A Comprehensive History of Woke D&D
“These gentlemen think that when they have changed the names of things they have changed the things themselves. This is how these profound thinkers mock at the whole world.”
- Friedrich Engels, “On Authority”
“Put a chick in it and make her lame and gay!”
- Eric Cartman, “South Park”
I’m a long time fan of the pen and paper tabletop roleplaying game “Dungeons & Dragons”. Being Swedish and joining the hobby before I had full access to my own home computer, I never really was very up to date on the most recent releases, trends and discussions coming out of America, the home and heartland of the game. In fact, when me and my childhood friend first started playing, we basically compiled our own version of the game out of stories passed down orally from his dad—from the time he himself used to play. We used disparate and usually torn and incomplete rulebooks from incompatible editions and stuff we made up on the fly. Even now, when I have access to pretty much any up-to-date official product I want, whenever I want it, I still kind of stick to the philosophy of just grabbing whatever works and meshing it into our homebrewed settings and campaigns.
Maybe that is why when I first heard about what is now being called “woke D&D”—basically American left-progressive ideology beginning to permeate all official D&D releases—I assumed the whole thing was blown out of proportion and at least partially an intentional joke. A wheel-chair accessible dungeon, for example, I thought was a pretty funny idea. In a comedic RPG adventure it’d be good comedy if the evil lich had to make concessions to a lobbying group formed by goblins having suffered mutilation in their master's service. Writing a little backstory for the dungeon wherein United Dungeonworkers and an HR-department of mindflayers have reached an agreement where wheelchair ramps are installed, non-combative tasks such as torture and looting is earmarked for old and infirm workers and prayer rooms are set up wherein blood sacrifice can be made to Tiamat, Orcus or whatever evil deity you as a member of a sinister but diverse workforce happen to adhere to – that could work if you would want to lean into the more meta and comedic elements of the fantasy roleplaying tradition. When it was made clear to me that the wheelchair accessible dungeon was, in fact, not a joke I was at first dumbstruck, then amazed and finally intrigued.
Reading the actual adventure, “The Canopic Being”, makes it clear that the accessibility and “anti-ableist” stuff isn’t really that central. Basically, the dungeon is filled more with ramps than stairs and there are supposedly (she claimed so in a panel teasing the dungeon) several elevators, powered by magic or rope mechanisms (it’s not specified which and the only thing close to elevators in the dungeon are anti-gravity fields). That’s pretty much it. This fact could, of course, be used as an argument that the “anti-wokes” are once again, predictably overreacting to the preprogrammed culture war where the facts on the ground are rather innocent and banal. While there’s something to such a critique on a general level, an argument like that in at least this specific case falls flat as Wizards of the Coast (WotC), the publishing company behind Dungeons & Dragons for the non-gaming readers, has decided to push the “anti-ableist” angle of the product straight out of the gate at launch despite the absence of much actual content in that vein. If this is a culture war, the wokes started it. It’s not just the Battle of Wheelchair Ramp, the war has been raging for some time. To quote Wikipedia:
“On June 1, 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, WotC released a statement1 in support of its Black fans, employees, and community members. This provoked a backlash; multiple open letters that criticized the company for its treatment of people of color, and documenting issues Black and Brown community members had taken with the company's actions were published. The New York Times, Polygon, and Kotaku reported following this criticism, WotC banned seven Magic: The Gathering cards that were deemed racially offensive from tournament-sanctioned play. The D&D team announced it would be changing portions of its fifth-edition product line that fans had criticized for being insensitive, such as racist portrayals of a fictional people known as the Vistani, and races characterized as monstrous and evil. The company also announced plans to change character creation to broaden the range of character types and adding a sensitivity disclaimer to some legacy products that include cultures inspired by Asia, Mesoamerica, and the Middle East.”
Games journalism website Polygon reported on another announcement by WotC on June 17 called “Diversity & Dungeons & Dragons” about, “adressing racist stereotypes in D&D.” In the statement WotC declared that appropriate representation of different (real-world) ethnicities, gender identities, sexual orientations and beliefs would be a priority moving forward, as they had up until now (to the surprise of many of the games long time players, I’d expect) only focused on depicting “fantasy versions of North Europeans”.
Objectively evil races such as the Drow (dark elves) and Orcs are described as “problematic” as the way they are depicted supposedly empowers essentialist (biological or otherwise) notions of real-world human ethnicities. It is also heavily implied that the Drow and Orcs are especially hurtful as they have, up until now, acted as stand-ins for different non-European ethnicities. Whether WotC means that western sub-ethnicities, such as afro-americans, also find their stand-ins in races such as orcs is not entirely clear in this post. They do however claim that “some of the peoples in the game—orcs and drow being two of the prime examples—have been characterized as monstrous and evil, using descriptions that are painfully reminiscent of how real-world ethnic groups have been and continue [my emphasis] to be denigrated.” So it’s clearly not only historic cultures such as nomadic North American Indians they are referring to. Whatever is the case, many have made the connection to American blacks, such as WotC-hired sensitivity and cultural consultant James Mendez Hodes. Mendez Hodes doesn’t prove any connection between orcs and American black people at all in his article but just operates from the assumption that as J.R.R. Tolkien’s orcs came to America they were mutated from, what Mendez Hodes correctly identifies as, stereotypical depiction of orcs as mongols into being representative of black people as words like “Horde. Terror. Tribe. Barbaric. Savage.” are used to describe them, as well as being visually depicted as “swole”. Not to mention that they weren't actually at all depicted as very “swole” back then, but as pretty normal looking dudes but with a pig's head in the first edition and as scrawny, toadish guys with a snout in the second edition, it's kinda weird that Mendez Hodes immediately associates them with black Americans, a population who through its entire recorded history have never lived in tribes or outside of civilization. A racist mind is a racist kind, one might be tempted to say. Whatever WotC meant by saying that “real-world ethnic groups have been and continue to be denigrated”, the idea that black Americans were denigrated by the depiction of orcs in WotC’s products has become an accepted truth in woke circles and by WotC.
Finally, WotC stated that they will from now on work with a variety of “sensitivity readers” on future content and continue relying on “experts in various fields to help us identify our blind spots.” The publisher added that it is “seeking new, diverse talent to join our staff and our pool of freelance writers and artists.” This was the dawn of what would later become WotC’s “inclusivity reviews.”
Since June 2020, several things have happened. To go through all of these things here, however, would take up too much space. But as the headline promises a comprehensive history of woke D&D, I encourage more curious readers to have a look at Appendix A. One particular thing was however, I believe, more telling than others.
In November 2023 a very interesting blog post was released. In “What we can learn from WotC’s Core Book Sensitivity and Inclusivity Changes”, Teos Abadía (professional Environmental and Health Consultant as well as part time WotC published game designer) details the sensitivity and inclusivity changes from what core rulebooks for 5th edition D&D were like when they were released in 2014 to how they appear now (in november 2023) in the mobile app for the game. As Abadía explains, only a minority of the changes have been technical or grammatical while the vast majority of the changes were around sensitivity and inclusivity. Abadía considers these changes as a part of “decolonizing games”. According to Abadía, what makes roleplaying games, among other things, colonial, in this sense, is that they have historically “portrayed non-Western cultures and non-urban areas as lesser.” An expression of this colonialism in RPGs is “the barbarian who wears animal skins and is portrayed as uneducated” and “the quest to tame the dangerous wilderness and any sentient creatures dwelling there”. But is this really colonialism? Barbarians, of whatever non-Greek speaking variant they were such as Germans, Slavs or Bedouins, were in fact, and not only in colonialist stereotypes, quite often clad in animal skins and possessed little to no formal education. “Taming of dangerous wilderness” goes with agriculture as such and while one might define colonization as the settlement of any land, inhabited or not, it’s usually not the struggle against permanent residence in general that the term “decolonization” is associated with. All this is just to say that Abadías, and WotC’s, concept of “decolonization” is pretty confused even on its own premises.
Abadía goes on to describe and discuss changes in the books regarding sensitive themes or terms such as Savagery and Civilization, Madness, Insanity and the word "Crazy", Bioessentialism, Racial Purity, Comparisons of Lesser races, Low Intelligence as a Species, Gender, using "Blindness" in a figurative sense to describe someone being unaware, the word "Fat", Asian cultures association with honor, Phylacteries, Slavery and Darkness. Some of these are rather ridiculous at face value, such as describing ogres as “fat” apparently being so insensitive that Abadía deems it appropriate to celebrate the sensitivity of WotC instead calling ogres “well-fed”. There’s enough finger-wagging and anti-bullying discourse of the grade school variety in Abadías article, as there is in most cases of woke language policing, to fill a rather long catalogue. This makes Abadías compilation of changes a strong reference point which we’ll be coming back to in this article but we won’t have the time to deal with every identity based grievance and will mostly focus on the bigger cultural issues such as claims made about civilization/barbarism, essentialism/social constructivism and so on. This is because I believe these themes to be the most relevant ones not of wokeness in general but of woke D&D in particular. I also believe that Abadía is entirely correct in that decolonization, as that term is understood in the academic fields of post-colonialism and decoloniality,2 is the core of woke D&D.
This leads us, finally, to the core issues this series of articles will try to deal with. In the first article I will try to answer what wokeness is in general and in the context of D&D and fantasy in particular. I will do this by continuing the comprehensive history of events (though not in strict chronological order) leading us to where we are today as well as through a summarized explanation of the underlying theory and praxis of wokeness in general. In the second article I will go through the dominant criticism of woke D&D from those who we might call the anti-wokes (some of whom, like the Good ol’ Boyz podcast, D&D legend Robert J. Kuntz and perhaps most importantly “the RPGPundit” whose coverage of the woke D&D phenomena has been invaluable to me due to his vast knowledge of all things TTRPG and D&D as well as due to his personal insights into the machinations of WotC) and then do a deep dive into the theoretical framework behind the phenomena of woke D&D in particular. I’ll try and deal with these issues in order before offering my own perspective on the recent developments in the hobby in regards to what both the wokes and anti-wokes take issue with. I will argue that while my sympathy lies more with the anti-wokes, I believe their criticism to be misguided. Furthermore, I will argue that the wokes would be, in fact, not completely wrong in their diagnosis if what they analysed was in fact an illness, which I argue it is not. It is instead a healthy and necessary organic function of the game and genre.
One final thing before we get to it:
With Trump II, the times are changing for wokeness with "anti-woke" points becoming official state policy. What I am doing in this piece is telling a historical story of so-called "wokeness" and "inclusivity" through a single company, Wizards of the Coast and their beloved game, Dungeons and Dragons. While most companies are in the process of purging their Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) departments, it should be noted that WotC has not made any changes in this regard (yet). This could be because roleplay gaming companies feel the need more than other companies to, for marketing reasons, distance themselves from the image of being the territory for shut-in white male nerds, to instead embrace an image of being a bastion of diverse, college-educated identitiarians with a left-leaning bent. Could be. However, I’m not very convinced that DEI and corporate wokeness actually is a thing of the past, as many companies are evading Trumps policies by doing the same thing under a new name. This goes for the main investors behind WotC parent company as well, who besides having tried to hide it behind new names still flaunt their DEI credentials openly. Wether this will come to be an obituary of woke D&D or a comprehensive history of woke D&D so far, I think the arguments hold either way.
Wokeness in general
In its modern context, the term “woke” was originally an African-American slang term referring to being aware of (or awake enough to perceive) everything from your partner’s infidelity, conspiracy theories and to, most prominently, police brutality and unjust tactics towards black people out of informal racist motivations. The racism part grew to become the dominant aspect of what being “woke” entailed. More importantly, being “woke” in this sense referred to being able to perceive expressions of racism not immediately apparent, unlike historical formal racial segregation in America. Originally referring to more serious concerns such as informal racial discrimination and brutality from police towards blacks, as the term became to be used as a slogan and twitter hashtag (#StayWoke) during the 2014 Ferguson protests and riots in response to the shooting of Michael Brown, it began to mutate over the years to refer to all kinds of perceived discrimination and negative attitudes. With black cultural and political life functioning as fuel for the American liberal political machine, the term was gradually lifted from its’ context as a tool for framing the many and disparate grievances held by the less important parts of the liberal coalition, along with the affluent white female liberal part – arguably the coalition's most important constituency. A good liberal, or even perhaps a common decent person, was expected not only to be “woke” to the informal power structures governing the lives of black people (which had now also come to include white people asking to touch black peoples hair and other such pressing issues) but also the ones governing the lives of many more ethnic minorities, homosexuals and people believing themselves to be of a different gender than the one they were born into. On the fringes of the woke milieu, disabled and obese people were viewed through the same lens of informal power structures, often referred to as systemic and/or institutional. It’s somewhat ironic that a term meant to describe the way racism permeates society even after formal, state-sanctioned racism (or other forms of discrimination) has been abolished has come to be called “institutional” or “systemic”. Surely, someone who believes that historically-inherited racist values explains why racial disparities still exist despite formal, judicial, state sanctioned racism has been abolished does not believe in institutional racism. It is also unclear what clarification words like “systemic” or ”structural” offer in this context. Nevertheless, these beliefs are pervasive in American political life.3 Some of these beliefs in power structures (institutional or otherwise), such as black people still being set back from the effects of slavery and Jim Crow and women being discriminated against in the workplace due to persevering gender norms regarding public/private life, can be seen as a new unpopular framing of old racial, gender and sex related grievances that were considered far more legitimate in the older framing. This older framing included less-esoteric language and placed less of a burden on the average person to remedy it.
What is most remarkable about these ideas are perhaps not the ideas themselves but the fact that they gained such prominence despite being very unpopular (at least in the way they have been presented) with the above mentioned average person. This seems to have worked to the advantage of the anti-woke camp but without this fact breaking the woke stride. Furthermore, it is perhaps this peculiar self confidence and undiplomatic nature of the woke movement that infuriates people more than at least some of the woke positions themselves. Staying “woke” was once an attitude promoted among black Americans with the purpose of keeping an eye out for wolves-in-sheeps clothing within the justice system. It has in the liberal coalition since become an enlightened state of mind attainable in perhaps generous cases by blacks in general as well as by an (often non-black) educated elite, but in most cases attainable only by the latter group (consider terms like “internalized racism”). The woke college graduate draws her legitimacy from the black non-college graduate but while woke ideology only grants the latter state-backed moral support in their struggle against the evil spirits (or structures and institutions) of racism it clothes the former in immense priestly powers. Priestly, unlike political or economic, power can not grant the priests flock immediate material boons, but it can grant them symbolic ones. This priestly power can however in turn grant the priest material boons and even political power. But this political power and these boons are not generated through a symbiotic relationship of patronage from the groups of peasants the priests claim to represent, but through a parasitic one where power is taken from the corporate and state actors in America, serving collectively as the king in this metaphor.
This sketch of professional class people adhering to woke beliefs as priests to religion is hardly very original and were my point with this article to add to that conversation I would be very late to the scene indeed. But just to get the issue of what drives the woke professional class in general out of the way, I would defer to the writer Malcom Kyeyune who I believe has been the most insightful contributor to the debate. When asked in what way wokeness is a class phenomenon, Kyeyune once replied:
“It’s not necessarily the case that everything can be explained through some sort of primitive application of class analysis, but it’s also not something you should be blind to, especially when discrepancies are staring you in the face. In the case of woke politics, it’s probably meaningful that you rarely find an example of, say, a woke electrician or plumber or truck driver. Those people might exist—and we might find proof of the Loch Ness monster at some point, too—but this is not an ideology that infects people at random. It’s clearly a class phenomenon in what we can observe, in the sense that certain people, from certain classes—essentially people in the big cities, people working what some have called “email jobs”—tend to be woke, and people who work as part of the real economy tend to be not woke. To try to deny that these discrepancies exist, or that they’re not in need of investigation, is just a form of political self-harm at this point.
To lay out what wokeness does: one explanation we should take seriously is that wokeness serves as a sorting mechanism for sinecures, prestige institutions, and so on, where there’s growing competition for jobs.”
Beyond it being a matter of intraprofessional class competition, Kyeyune also once elaborated on how this class uses wokeness as an ideology to exert power over broader society:
“[One might see wokeness as] a systematized, managerial ideology capable of standing on its own as a claim to rulership over society on behalf of the new class of managers. (...) Wokeness serves to abrogate property rights, as seen in many controversies taking place in the business world. Consider the fate of the video-game behemoth Activision Blizzard, recently bought by Microsoft. After various ex-employees leveled allegations of workplace mistreatment and a frat-boy culture at its California offices, the company found itself under siege from multiple directions. First, the state of California sued it. Then, the media started covering the story with fervor. Various NGOs and activist organizations jumped into the fray, and the Securities and Exchange Commission launched an investigation. Though the original accusations against the company had to do only with sexual misconduct in the workplace, the list of demands made on Activision Blizzard quickly expanded beyond the original crime. Firing the offending workers or instituting mere workplace reform wasn’t good enough; rather, Activision Blizzard would need to open up its internal hiring and firing decisions to some sort of public review to ensure that it met various “diversity” targets. If one reads between the lines of the controversy, it becomes clear that the owners of a company now must subject their hiring process to review by other managerial institutions. The main practical demand that wokeness places on society is a massive expansion of managerial intermediation in previously independent social and economic processes.”
When trying to understand wokeness in general, I believe Kyeyune is correct in, as he has done more directly in other instances,4 pointing out the irrelevance of the woke ideology in itself. What drives these people is their professional5 class logic of carving out a place in the market for their dubious skill set, for which the demand is not very high, at least not in some objective-technical sense. The woke ideology, as it is, serves this class interest through pretty much historical happenstance. It is also misguided to understand the anti-woke reaction through a deeply conservative silent majority. By all accounts, Americans have only become more and more small p progressive over the years and it is not what the wokes’ claim they are doing (in most cases) but what they are actually doing that bothers people. But if one wants to understand woke D&D in particular, what makes it produce the often seemingly absurd products that it does, how this relates to the traditional fantasy tradition and how one should criticize it on a purely literary level, I do in fact believe it is important to examine woke ideology itself and the form it takes in the context of the fantasy genre in general and the D&D hobby in particular. To do this, we have to go back to the 2020 Summer of Love, and further back into its prehistory – The Great Awokening of 2014.6
Bridging the gap between general wokeness and woke D&D – riots in the streets, ESG in the sheets
The link between what once started as the simple hashtag #StayWoke and what is now going on in D&D is aptly another hashtag, namely #BlackLivesMatter. Also apt for the purpose of this article is that the road from spontaneous protests and slogans to a registered organization for the advancement of professional class interests is made even clearer with the BLM hashtag. From the beginning, Black Lives Matter was a slogan used in more-or-less spontaneous protests in response to police violence, with the term appearing for the first time in the protests around the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of black teen Trayvon Martin in 2012. The slogan itself was however not spontaneous but the conscious design of Alice Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Ayọ Tometi. Garza coined the term in 2012, Cullors created the hashtag in 2013 and then contacted Tometi to help establish Tumblr and Twitter accounts using the hashtag where users could share relevant personal stories. They pushed for the slogan in other different ways as well, such as making protest signs with block capital letters and putting them in shop windows and leading (at least) a (single) march (the size of which we will never know) with a banner emblazoned with the same hashtag. They also organized transportation to riots and protests, such as Ferguson in 2014. All three were employed as professional activists at the time.7 It wasn't until the 2014 Ferguson protests and riots however that the slogan really took off and successive protests and riots were to be labeled as BLM protests or riots, whatever credit was actually due to the people behind the phrase. The three women were also the founders of the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, the biggest formal organization claiming to speak for the BLM movement and which simply refers to itself as “Black Lives Matter”. This particular organization began its transition from petty priesthood siphoning political and economic power to political and economic institution in its’ own right in 2016, when BLMGN announced a new partnership with IDEX, a financial institution that could receive tax-deductible grants, donations and gifts on behalf of BLM. It didn’t really take off as a more material powerhouse, however, until the death of George Floyd in may 2020 when BLMGN received millions worth of donations from several large corporations, including but not limited to: Amazon, which donated part of 10M to BLMGN; Coca-Cola, which donated $500,000; Microsoft, which donated $250,000; Airbnb, which donated $500,000; Intel, which donated part of 1M; and Google, which donated part of 2.35M. These donations in turn helped BLMGN to formally enter the political scene when it in October the same year founded the Black Lives Matter Political Action Committee.8 According to Republican-aligned sources,9 organizations explicitly tied to Black Lives Matter since 2020 received 1.37B dollars in donations from large corporations and foundations tied to financial oligarchs. Georges Soros Open Society Foundation, Bill Gates Microsoft and Jeff Bezos Amazon made up about half the amount of these donations. It was also widely reported by more mainstream sources that BLM managed to get smaller as well as the biggest financial institutions more invested in diversity and inclusion programmes, implicitly for the benefit of middle to upper class non-whites. So the non-white (and probably also white) professionals rioting in the streets did cash-in on the turbulent summer of 2020 and even got off pretty scott-free, despite the arson, vandalism, and looting that occurred between May 26 and June 8 which caused approximately $1–2 billion in insured damages nationally. Their flock of less fortunate brethren also benefitted from the many dropped charges. The BLM rioting was the highest recorded damage from civil disorder in U.S. history, even surpassing the record set during the 1992 Los Angeles riots. It is however, let’s say, doubtful if working class or unemployed protestors cashed in on, for example, Blackrock “actively guiding and developing the careers of the firm’s black professionals”. If the leading figures of BLM even attempted to do much at all for their working class and unemployed supporters other than getting corporations to hire members of their professional priestly caste as a sort of letter of indulgence has been questioned by several political writers aligned with multiracial class politics. Whatever the case, it was in this 2020 time of letters of indulgences that the saga of “woke D&D” began.
As previously mentioned, WotC around this time started trying to appease “Black and Brown community members” who were unhappy with the supposed racial and cultural insensitivities of its’ products. It should be clear to most people that these “community members” weren’t really representative ofWotC’s main customer base, most of whom probably didn’t register WotC and their hobbies to have anything at all to do with the BLM protests. Self-evident as this may seem to some, a comprehensive history of woke D&D demands an examination of the claim.
It’s not that D&D players can’t have liberal views or that the mainstreaming of the hobby over the years hasn’t led to an influx of more liberal-minded types (the rise of women in the hobby being a good proxy for this) but there’s no evidence that the “issues taken” by the so called “Black and Brown community members” were actually taken by anyone outside of a small circle of professional class woke people.
The “Diversity and Dungeons & Dragons” blog post from June 2020 (since removed from the D&D web page but reposted here), which kicked all of this off, cites no particular reasons for why it was written, but it has been claimed in most reporting and on Wikipedia (not the most reliable source in itself but a highly influential website in establishing dominant historical narratives) that it was due to the events surrounding George Floyd’s death and “issues taken” by the “Black and Brown [D&D] community”. In the Wikipedia article, three articles are cited to support the claim of a reaction from the “Black and Brown community”. In these three articles, two letters documenting twitter reactions from this supposed community are mentioned to support the claim. The people behind the letters and the people mentioned within them who have spoken up (mostly through single tweets) are no more than 18 people, only 11 of who are non-white, and several of them have an interest in getting hired by WotC, selling products to WotC, or getting slots in game tournaments organized by WotC, alot of them even argue that they should get these things because of their woke professional skill set or because they belong to an identity group that gives them exclusive right or competence to work on certain products or in certain roles at conventions and tournaments.10 Perhaps most importantly, none of these people are writing about Dungeons & Dragons. The people behind and within these letters are strictly from the Magic: The Gathering11 scene, yet their statements are provided as evidence for a consumer/fan backlash affecting the design process of D&D, a game with about 14 million players worldwide. There’s little more evidence of a reaction from the “Black and Brown community” in the reporting made by Kotaku, Polygon and similar gaming media outlets.
In contrast: Between November and December 2022, there was speculation based on unconfirmed leaks saying WotC was planning to discontinue the Open Game License12 (OGL) for Dungeons & Dragons. This led to an actual boycott of the game with a much bigger number of people criticizing the company, yet WotC, according to media outlet Io9:s reporting, in internal messaging to employees designated it all as a “fan overreaction”. WotC finally made some concessions but as things stand today, among other things, publishers operating under the existing OGL may have to overhaul their products and distribution and must sign the updated OGL 2.0 document in order to continue publishing D&D materials, publishers making over $50K a year in revenue will now be required to report their earnings to Wizards of the Coast, Wizards of the Coast can modify or terminate the OGL 2.0 agreement for any reason whatsoever and is required to give only 30 days notice and WotC are now arguing that its only goal in revising OGL was to protect players from "hateful and discriminatory products.”13
All this is just to say that when it comes to the actual core of the game and issues affecting all players on a very practical level, WotC are rarely very open to criticism and it is therefore very unlikely that angry tweets from 11 or so “members of the Black and Brown community” would make them fear a consumer backlash with genuine economic consequences when an actual boycott with actually noticeable such consequences barely made them move an inch. And even if a more female consumer base and perhaps even a more ethnically diverse one (the facts of which we know little) has broken down the walls of the supposedly hard core of incel grognards whose hearts are filled with nothing but hate for their fellow man, it seems very unlikely that the great mass of these consumers had any active demand for wheel-chair accessible dungeons in D&D or for Aragorn being a black guy in Magic: the Gathering.
Most people who play these games are not members of a “fan community” but engage with the hobby through a small circle of friends without partaking in forum debates and without attending conventions. Therefore, it is unreasonable to consider the so-called “members of the Black and Brown community” as representative of the main consumer base of D&D products or even of the fanbase of the game.
Rather, these people were representative of the woke professional class, emboldened by the zeitgeist of BLM and drooling over the possible consultant jobs and other resources WotC might offer them in the wake of it. Indeed, WotC’s measures to make up for their many insensitivities was of course to offer jobs to these professional woke types. But why then, if the people who actually buy WotC’s products probably didn’t have very strong feelings one way or the other about WotC’s stance in the BLM-issue, did WotC, among others, experience a PR panic in the summer of 2020? A brief detour might here be in order to explain that it is neither consumer nor consultant but capital which demands companies like WotC to tow the woke line, hire woke consultants and ignore an anti-woke or at least woke agnostic customer base.
What do I mean by this? Well, WotC is owned by Hasbro and Hasbro is mostly owned by several institutional investors.
In June 2020, the ownership structure looked liked this:
The owners behind Hasbro are mostly institutional investors, of both the passive and active variant. The thing about institutional investors, especially passive ones, is that they don’t really care about or have much insight into the individual companies they invest in and the people they get their money from. These investors, especially the passive ones, are mostly concerned with maximizing returns rather than engaging directly with the businesses they invest in. Their funds are built from sources like pension contributions and sovereign wealth funds, which creates an even further distance between actual investors, or contributors15 to the investment fund at least, and the companies.
Over time, passive investment has overtaken active management due to lower fees and similar or better performance. The rise of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in the 90s up to today has helped this shift by offering diversified, stable portfolios. ETFs are a type of investment fund that is also an exchange-traded product traded on stock exchanges, such as stocks, bonds, currencies, debts, futures contracts, and/or commodities such as gold bars. The main perk of ETFs is that they offer diversification. Diversification, in the finance world, means the process of allocating capital in a way that reduces the exposure to any one particular asset or risk. If the price of an asset doesn’t change at the same rate of another, a diversified ownership, or portfolio in finance terms, will have less variance than any one part of the portfolio. This offers stability, a much sought after quality by state, pension fund and insurance representatives. Another sought after quality is “responsibility”, socially and environmentally.16 Thus, ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) metrics have become key tools, helping even passive funds claim “ethical” investments without deeper engagement.
ESG allows investors to assess the reputational risk of their holdings rather than the actual impact of a company’s actions. Companies like Hasbro—especially parts like WotC, which contribute little to total profits—strive to boost their ESG scores to attract and retain institutional investment. For Hasbro, which outsources manufacturing and relies on branding, boosting ESG scores often means promoting DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) initiatives rather than making real environmental or ethical changes.
Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) is shorthand for an investing principle that supposedly prioritizes environmental issues, social issues, and corporate governance. Basically, ESG ratings of companies inform investors on what risk they pose in making the investor seem environmentally, socially or governmentally (in the sense of governing companies ethically) irresponsible. ESG is basically a system of automatization for passive investors to make “responsible” investments, and active investors, such as Capital Group, have all adopted the system along with passive investors, even though the term itself has become too hot to handle for some. Different components of ESG contribute in different degrees to one's ESG score, as shown in the table below – a november 2023 example from Morningstar, an American financial services firm.
These different issues pose different challenges for different kinds of companies. For some, the issues are non-issues and for some, certain issues are enormous challenges. This has lead to some rather comedic situations where for example oil companies like Shell can’t do much about their carbon footprint without shutting down operations entirely, so instead they heavily push for gay oil.
What this has meant for individual companies like Hasbro is that they are owned, and indeed ruled, by several huge institutional actors with little to no interest in the products actually produced. All they care about is the sliver they own in the company and what that sliver poses as a risk as a constituent part of its portfolio in purely economic terms as well as in ESG risk terms. Some have argued that this should be first and foremost considered a case of indirect governmental regulation with roots in the Civil Rights Act and companies’ fear of being accused of disparate impact, a practice that might lead to litigation through the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) – a government agency set up as a consequence of the Civil Rights act and which serves to enforce it. While there is something to this argument, it doesn’t paint a full picture, as it doesn’t explain the genuine enthusiasm within corporations for the system making it not even having to be enforced.18 It also doesn’t explain why wokeness has grown to such a massive social phenomenon only in the last few years while EEOC litigations in general and in relation to title VII of the Civil Rights act (which prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin) in particular have seen a negative trend since 1980 in regards to staffing and since 2004 in regards to monetary relief for Title VII claims.
Nor does it explain the seemingly steady defunding of the EEOC since at least 2003 and its decreasing number of employees since at least 1988. I am neither a man of the law nor an American and I can’t say with certainty to what degree the Civil Rights Act plays into the rise of wokeness in general and corporate America or D&D in particular but the claim that it is the sole or even just the primary reason behind it I find unconvincing in light of these numbers.
The outsized enthusiasm for ESG within corporations I instead think can primarily be explained by the general financialization of capital in the western world leaving individual companies like Hasbro at the mercy of funding from these giant financial institutions. Hasbro is not so much a manufacturing company these days as they used to be. They have since long ago outsourced production internationally, but at the end of the day, their main product lines still need to be physically produced somewhere (whether that be in China, Vietnam or, as in the past, the US) and they have to rely on the brands they actually own, making them “bound to the earth” and unable to diversify to the same extent as entities like Blackrock or Vanguard can. They're constantly looking for ways to secure revenue through license deals (the Transformers movies and so on) and through steps away from physical production by means of digitalization but they’ve never managed to break their reliance on physical production of their own brand products. When their operating profit started going south in 2021 with a huge slump in 2024, all they could think of, as basically a giant conglomerate of offices with little room for productivity growth, to restore profits was to fire people. What else could they do? Shout at the Chinese until they invented a much more efficient toy-making factory? Find a country for production with even cheaper labour costs which still had the necessary technical capacity? Not likely. What they could’ve done, and what they have done and what they also did and continue to do is throw themselves under the yoke of financial rentier capital and act like desperate beggars in relation to their financial betters, pulling woke stunts like an actual beggar would do a little jig to impress the more well to do or pumping ESG scores like an actual beggar would carry around an image of Jesus, a photo of his starving children and a war veteran’s medallion all at once to drum up sympathy. The Dungeons & Dragons line of products being one of the least important for Hasbro profits,19 it has been left to them to overcompensate in terms of ESG begging, so they pull their weight somehow. But why does this work? Why does ESG exist at all?
Completely unregulated capitalist firms is a pipe dream and some form of regulatory frame is necessary to account for non-market related but social, political and indeed often times (though not directly market related) economic factors like the consequences of oil spills, underemployment, human rights or other political violations of companies acting in foreign countries etc. It is in the nature of these financial institutions to have to use very crude methods of dealing with these factors and it is in their nature to not have much incentive to care about how it actually plays out in the quality of the products of individual companies, for reasons described above.
In, say, a planned economy, non-market factors can be taken into account through simple political directives and the state carrying the short term non-profitable costs of long term necessary investments or inhibitory regulation. But under a more and more financialized capitalism, no one’s really in the driver’s seat, leading us to where we find ourselves today. In my own home country, the socialist dictatorship of Sweden, one might expect the bureaucratic regulatory nightmare to be even worse for companies, but while there of course is regulation through law, these absurd point systems are more rare. This is because of the tripartite structure of state, employers and unions20 where the latter two take pride in regulating the labour market without government interference, with the state simply functioning as mediator between the two and only final arbiter when negotiations have come to a complete halt. The mad maze of HR horrors beyond human comprehension is in fact a very American phenomenon and is, ironically, rooted in pro-market policies, weak unions and strong, by the state unbound, business where businesses are left to their own devices to coordinate around efforts necessary to tackle non-market factors.
For a company like Hasbro, desperately in need of funds from actors like Blackrock, Vanguard and State Street, they are prepared to go quite a far way to push up ESG scores, rather than face bankruptcy. The company as a whole, but Wizards of the Coast as a subsidiary especially, don’t pose much of a threat to human rights and their carbon emissions (the big two of ESG issues) are nothing compared to car manufacturers or oil producers. This is good for Hasbro’s ESG score, of course, but it also leaves fewer possibilities for ESG pumping. One thing a company like WotC can do, and has done rather aggressively, is to push for DEI practices in hiring. Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are organizational frameworks that supposedly seek to promote the fair treatment and full participation of all people, particularly groups who have historically been underrepresented or subject to discrimination based on identity or disability. Most importantly, DEI is a tool to pump up one’s ESG score. This is, in fact, where the demand for woke professionals, i.e. cultural and sensitivity consultants, come from. That these people might develop into a more or less autonomous force once let over the doorstep of the company office building and that even management might develop a culture disconnected from concrete ESG demands over time is a case that has be presented sophisticatedly by various21 writers. Not many, however, seriously disputes that the cause for the dramatic rise in hiring of these kinds of people was in June 2020 with the Black Lives Matter movement hitting its zenith. The BLM zenith, it might be argued, didn’t raise the hiring rate of these people but in fact for the first time opened the floodgates to it.
Bridging the gap between general wokeness and woke D&D – the heralds of the Great Awokening
The wokes have since then used their position to do some cultural campaigning towards the fanbase from within the company and from a place of secure and comfortable employment. To understand the content of this cultural campaigning, one should look to the general theoretical frameworks shaping the BLM movement and then to the particular, more narrow elements of this framework that was suitable for the wokeification of D&D in the specific.
If the three founding members of BLM can be allowed to act as stand-ins for what is at least commonplace within the movement as a whole, one can distill some sort of ideology, theoretical framework or worldview. Cullors, Garza and Tometi have all in their books, on their websites and so on given expression to a mix of post-black nationalism, intersectional feminism, postmarxism and postcolonialism very typical for the modern progressive left. Typical, as the mix is not very coherent and terms are opportunistically borrowed to give a radical veneer to what is at the end of the day banal liberalism, at least on a policy level. Allusions to black nationalism, for example, are pretty hard to take seriously as self-determination for black people in this case hardly means the black belt of the United States seceding to form an independent nation. Neither does it mean independent black armed policing of black-majority living areas as per the Black Panthers model. For example, when Garza speaks of black self-determination in her autobiography it is in the context of cultural representation, not national sovereignty (making it fair to say, I feel, that the ideas are in fact post-national and not properly black nationalist). She frames it as what the Trump campaign of 2016 was a reaction to was “Black people demanding rights, respect, and self-determination” and the reaction expressing itself in Trump rhetorically leaning on supposedly hegemonic cultural tropes of black criminality.22 Her proposed counter-offensive to the reaction is to “subvert common ideas and compete with or replace them with new ideas that challenge so-called common sense” in a cultural struggle. There is a lot of talk of this cultural struggle being conducted through “popular mobilization” but whether the spontaneous protests in Ferguson or Minneapolis had the goal of creating an afro-latino Spider-Man or something else in mind is actually up for debate. It can be said with some certainty however that Marvel and DC Comics reimagining “the role of superhero to include characters who identified as LGBT, like Batwoman”, which Garza lauds as a victory in the cultural struggle, was not the product of some mass movement but of professional class activist wokescolding.
In an annoying way of emphasizing words through punctuation, which I can only assume is supposed to emulate beat poetry or something, Cullors describes an activist she watches a video of. “I think: I want to be like her. I want to challenge structural inequities. I want to build power. In this space, we grow. I grow. I transform. After camp ends, I join the Strategy Center and for a year they train me to be an organizer. I read, I study, adding Mao, Marx and Lenin to my knowledge of hooks, Lorde and Walker. I focus on young people and produce spoken-word events.” People familiar with a certain viral quote from Cullors about her being a “trained marxist” might here believe to have found a smoking gun proving she is a committed Marxist-Leninist in the traditional sense. There is, however, not a single reference to socialism or communism in Garzas or Cullors autobiographies other than in the context of Garza criticizing leftists for voting for Bernie Sanders when Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden have been much more viable candidates and in the context of Cullors referring to some high school programme she is running where students “study apartheid and communism in China”. Talk of colonialism, slavery etc. is of course mostly discussed in terms of cultural struggle and cultural representation.
Their post-black nationalism, postmarxism and postcolonialism serves simply to educate the majority population (blacks as well as whites) that they are conditioned in a culture and ideological consciousness that is built on all sorts of oppression and wickedness and that cultural struggle to subvert common sense, which in practice of course must be primarily waged or at least lead by pseudo-political beat poets like Cullors and Garza, is the necessary solution. Say what you will about marxism, but at least historically its popular appeal was not based on this priestly model but on a mutually reinforcing model of patronage between mass and party. Party/union dues and votes go in, higher wages, a more generous welfare state and increased working class influence over industrial production come out. Neither was Garveyan black nationalism a movement of a few professional activists placing out signs in shop windows (The Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League had 6 million members at its’ peak), nor was anti-colonial movements anything less than armed mass movements which when successful lead to entirely new nation states being formed. Just to drive the point home even further, when Garza describes her relationship to Marx and marxism (mentioned exactly two times in the entire book) she recalls how it was all completely uninteresting to her until she realized that non-white people in other countries than her own had taken a liking to it. When she later on in the book tries to distill some sort of essence of marxist theory and method, she of course does not elaborate on the Moor himself, but on Gramsci. Antonio Gramsci, member of the Italian Communist Party and political prisoner in Benito Mussolini's Italy, is perhaps the most mistreated figure in all of marxism. Due to him having to write vaguely and suggestively because of prison censorship, his writing came out rather poetically and beautifully but also with the possibility for anyone trying to grab some of the radical prestige of marxism for themselves without actually having to deal with the materialist implications of the theory to do so. Garza writes:
“Gramsci is best known for his theories of cultural hegemony, a fancy term for how the state and ruling class instill values that are gradually accepted as “common sense”—in other words, what we consider to be normal or the status quo. Gramsci studied how people come to consent to the status quo. According to Gramsci, there are two ways that the state can persuade its subjects to do what it wants: through force and violence, or through consent. While the state does not hesitate to use force in pursuit of its agenda, it also knows that force is not a sustainable option for getting its subjects to do its will. Instead, the state relies on consent to move its agenda, and the state manufactures consent through hegemony, or through making its values, rules, and logic the “common sense” of the masses. In that way, individuals willingly go along with the state’s program rather than having to be coerced through violence and force.”
And what is the hegemony of the modern day USA? It is according to Garza “white, male, Christian, and heterosexual.” Not capitalist, bourgeois or liberal. The pressing issue is not the suppression of trade union rights, the lack of democratic control of industry leading to offshoring, backbreaking working conditions without compensation through subsidized healthcare expression. The pressing issue is hate crimes towards black transgender people, about 0.1% of the US population.
The reason I have yet to bring up intersectional feminism, the one constituent of the BLM founders worldview not accompanied by the “post” prefix, is that it is the one somewhat coherent standpoint they take. Intersectionality as an analytic framework in turn takes its theoretical standpoint in standpoint theory. Standpoint theory is, in short, a (supposedly) scientific theory of knowledge (or epistemology) claiming that the social categories outside of what Garza describes as hegemonic have a particular point of view allowing them to better, or exclusively, understand certain facts about their own marginalization. These categories are in this sense awake, or “woke”, to perceive the hegemony from the outside.
The idea in its feminist context was developed by Kimberlé Crenshaw, the founder of the term “intersectionality”, Patricia Hill Collins, the main expounder of the idea, and Angela Davies – the foremost popularizer in left-wing circles of the idea. In a limited sense this could of course be reasonable, but it rarely takes limited or reasonable expressions. Critics often point out that intersectionality, and its’ political expression in identity politics, distracts from more pressing issues of economic inequality and dismantling of organized labor by dividing people in a sort of “oppression Olympics” where the most marginalized hold the highest status and the supposedly less marginalized do not have the right to speak on as many issues as their betters/lessers. Such a critic was Bernie Sanders, who proved himself right by letting himself be politically blackmailed by identitarians until he “obviously changed” in regards to these issues, as expressed by a leading proponent of identity politics who with this change decided to support him. All this is really just to say that different forms of identity politics and the different modern academic expressions of standpoint theory are pretty intellectually uninteresting but all have something in common – they started to arise, at least in the US, with the rise of the New Left who either through Maoist third-worldist, Marcusian CIA-sponsored cultural criticist, Foucauldian discourse analytical, intersectionalist, Gramscian and Fanonian nationalist/socialist or Saidian literary postcolonialist premises all condemned the domestic US working class. The working class had up to that point been the basis for all American socialist politics, but now whichever minority or “marginalized” group one could claim had an unarguable moral high ground but who were still too weak to speak for themselves, needing intellectuals to speak for them, was embraced in their stead. One is tempted to say that all these disparate theoretical frameworks leading to the same method and goals without any overt orchestration speaks for this not being the result of some well thought out plan but of a parasitic class spontaneously looking for a new host body to replace the once much stronger, but on the other hand historically much more recalcitrant, decaying husk of organized labour.
To finally move on to the expression this takes in the context of D&D, we must keep in consideration that the upheld standpoint by the wokes in this context has very little to do with immediate US politics or with American society in general. Sure, when they’re feeling confident they can make self-incriminating statements like ”Orcs are obviously supposed to be American black people” but what we mostly deal with here is the upholding of the standpoint of pre-modern, non-European civilizations. This makes postcolonialism the most relevant expression of standpoint theory for D&D, developed in its’ modern form by the literary critic Edward Said and, perhaps not intentionally, founded by the political philosopher and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, a quote from whom Garza opens the first chapter of her autobiography with. Other expressions of the theory are worth mentioning to illustrate its’ overall influence but, as I will argue, studying the postcolonial premises of the sensitivity readers, cultural consultants and so on of WotC is very revealing of not only how these people view western depictions of the historical west but also how they view the wests romantic depictions of itself and its history and mythology, this depiction being the core of what the fantasy genre is. It is not merely this line of reasoning that determines postcolonialism as the relevant expression of wokeness (identity politics and standpoint theory, praxis and theory, united as a social phenomena), but more importantly what the woke professionals inside of and orbiting around WotC themselves proclaim as their worldview. General standpoint theoretical premises are probably to no one’s surprise easy to point too, but the specifically postcolonial influence is more explicit than one might think.
Woke D&D in particular
To get a fair view of what the woke D&D phenomenon actually is, it is appropriate to examine the worldview, ideology or theoretical outlook of the consultants being hired after the statement made on June 1, 2020, and after the death of George Floyd, who were meant to remedy the many supposed insensitivities in the company’s products. As the stated method was to establish “inclusivity reviews” where products were to be reviewed by “multiple outside consultants” I initially tried to find some organ of the company called something like “the review board”, but to no avail. What the “inclusivity reviews” were to become seems to have been the many cultural and sensitivity (1) consultants credited in WotC’s post-2020 products and who were hired with the explicit purpose of utilizing their professional woke skillset23 in the development of the products. It is therefore appropriate to examine these specific credited individuals. Furthermore, although not explicitly stated to be a remedy to racial or other insensitivities, some (2) writers who are not cultural/sensitivity consultants, in these products are clearly also of the more woke variety and the hiring of these particular individuals, it would be reasonable to believe, was probably motivated at least partly by the same impulses as the one’s leading up to the establishment of the “inclusivity reviews”. Therefore some writers could be considered as woke hires24 even though it can not be proven that they were hired for the exclusive purpose of cultural or sensitivity consultation. I will try and limit the examination of these people to the ones who themselves market their professional woke skillset or have an obvious career in selling wokeness. Lastly, certain individuals of the company who are not consultants or writers but (3) managers25 are in charge of leading the inclusivity and sensitivity work and will be worth taking a look at, especially when no consultants are credited in the products.
Looking through the credits of every single D&D book of the 26 released after June 1 2020, I found that 22 of them can reasonably be considered to have been under the influence of the inclusivity review regime founded but not fully established in June 2020. Out of these 20, 13 have credited cultural and sensitivity (1) consultants or simply “consultants”. I’ve documented my method and results in Appendix C for anyone who wants a comprehensive look at the inclusivity review regime's influence in all these products, but for the flow of this text we’ll have to limit ourselves here. To get a picture of what kind of people we’re dealing with, let’s go through some examples of the (2) writers who are not credited as cultural or sensitivity consultants in the 7 products without credited cultural and sensitivity consultants. For example:
“Candlekeep Mysteries” (16 March, 2021) has no credited consultants but is nevertheless the home of professional “consultant” and “disability advocate” Jennifer Kretchmers’ wheelchair accessible dungeon, a dungeon and adventure which was explicitly marketed on woke grounds, as described in the introduction of this article. It is also the home of contributions by writers such as Graeme Barber who describes himself as “a lapsed academic” known for texts criticizing “colonial perspectives” in D&D products (and to a lesser degree known for his NATO deployments to Bosnia and Afghanistan, a true anti-colonial effort!), so much so that he distanced himself from his own contribution to Candlekeep due to “Colonialist language and imagery around the Grippli[, a race of frog people,] was inserted [in the final product] as well, moving them from being simple and utilitarian with obvious culture and technology to being ‘primitives’ who ‘primitively decorate’ their thatched huts with crab bits.” We also have Daniel Kwan, famous for so effectively criticizing the AD&D 1E Oriental Adventures book still being sold online, even though it was supposedly an orientalist (a negative term in the post-colonial sense, se the seminal postcolonial work “Orientalism”, by Edward Said) book, that it resulted in WotC adding disclaimers to all of their old PDF products and Kwan earning an award. I could go on, but I think this is enough to prove that even when the explicit wokeness is not obvious at a quick glance, looking for it in writers and designers is like trying to hit the broadside of a barn.
Also worth mentioning is that behind the scenes, Jontelle Leyson-Smith was hired as the companies first ever Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in as early as December 2020, according to her LinkedIn (while it was officially announced on February 2, 2021). With this position filled, we can perhaps assume the inclusivity review regime to be ever present, even in addition to or in the absence of credited cultural or sensitivity consultants or other details revealing an inclusivity review having been implemented. Leyson-Smith quit her position in January 2024, but as Sameer Joseph (also a credited cultural/sensitivity consultant who we will be returning to below) was hired as “Associate Project Manager DE&I, Philanthropy, and Employee Experience” in July 2023 and still holds this position which entails being a product reviewer in relation to DEI, maintaining and enforcing the inclusion review process and being an “employee resource group advocate” (whatever that last one means) it is clear these woke (3) managerial roles exist and rule over the inclusivity review regime as a whole. These two are people appearing in news, company statements and who have open LinkedIn profiles and there might be more people like them at the company. These people are not very public about their theoretical outlook or worldview, but we can rely on the general spirit of the review process, as described by Teos Abadía above, to get an idea of what woke commissars like Leyson-Smith and Joseph se as their mission: “decolonizing games”, in Abadías words.
“Enough pussyfooting around!”, you say. “We were promised consultants, give us their names!” Calm yourselves, oh virtuous readers! Go to Appendix C and you shall find bloody judgement over your enemies. But for those of you not quite thirsting for a hailstorm of blood, it is perhaps suffice to say at this point that I found that out of the 17 cultural and sensitivity consultants, 17 of them had some connection to standpoint theory/wokeness through if nothing else the linguo they on their LinkedIn or personal websites used to market their services, 8 were clearly academically trained in the postcolonial tradition and implement it as a professional skill set for their consultant work and 4 were vaguely postcolonial in that their linguo clearly has its roots in postcolonialism even if they aren’t aware of that themselves. The 17 consultants aren’t actually all the consultants as I’ve had to limit myself to the consultants appearing in non-core rulebooks (some of the consultants appearing in the non-core books also appear in the core books, however, and they are all explicitly postcolonial). There are 48 consultants listed in the core books and even though I’ve already researched 22 consultants (only 17 of which are woke) for the non-core releases from after June 2020, I feel that 48 is a bit much even for me. I could go through my reasoning about that here, but for the sake of “brevity”, let us instead just remind ourselves Appendix C and of Teos Abadías detailing of the sensitivity and inclusivity changes from what core rulebooks for 5th edition D&D were like when they were released in 2014 to how they appeared to him in november 2023 in the mobile app for the game. Just like the theoretical outlook of the 17 woke consultants, the changes were in part generically woke, but decisively postcolonial in character.
Conclusions
This is where I should be nuanced and say that the reason these people became so influential is multifaceted. Sure, there’s not one single conscious person or even one single social force behind all this and it took many factors to be aligned in certain way for the series of events playing out in the way they did that lead us up to this point. But supposed “nuance” in these types of situations can often be veiled cowardice before sticking one's neck out when trying to be honest about how one connects the facts. To put it like this: the push for wokeness in D&Ds creative process could have come from below (the consumers), from the side (the consultants, by their own force elbowing their way into the creative process) or from above (capital).
In regards to consumers: there has been a rise of woke nerds in the hobby, since maybe the early 00’s or 90’s, but it has never been proven that these people are representative of the hobby. In “outrages” like the supposed one from Magic: The Gathering’s “Black and Brown community” it has just been taken for granted by the media that these “outrages” are an organic expression of the player and customer base. The woke nerd, let’s say “the Tumblr-nerd”, is very vocal and prevalent on social media and in games journalism, but they’ve never been proven to be representative of the hobby itself and when trying to estimate it myself, I’ve never been convinced that they are.26 To reiterate a point from earlier in the article: Most people who play these games are not members of a “fan community” but engage with the hobby through a small circle of friends, sometimes through hanging out in stores or gaming locales, without partaking in forum, Twitter or Tumblr debates and without attending conventions.
If I’m still wrong about all this, I find it curious that the supposed demands of this great popular uproar were met only at least 20 years after the Tumblr-nerd became a thing. The thing is, most players just don’t care very much. This might be bad news for the Tumblr-nerds natural enemy in the hobby – the Gamergater, or 4chan-populist to coin a term, who might be very but isn’t necessarily at all conservative, but always anti-woke. But none of these people I would say are very representative of the majority of players and the forces of narrative and aesthetic apathy among players is too strong. This makes sense in regard to a card game where aesthetic and narrative elements have always been a secondary concern and in a roleplaying game you mostly play inside of your own head and where the players own imagination is allowed to run wild. This lack of consumer demand for a radical change in either direction might be the reason both for why the most niche tastes of the Tumblr-nerds weren’t catered to since entering “the scene” about at least 20 years ago to up until 2020 as well as for why they’re so unproportionately catered to, by the consultants of the new inclusivity review regime, since after the 2020-shift.
The consultants, on their part, have existed as aspiring woke consultants trying to dethrone non-woke ones since at least the mid-2014 D&D controversy of #Consultantgate,27 amazingly so named about only a month before the coining of the term and hashtag #Gamergate.28 In the next article, I’ll go into #Consultantgate in more depth but here it is suffice to say that the woke consultants managed to dethrone some of the non-woke ones in 2019 as one Zak S early on in that year was publicly accused of sexual misconduct by his former partners. Whether he’s guilty or not, I have no idea. It’s clear however that rather than deal with the headache of dealing with criticism of having hired him in the first place and of dealing with potential retorts by Zak, WotC decided to remove all special mentions of consultants altogether, including some who had been feuding with the wokes during #Consultantgate but had nothing to do with Zak S’ sexual relationships. But even though these guys were dethroned, the wokes we not placed on the throne in their stead. There was no demand for it, from WotC or from the fans. It wasn’t until the corporate panic of 2020 that these people started to be hired en masse.
This brings us finally to capital. The segment of consumers we call Tumblr-nerds acted as little more than shills for when the woke consultants finally triumphed but it was capital which placed the crown on their brow from above. What has been described as an outrage from “black and brown” or other “communities” is a completely astroturfed phenomenon and the woke consultants have proved time and time again that they are utterly powerless in themselves. The consultants had successfully fought a war of position for years long before 2020 so that their ideology would become hegemonic within D&D at a future date when capital would allow a war of manœuvre. The needs of capital have reigned supreme during this process and the minute details of how the woke consultants fulfilled these needs is not necessary to understand the general power structure behind it all. The minute details of their wokeness are, however, important on a cultural level to understand what they actually believe, why they produce the products they produce and to predict how their cultural output might develop and how to best criticize it.
Modern D&D is not only woke, it is deeply postcolonial. This, I believe, is proven by my reasoning above and the evidence presented in Appendix C. More than half of the consultants under the new inclusivity review regime are academically trained in postcolonial thinking, most of them seem to be consciously influenced by postcolonial thinking and, I think it could be argued, all of them, as evidenced by their jargon, references and education backgrounds, are shaped by a postcolonial way of thinking even if they’re unaware of it themselves.
But what is postcolonialism, really? What are its consequences for fantasy roleplaying and why does it matter? In the next article, I will do a deepdive into postcolonial theory and its mutations over the years and argue that this is important to understand if one wants to offer a different design and narrative philosophy for the hobby. I will deal with some of the existing critiques of woke D&D, many of which have inspired me to write this article and to many of whom I am indebted to, and argue that they misunderstand the wokes. The wokes are in many ways empirically correct about the history and origins of fantasy and fantasy roleplaying but they have theoretically turned things on its head. What is needed is to turn them onto their feet.
This statement is actually from June 2, not 1, but still seems to be the statement referred to in the Wikipedia article.
Decoloniality is basically not at all distinct from postcolonialism when it comes to general frame of analysis. It mainly differs in that decolonialitiy’s object of analysis is first and foremost the relationship between pre-colonial and colonial America and in that decoloniality usually makes direct political claims about having to culturally or psychologically “decolonize” this or that. The general discursive and historical method used by Edward Said, in his seminal postcolonial work Orientalism, to identify cultural and psychological colonialism remains, however, as does the psychological elements of Fanon as presented in his “The Wretched of the Earth” and “Black Skins, White Masks”. I bring up the distinction just to make clear that whenever decoloniality and not postcolonialism is used as a term, they should be considered to be interchangeable terms in regards to theoretical basis.
According to the ABC News connected website “FiveThirtyEight” which focuses on opinion poll analysis, politics and economics, an ascendant idea on the american left in 2021 (the year after the George Floyd riots and protests) was that “People of color in America suffer from not only individualized and overt acts of racism (someone uses a racial slur, for example) but a broader “systemic” and “institutional” racism.”
FiveThrityEight reports on these ideas in the context of the rise of the term “woke”. Woke attitudes influential in mainstream politics yet controversial among large groups of americans could be summarized as the beliefs that white Americans experience white privilege (systemic/institutional or informal premiering of white people, regardless of class position, in all forms of public life), that minorities, especially blacks, deserve economic or a vaguer form of cultural compensation from white people (irregardless of a white persons current or historic class position), that individuals (under the label of “trans”, “non-binary”, “agender” or some other such label) should be able to identify with any gender or none irregardless of their actual biological gender without having to experience any form of objections from people or public agencies who disagree and that there still is a patriarchy, if not formally, then informally (or “systemically and institutionally”), in the sense of men having an exclusive right to dominance in the public sphere while (at least married) women are informally bound to the home. More fringe woke beliefs could be described as championing the idea that obese people deserve the same right not to be questioned as the woke milieu wants for the non-binary crowd and that disabilities are only disabilities in the discursive sense and any practical implications of a supposed disability are due to, you guessed it, systemic/institutional or informal discrimination. The relevance of these more fringe ideas can be debated, it is however the case that the perception that these ideas are normal within the “far left” has gained some traction. Some of these beliefs can be described as a new unpopular framing of old racial, gender and sex related grievances that were considered far more legitimate in the older framing which included less esoteric language coming out of the college system and which placed less of a burden on the shoulders of Joe Sixpack.
“CRT or wokeness is not the name of some discrete set of ideas or a coherent ideology as much as it is a language or toolset one can use to compete against other people by means of a form of ritualized social combat.” https://tinkzorg.wordpress.com/2021/07/09/send-them-back-your-fierce-defiance-stamp-upon-the-cursed-alliance/
Kyeyeune describes this group as professional and/or managerial, I would however argue that most of these people are strictly professional class and most times not managerial. The professional class is defined by their training and education, typically business qualifications and university degrees, with occupations thought to offer influence on society that would otherwise be available only to capital owners. The professional skill set of the professional might be of technical-practical use or wholly ideological but the proof is in the pudding whether these skills actually allow them influence over the public and private sector without being actual owners of capital but employed as wage earners. Managers are defined by their delegated powers from the owner of an organization and are employed by that organization without being owners. What separates managers from, say, foremen is that a manager may fire and hire and has influence over the strategic decisions of the organization. Most managers are also professionals (making them the “professional-managerial class (PMC)) but most professionals are not managers. I write this little footnote on social theory and definitions to make clear my own position without slowing down the text and because I believe that at least in the context of woke D&D, the non-managerial professionals dominate as pushers of woke ideology.
Some would argue that “The Great Awokening” began around 2010 but this is more in relation to woke perspectives gaining influence within the american university system. The 2014 Ferguson protests and riots are usually agreed upon to be the “Great Awokening” event itself, with events leading up to it starting as far back as about 2012 with the shooting of Trayvon Martin.
It is hard to date what exact dates these three individuals were employed by what organization but it is clear they were all moving between jobs in that world in 2012 as well as around the time the hashtag took off in the time around the 2014 Ferguson protests. In this 2015 article their employments are made clear and from context seems to have been their employments in 2012 as well: “Garza is special projects director for the National Domestic Workers Alliance, which fights for labor protections for nannies, housekeepers, caregivers and other domestic workers. Cullors is executive director of the Coalition to End Sheriff Violence in L.A. Jails. And immigrant rights activist Opal Tometi runs the Black Alliance for Just Immigration.”
After the announcement of the PAC on October 9th in 2020 BLMGN started funding Democratic party policital candidates, forming corporate partnerships, adding a third organizing arm and demanding an audience with President-elect Joe Biden and power was centralized around Cullors as “exectuive director”. This was to the dismay of some members and after the fact that Garza had left the organization in 2017 and Tometi in at some unspecified date around that time. Cullors left the organization in 2021 after she was criticized by both right wing media and others in the BLM movement for what many saw as mismanagement of funds after it became public that the Black Lives Matter Global Network foundation spent $6 million to purchase a property that included a mansion using funds that were donated in response to the murder of George Floyd. She later said she used the property for private events twice. She now focuses on her work as an artist. Garza seems to be working as a writer and podcaster these days while still dabbling in professional activism, while for Tometi, professional activism (or rather “social entrepreneurship”) seems to be the full-time gig.
The BLM Funding Database is tied to the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank, and their methods have been criticized. The criticism is based on Claremont lumping together all kinds of organizations whose relationship to one another and to the BLM cause are unclear. Limiting the recipients in the database to "BLM, BLM Foundation, BLM Global Network Foundation, BLM Greater New York, BLM Los Angeles, BLM Louisville, BLM OKC, BLM Toronto" (organizations explicitly tied to BLM), however, gives a figure of 1.37B$.
For all the talk of a “community” giving backlash, pretty much the only cited evidence of this in articles documenting the event are open letters written by Magic player Lawrence Harmon and former contributing editor, then editor-in-chief for major Magic: The Gathering, Zaiem Beg and the twitter reactions the document in these letters. Harmon ends his letter urging WotC to make more diversity hires and establish more diversity quotas for Magic: The Gathering tournaments while the “community” reactions to people pointing out supposed racism in the game is actually mocked in the examples he gives in his own letter. Beg’s letter mentions several vague cases of supposedly racist workplace culture at WotC but never specifies when or who was involved. He ties it all together in the end saying “You can print all the Teferis and Saheelis and Chandras [Magic cards with non-white representation] you want, but it doesn't make you racially inclusive when the people profiting off it all are almost exclusively white. And people of color can't get in on it even when they try.” For a comprehensive list detailing who the people authoring these letters and the people mentioned in them supposedly making up the “community”, see Appendix B.
A card game and another product released by Wizards of the Coast with no relation to D&D other than both being fantasy games.
The Open Game License, the open contract Wizards of the Coast requires all third-party publishers to consent to in order to publish homebrew content – without the OGL, players would be unable to legally publish Dungeons and Dragons homebrew–even for free.
Linda Codega, writing for Io9, reported on the details from a leaked full copy of the OGL 1.1 on January 5, 2023. Codega said: "every single licensed publisher will be affected by the new agreement (…) The main takeaway from the leaked OGL 1.1 draft document is that WotC is keeping power close at hand." ICv2 commented the leaked OGL had several controversial parts. Following this leak, numerous news-and-industry-focused outlets reported on negative reactions from fans and professional content creators. TheStreet, one such outlet, claimed WotC had united its player base against it. Both TheStreet and Io9 noted the movement to boycott D&D Beyond and mass subscription cancellations; Io9 stated the "immediate financial consequences" forced a response by WotC. Io9 also reported WotC's internal messaging on the response to the leak was this was a fan overreaction. In the following weeks, WotC reversed some changes to the OGL as a concession to critcism and solicited public feedback but they didn’t overall change course from a less generous license. As things stand now:
OGL 1.0 is no longer binding: Publishers operating under the existing OGL may have to overhaul their products and distribution and must sign the updated OGL 2.0 document in order to continue publishing D&D materials.
Declaring revenue: Publishers making over $50K a year in revenue will now be required to report their earnings to Wizards of the Coast.
Registration required: Publishers will have to register all new products with Wizards of the Coast, regardless of how much revenue they’ve generated or whether the products are free or paid.
Royalties must be paid: Publishers generating over $750K in revenue will now have to pay royalties (although this likely impacts only a relatively small number of publishers).
Non-commercial publishers must sign: All publishers must now sign the OGL 2.0, even if they’re offering content for free.
Licensed vs non-Licensed: Publisher will need to clearly and deliberately distinguish their content from existing licensed content (either through the use of font colors or an index)
Termination with 30 days notice: Wizards of the Coast can modify or terminate the OGL 2.0 agreement for any reason whatsoever and is required to give only 30 days notice.
Wizards of the Coast retains rights: Wizards of the Coast will still retain the right to use any content that licensees create, whether it’s for commercial or non-commercial purposes.
WotC are arguing that its only goal in revising OGL was to protect players from "hateful and discriminatory products”.
Edwin Evans-Thirlwell of The Washington Post wrote about this controversy that the company "appears to have committed an irreversible act of self-sabotage in trying to replace [the OGL]—squandering the prestige accumulated over 20 years in a matter of weeks".
Alan G. Hassenfeld is a member of the Hassenfeld family, the founders of Hasbro, and is what is called an insider and legacy investor. DLE Inc. is a subsidiary of Asahi Broadcasting Corporation, a broadcasting holding company. Other than them, all other main shareholders are what are called institutional investors, with the Capital Group being an active institutional investor while the others are passive ones.. Below State Street and DLE in the two tables are small shareholders who hold less than 1% each. These are so many and so small that they are practically impossible to organize into one voice and as such hold no practical influence over the direction of the company.
More concretely, these contributions are made up of private employers withholding pay from employees (as usually regulated by collective bargaining agreement or law) and putting it into insurance and pensions or state capitalist enterprises such as state owned companies selling oil or other natural resources some of the profits of which they put in sovereign wealth funds. All wealth derives from labour, but these non-economic and judicial means of extracting additional value from the workingman has rubbed a lot of people the wrong way.
Me saying that might sound a bit naive in the sense that I might be perceived to believe that giant pension fund management and state investors act out of the goodness of their heart. This is not the case. The case is rather that they (1) do have some kind of interest in not entirely wrecking the societies which they want to govern, (2) do not want to cause diplomatic scandals with other actors, (3) for legitimacy reasons do not want to be perceived as completely amoral and (4) for ideological-psychological reasons want a story to tell themselves about what they are doing. At first glance, the robotic nature of passive investing is much more ill-suited for this task than great humanitarians such as Warren Buffet and George Soros, but this is where ESG comes in.
“Compliance had a rational basis: engage in (or appear to engage in) affirmative action to avoid legal trouble. Diversity’s rational basis—to compete in an ever more diverse economy—appears to be a mirage. Instead, diversity seems to have survived because corporations have been unwilling to drop an entrenched practice even after justification for its original purpose receded. Diversity was a norm that had become, by the 1990s, “institutionalized.”” https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-genealogy-of-woke-capital
In the year 2020, WotC had around 1000+ employees (according to Wikipedia) and Hasbro 6,822 (according to macrotrends.net). After the layoffs, Hasbro’s number of employees was down to 4,985 in 2024. All I’ve managed to find on WotC layoffs is that around 30 individuals of the staff of Sigil, their project of trying to get people to play D&D digitally, have been laid off, leaving 10% of the staff (so ~3 people). All of this is just to say that Hasbros cuts probably didn’t find much meat on WotC bones and these WotC layoffs probably contributed microscopically to restoring profits. Of the core D&D products we know precious little about revenue, but combining the estimates of Teos Abadía with reporting on Hasbros and WotC’s total revenue in the year 2023, we can in turn estimate that D&D digital and printed products account for about 18% of WotC total revenue and about 5% of Hasbro's total revenue. If we only look at Abadías estimates for printed products, they make up about 9% of WotC total revenue and about 3% of Hasbro's total revenue. It’s hard to say just how profitable Dungeons & Dragons books, printed and digital, are for WotC and Hasbro but to answer the question of how profitable they are on a general level – not very. So what is the potentially least profitable WotC line of products to do to generate income? Why, pump ESG scores of course.
Up until the crisis of the 90s the unions were comparable in strength to organized business but are now severely weakened, even though they are still among the strongest in the western world.
“Indeed, Bloomberg Businessweek recently revealed that the largest for‑profit accreditation company of corporate environmental and social responsibility, MSCI, does not actually measure a corporation’s impact on society or the environment, but rather assesses how companies are reducing regulatory and brand risks for their shareholders. New York University finance professor Aswath Damodaran recently lamented that the ESG ecosystem is merely a “gravy train” for consultants, ESG fund managers, and investment marketers, leading to little social benefit for stakeholders outside of the self-serving circle of the ESG industry. Former Facebook executive, SPAC promoter, and Social Capital founder Chamath Palihapitiya has made an even bolder statement that ESG funds and evaluation agencies like MSCI are fraudulent products. He argues that these groups use the veneer of social and environmental responsibility to reduce regulatory oversight for multinational behemoths while allowing them to apply for negative interest rate loans from central banks. From Palihapitiya’s perspective as a venture investor, these “green washed” and “social washed” funds attract investment away from actual businesses that are addressing social and ecological challenges more fundamentally in their business models.” https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2022/02/society-inc/
Anyone barely plugged in to mainstream Hollywood movies, major television and streaming series and so on might question whether black people being depicted as violent criminals is now the norm.
Or who “offer professional intermediation in the companies previously independent social and economic processes” to keep with the more specific definition offered above.
That is, not diversity hires, but hires meant to enforce woke ideology, which they are capable to do due to their specific professional skill set.
It might here be appropriate to reiterate some class definitions. The professional class is defined by their training and education, typically business qualifications and university degrees, with occupations thought to offer influence on society that would otherwise be available only to capital owners. The professional skill set of the professional might be of technical-practical use or wholly ideological but the proof is in the pudding whether these skills actually allow them influence over the public or private sector without being actual owners of capital but employed as wage earners. Managers are defined by their delegated powers from the owner of an organization and are employed by that organization without being owners. What separates managers from, say, foremen is that a manager may fire and hire and has influence over the strategic decisions of the organization. Most managers are also professionals (making them the “professional-managerial class (PMC)) but most professionals are not managers. The writers and consultants here mentioned should be considered as two occupational groups of the same professional class, while the managers (in their individual occupations some times referred to as “directors” etc. but with no practical distinction from being just another manager) are of course of the managerial class.
Angela Nagle in her book “Kill All Normies” describes the “Tumblr-liberals”. As Nagle puts it, “the preoccupation of this subculture was [and is] gender fluidity and providing a “safe space” to explore other concerns like mental ill-health, physical disability, race, cultural identity and ‘intersectionality’ – the now standard academic term for recognition of multiple varieties of intersecting marginalizations and oppressions.” This is basically the same thing as the “social justice warrior” (SJW) phenomenon which overlaps with what is nowadays called “wokeness”. The term “Tumblr-liberalism”, however, highlights pretty well a segment of these phenomena forming a subculture around video games, fantasy and sci-fi shows, movies, comics and literature and of course also tabletop roleplaying games. They mostly grew out of websites such as Tumblr and on previous platforms like LiveJournal and on a mixture of social media. Tumblr-liberalism of course didn’t settle for the creation of safe spaces for concerns like mental ill-health, race, identity and so on just Tumblr and the like but wanted the products they consumed to be “safe” in this sense as well.
The rise of Tumblr-liberals, or just of Tumblr-nerds, in nerdom is hard to measure in general but even more so for the even more niche hobby of tabletop roleplaying games and D&D. The rise of women in D&D is however a good proxy to measure the rise of Tumblr-nerds. Not because all anti-woke people in these hobbies are men (or necessarily white and heterosexual or even conservative, far from it) but because, I admit based on anecdotal evidence, my own experiences in the roleplaying hobby and the fact that wokeness in the hobby so explicitly tries to appeal to women, the vast majority of woke people in the roleplaying game hobby are (young) women. To be clear, woman does not equal woke here but the rise of women in the hobby seems to have created at first a potential for and then a realized base for wokeness in the hobby. Correlation but not causality.
When roleplaying games got going in the 70s Gary Gygax (the game’s founder) optimistically estimated women making up 10% of the player base while in reality it was probably much lower than that. Over the years, there’s been a dramatic increase of women in the hobby with a doubling of their ranks from around the 90s to women making up about 35-40% of female players since around 2010. Tumblr nerds have been something I was aware of myself since at least 20 years ago# and they were always considered a more fringe element in the hobby. When I go to hobby stores or gaming locales today, it’s still always men in there to a degree of about 80-90% in the former case and maybe 60-70% in the latter. From all the people in the hobby I’ve talked to over the last few years who I don’t personally know, I can recall only two people (both women) being clearly woke. Were I an American, I would expect I would’ve been able to recall more of them.
Sometimes called #Consultancygate.
The earliest tweet I’ve found still up that uses the #consultantgate hashtag is this one: https://x.com/wylfing/status/495301271729885184 . "#GamerGate" was coined by the actor Adam Baldwin on August 27, 2014.