site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 25, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

6
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

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?

Is the video game industry woke? Or are you just updating on a few high profile titles?

As others have pointed out, Japanese games are largely not woke. The big mobile titles and Mihoyo stuff coming out of China are very much not woke. Indies are rarely woke. Eastern Europe and similar nations largely don't produce woke stuff.

So we're largely talking about AAA/AA titles from the larger publishers in NA and Western Europe. How many of their titles are woke? Is Call of Duty woke? Fortnite? FIFA/Madden/NBA?

Before we dive into other titles, we need to define what is and isn't a woke game. Something like recent (indie) flop Dustborn is clearly, explicitly woke, but most titles aren't nearly so clear cut. The biggest seller of 2023 was Hogwarts Legacy. Is this a woke title? Supposedly it had a very diverse cast for 19th century England, but Rowling's reputation has become poison amongst woke-types, so much so that there was a big backlash against the game.

How about Battlefield V? I recall there was a furore around the announcement trailer because one of the main characters was a 'girlboss' in WW2. But as far as I'm aware there wasn't much else that would be woke in there. Is a single character enough to make a game woke or not?

What some of the big GaaS titles? LoL's character design branched out from big titty anime girls years ago, but are a handful of 'diverse' characters enough to deem it woke? Rainbow Six Siege has get some shit recently because of a character in a wheelchair, and I believe the much criticized recent 2B design was a skin from that game. But again this is just a handful of characters available.

Here's the top selling US games from 2023, 22, and 21 (with duplicates/yearly entries removed). Which ones are woke?

Hogwarts

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

Spider Man 2

Diablo 4

Jedi: Survivor

Mortal Kombat 1

Starfield

Call of Duty

Elden Ring

Madden

God of War: Ragnarök

LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga

Pokémon

FIFA

Horizon: Forbidden West

MLB: The Show

Battlefield 2042

Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe

Resident Evil: Village

Super Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury

Hogwarts Legacy. Is this a woke title?

Yes, JK Rowling is very progressive, and only differs from woke orthodoxy along a single axis.

I recall there was a furore around the announcement trailer because one of the main characters was a 'girlboss' in WW2.

LoL's character design branched out from big titty anime girls years ago, but are a handful of 'diverse' characters enough to deem it woke?

Rainbow Six Siege has get some shit recently because of a character in a wheelchair, and I believe the much criticized recent 2B design was a skin from that game. But again this is just a handful of characters available.

Yes, all of these seem like central examples of the kinds of things people are complaining about when they complain about woke in video games.

If individual characters or elements are enough for a game to be woke, and thus the industry, then the OPs question has a very simple answer. Companies are putting these things in because they want to make more money. Adding a women or similar is a very low effort way to make a game more appealing to a wider audience

Adding a [certain style of] women or similar is a very low effort way to make a game more appealing to a wider audience

I don't think that's the case. Rather, I think it's a low effort way to convince oneself that the game is more appealing to a wider audience, assuming that the oneself in this case buys into a certain ideology. The question then becomes why so many decisionmakers buy into this ideology, to such an extent that it overrides their greed.

You could ask this about millions of bad business decisions: I think the consensus is that there is a bias to action in corporate settings, because people need to be seen to be doing something. In a lot of media, not just games, this ends up as "Put a chick in it and make her lame and gay"

The bias to action is orthogonal to the question, though. There's no limit to the types of actions they could have taken in order to expand their audience, but for some reason, they chose to "put a chick in it and make her lame and gay" instead of one of the other options, such as, say, making the chick sexy and gay (a tactic that was likely more common a couple decades ago, though the expansion target was a different group than women).

The answer to that is pretty obviously their ideology, but then the question becomes, why this ideology in particular, and why follow the ideology off a cliff?

I don't think the woke additions do all follow the one option though, that was just an expression. In some responses below, people are complaining about minor changes like using "Body type" instead of Sex or Gender. Plenty of female characters added into games are good looking and the bizarre non-binary examples from Dragon Age are much rarer.

So I'd say corpos are deciding they need to do something to attract wider audiences. And then the developers themselves are choosing implementations as simple as body type and a female protagonist to full blown Dragon Age. I'd imagine explaining these would need to focus much more on individual studio effects.

So I'd say corpos are deciding they need to do something to attract wider audiences. And then the developers themselves are choosing implementations as simple as body type and a female protagonist to full blown Dragon Age. I'd imagine explaining these would need to focus much more on individual studio effects.

The beginning of this paragraph seems true enough, but I don't think we'd need to focus necessarily on individual studio effects. The various things people are complaining about might not all be specifically "add a gay lame woman to it," but they all still fall within the same one ideology or tight cluster of ideologies. Why that specific cluster of ideologies and why follow that off a cliff are the questions at hand.

More comments

This is the stated theory. Does it actually work? Are they actually successful at drawing in a wider audience? And if so, is the incoming audience large enough to offset losses from the previous one?

I've never been convinced on this.

Just getting regular sales data for retail games is difficult enough, let alone trying to parse out how an ongoing GaaS title is affected.

I think League has probably done well out of it, research suggested female players overwhelmingly played female characters while men played an equal mix - indicating that the male playerbase was unbothered while attracting new female players.

Battlefield V sold less than its predecessor according to Wikipedia, but still sold more than 7 million copies. Presumably there is some percentage of regular players who decided not to buy the game due to the woke marketing, alongside some percentage of new players who were attracted by it. 2142 looked a lot more regular in its marketing, so perhaps EA decided it wasn't worth it overall?

Women overwhelmingly play attractive female characters, the kind riot was always making. They are not champing at the bit to play Rek'Sai or Ambessa.

The pervasive myth that women want fat ugly characters in video games is so out of touch with the revealed preference of women who play games. If you want to know what kind of 'diverse' characters women want in games, look at the character designs coming out of Hoyoverse, not Firewalk Studios.

If we're talking about LoL specifically, I'd say female preference appears to tilt towards pretty/cute rather than attractive/sexy. Lux rather than Miss Fortune. And I think Riot's redesign of some earlier characters and move away from the high level of sexualisation (and general huge tits that a lot of the early female champs had) was probably a big deal for potential female players.

Nah, they don't play MF because she is an adc. Sona is just as busty, and is probably the number one most played character for women playing league. You can just look at the games that women actually play, they only play games where they can play as a hot girl, and they more or less exclusively play as hot girls*. In fact, I would say Lux (and Zoe, specifically these two) preference, codes trans woman more than woman, as far as league players go. There is probably a line where your game goes too far into the male gaze, like, Nikke is in theory a waifu collector like Genshin, but with no husbandos and outfits that look like they came from a slutty Halloween shop, it has basically no women playing it.

Of course, this is all miles away from woke injections, which look like Ambessa (Buff Old Black Girl Boss Brusier), not Lux. If Concord was full of characters that looked like Mercy, nobody would have complained about how Woke the character design was.

*Edit, this is overstated, they will also play cute games, like Stardew Valley, Animal Crossing, Pokémon, etc.

More comments

It's not about the individual characters or elements though, it's about the philosophy behind them. The idea of having a character in a wheelchair in your fps about elite spec ops units is bugnuts retarded and can only come from a brain warped by a perverse concept of inclusivity. World war 2 was not won by girlbosses and jamming one in your game immediately demonstrates a fealty to diversity over anything else like pleasing your fans or historical accuracy.

But yes, the justification used to do all that was easy money. It was an overly simplistic perspective that equated to cooking the golden goose to smuggle in the progressive agenda, but that was the justification.

Hogwarts

Definitely woke, even if it was inspired by the works of a woman who later became a wrong-thinker. 1890s rural Scotland having the same demographics as UCLA, plus the deliberate inclusion of a wizard in a dress witch with a croaky voice.

It's worth remembering that JKR was very politically correct back when it was called that. She retroactively made Dumbledore gay, and in the stage show made Hermione black (and then tried to gaslight her fans into believing she always was).

Of course, the success of the game in spite of the attempted woke boycott probably strengthened the belief among dev companies that they can just ignore an angry twitter X Bluesky mob and sell games anyway.

and in the stage show made Hermione black (and then tried to gaslight her fans into believing she always was).

It wasn't actually Rowling who decided to cast a black actress. She did praise the choice, however, and then said "The books never specified Hermione is white." Which is technically true, but while I wouldn't go so far as to call it "gaslighting" (Rowling didn't actually claim that canonical book-Hermione was black) she was pretty obviously taking the piss out of people who were complaining about the casting.

I wouldn't call Harry Potter "woke" in general, unless anything liberal is woke. It's got some multiculturalism and very tepid feminism, and nothing else that would offend your average conservative. Rowling is a standard liberal feminist Gen-Xer with slightly heterodox (by today's standards) views on trans people. You're right that gay Dumbledore was a retcon. (Rowling claimed he was always gay in her head; whether or not you believe her, she clearly knew it wasn't something she could put on the page in the 90s/early 2000s.)

The movies and games have been much woker than the books (no doubt with her approval).

Regardless of whether Dumbledore was gay in Rowling's head when she wrote the first book, I think it's worth keeping in mind that she had pretty clearly already decided on it by the time she wrote the seventh, which seems to be designed around the gay Dumbledore even though it doesn't make it explicit. I think the common suggestion that she more-or-less invented it on the spot in the interview where she announced it is clear copium.

I think the common suggestion that she more-or-less invented it on the spot in the interview where she announced it is clear copium.

Sure, but that's the [classical] liberal argument where "it doesn't actually matter, it never actually says in the books, Just Like You (angers the traditionalists), It's Not Special (angers the progressives)".

Which, I'll point out, is generally how those who are feminist-but-not-gynosupremacist treat womanhood in general (because that is how they were raised). It's common in media properties created by Gen Xers (because they were the most exposed to that viewpoint); that's why 4chan loves My Little Pony (G4 only), for instance.

I can't figure out whether Diablo IV is woke because it has a non-binary boss (Lord Zir), or anti-woke because ze's monstrously unattractive and ill-tempered.

That would be anti-woke by the current paradigm, in which negative representation is generally considered worse than non-representation for the same reason that 'don't concede the existence of excesses since it will give the bad people grounds to continue criticizing' is a norm.

A paradigm of prioritizing beneficent representation doesn't go well with making light (or villains) of it. The viewpoint of 'any representation is bad representation' being replaced by 'you must endorse' is one of the distinctions between liberalism and woke.

I was just joking about the name. Lord Zir is not actually canonically non-binary.

Horizon: Forbidden West
Spider Man 2
Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales
Mortal Kombat 1 ( heard they are covering the women up, haven't played it myself)

Mortal Kombat 1 ( heard they are covering the women up, haven't played it myself)

One wonders if this is done by region-specific graphics, a la gay pride flags being replaced by black flags in the Middle East release of the latest Spider-Man game (or was it Assassin’s Creed?)

Proposed answer: Political selection of devs.

I mean, it's the political orientation of devs.

From personal experience, the vast majority of competent and brilliant software engineers are either progressive or turbo-liberals. It's an unfortunate truth, but conservatives have to face reality here -- there is no hidden trove of right-leaning engineers waiting in the wings to take over.

Yeah, the defenestration of Brendan Eich was one of the first big moves of the Awokening. High level devs just tend to be lefties, it doesn't have to be all of them just enough to make it SEEM like its all of them and keep righties in the closet (and Damore the ones who don't), and the unaligned will mostly go along with whichever group seems to be in the majority.

At the time of Eichgate Eichpot Dome Eich Mobilier Let's go Brendan whatever we're calling the matter, I was just beginning to follow the rationalist sphere; the wokists, then called 'social justice warriors' or 'SJWs', had not yet burned all their credibility, and I still looked with favour on the movement, despite dis-agreeing with it when I felt it was wrong.

I thus held the following Views on their actions:

  1. Desiring that the State offer privileges to opposite-sex couples that are un-available to same-sex couples, ceteris paribus, constitutes animus against gay people.
  2. A person who harbours animus against gay people ought not be the CEO of a company, as they cannot be trusted to take sufficient action should gay employees face discrimination from their supervisors or harassment from their colleagues. (The same applies to the head of the HR department.)
  3. However, such animus ought not be dis-qualifying for other positions; had Mr Eich been dismissed as CTO, CFO, EIEIO, Assistant Regional Manager, Assistant To The Regional Manager, or Deputy Assistant Head Of Purchasing For Custom-Colour Office Supplies Such As Red Staplers, despite not having acted on his animus while on the job, one could reasonably argue said dismissal to be an act of injustice.

Desiring that the State offer privileges to opposite-sex couples that are un-available to same-sex couples, ceteris paribus, constitutes animus against gay people

You made a version of this argument when we were discussing immigration. It seems that you have a strong belief that there is no acceptable reason (without animus) to treat one group of people separately from another. Is this correct?

Heterosexual and homosexual people cannot be regarded as literally exactly the same. There is a clear characteristic that distinguishes them: having intercourse with members of the same sex vs the opposite sex. Likewise, a heterosexual marriage is not literally exactly the same as a homosexual marriage: in one, two people of the same sex are marrying, in the other, two members of the opposite sex.

Anyone can regard this distinction as being relevant or as being irrelevant. Someone who believes that marriage is primarily about financial cooperation, or about publicly celebrating subjective affection, may regard the distinction as irrelevant. Equally, someone who regards marriage as being the joining of two complementary sexes to form a well-rounded whole, or as the basis for the creation and nurturing of genetic offspring, will see the homosexual / heterosexual distinction as highly relevant. No animus is required, though of course it may be present.

And this applies in all sorts of cases. Consider paraplegic sports. There is a distinction between an able-bodied person pedalling a bicycle, and a paraplegic operating an electrically powered bicycle. Depending on what you think sports are for, one might regard this difference as important, and split these cases into separate leagues, or one might not. Discrimination between them would not necessarily indicate animus against the disabled, but instead, say, a belief in the importance of fair competition as opposed to the importance of building community spirit.

In short, I do not believe it is sensible to maintain a moral system that regards evidence of discrimination as evidence of animus or unfairness, because people differ on so many axes that a reasonable person may find relevant.

It seems that you have a strong belief that there is no acceptable reason (without animus) to treat one group of people separately from another. Is this correct?

I believe that right and wrong consist in how one treats individual human beings; 'committing a wrong against a group' is an abstraction of wrongs committed against individual members of that group. Thus I would phrase it more as "Membership in a group is not an acceptable reason to treat one person worse than another."

Likewise, a heterosexual marriage is not literally exactly the same as a homosexual marriage: in one, two people of the same sex are marrying, in the other, two members of the opposite sex.

Anyone can regard this distinction as being relevant or as being irrelevant.

The distinction is irrelevant with regard to the State. For legitimate government purposes, 'same/different genital configuration' of the persons marrying is approximately as relevant as 'same/different astrological sign', or 'same/different final digit in Social Security Number'.

Someone who believes that marriage is primarily about financial cooperation, or about publicly celebrating subjective affection, may regard the distinction as irrelevant. Equally, someone who regards marriage as being the joining of two complementary sexes to form a well-rounded whole, or as the basis for the creation and nurturing of genetic offspring, will see the homosexual / heterosexual distinction as highly relevant.

The government's interests in marriage largely involve 'financial cooperation', along with things like 'this person is in hospital, unconscious; whom do we ask about their wishes: the person with whom they have lived for two decades, or their parents who kicked them out when they were 16?'.

'The joining of two complementary sexes to form a well-rounded whole', being, if not a religious belief per se, at least religion-adjacent, is not a legitimate foundation for government policy. 'Nurturing of genetic offspring' is also, while easily pattern-matched to the legitimate government interest in ensuring that children are cared for by someone, not a valid argument against same-sex marriage, as a same-sex couple can adopt children or conceive via surrogacy or gamete donation, and opposite-sex couples in which one or both members are infertile are not excluded from government marriage.

This applies to civil marriage; a church which teaches the doctrine of 'complementary sexes forming a well-rounded whole' and thus only solemnising opposite-sex marriages is a different matter. There were proposals made that the State withdraw from the business of marriage entirely, issue 'civil unions' to couples without regard to gender, and leave 'marriage' to religious organisations, which could set whatever criteria they darn well pleased.

If such a proposal had been on the ballot, support thereof would not constitute animus against gay people.

"Membership in a group is not an acceptable reason to treat one person worse than another."

But worse ceteris paribus, yes? I’m saying that the ceteris are not necessarily paribus, and which ceteris you consider relevant is a matter of judgement and of individual conscience.

From where I am standing, you have asserted a set of conditions for what the government’s legitimate interests are, and what information it may or may not consider when dealing with people. On what basis do you make these assertions, and why should I consider them compelling? Do you truly believe that nobody could disagree with you on any of them them except through hatred of those involved?

The distinction is irrelevant with regard to the State. For legitimate government purposes, 'same/different genital configuration' of the persons marrying is approximately as relevant as 'same/different astrological sign', or 'same/different final digit in Social Security Number'.

That's simply not the case. The state has a vested interest in stable family configurations that produce children that grow up to be healthy citizens, and that's exactly why marriage is a recognized concept in the first place.

Thus I would phrase it more as "Membership in a group is not an acceptable reason to treat one person worse than another."

I don't believe "group membership" was ever a significant factor of the issue. It was always the characteristics of the specific individuals involved. E.g., nobody ever campaigned against allowing a gay man to get married to a woman.

'The joining of two complementary sexes to form a well-rounded whole', being, if not a religious belief per se, at least religion-adjacent, is not a legitimate foundation for government policy

This is only true if you take for granted a very modern libertine view of the role of government. In reality, "religion-adjacent" concepts like morality, justice, and the promotion of human flourishing have more or less always been the proper aim of law, since prehistory. The movement for gay marriage won not by persuading some people that these are illegitimate ends but by persuading them that gay marriage does not in fact have any negative consequences along those lines. However, not everyone was persuaded by that judgment, and it is not an act of hatred to be skeptical, a mere handful of years hence, that that foretold negative consequences will never manifest.

'The joining of two complementary sexes to form a well-rounded whole', being, if not a religious belief per se, at least religion-adjacent, is not a legitimate foundation for government policy. 'Nurturing of genetic offspring' is also, while easily pattern-matched to the legitimate government interest in ensuring that children are cared for by someone, not a valid argument against same-sex marriage, as a same-sex couple can adopt children or conceive via surrogacy or gamete donation, and opposite-sex couples in which one or both members are infertile are not excluded from government marriage.

Everything about this is wrong by the standards of any civilization in western history. The government has always had a sacral function and the sacred rites aren’t always theological in nature but always have a foundation in ideas of right ordering. Every western government has been very concerned with the legitimate propagation of citizen children. Etc, etc.

Accepting (2) here is really wild. For one, it's quite hypothetical -- perhaps such discrimination never even occurs. Or perhaps it occurs and some lower-level management handles it appropriately. Or perhaps it occurs and Mr Eich recuses himself from the response and delegates it to his COO or other suitable entity. There are a half dozen ways that any putative animus need not have any impact on gay employees at all.

And even if it does come to Mr Eich to decide on the response (for whatever reason the CEO really handling such mundane personnel decisions), it's hypothetical that he would not conclude that he had to set his animus aside and decide on the merits. Either for his own ethical sense or at the advice of counsel.

hypothetical

Many bad things are hypothetical, but we guard against them anyway. It's quite hypothetical that Mozilla headquarters catches on fire, but we still insist that they have fire-alarms, sprinklers, and stairwells with doors and walls that won't burn through in less than two hours.

Furthermore, the CEO having given support to government discrimination against gay people signals to gay employees 'You Are Not Welcome Here', to homophobic employees that they are more likely to get away with mis-conduct aimed at gay people, and to managers dealing with said mis-conduct by sub-ordinates that a vigorous response to said mis-conduct might not be appreciated.

Affirmative Action is discrimination against jews, asians, and whites (in that order). Should someone who has contributed a few hundred bucks to the democratic party which works in favor of that ALSO not be allowed to be a CEO? Or does this just apply to causes lefties care about?

Yes, but fire safety equipment doesn't require excluding anyone for their political views, which is itself its own negative.

Anyway, you could run the entire argument in reverse except signaling that folks can get away with discrimination based on anti-marriage-equality views. Or anything. At this level of hypothetical one could justify excluding anyone.

Furthermore, the CEO having given support to government discrimination against gay people signals to gay employees 'You Are Not Welcome Here', to homophobic employees that they are more likely to get away with mis-conduct aimed at gay people, and to managers dealing with said mis-conduct by sub-ordinates that a vigorous response to said mis-conduct might not be appreciated.

This seems like the kind of thing that one would actually need to prove with empirical evidence. As best as I can tell, there's no evidence that someone donating to a mainstream cause against gay marriage would lead to any such downstream effects in their professional conduct in their workplace, or that gay employees in general (versus gay employees of a certain ideological stripe) tend to interpret their boss's political views against gay marriage as being a signal about how welcome they are in the workplace.

Proposal: Had Brandon Eich been CTO, CFO, EIEIO, etc when he got the boot, and been just as famous, the content of your comment above would be basically identical except the substitution of his counterfactural position for "CEO" and some slightly different rationalization in item 2.

From personal experience, the vast majority of competent and brilliant software engineers are either progressive or turbo-liberals.

By "turbo-liberal" here are you including libertarian types? They have existed as a consistent minority within software development since at least ESR's day, but I don't think they're as party-aligned as they might have been at the time.

I do think there's probably a poorly-researched difference in political alignment across the software spectrum: there are big differences in how front-end, back-end, embedded, and medical/aviation/automotive/defense (validation!) developers are tasked with thinking that probably selects for political persuasions. For example, I wouldn't be surprised if more left-leaning developers are prone to be more involved with public development (open source, conferences, etc), while self-driven solo developers (Linus circa 1993, Carmack, and such) have a different bent.

there are big differences in how front-end, back-end, embedded, and medical/aviation/automotive/defense (validation!) developers are tasked with thinking that probably selects for political persuasions.

By “tasked with thinking” you mean what they think about/do on the job?

I’m curious as to what your perspective is on how that influences the politics of these groups, but IMO defense developers skew much further right than the others not because of the type of engineering work, but rather because working for the military/MIC codes as Red Tribe

Yes, that's what I was trying to describe. Front-end web development is a lot heavier on "user experience" and, for lack of a better term, art, while something like fintech C++ developers are concerned about absolute minimal latency (processor cache misses, pipeline hazards, memory access patterns), and your automotive embedded developers are tuning physical control systems. My guess would be that user-facing developers, especially for non-business users, are more likely to lean more progressive because they really do need to worry more about accessibility (internationalization, screen reader support, color-blindness-friendly palettes) than kernel developers, which seems to me to at least loosely fit the people-focused vs. thing-focused spectrum that seems to already have a bit of a political valence.

I agree that the further backend/lower-level you go, the more systematizing, as opposed to empathizing, engineering becomes.

However, I think this maps to the greater autistic-ness (in the colloquial sense) of backend/low-level devs (and I wouldn’t be surprised if this held true even for the strict medical definition of autism). It’s not obvious to me that greater autistic-ness maps cleanly to more right-wing political views; for example, anecdatally, transwomen represent greater percentages of engineers as you go deeper into backend/low-level infra work, but I’d be shocked if any of them identified as Red Tribe in any way.

Perhaps there is a case to be made that autistics tend towards individualist rather than collectivist views. But neither Red nor Blue can be rightly deemed the tribe of individualists, per se.

But neither Red nor Blue can be rightly deemed the tribe of individualists, per se.

I would argue that they are both quite individualist, but don't get marked as individualist because invididualism is so baked into American society that it's invisible to Americans. Both Republicans and Democrats discuss their ideas in terms of individual rights ("2A! Religious freedom! Freedom of speech! Right to life! My body, my choice! Constitutional right to an abortion, that SCOTUS took away! Trans people's right to exist! Civil rights!") and while there are grumblings of genuine collectivism in both parties, such views don't have much power.

Collectivism believes that rights come with duties -- and even the French Revolution's great document included disussion of "the rights and duties of man and the citizen." When's the last time American discourse had a real discussion of "the duties of man and the citizen?"

I mean, read some of the stuff even the French Revolutionaries wrote:

The obligations of each person to society consist in defending it, serving it, living in submission to the laws, and respecting those who are the agents of them.

Every citizen owes his services to the fatherland and to the maintenance of liberty, equality, and property whenever the law summons him to defend them.

No one is a virtuous man unless he is unreservedly and religiously an observer of the laws.

And my favorite two:

The one who violates the laws openly declares himself in a state of war with society.

The one who, without transgressing the laws, eludes them by stratagem or ingenuity wounds the interests of all; he makes himself unworthy of their good will and their esteem.

But of course American discourse involves no discussion of such things; they're anathema. Even the farthest of the far right would shudder at saying such things out loud! Even our legal system involves many complex financial instruments designed "by stratagem or ingenuity" to avoid taxation, and a major theory of American legal thought argues that there is nothing immoral about breaching a solemn contract!

Pure libertarians are definitely individualist, but also marginal, because most Americans have some level of collectivist ideals even if they fall well short of the global and historical norm.

By "turbo-liberal" here are you including libertarian types? They have existed as a consistent minority within software development since at least ESR's day, but I don't think they're as party-aligned as they might have been at the time.

Turbo-lib here meaning the PMC version of limousine liberal -- performative and extra.

The libertarian streak is definitely present -- although it took a bit of a backseat during COVID -- but it's not as defining of a feature as liberalism. Moreover the rise of FAANG has lead a lot of those with libertarianish sentiments to think of government as the agent for vindicating liberty against the excesses of private power. I tend to think that's rather a silly view, but here we are.

I thought that the Grey Tribe also had its share of good programmers. But perhaps I am typical-minding here.

Personally, I see modern progressivism as largely performative, you keep your pride flag up to date, do land acknowledgements or whatever is en wogue right now to signal tribe membership.

A few of the great coders I know are conservative at least in their choice of tools. Rather than eagerly awaiting the next release of their IDE, you would have to pry their vim from their cold dead hands and like to compile their code in hand-crafted makefiles using gcc -std=c89 or some such.

While the one behavior does not necessarily preclude the other, a combination of both would nevertheless feel a bit incongruent.

But perhaps this is my own perception, or my own bubble.

It does, but it's not the majority. Brendan Eich was clearly brilliant as was Bill Gates, but there's a lot more Gates' just due to programmers largely being the kids of the PMC and inheriting their political affiliations along with the high IQ.

Also, I don't think political/social conservatism and appetite for change are all that correlated. I knew a cracked engineer that was extremely right wing but was always eager to try and asses new technologies and trends. Of course, if it was shit, he would say so, but if it was good he would be the first adopter and bring everyone along as well. YMMV, anecdote != data.

There is an old saw that says that a man is often most conservative about what he knows best.

If you think game devs & video game designers sit in a room together, then you're dead wrong. Devs are the exploited labor. If devs were the problem, then indie games would have been an even bigger woke fest. That opposite is true.

The problem is lack of cartelization. Or : "Tech dudes are pussies".


Here is the day to day in the life of a developer:

  1. Report your progress to your VP who decides if you get promoted. MBA.
  2. Report your progress to a product PMs who decides what needs to get done. MBA.
  3. Build the software to the exacts design created for you. BA Painting.
  4. Submit legal review to the legal team who decide if you're infringing on external IP. Lawyer.
  5. Rinse and repeat

They have no agency.


Have you ever worked in a law firm ? The partners, managers, associates....all lawyers. Everyone else reports up to them. Hospitals : Admins, Head of departments, Regulators.... all doctors. Everyone else (nurses, insurance, etc) must report to or work with them. Same is true for heavy engineering or any industry that needs deep expertise.

Tech prides itself in being anti-credential. But in the process, it has become anti-expertise. When the door is open for everyone, the politically savvy are going to run rounds around the meek devs.

The problem started with Steve Jobs. Steve portrayed himself as the cool 'designer' who figured out how to take socially inept coders and transform the world with it. This set the narrative for the tech industry as it exists today. It is exacerbated when a startup CEO sees massive growth, and must hire people to 'manage' all the growth. Rather than promoting socially competent senior devs, they hire 'ready made' MBAs. This sets up empire-building MBA culture in the entire middle management (VP - Director) band.

Tech guys created an industry, and MBA types stepped in to make all the money from it. MBAs understand all products as a supply chain. Create more, create faster and more time pressure. Ofc, that's a terrible combination for anything that needs the slightest bit of expertise. So, that's how you get the modern game dev industry.


To be direct:

  • Arts grads (writers, designers, directors) come up with woke stories
  • MBA CEOs follow the money & NYT. NYT tells them more woke. Money tells them more Fortnite.
  • Tech see major issues. But, are pussies so they build what they're told at insane time pressue
  • Thing doesn't get made in time because in any high-skill job - more time pressure is worse quality is broken game
  • Deadlines keep slipping for reasons any dev could have explained. But to MBAs, whippings must continue until morale improves
  • Devs keep getting abused
  • Game releases as a broken unplayable mess
  • Consumers give shit reviews. IGN says 10/10 because video game journalism also isn't run by gamers or devs.
  • Art grads and MBA CEOs have never played a video game in their life. So they don't know the video game is shit. IGN must be right. Gamers are sexist.
  • MBA CEO says numbers must go up. So, burn all good will by overselling cosmetics exploiting gambling whales.
  • Shit game but breaks even. Convenient explanation so board-of-directors doesn't fire MBA CEO.
  • CEO gets bonus. Art team gets credit. Dev team gets fired. (cost cutting measure to show good quarter)
  • 2024, good will runs out, gamers out of touch with companies. Customer rebels. No sales.
  • -> WE ARE HERE

All the recently successful game companies are run by hardcore tech dudes. Epic and Roblox are obviously having a moment minting money. Both their CEOs were hard core tech dudes who built the core tech that underlies their companies. The 2 games that recovered from shambolic launches (No man's sky, Cyberpunk) are both run by hardcore tech people.

When looking for tech people running game studios, I found this quote from the founder of No Man's sky's studio.

My degree was straight Computer Science which generally frowned on anything games related

Tells you everything you need to know about Gaming as an industry.

Why should devs be the one in charge? It's the designers, the ones that design the systems, that make the games what they are.

Is design really that exclusive of a skill? I find it hard to believe.

I'd put artists above designers in terms of value, and programmers above all of them.

I can come up with the coolest game you've ever played, in my head, right now. Good luck making it without artists and programmers.

This seems exactly backwards. Solo indie devs with shitty art assets and buggy code are over night millionaires if they actually have a cool game idea, on the flip side, AAA games with polished performance and graphics flop left and right because the fundamental game play is shit.

Maybe I've been out of the gaming world too long - where are these fantastic games with no/crappy art?

Even very designer-driven games (EX Super Meat Boy) have great visual components.

Vampire survivors and co? Juice Galaxy was my first thought, but that barrel of lunacy is free already.

EX Super Meat Boy

If super meat boy has great visual components then basically anyone who can download a free asset pack from itch.io has great visual components.

Yeah, good luck making a movie without actors, camerapeople, costume designers and so on, but it's still the director who is the lynchpin of the whole production.

I am one of the people who would agree with you that leadership in any team context is key, and it's a lesson that took me too long to learn.

I see the value in a designer/team who has a vision and can push to see it through. The analogy of a director may be a good comparison, in that they can produce what I would consider a good movie with very little in terms of assets or contributions from the team.

I suppose it depends on your definition of "Value" and "Success". An indie film with one director is almost always going to be crap, occasionally a niche art-house classic, and very, very rarely a breakout like Blair Witch or something.

It's not management specifically I was talking about, it's having a detailed vision that you know how to iterate upon all the way to the successful release. You can be the sole developer/artist/writer/composer working on the game, but game design is the only critical skill you can't really subcontract. Theoretically it's just a PDCA cycle, but in practice it's a complex learned skill:

  • can you tell why your vision is a game people will play?
  • can you tell which features are quicksand and have to be dropped or replaced before you've wasted too much effort on them?
  • can you tell why build A is better than build B and what the next build C should be like to be even better?
  • can you tell when your game has started to diverge from your vision and rein it in or pivot to a new vision?
  • etc.

Indie devs have to learn this because they are often wearing multiple hats. It's very useful for designers to know the limits of engines/art/music/writing they have to work with. It's very useful for a developer to have some design skills ("Dave, the game is based around massive leaps across massive maps, our current movement code feels sluggish, I think we need more air control," says Steve the designer, and Dave can either increase air control and send the new build to Steve or keep tweaking the code until the movement feels just right). But it general that's two separate skillsets and one of them is critical.

No, you cannot. You cannot even come up with the coolest game you've ever played. At best you can do an elevator pitch for the latter, and noone will give a shit because being an ideas guy is indeed not an exclusive skill.

Actual game design starts at the hundreds of pages of plans and spreadsheets and design documents required to turn those ideas into something concrete. The detail level of which keeps growing the more people with less direct personal communication you need to convey those ideas to.

Tons of great games have been made without artists. Many, many more only spend any time and effort on artists long after the designers are satisfied their prototypes are worth the expense. Tons of great games have been made without programmers. The entire fields of designer board games and tabletop rpgs are like 30-60 years old despite requiring no technology not available centuries ago, only advances in game design.

You cannot even come up with the coolest game you've ever played.

First I'd disagree with this - stealing systems that I've played and modifying them is exactly what I'd do. Could I have come up with MtG on my own 30 years ago? Probably not, but a background in software and being a huge fan of games means I could probably come up with something serviceable, if not 100% unique.

Tons of great games have been made without artists.

I can think of vanishingly few games where the art and design were not significant. My video game dev friends often have something great on their hands, design and system-wise, that is ultimately not fun to play with stock art. Simple platformers with great art and music (Braid, Limbo) are vastly more successful than their hideous, bare-bones brethren. Sure, games are developed before artists get involved, but they don't make it to production or succeed without it.

I believe the contention is that the devs should also be designers, or rather, that the designers should rise up from the dev mines.

All the recently successful game companies are run by hardcore tech dudes.

The most profitable franchises in core gaming (FIFA, GTA) were made as profitable as they are by an Australian grifter with no real tech skills (Andrew Wilson) beyond html (they hired him because he was a jock, unironically it’s on Wikipedia) and the Houser brothers, who were two London rich kids with no technical skills who started a music label.

What happens when you don’t have the MBAs? You get SAP, run by German autists who missed out on 30 years of technical progress. Epic would be toast right now if they didn’t get lucky with Fortnite, they only had the money to pivot unreal into film because of it.

It's not so much that non-tech people are bad for games. But that their utter dominance means tech nerds rarely get their voices out.

When doctors & lawyers take on secondary leadership roles, they don't turn into narrow minded autists. They learn the ropes of their new role, and apply those to their profession. Tech people should be able to do this too.

A company must have at least one of - love for the product, love for the tech or love for the user's identity. The counter to that is love for the money, love for the optics & love for the media. The nerds are most likely to have love for the tech, love for the user (because they're gamers themselves) and love for the product (because they want to make good games).

MBA types usually love the latter. But, media, optics and money are downstream from success. You can game media + optics and temporarily identify a money extraction strategy. If the MBAs don't play the games, don't care about the tech and don't identify as a the user (a gamer), then they'll inevitably crash and burn. In the woke era, many video game art-people hated gamers & gaming, and were using it as a way to tell their own woke story. This doesn't work. GTA was the Housers' baby. They may not write code, but they surely loved the product.

Andrew Wilson

Wilson definitely revolutionized the monetization of gaming as EA CEO. It's not to say that people like him shouldn't be hired or given important roles. But the CEO is the lifeblood of a company. Give bean counters the reigns, and they destroy the whole company for better quarterly results. Ballmer is the classic example.

The counter to this is Google and Facebook. Susan Wojcicki and Sheryl Sandberg turned them into the world's richest companies. But, because the CEOs were technical, the focus of the company remained technical. Even Tim Cook's peak MBA personality (in the best way possible) was balanced by Ive & Craig as two people who loved the product. It's cliche to say you need a balance. But, you need a balance. For instance, look at the EA board. 2/11 people have technical backgrounds (2 CTOs). One of them is a forever program manager without game-dev experience and another is a head of security, who while technical, has nothing to do with game development. This is the lopsidedness I'm talking about. 0/11 people are hard core game dudes.

don’t have the MBAs? You get SAP

I guess I'm in the Bay Area where technical people are fiercely business focused. I can't relate to the SAP situation

Say what you want about Elon, but he quickly reaches a 201 level technical knowledge in the companies he runs. Your CEO doesn't need to be an expert. But they need to be good enough to smell bullshit when it stares them in the face. Listen to Elon's reasoning about major strategic decisions. It is simple first principles reasoning on top of the core technical primitives of his company. (and I don't even like the guy).

Ballmer is the classic example.

How much of a bean counter was Ballmer, really? I truly believed he loved Microsoft, probably even more than Bill.

"bean counter" isn't exactly the right word. But he instituted the "rank and yank" system which pitted employees against each other in a brutal competition for survival. From a distance I can sort of see the logic, but in practice it completely destroyed their teamwork and cohesion as everyone tried to make sure someone else was below them in the pecking order.

It’s hard in big tech where so many senior developers work hard in their 20s then have a family, coast, rest and vest, though. There’s no truly fair way of getting rid of them.

I truly believed he loved Microsoft, probably even more than Bill

Their respective portfolios certainly seem to imply so

…yes and no.

Devs are overworked, underpaid, and lack creative control. Yes. They are politically oblivious, subject to the whims and aesthetics of their MBA-wielding superiors. Yes.

But these are not a consequence of anti-expert sentiment. The door isn’t open for everyone. Those managerial nobles and HR legions were invited in thanks to the iron law of scaling: comparative advantage. Time spent managing is time not spent on interesting technical problems. Most of the senior devs I know, socially competent or not, are much more interested in the latter. So they hire their counterparts who, technically competent or not, prefer to manage.

Cartelization doesn’t help. Every hour spent on management or marketing or compliance or HR or accounting or basket-weaving is an hour not spent on the core technical task. If you need them all you have to hire more manpower. That’s more expensive with constricted supply.

The smaller studios of the 90s just had fewer non-core tasks. You don’t need a manufacturing specialist when your whole production line is one CD burner.

I'm not convinced that the SWEs they hire in the video game industry actually are all that woke, that's at least not my experience with swedish video game developers. They're not anti-woke but they aren't really woke either.

The people that are woke and who are able to insert woke inte video games are the writers, artists and designers (and game journalists but that's outside of the developers), and i believe its that pipeline thats really rotten if any. What percentage of writers with a "relevant degree" are even non-woke? Anti-woke?

Furthermore even if you're non-woke, if the only acceptable culture in your industry is woke what are you going to do? You'll at the very least put in performative nods towards wokeness like "body type a/b" and inserting a girlboss here and there.

Devs overestimate the importance of Devs and a lot of non devs do as well.

To launch a game you have to pitch to investors and get millions in funding. Your game has to appeal to the funders and be something that they believe they will make money on. The biggest challenge is post launch . There are a bunch of games launched every day. The market is saturated to an insane degree. In order to break through you need to have influencers, journalists and other people pushing your game. The youtube algorithm promotes woke gamers.

Another underrated aspect is that in cut throat industries people will try to outmanoeuvre each other. If knocking out the opponent by discovering a transphobic tweet gets you ahead people will do it. The gaming industry is dirty.

You're right, and it's such a shame, and it's because marketing has grown bigger than the product being marketed. So for every dollar spend on making something of value, 9 dollars are spend trying to convince others that it have value. This tendency generalizes to most of society, which is why most things have become so fake.

marketing has grown bigger than the product being marketed

There are reasons for this. A friend of mine is a VERY successful indie developer and publisher, and his business thinking is as follows:

The vast majority of people buy very few games every year. Even most ‘gamers’ might play five to ten.

So if you’re in the top ten in your market, whatever it is, you’ll rake in money. If not, you’ll make almost nothing.

Therefore, it’s worth spending whatever you have to on marketing, celebrity cameos, etc. Anything to shift you from 11th on the list to 9th.

I see, this feedback loop is to blame again. Viral content gets more viral, and less viral content disappears. This is because popularity is made out to be a metric of quality. All modern algorithms generally work like this, but it's a huge mistake. Merely changing the way the rating works from "Most plays" to "Best ratio of postive and negative reviews" should balance it better.

I actually want to make a game of my own. Guess I'll have to jump into a moral and social dilemma. Thanks for the answer by the way!

Ratio of positive/negative reviews is easily gamed and also selects for very niche things that has a loyal fanbase, rather than something with a wider appeal. I'd go as far as to say that positive/negative ratio on its own is worse than a pure view metric.

What you want is some kind of Bayesian weighting.

I don't see how it's easily gamed, but it does select for niche things. If these niche things are high quality to those that it appears to, isn't that fine? If less than 20% enjoy jazz, the better conclusion is "Of people who like Jazz, this one album is really good", rather than "Only 19% of all people like this album". Everything with a wider appeal has less depth, there's a sort of trade-off. I'd go as far as saying that everything good is niche. There's more people towards the middle of every standard distribution, but the best things (which are still popular enough to survive) are a few standard deviations to the right. And, if you allow those outside the niche to change what's inside of it, through the power of numbers, they will just destroy it or turn it into what they already like (which is plentiful everywhere). Hence why communities (like this one!) protect themselves with gatekeeping and rules and try to stay under the radar of outside political pressure.

I think the reason that votes aren't visible for a while on here is exactly to avoid starting a feedback loop (this one is the social one where people are influenced by other peoples votes). I also think that comments are sorted by "new" by default rather than by "best" (but I could be wrong), and that the "controversial" rating exists because the alternative is that the first decent comment to be made on a thread ends up being #1 simply because it started its exponential growth earlier.

Would your proposed weighting account for these things? (I don't know much about bayesian weighting)

You game it by controlling who gets access/early access to the game.

You can also review bomb other new games released close to your own release.

Given the quantity of games released this sort of score manipulation effectively turns that particular metric into a view of what has been released very recently, what is sufficiently niche to not attract non-fans and non-shills and what has most ratio manipulation behind it.

More comments

The main gaming that happens is review bombing. Even a few negative reviews can push your game out of the profitable peak and into the dead tail, so there’s lots of opportunities for bad actors to threaten devs into submission.

More comments

Mark Kern talked about this: https://www.geeksandgamers.com/video-game-producer-mark-kern-talks-sweet-baby-inc-and-esg-in-gaming/

Basically the issue is how games are funded. The studios get investors to front money for game development.

When companies like BlackRock were pushing ESG hard, ESG money was cheap money. Companies like EA saw the cheap money with the only condition being that they had to hire a bunch of DEI storyline consultants.

Now games are failing, but it's hard to fire the storyline consultants. They know how to work the system.

Also the various left wing activists they've hired over the years are trained to form a block and not back down, so it's a giant fight where just getting rid of the new hires isn't an option.

Of course you're right in that part of it is the devs. Trans women in particular tend to have issues with women's hips in games.

On a bit of a tangent, a surprising amount of game development is done in Canada as it's harder for devs to find other jobs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_games_in_Canada#Studios

Assassin's Creed 4 has it's modern day sections set in Montreal. Mass Effect 3 has Shepard's trial take place in future Vancouver.

When companies like BlackRock were pushing ESG hard, ESG money was cheap money.

Why were companies like BlackRock pushing ESG hard?

Larry Fink simply believes in it, and it's not his money he's wasting.

Larry Fink has no major politics beyond being a mainstream Democrat, at most he’s a centrist neolib. He strongly resisted almost all activist demands for Blackrock to divest from arms companies and fossil fuels firms. Blackrock isn’t primarily or even substantially responsible for DEI in corporate America and its influence on firm culture at board level is minimal. Fink is likely in the 65th percentile, no more, on the right-left scale among Americans. ESG was always a fake movement and the amount of money invested in ESG-focused funds, while high in nominal terms, was tiny compared to aum in the global asset management industry. What little was done was often under pressure from big institutional investors who do care, mainly universities and progressive pension plans (like teachers and academics), along with some progressive sovereign funds like the Norwegians. Blackrock promoted ESG under pressure from these institutional clients, not because of Fink’s own politics.

Fink is on video talking about forcing behaviors which was pretty infamous and is probably something that those who talk about ESG and Fink, one way or the other ought to be aware of.

"You have to force behaviors. If you don't force behaviors, whether it's gender or race or just any way you want to say the composition of your team, you're going to be impacted. That not just recruiting, it's development," Fink said. "We're gonna have to force change."

https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/blackrock-ceo-slammed-force-behaviors-dei-initiatives?intcmp=tw_fbn

The guy wanted and still wants to throw his influence around to transform or lock in social governance goals which are DEI goals. It isn't a credible argument to claim he didn't do nothing, only a little and he was just pressured into it.

ESG was always a fake movement and the amount of money invested in ESG-focused funds, while high in nominal terms, was tiny compared to aum in the global asset management industry

Global Assets under management is set to rise in 145 trillion by 2025
https://www.pwc.com/ng/en/press-room/global-assets-under-management-set-to-rise.html

And ESG assets were according to bloomberg 30 trillion on 2022 to reach 40 trillion by 2030 https://www.bloomberg.com/company/press/global-esg-assets-predicted-to-hit-40-trillion-by-2030-despite-challenging-environment-forecasts-bloomberg-intelligence/

This isn't a tiny part of global assets.

Larry Fink has no major politics beyond being a mainstream Democrat, at most he’s a centrist neolib.

This is like saying that apart from the shooting, Lincoln's theater experience was uneventful.

I agree that he is like a mainstream Democrat which puts him firmly in the cultural far left.

Centrist is one of the most abused words in the motte. Sure he fits with the kind of people who tend to get the title centrist neolib here, but it is often people who are in fact quite culturally left wing and very willing to push an agenda on that direction. In addition to those, at best those who do so on some key issues and are also zionists, but might not be leftists on some other issues also are too easily inaccurately called centrist. Which doesn't make them centrists since on the issues they are converging with the left and hardcore about, because they aren't really anywhere near the center. For example pro mass migration types such as Hanania fail at being centrists too.

The numbers seem completely wrong. Bloomberg found that $7tn in AUM was in funds where ESG was “mentioned” in the prospectus. That could be three lines in dozens of pages at the height of the ESG boom. A much smaller fraction. In any case, that a prospectus contains the buzzword ESG doesn’t mean for one second that core allocation / portfolio management decisions are made for ESG / DEI reasons.

The video I mentioned above of Fink directly talking of forcing companies to have change effectively counters the idea of the guy as an inconsequential centrist.

The reality is that Fink is still pushing ESG and also he responded to the backlash by limiting to an extend how much he pushed it.

Downplaying the ESG issue and excusing Fink helps the DEI agenda.

It isn't happening and it isn't (much of) a problem is how the real ESG problems enlarge. There is a woke/stockholder capitalism model that promotes a DEI agenda where there is pressure to be ESG compatible.

With all the downplaying and accusations of people being conspiracy theorists and all in their head, it is as if things change just magically. It isn't Moloch. It is people like Larry Fink. In fact things change more if people don't notice and downplay and less in that direction and can even reverse if they notice and oppose it.

The numbers seem completely wrong. Bloomberg found that $7tn in AUM was in funds where ESG was “mentioned” in the prospectus. That could be three lines in dozens of pages at the height of the ESG boom. A much smaller fraction. In any case, that a prospectus contains the buzzword ESG doesn’t mean for one second that core allocation / portfolio management decisions are made for ESG / DEI reasons.

Maybe I am wrong but it seems to me that ESG funds means ESG etfs while the bigger figure is ESG assets. For example, if Microsoft is considered ESG then it counts fully in the bigger figure but only to the extend it is part of ESG funds in the smaller figure.

If ESG assets are a sizable part of the global assets then that matters however. ESG corporations are at least much more likely to have DEI but also policies such as with the AI if big tech companies that are culturally far left.

Moreover, if a pro ESG organization like Blackrock manages assets in a fund that isn't ESG, that doesn't necessarily mean that they wouldn't be bringing their influence in a pro DEI direction. Influencing things in such direction doesn't mean they need to call this ESG To be doing it. And due to backlash they have made statements of rebranding as the term has become too charged, they say.

There is also ESG lending incidentally given to companies that pass these criteria.

Additionally that 7 trillion can matter too because organized minorities that are pushy can often get people to go along with them over larger groups that are less forceful and don't push a singular agenda. Which is why backlash and institutions turning away from Blackrock is useful in stopping the likes of Fink from forcing the changes that he wants to make.

With all the downplaying and accusations of people being conspiracy theorists and all in their head, it is as if things change just magically. It isn't Moloch. It is people like Larry Fink. In fact things change more if people don't notice and downplay and less in that direction and can even reverse if they notice and oppose it.

This. Recently I was thinking about all the effort that various "intellectual" movements put into basically saying that any thing that happened was the inevitable result of material conditions, technological progress, or whatever else that can be invoked plausibly and give the explanation an aura of inevitability. It's like a whole bunch of people internalized that quip about "creating other new realities, which you can then study too", or are repeating it deliberately so that others internalize it.

That could be three lines in dozens of pages at the height of the ESG boom. A much smaller fraction

So? We know from academia that merely having a sponsor with a particular interest is enough to bias a study, even if the money ostensibly comes with no strings attached, which is why we require to disclose conflicts of interests. But suddenly, when in comes to the corporate sector of all places, the standard of evidence is supposed to be set at direct funding for specific activities?

"...resisted almost all activist demands for Blackrock to divest from arms companies and fossil fuels firms..." Which has nothing whatsoever to do with pushing Woke.

"...money invested in ESG-focused funds..." This is just hilariously missing the point. Blackrock doesn't just "invest" - it provides day-to-day funding for businesses. You don't get access to those funds if you don't meet Larry Fink's requirements on diversity, which is why I had to sit through interminable videos of my CEO (and other bigwigs) verbally fellating Fink's (Fink is praised by name) diversity initiatives and how vitally important they are, never mind the obvious negative impacts it has had to our company's performance.

edit: also, what makes you think that only the funds specifically marketed as "ESG-focused" get your money? Look up your company's 401(k) plan information; I assure you, even if you're not chosing to invest in ESG funds, your money is still going there.

Look up your company's 401(k) plan information; I assure you, even if you're not chosing to invest in ESG funds, your money is still going there.

Can you elaborate? My 401k tracks SPY almost perfectly.

Why do I keep associating BlackRock with Erik Prince instead?

That's Blackwater, the private military contractor.

There's also Blackstone which is a different asset management company.

In the cyberpunk future, we will see a news headline stating that BlackRock hired Blackwater to put the hurt on Blackstone.

It's hard to know all his motivations. I think part of it was that hiring a bunch of leftists to run funds kept Elizabeth Warren and her ilk off of his back.

On a bit of a tangent, a surprising amount of game development is done in Canada as it's harder for devs to find other jobs

Actually this is because of a massive tax credit scheme which meant that not opening a game studio in Canada meant you were actively paying a big premium for the privilege. Any large company which could open an office there did, because any employee on a salary under 100k a year was effectively subsidized by the local government.

Do you consider Slay the Spire to be woke? Elden Ring? Bloodborne? Mario? Pokemon? The Persona series?

Where is the line drawn?

Dude I don’t know. I assume none of these games have explicitly anti-woke themes. Correct me if I’m wrong.

"Anti-woke" as criteria is the trouble.

The main game series we can consider "explicitly" anti-woke is the Postal series, and that devolved into cynical, low-complexity slop immediately. If the criteria of "anti-woke" was clearer, it would be easier to find a game that fits.

2016 Doom's main antagonist is a lesbianesque woman, and only the Doomguy can stop her, and Eternal even makes a few digs at hr wokeness with lines akin to "we like to think of the demons destroying earth as mortally challenged".

Relaxing it to 'games conservative white males can enjoy without feeling attacked for existing' widens those horizons dramatically.

"Anti-woke" as criteria is the trouble.

Sure. But the same should apply to woke games. Why are (apparently) some huge percentage of games pushing a failed, corrupt ideology on consumers?

If the games matched the consumer they would be like this:

  • 10% woke
  • 80% non-woke
  • 10% anti-woke

Instead, it's apparently more like this:

  • 50% woke
  • 45% non-woke
  • 5% anti-woke

Seems like an obvious fix right?

Nassim Nicholas Taleb talks about why this happens in Skin in the Game. You can read the relevant chapter here.

Basically, the most intolerant minority tends to win, when there aren't high transaction costs to cater to them. Jews won't drink non-kosher beverages, but gentiles will drink kosher beverages, so most drinks in the United States are kosher. Back when restaurants still had smoking sections, a non-smoker could sit in a smoking section and not smoke, but a smoker couldn't sit in a non-smoking section and smoke. Etc., etc.

Relating this back to woke, anti-woke and non-woke. I suspect most people who are anti-woke will still buy most woke games. They might grumble about female protagonists, unappealing female characters, and every romancable character being Schroedinger's bisexual, but most of them will still buy a triple-A game that has all these features. On the other hand, the woke and non-woke will not buy a game whose explicit purpose is to reinforce anti-woke ideas (anti-trans, anti-cosmopolitan, conservative, trad, anti-LGBT, etc.) As a result, games end up either woke or non-woke, with a vanishingly small contingent of anti-woke games catering to a tiny segment of the market.

They used to buy those games. But increasingly “woke” games are now associated with fundamentally broken or derivative technical/design aspects and are starting to flop. For example:

-Concord: a game you have to pay 60 dollars for that’s worse than a free game that came out 10 years ago

-Star Wars Outlaws: broken AI and particle effects that look like they came out out of a 1996 Tomb Raider game.

-Assassin’s Creed Shadows: the 400th derivative remake of the first Assassin’s Creed game from 2007.

There are exceptions, like Baulder’s Gate which was pretty woke and had solid underlying mechanics, but increasingly AAA games are just a garbage fire of slop.

I would build out the model as something like: If there is a genuinely good woke video game with solid mechanics and few competitors, most anti-woke people will still buy them.

I think most slop isn't bought by non-woke normies, let alone wokies themselves. The question is whether "it's woke" is being advanced as the whole reason for the game's marketability, or is just a big part of the story.

Though arguable, video games are already one of the most gender egalitarian artistic mediums. Plenty of strategy games like XCOM make no distinction between male units or female units, and there's plenty of Amazonian protagonists in the medium.

Yeah, I mentioned this before, but it seems like the best we ever get are games that are accidentally "based". As in, they might have a conventionally attractive woman with a pleasant personality. Or they depict a happy, cis heteronormative family. They might not even be mixed! Maybe they depict men as capable protectors and providers, or wise sovereigns, without some fucking girlboss with zero flaws who's just obviously better than them in every way because woman.

Basically totally ubiquitous shit from before 2012, which is now so atypical and rare people push them up on pedestals as "based" or "anti-woke" just for normal. Meanwhile game journos are praising a game where you get butt fucked by a bear as game of the year.

Note that all of those but Slay the Spire come out of Japan.

Mega crit is An american group (of 2 guys) Anthony Giovannetti and Casey Yano, who live in Seattle.

That's what he said?

It's consistent with what I said, but adds more details. I think it further weakens the objection to the original post as well: Every game on the list is either Japanese or made by a team small enough not to be infested with entryists.

yes I was just adding more details as to who they were!

You just named 5 Japanese products and one indie title? That's almost an argument in favor of the DEI-ification of western media. Japan hasn't become woke yet.

And even then the international consultants will recommend changing Male/Female to body type A/B. The localizers will further censor it (particularly Nintendo).

There was some murmuring of Elon, who is the #1 global Diablo 4 player, starting some publisher for gaming. (Edit: it happened https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1861801046949191686)

Gaming studios seem to need ESG dollars which come with strings attached like requiring narrative review by DEI SweetBabyInc-like consultants.

Ubisoft and others are on a run with bomb-after-bomb releases underperforming massively. Real financial losses.

It may just be a matter of time has the market adjusts post-election.

Yeah that’s kinda what I was getting at. Elon has joked about buying MSNBC but he should save his $$$ and buy some game publishers instead. For a couple billion you could flip the political polarity of the games market which reaches hundreds of millions of people.

Yeah, but you'd make a lot of money doing so which might not be so good for Elon's tax bill. At least with journalism the write-off is nigh-guaranteed.

The number of people who want to bet against Elon grows larger. So far their record is pretty dismal but good luck.

I'll take the opposite bet. Elon will make money on Twitter.

I'll take the opposite bet. Elon will make money on Twitter.

Elon would have made a massive profit if Twitter went completely bankrupt today and charged him another ten billion dollars for nothing on the way out.

He used it to buy himself a seat in the halls of power, not just embedding himself in a brand new government but doing so with an explicit mandate to fire the people who were in charge of regulating his various companies. I'm honestly not sure you could put the value of that trade into dollar terms.

Hard agree. And imagine the influence Elon could buy for just a couple billion invested in video game studios.

Somehow we allowed far left activists to dominate video games. It's bizarre. Video game players lean conservative. Why is there no conservative content being made for them? It's as if Mormons in Utah were forced to watch gay furry porn on TV because that's the only thing available. Sure, they'll watch it, but that's only because nothing better exists.

Once anti-woke video game studios appear, they will quickly displace the incumbents.

Take a look at CNN's ratings and see the future of current game devs who refuse to pivot.

Once anti-woke video game studios appear, they will quickly displace the incumbents.

They won’t because to the average Call of Duty or League of Legends player the ‘lore’ and any associated progressive politics are completely irrelevant to their enjoyment and these franchises have $10bn moats in terms of brand value and built up expertise.

This isn't exactly true. People are getting banned in these games for writing "faggot" or even "gg" because of wokeism. The political pressure leads to censorship, self-censoring, the dilution of art, the decrease of player freedom, and even competitive games modes (since hierarchies are seen as evil in leftist morality). I'm not sure how much the average console player understands these dynamics, though.

More comments

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?

(1) Ethan Strauss's "Undecided Whale" effect: The majority of money spent on AAA videogames is spent by young men. However, women control far more total discretionary spending than men overall, and can be spurred to spend on some games. Therefore, there's a significant incentive for executives looking to expand their sales figures to try and appeal to women, which given the recent massive leftward political shift of young women, often results in the insertion of hamfisted political messaging.

(2) Overrepresentation of Trans and other sexuality/subculture minorities in STEM. This one isn't complicated; transwomen, furries, and other nerds with odd subcultural affiliations around gender and sexuality are overrepresented in programming and among the type of monomanaically-focused near-autist who are more likely to go into intense knowledge-work professions like game design and creation. Thus, they're perfectly positioned to influence products from within.

(3) Standard labor law and NGO pressure-group tactics. See Hanania and Rufo.

Uh what. Women already control 75% of discretionary spending, and the encouragement is to... empower women?

I think the idea is that relatively little of the 75% of discretionary spending by women is being captured by games while a lot of the 25% of discretionary spending controlled by men is captured by games. This makes appealing to women relatively more attractive as a vector for making money. You don't need to convert as many of them as you do men for a similar payoff, which in theory should be easier.

You don't need to convert as many of them as you do men for a similar payoff, which in theory should be easier.

My guess is that this is the correct explanation. 10+ years ago, when I was all-in on social justice, the prevailing belief was that the primary reason women didn't play video games in exactly the same amounts as men was that the video games hadn't been designed to appeal to them, with most of the rest of the reasons being the video game community being misogynistic and hostile to women. Thus, by changing the way the games were designed, the theory went, video game companies could tap this untapped market and make even more massive profits, all the while also making the world a better, more Socially Just place. How convenient it is that we live in a world where doing what matches my preferred ideology also results in making more money! You'd have to be a complete idiot or an extremist bigot not to pick up that free money that's just sitting there on the table!

I think the recent high profile failures of "woke" games (arguable if "woke" is the same as "trying to appeal to women," but one of the core arguments for uglifying women in "woke" content is that such things are more relatable/appealing to women) such as Concord, Star Wars: Outlaws, or Dragon Age: The Veilguard show that many of the people in charge of the purse strings were true believers of this theory.

I believe that the lesson that those people will learn is that this proves that the video game community is even more misogynistic than they thought, and also that the content directed at pulling in woman customers in these games didn't go nearly far enough, and therefore next time they need to double down and also bully the existing toxic primarily-male gamer fanbase even more, so as to make the space more friendly to women. After all, when you're on the right side of history, you cannot fail, you can only be failed by all the bigots around you who have just not caught on yet that they're headed for extinction.

How convenient it is that we live in a world where doing what matches my preferred ideology also results in making more money! You'd have to be a complete idiot or an extremist bigot not to pick up that free money that's just sitting there on the table!

Ironically this might actually be true (eg, Candy Crush), but at the same time the autists and transgenders that primarily pushed this reasoning at AAA game devs and were tasked with designing them were uniquely unsuited to designing games actually appealing to the modal woman.