116A. Promoting Bad Design

Game design quality seems like it's been getting worse over the last quarter century. This isn't accidental, this is a feature. Here I explain the source and trend of this problem.

There are a lot of topics in the gaming industry that I don’t talk about because I don’t think the community is at a level where what I’m expressing would make sense to them. In the past when I have put out important papers like Zynga Analysis or Smedley’s Dream Part 1 and 2 , these papers were probably a bit early. Now when I refer readers to them, because they predict/solve current day problems, people can understand the topics better than they could 13 years ago because the issues are more obvious today.

My readers also find that the more of my papers they read, the more they all make sense. This is because the field is complex and all of the information on my substack is interconnected on various levels.

The Asmongold Threshold

One useful measure I now use to determine if the community is ready for a deep dive on a particular topic is what I will call The Asmongold Threshold. Asmongold is a popular streamer/influencer in the gaming community, especially with World of Warcraft players. He has over 3.5M followers on YouTube alone. As my early research was focused on identifying and solving the problems with the World of Warcraft metagame design, I use him as a strong metric for what sort of information the community is ready to discuss.

Yesterday I watched a video he put out titled Retail WoW is Done. He made it clear how obvious various design problems were to him, that seemed invisible to everyone at Blizzard. His emotional expressions are quite entertaining, and likely a big part of his popularity. I appreciate that since I’m not particularly emotional.

Asmongold would be explaining the problem to his audience, and then would watch devs from Blizzard explaining what they were “fixing” in the game and every time they would just walk right past the biggest problems in the game as if they didn’t exist. This would drive Asmongold into a frenzy. I share his frustration, and it was that frustration that motivated me in 2005 to dedicate my life to fixing WoW and games that came after it. This motivation has not waned.

Asmongold does not have any particular game related academic background, but he has 20 years of expertise playing WoW. As a top influencer he is at the nexus of information between gamers and developers. This is not unlike the position Adam Smith held when he created the modern field of economics. When you create something, you can’t go to school to learn it. You are the alpha strain, and have to create it from scratch. Thus I studied Adam Smith extensively and used his work as a model for my work creating the field of game economics.

Identifying and Repairing Design Problems

When I attempt to repair any complex mathematical/social system I follow a two step process:

1. Identify the core systems, along with any adjacent systems that affect the core systems. Identify those points of interaction and how they work.

2. “Run” the system in real time using a comparison of inputs vs. outputs and a lot of game theory in order to model the overall system’s behavior.

Step 1 requires a mastery level understanding of all the interrelated systems. This is the definition I use of “mastery”":

This is also an example of Crystalized Intelligence:

In 2012 I wrote a paper predicting that humans were going to abandon crystalized intelligence in favor of cloud intelligence (now often referred to as “AI”) and this would lead to a world where inventions largely stopped happening.

Asmongold has reached a level of mastery in the field of “World of Warcraft” and related systems such that he is able to perform step 1 above and that’s what he did in the linked video to a live audience that went into a frenzy as he explained how Blizzard developers were killing WoW. I fully agree with his analysis.

Step 2 is not really knowledge based. It’s a bit like counting cards in Las Vegas. Most people consider even this relatively simple task as an impossible cognitive feat. Yet some people have the innate ability to do these tasks. Thus I will classify Step 2 as a “Talent”, not a skill. Of course it gets better with practice.

For me, Step 1 involved over 100,000 hours of game analysis, 11 years of university work, and my going back to the university at the age of 41. This gives me a very broad in-depth knowledge which is why I describe myself as a Subject Matter Expert in the field of interactive media. My belief that this knowledge is valuable to other people is why I’ve been publishing papers on interactive media since the year 2000, without compensation.

Step 2 is something I’ve been doing since the age of 4 (before I could read), and I have a difficult time explaining how I do it, though I try sometimes.

Sustainable Virtual Economies and Business Models

After returning to school for conventional economics I felt prepared to write my WoW solution paper in 2009. Sustainable Virtual Economies and Business Models was the title, and it was 33 pages long. It took me 6 days to write it in a public library on a borrowed laptop during the Great Recession. Professors Mike Zyda (creator of the USC Gamepipe Lab, the primary feeder school for Blizzard) and Henry Jenkins (the godfather of transmedia) both agreed to review the paper. Both were very enthusiastic about my work and Zyda valuated the paper at at least $250,000 USD.

I never published that paper because it was too valuable to publish. Which is a shame because I was broke in 2009. But I could never figure out how to monetise it without it just getting stolen, so I sold myself instead to various major companies and that seemed to work pretty well for a while.

In that paper I did the above 2 step process and identified the problems in detail that Asmongold has articulated more generally in 2025. I viewed the problem as the game economy being under attack from various vectors and considering a large variety of countermeasures. Blizzard was using what I described as Active Countermeasures to deal with the problems, and I explained the limitations of this approach. I suggested that Passive Countermeasures would be more effective and less expensive, and detailed what those were.

Active Vs Passive Countermeasures

Blizzard and the rest of the AAA industry see any threat/attack as a vector that needs to be intercepted and destroyed. Thus they spend enormous resources protecting themselves. This rarely works at all, and it actually make the problems worse in exactly the way Asmongold described. This is because each countermeasure creates more problems and areas of vulnerability that then need to be defended. The result is a layering effect and increasing levels of complexity that cripple the original product. [Note that the “real” economy taught in schools is also layered in this way.] This is what Asmongold describes with passion, and he seems to express how stupid this is.

Passive Countermeasures (PCs), by contrast, involve removing the root problems and thus any threats instead of destroying all inbound vectors. PC’s are more difficult to deploy only in that they require a higher level of expertise/understanding to create. They also require a mindset that is less aggressive and which does not see consumers as the enemy. So perhaps there is an ideological prerequisite that could be missing in AAA. Ideology is tricky because the designers at Blizzard might be smart enough to solve the problems they were hired to solve but they can’t even see the problems because their ideology makes the problems invisible to them.

Essentially the designers are looking for solutions to the “player problems” not the “design problems” because they are unwilling to accept a reality that includes the possibility that they themselves are at fault.

Ramin Shokrizade: The Attack Vector

Thinking hard about Asmongold’s video yesterday got me realizing that all the energy that people have put into trying to neutralize me is likely because by suggesting that there are design problems at these studios, this painted me as an “attack vector”. If I had consent, it would be very easy and fast to go into these studios and repair the core problems with these designs. Generally on a AAA game this takes from 3 to at most 7 weeks.

But holy smoke, if you suggest anyone is making design errors the peasants rush at you with pitchforks and torches. “They’re stealing our jobs!” If Asmongold sounds frustrated, imagine how hard this is for me to make sense of. It’s not like I even want those people’s jobs. In most cases (according to various public lawsuits) those work environments are so toxic that all I want to do is get in, save the company millions of dollars, and get the heck out of there as fast as possible.

Even academia often has this mindset. When I tried to help Dr. Edward Castronova with a paper that had numerous errors, he saw me as an attack vector. The email he sent me had incredible vitriol unbecoming of a professor. He ignored me and published that paper, ruining his career. My thanks was being blacklisted from academia despite Professors Zyda and Jenkins doing their best to protect me.

Why We Protect and Promote the Unfit

In the gaming and movie industries, there are many people who consumers readily identify as being really problematic people who are lowering the quality of products from those industries. There are so many unfit people just in those two industries that literally hundreds or even thousands of influencers on YouTube make their living just trashing those people.

But they never seem to lose their jobs, and continue to harm the interests of the companies that employ them. This is because companies don’t hire/fire people. Other people do. And these other people may be in the same boat, so they create a Mutual Defence Pact. There is another word for this:

This is the uncomfortable next step in Asmongold’s evaluation that he didn’t make. Because he’s smarter than I am in avoiding being labelled as an attack vector, even though he has been banned in the past for unacceptable behaviors like racism. But I’m a problem solver, and you can’t solve a problem you aren’t willing to identify.

The big problem with prolonged entrenched nepotism is that if anyone comes in with a solution they are immediately disposed of as a threat to the established members. When I moved to the UK to assist Radiant Worlds, my boss got very excited one day after I solved multiple key design problems. He walked out to the floor and exclaimed “See, that’s how you do it!” [a microaggression against the existing design team] I threw my pencil into the air and thought “I am so screwed, that’s the end of that job”. That wasn’t even me being autistic and failing to mirror. That was someone else dooming my job by publicly praising me. After that the design team had their daggers out. Now I try really hard to get in and out as fast as possible before the drama starts, preferably remotely. I save up enough money to make it to the next (short) project.

It’s always awkward when the “autistic” has to explain to normal people how to talk to (and not talk to) other normals. Since they take that for granted, they don’t have to put a lot of effort into understanding the consequences of these little microaggressions.

It gets even worse when you consider that nepotism is pervasive across AAA. Thus people who have AAA employment on their resume are likely to be hired by other AAA companies because they know how to play ball. These are not merit based hires.

I had originally listed some of the more problematic companies here, but since I’m looking for work at the moment I’d rather be in the “tough sell” category than the “no chance” zone. I suspect many of my readers would suggest I learn how to play this game better. But by “playing ball” in a system running on nepotism, don’t you become part of the problem?

Unless you can create a “clean” team from scratch, just bring me in fast, let me fix your biggest problems and save you millions of dollars, and let me get out before the drama builds up. Transfer my merit to the rest of the team and don’t list me in the credits. I know how to play that game.

The Market Solves All

Ultimately this problem will get solved by market forces. AAA games will increasingly be shunned by consumers and indi/AA developers will be promoted. This is already happening at rapid speed. It would be happening even faster but these large companies have tremendous market power and can use oligopoly to subvert free markets.

As these companies fall from the sky, they shed a lot of employees. Thousands of them. Some are great talents. Some are nepobabies. The latter will immediately try to cluster again to avoid expectations of merit. Unsuspecting companies will hire these people in order to boast that they have AAA talent on the roster when they go to investors. This could be a double edged sword for both founders and investors.

The only solution is careful scrutiny of backgrounds, which is time consuming. People will go to great lengths to obfuscate their backgrounds. As I describe in my The Merit Economy paper, when someone without merit steals merit from someone with merit, the victim will not be credited for their work. Thus it makes it harder to identify them and employ them, which is the goal. The person who stole the merit is more likely to get the next job. This “game” often gets more attention than the jobs they were hired to do.

Thus the cycle I describe in my Corporate Merit paper is cyclical.