Total Biscuit and BioWare’s major culture problem
Well known games critic John “Total Biscuit” Bain passed away this week after a long battle with cancer. The gaming community plunged into mourning at the news. Well, everyone except BioWare’s David Cooks, who took the opportunity to mock Bain’s passing.
Shortly after Total Biscuit’s death was announced by his wife, Cooks took to Twitter stating that “the world just felt a little bit better some time around an hour, hour and a half ago. Oh Wait, I know, It’s because Totalbiscuit died!” Cooks later claimed that he’s aware that it’s “rude to piss on someone’s grave”, but he still has an axe to grind with the YouTuber.
Bain’s supposed crime was that he gave Mass Effect: Andromeda, a game which Cooks had worked on, a less than stellar review. Of course there’s more to it than that, and as usual it boils down to politics.
Cooks has since deleted his tweets and locked his account after the posts went viral on Reddit. Neither EA, BioWare, or Cooks have issued a statement about the comments.
UPDATE MAY 26 7:30pm: BioWare’s Casey Hudson issued a statement on Twitter, saying that Mr. Cooks’ views on TotalBuscuit do not represent those of BioWare or Electronic Arts. He further clarified that Mr. Cook is no longer an employee of BioWare, however it is not known when he left the company. Hudson offered his condolences to the Bain family.
Now, I’m not about to join a witch hunt and call for David Cooks to lose his job, because that’s what internet losers do. However, I do think it points out some very serious issues within the corporate culture at BioWare Montreal.
Cooks is certainly not alone in his vitriol when it comes to BioWare. Last year, game designer Manveer Heir was fired after tweeting a bizarre racist tirade against Caucasians.
It’s tempting to lay the blame on individual employees themselves. However, issues like this usually reflect a leadership problem in the organization. Recently, EA has been pushing the same “progressive” values similar to what we’ve been seeing in Hollywood. As such, many new hires have come from the ranks of the “snowflake” “social justice” crowd.
The “Social Justice Warriors” (SJW for short) are a far left political movement that has been pushing to reshape western culture to reflect their particular brand of “progressive” values. They are heavily focused on identity politics such as race, gender, and sexual orientation. Conservatives and libertarian leaning liberals have accused the movement as being little more than empty virtue signaling, while at the same time being bigoted and tyranical towards others outside their narrow political philosophy.
The end result of BioWare and other companies hiring people from the SJW movement has been the slow creep of their politics into games. Something which has not sat well with many gamers, including Bain.
Total Biscuit first came into their crosshairs when he stated that some of the issues raised by #GamerGate were valid. This group of gamers had expressed concern over unethical practices happening in mainstream games journalism. Particularly over one alleged incident where a female developer had offered sexual favours to journalists in exchange for positive reviews. SJWs soon spun this into a feminist issue, using it as an opportunity to attack the “toxic masculinity” allegedly rampant in the games industry.
SJWs seem to view any criticism of themselves or their movement as an existential threat, and have been known to go on vicious witch hunts to attempt to silence those they disagree with. Which is why Bain, who would have hardly been described as “alt-right”, became the target of their wrath.
BioWare management has allowed the company, and willfully so, to become populated with toxic, hateful individuals. These are people who seem more interested in pushing a political agenda, damn the consequences. Whether it be alienating loyal fans, or the cost of lost revenues.
That’s how we got to the point of company representatives celebrating the death of an average bloke and D list internet celebrity, because he, as someone on Reddit put it, didn’t praise their shitty games. The level of insanity is truly mind melting.
Frankly, there needs to be a major shakeup at BioWare management.
Source: OneAngryGamer
Feature image by Bru-nO, via Pixabay
