Anytime you say anything in any game community that isn’t licking status quo crack you’ll get dogpiled by the dev defense league. That’s just a reality across every gaming community on earth. People are naturally followers. We’re a species of lickspittle toadies in search of an alpha to give us orders, exploitation, and meaning. That has consequences in every context.
In gaming it means an ever-vigilant mob of change-averse way-it-is devknights.
And if you ever start to thrash them in the ensuing debate you’ll have your thread locked or be banned because it is invariably those types that are given contextual power by the devs.
No one wants to empower people that question them. We only ever empower flatterers and yes-men.
Like the lady said in the 80s… “…some of them want to be abused…”
The solution is always just to let the devknights have their bootlicking hateful last words. Trust me when I say otherwise it NEVER ever ends.
But firstly, what is a devknight? Anyone who defends a developer’s interests above and beyond even their own is like a vassal. A knight. That is, a warrior servant tasked mainly with suppressing a large but relatively weaker population. (Weaker only by virtue of peacefulness, and disproportionate backing of an exploitative owners class.)
Devknights are slaves in many senses of the word. They are essentially owned, they work for free or very very little, and they have essentially zero chance of ever becoming a lord or king themselves. They are also wildly dogmatic. Think the real historic version of chivalry. (Sexist, hypocritical, racist, classist, etc. You know, fox news.) Not the romantic version of Arthurian legend.
Devknights rush to the defense of developers regardless of their behavior or role in the conflict. This is exactly how a knight was required to behave. A knight was essentially a walking sword. No thought, no questions. Just obedience, propaganda, and mercenary combat.
Obviously this is an exploitative role. And just like in history, the knight’s gain in this was further exploitation of a larger group. The serfs. Like a trustee in a prison. They exchange their soul and integrity for a slightly better ranking in the pecking order amongst the rabble. Like today’s right wing rank and file or middle echelons, they think by kissing lordly ass they’ll meaningfully better their own position.
Rank and file gamers are the serfs here. Typically exploited by a monopolistic owner to one degree or another.
They buy in with our small individual software fee, instead of working the land etc. Our collective small fees pay for the castles of the devs and publishers. And somehow, just like in those times, knights and lords and kings think that their role as administrators makes them producers, when in fact they are parasitic middle men and it is the cooperative principle that is the actual productive multiplier.
By virtue of an economic monopoly. (IPL and ultimately software patents.) We have established a new feudalism. There’s no class mobility in this system. (That is why it badly needs reform.)
So, why do devknights even exist? Well, that’s a simple question with a complex answer having to do, for a start, with the basic ways a child responds to threats. (Fight, flight, appease.) I conjecture that they are essentially people who when faced with a giant monolithic seemingly unbeatable foe, have internalized their enemy’s world view to stay sane.
Sort of a psychologically callow version of ‘If you can’t beat’m, join’m.’
Of course there’s more to it then that. (Always is.) Mostly extending from the fact that the vast majority of engaged gamers, especially from the English speaking western world, are monied young white men. And the speaking online portion of that crowd is disproportionately right wing.
We’re essentially dealing with the gamer version of the tea party here. They in a very literal sense worship greed and psychopathy enabled entrepreneurialism.
Somehow these people have got it into their head that being a thief makes them producers. No doubt a consequence of the totally bogus “job creators” myth of trickle down fame.
Their economic religion essentially asserts that anyone who wants an economy with anything like integrity or consumer protections is an entitled socialist weak greedy parasite whiner.
I oppose these people in virtually every ideological arena since they were essentially manufactured to be trustees in a massive economic prison.
If you don’t like being called a devknight, then stand with your fellow gamers for once.
Why does this even matter?
Because the entire gaming industry, and all debates connected to it, rest on deeper foundations and ideas about what an idea is, what an object is, what a possession is, and what a right is, etc.
Yes, I absolutely am emotional about this because I see the logical roots and leaves of which the entire gaming market and any debate it might contain, is merely a branch.
These game companies are in the same family as Pfizer and Monsanto. The premises and logic that justifies dev behavior in this context, literally kills and tortures people in other contexts. Once seen, it can’t be unseen.
Honestly, given what’s at play in that context, I’m a Vulcan by comparison to 99% of people in those debates. They simply don’t have the training or education to see what I’m seeing, but if they did they would be on fire with rage, and I think rightly so.
When I calmly to any degree converse with the typical devknight I literally feel like I’m talking to a psychopathic sadist, the kind of which is one urge-set away from having a body collection, because that’s the logical end of the road of their self gratifying social Darwinist caveat-emptor right wing madness.
That they are unaware of this is the only thing that makes me able to speak to them, that they cannot be made aware of this is the greatest frustration about debate in this context and a big part of why debate is pointless.
To understand how I arrived here you have to start in a seemingly totally unrelated place.
http://underlore.com/the-apex/
Honestly, if you start from the axiomatic baseline I just linked, essentially stated as pleasure and life are of linked and paramount importance, then I can logically chart you to my opinions on the IPL market as a whole being ethically toxic, including gaming companies, despite the seeming triviality of their product.
It won’t be fast or easy but every step is as far as I know for lack of a better word absolutely correct, to the best of my knowledge. And I am always open to having a step tested.
Further up the tree from that root are ideas about what the point of culture is, what it means to be conscious, the role of compassion, the responsibility of power and opportunity, and so forth.
This entire market is extortion. What happens when humans start depending on hardware to live and software companies start pulling EULA/TOS garbage when the consequence of not paying the fee means your legs stop working or your robotic kidney shuts down?
We have got to nip this crap in the bud. Yeah, it’s “just a game” now, but it won’t always be, and by the time we realize it, it might just be too late.
Again, what happens when all text becomes code? When a computer can turn any cogent description into a program?
If we carried the publisher side of the IPL debate’s ideas backwards to apply to all public domain and the entire material world, life would be basically impossible. Literally everything you do would have a constellation of license fees and it would all be crippled or abandoned because no one could work together on anything. Every memory would be an infringement unless you were paying a fee, and they would have to have access to them and power over them for DRM reasons.
After all you can’t enforce file sharing without knowing what’s in the files. That’s why the DOJ/NSA/etc hates us having encryption. And that all that really matter is that as we move forward, the line between material and software will get ever more blurry.
Devknight logic is completely toxic. And I hate it like I would hate any other predator or parasite.
And I want to jam a spear in its brain. I’m human. /shrugs
See also:
http://steamcommunity.com/groups/CasualVendetta/discussions/0/530645961935929818/
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