Gabe Newell: Reflections of a Video Game Maker

how do you know he isn't?

There's an urban legend that says the only condition to keep him immortal is to never release Half-Life 3.

Great talk but I am not really sold on the idea of games as "productivity platforms." This doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense to me unless we live in a post-scarcity world or a world where human labor is irrelevant. And even if we did live in a world where either of those were true, the non-infinite nature of the human mind leads to valuation and hierarchies of status & interest such that games are not going to exist for the vast majority of people as anything other than private diversions.

I believe I see where he's trying to go in that thinking of games in this way allows both Valve and pro players, and a nascent eSports media, to capitalize on each others' efforts & success. But this seems like a very specific train of thought relevant mostly to existing and well-established names (DOTA, CS) that all games are unlikely to tap into. L4D really doesn't have a thriving competitive scene for example, and I doubt there's anyone in the world using it as a "productivity platform" but I'd be surprised if it wasn't a money-maker for Valve.

I also am a little skeptical of the idea (~22m) that democratization leads to better social systems overall (for lack of a better, more succinct way of putting it). His statement "You can't lie to Reddit" is entirely untrue for example -- If there's anything that can be counted on it's that hivemind mentality of places like Reddit will lead them to upvote and latch onto untruths that align with what lowest common denominator Redditors want to believe. This is actually a topic that is directly & indirectly touched upon in the last couple of books I've read, Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman & The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt, both well worth reading.

In the short term you can lie to reddit, but ultimately you'll be exposed

Quote from FMPONE

In the short term you can lie to reddit, but ultimately you'll be exposed

I think that's a bit of a naive view. Every single day there are tons and tons of, "Look what my girlfriend made," or "Look what I saw on my way to work today" posts. Oftentimes these headlines are untrue but these items are upvoted because their content is interesting or humorous, even though the post is in some respects false. The vast majority of these untrue things on a site like Reddit are not challenged and exposed as untrue because their truth or falsehood is tangential to the supposed entertainment value they possess. It'd be like going to "Damn You Autocorrect" and trying to discern real autocorrects versus humorous staged ones.

As another example I went to Reddit and pulled off a headline: "Today I learned about the Officious Website of [An ex-President] which include tips on how to prevent masturbation and what causes these 'impure activities' such as rock and roll music and idealism" The link here is to a political humor site not the official website of that president. However, no one stepped forward in the comments to say, "This is untrue." Stepping in and correcting something that is untrue takes additional effort and means someone has to care enough to spend their time doing that. That person isn't a given. Many places on Reddit drive out "conscientious objector" types, such as /r/Atheism or /r/Politics, because their hivemind mentality is too strong. Echo chambers are a problem everywhere, but the anonymity and the explicit up-down mechanisms of Reddit amplify it even further.

And even whether someone actually corrected this or not is largely irrelevant because finding out the truth in a sea of unreliable sources of information is hard work and human minds are lazy. Almost everyone probably knows the mythical factoid of "Human beings only use 10% of their brains," but that's not even close to true. However it's doubtful anyone knows offhand of any factual debunkings of this myth. Even reading falsehoods that are later corrected impacts your thinking, and not necessarily towards believing the truth. This sort of thing is lazy and deceptive but extremely common, and it's widely used in advertising and politics because human beings are wired to believe things we hear more than we are to disbelieve them (See Thinking, Fast & Slow for more in depth on this one).

Quote from Wail

I think that's a bit of a naive view. Every single day there are tons and tons of, "Look what my girlfriend made," or "Look what I saw on my way to work today" posts. Oftentimes these headlines are untrue but these items are upvoted because their content is interesting or humorous, even though the post is in some respects false. The vast majority of these untrue things on a site like Reddit are not challenged and exposed as untrue because their truth or falsehood is tangential to the supposed entertainment value they possess. It'd be like going to "Damn You Autocorrect" and trying to discern real autocorrects versus humorous staged ones.

As another example I went to Reddit and pulled off a headline: "Today I learned about the Officious Website of [An ex-President] which include tips on how to prevent masturbation and what causes these 'impure activities' such as rock and roll music and idealism" The link here is to a political humor site not the official website of that president. However, no one stepped forward in the comments to say, "This is untrue." Stepping in and correcting something that is untrue takes additional effort and means someone has to care enough to spend their time doing that. That person isn't a given. Many places on Reddit drive out "conscientious objector" types, such as /r/Atheism or /r/Politics, because their hivemind mentality is too strong. Echo chambers are a problem everywhere, but the anonymity and the explicit up-down mechanisms of Reddit amplify it even further.

And even whether someone actually corrected this or not is largely irrelevant because finding out the truth in a sea of unreliable sources of information is hard work and human minds are lazy. Almost everyone probably knows the mythical factoid of "Human beings only use 10% of their brains," but that's not even close to true. However it's doubtful anyone knows offhand of any factual debunkings of this myth. Even reading falsehoods that are later corrected impacts your thinking, and not necessarily towards believing the truth. This sort of thing is lazy and deceptive but extremely common, and it's widely used in advertising and politics because human beings are wired to believe things we hear more than we are to disbelieve them (See Thinking, Fast & Slow for more in depth on this one).

There is a big difference between "I told a bunch of people some silly piece of made up trivia" and "XYZ lied to us about [important issue]"

Everything you said about collective falsehoods is true, but if they're collective falsehoods you don't care about, that's not really going to the nature of what Gabe was speaking. At least not in my opinion. The nature of reddit is that people congregate in areas they're most passionate about, so it's less and less likely to be able to con those people, and if you can't con them, you risk that their knowledge spreads and becomes the mainstream opinion.

Anyways, I think he's fundamentally right. It's harder to con people now than it was in the past, because we have more access to information. Obviously this means less important shit gets cloudier, and there is a lot of low level bullshit, but if something a dedicated subset of people are interested in, it becomes clearer in the sense that you can go to those experts and get a more credible answer or they themselves might take action to inform others.

Quote from FMPONE

I think that's a bit of a naive view. Every single day there are tons and tons of, "Look what my girlfriend made," or "Look what I saw on my way to work today" posts. Oftentimes these headlines are untrue but these items are upvoted because their content is interesting or humorous, even though the post is in some respects false. The vast majority of these untrue things on a site like Reddit are not challenged and exposed as untrue because their truth or falsehood is tangential to the supposed entertainment value they possess. It'd be like going to "Damn You Autocorrect" and trying to discern real autocorrects versus humorous staged ones.

As another example I went to Reddit and pulled off a headline: "Today I learned about the Officious Website of [An ex-President] which include tips on how to prevent masturbation and what causes these 'impure activities' such as rock and roll music and idealism" The link here is to a political humor site not the official website of that president. However, no one stepped forward in the comments to say, "This is untrue." Stepping in and correcting something that is untrue takes additional effort and means someone has to care enough to spend their time doing that. That person isn't a given. Many places on Reddit drive out "conscientious objector" types, such as /r/Atheism or /r/Politics, because their hivemind mentality is too strong. Echo chambers are a problem everywhere, but the anonymity and the explicit up-down mechanisms of Reddit amplify it even further.

And even whether someone actually corrected this or not is largely irrelevant because finding out the truth in a sea of unreliable sources of information is hard work and human minds are lazy. Almost everyone probably knows the mythical factoid of "Human beings only use 10% of their brains," but that's not even close to true. However it's doubtful anyone knows offhand of any factual debunkings of this myth. Even reading falsehoods that are later corrected impacts your thinking, and not necessarily towards believing the truth. This sort of thing is lazy and deceptive but extremely common, and it's widely used in advertising and politics because human beings are wired to believe things we hear more than we are to disbelieve them (See Thinking, Fast & Slow for more in depth on this one).

There is a big difference between "I told a bunch of people some silly piece of made up trivia" and "XYZ lied to us about [important issue]"

I agree the immediate examples I gave are about unimportant trivia, but it's not limited to that. In fact I'm inclined to say that the examples where there are clear true/false ideas are the trivia, almost all real issues involve shades of uncertainty that are probably not reducible to true/false statements.

I was thinking about your point when I went out earlier tonight and actually one of the prime examples I saw in the last year of the malign influence of social media rearing its head was in a particular criminal investigation that was all over the American news earlier this year. I'm going to avoid going too much into specifics but from my impression this story went viral on sites like Reddit and then started getting attention by national journalists who ran with the story for a few weeks. There has been followup information in the national news media that contradicted a lot of what was initially reported, but at this point the initial impressions of people have already been formed and they've made up their mind on what story they believe. The fact that millions of people still believe an untrue narrative in the face of convincing evidence that the story they believe is wrong doesn't speak a whole lot about the truth-telling value of social media in my eyes.

Quote from FMPONE

Everything you said about collective falsehoods is true, but if they're collective falsehoods you don't care about, that's not really going to the nature of what Gabe was speaking. At least not in my opinion. The nature of reddit is that people congregate in areas they're most passionate about, so it's less and less likely to be able to con those people, and if you can't con them, you risk that their knowledge spreads and becomes the mainstream opinion.

Anyways, I think he's fundamentally right. It's harder to con people now than it was in the past, because we have more access to information. Obviously this means less important shit gets cloudier, and there is a lot of low level bullshit, but if something a dedicated subset of people are interested in, it becomes clearer in the sense that you can go to those experts and get a more credible answer or they themselves might take action to inform others.

I'm not so sure. Just to give an example I'm familiar with, and believe is important: In the 1970s it was commonly agreed upon that mankind hadn't undergone any substantial evolutionary adaptation in the last 10,000 years since the invention of agriculture. This was the dominant view for ~30 years among experts in the field. Fast forward to 2010 and we have learned through mapping of genomes of various different groups that not only were the experts in the field wrong, but human evolutionary adaptations actually sped up by orders of magnitude within this time frame. Even though solid data didn't exist at the time, a consensus viewpoint was formed [for nonscientific reasons]. But even today the views of 40 years ago are still depressingly common because consensus opinions are less about factuality than they are about social signalling. These same problems exist on the internet, but social media sites in particular amplify the negative elements by gamifying behaviors into points and attempting to disperse moderation of content onto everyone, which means no one is responsible when things turn into total pap (ie, r/Gaming).

Anyway to veer this back towards on-topic stuff, one of the reasons why I actually trust Valve's judgement is that they are ultimately responsible for their actions. The idea that Valve is authoritarian is kind of silly, since Valve itself is accountable (albeit in indirect means) to its customers. A collective anonymous group of Valve's fanbase is much less so, and these people are more worrying to me than Valve employees, particularly because I've actually played in CS pubs.

That experts might be wrong is just a part of life, it doesn't mean you shouldn't aspire to know more than others, just that you might end up being wrong. Anyways an interesting discussion not really related to the topic at hand, but whatever, all we were doing was saying how amazing Gabe was

Well to me it seems as if people are developing a kind of "this did so not happen"-mentality on places like reddit and similar. Naturally there is a lack of trust when anonymous people with no reputation to loose post hard to believe-stuff.

Gabe was great. Love how he uses the tools of economics to understand the world. Saying things like, market mechanism, moral hazard, incentives and so on. Steam really is a kind of micro-economy and it's supar that such a smart guy is there to steer and explain all this newness.

Considering what he said about Greenlight and that everyone would be able to set their own store, I believe that every game developer would be able to sell their games through Steam in the future.

Yea i just watched this today, big things coming to steam. Gotta love Gabe.

Quote from Al Anselmo

Considering what he said about Greenlight and that everyone would be able to set their own store, I believe that every game developer would be able to sell their games through Steam in the future.

With custom micro-transactions and goodies maybe. That could be really cool.

Quote from Mazy

I demand more Gabe dammit!!!

I happened to search if they had put the DICE keynotes online:

Somewhat related, apparently a bunch of Valve folks were let go

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/1865…hp#.URvpHVpete7

Quote from Mazy

Somewhat related, apparently a bunch of Valve folks were let go

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/1865…hp#.URvpHVpete7

And a lot of people were hired in the last month too, it looks to me they just flushed the toilet and they're bringing new and fresh talent on board, probably a lot of restructuring?

I could be wrong though, reading this it seems they're not just firing "idlers".

Quote

We can, however, confirm that the cuts have affected more than one department, namely hardware and Android development.... but the impression we get is that these cuts were driven more by company challenges than by individual performance issues.

Not sure if I am derailing the topic here, but I damn I was surprised to see Valve laying off a bunch of people! To analyse things a bit, it is my impression that layoffs happen for either a) financial reasons, b) personal reasons), or c) restructuring.

Financial reasons really should not be the reason as their revenue has been steadily increasing (even per employee) over the past years and they have no kind of investors to make any demands. Lay offs due to personal reasons tend to hit individuals and not groups. That leaves us with c) the management deciding another direction for the company which leaves some projects to be closed down. Valve not having much of management makes this one seem a bit off also, in particular when the presumably super skilled and dynamic people at those projects apparently could not move to other projects.

What am I missing in my thoughts?

It's possible that the people who got layed off were very specialised in a certain field that's no longer of interest, like hardware. Having them stay at Valve would've perhaps been a waste of potential and talent.

Or... like I said, maybe it was just Valve flushing the toilet, there's no room for idlers in this industry. Gabe said it himself in that "Reflections of a Video Game Maker" video, (25:00) cabal system is great and it really works for them, but it also means they have to be very aggressive with firing people, and I take it they fire people all the time, we just don't hear about it.