Ex-Blizzard developer Mark Kern is at the forefront of shooting down the woke agenda and bringing sanity back to videogames.
For the better part of a decade – if not longer – so-called nerd media has been under assault from within its own walls.
Wokeness, DEI, and HR run amok have irreparably destroyed far too many franchises to count. But with a right-wing vibe shift occurring throughout the civilized world, a change is coming, and one former developer from the once-beloved gaming titan Blizzard should get his dues for risking it all to lead the charge.
Before the culture war dominated so much of our lives, Mark Kern, aka Grummz, was already an important figure within the realm of gaming. Consider him the Greek God of the sky, for he raised multiple titans. As a producer, he helped bring Starcraft and Diablo IIto life, but more impressively he was the team lead on the global MMO powerhouse World of Warcraft.
With his contributions to those titles, he forever altered the gaming landscape. Not content to settle and simply end things there, he eventually began a crusade – not just to alter it a second time, but to save it from the clutches of left-wing demagogues intent on destroying the hobby for their own activist agendas.
For those not personally entwined with the hobby, it’s hard to fully convey just how far gaming has crashed throughout the 2010s and ‘20s, but one need only look at big-budget Western games to see how devastatingly it has rotted.
Military shooters like Call of Duty proudly feature trans flags and other gender-bending propaganda, while in far too many games to count, female characters are intentionally made ugly – spitting in the faces of real women, as the character models bear little resemblance to the actresses used as their base.
Consultancy groups like Sweet Baby Inc. are brought in to dictate changes in the name of inclusivity, and if that weren’t bad enough, left-wing preaching permeates nearly everything. Fun and meaningful gameplay have been thrown aside to cater to those who don’t even enjoy games in the first place.
Throughout the industry, most game developers are afraid to speak up, lest they be ostracized, forcefully silenced as gaming turns into a slurry of social justice agitprop. So it’s all the more meaningful that, at a time when doing so was nearly social suicide, Mark Kern risked his reputation and career to stand up to the mob.
Over the past several years, he has gone all in on fighting back, spending hours on social media calling out injustice and inadequacies where he sees fit. In doing so, he has caused a number of woke games to financially stumble or fail, while also helping titles untainted by DEI – like Black Myth: Wukong and Stellar Blade – find massive success.
None of this has been taken lightly by the opposition. He has survived endless attempts at cancellation and doxxing. The replies to his posts are often filled with death threats or wishes for grievous bodily harm. Detractors giddily share GIFs of him being beaten with hammers. His name is constantly smeared, and even his role in delivering Blizzard’s greatest hits is questioned.
All that is just par for the course for anyone who loudly and proudly goes against the “tolerant” left – which is all the more reason to commend him, because he has stood firm.
It’s a massive gamble that is now paying dividends. Elon Musk retweets him often enough, helping spread his message to an even wider audience, which is only serving to unify a growing army of distraught gamers. They are now taking back the medium – but perhaps more importantly, they are fighting back against runaway leftism.
The 2014 Gamergate scandal was already one of the original MAGA battlegrounds, but back then, the right wasn’t fully united. By 2025, however, the story is vastly different. Diversity, equity, and inclusion are being rejected by the masses, and now government institutions and entertainment mediums are being reclaimed for the land of the sane.
There’s no doubt a lot of people deserve thanks for putting us on track toward stability and no one person can take all the credit, but Kern still deserves his dues as a commander in the culture war.
That’s not to say everything about him is perfect. Post-Blizzard, his game development track record isn’t as strong, and sometimes he posts things that are a bit too cringeworthy. But that doesn’t diminish the strides he has made.
He may be an imperfect messenger, but his voice is still one the world needs to hear.
Wokeness may be on the back foot, but it’s not completely down and out. People like Kern may be the ones to finally land a knockout punch.
As Musk loves to proclaim, “DEI kills art,” and Grummz is how we bring it back to life.
By a high-profile games journalist who wishes to remain anonymous.
For those genuinely curious, Gamergate had very little to do with “toxic males” wanting to keep girls out of their video games (as the MSM to this day repeatedly lie about).
Gamers were simply the first people to notice mainstream media (in their specific case, GAMING media) was corrupt to its core and that establishment journalists were filled with bias, arrogance and treachery.
The “misogynistic, toxic male” angle stemmed from a bunch of gamers discovering that a certain female game developer (I won’t name her here) was essentially paying journalists sexual favours in exchange for positive reviews of her lacklustre game. Because the gamers (or “autists” as they like to refer to themselves) hacked into personal messages etc to prove it, they were accused of “targeted harassment” and the greater mainstream media swooped in and ran cover for their gaming journo friends, which led many people to go, “wow the MSM is pretty scummy”.
Two years later, all the same dirty tricks and smears came out against Trump in the 2016 election, but he managed to weather the storm since people were already beginning to ignore establishment journalism since they could see it for what it was thanks partly to Gamergate. This is where today’s leftwing media’s, “Gamergate led directly to Trump and Elon,” tantrum stems from. As always, zero self-awareness, no accountability for THEIR role in Gamergate or their gargantuan bias during Trump’s first presidency or all their many lies during the Covid scam. No, people lost trust in the media because racist, sexist video game players!!!
Grummz is a fantastic individual who has been targeted, harassed, doxed and threatened more times than just about anyone, and always by those who are supposedly beyond reproach. Journalists, gaming studios, developers. The industry is going through a very noteworthy crash right now due to censorship, corporate greed and a push toward WEF-inspired “games as a live service” instead of outright ownership of games. The woke and DEI garbage that poisons almost all new games has also led a majority to play older games from previous decades as it turns out you can only tell your customer base to piss off for so long before they start listening to you.
Same thing has been happening in film, television and music over the past few years. I personally think a cultural renaissance is needed, it just requires all the unhinged and out of touch leftists to bugger off out of the way first.
I heard an African-American tech gaming company lady once complain that there were not enough black characters in sci-fi and fantasy games with which she and other ‘people of colour’ could identify with. Apart from performing an involuntary spasm of laughter which I tried to contain but couldn’t, wondered if I should ask her what colour are aliens and made-up beings?