Despite what the title says, this isn’t a piece about the Dunning-Kruger effect. While I do believe that type of cognitive bias is rampant and overtly apparent in our society, what I aim to do is to take a look at a couple of folks who epitomize a similar effect. This unnamed effect is similar in that it involves the overvaluing of one’s skills, however, the act of overvaluing is not done by the person possessing the skills but by the people around this person and/or society as a whole. In less confusing terms, a hypothetical person has a set of skills that society views as extremely important or difficult to obtain despite this not being the case. From here on, I’m going to be looking at some faces, both relatively known and unknown, take a look at the skill sets that they state they have, and then assess on how difficult it would be to obtain these skill along with how important these skills are in society.

Example number one is Bryan Menegus of Gizmodo. I’d use Gizmodo to show you what he does, but the man has pumped out nearly thirty pages of ‘articles’ in the span of a year of working for the Giz. I say ‘articles’ and not articles because articles are peer-reviewed, they are proof-read and they are edited to ensure that they are of a standard quality and, in some cases, minimum length. What Bryan actually writes is the Twitter version of articles; just long enough to convey some sort of message but not deep enough to mean anything. Having combed through his work for the month of January, here’s the summary of his work. The chart was largely unnecessary, but I know folks who generally are scared of numbers and figures tend to love pictures, hence its inclusion.

I don’t know what Gizmodo pays its writers, but I would assume that it would have to be enough to live in a massive city like New York. Since I have family that lives in the city and manages at about a $42k salary, I’ll use that. This means that Bryan makes just about six dollars per word he writes. As a hobby writer, I have no fucking clue what a writer who is one by profession makes, but I’ll drop this Clearvoice infographic and pretend it means something since not only did they come up with what appear to be reasonable numbers based on fairly reasonable assumptions, but they actually updated the infographic with a link to data that is supposedly from first-hand sources. I say supposedly because they don’t provide any real quotable sources, instead opting to keep them anonymous. In any case, all of these seems to be the most definitive numbers I’m able to find; the only other seemingly useful guide was this one on Writer’s Market complied by Lynn Wasnak, but again there aren’t any sources and much of the data is referring to print media/mediums, which are fairly old-hat.

So what is the purpose of me bringing up the apparent and assumed value of Bryan’s words? Well, the first is to highlight that at the word ‘what’ in the last sentence, I wrote as much as Bryan does on average. Take note that I’m on my fourth paragraph, and taking an incredibly rough estimate of all my work here indicates that I write around 3100-3200 words on average per piece. None of that includes images I create, actual data I compile and real math that I do when I decide to or the situation warrants it. Not that what I do is difficult or that time consuming or that I’m bragging because a kid in junior high could run circles around Bryan and people like him, and thus the point of this piece. People like Bryan are overvalued in modern society; what he does are things anyone with a high school diploma can do yet despite this fact and the logical conclusion that he isn’t adding much, if anything, to the world, he can make enough to fart out pieces barely longer than the average TwitLonger post at three in the morning because people believe his skill set is rare and a commodity.

To further drive my point home, here’s his LinkedIn.

Yuck.

From the get-go, I would not hire this guy, and he’s not that much younger than I am. Shit like this reads like it came from someone’s old AIM buddy profile who wanted to sound hip, intelligent and clever and luckily had enough time in the world to come up with something that fit the bill. It also doesn’t tell me dick about who he is. What kind of freelancer is he? Why would I want to hire a ‘goon’ of the internet? What in the fuck does ‘future expert’ even mean? Not only that, but the statement is absurdly presumptuous; it assumes that this meat puppet is simply going to become an expert at something at some point in time in the future. What a fucking useless and terrible statement.

Wow.

What kind of professional puts ‘the internet’ as the place where you worked? Are recruiters really hiring people like this; people who can’t properly capitalize on what is essentially a resumé and who think spending time on the internet reading articles, use Windows Movie Maker ineffectually and blog pointlessly?  What work has this moron done in this nearly four year period of freelancing? What kind of videos did he edit? Where is some of his writing?  I know my art friends have a portfolio they put together of all their work, but fuck’s sake, plenty of them that I know go out of their way to post their work so that people will be able to visually judge the quality of what they’ve done and make a more informed recruiting decision. Perhaps Mr. Menegus has this somewhere, but that still doesn’t validate the absurd brevity that he’s employed here. I’m all for directness, but this retard is so succinct I have no idea what kind of work he’s done and, again, the dipshit can’t use proper grammar. How in the fuck can you hire a writer who can’t capitalize properly, end statements correctly or use apostrophes in his work (seriously, go check the links I provided on the spreadsheet, the fool cannot write contractions properly)?

Can’t breathe, laughing too hard.

At this point in my initial digging I burst out laughing loud enough to wake both of my roommates and re-reading this is still giving me a giggle fit. Being the only one of your peers to talk about, care about and be involved with OWS is grounds for any serious business to never give you a second look. This is because the OWS ‘movement’ was well-documented as a means for lazy-as-shit college kids and recent graduates to fuck about, do nothing and squat on public properties in order to ‘fight the man’. I don’t use this term a lot since morons have stolen it and twisted its meaning, but Bryan Menegus is a definitive faggot. Not gay, not effeminate but annoying, douchey and self-aggrandizing as the term used to mean in the eighties and nineties when people didn’t get so butthurt over implied word meanings. ‘Come on, Sahltines, that’s not nice at all! Plus, you can’t prove that!’ I sure as fuck can because the only people who ever sued YTMND, or You’re the Man Now, Dog! were those kinds of people; the same kind of people who think spamming ‘NIGGERS!’ in large group chat scenarios is funny are the same kind of people who used that ‘service’ back then. Very few funny things ever came out of YTMND and most were generally annoying, loud and idiotic. Of course, very few people know what it is considering how awful it was even then. In fact, out of everything I’ve seen related to or on YTMND webpages, the only funny thing is the fact that Menegus has listed it here on his litany of things he’s done/accomplished. The fact that he believes using something that directly added to the cacophony on the internet is ‘content creation’ and worthy of being put on a would-be resumé is the nail in the coffin that he is straight garbage that should be unemployable and a massive douche.

This is what passes in 2017 as skills?

It was this that prompted me to write this piece. To start, some of these aren’t even skills. ‘Facebook’? ‘Magazines’? ‘Social Media’?! Are you fucking kidding me? These aren’t skills, they’re things. I fully assume LinkedIn uses some sort of shitty tagging engine to compare tie people with similar ‘skills’ together, but opening Facebook is not a skill. Neither is copy-editing or copy-writing, for that matter. For those confused, copy-editing is simply proof-reading and copy-writing is simply writing; it’s lingo used by dipshit advertisers to try and differentiate what they do from written media. Apparently, everything in that field is called a ‘copy’, which makes no sense since the word ‘copy’ implies an original exists somewhere, but for advertising, the original is called the ‘copy’. In short, advertisers are fucking stupid and have their heads up their asses. Even ignoring how idiotic some of these sounds as individual skills because they aren’t, that’s not touching on the fact that these are all things a modern grade school kid can do. I used to use Photoshop all the time when I was in junior high, and that was back when the software as impossible to figure out. This guy has nothing useful, and yet that is perfectly okay today. Hell, it’s not just okay, it’s enough to guarantee you a fairly good starting salary in the middle of an incredibly busy and expensive city. Shit, you can even take time off to fuck about and waste more influential people’s time for some bullshit social movement, come back, be woefully outclassed by the kids who just graduated and still make bank. Unreal.

Nearly seventeen-hundred words in, hopefully the idea that we, as a society, are criminally overvaluing dime-a-dozen people is starting to make some sense. As a quick tangent, it sucks that I can’t make Bryan’s per word earnings because if I could, exactly at this very point I would have made $10,296 dollars on this article and I’m not close to finished. Our next subject is Bonnie Ruberg, who I’ve chosen since she had a panel at GDC that was aimed at teaching people to make ‘socially aware’ games. Naturally, Bonnie is as white as bleached rice, a female, has a Ph.D from a very respected university and aligns herself with LGBTQ+-whatever, so she meets all the necessary qualifications for needed in order to be able to get away with being absurdly condescending, authoritarian and completely wrong with all of her ‘insights’. Here are some images of her panel at GDC this year so you can follow along while I pull these apart.

I wasn’t aware that this was a classroom.

I know it’s bad lighting, but it looks like she has the thickest beard ever.  The presentation background art is really terrible; I don’t get why these media-focused people use three-dimensional geometric shapes whenever they’re talking about shit that has to do with video games. It’s like they still think Asteroids is the hottest thing out there and wooden cabinets are the ‘cool thing’.

What.

How are you a Ph.D again? Perhaps this is why it took you eight years to get your dissertation approved, because no sensible professor would look at this slide and think, ‘This gal sure has her stuff down’. Straight from her resumé, her Bachelor’s was in Creative Writing and her Ph.D was in Literature. This woman comes from the Communications field and she creates a PowerPoint slide like this?! Whomever greenlit this should be fired immediately, both the person at GDC and her doctorate mentors; have some fucking quality control, you fruit cakes.

Let’s break down this tragedy bit by bit. First, why are the words randomly capitalized? Words like ‘is’ and ‘it’ shouldn’t be capitalized unless they start the sentence. This shit reads like tHaT 1 guRL iN uR maTh claSS wHo tiPed lieK diS aLl teH tIme oN aim. You see how difficult it is to comprehend that garbage? Granted, I went out of my way to recreate the scenario in full, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that it’s fucking annoying and just outright incorrect. This is how it should read:

Video games are expressions of culture, goddamn it, and it is ethically irresponsible of us as educators and human beings, especially given the garbage fire that is politics today, to send our students out into the world without teaching them to think about the fact that the work they produce exists in a broader social context – like, to seriously think about that and actually care

You’ll noticed I dropped the quotation marks, which is because this fool didn’t include a source to the quote. From this, it can only be assumed she’s quoting herself, which is a prospect that immediately turns me off. Anyone who takes the time to quote themselves seriously is arrogant beyond any means we can or will be able to measure and you should avoid interacting with them at all costs. Nobody needs to be around someone who thinks so highly of themselves that they believe what they say is worthy of being saved and repeated for future generations to hear. Even if she didn’t, the point is that if you quote something, put the fucking source, even if it is yourself. None of this is touching the fact this quote is a run-on sentence and a huge block of text, both of which go against fundamental PowerPoint slide design, the fact that the quote can be shortened and that this complete retard used a quote with that features the stereotypical valley-girl usage of the word ‘like’. The contact information and author name at the bottom of the slide is garrish and frankly insulting; a comparative action would be if YouTube flashed the title of the video you happened to be watching mid-screen of said video every once and a while in an attempt to remind you what the fuck you were watching. Never mind that you should know what in the hell you’re watching and who made it; put it on the fucking bottom because everyone here is a total dipshit and needs everything spelled out in black & white!

Title cards go first, my god.

Is this the title card? I can’t tell because, again, this imbecile of a Ph.D. holder uses quotation marks improperly, can’t capitalize words correctly, uses words while not knowing what they actually mean and doesn’t understand the basics of a PowerPoint presentation that shitheads like me figured out in the eight grade. Side note, look how goddamn empty that hall is. You’d think that more people would show up to see a presentation tailor-made for the crap that gaming media outlets keep throwing down our throats in an effort to please these has-been hacks. We can only logically deduce that if people aren’t willing to sit through this tripe that gaming media is full of shit and we have every reason to be hopeful that real game developers are busy making great games instead of showing up to this shlock.

How to Spot a Pinhead 101

Bonnie, seeing as you’ve only got two working brain-cells left and they’re busy rubbing the ever-loving fuck out of each other to create frictional heat to ensure your electrical synapses continue firing, I’ll explain why you shouldn’t be happy to be called a social justice warrior. The term is used a pejorative for people who spend their time standing upon an invisible platform, preaching how they are better than others for being more ‘woke’ and understanding the nuances of social interactions that we mere mortals cannot hope to while lauding and masturbating people like them for repeating this mantra the world over. Not only is this classic ‘holier-than-thou’ behavior, which most people will find negative no matter where they come from since most people don’t like being condescended to, but there is a disturbing propensity that this condescension is coming from people who come from educative backgrounds that are prestigious by name but have little weight elsewhere as the education you and people like you, Bonnie, have received, is scant of anything useful. Additionally, the sector of the population that is behaving like asshats tends to be from the mid-teens to people in their mid-thirties, thus it includes people who have no identity whatsoever to people who are going through a mid-life crisis because they’ve realized that the identity they’ve made for themselves and the life they have is sad, depressing and seems to not be bearing any kind of tasty fruit. In short, a person who is a social justice warrior is a person who is a cunt across the board and spends his or her time yelling into the wind at clouds, hoping someone across the mountain range will hear them. However, I’ll hijack this picture to say, once again, I wish there was a concerted effort to drop the term SJW and used ‘social justice crusader’ instead since the word ‘crusader’ not only has religious overtones, which many people aren’t fond of, but historical overtones that are very dark and sinister that more properly describe what these shitty people are truly about.

I can’t believe USC considers her a post-doc candidate.

 

When I saw this slide, two thoughts immediately sprung to mind:

1. Good lord, I can’t believe I’m busy slaving away at a Master’s while this fucking retard has a Ph.D. and is making stupid amounts of money giving speeches about nothing.
2. This is the best example of propaganda I’ve seen since my high school U.S. history class unit on the Cold War.

Note first the Caps Lock’d text itself. To anyone who has spent five seconds online, it’s commonly known that putting capitals on every letter is the equivalent of yelling, and if there weren’t more evidence available to my second point, I would’ve left this slide as just another proof that these social justice crusaders are simply yelling into the wind. However, the statements made on this slide are concise, clear and leave no room for misinterpretation on the part of the audience; Ruberg is stating in no uncertain terms that video games are political, involve politics in every facet of design and that political agendas are pushed as students are taught how to design games, thus effectively spoon-feeding the audience the opinion she wants them to have without giving them time to think. She has the word ‘political’ colored in red. This is naturally going to draw people’s attention to the word since it’s the only thing that stands out in the text. The color red is also associated with violence, blood and battle, all things that are focused around the emotions of hot-blooded emotions like love and rage. Thus, the word ‘political’ is going to stick in the audience’s subconscious along with parts of the presentation that will likely drive them to think and act in a predetermined way when games or game design is being discussed (read: think and act in the way Bonnie wants them to). I would say this was unintentional, but considering this woman is a writer by education and profession and a social justice crusader, it would be incredibly naive to assume she wouldn’t use what little she’s learned in an attempt to control and help push her narrative. If nothing else, this is a wonderful eerie example of the authoritarian regressive left utilizing similar tactics to those used back when the fucking Red Scare was going on.

Some of you may be thinking, ‘Sahltines, has Bonnie designed any actual games? How come she’s at GDC and not someone like Chris Metzen?’ A great question, and to answer it, I’ll simply point you back to her resumé I linked a while back. At no point in the five pages of tripe does it indicate that Bonnie Ruberg has ever been on a design team. The only thing close video game design is some course she taught last year titled ‘Experimental Game Design’. However, I can’t find it at all in the entire course catalog at USC, and looking at the division she’s a part of, the focus is on shitty narrative games that are walking simulators. I also found some other professor’s syllabus for an experimental game design course, but all it focused on was music games, narrative games and writing papers. Reading the Amazon page on the required textbook, which was written by some Kickstarter hack who has yet to deliver on what they promised nearly four years ago, it states that the book comes with some low-tier software package, so I can only assume this is what this experimental games design class used. In short, USC is at the very least a pathetic school to go to for game design since they’re only good at churning out Depression Quest-esque games, and straight cancer at the worst since their active faculty uses material made by yet another over-promising retard while others espouse totalitarian mindsets and drop propaganda like it’s no big deal. Go to DigiPen instead or just learn how to use Unity, C++ and Python properly; they aren’t that difficult.

I have a couple more people I’d like to look at, but seeing nothing new would be brought up, so wrap this up. At the end of the day, these two (and plenty of others) aren’t making their money because they’ve got a skill set that is useful or rare, they’re making it because people think what they do is useful, even if it’s not. I’m not exactly sure what can be done to shed this idea, as it seems a small sect of people will put things or others on absurdly high pedestals for whatever reason. Even so, as long as this motivates some folks to chase whatever dreams they have and pushes people to be more wary of those around them and what’s going on, I’ll call that a win. What matters is what is done and what others do, not what they say they can do or have done; merit over mouthiness.