domain:gurwinder.substack.com?page=2
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
2hr ago
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.
Even weirder aspect: why was the Israeli consulate privy to info about Gaetz’ Dad?
this is screwing up my efforts to free Bob Levinson. Gaetz's dad was secretly funding us. So I'm very much wanting this to be untrue. I've got a commando team leader friend of mine nervously waiting for wire transfers to clear. […]
And we only asked for $25 million as an estimate at first. We came way down.”
That consulate employee is now the spokesperson for Betar USA. Why would an employee at Israeli consulate know all of this? What did he mean “my efforts”, “funding us”, “we only asked”, “we came way down”. This indicates that an employee at Israeli consulate (who now works at major Zionist org) was somehow intimately involved in an operation to extort Gaetz. Which in a normal world would be a huge deal. Did this have to do with Gaetz’ opposition to Jewish lobby / Israel?
gives them fraudulent real Florida driver's licenses listing their age as 18
Right — in Gaetz perception, nothing he was doing was illegal and plausibly nothing he was doing was immoral. The “payment” can be simply reimbursing for the girl’s travel expenses or time off work, which wouldn’t be unusual for a man to do for his girlfriend or wife. As in, if you have a girlfriend and you want her to vacation with you, but she planned to work during this period because she needs money, there is nothing off or suspicious about providing her with money so she can join you and also be able to eat next semester. There’s no evidence that the payments were for sex.
Another weird thing: Oleg Deripaska, the oligarch, paid 20 million to the FBI in 2009 for the same “operation to free Bob Levinson”.
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...
Does this explanation make sense?
Not really. It runs into similar problems as most attempts to explain wokeness, especially the first one:
- "Overrepresented" is not enough. The claim is that woke politics is overwhelmingly dominant to the point where there're no antiwoke studios. Trans devs would have to be overwhelmingly dominant to match that claim or something else is going on to give even an overrepresented minority this outsized say.
- The idea that young gamers who want to be devs will naturally be woke doesn't pass muster to me. Gamers tend(ed?) to be irreverent shitbags and were a target of woke whining from feminists for a reason. Even if they were woke today, they'd eventually find some way to piss off the keepers of the revolution because the ideology doesn't stand still (the same way progressive, "science, bitch!" atheists pissed off their feminist fellows). They'd end up on the same trajectory as Elon Musk basically. There have to be some disagreeable autists that go the other way.
Something else has to be happening.
No_one
3hr ago
BG3 is mid. The game is okay but the writing is crap.
Stellaris is also mid and in many ways more of a role-playing game than a strategy. In terms of depth it has the same sort of 'fake' depth other Paradox titles have, and is not in any way deeper than an ordinary Civ-game from before they got hit by the stupid ray.
No_one
3hr ago
So ?
Great men are rarely good men. Gaetz seems to be pretty eloquent and an enemy of the bureaucracy. Until that is purged and once again accountable to elected representatives, you'd do well to ignore any wrongdoing short of large scale fraud, actual forcible rape or murder.
DirtyWaterHotDog
3hr ago
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).
Throwaway05
3hr ago
Some complicating factors include the fact that not all spots are funded by the federal government which means we can in fact increase the number of spots. Not all spots are desirable, and a good number are bad enough that American grads will give up or try again next year instead of being willing to take them.
As to if the international applicants are so bad that the places won't take them or the spots are so bad they won't go to them, I do not know.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
3hr ago
Tremendous week for the Eagles. With any luck they have the NFC East sewn up after beating the Rams, with the Redskins dropping a sloppy game to a scrappy Dallas team.
Saquon is the truth. You can't stop Barkley you can only hope to contain him. Next week is going to be key for his MVP and OPOY narrative, if he has a great game and the defense stuffs Lamar and Henry, then Saquon will emerge in a two horse race with Josh Allen. He'll still probably lose to Allen, non-QBs rarely win, but he'll have a puncher's chance down the stretch.
Hurts and the rest of the offense looked OK at best. I was hoping to see Hurts spread the ball around more, but he stuck to AJ Brown and Dallas Goedert. He just never has the processing speed to run through his other receiving options. If he could, he'd be unstoppable. He'll need to find it against a weak Ravens pass defense next week if they're going to outshoot Lamar.
The Eagles' D finally managed to beat a competent QB in an unassailably well executed way. Stafford looked good, but didn't have enough. Unfortunately, they lost Brandon Graham to a season ending triceps injury. That leaves the team dangerously thin at Edge, relying on Josh Sweat, second year development project Nolan Smith, and developmental rookie Jalyx Hunt. All three will need to step up if the team is going to make any noise down the stretch.
Luckily for the Eagles, the Redskins fell apart against a shorthanded Dallas team. Three up in the loss column with six to play puts them in a position where if they just beat the Panthers, Giants, and Cowboys at home, then the skins need to win out in order to get a tie. The dallas game was hilarious, I listened to the radio broadcast doing chores, and I turned it off after the kick return touchdown figuring the game was over. Missing two more touchdowns and a field goal that were still left in the game. Daniels is Good, and will be trouble for the rest of his rookie contract for the Eagles. Dallas is bad, but still has enough star power that if they all decide to pull the wagon together they can make it tough for any team. Hopefully by Christmas they are so far out of it that they have little motivation to play spoiler in Philly, and if you put your arm on their throat they'll fold.
Elsewhere in the NFL: Can Pat Mahomes keep getting away with it? Is Russell Wilson cooked? How much tanking is too much tanking in New Jersey?
DradisPing
3hr ago
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.
No_one
3hr ago
Does this explanation make sense? Or is this just a $20 bill sitting on the sidewalk?
No, there's no $20 bill.
Big companies are woke and will mandate woke BS. People who climb the greasy pole in corporations are socially adept conformists with sociopath traits. Not the kind of people who care about truth or beauty or get disturbed by woke shenanigans. They read the room and act accordingly.
This will change as US business and political elites become anti-woke which they must. According to Thiel, in SV in '16 they thought he was crazy, by '20 people were telling him he was right. People got fired over activism since then. So the tide is turning.
MtF devs, rare as they are, or woke devs in any normal company would simply toe the line or be told to go elsewhere if they acted out.
But then, you're not missing anything because big companies make games for big market shares and big market share require games made for the average person, who are not that interesting.
But could they get devs?
Yes. For example, Factorio devs are anti-woke to the point there was a minor scandal when someone called out one of them for recommending a programming essay by Uncle Bob, he was told to shove his opinion up his ass..
Another anti-woke game is Kingdom Come, whose developer is notorious for talking back at liberals, unapologetically told people to get lost after they wanted blacks in medieval Bohemia and is even mildly politically active in Czech Republic having founded a small NGO called Society for the Defense of Freedom of Expression which has of course been accused of spreading 'disinformation' by the arbiters of truth working for the Ministry of Interior. (for Americans, that's the guys who run the national police, jails and so on )
It's a matter of funding and publishers culture moreso than the raw talent. Factorio was self-funded, Kingdom Come got funding for development from a local oligarch. Not sure how KC2 will be, there were rumors but the guy in charge is not the kind to let himself be overruled, so I expect no wokery even if publisher/funder is no longer local.
After all, there are roughly 2 billion people from high-average IQ populations like whites, east Asians where people with an IQ of 120 are likely to become devs. Only cca 500 million of these live in countries where woke is the official culture.
(If you're black with that IQ, you can get paid much, much more by being a businessman etc)
Tanista
3hr ago
None of this matters to someone who just wants to play FIFA and take his favorite team to victory. The times when you could just go around calling people faggot without consequences...like, I don't recall being that brazen in the Xbox 360 days. Even back then Microsoft was trying to crack down on it.
It's been a while since I jumped into those sorts of money-printer games that 2rafa is describing, but their main weakness is really complacency and over-monetization (the argument would be that they're not really "art" in the first place, just whatever they have to be to justify what's essentially a yearly $60 subscription fee). Most people don't care that much about lore for something like CoD or Halo (when it was good). They certainly don't care for FIFA or those other sports games.
SerialStateLineXer
3hr ago
Well, not a fast mass suicide.
Maybe your idea of "political material" is a vicious coke-addled rapist, with such a short temper that he has been convicted for physically assaulting a fifty-year-old man for the crime of refusing a glass of whiskey he offered him. It is not mine.
which implies he's part of some sort of organisation, which is definitely not progressive.
It's called a "gang".
No_one
3hr ago
Seeing how few interceptions were visible during the latest attack on Israel, and that the missiles use there were a tier above (SM-3, THAAD, Arrow) and none of them was ever mentioned as being deployed to Ukraine ?
Why'd you expect a single interception? Patriot can intercepts Scuds, missile with vastly lower velocity and predictable trajectories.
No_one
3hr ago
neutrality and pretty much openly announced that their satire would only be a means to advance a socially progressive worldview, t
Seeing how rapidly Ireland is embracing migration and progressive causes , is there any.. actual opposition, in Ireland, to the idea of making the country as diverse and consequently as low trust as New York ?
Looking at the 'controversies' section, it does make him look like political material. After all, he's probably not setting those cars on fire by himself, which implies he's part of some sort of organisation, which is definitely not progressive.
SerialStateLineXer
3hr ago
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.
No_one
4hr ago
He has said it's most of his free time though. And he's not claiming he's best in all of it, just has best performance in some subset of it. I don't think it's that implausible tbh.
The game has cca 80k daily players. War Thunder has 800k. Counterstrike about the same order of magnitude as WT . It's not one of the very popular games, though still fairly big.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
4hr ago
This whole theory rests on a no true Scotsman. Any time intelligence is categorized more than one step away from IQ it's just the author letting out their biases.
SerialStateLineXer
4hr ago
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.
ControlsFreak
4hr ago
Figures 1, 3, and Table 5 might tell a different story to some folks. 5-10% unfilled can easily be chalked up to various frictions (see also discussions of things like the general unemployment rate), and one could think that the percentage unfilled would remain approximately constant if the number of slots were increased within some range.
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.
FistfullOfCrows
4hr ago
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)
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
4hr ago
Milady from the book is one of my favorite villains. She is smart, adaptable, ruthless, resourceful, flawed, vicious, and above all feminine. She wields femininity as a weapon far more effective then mere swords and muskets. Why dirty your hands, when you can manipulate men to do it for you?
Cardinal Richelieu is smart, adaptable, ruthless, resourceful, flawed, vicious. He manipulates dumber men to do his dirty deeds for him. And yet he's a magnificent bastard worthy of respect, while Milady is put down like a viper. She's not exactly portrayed as a role model by Dumas.
Men hate when women characters like this are empowered. We've had a discussion of Heartbreakers on the Motte recently and I think we have discussed Gone Girl as well. So of course the old manipulative Milady was replaced with the new one, the one that can escape in the final reel.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
4hr ago
Sure, but they're much rarer than they think they are. Labeling oneself heterodox is a poor indication of actual heterodox thinking.
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.
More options
Context Copy link