139B. The Force Wars Have Begun (Part 2)
As discussed in Part 1, this war has been brewing for 24 years. It's about more than games. The result of this worldwide conflict will ultimately decide who owns digital assets and "data".
As I’ve previously discussed, data centers and AI will soon require more energy than humans do. In some places like Pennsylvania, that’s already the situation. Why is “data” so important? Perhaps more important than humans, since most of our resources are planned to go to data instead of humans.
It seems paradoxical, if we assume humans are still running the Earth, that we have subordinated ourselves to data. I’m operating from the assumption that at least for a brief moment humans are still in charge of things. But anything that is “free” in one part of the world and can be “sold” in another part of the world gets treated this way. You saw this when public water was privatized in Bolivia under the orders of the World Bank by USA’s Bechtel corporation in 1999.
Companies used to dump whatever they wanted into our air, rivers, and oceans before we stepped in and regulated them. All life off the coast of Santa Monica died when I was 7 years old because of DDT (Montrose Chemical Corp) and sewage dumping (from the Hyperion sewage “treatment” plant) off the coast of Playa Del Rey. All the fish, sand crabs, and sea weed died. For a time all that was left was poisonous jellyfish. Then they died too.
All these things happened all over the world, because they could. Private profits and public responsibility. What I mean is that these expensive environmental “externalities” were tossed onto the surrounding public, that had to shoulder the cost of fixing them (if they could) while the companies pocketed all the income.
Now the same thing is happening because “data” is being gathered constantly from us, for “free”, but then being sold back to us or others without our permission. Money for nothing. But this “nothing” is everything. Our thoughts, our messages, our pictures, our memories, our creative and intellectual output, even our identities are being stolen and then resold to others.
In 2000 I cowrote the first mainstream paper on the sale of “virtual goods”, it posted on the front page of the Los Angeles Times, the main paper where I grew up. As I mentioned in Part 1, I doxed BlackSnow Interactive in 2001, triggering the first legal dispute over who owns digital goods. That was never legally resolved. Because of that, data is “free”.
As long as something of potentially infinite value is free, its harvesting is going to be more important than humans are.
What are the six biggest companies in the world? Nvidia, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Alphabet (Google), and Meta (Facebook). All of them are in the data business. Nvidia is number 1 all of a sudden, because they make the chips that run AI. AI eats data and energy to grow.
This Started With Gaming, and Will End With Gaming
Most corporate types and academics don’t take gaming very seriously. But the most important question of the last 50 years (who owns data?) started in 2001 because of a game called Dark Ages of Camelot, and will be litigated in 2026 or sooner when the EU deploys the Digital Fairness Act.
Whether by Fate or choice (if you believe in free will) I’ve been chronicling all the related events over the last 25 years. In 2005 I had access to almost every developer in the world (including Korea, Japan, and China) because of my journalism. I was fascinated by game economies and assisted with their design in most MMOs from 2001 to 2005. But no industry leader seemed to understand their importance. So in 2005 I dedicated the next year or so to solving the “gold farmer” problem, which is “free” digital assets got farmed on industrial scale and then sold back to us. Another person who was heavily involved in the “selling” part was a guy named Steve Bannon who was leading IGE (2007-) and then later Cambridge Analytica (2014-2016, in 2016 he went to the White House). He’s a smart guy and not to be underestimated.
I solved the gold farmer problem, despite being told over and over again it was impossible. But it took me 4.5 years instead of the 1 year I had hoped. Going back to school for 2 years in 2007 for economics ate up half that time. One of my academic mentors was Professor Henry Jenkins. He was the subject matter expert called to testify before Congress regarding the Columbine massacre and whether games were involved. That happened in 1999. In 2009 I told him that the next time the government needed a gaming subject matter expert, I wanted it to be me. He was supportive, as gaming was not his core focus. But he said I would have to prove myself by publishing papers in the field. Which, if you are reading this, you know I have been very active doing that.
In 2013 I was called by the UK’s Office on Fair Trade (OFT) and asked to assist them in writing the first generation rules regulating games provided to children online. They made it clear I was the top industry subject matter expert, and the only one willing to write on the subjects that were relevant to their regulatory work. So, with the blessing of Dr. Jenkins, I went to Panama and testified before the ICPEN (International Consumer Protection and Enforcement Network). It would prove to be a professional death sentence for me, but everyone there knew what was going to happen. They kept thanking me for my sacrifice. That was very uncomfortable.
When Jenkins testified, he said nothing negative about any gaming company and said that games had nothing to do with the shooting. Jenkins is a smart guy and his career was unaffected. I’m not that smart, and I gave the ICPEN all the information they needed.
I must stress that I serve all 3 groups/armies that I will be discussing here. I am a public resource. I don’t charge or get paid for any of my papers, ever, for 25 years now. I don’t play favorites and I do my best to stay politically neutral. But the worst violence is domestic violence, and my assistance to regulators was seen as a betrayal. I have no ego and would help any developer that needs help, as long as they don’t ask me to do anything illegal or unethical. Of course there’s the rub, and why I wrote the 2017 Force Wars paper predicting this war. By that year this war was inevitable and it would be impossible for them to get help from me with their myriad terminal business model problems because the Darksiders who had taken over the industry would be ideologically opposed to working with me. Several of them literally said this to me, because in their eyes my pro-consumer business models made me overly pro-consumer.
The 2024 announcement of the Digital Fairness Act, with a projected deployment date of 2026, caught me and most everyone else off guard. It contains a lot of language ripped straight from my papers that were used in 2013 by the ICPEN. That’s a long time to work on a piece of regulation, but as I will explain here it’s one of the most complicated and important regulatory efforts in history. My papers, including all those source materials, were simultaneously deleted from all reservoirs on the internet some months prior to that announcement. I had no idea why, at the time. With the help of the community I rebuilt all my papers going back to 2010 and put them on Substack. About a year later, around the time the DFA was announced formally, they re-appeared on the internet.
While it was puzzling at first, it would seem now that this was an attempt to expunge these source materials. Perhaps the industry felt that this would slow down the regulatory process. But Substack has so far proven to be a secure place for me and other subject matter experts to publish work that might ruffle feathers here and there. Thus that effort to delete the “written me” was abandoned.
The Three Armies
The Empire is primarily led by the Entertainment Software Association (ESA). It was formed officially in 2003 to act as a united lobbying and legal group to promote the industry world-wide, and to mitigate regulatory efforts. The ESRB (Entertainment Software Rating Board) is an arm of the ESA. The purpose of the ESRB is to act as a form of “self regulation” to advise parents on what is appropriate for their children. “Self regulation” is a mechanism used by industry to postpone or prevent external regulation. A vice president of Disney testified at the Panama summit that again the industry deserved to be allowed to “self regulate”. My testimony and evidence torpedoed that appeal so absolutely that no one at the summit took “self regulation” as a serious option going forward. I also busted the ESRB for promoting children’s gambling in 2017. Michael Gallagher was the president and CEO of the ESA from 2007 to 2018. Stanley Pierre-Louis has served since Gallagher left. Gallagher left after being investigated for creating a toxic work environment, nepotism, harassment, aligning the ESA with the (first) Trump administration, and mismanaging E3. Stanley was the top lawyer at the ESA prior to becoming leader, signalling the focus of the ESA going forward. I interpret his ascension as reflecting support from the ESA’s board that delaying or preventing regulation was the organisation’s top priority. As regulation tends to be a response to consumer dissatisfaction, this also signalled to me that the ESA was only concerned with consumers if dissatisfaction rose to a level that would empower regulation. To a hammer, all problems look like nails. To an anti regulation lawyer, all problems look like regulatory efforts.
The Alliance could theoretically refer to any regulators, especially if they are regulating products coming from outside their country. In reality, countries are rarely allied with each other except in the most dire of circumstances so an actual Alliance of regulators only forms once a threat to consumers has reached the “dire” level of perception. There are many ways to prevent this from happening. Flooding the academic environment with false or conflicting research output can prevent consensus. Similarly sponsoring influencers or politicians to provide consensus-conflicting statements can create the perception that consensus does not exist. Multinational companies have become so powerful that they can actually influence elections and entire governments, splintering even existing alliances. All these tactics are currently in play against regulators, so it is a small miracle that the EU (sans the recent exit of the UK, their previous leader in gaming regulation) has managed to integrate to the level necessary to promote the Digital Fairness Act. Going forward in this paper, “The Alliance” here will refer to the EU and the European Commission.
The Rebellion in general terms refers to gamers, especially those using online content. Today almost all content has an online component as The Empire exerts ownership and the ability to delete/disable content that gamers have paid for. For instance I have “paid for” Ubisoft’s Might and Magic VII but Ubisoft has disabled my access to the game. Similarly EA has altered or disabled my access to the first three Dragon Age games. As gaming companies increasingly exert the “right” to provide games only as a service and not ownership, gamers are becoming more sensitive to the erosion of their ownership rights. Note that this move by The Empire, explicitly detailed in the EULAs of these products, is not a right and has never been properly litigated. The Rebellion traditionally has no cohesiveness and thus possesses little or no ability to defend itself. But since they do interact at a very high level the possibility for this cohesiveness has always been possible, and this cohesiveness is what I predicted in my original 2017 Force Wars paper. There I predicted that The Rebellion was the greatest risk to The Empire, not the Alliance. Until very recently, this was an unimaginable scenario for The Empire. But The Empire’s recent attempts to program gamers with industry-favorable ideology began to raise the Alertness and organisation level of gamers. In military terms we would call this Readiness in the preparation stages and Mobilization during the transition to action. The Empire’s blind spot to their consumer’s sentiment has allowed Readiness levels to rise to a level that Mass Mobilization can and is occurring. The “Sweat Baby Detected” movement was a practice run and now the mobilization infrastructure, though informal, is well developed. This has led to a full scale gamer mobilization in the EU called “StopKillingGames”. Over 1.3 million EU gamers have mobilized at the time I write this and it will likely peak at well over 1.5 million. As they are making direct appeals to The Alliance, this is going to accelerate funding and mobilization for Alliance assets.
What is a Force War?
The natural order of industry, supply chains, and even society (even in capitalism) is that companies exist to serve consumers, and thrive or fail based on their ability to do this. When industry leaders go against the natural order, and expect consumers to serve them, this creates a disturbance in The Force. If this unnatural order persists, then a Force War is inevitable. This does not only apply to gaming. As I am about to explain, this can affect any industry and in this case the Force War is about to breach containment and spread to parallel unnatural industries.
Objectives and Strategies for All Three Armies
Each group in this war (which is going from cold to “hot” this week, a year early) has their previous planned objective and strategies for the war they were anticipating. Now that the scenario has changed from what they were planning to what I was planning (in 2017) each group will attempt to pivot, with a wide range of efficacy and consequences.
The Empire was created to shield member companies from legal and political entanglements. As long as it did this, member companies were happy with this divestiture of responsibility as it was one less thing for them to worry about. This especially was true for the original five Japanese members (Sony, Sega, Capcom, Nintendo, and Konami). What is less obvious is that the major USA tech giants all have significant supply chain entanglements with the gaming industry and thus they also rely on the ESA to keep The Alliance in check and to prevent any Rebellions. I would imagine Stanley Pierre-Louis assuring all these groups that “I’ve got this”. Which he has, until now. With the Rebellion now fully mobilizing, Stanley definitely does not have this under control. He is being flanked, and I believe he has no contingency for this. The obvious reaction would be to activate Empire-sponsored studios and influencers to generate counter-consensus messaging. The “Sweet Baby Detected” forces have already become exceptionally good at identifying pro Empire studios and putting them on target lists. I don’t think the Rebellion has successfully identified the source of the disturbance, but it won’t take them much longer to figure it out. Pro Empire YouTube influencers have already begun pouring out Pro Empire content, but The Rebellion rapidly “ratioed” them. This has forced them to put out thumbnails that sound anti Empire but then pivot to being pro Empire later in the video. This prevents ratioing, but still causes them to lose viewership. As The Empire had zero contingency for the scenario I warned them about in 2017, they have no “Plan B”. They realize that all of their long term projects are dead on arrival and are moving to cancel them. Resources that went to development/employees are being diverted to stock buy-backs, which boost stock values and give the perception that these companies are not collapsing. The Big 6 tech companies, which used The Empire to make them look more “cool” to consumers while stealing/reselling their data, are getting nervous. They likely know that this War is ultimately over the ownership of data and could disrupt their plans to suck all human experiences into their data centers. If they haven’t figured this out yet, they soon will. Countries they control (like the USA) will likely be forced to go to real war against countries they don’t currently control (like the EU). This will start at the trade war level. The most important thing here to understand is that the “layoffs” you are seeing across gaming and tech right now are not cost saving measures. The purpose here is DIVESTITURE. The Empire is going under the bus and Big Tech will do their best to create a safety partition to contain the implosion. The Empire has been expecting to deploy a “Too Big to Fail” strategy, along with saying that regulation is not supported by consumers. But clearly it is supported by consumers and many gamers are actually cheering every time The Empire gets one of their new released ratioed/boycotted. The natural order is rapidly being restored. Their third argument, which might have been more effective, is that there are no alternative technologies and business models to their current “dark pattern” systems. That’s where I come in since I’ve been developing and deploying these alternative business models since 2005. Regulators are well aware of this, and I believe that’s why my papers got deleted from the internet.
The Alliance is reliably slow and cautious. They want to protect consumers, but they realize that even if they know more about this than consumers, they can’t exceed consumer mandate. Normally there is very little consumer mandate, so regulators move extremely slowly. They make snails look speedy. That changed on an unprecedented level when the USA initiated their trade war against the EU and others. Suddenly money, labor, and mandate were flowing into the European Commission at rates they likely could not assimilate. Now with the StopKillingGames mobilization, things could not be any hotter for the Alliance. Every ship they have is being called up, this is Dunkirk Evacuation level mobilization. Regulators aren’t used to being popular, and they likely don’t have military background, so this is all going to be new to them. They will become a serious force, but it still will take some time for those Battle Snails to fully suit up. Every member of The Empire is vulnerable, and so is their Big 6 Overlords. The USA likely will respond by turning “services” off to the EU, but that’s only going to make it more obvious to the EU that they need to diversify their supply chains away from the USA. They already did this to me, so I moved my writing supply chain to Substack. This animosity with the USA could also leave the EU vulnerable to military overtures from the East, but their military already sees this scenario and is mobilizing (much faster than the Battle Snails).
The Rebellion usually couldn’t care less how their games are made, as long as their entertainment needs are met. But increasingly over the last 10 years, they have not been. That’s because The Empire’s unnatural goal was control, not serving consumers. Now gamers are cross-educating via their Persistent Gaming Collectives (PGCs) that I first described back in 2013. This makes them natural activists, if they can get motivated enough to activate their butts off of the couch. Fortunately for them, this war can be waged from the couch. This war could die down if The Empire quickly capitulated, but that’s not going to happen. Instead when the The Empire tries to force more control The Rebellion will correctly identify the situation as an existential threat and begin a full mobilization. As gamers, they are not slow. They are trained to react assertively to challenges. Their ranks also contain a lot of expert techies and even hackers. The Empire will hire non techies based almost purely on their Compliance rating (not merit) but for tech jobs they recruit from the Gamer pool. This creates opportunities for The Rebellion to engage in partisan activity from within, including sabotage and “double agents”. If The Alliance acts too slowly (almost a certainty) The Rebellion will organise boycotts and influence campaigns. You’ve already seen this on a smaller scale with the Sweet Baby Detected movement that killed billions of dollars of games in the last year. Industry well beyond The Empire was forced to modify their ideology-based hiring practices. Not completely, but noticeably. The Resistance is already getting their needs primarily met by “indie” developers, so a boycott won’t be painful for them. Their ability to go after the Big 6 is limited, but if they support The Alliance, The Alliance can create data ownership laws. That would be an existential threat to Big 6 and AI development. If Steam gets shut down, gamers will go outside. That might have some positive effects for gamers, but as you can see in Los Angeles right now, that’s going to be disruptive.
Analysis
War is about planning, morale, and supply chains. Lack of planning puts you at a severe disadvantage. If your morale or supply chains get broken, you must surrender. The Force War is the ultimate game for The Resistance, so you can expect their morale to skyrocket as this gets hotter. There is no upside to a Force War for the Empire unless they can get laws passed that give data ownership to them, and make boycotts illegal. Laws against boycotting, which would strip consumers of their consent to consume, are actually a real thing that are currently being deployed in the USA. Expect those to become even uglier during the Force War as the larger corporate system fights for supremacy or at least survival. I already predicted all of that in my paper from February on American depopulation. For generations that have not lived through a World War, this is all going to come as a great shock to them.
Even countries that are not shooting each other, and are just engaging in trade war, will find their supply chains severed. This will go well beyond gaming and could include things like access to electricity, fuel, rare earths, Google/email access, or even food. Many leaders in the Big 6 have an apocalypse mindset. That doesn’t have to be, but that’s what they expect to be the outcome of their actions. They could literally create that, but just like when I was smoking unfiltered Camels at the age of 5, just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.
I expect that ultimately the natural order will be restored, since it’s very expensive to force your population to consume against their will. As Adam Smith pointed out, slavery is not efficient because when your slave dies, you lose capital. Better to use freemen. But freemen are going to become a lot less free with boycotts becoming illegal in the USA and spreading to other authoritarian countries. If the European Commission begins setting data ownership laws, which I expect as an outcome, the result will be an all out global war as this would be an existential threat to the Big 6. The USA would be forced to make military and economic threats to force a repeal. NATO could be dissolved.
When the cat’s away, the mice will play.
I’m not pro-apocalypse, but I’ve been studying military and economic history for over 50 years. The tinder (not the dating app) is piled up and people are running around with torches. It would be fantastic if cooler heads prevailed, but that’s not been the trend.
My advice to countries, companies, and consumers would be to check your supply chains. ALL your supply chains. Diversify them starting now to limit disruptions.