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Every time we made a piece of art that didn't have POC/gender balance in it, our boss told us it wasn't diverse enough and we had to remake it to be more diverse. This complaint never was made for anything involving villains. It took a dozen iterations before we started internally discussing where to put the diversity in a given image during the planning stage, and we still frequently are told that the images aren't diverse enough and we need to add more. Any time we do an early mockup with stock images that aren't themselves diverse, we're reminded that the finished version has to be diverse. I'm indy; the boss tells us directly.
Have you ever asked why?
Video games with more diverse characters don't seem to sell more.
I don't need to ask why. I've sat through a couple impromptu diversity lectures over the years. Both the indy space and Triple-A are completely dominated by progressive voices. The entire gaming press ecosystem is rabidly progressive. Influencers are more balanced, but everyone the boss knows and everyone the boss respects, cares about, and wants to impress are all on one side. You want to show your game at PAX, you want buzz, you want people cheering you on and giving you good press, well, there's a set of beliefs and behaviors that get you that, and there's another set of beliefs and behaviors that definately will not.
I could give more examples, but I'll leave it there for OPSEC purposes.
So it's more a matter of placing the company on the map of 'good guys' or for individuals to make sure that they can keep finding jobs in the same type of companies.
Making a good game with innovative, fun gameplay, interesting visuals and story, compelling characters etc, would definitely make you (commercially) successful as well. Insofar your company is not banned from payment processing I suppose.
Of course that's much harder so the sea of average workers of the industry just go for the low-hanging fruit.
Sure. But while you're doing that, you also want to be a good person, and you want the extra boost of being seen to be a good person, and you definately do not want to be called out as being a bad person, because that could be disastrous.
The fear of failure is considerable. The desire to do anything possible to increase the chances of success is likewise considerable. And that's why I burned a couple days some time ago making art for a progressive fundraising campaign that I absolutely despise and that had zero to do with our product, but that my boss thought might get the company some good press. You miss 100% of the shots you don't take.
But why is that the option? From a manager's POV, they can either get staff to spend X hours working on getting progressive acceptance or X hours on making the actual customers want the game more. For example thinking of ways of making the game more fun or more mesmerizing, the story more compelling, etc.
Wouldn't a brainstorming session 'give me the most controversial idea that you think could create press / make more people interested in the game you can think of' be just as valuable if not more? I can't imagine what kind of pressure the people working there are working under, being creative within extremely narrow guidelines.
Perhaps having a character say dirty, sexist or racist jokes could make the game more interesting. Unless there is no dialogue whatsoever.
Because virtue signaling works.
Pretty sure my boss thinks the customers are all progressive as well, and he knows the middlemen between us and those customers are progressive. It's cheap advertising.
Diminishing returns. We've already spent between hundreds and thousands of hours on those objectives; meanwhile, we'd spent zero hours shilling for this particular progressive cause.
That's actually probably a pretty good idea, but it's clearly the sort of idea a bad person would come up with. You don't want to be a bad person, do you? People don't like bad people.
"Every day, there is a Main Character of twitter. Your goal is not to be this person." I mean, it's definately possible to succeed that way, but it's an extremely high-risk/medium-reward sort of strategy.
It's generally not so bad, but it certainly has its moments. Diverse characters make pretty much everything harder, for approximately zero actual benefit. A lot of character design is exaggeration and cartooning; when you apply exaggeration and cartooning to a POC character, you enter a minefield, since anything resembling a stereotype has to be avoided. You can make a white character look dumb as a post, or criminal, or malicious, or lazy; doing these with a black character is capital-P Problematic. there's workarounds to the problem, which of course inflict their own forms of damage. Our game has male and female characters of various non-human races. The best way to make non-human female characters look female is with female signifiers, which are now understood to be sexist. and on, and on, and on. We go a couple months without having to deal with this horseshit, and then it pops up again, and you grit your teeth and do as your told until it goes away again. We had a no-shit full-bore SJW on the team injecting this stuff non-stop for a couple months, but they got let go when it turned out they didn't do any of the actual work they'd been hired to do, and then we got to crunch for a couple weeks straight to get done what they'd been supposedly working on for the last six months. After they were gone, I tentatively floated reversing some of the progressive bullshit changes to the art they'd demanded, and got immediately shot down. Haven't made that mistake since.
So it goes.
How do you bring yourself to stay employed at a place like that? I'd rather work at a gas station than feel like I'm selling my soul by helping my enemies run roughshod over a hobby I love and doing my small part to assist them in their complete takeover of our civilization. I'm especially surprised to hear this coming from you, since one of your common refrains is advocating Reds resist Blues, refuse to compromise, reject the system, deny their institutions legitimacy, etc.
When it comes to politics, it's all,
and
and
But in the tiny sliver of overlap where the culture war actually intersects with your personal life in a way where you finally could conceivably stand up and actually sacrifice something, you're all talk (and not even in person to your coworkers' faces)? Can you forgive an admirer of yours for seeing this as weak, disappointing, and hypocritical?
"Well, my small contribution wouldn't make a difference - they'd just fire me and hire someone who'd acquiesce", you might say. But everyone could say that in every situation where resisting is a possibility. Everyone does say that, which is why Blues keep winning. It's a classic collective action problem.
I'm not trying to shame you. Well, okay, maybe a little. But I am actually genuinely curious whether you conceive of a grander justification for your small participation in the Blues' battle. Are you biding your time? Are you under the impression that the solution is going to be political and thus our personal actions in non-political life aren't actually making things worse?
Certainly. Since you ask, though, allow me to provide additional context.
FC stands for Faceless Craven. I joined this community explicitly to better understand the threat posed by Social Justice ideology, and I did so from the start with a strong awareness that maintaining anonymity was extremely important. My introduction to Social Justice in its modern form was getting "cancelled" by a close friend for speaking the truth in good faith, and having experienced the process first-hand, I had zero intention of ever running that gauntlet again. Seven years later, that intention has not changed. I have made a serious effort to maintain anonymity, do not attend meetups, and consciously remove or obfuscate most personal details from my posts.
This specific topic has come up semi-regularly over the years, and my advice on the question every single time has been to prioritize protecting yourself, to keep your head down, and not to play stupid games for symbolic prizes. Progressives have built a massive, interlocking system of social control backed by the power of the state, specifically to abuse people who expose themselves in exactly this way. I do not think marching into a meatgrinder is brave, and I do not believe that those who do so are setting an example that will inspire a hundred others. they will be significantly harmed, those harming them will suffer zero perceptible consequences, and the harm they suffer will be used to intimidate the rest of society. I've made no secret of this view, or about the fact that I do not engage in any significant political speech in public under my own name, to the point of avoiding lawn signs and bumper stickers. I do not believe that I live in a tolerant, pluralistic society, and I see no point in making it easy for people who have openly declared their intention to abuse people like me.
I mean, not everyone says that. Some people do in fact stand up bravely. Most of them get promptly crushed. Awareness of the nature of the collective action problem has greatly increased, and yet none of the people who periodically attempt to resist it actually succeed, even a little. Most normies are still oblivious to the problem's mere existence. Almost all normies have no comprehension of the sheer scale of the problem, how deeply entrenched it is into every significant social system.
There was a time, early on in the original forum, where the "we all just need to stand up at the same time" argument seemed, if not persuasive, at least colorable... And then Damore wrote his letter, and got promptly smashed. The other side is not looking for dialog. We are not participating in a good-faith conversation. The problem will not be solved "if only Stalin knew". Progressivism is not a common-knowledge problem that will go away if enough people just say "no", it is an intentionally-created and -maintained system of dominance, and dismantling it is going to involve a considerable amount of bitter conflict.
I don't think the stuff I make provides any significant contribution to the general problem. I don't think I could persuade my boss that we shouldn't be making it. I don't think the stuff I'm making is evil enough to refuse to make it on moral grounds. There is a difference between compromising and being compromised, and it seems to me that this is the former. It is humiliating and infuriating when I have to deal with it, but humiliation and infuriation are part of life. I use the money to make a home for my wife and my children, and I put my effort into things that might actually make a difference.
That's fair enough. It's legitimately shameful.
"Be nice until you can coordinate meanness". The important term there is coordination. Fighting a civilization-spanning system of control as an individual is a bad idea. In the long term, the goal is to find ways to coordinate large-scale resistance, or to develop capabilities that increase the effectiveness or lower the costs of that resistance.
On the coordination side, politics is a dandy coordination mechanism, but individuals have little impact on it. Integrating into healthy local-level communities and, if possible, hardening them against Blue infiltration and attack seems more immediately important. Building a family, having kids, and raising them properly seems like the most important thing of all.
On the capabilities side of things, my personal efforts are in the general spirit of Defense Distributed. The goal, as I see it, is to find and exploit significant vulnerabilities in the existing gun control regime, and to develop techniques that move us as close as possible to a state of weapons being, for all practical purposes, uncontrollable.
In all of these areas... Guns aren't valuable because you can use them to fight the Blues. Guns are primarily useful because they serve as a coordination mechanism, a banner to rally around. Politics isn't useful because winning an election means winning the culture war, they're useful because they are a coordination mechanism. What we need to be coordinating is a complete rejection of Blue Tribe, of Progressivism as a whole, root and branch. In order to do that we need to build common knowledge of what Progressivism actually is, what its actual history is, how it actually works, and what steps are necessary to actually dismantle it. Most of my participation here is focused on trying to gain an understanding of these questions for myself, such that it can be communicated persuasively to others, and especially to normies who don't spend all day Very Online.
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