On May 16, gaming and entertainment news site Dexerto published tweeted an image of the upcoming match Assassin's Creed Shadows with one of the protagonists, the black samurai Yasuke, in a fighting stance. In dozens of reactions, some expressed their optimism, others their fatigue with Assassin's CreedThe series has now run for 14 games and some vocal people have expressed their frustration and anger at the fact that a black person was central to the story.
“I'm going to skip the DEI games,” wrote one blue-check X user, referring to the acronym for diversity, equality and inclusion. “Why Wokeism?” asked another. Comments filled with racist and sexist language filled the thread.
A more articulate undercurrent of these reactionaries, on many online forums, had a more specific set of complaints. Some claimed that the race of the real Yasuke had never been known, others that he was not a samurai but a vassal, and still others claimed that he had never seen combat.
These were all pretty sweeping conclusions to draw about a man from 1581 who has been depicted as a samurai many times in Japanese media, including in the 2017 video game Nioh And Samurai warriors 5 in 2021, as well as his own animated series on Netflix.
They might also have been the last piece of Yasuke history if the conversation hadn’t been perpetuated by a series of accounts looking for a new front in the online culture war, fueling what some are calling Gamergate 2.0. While 2014’s Gamergate focused on attempting to drown out feminist voices and the voices of women of color in gaming culture, this second incarnation seems focused on pushing back on diversity in games of all kinds. Yasuke simply stepped in their path.
The revival of the Gamergate moniker came earlier this year in response to Sweet Baby's work. Employees at the small consulting firm faced a wave of harassment this spring, fueled by misinformation and conspiracy theories that the firm was a BlackRock-backed organization seeking to force diversity in games. (It is not affiliated with BlackRock and only consults on characters and storylines.) As the controversy surrounding Assassin's Creed Shadows intensified, multiple to inform named Sweet Baby, even though CEO Kim Belair says the company has not worked on the game.
“I think it just goes with the post-Gamergate (late-Gamergate?) territory,” Belair wrote in an email to WIRED. “For a certain set of people, primarily trolls, we're synonymous with their idea of 'wokeness in games' or some vague idea of 'DEI,' but ultimately it's a reflection of the broader misinformation that's fueling this campaign.”
Gamergate was not the first intimidation campaign conceived in the bowels of 4chan and its affiliated sites, but it may have been their crowning achievement. The attacks on developers Zoë Quinn and Brianna Wu and media critic Anita Sarkeesian, among others, ranged from doxing to rape and death threats. The principles and tactics ultimately proved valuable in drawing people into the emerging alt-right movement. Even Pizzagate and QAnon can be traced in some ways to what happened to gamers online in 2014.
“Gamergate was a recruiting ground, a pipeline to exploit the loneliness, disaffection and alienation of young men – often young white men – for alt-right politics, extremist misogyny and outright white supremacy and Nazism,” Thirsty suitors protagonist Meghna Jayanth told WIRED.