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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 25, 2024

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As an old, I don't really play video games. But it's weird to me that the video game industry is so woke considering that the user base is so anti-woke. Why aren't there anti-woke game publishers?

Proposed answer: Political selection of devs.

Video games companies need developers who are competent, willing to work for low wages, and willing to tolerate long working hours. This is a tough sell. Competent devs in the US can easily earn 200-500k with cushy working conditions. Why get paid less than half as much and be subjected to semiannual death marches?

As a result of this rotten bargain, the men who choose this field will tend to be young, not have families, and be fixated on video games. Frankly, this is going to select for autists. To the extent that autism and MtF trans are correlated, I would expect that video game developers are trans at a rate at least far above the norm. This might explain a lot of the soy-type politics espoused by major game studios.

There's clearly a market opportunity for non-woke game publishers. But could they get devs? Conservative men tend to work in the field that pays them the best, allowing them to support their family. They aren't out there making children's toys.

Does this explanation make sense? Or is this just a $20 bill sitting on the sidewalk?

Does this explanation make sense? Or is this just a $20 bill sitting on the sidewalk?

No, there's no $20 bill.

Big companies are woke and will mandate woke BS. People who climb the greasy pole in corporations are socially adept conformists with sociopath traits. Not the kind of people who care about truth or beauty or get disturbed by woke shenanigans. They read the room and act accordingly.

This will change as US business and political elites become anti-woke which they must. According to Thiel, in SV in '16 they thought he was crazy, by '20 people were telling him he was right. People got fired over activism since then. So the tide is turning.

MtF devs, rare as they are, or woke devs in any normal company would simply toe the line or be told to go elsewhere if they acted out.

But then, you're not missing anything because big companies make games for big market shares and big market share require games made for the average person, who are not that interesting.

But could they get devs?

Yes. For example, Factorio devs are anti-woke to the point there was a minor scandal when someone called out one of them for recommending a programming essay by Uncle Bob, he was told to shove his opinion up his ass..

Another anti-woke game is Kingdom Come, whose developer is notorious for talking back at liberals, unapologetically told people to get lost after they wanted blacks in medieval Bohemia and is even mildly politically active in Czech Republic having founded a small NGO called Society for the Defense of Freedom of Expression which has of course been accused of spreading 'disinformation' by the arbiters of truth working for the Ministry of Interior. (for Americans, that's the guys who run the national police, jails and so on )

It's a matter of funding and publishers culture moreso than the raw talent. Factorio was self-funded, Kingdom Come got funding for development from a local oligarch. Not sure how KC2 will be, there were rumors but the guy in charge is not the kind to let himself be overruled, so I expect no wokery even if publisher/funder is no longer local.

After all, there are roughly 2 billion people from high-average IQ populations like whites, east Asians where people with an IQ of 120 are likely to become devs. Only cca 500 million of these live in countries where woke is the official culture.

(If you're black with that IQ, you can get paid much, much more by being a businessman etc)

Glad someone mentioned Factorio and Kingdom Come. I think Factorio shows the most likely path out of the mess: non-woke, not anti-woke. Contrast explicitly anti-woke games like Hatred where you just trigger a new wave of thinkpieces that probably hurt your cause more than they help.

After all, there are roughly 2 billion people from high-average IQ populations like whites, east Asians where people with an IQ of 120 are likely to become devs. Only cca 500 million of these live in countries where woke is the official culture.

Is that true? Europe is 500 million, Japan+Korea combined is about 200 million. Brahmins roughly similar, we can probably guesstimate another 500 million whites and Asians in the western hemisphere. Arab Christians are about 15 million, add African whites to get to 20 million, and Russia is about 1/3 Muslim 2/3 Christian- if we assume all Russian Christians belong to high IQ groups(and most of them are ethnic Russians so this is probably close enough for government work) that’s 100 million. Add Oceania and the Ashkenazim. So we’re at 1.5 billion before we account for China, which might be lying about either its population size or its IQ scores, but we can probably say at least another billion at an average similar to other East Asian countries. That’s 2.5 billion before we start trying to chase down every Tutsi and Igbo and Yakut, but there’s so few of them that it doesn’t matter very much.

Of those, woke is the official culture for the western hemisphere(hate to break it to you, but Latin American elites are not based, although some of them are racist and woke on every other issue), plus most of Western Europe(Italy and Austria seemingly the only partial exceptions) and Oceania. This is probably closer to a billion out of 2.5 billion than than .5 billion.

Japan at least is already over represented in game design.