Hey Ross, I didn’t think this rose to the level of of an email, but I’ve noticed a trend that you might want to get ahead of. Recently at a Ubisoft shareholder meeting, the CEO was first asked about “woke” games and then the SKG campaign by the same person. I’m not going to get into the content of the answer, but I have seen a lot of people supporting SKG who could broadly be thought of as representing the alt-right/Manosphere kind of gamer. Another example I saw was the SKG Twitter retweeting a message of support From Bounding into Comics, which was strongly connected to an alt-right harassment campaign against comic creators and is very right leaning according to every bias checker.
I am not trying to make a political argument here but I this sort of association could be problematic for the campaign. Obviously it is important to have as broad a base of support for SKG as possible and I don’t think the campaign should try to push away people who I find unsavory, but it would be very easy for the industry to try to frame SKG as another Gamergate if they can make these links. They haven’t done so yet but I can imagine them taking any step they can think of to discredit SKG the closer it gets to achieving its goals. The original idea of Gamergate wasn’t even bad—gaming journalists are too close to their sources—but the possibility of pushing back against those bad practices was lost when the goals got mixed up with politics.
Obviously, you can control something like the shareholder meeting, but it might at least be a good idea if the person running the SKG Twitter tried to be a bit more careful with retweets.