No Christians Allowed In Game Dev

Kotaku calls Scott Cawthon a "weird Christian dude" which is . . . weird.

I don’t care what religious beliefs you hold. You can be a protestant or a Catholic, a Muslim or a Jew, Hindu or Buddhist, Sikh or Baháʼí, Taoist or Rastafari. Do the druidism thing or pray to Odin. Go old-school and get your Zoroastrianism on. Your beliefs are none of my business.

And if your beliefs and mine don’t always align, that’s okay, too. We can debate if you want, or we can take our differences to the polling station and vote on how best to shape the future of society. That’s all part of living in a healthy democracy. If some people on the religious right don’t think other religions should count, I have a Constitution that says otherwise. It includes the (wise, precious) separation of Church and State.

Yes, sometimes one group’s views are imposed on another and that sucks, but that’s still just part of the process. I’ve said it before: Democracy is messy. It’s the worst system of government other than all the rest.

Being part of a pluralistic society means we do our best at tolerance and understanding, even when we disagree—perhaps especially when we disagree.

That’s one reason I found the Scott Cawthon controversy (explained here) so troubling. Cawthon is the creator of the jump-scare video game series Five Nights At Freddy’s (FNAF). He got into hot water when it came to light that he had donated money to Republican candidates, including Trump.

Cawthon is a conservative Christian, and apparently this is verboten in the video game industry. People freaked out. Cawthon stepped down. I found the whole thing quite puzzling. Cawthon hadn’t said or done anything to target LGBTQ people, but he was run out of town just the same (and bowed out gracefully) because his mere existence as a conservative Christian somehow caused harm to the LGBTQ community.

So it was that last night before bed I was reading this piece at Kotaku about the games Sony shared during its (apparently quite lackluster) State of Play yesterday. I intended to watch the livestream myself but life got in the way and I missed it. I figured a helpful recap was just the thing to catch me up.

And then I got to the bit about the upcoming game Five Nights At Freddy’s: Security Breach and noticed that essentially the entire paragraph was just a random dig at Cawthon. I tweeted what has become, I believe, my most viral tweet ever:

Erik Kain @erikkain

This is a very childish take, Kotaku.

Boiling down Cawthon’s entire person to “some weird Christian dude” feels unnecessarily derogatory to an entire religious group. It is incredibly safe to target Christians in our current cultural moment. Especially white cis-male heterosexual Christians.

Can you imagine if this had been a game franchise created by a conservative Muslim? “Some weird Muslim dude” would not fly, nor should it. It’s a messed up way to view the world.

As someone who believes deeply in religious and racial tolerance, in accepting humans for who they are and turning the other cheek when that tolerance is not extended our way, I find this new tendency on the left disturbing. I know that the word “woke” is tossed around to describe anything vaguely liberal or left-leaning these days (lololol at anyone who refers to centrists Democrats like Biden as “woke”) but wokeness to me is the antithesis of liberalism and tolerance. It goes against the grain of a pluralistic society. Its adherents believe that the world can be made anew, that all wrongthink can be erased, through force rather than persuasion.

So we disagree with Cawthon’s views, fine. But he is allowed to have them and he is allowed to make video games in spite of them. So are Muslims, so are atheists. You can choose to not buy those games if you want, absolutely, but this knee-jerk drive to destroy (or cancel) those with beliefs or views we do not share is a sickness, a rot. This is the moral majority all over again, the censorious religious nuts who tried to ban heavy metal and violent video games back in the 80s’ and 90s’, only now the religion is the Cult of Woke and comprised of a lot of people who ought to know better.

And that, oh my droogies, is all I have to say about that. Be excellent to each other and party on.