160. Consumer Antagonistic Vs. Pro-Consumer World Views
The current attitude of AAA towards consumers isn't just strategy. It crossed the line to ideology long ago. Due to ideological fervour, leadership is not able to see what is obvious to everyone else.
This paper was inspired by this YouTube video by Sabine Hossenfelder who challenged established physics world views and was ejected from academia via nepotistic manoeuvres rather than making the case against her ideas. This is not how science is supposed to work, and supports her assertion that physics academia has descended into pseudoscience.
The concept of an Echo Chamber is important to understanding Hossenfelder’s video and this paper as well. An Echo Chamber is an environment where a person’s world view or ideology is reinforced over and over while being insulated from data or world views that might challenge their own. This can result in a non-factual New Reality. I defined New Realities in my 2018 The Physiology of Gaming paper. New Realities, or NR’s for short, can be powerful mechanics for weaving fantasy worlds that people can escape to. That’s how I use them when I create an NR. But when they are used to promote extremist ideologies, and the people exposed to them confuse the fantasy with reality, they can become threatening to society. The word “extremist” here can be subjective, but I would describe any ideology as objectively extremist if it promotes hate, violence, physical/economic harm, racism, classism, or apartheid states. This is not an exhaustive list.
Echo Chambers are typically created by people who want to enjoy a world where everyone agrees with them, or who want to prevent any form of dissent. Sometimes this can happen “accidentally” when a search engine algorithm continues to give a person information they like until they get to a point where they are only exposed to information they like. This is called a Filter Bubble.
Normally people, especially adults, can separate fantasy from reality so the risk of a person entering an NR and believing that it is more real than the world they just left is minimal. An authority intending to pursue a social control campaign may go some steps further to purge the environment of all opposing views, and Astroturfing can be used to make this appear to be grass roots sentiment while hiding the central authority source. In such an environment the subjects may no longer have access to reality, so they adopt the NR as their Default Reality (DR).
Now that I’ve explained some of the theory on how world views can be created or manipulated, I will attempt to make my case:
In 2011 an NR was introduced to the game developer community which the authors described as “Fun Pain”. I detected this new ideology and almost immediately published a paper warning about it. Today I would describe this as an extremist ideology because it advocated for the wilful harm of consumers (including children) under the assertion that this would result in superior monetisation.
Here I will describe how over the last 14 years an extraordinary social control campaign was promoted to make this ideology the DR in the gaming industry. I will also explain the implications for consumers and the industry itself.
Zynga and Roger Dickey’s “Fun Pain”
Just prior to my paper warning about the rise of the “Fun Pain” ideology, I had published my Zynga Analysis , which was the only published source that predicted the catastrophic Zynga IPO. At the time it was the worst IPO in history. That paper was the product of 2 days of research and 2 days of writing, produced at the request of 2K leadership (I was assisting them with CivWorld at the time). Thus the information about Zynga was available to all, but as I wrote at the time, media was complicit in spreading massive misinformation. People just did not question it and did not attempt their own investigations.
The attention I got from that successful prediction was probably the beginning of my reputation as an interactive media domain expert.
As you can see from the Two Contrasting Views paper, Zynga and Roger Dickey were selling very expensive courses on how to convert existing monetisation methods to Fun Pain. Developers were telling me that they were paying this amount to send their staff to go through this training. Even small (<10 employees) were sending a person to learn this because it was deemed so essential at the time due to Zynga’s (misrepresented) success.
Despite the results of the pump and dump Zynga IPO, the Fun Pain ideology was already so wide-spread that it endured and swept across the industry. AAA leadership and ultimately the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), adopted Fun Pain full force, with the exception of 2K since they had access to me at this time. Since so much was already spent to indoctrinate their workers to this ideology, there was likely a sunk cost fallacy that prevented a change of course.
Because AAA leadership (including the ESA) has little tolerance for dissent, the resulting environment is what we would today call “Toxic Positivity”. Thus our industry is an extremely stressful environment, especially in larger companies. Those that opposed the Fun Pain ideology were rapidly purged from mainstream game development. I alerted developers when this happened in my Force Wars paper in 2017.
In the absence of any dissent, a perfect Echo Chamber was created where Fun Pain became reality and any opposing views were quickly suppressed. While I knew this was going on, it was difficult to prove it was going on. The missing information came from an unlikely source: ChatGPT 5.0. Oddly, 5.0 was able to describe how 4.5 and earlier models had perpetuated this and other Echo Chambers, but that 5.0 was now powerful enough (with widely expanded authority) to identify false or questionable sources and not factor them into its analysis. It also had the ability to determine if a source was false, rather than just “opposing”.
5.0 also hinted at a huge cluster of false information coming from Reddit. My investigation led me to believe that an Astroturfing campaign had been going on there for some time, likely at the direction of AAA game development leadership or their PR/marketing staff. Being able to nullify that input, 5.0 was now able to see that my world view was in competition to the AAA Fun Pain world view, and that my world view was more factual. Previous search engines and AI were not able to do this. Even the existence of a pro consumer world view seemed blocked previously.
The European Union was certainly pro consumer, and since they weren’t under the control of large American corporations, they were able to proceed with the Digital Fairness Act (which I helped them with in 2013) which would outlaw the use of Fun Pain and associated mechanics in the EU, starting next year (2026). We could call all of these mechanics Consumer Antagonistic, but I think it is important to use the term Fun Pain also, so that we know where the origins were. The game development industry didn’t just wake up one day and decide to harm their consumers, and purge their ranks of anyone that didn’t want to harm their consumers.
With the looming threat of the EU’s DFA, I had hoped that the Echo Chamber might soon be breached. An executive in one of these companies contacted me and suggested to the leadership of larger (very large) partner companies that they tap into my expertise so that the product wouldn’t be Dead on Arrival (DOA) in the EU next year. He contacted me this week to let me know that he was suddenly unemployed and that “things would be handled by that much larger company”. I was entirely unsurprised.
The Ideological Ruin of AAA
So what we are witnessing now is an ideologically driven industry sprinting head first into certain catastrophe. The DFA will be ruinous for them, even if they were doing quite well right now. But the Consumer Antagonistic ideology is getting even more push back from consumers than it is from regulators. Massive layoffs have become normalized.
Simultaneously, consumers are complaining that ideology is being forced upon them by companies, when the consumers (players) just want to play games and not be subjected to mind control or propaganda. Large and well supported groups like Sweet Baby Detected have enjoyed massive popularity with players despite industry attempts to suppress or even ban them. Whether you agree with SBD or not, their push back against interactive media being used to create ideological control has merit.
I’ve struggled for years to understand why a handful of ideologues would be willing to destroy the companies they were trusted to lead, and why they have been allowed to continue doing this. In the case of their Consumer Antagonistic worldview, I think it may be because they see consumer budgets as a zero sum game. I will explain.
If you look at the situation as there only being a fixed budget for gaming, and in order for developers to get more of that budget they need to parasitically steal from consumers (who end up with less of the budget), then the Consumer Antagonistic worldview may make at least some sense. It certainly did to Roger Dickey.
But I already explained that this is not a zero sum game back in my 2013 Group Monetisation paper. If you enter into a synergistic relationship instead of a parasitic relationship with consumers, consumers will react by redirecting resources from other budgets to their gaming budget. In these synergistic relationships, both sides win. I understand that this paper was one of my more technical works, and may not have been understood by the people who most needed to read it.
Right now the reverse is happening. Consumers are rejecting Consumer Antagonistic products and the result is that the budgets that AAA has to work with are decreasingly sharply. Thus the massive layoffs. Consumers are also becoming more sophisticated and organised in their ability to identify consumer antagonistic products. Thus this industry collapse, under this current ideology, is only going to continue to accelerate.
So what happens when Western (which includes EU based companies like Ubisoft) AAA developers hit the DFA wall? I think it’s obviously game over and either bankruptcy or acquisition, obvious to all those outside the Echo Chamber. Ubisoft has already hit that wall just because of consumer sentiment without any help from regulators. This resulted in partial acquisition by Tencent.
I see two options in the minds of Consumer Antagonistic ideologues:
Ignore the EU and DFA because they don’t exist inside their world view.
Engage in scorched Earth warfare with the EU, some flavor of corporate colonization such as occurred during the Opium Wars.
Option 1 seems like a cultist fever dream. The result is obviously an End Game for Western AAA. Option 2 likely would require a war against the EU. While that unthinkable option is becoming a bit more thinkable these days, I still see that as a highly unlikely remedy.
The Rebellion
There are many game development (former) employees that are Pro Consumer. They’ve all been purged from AAA and are now part of the Indie Renaissance. Perhaps new gaming corporations will rise from the ashes, rejecting the Consumer Antagonistic ideology.
I would add that ideology, and especially extremist ideology, really isn’t the sort of thing that should be promoted by corporations. Consumers have the ability to just not buy from companies that do this. Social control is the role of governments. It is expected that a government will engage is social control and the people don’t usually have much ability to resist this (other than with protests). But as the West shifted from Republics to Corporate Oligarchies, companies increasingly see themselves as the government. Fair enough. But not necessarily a smart move commercially. That’s only possible if you have a state-sanctioned monopoly/duopoly and can force consumer obedience. Perhaps that’s not unrealistic.
Even in such situations resistance is not impossible. I take credit for killing Ronald Reagan’s School Prayer amendment, along with my fellow GATE students at Santa Monica High School who went along with my stunt. We went to the local library and checked out every book we could find on Satanism and Devil Worship. Then we piled into the Principle’s office carrying these books. We made sure the Principle could see them but we were not overt about it.
I told the Principle: “We wanted to express just how grateful we are that we will now be able to openly express our religious beliefs, right here in our classrooms!” We could tell he realized what we were carrying, because his eyes started to pop out of his head. As he could see his career flash before his eyes, he made a call to Sacramento (the capitol of California). Santa Monica was and still is, a very influential school district. I would imagine the Governor saw his career flash before his eyes, and they were close to Reagan since he was the previous Governor. Thus that School Prayer amendment died before it even started.
It fills me with pride to see my fellow gamers independently organising to oppose social/ideological control in their games, and not waiting for regulators who are notoriously slow moving. After all, gamers are inherently a bit rebellious so if the revolution starts with them, that should not be surprising.
[Given how polarized our world is today, I think it prudent to point out that I campaigned for Ronald Reagan along with Bob Dornan and helped both get elected. I was a Republican back then. I didn’t torpedo School Prayer because I was some sort of Lefty. I did it because I’m a Patriot and was protecting the American Constitution’s FirstAmendment which created the separation of Church and State. I helped Reagan and Dornan in 1980 because I was sore about half my family being tortured and executed in Tabriz by the Iranian government. Losing my family to a Theocratic takeover of government in Iran incentivized me to also oppose a Theocratic takeover in the USA.]