Shrimp Welfare Watches The EA Gates
When the hordes of the damned come for you, there is absolutely nothing you can do to stop them. If they want what was precious to you they will lift it from your grasp without realizing you were there. They have such a vast combined purchasing power that all the forces of capitalism will bend reality itself to give them what they want at fair market value. Your protests are a rounding error on their budget sheet.
Case Study: D&D
The most stressful test of my high school Freshman year was one delivered by my peers. I had no friends and in a bid for friendship I expressed my enthusiasm for D&D. This was met with suspicion. As we walked to the pizza place across from the high school on our lunch hour I was quizzed. What is a saving throw? What is THAC0? What is the range of Armor Classes and which is best? What are the basic stats? What are their maximum unmodified starting value? What does 2d8 mean?
I think I kept my voice from trembling. I held my hands in my pockets because I couldn’t stop them from shaking. These questions determined if I would have friends. This was simple knowledge for anyone familiar with the game, but the stakes were very high. And what if they asked something obscure I couldn’t remember? The flood of relief when they eventually nodded with grudging respect and accepted me was overwhelming.
A D&D group was a place of shelter for young nerds. It was a place by us and for us, where we were safe. When I was in a D&D group I knew everyone there was just as nerdy and socially rejected as I was. There was no fear that something said in that group would be used in the social battlefield later, or that I would be harassed for being a pale, scrawny, clumsy loser.
Between then and now D&D became popular. The socially gifted want to play it to show off their social grace and ability to be cool and fun. The publishers desperately want to sell to this market, there are so many more of them then there are super-dorks. The mass populace wanted different things from the game than the super-dorks did, and the publishers changed the rules to cater to them.
The rules changes aren’t bad per se. They’re often just a bit more bland. In some cases they do actually improve the game. The problem is twofold: first, the new rules are welcoming to the normies who just want to hang out and do cool shit and not care about keeping a consistent fantasy setting alive in your head. Second, the new rules are repellant to the turbonerds who read Lord of the Rings ten times.
The Cringe Gate
Much like different genres of music attract some people and drive away others, so too do different rulesets flatter and draw in some people and repel others. The nerds who created D&D and kept it alive in its early decades, the ones who found shelter in fairer and nobler worlds, now find themselves being told they aren’t welcome here. Too spergy, too socially pathetic, go be losers somewhere else.1
This was inevitable from the moment that D&D started to gain popularity among the normies. The thing that kept D&D safe for as long as it did was that it was cringe. It was weird. The normies would look at the nerds playing it and feel revulsion and instinctively stay away. The instant that faded, the fate of the game was sealed. Dead culture walking.
Every culture needs to have something to protect itself from predation by the monoculture. Rationalism has intense tolerance of social deviance born of cringe-blindness2 that repels both the rightists and the leftists to such a degree they can’t stand to be around us for long.
EA has Shrimp Welfare. Sure, it’s easy to mock them… and that’s exactly why they are the gate that will save EA from cultural digestion. As long as the majority of Effective Altruism is seen to welcome the shrimp welfare advocates, seriously engage with them, and include their interests in the values-handshake of the EA memeplex, normies will unable to be associate with it. Emotional commitment to shrimp is a signal that is too unnatural and too costly for the vast majority of Everyone Else.
The moment the shrimp welfare people are ejected, the day they no longer have representation at the EA table, will be the day we know the movement has been compromised and the hollowing-out has begun. Walls and gates always seem far too expensive to maintain until the day you actually need them. Stay weird. Stay cringe. Never give up the shrimp.
This happens to everything that gains mass appeal. I saw it happen to World of Warcraft. Everyone saw it happen to comic books with the MCU. It’s happening to science fiction. It’s creeping up on WarHammer. In every case it takes something that’s quirky and unique and uncomfortable for normies and makes it bland and disgusting to its original much-smaller audience.
Thank god for founder effects!
The post is great. I agree, except for one nitpick: I would say it /hasn't/ happened to science fiction (meaning SF book publishing). The results look similar--a proliferation of books with racially and sexually diverse characters, with much less emphasis on nerdy science puzzles--but the cause was not capitalism, but rather the conscious rejection of capitalism. Major SF publishers, and the SMOF, which basically means the people who run conventions and to a lesser extent the super-geeks who attend conventions and vote for awards and shout down or shun speakers, pre-emptively decided to eradicate "straight white male" fiction. So hard SF is more and more showing up in self-published SF books, including big hits like The Martian and The Bobiverse, and all the rationalist SF like Yudkowsky and There Is No Anti-Memetics Division.
Following from my comment on your previous post, this is a really well analysed point and well presented. You're on a roll of good posts!