domain:astralcodexten.substack.com?page=4
DradisPing
6hr 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
6hr 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
6hr 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
6hr 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
6hr 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
6hr 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
7hr 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
7hr 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
7hr 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
7hr 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
7hr 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
7hr 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
7hr 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
7hr ago
Sure, but they're much rarer than they think they are. Labeling oneself heterodox is a poor indication of actual heterodox thinking.
sohois
7hr ago
Concord was supposedly in development for 10 years.
Everytime I see facts about this game, the budget and development time grow larger.
Wikipedia currently lists an 8 year dev time for Concord. But it's not directly sourced, and it doesn't seem to match reality. The studio that created the game wasn't even founded until 2018. Maybe some of the founders were had an idea for a hero shooter in 2016, but if you included all ideation for a game everything would have ridiculous development times
sohois
8hr ago
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
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
8hr ago
· Edited 8hr ago
Disclaimer: I don't actually work in the industry.
The problem AFAICS is that there are so many layers of selection against anti-SJ and no real layers of selection against SJ apart from the end-users, because arts are heavy on SJers and SJ will retaliate against people for helping an anti-SJ game.
Let's assume you're a game dev and you want to make an anti-SJ game. You need: funding, other devs, marketers, friendly-ish journalists, platforms to sell it on, and of course end users.
If you're rich, you can bankroll your own game, but if you're looking for investors you might have some trouble because of the latter stages, and because SJ has a reasonable degree of penetration into the financial system (i.e. people who can invest in you with other people's money, not just their own).
Lots of other devs are SJWs, so they're not going to work with you. The ones that aren't SJWs still are afraid to work with you, because if they do then their career is basically limited to "make more explicitly-anti-SJ games"; SJ will cancel them for the sin of working with you and they probably won't be able to be coworkers with SJWs ever again.
Lots of marketers are SJWs, so they're not going to work with you. The ones that aren't SJWs still are afraid to work with you, because if they do then their career is going to take a rather serious hit; lots of marketing agencies won't hire someone with that kind of black mark.
Lots of journalists are SJWs, so they're not going to promote your game. There is an alt-media ecosystem these days who've already paid the costs of cancellation and will not be deterred by it, but it tends to be focused on politics rather than entertainment; still, this one's noticeably less of an issue.
Lots of platform bureaucrats are SJWs, so you're going to have a hard time getting your game on those platforms. This one's especially hard because of the oligopoly.
End users, as you say, no real issue.
And a lot of these reinforce each other, too, because if the game is going to fail anyway then what the hell is the point?
Even trying to make a non-SJ game has some of these problems, because you still can't hire essentially any SJW devs (or to some degree marketers) without them at some point wanting to insert SJ and then you have the choice of either defying them and being considered anti-SJ by SJWs, or acceding in which case it's now an SJ game. And yeah, as others have said there are also rumours of ESG shenanigans on the "investor" rung.
Now, there are exceptions. Eastern media comes pre-made from a place where these incentives don't apply (although translators may still have a go at "fixing" it, that's actual extra work and thus less profit). Indie games don't have the incentives interlock quite as strongly because you need less people, although outside of single-person passion projects they're still there. But for the main industry? This $20 note is sitting on the ground... in the free-fire zone of the Berlin Wall. It's not impossible to pick it up, but it's also not surprising that it sits there a while.
No_one
8hr ago
Did the guy collect some recent Ukrainian jokes ? They ought to be pretty similar given the common cultural descent.
No_one
8hr ago
.. and given how dumb his shitposting it, I really doubt he spends much time on it.
TwiceHuman
8hr ago
That's a strong argument, I will give you that. We can only hope for something better if either of these are true:
1: We're more intelligent now
2: The ancients stopped progressing because they were content with what they achieved
3: Modern technology or circumstances makes it possible to go further (biofeedback and such?)
4: Having access to all of these different schools of knowledge thanks to the internet, and being able to combine them or pick the best parts of each, allows us to go further in some sense.
That being said, it's not an uncommon idea (and I discovered it myself independently) that we are god, and that we had to make ourselves forget that we were, in order to be able to live. If you wrote a book, and you were to enter the story you had written, then you'd need to forget that you were the author in order to enjoy it and immerse yourself in it. Being god is empty. "Against boredom even the gods struggle in vain". Even people who reach the peak in video games tend to get the urge to start over. Besides, limitation is important. Writers block is a result of having too many choices. "Everything" and "Nothing" have many things in common. I think they might be the same thing, actually. Things can only exist with limitations (Language can only exist because some combinations of letters and punctuation aren't allowed)
Southkraut
A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
8hr ago
· Edited 8hr ago
You're not wrong overall, but FWIW there absolutely are non-woke devs. Very few are explicitly anti-woke, though, that's a very small niche. And either way, they try to keep their politics out of the public as an issue of self-preservation. The userbase being anti-woke isn't entirely true - there are elements of it, but numerically I think the vast majority of players are actually just plain not interested in politics. There is a sizable group of vocal anti-woke players, but they're a drop in a bucket compared to the many more who just want to grill game.
One problem is that even anti-woke devs need to cooperate with woke publishers, influencers, reviewers, community managers, contributors, and of course a sizable woke customer base. Very few anti-woke people who work in game development for reasons you have pointed out. It's better for devs to try and be apolitical than to risk suffering sabotage, bad or no publicity, uncooperative business partners, negative reviews and alienating a large number of potential customers. It's a woke ecosystem; you can't thrive in it by swimming against the current. And given how ridiculously oversaturated the market is, it's hard enough to make a profit without making yourself a public enemy.
As a result, non-woke games made by non-woke devs do absolutely exist. Take any game without controversy about it, and chances are it's one of them.
But who can make an anti-woke game? It might have to be someone who doesn't care about an uncooperative environment and doesn't care about making a profit, i.e., an indie hobbyist. Those games exist, but they usually don't gain much traction, visibility or longevity, because this type of dev has very limited resources with which to make an actually good game. Alternatively, a serious game development company that managed to associate itself with politically indifferent influencers, publishers etc. might decide to market a game as explicitly anti-woke...but it would still have to be a good game, else they're just shooting their cause in the foot and ruining their own future prospects on top of it. But here's the rub, for a hobbyist or a company: if they can make a good game, then why not market it to everyone instead of just the small anti-woke minority? Ultimately even anti-woke gamers are gamers first and anti-woke second, that's why they play games at all, and will play a good game over a politically appealing game.
In conclusion, game development is a woke world with very little breathing room to spare, and trying to fight an uphill battle in there just has you run out of oxygen.
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?
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