185. Con Games and Objectivism
As I increasingly point out that my most dire predictions are coming true, this week I stopped to self-reflect. I'm getting a bit zealous. Am I creating my own ideology? What am I opposing?
Over the last year I’ve more than doubled my body of public articles. I’ve become a Tasmanian Devil of literary output. But what am I really trying to say? What’s that feeling that is driving me and causing such pessimism about the short term future events of game development? I was tempted to ask AI what it thinks I’m up to, but I decided not to. Here is what I think I’ve been trying to communicate:
Self interest has become epidemic in game development leadership, and perhaps across the wider economy.
Self interested people put a lot of effort into stealing work, not creating it.
AI appeals to these people because it is a method of automating merit transfers.
These people are so well rewarded for merit transfers, that this becomes their primary skill, along with bragging about whatever they stole.
My career comes to a halt every few years when someone tries to steal my work. They are getting increasingly aggressive about it with lawyers and such. The lawyers in turn make sure I can’t talk about their escapades.
Corporations increasingly are Not acting in the interests of their employees or even the company itself. Because the leader is acting in their own self-interest, not the interests of the company they are tasked with protecting.
“Confidence” seems to be the other characteristic that these self-interested people have in common. That and poor listening skills.
Game development should be a science based industry, but instead it is a science black hole. This allows obviously irrational activities (from a science based view) to be repeated over and over again without any advancement.
Objectively awful metrics like layoffs and dropping revenues should rationally trigger self reflection. But instead what we hear is even more confidence.
The Era of game development from 2009 to 2026 was based on anti consumer practices. The end of this era, what I call a technological paradigm, could not be more obvious. But there seems to be no effort to adapt, just denial. And defunding the entire industry.
In a world where nearly half the energy of the entire planet is being diverted into a technology (AI) that is attractive because of how fast it can steal stuff, led by people who present with limitless confidence, what happens when there is no one left to create new things? I would imagine we get the same things over and over, just made to look slightly different. We have two major companies suing each other over who stole the most content.
What is a Con Game?
The term “con game” is an abbreviation for “confidence game”.
Con games have become so normalized in society that peoples’ ability to trust has likely hit historic lows for the species. AI is especially good at creating such good fakes that it can trick people into thinking it is a family member that needs help.
Today the “Algorithm” sent me a video that helped me connect some dots here. Either it’s getting increasingly good at figuring out what I’m up to, or I’m just getting increasingly good at parsing the Algorithm. This video talks a lot about self-interest, and the creator argues that self-interest has been a derogatory thing (like I’ve been arguing of late) for almost all of human history.
Until the 1930s to 1960s.
Then an author named Ayn Rand began promoting an ideology of self-interest she called Objectivism. This was basically the idea that you had to take care of yourself first because no one else will. She escaped Russia two years before the first Cultural Revolution, and she surely would have been killed if she hadn’t fled. So I am sure this had a big influence on her. And during the cultural revolution, you really did have to do whatever it took to survive. My paternal grandmother also fled Azerbaijan to avoid execution around 1918 or 1919. Thus I have some compassion on where this sentiment comes from.
This concept of Objectivism was really the ultimate ideology for narcissists, self-interested people, and other assorted power hungry humans. You’ve seen this ideology just explode across industrial, political, and economic leadership in the West.
The problem with a society that promotes self-interest is that we managed to create all these countries and cultures through learning to promote cooperation and subduing self interest. Now we are glorifying the process of trying to own it all. On dating apps, which I talk about a lot, how do you create relationships with strangers if you can’t trust strangers? If more than 90% of participants are running one or more con games even before the first date, it is almost like the only way to win is not to play.
In the USA all political parties are running constant con games. This is not a partisan poke, it’s completely normalized across the political spectrum. Turning off food for 17% of children in the USA for 43 days is just business. Under Objectivism, this is a non problem if it doesn’t affect your children. Having been myself homeless from the age of 17 to 22, and having experienced food insecurity for at least 25 years, I take that kind of personally. That’s like negotiating with a gun to the heads of millions of kids.
But these are all Con Games. They are repacked to the public as actually good for them. The same thing is happening in game development. Companies are doing just great, really great, all the way up to the point where they have to sell themselves, go bankrupt, or lay off tens of thousands of workers. Investors will actually celebrate the layoffs because they themselves have no self interest in the long term health of a company, its workers, or the industry itself. Now that we can “short” a company, the easiest way to win is to see through the Cons and pick the losers.
Science versus Objectivism
I’m not going to argue that Objectivism is scientifically unsound. The latter is a philosophy. It makes up a part of the Victory Conditions that people may choose to program themselves with. It plays to the “short game” where you think about how to get ahead on your next trick. But the problem is that when you don’t produce anything but do a great job of taking things from others, that economically is a net negative.
If everyone is operating from a net negative ideology (and this certainly seems to be the case in game development) then the economy of game development is going to burn bad, and it is. I’ve self identified as a scientist since the age of 7, if not earlier. That’s when I started going to invite-only NASA presentations, thanks to my friend Roger who’s parents were NASA scientists. I grew up a feral guttersnipe so I would have not had any sort of privilege without that friendship.
Developing science is a painfully slow process. It typically benefits those that come after the scientist, as it takes so long to do the science and then longer still for it to trickle out to schools, industry, and consumers. It is absolutely a long game, measured in generations or even centuries. I’ve developed a lot of science for the field of interactive media. It could be argued that I’ve created more science than anyone else in interactive media, since it is such a new field.
Thus I make predictions and plan for a world 20 years in the future. I have an advantage because I actually know what is coming and can plan for it. To people who don’t have a long term view of life, or those who are Objectivists, or especially youth who don’t even know if they will survive for 20 years, maybe this comes across as lunacy. They would tell me I should have taken my math skills, gone into finance, and retired at age 30. Or just stayed in the military. But I didn’t want to play life on easy mode, people around me (including my teachers) were already complaining about how easy things were for me in school. I wanted to do something hard that people on easy mode would never do.
Science seemed the way to go there. But then I even ran into easy mode scientists that were super pissed off at how easy science was for me. So I had to do science solo. I wasn’t doing science to make money or get famous. I just wanted to make the world a better place, so that after I was dead people might think that I didn’t waste my talent. I had these thoughts even as a small child.
And, I took that troublesome Vow of Pacifism at age 18. I wasn’t a speciesist so I didn’t see humans as more special than cows. Back then I was an ultra endurance athlete and ate a lot of cows. I didn’t want to grow up as a super powered Dexter like my father had hoped. So I decided to go into a harmless industry where I couldn’t be weaponized. Game development seemed perfect.
I realize all my long term readers are laughing at me at this point, because game dev ended up being one of the perfect places for a Quant to be weaponized.
I obviously pushed back. But the thing that most concerns me in game dev isn’t all the weaponization or the con games. It’s that this Objectivist view promotes short term thinking and is completely antithetical to science. You can see this by the almost complete absence of scientists in game dev (data scientists don’t count, they aren’t making new science).
So when a meeting was arranged by Professor Mike Zyda between me and Blizzard in 2009 after I had solved the “impossible” problem of protecting game economies from 3rd party attack, Blizzard seemed completely disinterested. This despite it costing them in excess of a billion dollars a year to ignore that problem. The lack of scientists meant they couldn’t think long term and couldn’t understand the science related to their work.
I keep doing the science, solving the problems that will affect game development in the future while already sitting on a mountain of science that I started developing 20 years ago that’s desperately needed now. Well, not needed by Objectivists, they don’t seem to care at all unless they can steal it or otherwise take credit for it. I estimate that I’m now 20 to 30 years ahead of AAA in the science and related tech needed for them to make advanced game-computer-human interactive constructs. What I would call New Realities. I introduced that concept in my The Physiology of Gaming paper in 2018. That’s not AI or computer science. That’s neuroscience.
Not a lot of money is going into neuroscience. I think research into brain-computer interfaces (BCI) is really one of the huge leaps in technology that we assume will happen. But since BCI is about improving humans, not replacing them, it’s taking a back seat to techs like quantum computing and nuclear fusion (to power data centers). Objectivists don’t want to make other humans better, that’s just more competition for them. Still, BCI sounds expensive. What’s a lot cheaper is figuring out how the brain works and stimulating or manipulating it with game/video content, non invasively. Apps like TikTok are doing that, but seemingly without approaching it scientifically.
I realize that by promoting the future, and even talking from the future, I run the risk of coming across as if I’m talking down to people. Pointing out that industry leaders are making serial bad decisions leading to repeated billion dollar losses and opportunity costs probably comes across to leadership as me talking down to them. For those trying to run a Confidence Game, this is especially problematic for them because my narrative contradicts their narrative.
I’m trying to look at the situation rationally. If I point out that they are about to make a decision that will cost them billions, and I go to a lot of work to point that out far enough in advance so that they can make use of that information, I can’t see how I could make that any easier for them. Big Tech has already spent a lot of time and money vetting me, so authentication is a no brainer if that ever becomes an issue.
Ultimately it isn’t the lack of science or rational behavior (what looks irrational to us might be very rational to someone operating from self-interest) that is blocking progress in game development. It’s the Ideology behind it that is in turn blocking science or rational decision making.
Since Objectivism became the dominant Ideology in game dev (~2009), being anti consumer was not only acceptable, but encouraged. I’ve documented Roger Dickey training an entire generation of designers to intentionally harm their players, and pay a lot of money to learn that skill. I’ve documented teams of data scientists trying to figure out how to optimize that harm in order to boost revenue. I’ve even shown how the ESRB, set up to protect consumers under industry “self regulation”, was itself harming children.
This Era of Objectivism, which I’m expecting to hard fail for game dev next year with the Digital Fairness Act, has created a world view where industry leadership is superior to the consumers that buy their products. The consumers exist to serve/benefit this elite. Gamers become just like cows or whales (literally), inferior beings to be consumed for pleasure and power.
I am myself a gamer. Designers like Sid Meier and Chris Taylor inspired me to do this work. Being able to actually assist them was a dream come true. It would be all too easy to exploit gamers with what I know. I could make Mark Pincus and Bobby Kotick green with envy with how much of a dick I could be. But I’m not playing a short term game. I want to play in New Realities that right now exist only in fantasy. I want those NRs to make so much money that they just keep getting better and better.
And I want that money to come from the value that they bring, not because they were successful Cons. I was unable to find like minded people in Web3, which is why I got out. Not because of Web3, but because of the people in Web3. I will return when the culture changes. If it changes.
If people don’t appreciate where this science came from until 10 or 20 years after I die of old age, that’s a win for me. I’m playing a long game. I live a life of asceticism. I care not for personal enrichment. Having grown up feral and then later homeless for years, I learned to be content with as little as possible. To appreciate the little things. Now that I spend time in Buddhist cultures, that’s seen as meritous, not the behavior of a loser. I have no vices, unless you count gaming (I don’t gamble).
The last time I asked Wargaming if they wanted to rehire me, I had to go through the Machine Zone Objectivists that took over after I left. I knew that wasn’t going to fly. I was told “Wargaming doesn’t need a Guru”. I disagreed then and I disagree now. But thinking back, I find it interesting the choice of words they used.
Is that how industry leadership sees me? Clearly the term is meant to be derogatory, but I think I’m going to embrace it. After all, just like Blizzard, RIOT, Zynga and many others, I was born in California.