Why being political is a waste of time

I wrote lot of politics in the second half of 2016 and the first half of 2017. It was a major waste of time. I didn’t get much hits for them and no change (no matter how little) spawned from them. The only post I don’t regret is the one supporting Trump before the election, that made sense in retrospect (you should vote, and by extension endorse candidates before elections). But the rest had exactly one result besides wasted time: I had to switch to the much less user-friendly wordpress.com because blogger.com is owned by the hyper-partisan Google and my gaming content could be erased from the interned because of their disapproval of my politics.

I realized that it’s stupid to be political at some sub-conscious level and went back to gaming posts. I’m both happier and more productive since then. However “why?” kept bugging me. Then I’ve read Wolfshead’s post about boycotting Blizzard because of politics (warning: long and political). He describes how Blizzard fell to the crazy-liberal movement of affirmative action and white privilege and male privilege and whatnot and how he can’t support such horrible company.

I can’t join his boycott, because I’ve played no Blizzard game in the last 3 years and I’m not intending to do so, for a purely apolitical reason: their games are crap. However – and this is the revelation – their games being crap is strongly connected to them being crazy-liberal. They had good games back then. Then they changed them to be “accessible” and “casual-friendly” and their player count started to stagnate, then drop. Any reasonable person would have realized that this was a bad idea. But they were not reasonable, they were political. The crazy-liberal movement literally believes that meritocracy is oppressive, so they can’t believe that their game should reward good play. Instead it should be inclusive. They see “someone’s grandmother” an indentity that needs safe space and inclusion into the community they manage. Giving out welfare epics wasn’t a business choice, it was a moral choice. Blizzard games became the crap they are, because they are designed by people following a crappy ideology.

Blizzard games reward showing up and not performing well. That’s enough to know about them. You don’t have to make a political decision. You don’t even have to know about the politics behind the product. All you have to see is that they are crap. Followers of anti-meritocratic ideas, may there be racists, nationalists, communists or liberals are making crap and you shouldn’t eat crap. WoW had to go down the same way as Venezuela, but you don’t need to understand or discuss the politics to see it, only see the result and say “no thanks”.

I could do more damage to the crazy-liberal movement and more support to the meritocratic ideas by supporting meritocratic games (games that reward skilled play instead of showing up or bribing the devs). By choosing an apple, you support or reject a tree. There is no point arguing over trees. Just point at the apple and say: this is a good apple, come and eat this. By doing so, you’ll always support meritocracy and will do it in a way that defies political smear campaigns. If I write a post about unfair university admissions, one can call me a white supremacist. But I doubt that even a crazy-liberal can do that if I write how the WoW catch-up system encourages not playing WoW but waiting till the desired ilvl is handed out. (OK, he can always call it mansplaining).