiguously, in terms of the “social or political” content of their games. It’s a good opportunity to rebut some of the arguments against DEI, while exploring what “DEI” has come to mean to people who play video games – and to the people who sell them.
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion practices are embraced by many organisations, and can take many forms. Discrimination is, after all, pretty diverse. DEI training might include helping white managers understand how racism informs reactions to a Black job applicant, or helping cisgender male managers understand how sexism shapes the distribution of pay rises, or teaching the company at large to recognise the communication needs of autistic employees.
Many rightwing talking heads maintain that such interventions are unnecessary and, indeed, oppressive, because they feel that the discrimination at stake doesn’t really exist. So let’s bundle in some supporting statistics: according to a European Economic Review paper from 2023 that considers the results of several studies from 2005 to 2020, older people, people from minority ethnicities, and disabled people all face significantly more discrimination during hiring than younger white Europeans and North Americans without disabilities. According to a European Commission report from December 2024, women in the EU also earn on average 13% less than their male counterparts. The UK’s office of national statistics, meanwhile, have found that as of 2022, Black, African, Caribbean or Black British employees earned £13.53 median gross hourly pay for every £14.35 earned by white employees.
The concept of DEI today doesn’t, however, just cover what happens at work. Within many reactionary online circles, “DEI” has evolved, like “woke”, into a catch-all signifier for a caboodle of left-wing or progressive positions across society and culture, from recent trans rights advocacy to older feminist arguments about positive representation in art. There’s a lively community of rightwing journalists, streamers, and assorted grifters who bond over and profit from the exercise of combing video games for signs of “DEI infestation”. For instance, a “cybernetic bondage” outfit in Stellar Blade being patched to include a modest undershirt. Or the discovery that Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, often framed as a nostalgic fantasy about an all-white 15th century Bohemia, includes at least one person of colour with a Quranic name.
The recent comments about DEI from CI Games are clearly aimed at this bunch. The story begins with a question directed at global marketing director Ryan Hill during an investor call last week: “What is your stance on DEI in gaming?” The phrase “DEI in gaming” is hopelessly broad, of course, but rather than ask for context, Hill responds as though the question is specifically about representation within games, rather than employment practices.
He associates it with “social or political agendas” at the level of story theme and character, and nebulously claims that games that “embed” such agendas may “underperform commercially”, citing certain unnamed “high profile releases” from the past year or so. “Our games will always be developed to maximise player enjoyment and commercial success, and as such, we will not be integrating any social or political agencies into these experiences going forward having observed the high risk this can present,” Hill concludes.
CEO Marek Tyminski was present during the investor call, and later chimed in on Xitter to echo Hill’s points and spread the word to CI Games’s audience of (in Hill’s phrase) “core and adjacent” players. In that tweet, he gives a clunky #shoutout to 2023’s Lords Of The Fallen – a huge success for CI that has been savaged for its extensive launch bugs, and which is now being positioned for a “2.0” redemption. In confirmation that “anti-DEI” is now a CI Games PR campaign, Tyminski is also now openly toying with updating Lord Of The Fallen’s character model labelling to suit transphobic, “anti-woke” ideas about gender.
While Hill’s comments were directed at questions of story and character within games, Tyminski links it all back to CI Games’s hiring and working practices, boosting a post from October last year in which he ceremonially redefined one of the company’s “core values” as “equal opportunity”, rather than “diversity and inclusion”. In the October post, he adds that “our focus remains on fostering a culture of best talent, ensuring that all hiring decisions are based solely on talent and merit, with no other external agenda.”
All of which betrays an elementary or perhaps, wilful misunderstanding of what DEI is supposed to achieve. Central to the case for DEI training is that discrimination can be intangible unless it’s aimed at you. As such, hiring or working strategies that try to reward the “best candidate” without reflection risk shoring up the systemic advantages that make it easier for some applicants to succeed. Tyminski’s promise to hire based “solely on talent and merit”, for example, overlooks that “talent” and “merit” are concepts cultivated by humans whose sense of fairness is shaped by their circumstances.
This isn’t to say these words are meaningless, but they are not self-evident truths that materialise from nowhere. They have tricky histories of usage which help determine who they’re applied to: anglophone writers, to pick an example close to home, may be more likely to meet standards for “good English” if they have a particular manner and vocabulary born of a particular background. “It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit,” wrote Alan Fox, the sociologist who coined the (once-pejorative) term “meritocracy”, in 2001. “It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others.”
As for avoiding games that have “social or political agendas” – it’s obvious that Hill has specific agendas in mind. CI Games clearly do not have a problem with the “social or political” in general or they would not be publishing the Sniper: Ghost Warrior games – a celebration of extra-judicial “spec op” interventionalism set predominantly in Middle Eastern or post-Soviet countries, which let you treat “unstable” regions as a firing range, and live the superpower fantasy of being “world policeman”.
These hawkish daydreams lend themselves easily, even inadvertently to active prejudice. Back in 2021, CI were obliged to apologise after throwing a preview event in which journalists were invited to shoot at people dressed as Arab stereotypes. In their apology, CI Games claim they weren’t “directly” involved in the event and that as such, “certain decisions were overlooked”. A DEI consultant might have helped them spot all that in advance.
The argument that games with “social or political agendas” are a risk commercially, meanwhile, echoes the reactionary claim that there isn’t really an audience for games that express leftwing positions of any kind. I’m interested to see Hill put some actual figures behind that, because the comments thread battlecry “go woke, go broke” doesn’t stand up to casual analysis.
Just look at Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6 – “the biggest Call Of Duty ever”, according to its creators, despite being the first Call Of Duty to feature a non-binary character, whose voice actor has had to deal with transphobic harassment. God Of War: Ragnarök, meanwhile, is a flawed deconstruction of patriarchy that features input from the narrative consultancy Sweet Baby Inc – a popular boogeyman for the DEI Detectors – and has still managed to sell tens of millions of copies. Fortnite hosts an annual pride event, amongst other “woke” initiatives, and remains one of the most-played games in history. As explored in a recent piece from The Gamer, From Software’s fables engage in complex, searching ways with constructions of gender that go beyond any essentialist male/female framing. Nobody is calling the Dark Souls series or Elden Ring a flop.
The less exciting reality here, again, is that CI Games are trying to rustle up some social media hullabaloo for the much-patched Lords Of The Fallen. Asked about CI’s 2025 business plans in the investor call, senior vice-president of development Tom O’Connor summed it up as “maximising sales of Lords of the Fallen 2023 in line with strategic markdowns and the continued release of meaningful updates up to v2.0 in response to player feedback and external user testing”. Naturally, all of this paves the way for the announcement of another Lords Of The Fallen game, which is slated to launch in 2026.
Perhaps baiting the DEI Detectors will work out for CI Games in the short term. I’m not so naive as to suggest that there isn’t a market for games that cater to transphobes. Still, I’m keen to know what CI’s staff make of the CEO flirting with bigots on Xitter, given that a sizeable number of rank-and-file developers are in favour of existing “diversity” initiatives and would like their employers to go further.
If there’s a broad lesson here, I reckon it’s that otherwise worthwhile practices are easily appropriated and turned into ciphers, which can then be used to sell products both by endorsing them and decrying them. “DEI” in its current guise risks being stripped of its material history and reduced to ammo in an online culture war. While the DEI Detectors have played an outsized role, this is arguably a practice begun by certain self-described progressive corporations for whom being pro-DEI is also a marketing strategy.
Notwithstanding the continuing need for better understanding of wider inequalities, DEI is an industry governed by familiar tensions between capitalist incentives and social responsibility. Bridget Read wrote an overview of DEI in the USA for The Cut in 2021, based on interviews with several practitioners following the murder of George Floyd by a white police officer in 2020. It’s a useful cross-section of what Read calls “a loose federation of adherents, with a host of methodologies, competing for money and attention” in a market where the value of DEI programmes depends fundamentally on the seriousness of the client.
For some corporations, Read argues, DEI programmes are just a question of optics and a way of lowering the risk of lawsuits – much the same thinking that reportedly informs this year’s shift away from DEI. “Many corporate clients, of course, don’t really want to change,” she sums up. “They just want to look as if they are changing.”
It isn’t hard to find parallels within the games industry. Activision-Blizzard and Riot Games, for example, have recently weathered hundred-million-dollar lawsuits over the cultivation of discriminatory workplaces. Both have bolstered their DEI investments in response. As far as I’m concerned, the jury’s still out on how much of that is change, or the appearance of such, and I’m… interested to see what happens, now that Trump is back in power. When it comes to challenging the reactionary memeification of “DEI”, there’s surely no better tactic than ensuring you walk the talk.
Kurt Indovina
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