In the wake of the Games Workshop controversy centering around Warhammer 40K utilizing the Kathleen Kennedy formula of ‘putting a chick in it and make it lame and gay,’ Wizards of the Coast once again reminds the tabletop gaming industry that they are still all-time undisputed kings of the landfill with an abrupt staff change, this time being the outgoing president of Wizards of the Coast, Cynthia Williams.
Cynthia Williams has been president of the oft-disgraced Wizards of the Coast for the last two years, and it has been one of the most painful tenures we’ve seen at any mainstream gaming company as Cynthia Williams is the prime example of the Dunning-Kruger effect that has plagued the mainstream in the last decade. You would think if you were running a game company, you would easily pick the best person for the job, someone who knows the lore of Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons and Dragons front to back, right? In this case, Chris Cocks (an apt name), the CEO of Wizards of the Coast’s parent company, Hasbro, didn’t think so and hired Cynthia Williams even though she has absolutely ZERO experience playing either of those games.
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If you look at Cynthia Williams’ background, it has all the makings of your standard corporate empty suit. It’s no wonder Chris Cocks handpicked her to be president of Wizards of the Coast, and under her tenure, it consisted of the usual modern corporate shenanigans. First off, the recent addition to ESG-backed funding by way of DEI by race-swapping Aragorn for their release of ‘The Lord of the Rings: Tales from Middle Earth’ set back in 2023. The game’s senior art director, Ovidio Cartagena, defended this action, saying:
“At any given time, we are surrounded by diversity, and it is our hope in this world to someday get along and come together despite our differences. It is also a message from us to fans of all walks of life: you are welcome here, you have a place here, you belong.”
That statement alone sounds like empty corporate sloganeering from any modern-day Madison Avenue marketing hack: full of buzzwords and flowery, non-offensive wordplay.
There’s also an incident that centers around removing ‘race’ from Dungeons and Dragons and even going so far as to remove half-species from the game under the excuse of it “being inherently racist” in an attempt for Wizards of the Coast chasing the mythical ‘modern audience’ which as we all know, that their so-called modern audience are woke investors and donors (i.e. BlackRock, Vanguard). This act was so inclusive that even Wizards of the Coast’s Executive Producer and probably the next president of the company, Kyle Brink, went even further, stating:
“This is not the face of the hobby anymore, and I think there’s been mistakes made in years past where people assumed that D&D players were all, you know, white dudes in a basement. Which has been a faulty assumption for a lot of years and gets more and more false every day. And so in my viewpoint, guys like me can’t leave soon enough.”
However, the biggest sin that Wizards of the Coast has committed under the tenure of Cynthia Williams is the blatant attempt to change the foundation of Dungeons and Dragons by modifying the Open Gaming License. They tried to accomplish two objectives with this move, the first being its transition to a virtual tabletop format in which they would charge microtransactions to make a game that is already expensive to procure any ephemera from aside from the players’ handbook into something in which even to play the game properly would rival the budgets of Warhammer 40K and Battletech.
The second objective can be explained within the first draft of the proposed OGL, which gives Wizards of the Coast the right to halt publication of any content deemed “blatantly racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, bigoted or otherwise discriminatory” and knowing how modern corporate America is, the definition of that statement is fluid and interchangeable to the point that an innocuous floor design would be deemed as such because if looked at a certain way the design resembles swastikas.
This incident was so universally frowned upon that multiple parties, including Paizo, Chaosium, and Alexander Macris pooled their resources together to compose the Open RPG Creative (or ORC) license, which revolutionized tabletop RPG creation and ultimately cut out Wizards of the Coast from having a monopoly on the ‘industry standard’
So, within this two-year timeframe, the already damaged brand, Wizards of the Coast, is FUBAR after Cynthia Williams leaves the company. However, this will not solve anything as two things are certain. Cynthia Williams, like most corporate hacks, will fail upward and be promoted to somewhere on the board of Hasbro, where she could probably inject more DEI nonsense into IPs like G.I. Joe or My Little Pony. As for who will fill the vacant position at Wizards of the Coast? I wouldn’t be surprised if a certain soy-filled Executive Producer ends up getting the chair and fulfilling their racist ambitions of expelling white males or anyone who doesn’t vote leftward from the hobby.
Get your popcorn ready, ladies and gentlemen!
What do you think of Cynthia Williams’s resignation and Wizards of the Coast’s lamentable future? Please leave a comment and let us know.
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