domain:alakasa.substack.com?q=domain:alakasa.substack.com
TwiceHuman
7m ago
You just named 5 Japanese products and one indie title? That's almost an argument in favor of the DEI-ification of western media. Japan hasn't become woke yet.
vorpa-glavo
11m ago
Nassim Nicholas Taleb talks about why this happens in Skin in the Game. You can read the relevant chapter here.
Basically, the most intolerant minority tends to win, when there aren't high transaction costs to cater to them. Jews won't drink non-kosher beverages, but gentiles will drink kosher beverages, so most drinks in the United States are kosher. Back when restaurants still had smoking sections, a non-smoker could sit in a smoking section and not smoke, but a smoker couldn't sit in a non-smoking section and smoke. Etc., etc.
Relating this back to woke, anti-woke and non-woke. I suspect most people who are anti-woke will still buy most woke games. They might grumble about female protagonists, unappealing female characters, and every romancable character being Schroedinger's bisexual, but most of them will still buy a triple-A game that has all these features. On the other hand, the woke and non-woke will not buy a game whose explicit purpose is to reinforce anti-woke ideas (anti-trans, anti-cosmopolitan, conservative, trad, anti-LGBT, etc.) As a result, games end up either woke or non-woke, with a vanishingly small contingent of anti-woke games catering to a tiny segment of the market.
If you think game devs & video game designers sit in a room together, then you're dead wrong. Devs are the exploited labor. If devs were the problem, then indie games would have been an even bigger woke fest. That opposite is true.
The problem is lack of cartelization. Or : "Tech dudes are pussies".
Here is the day to day in the life of a developer:
- Report your progress to your VP who decides if you get promoted. MBA.
- Report your progress to a product PMs who decides what needs to get done. MBA.
- Build the software to the exacts design created for you. BA Painting.
- Submit legal review to the legal team who decide if you're infringing on external IP. Lawyer.
- Rinse and repeat
They have no agency.
Have you ever worked in a law firm ? The partners, managers, associates....all lawyers. Everyone else reports up to them. Hospitals : Admins, Head of departments, Regulators.... all doctors. Everyone else (nurses, insurance, etc) must report to or work with them. Same is true for heavy engineering or any industry that needs deep expertise.
Tech prides itself in being anti-credential. But in the process, it has become anti-expertise. When the door is open for everyone, the politically savvy are going to run rounds around the meek devs.
The problem started with Steve Jobs. Steve portrayed himself as the cool 'designer' who figured out how to take socially inept coders and transform the world with it. This set the narrative for the tech industry as it exists today. It is exacerbated when a startup CEO sees massive growth, and must hire people to 'manage' all the growth. Rather than promoting socially competent senior devs, they hire 'ready made' MBAs. This sets up empire-building MBA culture in the entire middle management (VP - Director) band.
Tech guys created an industry, and MBA types stepped in to make all the money from it. MBAs understand all products as a supply chain. Create more, create faster and more time pressure. Ofc, that's a terrible combination for anything that needs the slightest bit of expertise. So, that's how you get the modern game dev industry.
To be direct:
- Arts grads (writers, designers, directors) come up with woke stories
- MBA CEOs follow the money & NYT. NYT tells them more woke. Money tells them more Fortnite.
- Tech see major issues. But, are pussies so they build what they're told at insane time pressue
- Thing doesn't get made in time because in any high-skill job - more time pressure is worse quality is broken game
- Deadlines keep slipping for reasons any dev could have explained. But to MBAs, whippings must continue until morale improves
- Devs keep getting abused
- Game releases as a broken unplayable mess
- Consumers give shit reviews. IGN says 10/10 because video game journalism also isn't run by gamers or devs.
- Art grads and MBA CEOs have never played a video game in their life. So they don't know the video game is shit. IGN must be right. Gamers are sexist.
- MBA CEO says numbers must go up. So, burn all good will by overselling cosmetics exploiting gambling whales.
- Shit game but breaks even. Convenient explanation so board-of-directors doesn't fire MBA CEO.
- CEO gets bonus. Art team gets credit. Dev team gets fired. (cost cutting measure to show good quarter)
- 2024, good will runs out, gamers out of touch with companies. Customer rebels. No sales.
- -> WE ARE HERE
All the recently successful game companies are run by hardcore tech dudes. Epic and Roblox are obviously having a moment minting money. Both their CEOs were hard core tech dudes who built the core tech that underlies their companies. The 2 games that recovered from shambolic launches (No man's sky, Cyberpunk) are both run by hardcore tech people.
When looking for tech people running game studios, I found this quote from the founder of No Man's sky's studio.
My degree was straight Computer Science which generally frowned on anything games related
Tells you everything you need to know about Gaming as an industry.
sun_the_second
43m ago
I think the moniker "a woman in real life" (as in "those incel gamers have never seen a woman in real life") is meant to acknowledge that Aloy is depicted below the 70th percentile or wherever "less attractive" starts for you.
TwiceHuman
54m ago
You're right, and it's such a shame, and it's because marketing has grown bigger than the product being marketed. So for every dollar spend on making something of value, 9 dollars are spend trying to convince others that it have value. This tendency generalizes to most of society, which is why most things have become so fake.
TwiceHuman
56m ago
You're correct that the rate of autism is quite high among programmers, but I think there's even more competent non-woke programmers. So yeah, these companies hire people who are woke, and non-woke people do not apply at these companies.
Here's my personal intuition-based view: All larger companies are political, and often woke and generally left-leaning. Smaller companies and individual developers tend to be neutral or at least non-woke. To escape the bullshit, and the producers who have a hostile relationship with their producers, you just need to avoid mainstream products. It's not just video games, it's basically everything. A personal rule of mine is "everything sucks once its gets big and popular enough". It seems to tie into enshittification, in that companies only initially try to please users. After a while, they try to please investors and business partners and shareholders - not the users who consume the product.
Non-woke publishers can get devs, but it's politically dangerous to not be woke, since there's a constant pressure against you, and the media is likely to harass you, you might even get in legal trouble. See for instance how Steam is accused of allowing hateful content because some users have Pepe profile pictures. So it's not that there's too few non-woke developers, but that there's too few non-woke companies, especially at the top.
Why is the law so woke?
I have the displeasure of working with a legal textbook, it's full of stuff about destigmatizing prostitution and drugs, getting overincarcerated minorities out of prison, criticizing socially invented 'fear of crime', the neoliberal practice of fining people... This isn't a 'random academic writes law about the plight of refugees that nobody will ever read' (though there are plenty of those), it's a textbook that thousands of students are supposed to study. It's written by a bunch of established academics, it reflects a certain level of consensus that is filtering through to the next generation.
Why are Jaguar so woke? Jaguar is/was considered a heritage British brand for classy and wealthy drivers.
https://x.com/Jaguar/status/1858800846646948155
https://x.com/EndWokeness/status/1859813947396047075
There must've been a consensus decision that this was the way the brand was headed, that this was the fellow who should be in charge of marketing.
I think it's a mistake to say 'this is one local effect' when we see it in so many places. There is a broader systemic cause, people think that this is good and prestigious so they do it regardless of whether it makes sense in context. There might be many commissars in the Red Army but the root cause doesn't have to do with the Army being particularly attractive to Commissars, it's that the Red Army is part of the Soviet Union.
Rosencrantz2
1hr ago
Russians hacked the voting machines and changed vote totals to ensure Trump would win. That is very clearly an example of a conspiracy theory.
So here I for sure agree with you. Phrased like this, it's on a level with QAnon and flat earth.
The others not so much. That Kavanaugh for instance was a sexual abuser is nothing close to a conspiracy view, he was accused by a professor. This doesn't require any kind of nefarious shadowy cabal, it requires Democrats to be more disposed to 'believe women' and some motivated thinking, and the Republicans to see plausible doubt that he did anything at a party decades ago, certainly enough that they can give their ally the benefit of the doubt. There's no specific coordination, no outrageous nefariousness, just a he said/she said that's split along lines of self-interest.
Anyway, I agree that both sides use ambiguous and provocative claims, only for many to retreat to more reasonable specifics when under pressure. My only point is that such motte/bailey strategy should be separated from off-the-reservation beliefs that are different in kind because they include implausible specifics, usually to do with central coordination or schizo leanings that the believer is very special. That a pizza restaurant is a paedophile market. That a government higher up is speaking to you directly on the dark web. That the space landings were faked.
I maintain that's a useful distinction.
whenhaveiever
1hr ago
Could it be that brilliant liars are simply smart enough to lie convincingly and are never found out?
functor
1hr ago
Devs overestimate the importance of Devs and a lot of non devs do as well.
To launch a game you have to pitch to investors and get millions in funding. Your game has to appeal to the funders and be something that they believe they will make money on. The biggest challenge is post launch . There are a bunch of games launched every day. The market is saturated to an insane degree. In order to break through you need to have influencers, journalists and other people pushing your game. The youtube algorithm promotes woke gamers.
Another underrated aspect is that in cut throat industries people will try to outmanoeuvre each other. If knocking out the opponent by discovering a transphobic tweet gets you ahead people will do it. The gaming industry is dirty.
Jordan B Peterson is a competent clinical psychologist and a middling public intellectual. He describes Sozenhitzens work on the USSR as a must-read but has acted pretty badly whenever people bring up 200 years together lol.
mrvanillasky
2hr ago
I would recommend some from the nrx and post nrx cannon. The NRx cannon starts off with Moldbug
- An open letter to an open minded progressive by Mencius Moldbug. My introduction to the world of neoreaction, one can also read a gentle introduction to unquailfied reservations, patchwork on toher works by Moldbug aka Curtis Yarvin but an open letter is perhaps his most influential work. He reads a lot so recommends a ton of books from other writers, including prominent reactionary ones
- Xenosystems by Nick Land. Nick Land also wrote fanged noumena, the dark enlightenment but xenosystems is a good work to start off from. Nicks work at CCRU is cool too but beyond my pay grade for now.
- Iq shredding, bioleninism, post mortem on neoreaction and the politics of heredetarianism by Spandrell found on his spandrell.ch for now. Spandrell distilled sopme ideas very well, besides iq shredding and bioleninism, his essays on the post mortem of neoreaction and heredatrianism are great reads. He also wrote essays on what he calls sexual deviance that quote Michael Bailey. He is extremely easy to understand and not as verbose as Moldbug.
Now the next two are not as gentle in their tone and are heavily inspired by jim donald of jims blog now on blog.reaction.la where he blogs. Jims vision of reaction or neoreaction has more pua, catholicism and medieval euro values than those of the first three. These are archives of two blogs of people inspired by him. I would cal this post NRx, though these two perfer the term Rx (reactionary).
-
truthinaworldoflies.com (use internet archive to read this). This is a great short primer on nrx and rx thinking but heavily influenced by jim but not as explicit. if you go on archive.today for the archives of alfs posts, you will find miscellaneious sections on god, family and other things as well. The main thing alf stresses on is what a friend of mine I met here calls cafetaria christianity, I have simialr issues with faith myself, him admitting this publicly was fairly honest.
-
setting the record straight by Aidan Maclear. Aidan now writes on chevauchee.substack.com and like alf was a longtime PUA guy who was more on the manosphere spectrum than on the PUA spectrum, so little in terms of technique, mostly psychology. He has no filter and packs a lot in just 100 pages.
All of these people are fiarly interconnected. Spandrell and Jim commented on slatestarcodex alongside heartiste, Curtis wrote a post about scott alexander and why hes wrong too. Alf, Aidan and Yareally were present on Heartiste and the first two are prolific commentors on Jims blog alongside the dividualist.
Esoteric
- Bronze age mindset by Bronze age pervert. BAM got recognition among the non frogs post yarvins praises for it. BAPs writing are more philsophic and esoteric in nature. His ideas with regards to bodybuilding, embracing atavistic euro values, the aesthetics of europe are fairly popular within many young people my age. BAP is heabily inspired by philoshophers of old, especially neitzche who Spenglar saw as a primary influence.
Bonus
- book of yareally by yareally and heartiste on game/his archives. I strongly recommend yareally over heartiste as in case you are a young person, this will give you an honest idea into what human mating looks like and what it can look like if you optimise for it and how to get there. Heartistes archive or his two books titled on game volume 1 and volume 2 in my humble opinion do not cover it as much or as well. Yareallys work offers a complete roadmap on how you can go from being terrible with girls to being a real social magnet who can read people, social situations and get an intuitive understanding of how women think. He recommends great resources along the way like sex god method, tyler digest etc that are not canned PUA routines.
Again, I do not in fact am telling people to believe all that is written here, the first three are foundations of what we would call NRx. Let me know if this would make a suitable blogpost. I always have wanted to make an intro to NRx after all.
some
2hr ago
Living the life of a rugged warriors, not always having enough to eat, wouldn't cause ones face to become more similar to that of Nikocado (before his weightloss) in terms of fatness.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
2hr ago
The frustrating thing about the Aloygate is that the changes to her are entirely plausible: not every woman ages gracefully, especially not a post-apocalyptic tribal. Well, not in six months, but such changes in six years are far from impossible.
However, this framing would require the creators to acknowledge that they've made her less attractive and defend this as a natural process that women go through and are very sensitive about. And since the unspoken rule is that every woman is 10/10, the whole thing devolved into a shouting match of "you've made Aloy ugly" - "no we haven't".
2rafa
2hr ago
Joel Greenburg recruits women off of sugar daddy websites, gives them fraudulent real Florida driver's licenses listing their age as 18, he then pays them to have sex with men (at least one rising star in US House of Representatives), and then uses this information to negotiate a deal with the DOJ,
This seems like a much less likely course of events because if Greenberg had never spread lies about his primary opponent (and thus been investigated) the government would next have found the relevant evidence. Maybe he set that up himself, but it seems unlikely given his general sloppiness and failson nature.
It seems much more likely that Greenberg and Gaetz both enjoyed underaged hookers from SeekingArrangement and that when Greenberg’s ridiculously corrupt behavior got him caught by the Feds he offered the only thing of value he had. They then looked up Gaetz’ dad and saw an opportunity to get some off the books money for whatever wacky op this is.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
3hr ago
The Kraft Heinz Company would kindly like to insist that it wasn't Kool-Aid®. The Kraft Heinz Company products have never been used to facilitate a mass murder-and-suicide.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
3hr ago
Possibly, in some circles even probably, but historically (I write that without solid support beyond my assumption) this type of behavior has been invisible. To be too brazen or overt (by, say, throwing a shoe, or, imagining Connie Corleone, breaking a bunch of dinner plates and sloshing the pitcher of wine over the veal) is to reveal oneself as an aggressor and thus drop the plausible deniability (if I may borrow a CIA term).
Any physically vulnerable or weaker player will necessarily develop strategies to compensate for this weakness, and passive aggression done well is like an art form. Its sisters, cattiness, backstabbing, intrigue, manipulation, these are the fey but effective weapons of the court (or dining table) as opposed to the battlefield or backyard. And to repay cattiness with a smack up the mouth is forbidden (and ineffective), just as to answer a blow to the jaw with a withering comment doesn't win fights.
This is nothing that everyone here is not already aware of (probably. Some might take issue ) I suppose my point is that this behavior gets modeled and copied, the same way swagger and volume of voice and strongarm get modeled for growing boys. Modeled without being so much overtly talked about.
2rafa
3hr ago
Once anti-woke video game studios appear, they will quickly displace the incumbents.
They won’t because to the average Call of Duty or League of Legends player the ‘lore’ and any associated progressive politics are completely irrelevant to their enjoyment and these franchises have $10bn moats in terms of brand value and built up expertise.
I'm not convinced that the SWEs they hire in the video game industry actually are all that woke, that's at least not my experience with swedish video game developers. They're not anti-woke but they aren't really woke either.
The people that are woke and who are able to insert woke inte video games are the writers, artists and designers (and game journalists but that's outside of the developers), and i believe its that pipeline thats really rotten if any. What percentage of writers with a "relevant degree" are even non-woke? Anti-woke?
Furthermore even if you're non-woke, if the only acceptable culture in your industry is woke what are you going to do? You'll at the very least put in performative nods towards wokeness like "body type a/b" and inserting a girlboss here and there.
2rafa
3hr ago
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.
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?
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.
urquan
3hr ago
HR having a "Cluster hiring" policy literally gives them a party cadre within a few hiring cycles, and then you're fucked.
Wow... you weren't kidding. I looked up the term "cluster hiring" and was greeted by this helpful description (in an academic context):
Cluster hiring, a recruitment practice known to increase diversity and promote interdisciplinary collaboration, is becoming increasingly popular among colleges and universities looking to diversify faculty and advance research related to social justice.
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:
"I do think the church is well placed to bring about some significant change in the world. And change in the world is desperately needed." The church’s "new mission" will be to “develop spiritual awareness in individuals and communities around the world”. Because the church – at least in North America – is so widely distributed throughout the community it is well placed to effect widespread consciousnessraising about such issues as AIDS, Global Warming, equitable access to technology etc. "The church has ground level access to millions of people. And millions of aware, reflective, conscious people is exactly what this world needs."
(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.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
3hr ago
Who are these people who need to touch grass, the implication being that they are so opposed to the woke they make this (and @WhiningCoil) look tame in comparison -
it is just really exhausting to be constantly reminded that these are the most marginalized and oppressed people ever and the slightest hint of impatience or annoyance with them is a genocidal wish for them not to exist, and meanwhile we have to celebrate them everywhere every day, in films, in games, in books, nothing can be published without Representation and god fucking forbid any work feature all gender-conforming straight white people (or any two out of those three) because that's a hate crime.
I want to "just show basic human decency." I do show basic human decency. I do not hate anyone and I do not want LGBTQ people harmed, harassed, or shoved into a closet. And that's not enough. Because I have hateful, bigoted, genocidal beliefs (like maybe trans women shouldn't compete in women's sports, and it's just possible that some sex offenders with penises who want to be sent to women's prison are not sincere about their gender identity, and also they are like 0.5% of the population so maybe everything doesn't have to be about them!).
Because it looks to me like that there is precisely what the vast majority of the anti-woke - particularly on the motte - have been screaming exasperatedly for the past decade and it is the same gaslighting that you point out here - which has only started dying down recently (since the election made it clear the progressives weren't ordained by God is how it looks to me) and was previously much much more ubiquitous - that has made them apoplectic.
This isn't exactly true. People are getting banned in these games for writing "faggot" or even "gg" because of wokeism. The political pressure leads to censorship, self-censoring, the dilution of art, the decrease of player freedom, and even competitive games modes (since hierarchies are seen as evil in leftist morality). I'm not sure how much the average console player understands these dynamics, though.
More options
Context Copy link