Original ideas lead to amazing creations but despite there being an infinite number of things to create the path of creativity is actually very strict. You can only arrive at perfection if those doing the creating are in specific mind spaces and working conditions. The more hurdles the creative have to jump in the pursuit of their goal, the less likely their product and vision will be realized.
Today’s creatives have a lot of hurdles put in front of them from figures who have nothing to do with their creative process. Activists, journalists, politicians, and even Twitter mobs will do their absolute best to control what happens within the walls of someone’s company and produce a product that they can approve of.
Merit, talent, or excellence be damned. Jump through the hoops, check the boxes, or die a figurative, but very public death in the court of public opinion.
But the people who don’t often try to control the output of those who do. They gin up mobs, slander, and attack those simply trying to do what they love or want for ultimately ridiculous reasons while staying more or less silent about wrongdoing happening in their own camps.
Case in point, Bloomberg tech reporter Jason Schreier is a solid example of this.
On Wednesday, Schreier posted a link to the gaming news site Gamasutra, where a report that “core talent” from a gaming studio known as “Typhoon Studios” had reunited to form their own company called “Raccoon Logic.” The Montreal-based company includes veterans of past games such as Far Cry 4 and Assassin’s Creed 3.
This article made Schreier angry. Why?
I’ll let him tell you himself because I can’t fully relay the asininity in his outrage.
It's pretty wild that in 2021 a new game studio still looks like this https://t.co/klV0FbvG8s pic.twitter.com/m9NVFILGYj
— Jason Schreier (@jasonschreier) August 11, 2021
That’s right. It’s all white men.
If you need to take a breather on your fainting couch and clutch your pearls for a moment, then you go right ahead. I know this is a massive shock but we must endure for the sake of society, and press on with the op-ed.
Raccoon Logic committed the grave sin of being a group of white men. It’s likely that the hiring process consisted of the team heads sitting down with each individual and asking them questions and reviewing their past work, and then selected the cream of the crop who were right for the job. That’s very, very, very likely how it really went down.
How Schreier and people like him want to think it went down (and how they want you to think it went down) is that they interviewed a whole bunch of people, then took the files of everyone who was female or a minority, then laughed evilly as they tossed them into an overly large fireplace. They then proceeded done their white hoods and pledge allegiance to Donald Trump.
Schreier wanted it to be very clear to all of his many followers that Raccoon Logic is evil for no other reason than they’re all white. Being all white and male in a business isn’t allowed nowadays. Everything must look like a modern group of friends in a television show or commercial, replete with females, minority characters, and Marx help you if there isn’t a gay or trans person in there too.
These ridiculous people don’t care if the people in the group were put there because of their merit, talent, or aligning visions. They demand a lot of these white people be terminated from their jobs and replaced with people of varying genders and skin colors…talent or compatibility be damned.
Schreier was adamant that this be addressed in the court of public opinion by an unforgiving and very biased jury. They would then attack Raccoon Logic online, in the press, and without mercy until they capitulated and made their company into something more agreeable to the people who will likely never work on a game in their life. Whoever had to lose their job in the process, well, that’s just collateral damage for the cause. Also, they’re white. It’s deserved for being so privileged.
Let’s get down to brass tacks. This is pure, unadulterated racism. It’s also an excellent example of how we as a society will never be allowed to create anything extraordinary because bullies with mobs in tow will enforce the checking of socio-political boxes. They will force more and more creatives to abandon their visions and settle for something that was less than so they can say the way they did it looked better to groups who likely won’t buy their product anyway.
This particular story is just about video games, but this is a story that’s happening in all sorts of businesses. From food companies to tech companies, the “diversity hire” is in practice, but it’s a practice of discrimination based on race and sex. In some cases, even in sexuality.
This is not the way to advance civilization. We’ll continue to churn out mediocrity and call it “good,” not because the end product was actually any good at all but because a small group of very bigoted people with a very large platform said it was. Exceptionalism can be forgotten about. We’ll settle for absolute garbage.
And we’ll revel in it until a society not bothered with such lunacy displaces or destroys us.
