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As an old, I don't really play video games. But it's weird to me that the video game industry is so woke considering that the user base is so anti-woke. Why aren't there anti-woke game publishers?
Proposed answer: Political selection of devs.
Video games companies need developers who are competent, willing to work for low wages, and willing to tolerate long working hours. This is a tough sell. Competent devs in the US can easily earn 200-500k with cushy working conditions. Why get paid less than half as much and be subjected to semiannual death marches?
As a result of this rotten bargain, the men who choose this field will tend to be young, not have families, and be fixated on video games. Frankly, this is going to select for autists. To the extent that autism and MtF trans are correlated, I would expect that video game developers are trans at a rate at least far above the norm. This might explain a lot of the soy-type politics espoused by major game studios.
There's clearly a market opportunity for non-woke game publishers. But could they get devs? Conservative men tend to work in the field that pays them the best, allowing them to support their family. They aren't out there making children's toys.
Does this explanation make sense? Or is this just a $20 bill sitting on the sidewalk?
Most “anti woke” consumers still enjoy woke media. Marvel movies attracted hundreds of millions of moviegoers in red states. The new Gladiator movie is extremely woke and lib and yet box office data suggests it’s attracting a primarily white male audience (unlikely to be mostly progressives).
Most gamers don’t even play games for the story and don’t pay attention to it, so the relative ‘wokeness’ of the writing is irrelevant. Among those who do care, I’d guess a disproportionate number are women, gay or lib.
This is a misunderstanding. Most game devs aren’t software engineers / programmers, for whom this is (sometimes) true. Most devs are QA, artists, level designers, 3D modellers, writers, sound engineers, producers, cinematic designers, and system/game designers. Those jobs can’t be ‘easily’ found at much higher salaries elsewhere; in fact if you’re a professional artist or writer who doesn’t want to write non fiction (ie be a technical writer / copywriter) being a game dev is probably one of the most secure, highest paying roles.
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There are lots of non-woke games literally so many
It's just that you focus on some weird niche of american games, but the Japanese and korean studios make plenty of interesting ones. There are also american indie titles which... are actually pretty woke (I'm a member of many indie game publishers private discords and the politics channel is like Bluesky)
So it is the devs who are super woke then?
Yes. I think it's selection bias on the kinds of people who make games compared to other types of programming.
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Credentialism + nepotism is also a major factor on the creative side. A lot of the industry jobs are going to people because "I met they/them at calarts and followed their Tumblr askblog about superheroines with vitiligo, that's definitely the sort of person we need for Concord's character design team." I'm not kidding, that's literally the life story of all but two people I know doing art for games and cartoons, and those two are old guys.
Same with translation/"localization." It's a tiny industry with cliques of professional bullies getting away with hiring all their discord buddies, because there's literally no oversight.
It works without pushback because there's still no counter to the superweapons they developed. HR having a "Cluster hiring" policy literally gives them a party cadre within a few hiring cycles, and then you're fucked. And what do the old guard do except shake their heads and say "well I'd never hire or reject a candidate for political reasons."
Yeah, we used to hear that a lot from Google guys in 2012 who are no longer Google guys.
TL;DR: as nybbler likes to say, you can't pick up $20 off the sidewalk when there's a troll with a club making sure nobody touches it.
Wow... you weren't kidding. I looked up the term "cluster hiring" and was greeted by this helpful description (in an academic context):
That's almost, but not quite, the most on-the-nose self-aware description of the long march through the institutions I've ever seen. I also enjoyed the one HR blog that described it as "an approach that aims to aggressively onboard diverse candidates", which sounds rather, um, unnecessarily violent. (Perhaps it's just a microaggression.)
The most self-aware description of the long march I've ever seen was from a book by a progressive theologian, described in an academic article I read like this:
(Students of history may be reminded of suicide-cult-leader Jim Jones, who -- before drinking the Kool-aid -- attempted to convince the people of Indiana to "put real socialism into practice" through the guise of Methodism and then Pentecostalism. Sometimes a wolf comes as a wolf.)
I do appreciate all the evidence we're gathering on how progressives are wearing all our institutions as a skinsuit, but one wishes they might try to be more subtle.
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The video game industry became "woke" because of a combination of factors.
First, the whole tech industry is woke and video games are technology. Input/output, California, etc. Austin is a video game development hub, the blue-ing of it followed. Hell, look at AI.
Second, video games were considered an endless growth industry, "recession-proof" and with infinite potential for monetization and expansion. They made more money than Hollywood a while ago and the trend has continued ever since. The more money you get, the more investors salivate at the thought of unloading their capital cannons at something and flakking it to death. You also tend to attract vultures who see opportunities for easy grift or coasting. A diversity consultant at a video game company doesn't do much in the way of actual work but can get a good salary when times are good and potentially infinite growth means lots of opportunities for free money.
(Creative industries awash with cash don't tend to make very good use of this cash; this is not unique to video games either.)
Third, it's known that DEI/ESG investing makes it easier to get loans. Triple-A video game development is lengthy and very expensive. Why fund your own development when you can get a low-interest loan to do it for you as long as you DEI a bit? Better yet, you can use it to hedge against your failure, because you, personally, didn't lose money. Blackrock did! Roll hard left and die, or die and roll hard left etc.
Finally, there's something that Steve Jobs famously identified; as companies grown, product guys get sidelined in favor of marketing guys. Marketing guys end up running the company, and marketing guys are very sensitive to how their companies are perceived. Everyone swallowed the meme about how consumers don't like supporting companies or brands that don't share their values, and the loudest people that end up giving marketing guys the most input on the internet with the most social reach tend to be very loud about social justice in particular.
Video game development is very, very hard. The modern SDLC can occasionally write functional software or simple CRUD apps to spec, but very rarely will it make a genuinely fun game. The fun in a game requires near-autistic levels of dedication to design, interaction with players, and a wealth of technical knowledge to even implement, let alone test. Hand-adjusting animations frame by frame for simple actions or interactions, hours spent manually adjusting the lighting for areas, design documents written in arcane notes over napkins, walls and coffee tables, playing and iterating again and again.
It's pretty apocryphal that during Blizzard's golden age they knew what they were onto winners when their own employees would put off working on the game to play the game they were making some more.
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I donno man. I think a lot of things were going on at once.
The centralization of the video game journalist profession in San Francisco when Ziff Davis bought everyone and consolidated their offices there didn't help. You saw a lot of video game journalist organizing on mailing list and at conferences to bully developers into pushing their views.
There is a certain type of terminally online, always offended psychopath that always seems to work their way up the ranks from forum bully, to jannie, to "Community Manager", to holding a gun to a company's head threatening to run to their game journalist buddies if they don't get what they want. Sometimes the company calls their bluff, I think the developer behind Guild Wars did that.
Sometimes the call really is coming from inside the house, and employees feel emboldened to bully their coworkers into conforming with progressive dogma. Although given all the leaks you see Grummz getting, it's obvious some dissidents are keeping their heads down and cashing paychecks.
There are all the theories about ESG loans and other financing options only being available if games pay protection money to DEI consultants. I'm not sure how much concrete proof has ever come out about that. I've never seen a contract with it spelled out, but it wouldn't shock me.
I know the indie scene is incredibly cliquey and woke. BPD chicks who've practically never made a game somehow hold court and decide who is or isn't allowed to network and make connections, and who get's slandered by the woke games journalist. Sometimes they even drive their targets to commit suicide, and then their own family throws them under the bus and refuses to tell the dead man's side of the story because of some word salad about privilege and lived experience.
And then there is the fact that the pay and the hours suck. I make way more fucking money plying my trade literally anywhere but the video games industry, despite loving games and desperately wanting to make them my entire life. In the early 00's when I was choosing a career path, The EA Spouse scared me away from even considering it. Now I wouldn't want to subject myself to how utterly toxic the entire industry appears from the outside. And I wouldn't trust anyone who tries to sell me that it's not that bad. I don't know how you tolerate the work culture unless you are already mostly on board with progressive dogma.
Surely video game journalists don't matter. These clowns can safely be ignored or, even better, mined for exposure as their performative tears serve to drive engagement.
I don't follow video games, but this seem incredibly obvious.
No one cares what these people think.
I disagree. Games journalist have proven themselves quite able to collect scalps in the industry even fairly recently. And while a good game often overcomes their smears, sometimes they don't, and I can sympathize with an executive not willing to bet the company on pissing off Jason Schreier.
With respect, no one gives a rat's ass about this creature, whoever he may be.
At some point, people need to realize that woke scolds have no power. Don't apologize, don't cuck, and things will be fine. In fact, they will be better than fine if you mine their outrage for engagement.
They do, though. They can have you fired. They can have other companies break contracts or refuse to do business with your company. Including companies like Mastercard and Visa.
Fair enough. If you’re a wage slave they can get you. If you’re a person or brand with a real audience they are powerless.
The situation can be fixed by firing DEI departments and it’s happening right now.
Sometimes the good guys win.
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Uh, not an expert on the video game industry, but isn’t the US tech industry far less dominant in video games than in other fields?
That would make sense. US devs are overpaid to a ridiculous degree. Good luck getting them to work 80 hours a week on some video game for 50k a year.
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Why aren't there antiwoke Game devs?
Because riot games was forced to pay 100 million for gender discrimination when it hired people on the basis of whether or not they even played riots games.
Anti Discrimination law MANDATES that you continually hire hostile sexual and ethnic minorities who largely resent the cre audience, and then increasingly pander to those employees, lest they file suit for workplace discrimination.
This is why indy games don't have this problem and are still creative, sexual, violent, disturbing, male-coded, etc.
As your games company employs more people the more DEI people you're forced to hire and shove into every function you can fit them... This is why hollywood and videogame writers rooms are so woke... There's maybe 0.1% gender-queer black people who can code or 3d model at the level of the pros in the coding employment base... but you can shove anyone in a writer role, have them throw out horrible ideas, and then have some poor intern turn that into dialogue.
Thankfully, this does seem to be going away.
Walmart just canceled their DEI program, following many other companies like John Deere, Harley Davidson, etc...
It's not so much that the law required these departments. It's more that folk beliefs sprung up thinking that DEI was "best practices". This thinking is now obsolete, and DEI programs are now accurately perceived as damaging to public relations and the bottom line.
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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.
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:
Instead, it's apparently more like this:
Seems like an obvious fix right?
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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.
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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?
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There was some murmuring of Elon, who is the #1 global Diablo 4 player, starting some publisher for gaming.
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.
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.
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