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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?
Not really. It runs into similar problems as most attempts to explain wokeness, especially the first one:
Something else has to be happening.
But it is. Trans women are already, typically, fairly loud and visible influences. If you double or triple their representation in a given population, they'll help drive direction in a game studio's writing, especially if the corporate overlords are looking closely at leadership position diversity. Not to mention, many trans women are excellent programmers, and so therefore valuable to placate.
Why? There are no loud, visible anti-wokes? Why don't they win, if a minority can seize all the spoils? Surely the presumption should be on their side since until comparatively recently unwoke things like "objectification" of female characters and jokes that punched down were common.
The "trans priestly caste" explanation simply doesn't work because someone is going to say "no". Someone is going to find trans people changing their plans offputting (or the trans themselves tbh -- they were a punchline in living memory). Why is it that small percentages of people are able to swing entire organizations across the entire industry? No one wants to pick up the $20 bill?
And what about industries that don't attract people with programmer socks? Why did they go woke?
I'm actually not sold that random devs, even good ones, can do this. There's plenty of work that doesn't involve the story.
And there we go.
There's always some other element that explains the "and then the entire organization bent the knee". Seems to me that, as with woke more generally, whatever that is explains why the vidya game industry is where it is more than the trans priestly caste.
I think what people around here are missing is that trans people in tech are more important as a long-term byproduct of feminism than they are as their own specific hot-button issue. There are so many of them in tech because they're an end-run around demands to load he industry up with mediocre authoritarian women and restructure everything to cater primarily to them. There are some women who excel in STEM, sure, but as a demographic, women are so uninterested in the field that it turns out that the easier way to comply with the demands of feminism is to convince a significant portion of the actual male talent (who were kind of incel-y anyway) to take up the trans thing. For culture war reasons (to put it charitably), we get a warpedly negative sample of the trans population around here. In fact, transgender "women" are obviously much more culturally compatible with tech than their cis counterparts; they aren't attractive but they're more pleasant to be around. They aren't going to call HR to have you written up for having an anime figurine on your desk, they aren't going to try to have math devalued as a racist skillset, they aren't going to get pissed off and go scorched Earth on the company and have everyone fired on trumped up sexual harassment charges and replaced with the Gestapo. "Loud exhibitionist Chris-Chan-type autist" is the common model of the situation on the culture war right, but it's the wrong model; the ones who succeed professionally in tech are meek intellectual rationalist-type autists. They think like men and it's a field where you need to think like a man to make money. They aren't a real priestly caste, they're a fake priestly caste, a stopgap to prevent the installation of a female-feminist priestly caste, and to be frank, I much prefer things this way over the way things were going about a decade ago. (Of course it would be better if relations between the sexes weren't falling apart in the first place.)
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They tend to be fired if they don't shut up. If they get into a dispute with the visible minorities, management can't fire the visible minorities so they fire the anti-wokes who rile them up.
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