Take This Executive Director Eve Crevoshay via Games for Change YouTube

The activist organization, Take This, that has received significant funding from the United States government is now begging its followers to give them $80,000 in order to keep its doors open.

A screenshot from Marathon (TBA), Bungie

The organization was brought into the public eye when it posted a blog post back in March encouraging game developers to denounce gamers for defending themselves from Sweet Baby Inc.

The organization stated, “If you’re reading this, you’ve probably been hearing about what’s now being called “Gamergate2.” It’s the latest  targeted harassment campaign within the game industry and it’s aimed at Sweet Baby Inc, a Montreal-based narrative development studio.

As previously covered, this is a lie. The initial harassment campaign was led by Sweet Baby Inc. and its employees Chris Kindred and Maya Kramer against Brazilian gamer KabrutusRambo for creating a Steam curator list documenting the games that Sweet Baby Inc. worked on.

These Sweet Baby Inc. employees could not tolerate the Steam curator list and attempted to get KabrutusRambo cancelled and even tried to get Valve, Steam’s parent company, to effectively steal his game library.

Kindred posted on X, “The Steam curator harassment group Sweet Baby Inc detected is lead by this person, kabrutusrambo. Here’s them trying to be slick so they don’t get reported. Even with the discriminatory language filed off, the group itself still fails the code of conduct.”

Chris Kindred on X

Next, Kindred wrote, “anyway report the f*** out of this group.”

Chris Kindred on X

Finally, Kindred concluded, “And report the creator since he loves his account so much.”

Chris Kindred on X

Nevertheless, despite pushing an easily refuted lie, the organization then demanded developers denounce gamers opposed to Sweet Baby Inc. and their goals of injecting the objectively evil ideology of wokeness into video games.

The organization wrote, “You may be  inclined to be quiet or cautious, but that’s actually not helpful. As noted in our resource ‘Empowering the Game Industry,’ a major lesson learned from Gamergate was the importance of taking a loud, public stance.”

Take This continued, “At the time, many studios were hesitant to address the hate and abuse from Gamergate in any meaningful way. The reasons varied, but usually this hesitation was born out of fear of losing profits or concern that taking a stance would attract the attention of the Gamergate mob.”

A screenshot from Concord (2024), Firewalk Studios

It then asserted, “In other words, failure to clearly and unequivocally denounce Gamergate and the harassment and abuse done in its name created a space for that hate and abuse to flourish, spread, and become normalized.”

“Hate, harassment, and toxic behavior have no place in games. By taking direct, targeted action in a timely manner, we can mitigate further harm to talented, dedicated folks in games, and help prevent additional recurrences of these harmful events,” the post concluded.

Rachel Kowert via Mxiety YouTube

Less than six months after this post, the organization’s Research Director Rachel Kowert resigned from her position. As reported by Ars Technica’s Ashley Belanger, Kowert also founded the organization after encountering “a 2019 nationally representative survey from ADL. It found that nearly 1 in 4 respondents ‘were exposed to extremist white supremacist ideology in online games.’”

She wrote on X, “I’m getting a lot of queries about this post meaning I’m leaving games. I’m not leaving games, I just resigned from my former position.”

Rachel Kowert on X

To no one’s surprise, Kowert admitted in a Game UX ’22 presentation, which was sponsored by Bungie, that the original polling she encountered that inspired her to start the organization was complete bogus.

She said, “In 2019 the Anti-Defamation League reported that nearly one in four, was 23%, of game players are exposed to white supremacist ideology in game.”

She continued, “And honestly, somebody asked me earlier how I got into this work because it seems like a very niche area, but it was this report. And when I saw that I thought that number is so high it can’t be that high; it can’t possibly be that high. And I called Daniel Kelley, who led this research, and he was like, ‘No, that’s the number.’ And I was like, ‘Okay, we have to do something about that. That’s terrifying.”

“In 2021, they did another report looking at the same thing and they found the number was closer to one in ten, but it’s unclear whether this is actually a change in the landscape or just differences in sampling as it is with research sometimes,” she admitted.

Not only did Kowert resign from her position, but the entire organization is now begging for $80,000 in order to keep it afloat.

In a post to the company’s website at the end of August, Dr. Raffael Boccamazzo, the organization’s Clinical Director, wrote, “This might be the most bittersweet post I’ve ever written in my tenure with Take This. … You may have noticed our plea for financial support earlier this year. As hard as we’ve worked to make up that gap, we still need significant help. Without your support, Take This and all of our impactful programs will cease to exist.”

After listing out what he views as the organization’s accomplishment, he stated, “If we don’t raise $80,000 by the end of September, all of this will disappear.”

A screenshot from Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn (2024), A44 Games

The company received a split of nearly $700,000 in grant money from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) through its Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention Grant Program.

DHS shared that in 2022, “Over the past decade, video games have increasingly become focal points of social activity and identity creation for adolescents and young adults. Relationships made and fostered within game ecosystems routinely cross over into the real world and are impactful parts of local communities.”

It added, “Correspondingly, extremists have used video games and targeted video game communities for activities ranging from propaganda creation to terrorist mobilization and training. Game developers in general–from small, independent studios to billion-dollar multinational corporations–have lagged in awareness of how extremists may attempt to exploit their games, and how their communities can be targeted for radicalization.”

“This joint project from the Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism, Take This, and Logically seeks to develop a shared framework for understanding extremism in games. This includes the development of a set of best practices and centralized resources for monitoring and evaluation of extremist activities as well as a series of training workshops for the monitoring, detection, and prevention of extremist exploitation in gaming spaces for community managers, multiplayer designers, lore developers, mechanics designers, and trust and safety professionals,” it concluded.

A screenshot from Dustborn (2024), Red Thread Games

What do you make of Take This begging for funding in order to keep the organization afloat?