IGN’s Kat Bailey Ignores the Woke Elephant in Blizzard’s Room

Triggered by a steady surge of talent leaving Blizzard, an article authored by the IGN’s Kat Bailey does an admirable but predictable job explaining the recent downward turn of this once great video game studio. Kat gets a lot of things right about what’s wrong with Blizzard, but she misses one important thing: how the introduction of identity politics and wokeness has forever changed the Irvine company.

I know nothing about Kat Bailey but I suspect political correctness is so imbedded into our zeitgeist and the psyche of millennial journalists that people like her can easily miss the woke elephant in Blizzard’s room. Like a person that loves to smell their own farts, modern journalists have become nose blind to the beliefs and biases that they bring to the table and as a result they have lost the ability to be critical about them. Journalism has been replaced by the status quo of advocacy.

After many articles and extensive research into Blizzard, I can unequivocally state that part of the problem is that identity politics policies has turned the Irvine studio into a very unpleasant place to work. It goes without saying that people who work in bad studios don’t produce good games. The onerous dictates of diversity, inclusion and representation are taking their toll and starting to manifest in both Blizzard’s staffing and in the content that they produce as evidenced by an almost monthly announcement of new LGBTQ characters in their games and trite virtual signaling overtures to the press about BLM, diversity and inclusion. Everyone is equal at Blizzard but some are more equal than others.

The problems at Blizzard are not coming from the outside, they are coming from the inside.

The very same people at Blizzard that advocated for these polices are now faced with having to live with them. Terrified of the uncontrollable Frankenstein monster they have created, they are leaving in droves and voting with their feet. This is a metaphorical phenomena that Democratic controlled states like New York, California, Oregon, and Washington are also experiencing. White progressives are ruining the places they live, then fleeing the mess they created and then ruining their new communities. Rinse and repeat.

There’s an old saying, a fish rots from the head down. This is true for Blizzard. The oft praised CEO Mike Morhaime is directly responsible for all the woes that have befallen Blizzard over the years. The buck stops with him. In 2014, he replied publicly to the open letter of a feminist activist and apologized for the lack of diversity in Blizzard’s games. This was the beginning of the end for Blizzard 1.0 and soon a kinder, gentler, woke, feminist and LGBTQ friendly Blizzard 2.0 was born.

With the $50 million dollar failure of Project Titan and the incalculable opportunity cost that resulted, Blizzard had lost their King Midas touch and their confidence. They were exposed for frauds because they could not replicate the success they achieved with World of Warcraft. They were embarrassed and vulnerable, so they quickly latched on to the diversity and inclusion racket as way to cloak themselves in a smokescreen of virtue with the goal of attaining some semblance of relevance in a newly woke cultural landscape.

2014 was a black year for the video game industry. The Gamergate scandal erupted and exposed the collusion of radical leftists posing as game developers and journalists who declared war against white male gamers. During the same time, wide-eyed millennials filled with the poison of cultural Marxism and post-modernism, were graduating from college. With no substantive career prospects for degrees in gender studies and underwater basket weaving many of them, like good little ideological soldiers they are, became video game journalists and started to rattle off a list of demands for more diversity in games in their articles.

It was a time of turmoil in our culture. Political correctness was starting to manifest it’s ugly head into the HR and PR departments of corporate America. There is no doubt that Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime started to feel the pressure and capitulated to the woke vocal mob. He introduced sweeping changes to how Blizzard would hire new staff that would put a premium on diversity, inclusion, and representation. He made all these changes with no consultation with the rank and file employees as Blizzard.

The progressive left beaming with pride on how they managed to swindle the American public into accepting so-called “gay marriage” quickly pivoted and set their sights on entertainment and video games. Feeling unstoppable, they proceed to wage war on unsuspecting male gamers. Dominoes like Blizzard were ripe for the taking and tumbled over with ease. Blizzard’s shameful capitulation was a feather in their cap and it emboldened hucksters like Anita Sarkeesian to slither out of the wood work to bully other weak and unprepared video game studios run by compliant beta male CEOs.

Fast forward 7 years later and the cult of wokeness has now infected all walks of life in America. But not for long. The NBA revenues are down 50%. Many woke TV shows are being cancelled. Wokeness is unsustainable, it destroys every company and institution it infiltrates. Get woke, go broke.

Conclusion

Once upon a time, I like millions of other passionate gamers, worshipped the ground Blizzard walked on. My reporting and analysis has been done in a spirit of of good faith that provides a counterpoint to the current Blizzard narrative and over the years. In article after article, I challenged them to return to the gamer-centric studio they once were before the scourge of identity politics was introduced into Blizzard’s bloodstream.

Over the years, I have been puncturing holes into the myth of Mike “Nice Guy” Morhaime that the video game press dutifully and relentlessly promotes. Mike Morhaime is the mastermind behind it all. I have also exposed Blizzard’s woke shenanigans for posterity.

I think it’s too late for Blizzard 2.0 as J. Allen Brack and their masters at Activision are running the once beloved studio into the ground. The sad thing is that gamers feel powerless to stop it. It would be nice if video game journalists like Kat Bailey would have mentioned the role that cultural Marxist ideology has played in Blizzard’s demise. I can not believe that this subject didn’t come up in any of her anonymous interviews with Blizzard employees. But it’s understandable since this topic is so dangerous and forbidden that mere mention of it can get you cancelled and fired. The truth is most modern journalists can’t be trusted and are activists for a post-Christian totalitarian mindset that would delight in the cancellation of people who dare to speak out in dissent of the woke orthodoxy.

Live not by lies.

Update: a reader pointed out in a comment that Kat Baily is a lesbian. It took me all of one minute to find this Tweet from her:

Given the fact that she’s admitted she’s a lesbian, the pro-LGBTQ values of Blizzard 2.0 seem to coincide with hers. Not all LGBTQ people have the same values. A trans journalist named Sophia Narwitz routinely criticizes wokeness in the video game industry. There are many in the gay community that to not appreciate that they have been hijacked by others in the alphabet community either and have disdain for pride extremism.