domain:lesswrong.com?page=2
jeroboam
4hr ago
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.
edmund-nelson
Filthy Anime Memester
4hr ago
Mega crit is An american group (of 2 guys) Anthony Giovannetti and Casey Yano, who live in Seattle.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
5hr ago
At some point, people need to realize that woke scolds have no power.
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.
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.
jeroboam
5hr ago
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.
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.
WhiningCoil
5hr ago
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.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
5hr ago
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.
jeroboam
5hr ago
"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?
WhiningCoil
5hr ago
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.
jeroboam
5hr ago
You saw a lot of video game journalist organizing on mailing list and at conferences to bully developers into pushing their views.
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.
clo
5hr ago
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.
WhiningCoil
5hr ago
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.
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.
FD4280
5hr ago
If you don’t set the high bar at prodigy level, we have counterexamples in Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon.
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.
jeroboam
5hr ago
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.
hydroacetylene
5hr ago
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?
"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.
clo
5hr ago
It's perhaps useful to compare the UK's case. Many of the same problems, some different.
They imported and swallowed BLM wholesale, right down to disruptive protests. The UK has no history of African-American slavery.
Or, well, I hate bringing this up because it's common knowledge and nobody cares about old hatchets, but pretty much the entire field of eugenics and progressive curation of the human genome to remove undesirable elements was cutting-edge American science... that the Germans followed to their own conclusions, with interesting results.
People copy America and import their memeplexes because America wins. America has some natural defenses against their own memeplexes, namely that everyone knows on some level it's all kayfabe. This is frequently missed by foreign observers, who are still at the "call a spade a spade" level of meta.
This isn't a disagreement about possible charges because it's not hard to think of any number of about a dozen federal charges if a connection between Alford and Kent and McGee is made. It's about your belief there are no facts to support such a connection, except there are some small ones: Alford told the Gaetz to direct the money towards a trust account in care of David McGee, Alford claimed he was working with Kent, McGee, and others to rescue Bob Levinson, Alford's company to handle this exchange was incorporated by... David McGee. Kent is the one who handed Don Gaetz the "Project Homecoming" document which implies a promised presidential pardon or the investigation/indictment would be ceased. Could this all be innocent connections? sure!
It's entirely possible a former DOJ prosecutor currently working at a large, prestigious law firm continues to involve himself in various schemes of a long-term client who has been convicted multiple times of fraud and blackmail. Perhaps McGee just takes his bar oath to heart. Of course if McGee did want to put together a blackmail scheme, a person like Alford would be the perfect bridge because his word is shit, he's a repeated felon, and he already has a history of taking the blame if the scheme falls apart.
The scheme would be David McGee would accept the money to fund the rescue effort. Kent is the one who handed Don Gaetz the "Project Homecoming" document which implies a promised presidential pardon or the investigation/indictment would be ceased. Alford was the person who connected the payment with the reward. In the middle of this investigation by a local FBI office right as it's about to get to the McGee stage, the Gaetz charges get released to the NYT and then everything stops. As soon as the scheme falls apart, Alford falls on his sword and takes all the blame.
I wonder when the FBI is going to release the full tapes or transcripts of the meetings between Don and the trio. Matt Gaetz claims there is far more on those tapes and in other documents which substantiate his accusations about McGee and Kent. I have seen nothing to convince me these allegations were seriously investigated and instead the FBI was happy to charge Alford and move on.
Here's the thing, though: The Feds only had jurisdiction over Alford because he made fraudulent statements via text message.
In the particular charge the picked, sure. That doesn't mean this was the only way they could have established jurisdiction over Alford or possible co-conspirators. This isn't some strong limitation or even much of a hurdle in the modern day and how and what communication devices are typically used. I'm not implying there is strong evidence to currently available to prove McGee or Kent knew Alford was going to send fraudulent text messages to Don Gaetz or fill out the conspiracy.
On a side note, I'm disappointed no one has made an "Alford plea" pun. It's too bad he didn't even attempt to obtain one.
Are you suggesting that they were setting him up in 2017?
Who is "they"? Our three muskateers currently being discussed? The government at large? No, I doubt it. As far as I know, there is no connection between Joel Greenberg and the trio. I'm speculating about some facts I find interesting and thought others would find them interesting as well. Other than my characterization of Joel Greenberg as looking like a honeypot operation, I'm not arguing anything in particular.
Furthermore, if you have that evidence (or fake that evidence), then what was their goal? If the goal is to destroy Matt Gaetz's public career, just charge him and move on. What's the purpose of the hare-brained fraud scheme?
To have leverage over Matt Gaetz in order to control him in some way in the the future. I find it hard to believe you cannot fathom some other purpose of having blackmail material on someone other than to burn your blackmail material to harm that person.
Or is it your contention that the Federal Government was in such dire need of somewhere between 5 and 25 million dollars that they resorted to phonying up an investigation into a congressman so they could use a twice-convicted con man and two confederates to bilk the money out of him?
The federal government wasn't in dire need of $20,000,000 in 2010 when David McGee was attempting to sell favors to a Russian Oligarch, but they did and the contention was the operation needed to be kept off of official books because the government had not admitted Bob Levinson was a likely CIA contractor or they couldn't get official approval and were attempting to save their buddy.
I don't think the entire scheme was hatched to bilk money out of Gaetz family starting from back in 2017. A plausible narrative is Greenberg was attempting to get leverage on him. Later on as that leverage was falling apart because our naughty boy Greenberg couldn't help but be a sloppy criminal who couldn't help himself to not commit a laundry list of crimes, a group of people who clearly had non-public knowledge saw an opportunity to get money out of the Gaetz family. Whether that group was large or confined to one, two, or a few is unknown.
KulakRevolt
5hr ago
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.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
5hr ago
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.
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)
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