Now that Microsoft has completely taken over Activision-Blizzard they have wasted no time in replacing outgoing president Mike Ybarra with token diversity hire Johanna Faries. Ybarra was an empty suit all along as I duly noted in my previous article about BlizzCon 2023. He groveled at the feet of his new overlord Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer and then ran off like a beaten dog.
Some feel that Ybarra was fired. This is a plausible theory:
At one point he told woke reporter Jason Schrierer that they would have to drag him out of Blizzard as seen in this Tweet:
Fragile leftist Jason Schrierer must be overjoyed at the news because in the aftermath of the George Floyd BLM riots in America, seeing lots of white men working at video game studios triggered him:
Now that Blizzard has one less white man working there, I’m sure Jason is overjoyed. When all the white men are finally fired and the video game industry completely collapses, what will Jason do then?
Back to the new President of Blizzard. I find it interesting that the official announcement has no photograph of Johanna Faries. You would think that they would want to advertise that they just helped to meet their ESG targets by hiring a black woman. All we see is an icy cold blue Blizzard logo:
There is no point in bothering to analyze her letter because it’s all worthless boilerplate corporate speak. I doubt she wrote it.
After looking at her LinkedIn profile I don’t see any particular qualifications that apply to her role as the president of a global video game studio. It looks like she’s had several low-effort, ceremonial, featherbed jobs in the past such as working for the woke NFL for 12 years and working for Call of Duty e-sports. Naturally, since the BLM riots, black women have been very desirable in corporate America for their symbolic value because not only do you get a black person, you get a woman (or a non-male as they are called now) too.
Maybe the next Blizzard President will be a plant-based, extraterrestrial, polyamorous, black, lesbian, disabled woman, and a military veteran?
Faries is a True Believer in Diversity, Inclusion, Equity, Representation and Intersectionality Cult
In only 30 seconds of research, I managed to find a smoking gun 34-minute YouTube interview conducted in 2021 where Faries is having a conversation with an obscure (currently unemployed) sportswriter named Sarah Kwank and a DEI officer named David Gould. The 3-way conversation (with only 184 views) is very hard to watch as all three participants engage in a woke lovefest complete with clichésm mutual admiration, sophistry, and circular arguments.
Bay area Asian journalist Kwank did her best to ask very leading softball questions that were all naturally woke. I went through the painful task of scrutinizing the entire transcript and could not find anything of real substance other than Faries’s belief in promoting the DEI agenda and claiming that systemic racism exists in America and that we need “change.” All of it, tired civil rights, black experience, female empowerment, corporate bromides.
The impression I got after hearing the entire interview is that these DEI industry hucksters see white culture as a vast reservoir of wealth and goodwill that is to be infiltrated, hijacked, looted, and pillaged. Everything made by guilt-ridden white people is theirs for the taking by mere virtue of their melanin levels which confers to them the spoils of unearned status and power. This perspective reduces white people to suckers and slaves solely to exist for the benefit of non-whites. It’s obscene and sickening how this kind of thinking has been normalized and adopted by corporate America.
In the Brave New DEI World JFK and MLK Are Persona Non Grata
At one point in our history, the USA was on a positive trajectory to a post-racial future. I remember as a boy hearing the timeless words of both JFK and MLK. Sadly, thanks to the elites, today we are polarized and divided.
The inspirational words of John F. Kennedy: Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country is not even in the same universe as their selfishness and sense of entitlement are right off the charts. The opposite of JFK’s words: What can my country (of racist white people) do for me? seems to be the guiding principle.
Forget about MLK’s plea for white Americans to judge people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin. That too has been inverted by the modern left.
All they talked about is diversity and inclusion but failed to mention the plight of the forgotten people who will impacted by this: straight white males. You know, those awful people that built the industry that they are constantly critiquing. I hope someday historians will look back at this period with horror, just as they looked back at how Russian and Chinese communists ravaged their respective countries with similar ideologies and ultimately killed millions all in the name of Luciferian-inspired equality.
There is no doubt that Faries is an extremely polished and personable high priestess of wokeness. She manages to mention every kind of woke trope from allyship to intersectionality to systemic racism to Colin Kaepernick to George Floyd. Her grasp of the DEI industrial complex terminology is quite a thing to behold.
Interestingly, there were no white people in this conversation. Most DEI discussions are reduced to regurgitating unchallenged platitudes about female empowerment, hiring more minorities, and pandering to “marginalized” communities. You know the drill.
I found another interview Faries did with another Asian woman. This seems like a pattern. She alluded to this in the first interview as she found kinship and allyship with Asian women in her previous role as Call of Duty e-sports.
The NFL Problem
Like Blizzard, the reputation of the NFL is in the toilet all because of the introduction of wokeness. I wonder how much Johanna Faries was responsible for the politicization of the NFL during the Colin Kaepernick fiasco?
The fact that black players comprise 56% of all players but only represent 13-14% of the American population is problematic for Fariers as she was part of the sports industrial complex that hired based on merit but only for black-dominated sports. By today’s standards, this is textbook racism. At the very same time, Fariers is a strong believer in DEI which ignores merit requirements for blacks at the expense of heterosexual white males.
If under-representation is wrong, then over-representation is equally wrong. Both the NFL and the NBA are prime examples of the hypocrisy and absurdity of DEI idealogy.
The NFL is on its last legs as it’s gone completely woke. The NFL has forgotten who its audience is. The fact that Faries was with the NFL for 12 years is evidence that she was in the belly of the beast and knew exactly what was going on during the Colin Kaepernick debacle and the George Floyd moral panic.
I have mirrored this interview on my Rumble channel in case the YouTube video gets taken down. I predict many DEI lawsuits will be forthcoming and lodged against corporations who recklessly infected their companies with the woke mind virus and willfully discriminated against straight white males who work there. I hope lawyers will find this information useful in their cases to show that this demonic ideology has been systemically and institutionally present at Activiion-Blizzard for many years.
DEI is a Metastatic Cancer that will Kill Western Civilization
Western civilization is no accident. Chief among its foundations is the principle of merit. Merit is a practical virtue. It means you strive to be the best, you push yourself. Meritocracy is color-blind. We all want the very best surgeons to operate on us and our loved ones. We all want the highest caliber of pilots to fly our airplanes.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion are the exact opposite. Equity means equality of results not equality of opportunity. DEI encourages victimhood and is ultimately divisive and corrosive. The cost of DEI is solely borne by the heterosexual white man who by his birth is turned into a convenient malefactor and blamed for all the evils of society.
DIE will die when enough of us realize that we have nothing to feel guilty for.
Conclusion
It comes as no surprise that Micscroft has assumed total control over Blizzard. The audacity of Phil Spencer to parachute into BlizzCon 2023 like some kind of conquering Roman emporer or like Hitler entering a defeated Paris in 1940 was a humiliation ritual to both Blizzard and their players.
Putting an unknown, unqualified, activist, woke black woman in charge of Blizzard is an obvious insult to all their loyal players. Being a big Diablo fan does not make you qualified to be president of one of the largest most famous video game companies in the world. I just do not see what — if anything — she brings of substance to the table.
Chris Metzen is the only person who would have been an acceptable president because only he has the vision, the institutional knowledge, and the trust of the players. He earned that trust because of his achievements and hard work — unlike posers like Ybarra, Spencer, and Faries. But Metzen’s real problem is that he was born white and male.
Call me jaded but I think that Faries as president of Blizzard 3.0 will be business as usual. They’ll stay true to form and continue to screw up and make crappy games until the Blizzard name has been milked beyond recognition, Expect more black and oriental faces in Blizzard games and their marketing materials. Naturally, white men will be running the studio in the trenches and doing all the heavy lifting while Faries gets the credit and continues to walk in between the raindrops. You can be sure they will trot her out occasionally to make speeches about female empowerment and racial justice.
At best, she will be a harmless figurehead trophy hire. At worst, she’ll be promoting the DEI agenda and pandering to LGBTQ people and all the usual suspects. I think she’ll last about a year or until the next scandal/crisis erupts at Activision-Blizzard which is almost monthly. Then she’ll have to take the fall and resign and join a long list of disgraced ex-Blizzard presidents. Rinse and repeat.
To be fair, Johanna Faries is not the problem. People like her have been propped up for strategic reasons for decades. She is simply an actor playing her part. The problem is the people at Microsoft who hired her.
–Wolfshead
You are more up to date with gaming industry related stuff than me, but I also checked her background. Please let me say a few things you mostly already mentioned from my research and quote what I found:
“A graduate of Harvard University, Faries served as President of the Kuumba Singers of Harvard College – the college’s largest multicultural student organization.”
Okay, that’s reason to be alarmed. But did she at least have success in her job?
“Johanna Faries serves as Commissioner of Call of Duty League for Activision Blizzard, Inc. overseeing league and business operations, product development, and corporate strategy for Call of Duty’s presence across the global esports landscape.” and before she was 12 years working for the NFL in the league headquarters office.
A manager. But when did she ever have success? She seems to have quite some connections and the ability to convince people to give her jobs. The Call of Duty League flopped. The NFL is still going strong, but you already mentioned the issues it has. Faries did nothing against that. I am not sure what her job was besides some overpaid management. An assistant can do such things better, I really have not the slightest info what she actually did.
Now my sympathies to you, I couldn’t watch the entire video, didn’t even start the second. I trust you that she never recovered from the silly entry questions and went on like that. Pure cringe.
“Her grasp of the DEI industrial complex terminology is quite a thing to behold.”
Haha, yeah, indeed. Almost funny how perfectly she applies this nonsense to everything. I bet she could even without blinking talk about the intersectionality of sliced bred.
MLK and JFK would be terrified seeing society nowadays. This is not the living together King wanted, the meaninglessness of race, race being no longer relevant. It is now more relevant than ever and more divisive and hateful than in a long time.
It is a crusade of hate against white people, but also against christianity and western culture. They are just part of the bigger intertwined movements of destructive nature.
One of the most disgusting things I have ever seen was the pompous burial of sanctified George Floyed, with a white horse riding parade for someone who was an awful violent petty criminal with aspirations to a criminal career. Derek Chauvin certainly contributed to Floyd’s death, but he was not punished for that. He became a victim of hate himself. All hate for the white man was poured into his sentence. Justice is supposed to be blind and focus on the case. Chauvin got stabbed already in prison but survived.
Faries reminds me of Claudine Gay. Nobody could figure out why she became president of Harvard, unless one uses the woke DEI filter, suddenly such a nobody becomes the right choice…
You had an excellent idea; the problem is the people from Microsoft who pushed her into this position. I would like to know that for Faries and the same for Claudine Gay.
And yeah, I don’t expect anything positive coming to Blizzard from her leadership, but hope she doesn’t make it go down as fast as the CoD League. But then, I am afraid Blizzard is already dead, despite Metzen being there again.
Any black woman who is slightly attractive and can put a sentence together can write her own ticket in corporate America. Companies are desperate for twofers and threefers — black/woman or black/woman/lesbian. They hire them and give them an office and they do nothing all day. They are ceremonial positions to bolster their ESG scores.
The studio is no more. First it became Activision, now it became Microsoft. Calling it Blizzard anymore would be nothing short of inaccurate.
This new president will only make things worse. There is still potential to dig through the rock bottom and find a deeper bottom. I expect more woke, more “inclusivity”, I don’t expect any new games though, or if there will be, it will be a fever nightmare to behold. I expect a game clad in purple and pink, main character is an African woman-like thing who is attracted to toddlers or something, but there is a very good reason about it. Every dialogue is a political statement or agenda, etc.
They haven’t created any outstanding games in years. I’m pretty sure Diablo 1 was the first of its kind, I’m not sure if such a game with the same action gameplay existed before it, I’d be happy to be corrected if wrong.
WarCraft and StarCraft weren’t unique by a long shot, but were good, although I haven’t played WC 1 and 2, and played SC 1 for less than an hour.
Of course, WoW was definitely not the first MMORPG, but it was the most accessible one for the largest demographic. WoW (Vanilla, 2004, patch 1.12.1) was also the last game that still has that feeling which gives players the impression that the developers poured desire, love, determination and much more into the creation of this game. As I’ve read and heard, a lot of content was cut even from Vanilla and despite that, it was still a massive success.
Diablo 2 is probably the only other game of theirs that I’ve played which really left an impact on me, shaped my preferences and I spent a lot of time playing it. By that time, I believe there were more ARPGs, but Diablo 2 simply had the best visuals for a 2D game. I believe it had 16-directional movement and pretty good animations compared to anything from that time.
Now they don’t have anything. Even Diablo 3 from 2012 felt lame. The fact that they made it online-only was a greedy decision that makes no sense whatsoever. The popular argument of most imbeciles and mouth breathers who like to kiss the nutsack of “those guys” that the game was live service so that people can’t exploit, dupe and upload custom created items like it was possible in Diablo 2 is brainless. They could easily release two separate clients – Diablo 3 Single Player and Diablo 3 Offline. They can even charge full price for each, make double the money and not have to worry about evildoers exploiting anything.
They could have done the same with Diablo 4, but the current gamedev philosophy seems to be all about:
– live service, online-only and simply forcing people to pay full retail price just to rent something until the publisher/developer decides it will exist and become unplayable after that
– monetize the sh*t out of the game – battlepasses, gacha, DLCs about nothing, the works
– sacrifice gameplay mechanics, challenge, replay value and any chance of enjoyment for the sake of creating something so dumbed-down that even retarded people can play it, this has become a pattern or a template if you will
– make the game “inclusive”, by making it woke – if it has character creation, it doesn’t have Male/Female anymore, just Body type 1/Body type 2, women run the universe, men are incompetent buffoons and are made fun of constantly to be reminded of how stupid they are, everyone is of the 68th gender and are the most pivotal and mysterious characters, Caucasian characters are evil, protagonists are African or Semitic, could be Asian, or even better – a mixture of these, but not Caucasian
This is how Overwatch feels to me and Diablo 4 somehow feels worse than Diablo 3 for me. Diablo 3 kind of had some feeling of semblance of Diablo 2 in it, Diablo 4 tries to be so different, that it doesn’t even feel like a Diablo game at all. Which I previously said about Diablo 3, but with Diablo 4 being so bad and un-Diablo-like, Diablo 3 is actually starting to look more like Diablo for me.
I don’t know if they have any new games in the works and I don’t care. At this point, I think that they have exhausted every resource in terms of creativity to develop something new and captivating. They can only churn out remasters and “classics” at this point, and even those are inferior to the originals.
At this point, I only accept people who only play their old games – D1, D2, SC1, WC1, WC2, WC3, Vanilla WoW (on private servers, not WoW Classic). For me anyone who plays and says the other games – OW, D3, D4, Retail WoW, WoW Classic are good is just a superficial moron. It may sound conceited, but liking (and paying for that matter) their new trash is akin to being part of the problem why gaming has become so bad and only getting worse and the next games will just be even worse – look at Suicide Squad. One has to have fallen on his/her head to enjoy this.
I don’t know, either I’m super depressed and cynical (and boring), or modern games are all 99.99% pure trash and the people who like them are also mediocre and boring to be around.
I just put Diablo 2, Heroes of Might and Magic 3, Age of Empires 2, The Elder Scrolls 3 Morrowind and Vanilla WoW side-by-side with all the new trash of today and I can’t comprehend how is it we’ve come to such a disastrous stage of gaming.
Previously I would fret about games just being dumbed-down versions of older games but with newer graphics. Now I would be astounded at how this trend has not only continued, but evolved into the next stage of disaster – woke trash propaganda into everything. And most people like or are just OK/indifferent of this crap and still play these games. I even had the misfortune of seeing some degenerate on Steam defending being a pedo as a “sexual prefernce” and going in great length to explain how this is normal and people who think it’s wrong are hateful bigot -phobes.
I remember 10 years ago people were arguing about who had skill and who was a noob crying about game X, Y, Z being too difficult. Now it’s just a few years later and almost everyone has been turned into a pussy. Like Clint Eastwood said – this is the pussy generation. And then all the woke trash tried to “cancel” him. not acce
Thanks for the amazing and insightful replies!
For one, I cannot believe that I’m the only journalist who’s bothered to investigate the past of Faries. Everything she’s done is a matter of public record. Jason Schreier, Asmongold, and Michael Bell could have easily come to the same obvious conclusions, but they are silent when it comes to the intrusion of far-left politics in video games.
I have a special loathing for Asmongold. This clown knows what’s up but he’s too scared to bit the hand that feeds so he stays silent. He’s got clout to speak out about how wokeness has decimated the industry, but he’s silent. How many millions do you need Asmongold before you grow a pair?
Video game journalism is dead.
This is not the president of a homeowner’s association, this is the president of Blizzard Entertainment! This is a vital role. Too important IMHO to be a symbolic role. But, that’s exactly what it is given her meager accomplishments.
One YouTuber that I’m starting to respect is Endymion. He’s doing an amazing job of reporting and exposing this woke garbage in video games.
https://www.youtube.com/@EndymionTv
Check this guy out. I think one of my readers may have recommended him to me.
Some big stuff will be happening on this site in the next few weeks. I’m going to be breaking some exclusive news.
I began by liking Asmongold a few years ago because I thought of him as “one of us”, until I saw how much of a hypocrite he can be and on occasions his opinions being complete opposite of mine. Even after a while I would still listen to his videos while playing just to pass time, but in the last couple of months, I really can’t stand him as I’m realizing I’m gaining nothing from listening to him and the mere though of thinking about listening to him again makes me feel slightly depressed.
A friend of mine told me that Asmongold is following the steps of Athene on how to build his own cult and that’s what he is doing. All the Asmongold fans are nothing more than his cultists and they don’t even know it.
I will check this guy EndymiionTV, I think I may like him, thanks for letting us know about him.
Allwynd, Wolfshead, I will sum up my replies to you both up here instead of splitting this reply. In general I think its best to focus on the blogpost instead of commenting on comments, here we can do it, try that on blogger or WordPress, it’s not really working most of the time.
“There is still potential to dig through the rock bottom and find a deeper bottom.”
Haha, yeah. Kinda responding more to Wolfshead here though, she has a nice face and fine hair, probably also a nice bottom. And she can talk.
I am just horrified that being a 2x, 3x, whatever x-times “victim” is THE most important qualification these days!
Now is that not pure sexism, being a x-times supposed victim, pretty plus can talk? Faries and other should be ashamed. This is not the dream of King or equality at all.
I will check out EndymionTV.
Yesterday I watched for an hour in 2x and then fast forwarding a Baldur’s Gate 3 Let’s Play of a Youtuber. That was time well spent. I was horrified. The Youtuber was good, he was just playing the game, after all. It was super interesting to see what this is all about!
Now that’s the bestselling and apparently popular game these days? Really…?
There is little game, it is very good graphics, a sleek interface (lots of positive things to say about the production quality!) and then you watch ingame cutscenes endlessly. The player didn’t encounter significant bugs in a live play through. The story has quite a lot of wokeness, but it is not all that “sex with a bear”, one does not even have to have this weirdo stuff, so while very woke is not hyper woke at least.
But I could not help but notice that every companion character can be knocked over and romanced, and they are all horny to boot. That’s a horny trash movie of a game with not really that interesting or likeably characters. They are all horny weirdos!
Really, gaming in 2024 and years before by now… just awful. Larian writing is full of weird end of game revelations and twists, the overbearing tone and style of writing is terribly bad. It makes the BG1 and BG2 stories look like prized works of literature from another age.
I enjoy the writing in Expeditions Rome and admit, there you must at least pick one of four possible romances. And it is not the central and most elaborate part of the story.
I liked the SciFi military books by Glynn Stewart, he recently made a two female heroines take on the genre, but he fell into a similar trap and created two weird Mary Sues. No idea if they got better in book 2, I gave up after half of book 1. And I usually finish books.
Sorry for going somewhat off topic, this was on my mind and it really bugs me!
My apologies for approving this comment so late. I have been travelling for the last week or so and not had access to the internet. Aksimet is still blocking most comments on this site.