Until a few weeks ago, I had no idea who Geoff Frazier was or who he worked for. I’ve been covering Blizzard’s World of Warcraft for years and I have never heard of him. All that changed when a notorious “Karen” — a disgruntled ex-Blizzard employee and radical left-wing malcontent named Jessica Gonzalez levelled public accusations against him by leaking posts he had made on a private Discord server for a select group of Blizzard employees and friends.
Ever on the prowl for victimhood narratives to exploit, Kotaku ran with the story and the video game press followed suit and dutifully parroted all of Gonzalez’s allegations against Frazier. The result is scores of copycat articles with eerily similar language that universally condemns an obscure Blizzard employee all based on a few tweets of a former Blizzard employee with no impartial investigation and precious little journalism.
Not one member of the fourth estate has tried to get the other side of the story. Not one has challenged Gonzalez or behaved in an objective manner. Instead, they believed her and taken her claims at face value. The result is that Frazier has been found guilty and sentenced all via the immense power of the corrupt video game press.
It is my belief the same thing happened to other long-time Blizzard employees Alex Afrasiabi, Jonathan LeCraft, Jesse McCree, and no doubt many others. They were terminated for no just cause thanks to unproven allegations by conniving female employees that were brought in to satisfy internal diversity quotas and for virtue signaling purposes.
By all accounts, working at Blizzard in the past few years has become a nightmare as most non-intersectional males are walking on eggshells for fear of being reported vindictive feminists and perpetually offended alphabet people who patrol the icy halls of Blizzard HQ like the feared Mutawa — the stick wielding Saudi religious police.
Employees vote with their feet. Most of the old guard at Blizzard has either left or been fired. Even Jeff Kaplan, ever the sniveling woke beta male, saw the writing on the wall and left Blizzard. Like a rat that leaves the ship before it sinks, he too somehow knew that it was time to go.
None of these male employees were presumed innocent by the press and the madding crowds on Twitter. None of them were given a fair hearing. None of them were given an independent and unbiased forum to defend themselves. None of them have had a chance to face their accusers. All of them were tried, convicted, and cancelled because of a corrupt media establishment that pronounced them guilty at the outset.
The presumption of innocence is a bedrock foundation of Western civilization and today’s angry neo-Marxist activists could care less.
The Cosby Suite Moral Panic
The left is infamous for creating false narratives to feed to a docile public. A few of them are: the Duke Lacrosse scandal, campus rape culture, toxic masculinity, climate change, voter suppression, Russian collusion, the Steele Dosier the 2020 election, and the January 6th protests. They did the same with the Cosby Suite.
Despite no evidence of any crimes being committed, the lives of Blizzard developers who set foot in the Cosby Suite (but not the others who willingly attended) have been ruined based on allegations due to a few selective photos taken in 2013, in a typical green room in a hotel suite and a few screen captures of a private chat with the developers using spicy language.
Hot on the hells of the #metoo moral panic, the unscrupulous media morphed the harmless Cosby Suite into an Epstein style sex-slave house and sold that big salacious lie to the public. Reality check: many grown women visited the Cosby Suite. They were not drugged and dragged there. They came of their own volition.
Worthless Squeamish Streamers
Male gamers have nobody to defend them. There are previous few if any advocates for male gamers. Millionaire streamers like the clownish Asmongold and others who claim to be on the side of gamers, do nothing to support persecuted male developers. Instead, they snicker with self-righteous glee, roll their eyes, and then proceed to capitalize on the suffering of others by creating more vapid reaction videos as more old guard Blizzard devs get crucified by feminist activist employees and their limp-wristed enablers in management.
With friends like Asmongold, who needs enemies?
Not one journalist has dared to challenge the official narrative about any of these stories. They are not interested in the truth. All they care about is shaping, promoting, and protecting their identity politics narrative. They are like religious zealots who are impervious to reason. Their unholy agenda is their gospel and Twitter is their church.
#MeToo Video Game Industry Edition
What is happening to Frazier feels like a “me too” witch hunt, all planned and perfectly timed, just like the 2014 Gamers are dead fiasco where sleazy leftist journalists conspired to form a narrative to usurp and marginalize white male gamers. This disgraceful episode of journalistic malpractice happened during the Gamergate scandal.
Their rules are simple: if the accuser is in a protected (intersectional) group, they must be believed. End of story. Case closed. But if the roles are reversed, nothing happens, and the public never finds out. Women can and have harassed men at Blizzard and the media has little to no interest.
After reviewing the leaked Discord chats, Frazier’s only crime is having candid opinions that lampoon and challenge the orthodoxy of the degenerate globohomo regime that is currently taking over every institution in the U.S.A. In today’s depraved world, having the wrong opinion about “protected groups” like the precious alphabet people can cost you your career and your reputation.
I’ve got news for Gonzalez and people like her: myself and most sane people — in their heart of hearts once were serious fans of the Irvine studio — AGREE with Frazier’s assessment of what’s going on at Blizzard. He’s right on every account and is speaking God’s unvarnished truth. Besides, what he said was in a private forum — not an official Blizzard forum and not on behalf of Blizzard. Frazier had the expectation of privacy. He didn’t use his real name either. This is just sour grapes on her part.
Don’t believe me, look at the astute reply of a lowly unwashed gamer on Twitter who makes a perfect assessment of Gonzalez’s unbridled narcissism and calls her out after her sanctimonious tirade against Frazier:
Sadly, gamers like this brave person are ignored and dismissed by the woke and the powerful institutional overlords. They have no real voice. They don’t have a media that advocates for them. Filthy rich streamers and YouTube e-celebs are too afraid to speak out on behalf of gamers because it’s going to hurt their bottom line with demonetized videos and outright banishment from Twitch and YouTube.
Free Speech Matters but Not to Leftists
America is still a free country that values and cherishes the universal human right of FREE SPEECH for every citizen. It is not a crime to have an opinion. It is not a crime to pose for a picture beneath a portrait of Bill Cosby. Yet, the neo-Marxists, the intersectionalists, and downtrodden alphabet people can say whatever they want with impunity, and they have their allies in the media and in Silicon Valley to run interference for them.
The left can no longer win arguments on the merits, so they use intimidation and threats to silence their opposition. Geoff Frazier had the wrong opinions and challenged systemic bigotry and racism of the diversity, inclusion, and representation cult — so the leftist star chamber decided he must be cancelled.
Geoff Frazier was Right
Gonzalez even claims he tried to get her fired after she agitated for neo-Marxist ideology via diversity, equity, inclusion, and representation (the Four Horsemen of Wokeness) at Blizzard. Those pernicious ideologies are inherently illegal, racist, and openly discriminate against straight white males who are more qualified.
Considering all the disruption she has caused; Blizzard should have listened to him. Troublemakers make trouble wherever they go. Once you remove the time-tested principles of merit and replace it with identity politics hiring policies you are setting your company up for eventual failure. This is precisely the trajectory that Blizzard is on now.
The mean-spirited and arrogant Gonzalez believes she has the moral authority to be the arbiter of who deserves to work at Blizzard and who does not. This self-righteous person has no moral authority or earned authority to pronounce judgement on anyone. A few people like this left to their own devices, can quickly destroy a company with their unchecked malignancy from within.
Geoff Frazier is a hero and a whistleblower for bringing this malcontent to the attention of Blizzard’s HR department.
Behold Jessica Gonzalez
When she was not grandstanding on Twitter, she was working in the Blizzard Quality Assurance department, which is the lowest rung of employment ladder, except for the customer service reps or company cafeteria workers. She was a tester. Translation: she played video games while she worked at Blizzard.
When Gonzalez made all these public accusations against Frazier, he no longer worked at Blizzard. Therefore, he could no longer use his power to get her fired as she alleged. What possible good could come out of this? It’s obvious that she did this an act of revenge to hurt Frazier further and she used woke outlets like Kotaku and others to do it.
It’s interesting that during the Blizzard protests, Gonzalez’s outspoken activism gave her a higher profile at Blizzard, and she was promoted during the summer of 2021 — a few months before she quit — to Senior QA person. Blizzard were trying to placate her but it didn’t work. She no longer works at Blizzard and has left the game development industry.
The ungrateful Gonzalez’s unhinged attack on Frazier is her parting shot at Blizzard and one last desperate attempt to draw attention to herself as a champion of workers rights and LGBTQ rights and muster the perpetually outraged Twitter mob to her cause. She played them all like useful idiots.
Paradoxically she may have done more damage to her cause because prospective applicants reading all the salacious stories about her and Frazier might think twice before choosing a career in gamedev. This also applies to other Blizzard scandals such as the overheated rhetoric and overwrought protestation about the Cosby Suite might backfire completely and dissuade even more women and minorities from become game developers.
What sane women would tolerate crunch with 16-hour workdays and working on weekends? What normal woman would want to be a part of industry known for its sexism and misogyny?
FUN FACT: Gonzalez’s Twitter profile is a riff on the famous Rosie the Riveter World War 2 U.S. propaganda poster that is often used today as a symbol of female empowerment. It was based on a real person who quit her job after two weeks because it was too dangerous. She was no feminist hero. The poster should have been named Rosie the Quitter. Perhaps it’s an apt symbol for Gonzalez.
Women that are foolish enough to pursue a career in gamedev, soon realize that life at a studio is far different than the breezy bucolic images in their recruitment brochures: it takes serious talent and hard work to succeed. Some women wisely come to the realization that they are not cut out for it. Some find other career paths but a special few blessed with good looks change their strategy and become corporate gold diggers.
Jessica Gonzalez Believes “Gamers Don’t Deserve Games”
If there is one Gonzalez’s tweet that is a smoking gun it’s this one:
What is truly revealing in this contemptuous tweet is her brazen disdain for gamers. She comes off as smug, condescending, and elitist by attacking the people that pay her salary: those dastardly straight white male gamers. It’s likely that Gonzalez didn’t arrive at this opinion after she left Blizzard, she had it all along.
This tweet raises fundamental questions about Blizzard’s employment hiring practices and how they evaluate existing employees. How many other Blizzard developers secretly despise the gamers that purchase their video games?
Game developers who detest gamers for whatever bizarre reason are in the wrong industry and they should be immediately terminated. Frazier was right all along: she deserved to be fired. You should not be hiring people who hate your customers.
The Vindictive Activist
Along with her former duties as a game tester, Gonzalez was and is activist that was using the unrest at Activision-Blizzard to promote a divisive dangerous neo-Marxist agenda that will actively discriminate against straight while males in favor of intersectional people who ride the Partridge Family hippy bus every day to Blizzard campus.
All my life I have been a strong promoter of workers’ rights and unionization. I spent a few years as a shop steward. However, in the 1990s the union movement became increasingly focused on identity politics and as a result I could no longer in good conscience support my union which had abandoned the concerns of rank-and-file union members.
Here are the demands of the ABK Workers Alliance group Gonzales used to lead. The highlights are mine:
This preposterous litany of demands will never be met by any sane company. Many of them having nothing to do with basic worker’s rights and instead are all about promoting the identity politics Trojan Horse. Activision-Blizzard would be far better to fold and reform the company and relocate in Russia where the civilizational cancer of wokeness and LGBTQ debauchery is not tolerated.
FUN FACT: According to my sources, all but one of the Activision-Blizzard activists who protested outside of Blizzard HQ were people that had been hired in the past year. Those people at the protest did not represent the real Blizzard in any way, shape, or form. They are nothing more than unscrupulous grandstanders who jumped on woke bandwagon to give their shallow lives some semblance of relevance.
The Author of the Decline at Blizzard
Most if not all the problems that Blizzard is experiencing today lands directly at the feet of former CEO and “all around nice guy” Mike Morhaime. Year ago, I warned Blizzard about the unintended consequences that would erupt by bringing leftist harpies into the studio years ago after Morhaime foolishly got swept up by wokeness and introduced the diversity/inclusion hiring initiative in 2014. Now his naivete has come back to decimate both Blizzard and his legacy.
It was mild-mannered Mike’s job to protect the unique Blizzard studio culture that produced some of the most successful video games in history. He failed.
Thanks to Morhaime, Activision-Blizzard has been emasculated and is now full of these hysterical, talentless, blue-haired pansexual l troublemakers. These people are nothing more than parasites who will eat your company alive from within. I predict they will turn on each other in the months to come and the host organism that puts easy food on their tables will be no more.
It looks like Mike is making the same mistakes at his new Dreamhaven studio by hiring ex-Blizzard wokesters. How long will it be before Kotaku runs a story about sexual-harassment and a lack of diversity at Dreamhaven?
Nice guys finish last. Studios run by nice guys also finish last. Too bad Mike had to learn that lesson the hard way.
The Grand Experiment with Equality of the Sexes
The Blizzard public relations debacle raises many uncomfortable questions about modern assumptions about the equality of the sexes in the work force. Jordan Peterson is one of the few intellectuals courageous enough to talk about this issue and give it the awareness that it deserves.
About 50 years ago women started entering the workforce in Western countries in greater numbers. The video game industry which started around the late 1970s was male dominated for the first 20 years. Women were exceedingly rare. Those that were employed were happy to be in the industry and they didn’t cause trouble like they do now, thanks to the left that’s drunk on intersectional feminism, female empowerment, and identity politics.
Due to inevitable sexual tension, traditionally men and women never worked side by side or were not educated side by side. To this day, many militaries do not have co-ed combat units for this very reason as it would erode unit cohesion and put the national security of those nations at significant risk.
Given how feminist and identity politics ideology are endemic in the psyche of modern females and the sexual tension that naturally exists between the sexes, I do not believe that men and women can coexist in equal numbers in the video game industry and produce great games for male consumers. I do not believe that women developers have the natural ability to understand and empathize with males and produce games for males who are by far the biggest consumers of video games. The converse is true: men don’t have the empathy and understanding to create video games for women. Any man that would attempt to do so is suspect in my books.
The experimentation with female studio heads, female directors, lead female actors, and female empowerment tropes has been disastrous for Hollywood films in the past 5 years. They’ve destroyed beloved franchises like Star Wars, The Witcher and more with their stupidity and wokeness. Now they are doing the same thing to the video game industry.
In the end, the law of the marketplace will have the last laugh. People vote with their feet. Get woke, go broke.
The Narrative
America is now under the control of big tech leftist oligarchs who own vast media empires to spread their propaganda “the narrative” to the masses. They pay lip service to diversity, inclusion, equity, and representation to shield them from criticism. These companies are responsible for manufacturing narratives that a gullible and incurious public will find appetizing. Oligarchs like Jeff Bezos determine what stories show up in the broadcast and print media; it is they that pick the winners and losers.
These very same people made violent career black criminal, addict, and amateur porn actor George Floyd into a saint, while ignoring the murder of white toddler named Cannon Hinnant by a vile black hoodlum.
The narrative has already been cast in stone with Activision-Blizzard. All the lemmings in the video game press are dutiful regurgitating the narrative just like they did with the Gamergate narrative (see Wikipedia’s specious entry on Gamergate for an example of gaslighting propaganda that protects the “narrative” with an orgy of spin and lies) and the current false January 6th “insurrection” and COVID vaccine narratives. Anyone that dares to question that officially approved narrative will be marginalized by the Deep State, the conspirators in Silicon Valley, and their useful idiots on Twitter.
Conclusion
The Frazier situation is a big nothing burger narrative just like the overblown Cosby Suite narrative. Gonzalez is self-aggrandizing opportunist who is trying to make a name for herself by trying to destroy the reputation of veteran male employee. Even though the man is no longer working at Blizzard and is resorting to selling memorabilia on eBay to pay the pills and to put food on the table, she just couldn’t resist trying to make his post-Blizzard life hell. Thankfully, her 15 minutes of notoriety are almost up.
The very same people who claim to champion the cause of so-called marginalized communities, the main one being the most powerful and privileged sacred cows in Western civilization: the alphabet people, are waging a scorched earth campaign and trying to cancel anyone that disagrees with them. These intolerant neo-Marxist cultists hate viewpoint diversity and do not want to debate. Emboldened by 30 years of weak conservatives who gave them easy cultural victories, they demand conformity and obedience. Everything that made America great, they want to destroy and replace it with their intersectional victimhood agenda.
The public smear campaign being waged against Geoff Frazier and other male Blizzard devs, is just another example of how straight white males are being sacrificed in America on the neo-Marxist altar of diversity, inclusion, equity, and representation, and systematically replaced and colonized by non-white, non-male, degenerate employees. If you are a white male and want to stay employed at Blizzard, you had better become woke as possible as fast as possible or you too will be targeted, attacked, and terminated.
What is happening at Blizzard and at other video game studios is a result of weak leaders who failed to protect their studio culture. This tragic affair is microcosm of a much larger problem which involves a systematic purge of males, whites, heterosexuals, freethinkers, conservatives, Christians from all occupations and institutions by totalitarian globalists.
The much-maligned Great Replacement is not a myth or a conspiracy theory, it is a demographic reality that is ongoing. Not only is it happening to real people, but it is also happening symbolically. Unexplained black NPCs are replacing white NPCs in video games like World of Warcraft. White people have vanished in most TV commercials and race swapping in historical dramas is all the rage. Female empowerment tropes have swept Hollywood, while white males are relegated to playing bumbling, emasculated sidekicks. The medical establishment is giving COVID medical treatments to non-whites. Divisive diversity and inclusion policies are popping up in most companies in corporate America and resulting in hiring quotas that favor women and minorities. Racist critical race theory is being taught at schools, colleges, and being imported directly into corporate America. Our nation has embraced a two-tiered segregated justice system: one for the woke and another for the non-woke.
This ideology is demonic and anti-Christian by its very nature. These puppets of the diabolic will not stop until Western civilization and the glue that keeps it together, Christendom, is obliterated and replaced with a pagan form of communist totalitarianism.
When all the straight, white males have been purged from studios like Blizzard, all will be left is a loose coalition of castrated beta males, depraved feminists, and deranged alphabet people. When they are not polishing up their nose rings and marching naked in their clownish PRIDE parades, these termites will be busy running the once great video game studios into the ground with their nihilistic Utopian fantasies. These intersectional sideshow freaks are utterly incapable of replicating the success that straight white males created for the Blizzard of old. That is an undeniable fact that you can take to the bank.
Blizzard games like World of Warcraft have already seen the staggering loss of millions of players and there is a quantifiable and appreciable lack of quality across the board on all current Blizzard products. This is directly due to Blizzard hiring based on diversity/inclusion instead of merit. The quality of video games is inversely proportional to the amount of woke developers working on the game. Garbage in garbage out. Period.
The feminization of the video game industry has been a disaster. Blizzard — a studio long revered by male gamers — is no longer worth saving. In its current woke incarnation, it does not deserve to survive and the fools cheering on intersectional madness will soon be back on the unemployment line and complaining on Twitter. Poetic Darwinian justice indeed.
Hopefully, in a saner future, what happened to the once venerable Irvine studio will be taught at business colleges as a warning to idealistic dreamers to think long and hard before killing the geese that lay the golden eggs and changing the formula that brought you success.
The video game industry was founded by masculine alpha men, rugged individualism, and bold risk-takers who dare to think creatively and challenge conventionality. Yes, they can occasionally be annoying, crude, brash, irreverent, and impolite but these are the guys that get the job done and make legendary video games. These are the play to win guys you want in your MMORPG guild. These are the rough and tumble guys you want on your football team that give 110% when the chips are down. These are the dependable loyal guys you want in a foxhole beside you in times of war.
Weak hipster beta males and disruptive intersectional females who wallow in civilizational gutter of victimology are not going to survive 16-hour days during a typical studio’s crunch death march. You’re going to need an unapologetic, balls to the wall masculine culture to survive. To use a metaphor from National Lampoon’s 1978 Animal House film: you going to need more Delta House types, less Omega House types to make amazing video games for men. Instead of running away from masculinity, video game studios should stop apologizing and celebrate it.
Diversity hires destroying the company in overdrive… oh my. After they finally blackmailed and fired everyone, people like Gonzalez are left and go down with the ship. She already left before, but I am afraid she is not the only quality asset of that kind. Blizzard is not going to become a “better place” this way with hypersensitive, hyperaggressive and wrong snitches like that. They are also making live harder for transgender and gay/lesbian people who are not like that and don’t want to be associated with such persons at all.
Well, what Nebu (Frazier, apparently) said… that was the worst he ever said? I agree with your assessment about Cosby Suite and Afrasiabi. People have gone crazy about that, but what did he actually do? Embracing female employees and asking them jokingly if they will marry him? This was exaggerated as well. Nothing criminal happened, nobody got raped. Nobody suffered. If Frazier feels and says others got unfairly paid more by sucking up, or that some people come to work as if they are going to carnival, well, that’s it?! So, this is the worst that happened? Seriously?
And people, journalists, streamers, too many, fall for it and support this malevolent nonsense! Don’t speak up against it. They’d rather ride the wave, take the praise, till they become victims themselves.
I would like to point out that the person who did wrong is the supposed victim, Gonzalez. Blackmailing coworkers, and so unsuccessfully (or successfully, but I really can’t blame Nebu for writing what he did. I am not onboard with the graphene thing, but I would not say spinning such a theory is a crime or offending me at all), it is rather she/he who should be fired. In a sane world, in a world gone mad such a dubious asset seems to be even protected.
Regarding what Issa Lacos wrote, she is spot on. The employee demands are recipe for disaster. A company works by people working together, not based on representation and aggressively going after each other!
As you pointed out, this has nothing to do with basic rights or anything related to work. Work is hard and to be avoided if you are an activist full of rage.
Smile and say nothing Mike Morhaime, well yeah, there is this quote… “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” He was president and did nothing.
The arbitrary rules and heavy-handed enforcement of them by social media censors of big companies are another major problem that has not yet been addressed. Not likely to happen anytime soon. Regarding the replacement thing, it started with a wave of lesbian/gay heroes and heroines in SciFi and Fantasy literature, the Amazon Wheel of Time series is already hinting at the representation that we can expect in the upcoming Amazon Tolkien series.
Most of the cultural rot in our society starts in the late 1980’s when a book After the Ball: How America Will Conquer its Fear of Gays in the 90’s was published. Authored by two homosexuals, it stands as one of the most brilliant treatises of psychological and culture warfare ever created. They rival Saul Alinsky who was a master of Machiavellian tactics to seize power.
https://www.massresistance.org/docs/issues/gay_strategies/after_the_ball.html
The book is truly shocking in its honesty. They provided a how-to-manual on how to manipulate public opinion. It’s not available anymore but you can read it for free on the Internet.
Hollywood and the entertainment industry put all of the recommendations in the book into TV and films in the 1990’s. Soon gay characters were appearing in TV sitcoms. This was all about desensitizing the public which is mentioned in the book.
At the same time in 1989, the theory of intersectionality was created by an academic named Kimberlé Crenshaw. This is a theory that unites every minority against a common malefactor — straight white males. Eventually the lesbian feminist cohort of the gay/lesbian movement took over, alienated the gays and used the tactics found in the After the Ball book and from Alinsky. This double punch knocked out an unsuspecting America. Soon so-called gay marriage was the law of the land here in the USA despite the passage of the Defense of Marriage Act and many referendums by citizens overwhelmingly opposing same-sex marriage.
The cultural-Marxist left has been emboldened by all their victories and what you see today is a result of that. The trans issue is just another example of them looking for victims to emancipate so they can keep their outrage machine grift going. The LGBTQ movement is the most powerful, well-funded, politically connected movement in America. They will not stop until every institution is woke and intersectional. Now they are coming for our children with Drag Queen Story Hours popping up all over the USA. Watch this video where they openly admit that they are grooming our children:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArOQF4kadHA
Culture is vitally important. Culture is upstream from politics. Those who control the culture, control the world. This is why they have been targeting video games since 2013 and beyond. They don’t really care about video games, they just want to destroy the industry because they can. Why is it that only LGBTQ people get special parades at video game studios like Blizzard? Frazier was right, they want us to worship them. That’s stone-cold idolatry.
People like Morhaime are intellectual lightweights. He and the upper management fools at the time had no clue of what is going on or the sinister cultural forces at work looking to devour studios like Blizzard. He left his studio wide open to be destabilized and attacked by these malcontents. He tried to appease the SJWs but they got worse. I don’t feel sorry for him one bit. Now the Blizzard name has lost all its street cred and is an ugly stain on his legacy and the hundreds of good people that used to work there. All of this could been avoided if he had stood up for Blizzard’s unique culture when it mattered.
Now it’s too late for the industry. The purple haired pansexual feminist grifters are in control in most studios thanks to 8 years of relentless diversity hiring. It’s unsalvageable at this point for U.S. studios. Look at the former Eastern Bloc countries and Russia. They will be the future of the video game industry because they will not tolerate subversive woke globohomo culture. They already have the best art talent in the world. Trust me.
Update: Andrew Sullivan is the most celebrated gay columnist in America. Here’s what he just said about the trans movement:
The Trans Movement Is Not About Rights Anymore
It’s about a cultural revolution and the abolition of biological sex
https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/the-trans-movement-is-not-about-rights-67e
What the trans movement is now doing, after this comprehensive victory, is not about rights at all. It is about cultural revolution. It’s a much broader movement to dismantle the sex binary, to see biology as a function of power and not science, and thereby to deconstruct the family and even a fixed category such as homosexuality. You can support trans rights and oppose all of this. But they want you to believe you can’t. That’s the bait-and-switch. Don’t take it.
In the past year you have major leaders in the MMORPG and virtual world genre like Raph Koster and John Smedley repeating the childish slogan that “trans rights are human rights” so you can see how many on the left have taken total leave of their senses and crossed the Rubicon into bizzarro world.
Sports also got turned absurd with trans athletes dominating female college sports. The logical step would be to dissolve all gender divisions and let males, females and transgender people compete together. Weightlifting is for sure going to be interesting.
But yeah, it is not about rights. It is the leftist/marxist strategy of subversion. Maximum disruption to force change. They are not openly propagating their values, they hide behind trans people who are their useful tools.
“I do not believe that women developers have the natural ability to understand and empathize with males and produce games for males who are by far the biggest consumers of video games.”
Is this still true? Some quick searching reveals that male consumers now outnumber female ones by only 55% to 45%. Still a majority, but not justifying the qualifier ‘by far’.
Interestingly, a similar ratio appears to have emerged in China and Korea, outside of the arena of US culture wars. I suspect it’s one of the big driving forces behind the rise of mobile gaming in general.
I would love to see some comparative revenue data. I bet the big purchases favored by men (dropping $70 on Call of Duty, say) are more than matched in total annual outlay by a woman buying small lots of mobile in-game currency (say, to compete in a Love Nikki fashion contest).
Great question. Of course, more women are now playing video games but these games are very different than the ones that men play. Women are more likely to be playing social games on Facebook and games like Angry Birds and such. So we are not exactly comparing apples to oranges here. I would concede that studios are trying to make video games more female friendly. Look at the art direction of Overwatch, it’s not something that I as a male would not gravitate to.
The video games I write about and care about are MMORPGs. It would be helpful if there was a breakdown of sex-based percentages of who is playing them.
When you’re a game designer, you may end up working on a game that you don’t particularly like (this has happened to me many times) so you put aside your personal likes and dislikes and make games for your target audience. One of my old producers told me this is considered “paying your dues.” But naturally, it really helps if you’re working on a genre you like.
There are some terrific female designers. The problem is most females game devs entering the workforce today are going to be bringing a lot of political and cultural baggage to the table i.e. female empowerment ideology, wokeness, diversity/inclusion, LTBTQ, etc.
Back to the issue of natural empathy, look at a significant part of the original WoW dev team and you’ll see that they were all hardcore raiders. There was Pardo, Afrasiabi, Kaplan and many more who were playing MMOs like EverQuest every day. There were a tiny number of female devs at Blizzard at the time. Imagine if Blizzard had hired an all-female dev team for WoW at the outset, I think WoW would have been completely different and let’s be honest, it would have been much worse.
Jordan Peterson makes a similar argument when he talks about the STEM field. He says that if you want “gender” equality, then that means you’re going to suffer a serious decline in quality in those fields. He can say this because the test scores of males and females for the STEM field are widely known and men by far make up the top achievers.
If Western civilization wants to abandon merit in favor of D.I.E. (diversity/inclusion/equity) then we must face the reality that non-Western civilizations like China who still use merit as the foundation of their civilization will eventually surpass the West. If we are sane, we really do not want to live in a world where the West is no longer at the top. Human rights (invented by the West in particular from Christianity) is a foreign concept outside of Western civilization. There are countless advantages and synergies that we in the West have accrued because we are at the top. If we lose them, not only will we have less financial security, but we will also lose our military superiority and all of us will be less safe. Again, more unintended consequences of removing merit and replacing it with DIE.
So this is the question:
Do we want the very best games and accept that there will be sex inequality in the studio workforce, or do we want mediocre games with perfect sex equality in the workforce?
I think most gamers want the very best games.
P.S. Someday I would like to see an all-female video game studio and see what they come up with. The problem is that most females in the industry are standing on the shoulders of giants and riding the coattails of males.
(Edit: added one sentence)
Thank you for the reply.
If we confine ourselves to the MMORPG sphere, then of course the answer varies depending on the franchise. Men make up something up in the ninety percent range of EVE players. On the other hand, in something like WoW (and definitely in something like FFXIV) it’s much closer nowadays. While hardcore raiding/m+/arena still form the aspirational core of these games, an MMO would leave a lot of money on the table if it didn’t find ways to cater to casuals, which includes many older male gamers and most women.
(Here’s one recent survey, though it’s methodologically lousy, based as it is on self-selected respondents: https://www.sas.com/content/dam/SAS/support/en/sas-global-forum-proceedings/2020/5009-2020.pdf Still, at least it gives us a first-order approximation.)
The reason I’m harping on this point is not because I’m particularly woke (I wouldn’t be reading your blog if I were) but because I consider myself a principled free-market libertarian. The market decides, and if the girls are paying, the girls are playing. If King, which makes the inane Candy Crush, is a more valuable prize than Blizzard in Microsoft’s big acquisition the other day, then that’s just the way the cookie crumbles. If 40% of gamers are women, but 80% of devs are men, then the market will correct any resulting inefficiency. It doesn’t matter whether I personally like the result; since I support the underlying principle, I’d be a hypocrite to object.
I think it’s helpful to be cool-headed about these adjustments. Not everything is part of a great civilizational struggle against a neo-Marxist long march. Optics and drama aside, it is often simply about profit and tapping still-unsaturated demographic segments.
Speaking of, I’m curious to see how Notorious Studios, formed by a few exiled Blizzard devs, will fare in the current environment. They’ve already incurred the ire of the Kotaku types by pointedly retaining a single female on the team – a ‘morale officer’ labrador bitch named Ellie. It will be an interesting test case of a more laddish team spirit.
If we confine ourselves to the MMORPG sphere, then of course the answer varies depending on the franchise. Men make up something up in the ninety percent range of EVE players. On the other hand, in something like WoW (and definitely in something like FFXIV) it’s much closer nowadays. While hardcore raiding/m+/arena still form the aspirational core of these games, an MMO would leave a lot of money on the table if it didn’t find ways to cater to casuals, which includes many older male gamers and most women.
I personally am not fond of the raiding culture but I see its value and have no problems coexisting with them in a virtual world. I’m more of a casual explorer type myself. So I’ve got no skin in the game. But I do think that fantasy virtual worlds should have content for casuals and others. I like the role-playing aspect of MMOs and I have been a big advocate of player housing. At the infamous BlizzCon, J. Allen Brack openly mocked the idea of player housing and Blizzard has done little if anything to promote role-playing in WoW. Before wokeness and identity politics infiltrated MMOs I was on the side of creating more non-raiding activities that would appeal to females and other non-raiding archetypes. But now we’ve seen the pendulum swing too far in the other direction for me to be silent.
The reason I’m harping on this point is not because I’m particularly woke (I wouldn’t be reading your blog if I were) but because I consider myself a principled free-market libertarian. The market decides, and if the girls are paying, the girls are playing. If King, which makes the inane Candy Crush, is a more valuable prize than Blizzard in Microsoft’s big acquisition the other day, then that’s just the way the cookie crumbles. If 40% of gamers are women, but 80% of devs are men, then the market will correct any resulting inefficiency. It doesn’t matter whether I personally like the result; since I support the underlying principle, I’d be a hypocrite to object.
Some good points! There are two issues here I think are worth exploring. I believe men are in general better game designers and since men have been traditionally the main cohort of gamers, naturally they will constitute the majority of designers.
If the majority of your audience are males, it makes sense that hiring male developers will have more empathy to their wants and needs.
We have to be honest, there is a major societal and political push for women to enter both the STEM fields and video game industry. This is not organic, it’s a concerted effort to nudge women into these industries. People should gravitate to whatever fields of endeavor they choose and not have society or elites try to force them or apply societal pressure. The end result is going to be inferior products because your going to be discriminating against white males.
At this point, I do not trust female developers especially the millennials or Gen Zs. A female dev I worked with 12 years ago has since become super woke. Back when I worked with her, nobody cared or knew what your political opinions were. That’s all changed now. Look at the Twitter profiles of most Blizzard female devs and they are have the same thing: pronouns, purple hair, nose rings, and their social media accounts are full of the same virtue signaling and woke bullshit. Clearly, they are not there to make games, they are there to use gamedev as we way to promote their personal beliefs.
Imagine if all male developers converted to Christianity and then decided to indoctrinate gamers and preach Christianity on their Twitter accounts? The left would be outraged. Make no mistake wokeness is a stealth religion and it’s mutated into a totalitarian theocracy where govt/corporations/academia and every single walk of life are practicing and promoting this new faith. We can ignore it and put our heads in the sand or we can man up, speak out and get people to come back to their senses.
You can lose your job if you say the wrong thing on Twitter! The Roman Catholic Church never had that kind of power. Think about it…
I think part of the problem is that too many video games are trying to be all things to all people. Fantasy virtual worlds are unique in that they can accommodate different types of players where other games like Call of Duty are niche games that appeal to certain people.
The problem with creating new content aimed at new demographics for an already established customer basis that it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. What if Blizzard decided they don’t like men playing the game (i.e. Gamers (male gamers) are dead, gamers don’t deserve games…) and start appealing to females with female oriented content? It would be like having an Italian restaurant start serving Asian food. Eventually with an increasing emphasis on Asian food the restaurant would lose all of it’s loyal customers who like Italian food.
But this can backfire too. If you try and put more black and LGBTQ NPCs in your MMO, there is no guarantee that those groups will appreciate it and play your game. But, you just ended up alienating your core group: straight white males. Therefore in this instance, the economic case for trying to appeal to more demographic groups is null and void. I think this is where Blizzard has been at for the past 5 years.
Corporations make games to make money. You would think they make games because they want to make good games, but this is not true anymore. Studios like Blizzard since 2004’s WoW have been doing all they can to broaden the demographic by dumbing down gameplay. That very topic is what 80% of my articles have been about.
I think it’s helpful to be cool-headed about these adjustments. Not everything is part of a great civilizational struggle against a neo-Marxist long march. Optics and drama aside, it is often simply about profit and tapping still-unsaturated demographic segments.
The DIE agenda (repackaged cultural Marxism) is pervasive right now. I hope it’s a fad, but it has disastrous consquences for our world if it is allowed to fester. Jordan Peterson wrote a blistering column for The National Post where he sounds the alarm about the consequences of the DIE agenda that was created in Ivy League and is now in full blown effect in govt and corporations.
This is a chilling video recitation of Peterson’s letter to the National Post:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oq2rBE5zwAs
In a perfect world, the marketplace would take care of wokeness and other corporate aberations. But the DIE agenda is being adopted in every corporation and institution. Merit and competency is being replaced by mediocrity and incompetency. I think things are much worse than I make it out to be.
However, the marketplace will eventually win because you can’t force people to purchase bad video games. These studios will eventually learn but at what cost and how long will it take them to learn that the law of the marketplace is the ultimate arbiter? Those studios that don’t learn, will go out of business.
To my knowledge, I’m the only major MMORPG pundit writing about wokeness. I am doing all the heavy lifting providing a counterpoint while all the major video game and MMO sites continue to ignore all of this or they are outright promoting it.
I started this blog because I was passionate about MMORPGs and virtual worlds. I never wanted it to morph into a blog about cultural issues, but I feel I have no choice. I’d love to write more design articles but that would be like choosing to swat an annoying fly instead of fetching water to put out a house fire.