I had a meta-fun time getting my ass handed to me in Total Warhammer 3 skirmishes by a niche internet microcelebrity and now I'm going to write about it
Lord knows I can't get my actual friends to give Total Warhammer 3 a chance.
My wife and I went to Evo in 2011 at the Rio in Las Vegas shortly after we’d moved down to California. It was the first time I’d been to an event where I was suddenly seeing faces whose names I recognized for things they’d accomplished in a particular subculture and while I didn’t do any meetups or signings or anything (and I wasn’t even playing fighting games at the time), there was still something vaguely magical about just like, say, casually walking by Daigo Umehara down the hall to the event center.
I think about parasociality1 a lot, partly because it’s an interesting thing to think about and partly because it’s an underdiscussed cognitive bias trap that one should be mindful to avoid. Parasocial “relationships” occur when one person has extreme asymmetric information relative to the other person and mistakenly believes this constitutes a mutual friendship that doesn’t exist. Generally this is in the context of celebrity fandom; you might (think you) know everything about a particular celebrity and believe (or act as though you believe) there’s a relationship that exists between you (that doesn’t exist) if you encounter them in a social setting, however they almost certainly have no clue who you are and know anything about you—to them you’re just an awkward stranger who has approached them and is acting overly familiar.
I was a pretty big fan of Funhaus from when they defected to Rooster Teeth in 2015 ‘til around the time Adam Kovic left in 2020. I’m pretty big into video games but the thing I loved most was their talent for improv comedy blended with that. I would constantly be dreaming or daydreaming about being a participant in their videos, improv comedy and video games are both in my wheelhaus, I could totally be a part of this!
There’s a strong argument to be made that a lot of online, personality-based content generation is structured deliberately to encourage this; to make the viewer feel like they’re part of the experience, like the content creators are almost personal acquaintances. Probably, there’s a small degree to which this is unavoidable or inevitable even in the case where it’s not intended; the mere act of writing this blog for an anonymous audience is creating this situation by giving you insights into my thought processes in a way that is not reciprocal. When it becomes awkward and disingenuous to me is how a lot of content creators seem to be taking advantage of and/or are very aware of this but then break kayfabe to complain about it. Not to say these are contrary positions per se but to highlight that there’s no shortage of willingness to play the game despite being uncomfortable with the consequences of its success.2
Not being a known person sort of diminishes my ability to make a reasonable (or unbiased) judgment on how this ought to be properly mitigated. So my unreasonable, biased take is that, especially if you are aware this is a problem, you as the content creator should probably be the one responsible for mitigating it, whether that be addressing it directly with your audience3 or having passive measures in place to make your personal boundaries clear to prospective overzealous fans. Some people want to be and are capable of being approachable to their audience, but everyone in that situation ought to be mindful of their limits—and avoid the temptation to blame their entire audience for the actions of a few bad actors.
The subject of this goofy post is Jacob Falkovich, also known as @yashkaf and for his blog Putanumonit where he has written about quite a few things including lots on dating and quantitative analysis, often on subjects adjacent to modern rationality.
We’re going to duck the argument here of whether he qualifies as a celebrity, niche internet micro or otherwise, the point here is, like the fighting games legends I encountered in passing at Evo in Vegas, this is someone I’ve admired and/or had respect for from a distance over a period of time. Most importantly, he sometimes likes my dumb Twitter shitposts4. More relevantly, he’s got lots of cool social connections in the rationalist-and-rationalist-adjacent world.
One other thing I do frequently in my daydreams is start podcasts. The most charming, bullshit, shooting-for-the-stars concept I’ve come up with so far is myself, Jacob, and Patrick McKenzie play Total Warhammer 3 campaigns (knowing already that these guys are both into TW3) with probably a fourth (first choice: Eigenrobot5) and the ironic only-funny-to-me twist is that we talk about anything except any of things anyone would want to hear any of us talk about. Twist optional I guess. I 100% almost certainly couldn’t resist asking Patrick about VaccinateCA.
Anyways I mention this because our story here kind of spontaneously springs from that before drifting into my own personal highbrow intellectual demesne: video games.
So we get to talking a little bit about TW3 (and I even throw out my goofy podcast pitch). He goes on to tell me in DMs that he got sucked into watching Total Warhammer 3 domination skirmishes for fun via Turin on YouTube6. I volunteered to give it a go, not exactly knowing what I was getting into but, well, I mean it seemed like just a cool opportunity.
I invite him to my private Discord server and one of the first things he does is ask me my name and I realize at the last possible minute that oh yeah there’s quite a bit of information asymmetry here…
Alright well, while that’s true, I actually realized partway through writing this that, despite intending this post to have a thematic element of exploring/mitigating parasociality, I actually don’t know that much about Jacob. Aside from being casually familiar with his Twitter and blogging presence, I knew a little bit about his career and rationalist niche background but not really much aside from that. So I went poking around his blog a bit to get more of a sense of who he is. First impression was that he’s doing with his blog what I’ve kinda learned to enjoy about doing with this one—just writing about whatever I’m thinking about and/or enjoy doing; in some sense it’s what I might aspire to here.
I guess instead we can bring this back around to parasociality to say that when you’re aware of this cognitive bias it’s easy to become worried that one is not a fan of the subject so much as a fan of what you know about them vis a vis their public persona. In this case I’d be concerned that it’s more accurate to say that I’m not a fan of him so much as of what he represents vis a vis a connection to the social side of rationality7. But I hope being self-aware of this mitigates this—leaves it a worry versus a reflection of reality; I’m always down to have more casual gamin’ buddies. My other counter to this is that having someone on your Steam friends list and occasionally DMing over Twitter does kind of change the calculus on this a tiny bit, maybe. Or maybe that’s my failure to overcome this particular bias speaking.
We played four rounds, I maybe kind of didn’t play too embarrassingly in one of them but got pretty well stomped in all of them. I noticed a few days later that he had somewhere around triple my 300ish hour playtime on (just) Total Warhammer 3.
I see he’s now moved on to Age of Empires 4 and I can’t help but worry if I contributed to opening the RTS black hole that he’s been sucked into. If so, my sincere condolences to Jacob’s (other) friends and family.
I’m may or may not be inventing the word “parasociality” to avoid having to say “parasocial relationships” over and over in a way that feels really awkward.
I kind of feel like these last few sentences here should be cut because it doesn’t square with the next paragraph, but it’s still a genuine thought so whatever.
As per the previous footnote, this is admittedly what I was just whining about—it’s not exactly something you can “address directly with your audience” without “breaking kayfabe to complain about it”.
We’re also mutuals FWIW.
This is a silly aside but I somehow only discovered Eigenrobot after I happened to see a post he made about flooding in the Red River Valley and discovered he grew up/spent a bunch of time in Grand Forks, making him one of two internet cool people I can think of who spent significant time in ND.
Which I can strongly sympathize with. I discovered competitive Brood War VODs with commentary sometime in college and would watch them between classes. Got hooked on fighting game VODs shortly before graduating which is why we ended up in Vegas in the opening paragraph here. Though these days my interest in watching competitive games has mostly waned.
The weird thing in my case is that I’ve always been—and still am—fine not being a part of rationalism-as-a-community, but that doesn’t stop it from having a natural exotic allure…somehow. Thinking on it now, the novelty is that it’s probably the closest I have to having a common culture with a nebulous group of strangers, which is kind of exciting.
Getting giga-stomped in Warhammer by Jakeup as a coming of age story. Happened to me too