Like many people with an interest in game development, I joined a local meetup group – Boston Culties – to worship Social Justice. Though I originally thought the point of attending a local gamedev group was to meet other gamedevs and do game development, I soon learned the actual purpose of the group is to worship Social Justice, because if you don’t, good luck getting a job in the video games industry.
I thought I was doing well obeying the cult’s edicts until January/February this year when the Boston Culties mailing list was informed by our local cult leader, whom I shall call MyCult, that there had been a violation of the Holy Safe Space Policy but that it had been taken care of.
An artistic community censored a talk by one of its own members. That must have been some offhand comment! Desiring to be the best little cultist I could, I inquired what comment had been made that gave such grave offense, so I would know what not to say. The next thing I knew, I was in a Monty Python sketch.
As MyCult explained:
Seriously, I was in a Monty Python sketch, and probably the most famous of them all. Remember the Knights of Ni? Remember the word that was so dangerous the Knights couldn’t say what it was?
(See what I did there?)
In a sublime example of life imitating art, I stepped into a forty-year-old movie scene. Was I being trolled? Was this high level performance art? No, people took this quite seriously.
As one cultist noted, in true listen-and-believe fashion:
And another:
And also this:
Now this last statement was the most curious, since it was uttered by a young man in his late twenties who’s only worked one year of his entire life, who’s been living off of family money – in wealthy Beacon Hill, last time I checked – while building up his game company. But he understands oppression because he’s read the correct materials. He even went to a Yom Kippur prayer service at Occupy Boston, so of course he’s an expert theologian in the Cult of Social Justice.
I could only hope to learn. After all, how else would I get a composing gig networking with all these rich kids?
It seemed to be that the real point of all of this was to keep people guessing, so they weren’t sure what was forbidden or not. Notably, in an entire community of game developers, there was only one person who wondered how rules might affect behavior. You’d think a community of game designers would immediately recognize how a given set of rules would be exploited by an unscrupulous player, but it seems the majority was content to limit their understanding of such things to the digital world. Or perhaps Social Justice short-circuited their thinking. Only one person pointed out the obvious, when he asked:
And he was immediately countered with this remark by a young woman who developed a game to teach math to children:
In other words, “You don’t actually think someone would be mean, do you? That’s crazy!” It seems her naïve understanding of human nature matches that of her intended audience.
And now that someone got to the very heart of the matter, MyCult shut the conversation down:
Please be aware that MyCult broke into the video games industry through working in Quality Assurance, meaning if anyone he’d be the very person most interested in discussing hypotheticals. In case you don’t know, a person who works in Quality Assurance tries systematically to break a game, searching for the random sequence of player inputs that will render a game unplayable, however implausible or… well, hypothetical they may be.
Yet in real life when other people’s reputations are at stake – consider, for example, a false harassment claim, or someone trying to remove “offensive” content from someone else’s game – MyCult is perfectly happy to play by the seat of his pants. It won’t cost him anything, right? And why should he change when his loyal cultists are telling him what a great job he’s doing leading the flock to ever sublime Correct Thoughts?
What can I say? Cultists gonna cult. I guess I just needed to learn.
In May MyCult emailed me to continue the conversation. I didn’t provide closure in the January/February exchange, so he must have felt that I was straying and wanted to restore my faith in Social Justice. Eventually MyCult told me why he would not repeat what was so offensive and unsafe.
In other words, if people knew what the rules were, they would see how ridiculous they are. It’s better to keep the majority guessing, and let each person imagine that what was said truly was indeed terribly hurtful and offensive. Eventually MyCult did let me know what the “words we mustn’t hear” – as the Knights of Ni would say – actually were.
Yep, that’s it. Now, just so you know, any given night on your way from the T-stop to the Boston Culties meetup you’re going to pass at least a dozen homeless people, but this is the kind of thing these people focus on to make the world a better place. I could feel my faith slipping away. What would happen if someone tried to demo a game at Boston Culties that had any nudity in it, or simply included that banned comment on the title screen?
As I learned, discussion around acquiring status to attract women is “objectification.” Even though it’s a well-documented scientific fact that acquiring status is one of the most reliable ways for males to attract females, this particular tech community doesn’t want this scientific fact to be acknowledged even though everyone knows it’s true. I suppose it’s damaging to their lofty self-conceptions.
Yes, a scientific fact. As professor Gad Saad explains at 15:23:
“Around the world, men tend to place a lot more value on youth and physical beauty in prospective mates, and around the world women place a lot more value on social status of men.”
So we’ve got a tech community here where frank acknowledgement of certain scientific facts is verboten. A tech community that eschews science. Like I said: cultists gonna cult. Maybe it was time for me to find a new religion.
Of course MyCult didn’t offer an explanation of why this statement was objectifying. He simply explained that other people agreed with him.
Remember this is a community of INDEPENDENT game developers, but the only rule here is “make sure you follow the crowd.” So MyCult, who has the power to kick people out, asks a few people if they agree with him, and they all say yes. Instead of offering an explanation as to why the statement is offensive, MyCult hides behind the crowd even though he instigated the action himself. From a game design perspective, there’s no reward for disagreeing for MyCult, only a possible penalty. If you say the statement is harmless you risk looking like you support harassment if it turns out the majority finds the statement offensive. It’s better to say you also found the statement deeply uncomfortable but that you chose not to say anything.
In other words: groupthink. Say it with me now: cultists gonna cult. (The Church of the SubGenius is starting to sound pretty good.) And these game designers are oblivious to how rules affect behavior. I suppose it takes a professional composer like myself, whose stock-in-trade is making people feel things, to recognize emotional manipulation. Once I realized how this dynamic may have played out at Boston Culties, all I could think of was this passage from the McGill Daily article “Everything Is Problematic.” As you can see, there is simply no incentive to say something is inoffensive.
Hiding behind an imaginary consensus, MyCult dodged responsibility for his own actions. Skipping why some things are offensive and some things are not, he went straight ahead to why it was all for the Greater Good.
When I asked if he felt women were also treated unfairly in society, he agreed, and also included other marginalized groups as well.
Well, who am I to argue with that? Let’s just take a look at photographic evidence see how effective the Safe Space Policy actually is. Remember, this is how Boston Culties represents itself on its own website.
Trigger warning: you may want to put on sunglasses before viewing this image. The Whiteness, it burns!
Well, that doesn’t look very diverse, does it? To be fair, maybe we need some context. Let’s compare it to another group, one without a Safe Space Policy. To make the starkest comparison possible, let’s compare it to a group with a reputation for harassing women and minorities. Does anyone know a group like that? Hmm… I’m drawing a blank.
Oh wait – Gamergate! And as it turns out they had a meetup of their own in Boston this year. Let’s see how they did.
Well, shit, that’s awkward. A real, authentic black dude! (Who drove all the way up from New Jersey just to drink beers with a bunch of ostensible racists.) And just so you know, there’s one transwoman in these photos (who drove all the way down from Canada), a lesbian couple in the back corner (one disabled), and another black gentleman off camera, plus a couple other women who didn’t want to be doxed/harassed by for the crime of internalized misogyny.
Sorry Boston Culties, it looks like a tie, but I’m giving the edge to the GamerGaters. They look way more relaxed, almost like they’re having fun. Crazy what not imposing thought control will do! Hey MyCult, if you’re reading this, maybe I can put you in touch with the organizer over at Encyclopedia Dramatica – regular user of words like “nigger,” “faggot,” and “cunt” – for best practice information on how to recruit from marginalized communities. He seems to be doing a better job.
Jocularity aside, it’s reasonable to conclude that Safe Space policies are at best neutral. But let’s examine MyCult’s thinking and see if there’s anything he can do to increase recruitment of women and minorities. Although MyCult felt justified censoring someone’s entire talk on the basis of a single offhand “transgression,” he admits it was “not the most blatantly offensive thing” which caused him to take that action.
Gee, seeing as how no one brought the complaint to MyCult, it’s almost as if he went to that particular meetup with the intention of finding something offensive, just to make himself look good, or rally his fellow cultists around a threat narrative. “Something terrible happened but big, bad MyCult took care of it. Let us all take a moment to praise Social Justice.” (Hmm… can you put out a wanted ad for a cult?)
MyCult continued his rationalization:
Diverse outlooks are preserved, unless that outlook references inconvenient realities, in which case a single offhand comment gets your entire talk chucked down the memory hole. Honestly it’s difficult for me to make sense of MyCult’s worldview. Does he really think women are that weak and helpless, that a “slightly offensive statement” is enough to make a woman quit Boston Culties, or possibly the entire video game industry? Could there be some other reason women aren’t attending? Could it be MyCult’s patronizing attitude towards women?
At this point I recalled a conversation from October 2014, when MyCult issued a call for Lightning Talks. He’d been clear that he wanted to make space for women’s voices, so I thought I’d help.
To which MyCult replied:
I responded:
MyCult wasn’t satisfied. Apparently he felt threatened by women saying things he doesn’t like to hear.
I decided not to press the issue because way back then I was still afraid of being ejected from the cult, and after that MyCult explained his reasoning in full.
MyCult was afraid that a woman’s blog post would promote aspects of arguments that are harmful to the discussion. MyCult was afraid of a woman’s voice, so he silenced an expression of her voice. Looking back on it, I understand. MyCult is a misogynist. A woman with the wrong opinion doesn’t exist in the minds of a Social Justice Cultist like him. Women’s voices exist to serve the Social Justice narrative, not to share their own perspectives.
In other words, MyCult thinks women are objects. No wonder Boston Culties is a Social Justice sausage fest. And no wonder MyCult clamps down on offhand comments. He’s projecting, assuming other men are as sexist as he is.
Another aspect of MyCult’s censorious impulse is a sort of evangelical tone policing. Forget the dozen or so homeless people you’ll ignore on your way to the Boston Culties meetup, someone said mean words on the internet. At least in this area MyCult follows his own rules.
Spoke a “bit a condescendingly.” Damn. You know what’s really condescending? Anointing yourself the Tone Police for the betterment of mankind. Let’s call a spade a spade. There’s no metal detector and this is no “safe space.” It’s a bourgeois space, with bourgeois conventions, and bourgeois sensibilities. All this talk about protecting “marginalized groups” is cover for making sure upper middle class kids – who can always call themselves nonspecifically “queer” to gain victim status – receive the same physiological coddling as adults they received growing up. We’re looking at an entire generation of helicopter children entering chronological adulthood. They can’t handle the world as it is so they want to turn everyone around them into their own personal helicopter. And “social justice” is their vehicle for that.
Don’t believe me? There’s no mention of class in their Safe Space Policy. The fat rich girl is oppressed; the homeless white male is her oppressor.
For a thoroughly self-hating, emasculated man like MyCult, this his only opportunity to feel like a tough guy. He’s not physically imposing or rich, and these days one can expect women to be financially independent, so the traditional role of protector and provider is closed to him. Grasping for some remnant of masculine identity, he’s taken the mantle of Chief of Tone Policing, which he can do without guilt because it’s easy for him to believe that other men are as misogynistic as he is. And working class kids, who will never be able to guess what would ruffle the feathers of rich white girls, are just going to have to figure it out.
MyCult is the PC Principal of Boston gamedev, minus the good looks.
And make no mistake, this is about upper middle class kids versus working class kids. Gamedev is a risky endeavor, and one will find a higher concentration of upper middle class kids willing to squander a STEM degree on it. The upper middle class kids are the ones who depend the least on their own gamedev peer group for support, so they’re the ones with the greatest liberty to inject divisive politics into every discussion. And when they look around for marginalized people to protect, the ones they notice the most are the rich white girls – not the working class kids who stay out of political discussions. And for some reason, those rich white girls are the folks the upper middle class boys are the most enthusiastic about protecting. I wonder why.
The entire language of social justice – the up talking, the indirect phrasing, usage of words like “problematic” and “uncomfortable” – functions in such a way that rich kids can identify one another and enforce their sensibilities on everyone else. If you’re from a working class background and want to fit in, you had better learn to speak that language. So every gamedev networking situation is a contest to demonstrate that you belong to the correct tribe. That’s how you make friends. The only thing a Safe Space Policy does is formalize what’s already going on, and give an organizer explicit permission to bully and ostracize someone who fails to conform to a certain bourgeois sensibility.
And what exactly is that bourgeois sensibility? In 2015 it reflects a form of self-imposed infantilization. Let the working classes deal with “Reality.” When you have enough money, everything is a social construct.
And what is Boston Culties? It’s a group of artists who support censorship. It’s a group of game designers who don’t see how rules affect behavior. It’s a gathering of anti-science technologists and pro-conformity indies. It’s a safe space for anti-oppression activists who silence women and amplify class differences.
And what am I? I’m just a lowly composer, who wants to write music and get paid for it. Though I would rather leave politics at the door, I have no choice but to be most loyal cultist who ever culted – and never dare question the superiority of my egalitarian betters.
It’s depressing to see a community of talented artists sacrifice their individuality on the altar of political conformity, and even worse to know the same dynamic is playing out elsewhere in the “independent” gamedev world. All because we have a generation weened on the “everybody is a winner” ethos imitating the politics of their college professors and favorite mega-funded media outlets, but calling it revolution. It’s the safest and most comfortable revolution in human history, which instead of adding ideas to the human repertory seeks to remove them. Some would call that reactionary, but that would mean admitting there’s nothing transgressive about the drive for censorship.
As an artist who favors the weird and spikey, all I have to do is say I’m bored by the Safe Space Movement. There’s nothing new here, nothing original, and nothing creative. Art was never meant to be safe. I’ll take dangerous ideas over safe spaces any day of the week. And in a way, I welcome the New Authoritarians. Growing up there was no monolithic church or Soviet Union to offend, but now all you have to do to be subversive is point out the obvious.
I hope MyCult gets everything he desires. I hope he drives out every freely expressive artist, every person who understands how rules affect behavior, every science enthusiast, and every independent minded thinker. To make room for complete and total Social Justice, everything else has to go. Because at the end of the day I think we can all can agree, even MyCult himself: there is no room for game development within cults.
Final note: if you’d like to read the redacted conversations in context, you may access them here.