Pattern of Behavior

Because the lead developer of Godot plays a huge role in Godot’s toxic cult, it’s very important being able to recognize his manipulations.

Behavior of Juan Linietsky, who is in fact the cult leader of Godot, can be summarized as undue influence, which manifests as hypocrisy, lack of empathy, inattentiveness, irresponsibility, and carelessness.

Below is my critical analysis.

Juan posses a belief that he’s destined to help people to make great games using free tools alone, which manifests as Messiah complex. He attempts to create a game engine which could allow users to create both casual and AAA games with little to no effort. He wants to make a game engine accessible to everyone. But if you run after two hares, you will catch neither. He will always prioritize features that make the image of Godot look nice in the eyes of beholder, like editor features or movie maker mode, at the expense of neglecting core parts of the engine.

Juan attempts to create an image of being inclusive for all people around the world, trying to be all things to all people, but also trying to hit advanced features. He moves the goalposts a lot, both in terms of arguments and development goals.

Juan deliberately downplays himself, plays a victim to induce guilt in others, as if users are forcing him to work hard in Godot to make advanced game engine comparable to other commercial game engines out there, and allegedly experiences “pressure” because of this. Juan may say that he tried his best, but in reality he says this to cover up his irresponsibility. He does not finish features that he himself created or integrated in Godot, he says something like “I don’t have time for this, interested contributors will fix bugs themselves”.

Juan is mostly detached from real game development nowadays. Due to this, he doesn’t really understand how a particular feature should work in practice, so he tends to fixate on ideas. Simultaneously, he says to contributors that Godot’s development is extremely pragmatic, which is not true, because carelessness is not pragmatism.

When confronted with criticism, Juan fights it off by saying that he has more experience, or that others don’t understand Godot’s architecture. For contributors to gain his trust, Juan says that they must have “irreproachable attitude”, which means unquestionable attitude in practice. Juan publicly says that he encourages public discussions to users. But privately, he tells them that expressing disagreement in private is far more productive and useful. Therefore, Juan creates an environment where consensus cannot be possibly reached, only compromises, because it’s oftentimes not clear what kind of decisions were made behind the doors.

Juan plays a democrat. To users, he says that Godot’s governance has horizontal structure. But to contributors, he says that Godot’s development is based solely on trust, and not meritocracy nor democracy. He spreads manipulative propaganda: he substitutes concepts like “community-driven”, or says that number of contributors keeps growing “exponentially”.

Juan creates perceived threat, like “commercial engines feel threatened by open-source”, going out of his way to suggest companies to adopt pure Open Source terms, showing all signs of us-vs-them mentality. He comes up with a bogus solution to a bogus problem, which is the only core development “philosophy” in Godot, by saying that Godot has no philosophy.

Juan presents common knowledge as unique and innovative and demonizes approaches that doesn’t work for him. He creates surrogate solutions in attempt to match up to expectations of commercial engines, but such solutions end up being incomplete and overly simplified. He often rejects and even removes features from Godot to achieve a preconceived notion of purity, hidden under assumption that bloat accumulates quickly in Godot, despite the fact that engine’s binary size keeps growing in leap and bounds year by year in spite of this expressed purism.

Juan temporarily rejects proposals by saying that a feature is not needed, but then implements that feature himself years later. This kind of tactic is more likely to be used if a proposal is complemented with a finished solution. He rarely if ever reads elaborate proposals. Juan severely lacks tact when rejecting proposals. This is because he’s unable to understand and experience feelings of other people, completely lacks empathy. He may occasionally express feelings of sadness and grief, but it’s not genuine, more like “crocodile tears”.

Juan misinterprets facts. He’s extremely inattentive and lacks focus. When Juan is exposed in inappropriate behavior, he starts blame shifting by saying that others misunderstood what he said or done. He is a master of gaslighting, a manipulation technique that allows to undermine the perception of reality. He misinterprets someone else’s messages or make up imaginary situations. People who don’t pay attention to this tend to agree to his contrived conclusions that are built upon strawman arguments.

Juan uses love bombing techniques. He says that his work is done entirely out of love, convince people that they don’t have to be professional or serious as other engines. Alternates love with coercion, especially when contributors start to question Godot’s decisions. At the same time, Juan expresses ambivalent attitude towards commercial game engines. He wants to achieve the success of commercial game engines out there who he believes to be controlling the industry, but he will never tell this explicitly, because he experiences jealousy. Sometimes, you may see Juan covertly referring to Unity and Unreal as “two major technologies”. Yet he discourages users to compare Godot to any other technology, and say that Godot doesn’t compete with Unity, Unreal etc, to the point that “they are free to use Godot’s code”.

Juan describes Godot’s unusual governance as an “uncharted territory” for all people who’d like to take part in game development. Depicting it this way allows to create ambiguous environment where deception may be hidden and presented as mistakes, misunderstandings, or misinterpretations.

Juan says that he only tweets about Godot updates, and that Godot is the only thing which interests him in life. But this is false, because he oftentimes talks about politics, like Russian invasion of Ukraine, military, gambling, etc. He doesn’t care about people, unless they contribute to Godot’s development. Unfortunately, due to his false expression of confidence and guru-like behavior (as in, claiming how the industry works according to his sole experience), he becomes a real-life role model for a lot of susceptible followers (a “younger generation”, as Juan refers to them), which is alarming considering all above.

Juan was probably a “Nice Guy” decades ago, but instead of overcoming it, his insecurities allowed him to develop a painful attitude to criticism over time, so he has accumulated a lot of trust issues. Juan exhibits both vulnerable and especially communal narcissistic qualities. In other words, Juan is a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

He will deny everything written above because that’s what narcissists typically do. On rare occasions, he may even disingenuously acknowledge some of the aforementioned characteristics, publicly admitting past mistakes in an attempt to evade responsibility and convince others that he has changed. However, nothing could be further from the truth.