Working for BioWare： My GamerGate Origin Story ｜ 11⧸20⧸24
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 1 minute
Words per Minute
189.75775
Summary
In this episode of Dragon Age: An Elder Scrolls Online, I talk about how I got my start in the world of video games, and how I ended up falling down the Dragon Age rabbit hole. I also tell a story of how I became a full-time employee at Bioware.
Transcript
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All right, so jumping in today, I wanted to tell you guys a little bit of a story.
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Usually we get into some news of the day, maybe some political theory or some philosophy.
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But this one was just too good not to touch on.
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If you paid any attention to the world of video games, you know, of course, that Dragon Age The Veil Guard has come out.
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And this is a game that has come from Bioware or EA Edmonton, as we used to call it.
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And this is a studio that is well known through the years for having really interesting, in-depth RPG games across multiple platforms.
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But also known, unfortunately, for being one of the foremost companies when it comes to pushing wokeness inside the video game industry.
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Before it was cool or trendy for a lot of these video game developers, before they started jumping on the bandwagon and they got pushed into this from all these different consultancy agencies like Sweet Baby Inc., they basically got blackmailed in some cases.
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But before all of that, Bioware was really setting the tone.
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They were putting in a lot of characters that were trans or had gay relationships.
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They were putting preachy sections into different parts of their video games.
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And this has been a consistent theme throughout many of their releases, which their fans haven't always been a huge, well, fan of.
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The funny part of this was I was actually working with Bioware at one point.
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You know, being a teacher, a lot of times you have downtime.
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There's a lot of extra hours, especially in the summer.
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A lot of people get second jobs, and I was one of those people.
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One of the things that I did along the way was get work for a company that farmed itself out as a social media manager for a number of different big organizations.
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I think at one point we were doing work for some of the armed forces.
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We handled multiple big video game companies and their social media, including Riot Games with League of Legends.
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And the one I worked on the most, I worked on all of those different projects, though we had many, many more.
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But the biggest one, the one I spent the most time on, was Bioware.
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I was there when, let's see, it was Mass Effect 3 had come out, which had a lot of wokeness in it, but also was famous for its terrible ending.
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Even though I think in general the game was rather enjoyable to play, and also Dragon Age Inquisition, which was really where the wokeness ball got rolling for Bioware.
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So I was working as part of this company that was handling their social media moderation.
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We did the forums, we did Facebook, we did YouTube, a lot of this stuff.
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And so I was very unfamiliar with all of this when I kind of joined on.
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I didn't know about Gamergate or Internet politics, all these different people who were discussing what was happening, the scandals that were involved.
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I had, you know, talk radio conservative, normie, but Republican politics.
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And that's kind of how I ended up falling down a lot of the rabbit hole that I did.
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So today I want to show you some of what is in Dragon Age.
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Veilguard talked to you about kind of how this is infiltrated in and why this has become such a standard for Bioware.
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I want to give you a little bit about my story and experience working with them and what happened and everything.
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And ultimately why Gamergate was kind of the original ground zero for this recognition of what we would eventually call, I think, the total state.
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The fact that this wokeness idea had penetrated every aspect of our culture that had taken over, how this ended up being the canary in the coal mine for a movement that has now culminated in the re-election of Donald Trump.
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In a very strange but real way, Gamergate paved the way for the national politics that we are experiencing today.
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All right, so like I said, for those who are not familiar, EA Edmonton or BioWare was a famous video game developer.
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They weren't originally part of Electronic Arts, but they were bought by Electronic Arts.
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Electronic Arts is its own infamous name among kind of the video game sphere.
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It's well hated at this point for its propensity for buying up a lot of small publishers and then closing them down or changing their direction.
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People tend not to be a huge fan of kind of the cannibalistic manner in which they operate inside the video game industry.
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But interestingly, when they joined with EA, BioWare was known for really their very complicated PC RPGs.
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They were famous for the Baldur's Gate series, which is a Dungeons and Dragons video game, and they were known for Knights of the Old Republic, which was a really good spin on the Star Wars saga at that time.
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These properties were not burned out like they are today.
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You know, Star Wars was still relatively fresh.
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You hadn't had all of the tarnishing that had come with kind of the newer movies.
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So these were still properties that were well-loved, and the fact that BioWare had properly translated them into the video game format got them a lot of respect.
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They were kind of considered to be a gamer's gamer's video game company.
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You know, these were the people who understood the culture.
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They knew how to take complex stories and worlds and flesh them out and make them real.
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So this is a developer that had a lot of goodwill in a lot of ways.
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And they were also famous in kind of the modern era for their Mass Effect series and their Dragon Age series.
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One which was a fantasy series and one which is a sci-fi series.
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Now, both Mass Effect and Dragon Age had elements that hinted towards perhaps an interest in kind of progressivism, a little bit of a political in here and there.
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But the first editions of both of these were not overly woke in any serious way.
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They still had elements of this stuff, but much of it was written off as, well, you know, this is an open world.
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You're being who you want to be and doing what you want to do.
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And so some of those choices might end up falling inside kind of this leftist spectrum.
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It was present, but it wasn't in your face constantly.
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Mass Effect 2 ended up being one of the most well-loved games of all time.
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Something that I thought was definitely an improvement over Mass Effect 1.
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But again, we could see with each iteration, these politics were coming more and more to the forefront.
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It wasn't just an option among many options you could choose in a world that was open.
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But instead, it was something that seemed to be forced more and more into the main storyline.
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And more and more, it seemed like those characters were lecturing you about those interactions.
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Those things became less and less of one of the many ways you could pick through the buffet of role-playing.
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And instead, something that was being funneled directly to the player.
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It really took off with Dragon's Age Inquisition.
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And I remember because, again, I was working on the social media at that time.
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I want to get deeper into my experience in this.
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But first, I want to show you what they are doing now.
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Kind of what the modern Bioware game looks like.
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Why so many people are saying, okay, this is absolutely insane.
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We're talking about, in Dragon's Age, Veilguard, a game in which, of course, you have a trans main character.
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Before, in Inquisition, it was a side character you could run into.
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But there are side quests where you would run into the, I'm persecuted for my homosexuality.
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But once you got to this game, we're now on the point where this is the main storyline.
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These are mandatory scenes and lectures that you're running into.
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And in things like the character creation, they have, like, top scars from trans surgery.
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So you can include mutilation, self-mutilation, into your character as part of the game.
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You know, obviously, again, you could still make the argument, well, they're just opening up these opportunities to roleplay.
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You're not supposed to import your real-life politics into this escapism.
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I mean, sci-fi is famously a place where you can discuss real-world issues in a fantasy setting or a setting in which things are accelerated into the future, where they're distant but still connected.
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But when you're entirely in different worlds, I mean, Dragon Age takes place in a completely fantastic universe.
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It has no connection to Earth or, you know, any of our history.
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It's not Star Trek where we came from this and this is part of our politics and who we are and we have these relationships even somewhere in the distant past.
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And yet they still show up, but whatever, again, you could say, well, some of that is part of the selection.
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But let me show you one of the scenes that is just particularly egregious from the new game.
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All right, so to set the stage for this, I cut the clip a little short because I don't want to, you know, go through the whole thing.
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But they're having some kind of conversation about mates and telling everybody about what happened.
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And someone misgenders someone in the middle of the conversation.
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And we get an entire lecture about how terrible this is.
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She's still holding the ruby in her other hand.
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Tradition in the Lords of Fortune from one of our old members, barve.
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Good guy, but like most of us, his plans went sideways a lot.
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Bad blood among your crews, not good for morale.
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But there's not always time for big drawn-out apologies.
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So she is telling the story and she has misgendered one of the adventurers who, for some reason, has our notion, our current woke notion of gender identity imported into this fantasy universe.
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And because she has made this error and she has been shamed by one of the other members, she has to stop and we go through an entire struggle session.
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It's not enough to just say, oh, no, well, you know, you said the wrong word.
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No, I need to, I need to do some kind of recompense.
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I need to actually go through some kind of physical punishment so I can show, you know, that, that I, my, my contrition towards this person.
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You know, this, this is kind of where we get started, but it only gets worse from here.
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So when one of us screws up and we know we've screwed up, we do a quick 10 to put it right.
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Sometimes people say, oops, sorry, and hope that fixes it, but they just want to get the whole thing over with.
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But pulling a barve, you sweat a little, makes you think about it a little more, shows the other person you mean it.
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What if they mean it when they say they're sorry, though?
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They feel so bad about it that it's on everyone else to smooth it over and make them feel better.
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So this is just out of the worst HR struggle session.
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This is just completely like the straight up gay race, communism, just Maoism right here, right?
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So it's not enough that you've seen the faux pas and you've said you're sorry.
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No, you don't really mean it because you're making it about you.
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You need to sweat so we know that you really mean it, that you ultimately understand how deep your sin was and how you're willing to atone through it, not through just words, but through actions.
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Really, if they just asked you to donate to some, you know, make a million dollar donation to some charity, this would be completely indistinguishable from a current media witch hunt from any given celebrity that makes some kind of faux pas.
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Pulling above puts it on the person who screwed up.
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I'm glad the Lords of Fortune have Tasha's back.
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Oh, Tasha isn't the first non-binary member of the Lords.
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In this fantasy world, this completely new thing that popped up about 10 years ago and suddenly swept and completely consumed popular culture.
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This has just been around for a very long time.
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This is how you write it into history for people.
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This is not some insane thing that has taken over and completely rewritten our history.
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No, this is, you can see in a fantasy game, this has been around for a very long time.
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And of course, this band of adventurers is incredibly sensitive to this, this rough and tumble crew who runs around murdering and, you know, pillaging and, you know, pulling all kinds of hijinks and these kind of things.
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They're, you know, they're, they're very emotionally attuned to this kind of thing.
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They think very deeply about it and they make sure to guard themselves at all times.
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This is a softer, gentler pack of armed killers.
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It was a little before your time, but Horlicks was one of ours.
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Bastard looked better than I did in a dress or pants and out of them too.
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Just, I didn't expect the Lords to care about the stuff.
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Have they, have they, uh, genuflected properly in front of the holy visage of the non-binary deity?
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This is, this is video game entertainment, right?
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This is how you spend your time after dropping, you know, what, 70 bucks on this game?
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Probably me being non-binary Kirkwall taught me about family.
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But the thing is, well, and by the way, it, I, normally I would just say, well, this, this
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should just absolutely win me the bet a hundred percent between me and academic agent.
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The fact that this came out in 2024 should itself make it very clear that the woke is
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not going anywhere, but I will say that this has been around for a very long time.
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This is who Bioware has been for a very long time, which is why I want to tell this story,
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though it does kind of put the lie to the idea that people are just going to change course.
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Oh, well, you know, all of a sudden, uh, Donald Trump wins and, uh, the, all the corporations
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have chosen that they're going to go to the other direction.
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They didn't go in and change this or cancel this.
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They, they tripled down on all of this content and they will continue to do that because that
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So, uh, I guess now is, is when I should probably explain, uh, my connection to this.
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So, like I said, as you know, as a teacher, you have a lot of this open time.
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You, you often have to get, uh, you know, second jobs if you, you know, you don't have
00:19:17.980
You don't just want to sit around all summer, do nothing.
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And so this is where, uh, I ended up getting, uh, involved with this.
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I didn't want to, to be clear at the beginning, I want to make really clear.
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You won't, you know, I was not a, a, a Bioware employee in their offices.
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Um, I was not creating video games for them or anything like that.
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I wasn't writing scripts or code or any of that stuff.
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So when I say I'm working for Bioware, where I literally mean we were hired by
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And this is what I primarily worked on when I was doing this job.
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We had to inter, uh, act with them on a consistent basis.
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We were emailing them, talking to them, getting their impact, taking, or getting
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their input, uh, taking, uh, their notes and applying it to what we were doing.
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They were the ones that set the rules for what we were moderating and what we
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were pulling down and what was acceptable and all these different things.
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So there, you know, is a lot of understanding of kind of the culture coming
00:20:19.920
down from the company and what they expected and what we should be doing.
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So, you know, very familiar with where they were at.
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And I also became very familiar with their attitudes towards what they were
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making, but I was not directly involved in any, you know, I was not a video game
00:20:37.080
So not, not taking any credit or blame, I guess, uh, there.
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However, uh, like I said, because we were working on the social media, we had to
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constantly be aware of what they wanted put out there.
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We were controlling the message, controlling what people could see, what people could
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say, what discussions could take place, what discussions couldn't take place.
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We were doing this across YouTube and Facebook and the forums and all these
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Like they weren't the only client by any means.
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We even had, they even have multiple forums that people tend to work on.
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Uh, but I was just, I was focused mainly on dragon age and mass effect.
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That's, that's where the majority of my time was spent in their forums, on their YouTube
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And so I did not know at this time, anything about gamer gate.
00:21:34.640
I had not been watching, you know, political YouTube.
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I listened to, uh, you know, the guys that were on talk radio.
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I listened to, uh, Michael Medved and Dennis Prager.
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And, um, I don't think Ben Shapiro, I listened to Glenn Beck, of course, you know, there was
00:21:59.160
I had worked, uh, for, uh, you know, Republican, uh, Congressman, uh, you know, I had had some
00:22:05.260
level of, of course, political education, uh, at that time.
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Uh, but I w I was not plugged into what would become kind of the online writer, any of that
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And so I got this job and I thought, oh, I'm going to be working with video games.
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I got this downtime, so I'll go ahead and do that.
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It was, you know, very low pay, but you know, you're sitting at home, you know, closing threads
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and deleting comments and things like that's, it's not hard work.
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So it's not something you have to give your full attention to.
00:22:38.540
It's something you can basically do in the background while you're doing something else.
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So it's a nice way to make a little chunk of change when you don't have anything else
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I had no idea what the wider world that would be connected to this.
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So I joined in, you know, I start moderating this stuff.
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And at first I think it's primarily just going to be again, video games.
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Someone will post a nasty picture or they'll insult somebody or they'll throw around some language
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that's gross and you'll have to, you know, close them, give them a timeout or something
00:23:10.540
That's kind of what I thought the job was going to be.
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But as I went through the complaints, you know, you, you get these lists of complaints
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that come in the, the oftentimes, and this happened a lot.
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In fact, it's probably not even primarily the people using the forums or using the Facebook
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or the YouTube or whatever that are putting in any kind of complaints.
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It was mainly the people who were active on the forums who were connected to Bioware, who
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were complaining about people saying no, no words, touching topics that were foreboding,
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And I want to be clear also, like people are nasty on the internet.
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I did remove plenty of genuinely nasty comments.
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There were a few cases where full on threats were made.
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We had to report those as, you know, things that law enforcement needed to know about.
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So I want to make it clear, like not everybody on there was just saying innocent comments.
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There's really mean stuff that, you know, that did exist for sure.
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And that was the stuff I kind of expected to have to take down.
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That's what I thought the job was when I got started.
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It's like, okay, well, you know, these people, they're going to be discussing a video game
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And then someone will go fly off the handle of their post, you know, I don't know, porn
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Or maybe there'll be really nasty and use a lot of bad language.
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That's kind of what I thought was going to be the big part of it.
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But it turned out that a good percentage of the reports that came in that we had to deal
00:24:44.200
with came from the staff themselves who often got into it with their own fans and ended up
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finding that the best way to win arguments with their own fans was to ban them from talking
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Like, I did not expect the developers to be like on there actively combing the forums,
00:25:07.720
looking for wrong think and complaining about it and telling people that they had to shut
00:25:13.760
up and you can't use those words and you can't talk to us about this.
00:25:18.840
And one of the most common things was misgendering any form of using pronouns that a developer
00:25:26.600
didn't like, uh, or expressing any kind of, uh, of opposition to the idea that this would
00:25:33.960
be something in a video game or, you know, obviously if you said it to a developer, you
00:25:38.240
were toast, like you were immediately removed, but even mentioning the wrong pronouns that
00:25:43.420
a character used in the game was itself considered a violation of the terms of, of using, uh,
00:25:52.560
Again, I thought that was very odd up to this point.
00:25:55.220
While I didn't like that, these kinds of political things, these kinds of weird gender things
00:26:01.880
I like a lot of people, you know, I'd played fallout and I played these kinds of very open
00:26:09.080
And I was familiar with the idea that people could do weird, bad things in video games.
00:26:14.900
And that was part of the ability in some of these role-playing games.
00:26:18.500
It wasn't something I was a big fan of, but it was always there.
00:26:24.280
It was the consequence of having an open world game with a lot of role-playing, a lot of decisions
00:26:30.180
It didn't click with me because I hadn't really opened my mind to what I understand.
00:26:36.140
Now that these were deeply ideological things lodged into the game.
00:26:41.560
I kind of took that barstool conservative understanding, well, just let people do what
00:26:49.780
And we love the country, but otherwise, you know, the culture is what it is and there's
00:26:56.200
I really was ultimately the way that I felt about, or at least, you know, I thought about
00:27:02.320
Maybe I didn't agree with it at the core of it.
00:27:04.420
Eventually, I certainly figured out it was the wrong thing and the wrong way to understand
00:27:08.500
But at the time, that's the way that I looked at it.
00:27:11.240
What's better than a well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue?
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00:27:42.140
And when I saw this, when I saw the way that they were consistently pushing and were so
00:27:47.280
sensitive about those particular topics, when there were many different aspects of the game
00:27:51.660
that people didn't like, especially, you know, when Mass Effect 3 came out and had the ending
00:27:59.520
I had a lot of fun playing it, but it was very clear that the ending was just garbage.
00:28:03.920
And they kind of acknowledged that by going back and redoing some of it and releasing
00:28:13.400
But people, you know, bagged on that stuff all the time and sometimes it got heated and
00:28:17.200
we'd had to, you know, close a thread or take down a comment, which I expected.
00:28:21.400
But that was more what I expected at the end from the job.
00:28:24.740
I did not expect to be running around playing pronoun police for these people.
00:28:28.440
And yet that was the majority, it seemed, of the infractions that they really cared about.
00:28:33.880
That was the stuff that would escalate almost immediately.
00:28:38.520
It started to put off the alarm bells in my head somewhere at the edge of my mind.
00:28:43.260
That thing started to tingle saying, why is that?
00:28:49.560
I thought this was just part of the role playing.
00:28:51.880
I thought this was just, you know, one of many options I could engage in.
00:28:55.780
And that was the justification for why it was in the game and why it wasn't political
00:29:04.300
Like, actually, that seems to be the most important part of the game to you as a video
00:29:10.980
You care way more about pronouns than you care about, like, the ending to your multi,
00:29:17.460
you know, like hundreds of million dollar, you know, multi-year game that you built.
00:29:24.000
And the more I, you know, close these threads going through and everything, I started to
00:29:29.520
read more and more of them, pay more attention.
00:29:32.060
You know, I was, wasn't just saying, oh, okay, there's the report.
00:29:36.820
I started actually reading more into what the people who were being silenced were saying,
00:29:43.440
you know, who am I closing out of this discussion?
00:29:46.560
Why are they being silenced out of this discussion?
00:29:49.340
And the more I did that, the more I realized that these people, well, again, some of them
00:29:56.240
Some of them were saying things they shouldn't have said.
00:29:58.820
Majority of them were just saying, this is not what I want.
00:30:05.220
And there seemed to be other places that they were discussing it.
00:30:08.020
They started to reference other issues in the video game industry.
00:30:11.340
And this is where I, for the first time, ran into the idea of Gamergate.
00:30:15.820
Now, I'm not going to recapitulate the story of Gamergate for you.
00:30:20.420
There are people who've done entire videos about the history of Gamergate and every aspect
00:30:26.180
There are literally entire channels dedicated to this.
00:30:28.640
So if you want to know all that stuff, by all means, go for it.
00:30:33.080
However, when I started looking into this, I discovered that, okay, there had been this
00:30:39.200
issue with this woman and she had been sleeping with video game developers to help make sure
00:30:44.260
that they got the people who slept with her, got better reviews or whatever, stuff like
00:30:50.980
And there was a corruption in games journalism.
00:30:53.480
But I didn't think that was a huge deal because ultimately, I understand what a hobby
00:30:58.000
I'm somebody who has had a lot of hobbies throughout my life.
00:31:07.560
This is the thing that really stuck and became professional.
00:31:10.080
But when I see something I find interesting, I dive into it.
00:31:15.300
And so I've seen a lot of hobby presses throughout my life.
00:31:18.420
There's a lot of fluff pieces written in these things.
00:31:21.300
And it's not a big deal to me that that was part of it.
00:31:25.140
But it was clear that there's a wider issue going on here, that it wasn't just a corruption
00:31:33.180
But that it was really important to people to interject the politics and the culture aspect
00:31:41.700
And I started seeing some of these names like Sargon of Akkad and Milo Yiannopoulos.
00:31:51.460
But as I started closing more and more of these threads and I got more and more curious about
00:31:55.720
these comments, I decided to start, you know, saying, what is this about?
00:32:04.940
It turns out that this guy, Steven Crowder, had talked to both Milo Yiannopoulos and Sargon of Akkad.
00:32:13.720
You know, I started going down a rabbit hole at this time.
00:32:17.180
This is how I ran into Jordan Peterson and Computing Forever, you know, and a lot of the guys
00:32:23.480
who, for many of you who are familiar with these online spaces, will be very familiar.
00:32:31.840
So I was kind of running into these people one by one.
00:32:35.780
And so as I learned about Gamergate, I also learned about this wider world of people who
00:32:41.780
were disaffected, not just with video games, but kind of a very, a whole nexus of entertainment,
00:32:58.840
Now, remember, this is like what, 2014, 2015, it's leading up to the Trump election, but we're
00:33:06.680
Donald Trump hadn't quite come down the escalator yet, but there was this movement bubbling
00:33:11.400
under the surface saying something is wrong with not just this one popular entertainment
00:33:18.840
product, but it has ramifications across all kinds of dimensions inside our culture.
00:33:30.520
I started watching the Steven Crowder guy and more Sargon of Akkad.
00:33:34.260
And funny enough, at some point, Carl Benjamin, who I've now met multiple times and I'm very
00:33:41.340
Uh, but at some point he had a debate with this guy, Dave, the distributist.
00:33:49.540
And when I listened to Dave, the distributist, I said, man, uh, this guy really knows what he's
00:33:56.300
Like he, like he had, you know, Sargon was a pretty smart guy.
00:34:01.520
Uh, but he was still somewhat immature at the time.
00:34:05.480
I mean, today, Carl has really delved into philosophy.
00:34:10.560
He's become a very impressive individual and he was, you know, still saying smart things
00:34:14.880
at the time, but he didn't kind of have the intellectual firepower that he has now is more
00:34:20.660
If you guys remember kind of the SJW reaction videos and things that kind of dominated YouTube
00:34:26.140
Um, and so I went down the rabbit hole of, of Dave's, the distributist stuff, because man,
00:34:32.440
this guy really seemed to know what he was talking about.
00:34:35.560
He, he had considered questions that Carl Benjamin had just never asked.
00:34:43.840
This was a problem I had with a lot of Carl's content at the time because he was still billing
00:34:50.980
Like he, he was starting the liberalist party, right?
00:34:53.460
Like, yeah, now today he has completely abandoned liberalism.
00:34:56.580
He said, look, liberalism has a lot of serious flaws.
00:35:00.060
And I, I, you know, he, he has learned a lot about that, but at the time that was still
00:35:05.260
But Dave, the distributist came from a very different place.
00:35:08.480
Uh, and funny enough, Dave, the distributist also talked a lot about this guy called Menchus
00:35:15.320
Now at the time, Molebug had only written under that name.
00:35:20.100
Uh, Curtis Yarvin, a few years later would actually start revealing his real name and
00:35:25.780
But at the time he was just some internet blogger who was completely anonymous.
00:35:29.260
Now at the time I didn't pay a lot of attention specifically to the mold bug content.
00:35:34.920
I was more interested in Dave's cultural videos.
00:35:37.620
He had a lot of insights on, uh, you know, families and community and how people could work
00:35:43.540
together things that were adjacent to conservatism, but things that I had never really thought
00:35:50.780
Again, I had a very talk radio version of conservatism.
00:35:54.480
Church is important and family is important, but ultimately it's all about liberty and
00:35:59.720
And, you know, uh, we're moving towards kind of more, more libertarian understanding of
00:36:04.340
And this is what's going to bring people together and ultimately really make the right.
00:36:09.120
What it is, uh, that's what the future is for the Republican party and these things.
00:36:14.000
And I'm a Republican, so that, that makes sense.
00:36:16.720
But the more I listened to Dave, the more I realized that there was a much deeper and traditional
00:36:22.180
understanding of culture that I needed to grasp.
00:36:25.600
And then obviously everything happened with, uh, Trump, uh, we had, uh, everything going
00:36:32.420
on there and ultimately we, we started moving towards the madness of 2020.
00:36:37.320
And that's when I said, okay, uh, around like 2018, 2019, I was like, I need to start paying
00:36:42.500
attention to this mold bug guy because this Curtis Yarvin guy, we'd kind of learned his
00:36:47.540
He'd kind of started to come back and write, uh, under his own name at that time, the very
00:36:53.340
Um, I said, okay, this is the guy who, who is laying out a lot of these political predictions.
00:36:59.920
And so, uh, there was, there was a YouTube channel that, and I don't even remember what
00:37:04.200
it is at this point, but they had recorded through kind of the robot voice, the way that
00:37:08.560
skeptical waves does now all of his content, shout out to skeptical waves, go, uh, go, uh,
00:37:16.300
But, uh, before skeptical waves, there's this guy who had a uploaded the entirety of kind
00:37:20.800
of the open letter, uh, and a gentle introduction, these kinds of things to, uh, uh, to Curtis
00:37:27.800
They were like seven hour videos, eight hour videos.
00:37:30.260
If you listen to them, uh, at like double speed.
00:37:35.300
I listened to each of those multiple times to try to grasp them.
00:37:39.640
Uh, and then, uh, Nick lands dark enlightenment.
00:37:42.720
Like I would just go on walks and listen to these things over and over and over again,
00:37:47.000
trying to make sense of the world around me, what was going on.
00:37:50.140
And then I ran into guys like Clossington and I ran into guys like Charlemagne who were
00:37:55.280
doing more supplementary work on, uh, you know, the work of both Nick land and Spandrel and,
00:38:04.880
There's another guy, uh, his name is escaping me at this time.
00:38:08.140
And I wish I could remember it because he, he doesn't put out videos anymore, but I want
00:38:12.780
But all of a sudden it's, it's a skip to my mind.
00:38:15.480
Uh, he had a Thomas Carlyle, uh, you know, avatar, uh, for, you know, for a very long time.
00:38:20.700
But anyway, uh, the point being is this is kind of what led me down this road, right?
00:38:26.540
I started running into each one of these different people.
00:38:30.380
And so in a very strange way, but a very real way, uh, Gamergate unlocked this
00:38:39.940
And I didn't spend a lot of time on Gamergate content itself.
00:38:42.860
Like once I kind of knew what it was and I had listened to Carl and a few others, I was
00:38:49.940
But like I said, the guys like David distributes really kind of seem to have a firmer grasp.
00:38:55.320
And especially when you get to a mold bug and, you know, his story of the German cat,
00:39:00.320
uh, that one explains what happened, how we got the total state, how this woke ideology
00:39:09.560
It infiltrated into every one of our institutions that were just really laid out things in a
00:39:18.440
Not only, and I'm really not the only one, right.
00:39:20.920
Gamergate was, was a pivotal moment in helping me to discover a whole new understanding of kind
00:39:26.600
of where politics was going and what the underlying problem was and all of these other, uh, places.
00:39:31.880
And once I discovered mold bug, I started going down his reading list and I was reading Burnham
00:39:35.880
and Carlisle and Pareto and Schmidt and Mosca and, uh, Joseph de Maestra and Bertrand de Juvenal
00:39:42.360
and all of these guys, uh, that I had just never known existed before.
00:39:45.800
And that blew my mind because I had majored in political science and my focus had been political
00:39:50.920
Uh, if I had stayed around one more semester, I could have had a double major in philosophy,
00:39:56.600
I, I don't think I'm going to, uh, spend another, you know, go, go into debt to, uh,
00:40:01.400
get a second degree that no one's ever going to care about.
00:40:03.640
I don't see myself going into a job interview and then saying, well, if you had had that
00:40:08.600
double major in philosophy, we would have hired you.
00:40:13.240
I just didn't seem like a value proposition at the time.
00:40:17.000
Uh, but it's amazing to me that this kind of led me to this wider understanding of political
00:40:24.040
theory, one that I just never grasped when I was getting a formal education in political
00:40:29.400
Uh, you know, I certainly took political science and focused on political theory,
00:40:32.920
and yet I had never heard of pretty much any of these guys.
00:40:36.360
Uh, and the fact that that is just completely devoid from education right now is absolutely
00:40:43.320
And my experience is far from, uh, you know, unique, even though I probably went more down
00:40:51.160
And I probably went further down the rabbit hole than most when it comes to, uh, reading
00:40:55.000
mold bug and deeper into kind of a neo reactionary theory and all of this stuff.
00:40:59.560
Ultimately, I know a lot of people who were kind of made aware of the world around them
00:41:08.040
and how deeply it had been infiltrated by this ideology.
00:41:11.320
And they could never have put a finger on it, right?
00:41:13.800
Previous to Gamergate, they could have never said, what exactly is this problem?
00:41:25.160
I can't, I know I don't like this in my video game.
00:41:28.680
I know I don't like this in my comic book, but why is that a problem?
00:41:32.600
And the fact that Gamergate was a watershed moment for so many people to recognize this
00:41:38.040
issue is fascinating because it really does mirror the larger understanding of what Trump
00:41:44.120
Um, Trump didn't have any of these particular ideological currents attached to him directly.
00:41:52.840
Uh, he wasn't grasping the cultural and sociological problems attached to these issues.
00:41:59.560
But for the first time, a lot of people who were waking up simultaneously, uh, politically
00:42:09.880
Someone who would address the wider problems that had not been addressed by any of the politicians
00:42:17.160
These are guys who are not going to get excited about Mitt Romney.
00:42:23.880
Like I was the guy who was knocking on doors for George W.
00:42:26.840
Bush and part of the young Republican club in college.
00:42:30.680
So I was always politically aware in that sense, but ironically, I was politically aware
00:42:36.360
more than most people politically active, more than most people had even worked professionally
00:42:40.840
in politics to some extent, but I did not know the things I needed to know.
00:42:46.120
I did not understand the political issues at a deeper level.
00:42:49.960
And so in a hilarious way, this Gamergate experience moved me further down that road.
00:42:55.800
Uh, for a lot of people also, interestingly, the Gamergate phenomenon also helped break them
00:43:03.400
out of many of these kind of bug, man, man, child behaviors.
00:43:08.680
I know personally, uh, you know, the fact that all of this stuff was going woke
00:43:17.080
I still play some video games and I still, you know, engage in entertainment.
00:43:21.880
Uh, but the, the kind of consumption that was going on, you know, just focusing the majority
00:43:27.640
of my life on a lot of the, these, uh, consumer products, uh, was just gross, but I didn't know
00:43:35.320
at the time, like I didn't understand why that was a problem.
00:43:38.760
And again, I'm very far from being the only one again, again, just look at Carl Benjamin,
00:43:42.840
look at his commentary has gone from, why can't I just sit around and consume all of my product
00:43:48.760
all day to how can I read more Aristotle and how can I lift more weights and how can I have
00:43:54.680
a family and how can I be more virtuous and how can I improve my community and how can I care deeply
00:43:59.960
about, uh, my posterity and the future of my nation and my peoples.
00:44:06.600
Like as these, uh, as the pause entered into all of these bug man hobbies, it actually has
00:44:15.800
Like, yes, it's sad to see some of the things that you loved die, but at the same time, the
00:44:21.160
fact that they became so cringe, so unbearable, it's like, do you really want to spend another
00:44:26.680
few hours watching this movie? Do you really want to devote another 30 hours to this video game?
00:44:33.000
Or do you want to go work out? Do you want to read a, some of the classics? Do you want to go
00:44:38.840
out and try to find a wife, go to church? Like, do you really want to spend the rest of your life
00:44:45.880
consuming content that is at every step, woker and woker and woker, right? There's a magic.
00:44:54.120
The gathering is a game that I love to play. Uh, I, I still play it, uh, from time to time with
00:44:59.800
friends on the tabletop when we all get together in person, uh, you know, as a, like a community
00:45:05.320
group, but it's certainly fallen off. Like I used to play tournaments. I used to be a judge. Like I
00:45:10.280
used to do all kinds of stuff. Uh, I was very involved in it. Um, and recently the game has been
00:45:16.280
getting worse for a long time, but recently, uh, they, they opened up this product to, uh, what they
00:45:22.200
call other worlds. This used to be like a fantasy game that everybody, uh, kind of played because
00:45:27.240
it mirrored a lot of dungeons dragons and this kind of thing. It had a defined world, a defined
00:45:32.760
aesthetic. Uh, it was very interesting in that way. It wasn't just the game that the game was very
00:45:37.480
enjoyable. Uh, it was also the world it created and the story it told. Uh, but over time they've
00:45:43.080
gotten lazier and lazier and they've injected some wokeness, but mainly the thing has been
00:45:48.600
that the game just got lazy and started putting every other media property in there. They started
00:45:54.600
making transformer cards and my little pony cards and everything else. And a few of them were cute,
00:46:00.760
you know, with like the 40 K stuff came in and that was cool. They had fallout. Okay. Maybe that'll be
00:46:05.800
fun, but they've started to just inject every trope throughout all of pop culture. And now they're
00:46:12.440
taking like over half the magic sets are just going to be other media properties, all of which pretty
00:46:18.360
much have gone woke. So it's just slop on top of slop on top of slop. It's the layers of slop are never
00:46:24.520
ending. And in a way that's sad because magic was a thing that I enjoyed and loved. But at the same time,
00:46:33.240
if I'm going to spend less time on that, and instead I'm filling my time with more books and more, uh,
00:46:40.280
you know, trips to the gym and more time at church volunteering and more time with my family,
00:46:46.520
then I'm actually becoming a better person specifically because my hobbies got woke.
00:46:52.120
Like actually the, the hobbies going woke, driving me from them, spending my time on these things
00:46:58.040
actually ends up being, you know, it gets, I become a better person because those things got worse and
00:47:04.760
they drove me away from them. And again, I'll probably always play video games to some extent.
00:47:09.560
I'll probably always, you know, I've still got my 40 K stuff over there. I still, you know,
00:47:14.600
play magic with my friends that I had a great time with, because that is still a bond that we share.
00:47:20.360
Um, and we've shared so much of life after that, that, you know, when we get together, it's still
00:47:24.280
a fun thing to do for a little bit, but will I ever be dedicated to those things? Where will I ever be
00:47:30.360
a fan in the sense of fanatic? Will I ever, will that, that fandom ever consume large chunks of my
00:47:37.240
life where I don't do other more productive things, uh, that make, you know, that make a difference in
00:47:43.560
the real world and create a legacy and actually push me towards being a better person? No, I won't.
00:47:50.760
And a big part of that is because those things became so insufferable because they, they became
00:47:56.760
so woke and so garbage that I don't want to be involved in it anymore. And so I guess the point
00:48:02.360
of this story is that this strange, small, which should seem like a blip on the cultural radar had
00:48:12.280
a very big effect on, I think the young men of my generation, they pushed people away from a lot
00:48:20.200
of pursuits that otherwise would have consumed their lives. And they made them aware that there
00:48:25.080
was a problem at the heart of their culture that was much deeper than whatever entertainment they
00:48:30.040
were consuming that day. And this has led to wider cultural awareness and to a wider political movement.
00:48:37.640
And more importantly, you know, across all of this, I think a spiritual movement, one that I think for a
00:48:44.360
lot of people pushes them towards Christianity, which I think is great, but in general pushes them towards
00:48:49.480
maturity, adulthood, an understanding of the good and the beautiful and the true.
00:48:54.440
And I think that's critical. I think that, you know, if you're still sitting around 15 years later,
00:49:00.600
spending most of your time complaining about why are my video games still filled with, you know,
00:49:04.840
whatever characters, well, you missed the point. The point isn't to sit around for 15 years and,
00:49:10.200
and talk and complain about this. The point is to grow. The point is to realize that ultimately,
00:49:15.480
well, a little bit of these pursuits can be fun, right? That making them a part of your personality,
00:49:21.560
like so many people had, making them a huge part of your life, dedicating so much of who you are to
00:49:27.080
these things is incredibly dangerous. And the fact that these things became very unenjoyable
00:49:33.880
and filled with a message that was nauseous and harmful, in many ways, while it seemed bad at the
00:49:40.440
time actually moved us to a better place because it allowed us to grow as people. It allowed us to
00:49:45.400
separate from things that otherwise would have dominated our lives. And if you're still someone
00:49:50.280
trying to do that, if this is still something that you are addressing, then let me encourage you.
00:49:55.640
Let me say to you that life is good. And through all the things that are happening and all of the
00:50:01.480
difficulties that you face in our modern world with connection and meaning and truth and dating and
00:50:07.400
spirituality and all of these things, ultimately, God has created a beautiful world and has a purpose
00:50:13.080
for your life. And you should spend your time embracing that becoming a more virtuous person,
00:50:20.440
person, investing in a community, making connections, building skills, becoming, you know, stronger
00:50:27.960
physically, mentally, spiritually. And that doesn't mean that you can't have fun. I'm not here to be the
00:50:34.280
fun police. I know there are people who are running around. Look, man, I'm still going to play
00:50:38.200
a video game at some point. I'm still going to break out. Maybe I haven't played 40K in a long time,
00:50:42.920
but if I can catch a game of 40K, maybe I'll do that. I'll still play a magic deck with my friend
00:50:47.720
from time to time. I'm not here to tell you, don't have fun. Don't have hobbies. Never do anything
00:50:51.960
fun. I'm not saying that. But what I am saying is there is a real and amazing world out there for you
00:50:59.000
if you will invest in it. And as much as you invest in it, you will find others who are moving
00:51:05.800
the same direction and that will improve your life and it will improve their lives and improve
00:51:10.280
the life of the community. You will level up, you will create a better world around you. And that is
00:51:15.720
ultimately the true meaning of life is to pursue God, pursue the divine, pursue his purpose, and to
00:51:23.240
dedicate yourself to becoming a valuable member of something that is real. And so ultimately,
00:51:31.080
I think that while some people got stuck in the gamer game slop forever, a lot of people moved
00:51:37.160
beyond that and became better people. And I think we should all be grateful for that. We should all
00:51:41.400
recognize that. And while it seems silly that this is the origin point of a movement like that,
00:51:46.280
I think we should recognize how important it is because ultimately that is really what life is all about.
00:51:51.720
All right, guys, we're going to move over to the questions of the people real quick. I appreciate
00:51:57.400
you hanging in there with me for story times with Oren. But let's see here what people have to say.
00:52:06.920
Nogard says, one way this crap got in was the millennials who were more interested
00:52:12.360
being a game developer than they were in developing games. And they were the employees who signed a George
00:52:18.840
Floyd petition in 2020. It's all about status. Oh, that's certainly true. Right? I mean, one of those
00:52:23.480
things that happens and you've seen this with any niche hobby that becomes a multi-billion dollar
00:52:28.360
industry is going to start attracting people who aren't really interested in it. Right? And that's okay.
00:52:35.480
There's a certain level and anything that achieves popularity is going to do, and you can get angry at
00:52:42.440
that. But ultimately you're right that there are so many people who came into that space
00:52:49.000
who didn't care about it that it was really more about injecting their personality or their politics
00:52:54.200
or whatever than it was about making something good. Now that said, like I just went on about,
00:53:00.680
ultimately that ended up being a good thing because it drove a lot of us away from a life sink that
00:53:05.720
ultimately I don't think is very productive. Like, you know, if you're a grown man spending,
00:53:10.520
uh, you know, 80 hours a week on video games or something, then that's insane. Like you, you gotta,
00:53:14.840
you gotta figure that out. Um, but, uh, but yeah, you're, you're absolutely right that this was a,
00:53:19.400
a point at which, uh, things pivoted. Uh, let's see here. Uh, burning cherry says, uh,
00:53:26.360
protein empire did nothing wrong. Uh, let's see here. Uh, Lord, uh, chronicler says we just wanted to play
00:53:33.960
video games. Yes. Uh, the, the classic, uh, classic last words of the woke, uh, jihad,
00:53:40.520
they crashed against the shores of, of the guys who just wanted to play video games.
00:53:46.120
Uh, Trey 50 Daniel says, always remember Gamergate is their Reichstag. Yeah. You know,
00:53:51.160
it's, uh, it's funny because the, even though they would never put it the way I just put it,
00:53:56.520
a lot of leftists recognize, uh, this aspect that you'll still see them, you know, uh, mainstream
00:54:02.040
magazines who have nothing to do with video games, writing, you know, articles about the
00:54:06.440
Gamergate phenomenon, uh, a decade later at this point. Uh, and it's kind of insane when you think
00:54:11.720
about it, but yeah, it really does live in their minds and give them justification for what they
00:54:16.040
want to do. Uh, perspicacious heretic says I love self-flagellation in my, in my game personally.
00:54:23.160
Yeah, man. Well then you are in luck because there is so much of it. Uh, let's see. Elijah
00:54:29.480
Tymon says in 2011 for me, uh, for mass effect three Bioware, let people vote for fem shepherds
00:54:35.960
default look with lots of diverse options. People voted for the blonde option by two to one journals
00:54:41.400
complained until Bioware held another poll. Yeah. Though that's the great thing about democracy,
00:54:45.400
right? You just keep voting until they get it right. Uh, and yes, they were again, I wasn't
00:54:50.680
sitting through developer meetings. I wasn't in a building. I wasn't even an official Bioware
00:54:55.800
employee in the sense of, uh, you know, I was hired by an outside company to work on their product,
00:55:01.320
uh, for a long extended period of time over a couple of years, I think in totality. Uh, but
00:55:07.960
you know, we did interact with these people on a very regular basis. And this was absolutely, uh,
00:55:13.480
the attitude, uh, from every developer I ever interacted with any corporate stuff that came down
00:55:19.640
to us, uh, that they were very much deeply bought into this ideology. Bioware is, is deep in this.
00:55:25.800
I don't, you, you, you would need an anti-woke, uh, like, like almost an anti-fascist crusade,
00:55:31.560
an anti-woke crusade to kind of pull the woke out of Bioware that that is what that company is at this
00:55:37.000
point, which is why I was kind of joking. Um, you know, at some level it should prove my bet with,
00:55:42.280
with, uh, with academic agent, but I will give him credit. The fact that this, this
00:55:47.080
developer has been woke for well over a decade and has made it their core personality and all of
00:55:52.840
their hires have been selected because of ideology at this point. So that is not going anywhere. You
00:55:58.120
basically have to nuke that company from orbit, uh, to get the woke out of it. Uh, George W. Heyduke
00:56:04.600
says, uh, when did nerds become the group that was a horniest nerd was, has become a synonym with
00:56:11.000
sexual deviant polyamory, uh, uh, novel sex identity orientation. Um, I think the reason
00:56:19.240
is that video games are a medium that allows you to play this out in a very real way that doesn't
00:56:25.960
exist anywhere else. Right? Like if your hobby is football, then you don't really, you know,
00:56:29.320
you can't really explore that stuff in football. I mean, to be fair, uh, you know, uh, films will do
00:56:36.120
this too, which is, you know, to be fair, Hollywood is also known for its perversion. So it's not,
00:56:40.840
you know, famous for its abuse and, and, and all kinds of terrible people there. So maybe,
00:56:45.080
maybe there's a level of overlap when the creative medium allows you, uh, to make these fantasies
00:56:50.360
real, you'll see more and more people who are desperately obsessed with making them real going
00:56:54.760
into, uh, those, uh, those industries. I think there's a very real, uh, connection there.
00:57:00.920
Let's see. Uh, Adam doll says, we just need Trump to tweet about gamer gay. It's coming.
00:57:05.560
It's coming, man. It's only a matter of time. What one point, uh, at one point, uh,
00:57:09.720
Trump will be pinning medals onto gamer gate veterans. Uh, make, make no, uh, mistake about it.
00:57:17.080
Uh, Brahms window says, thank God for gamer gate made me into a healthier, successful person. Yeah,
00:57:21.240
no, I really do believe that. I think for a lot of people, uh, it certainly drove them out of, uh,
00:57:27.960
this mode of consumption constantly. It's funny. There's a very real pipeline of like video game
00:57:33.480
consumption to gamer gate, anti video game creation, consumption content consumption.
00:57:39.080
But then there's another, another, uh, mode where you get completely out of the consumption and you
00:57:43.080
say, okay, now I'm actually going to improve myself. And I think, again, you see this, you
00:57:47.000
look at a guy like Carl and others who, who made this journey. Of course, not everybody made this
00:57:51.400
journey. They're a part of, you know, Chris Reagan is still out there somewhere talking about,
00:57:55.160
you know, leftism or something. But, uh, I think, I don't even know. I don't, I remember that's just a
00:58:00.520
name I pulled out of the hat. I don't know. Maybe, maybe he's become a great guy. I really don't
00:58:04.040
know. Uh, but, um, the point being is I think there are a lot of people who made this journey.
00:58:09.000
And I think you're, you're far from the only one who, uh, so many of the content creators
00:58:13.080
who were talking about video games, uh, you know, started talking about things that make you better.
00:58:17.080
I think about PewDiePie, right? PewDiePie is a guy who started, uh, talking about what,
00:58:21.000
like call of duty. And then he started like doing meme reviews. I remember when Ben Shapiro showed up
00:58:26.120
on meme review, that was very strange. Uh, but then like he started talking about Aristotle and
00:58:31.160
like got married and had a kid and you know, so like people who started consuming that content to
00:58:36.840
watch video games, inevitably came to the point where they were consuming that content that was
00:58:42.040
telling them, go read, uh, ancient philosophy and become virtuous and get married and find God.
00:58:48.520
Um, and so a very, it's a very weird road, but it's a very real road for a lot of people.
00:58:53.720
Uh, burning cherry also says, I understood that leftists think it, uh, in the colored,
00:58:59.800
uh, white friend, enemy distinction after seeing the media literacy takes on, uh, Ronok. Sorry.
00:59:07.000
It's been a while, uh, since I played mass effect three. So I don't know how to pronounce all the
00:59:10.760
names, the arc in mass effect three. Yeah. Again, the, the people lecturing you about what you're
00:59:16.440
supposed to take from media is probably my favorite type of media. Uh, there's so many on the left who
00:59:22.120
talked about death of the author and how nothing actually means what it's supposed to mean. And
00:59:26.520
it's all up to interpretation. And then like, as soon as they started writing the media and, uh,
00:59:31.880
their, their messages were being put in there, it turns out actually, no, the messages are very real
00:59:36.200
and you have to believe exactly what the media tells you and you can't have your own interpretation.
00:59:40.200
And there is no death of the author. What the author wrote is sacrosanct. And you have to believe
00:59:43.640
that it's funny how, as soon as something you agree with is in there instead of something you want to
00:59:48.040
subvert, all of a sudden the author's intent matters. Uh, and is actually the only thing that
00:59:52.040
you can consider. So, uh, not a shocking move. Turns out the left is, you know, it's hypocrisy.
00:59:57.560
Who knew? Uh, but you know, uh, no, no reason to belabor that point. All right, guys. Uh, looks like
01:00:03.320
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01:01:02.920
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