146B: How to Hire? Nepotism or Catfish? Merit No Longer an Option.

Systemic changes have caused people to mimic the methods of social engineering sites. Now your ability to claim every possible skill is all that matters as hiring duties are assigned to machines.

I don’t make written predictions until I deem that the mathematics of a trend mean that the odds of something occurring is 100%. This is why my success rates on my prediction papers match that metric. I don’t make obvious predictions, as those are not valuable. My predictions often sound outrageous when I make them. As I discussed in the last paper, my wildest predictions from my 20 year prediction paper, Third Tier of Game Development, are safely proven true.

Key among those predictions was a global system of authentication. I updated the previous paper to provide a link to a post by Asmongold where he affirms my assertion that everyone is going to get authenticated. His tone was alarmist. When I revealed that this was going to happen back in 2010, I was not alarmist. I was explaining what was going to happen and why. My purpose in this paper is to explain in more detail why this is happening. As troubling as the end of anonymity sounds in a world where companies and countries often are not your friend, the alternative is even worse and that’s why this result is inescapable.

I talk a lot about supply chains, especially in the last few months, because our supply chains on all levels are threatening to collapse on a scale never before seen outside of a World War. A World War might still happen. But what is threatening our anonymity, and also pushing us towards a World War, is the same thing: The Internet. What could have been a bridge between countries has instead become a battleground for social control. When I began the mathematical project that would become Third Tier back in 2010, I thought the result was going to be that by 2030 online gaming would act as a bridge that would bring people together. By the time I finished my analysis, which took the entirety of 30+ days of the hardest math of my life, my conclusion was actually something very different.

I’ve stopped calling social media, social media. I now call it what it is: Social Engineering. Our lives revolve around our use of social engineering platforms, and those platforms do exactly that: they control and manipulate our thoughts, behaviors, purchases, and consumption. This is truly a Matrix moment in time. Different countries are creating competing social engineering tools. When they weaponize these, they aren’t trying hard to hide this fact. This is why the most dangerous social engineering platforms are banned from being used in the countries that make them.

Western countries don’t want to point fingers, because they are doing the same thing. They have not figured out how to warn the population how to defend themselves without this backfiring on those governments. The citizenry meanwhile is learning how to behave, just like they are supposed to. One of the most important lessons (which isn’t really new) is that what you are is a lot less important than what you appear to be.

Thus “catfishes”, which used to be somewhat rare, are now approaching 100% of the population. Current estimates/research put 80% of our population as misrepresenting their abilities/qualities formally in writing. The rate will be even higher in younger generations since they are the fastest to adapt. I don’t blame them for this adaptation. They did not make the rules for the game they were born into, they just learn to adapt or die. Younger people are more neuroplastic and will adapt much more quickly than older people.

13 years ago, game economics didn’t exist as a commercial occupation or an academic field. When I was asked to come to Redmond, California to appear before Microsoft executives, they were looking to employ their first Game Economist. I didn’t apply for that job, it wasn’t even a job per se initially. They were exploring my claims that I had invented new technology that would benefit Microsoft and solve problems that their 99,000 employees could not solve.

So that “interview” (and I didn’t know what I was interviewing for until I got there) involved my flying out and being evaluated by 20 MS execs over two days. I was given a problem none of them had an answer for. I loved this test because there is no way to fake it. So after I solved their problem and presented the solution on the second day, they hired me immediately on my terms without any negotiation. That’s when I realized I had asked for too little money.

Years later they would move to automate the hiring process. Perhaps no one would ever get an interview as detailed as the one I went through, ever again at MS. The new criteria for a Game Economist strategically excluded me from the position and all the humans I talked to said they agreed it was odd but that humans couldn’t change it. Because it paid so much, perhaps machines just automatically assigned it a Master’s degree prerequisite, even though the Masters in Game Economics does not exist in academia. I know, because I tried to create it in 2009 and my superiors in the field of Conventional Economics didn’t understand why this was needed.

I’m going to use the case of Amazon to explain how this translates to the global economy and game development in particular. Some years back Amazon leadership wanted to create a top tier game development studio. Why? Maybe to improve their brand, or just widen their empire, or maybe they wanted to “gamewash” their other activities that were so problematic that they managed to be accused of the world’s worst human rights violations by the International Criminal Court. The why, or even the ethics, is not the point of this paper. The result here is what is important.

Last week Kira published a very detailed analysis of Amazon Game Studios, which I am going to link to here because it was so well done. He titled it “Probably the Worst Game Developer in History”. A bold title, given the competition. He goes into years of problems but since he is on the outside looking in, he does not explain why this experiment on the part of Amazon turned out so badly. In order to explain the “why”, I’m going to reveal my internal experience with AGS (which I’ve never done before) and show how it links to the greater story of why we are going to all get authenticated.

Some time around 2017 I was contacted by an employee at AGS. He was employed there as their Game Economist. Fair enough, I assumed he wanted advice on something. While he didn’t say what project they were building, the size of it suggests it must have been their New World MMORPG. What he said next kind of stunned me. He couldn’t do his job but he didn’t want to lose it. So he wanted to have me do all the parts he couldn’t do so that he could turn them in. I would have been more stunned except that this was almost the exact situation I had just gotten out of at Wargaming. There a drinking buddy of the CEO, who had no game dev experience, thought I had a fantastic life. So he wanted to copy it. His practically copy pasted my LinkedIn profile and then told me he would have me fired if I didn’t do all his work for him but give it secretly only to him so that he could turn it in and take credit for it. Thus I was familiar with this whole Catfish Dance, at least in concept.

Catfish Dance (definition): When you get hired as a Catfish and outsource your job to someone qualified (perhaps even AI if possible).

It got even more spicy when he claimed his boss knew he was calling me and was okay with it. You see, if most of a team is catfish, the last thing they want is an investigation or anything looking out of the ordinary. So they will cover for each other. Just out of pure morbid curiosity I told the Catfish that I could help him. I really wanted to see how he was going to pull this off. In the end he wasn’t able to achieve that Olympic gymnast level of contortion ability.

This also made me think, “if he’s paying me, then who’s paying him to pay me?”. I mean, he must have been pulling two incomes for the same job. Perhaps his real role was commercial espionage for a 3rd party that wanted all of Amazon’s tech. Because, you know, it was so amazing.

Now with a Catfish rate of 80% across all of industry, imagine if just 60% of a studio was made up of Grammarly addicted Catfish? Are they all pooling tips to hand to the 40% that are doing all the work every month? Presumably Amazon was trying to hire the “best of the best”, but if you start with Catfish then who is qualified to evaluate those new hires?

What is the Solution to Catfishing?

Okay so let’s assume you don’t want a studio full of Catfish. No seriously, it’s happening all across interactive media right now. Have you seen some of the interviews of staff that worked on games like Dragon Age: Veilguard, Concord, or Bungie’s Marathon? In the last example we know for fact that their Catfish were stealing art assets from actual qualified artists that were not hired. Catfishing is the only plausible explanation for some of the things these people say and do.

I would think that hiring people you know personally, this would be the obvious solution to the problem.

If you hire people you trust, what could go wrong?

I guess Bezos ran out of people he trusted.

Thus we live in a world where you have two options when you create a new studio:

1. Hire Catfish

2. Nepotism Hires

If you wonder how a studio can burn through almost a billion dollars in 5+ years and produce something that is the definition of mediocre, you don’t need to wonder. Cherry on top if the studio actively stole the work of qualified people who were blocked from being hired by nepo hires.

Even your Human Resources department (if it still contains humans) is going to support this cycle. They won’t know how to vet new hires, and no one puts the effort into vetting like Microsoft did with me in 2012. But they don’t want to look unqualified themselves, so they have strong incentive to cover up any bad hires. Thus everyone in the food chain is covering for everyone else because if they can all keep their mouths shut they might be able to ride the gravy train for 5 years without producing anything.

After that they can say “I worked for Amazon for 5 years!” and just keep riding that nepotism train at other studios that hire from the “club” instead of doing merit hires.

In the current environment, there really is no way out of this trap unless you can get Grammarly to do hiring for you on top of doing all of your emails and letters. Heck, even Grammarly might sabotage you since Grammarly only wants Grammarly-dependent workers employed, to make sure you can’t live without it.

The only way out of this commercial death-spiral is to not only authenticate workers, but to authenticate their skill sets. This is exactly the process I predicted/explained in my 2010 Third Tier paper. The price of building that Metaverse I described would be staggering, but the price of not building it would be much greater.

Of course you could take 20 of your experts and have them vet new experts, like MS did with me in 2012. But that’s probably not an option either since AI is so expensive and the whole point of AI was to replace employees with cheaper options. So your experts were probably some of the first fired since the nepotism hires will be the last fired.

Have your CEO sleep with the head of HR that he/she hired and you can make sure everyone is on-board with the nepo gravy. Just don’t take your nepo hires to any Cold Play concerts.

On a side note, I recommend that people using Dating apps do the exact opposite. Instead of trying to appeal to everyone (standard Player/Catfish move), design your profile to appeal to as few people as possible while still appealing to the people you want. That way they come pre-vetted. This is probably not a solution with trying to get hired as the HR automation is designed to only hire the catfish/Players, not real people.

I previously wrote about how AI is both gullible and lazy and will prioritize Catfish ahead of all other applicants.