Reactions and Propaganda

After the online publication of this book, it was fairly expected that it would receive negative and even angry comments by Godot followers. The book even found its way into Godot’s circle of cultists in some cases, which was spread by some Godot followers themselves, mostly for scoffing purposes and the suppression of doubt.

The following describes some notable reactions to the contents of this book by Godot followers and cultists. This is an explanation on how cult propaganda attempts to counteract facts. At the moment of writing this section, everything that you see here is publicly accessible. It’s fascinating to observe how cultic behavior manifests in various forms, once you know about it and are outside of it.

Case A

The announcement thread of the book at unofficial Godot Forums was immediately locked by the admin without any prior discussion¹, not giving it a single chance to be discussed with community members.

The author of this book has also received an account suspension for two months! From the standpoint of human values, to be banned from a toxic cult community is the highest reward that one can dream of! If you want to find an easy way to get banned without actually breaking any rules, all you have to do is to share this book at Godot Forums or similar places. 🙃

Indeed, cults usually block information that criticize their governance and management, especially when such information directly relates to former members. The only exception why such discussions might be allowed is for scoffing and scapegoating purposes from within a cult.

Progressively throughout years, Godot has been limiting the scope of topics that users and contributors are permitted to talk about. For example, Godot’s Q&A website used to contain “Gossip” topic in the past ², but now it only has a single “Engine” topic.

Case B

That feeling when your pseudo-philosophical comment is used in a “book” for Godot anti-propaganda³

For your information, this person’s opinion about philosophy was taken as the base behind Development Philosophy section. But due to the ethical dilemma, I deliberately decided not to mention him directly at the moment of writing this book in order to potentially avoid retaliation of this person by Godot’s cult leaders. But since he explicitly decided to present this book this way, this dilemma is no longer relevant now.

His words about the lack of development philosophy, and on importance of having one, was quite spot on. Unfortunately, even having such bright ideas didn’t protect him from being affected by Godot’s cult indoctrination, which manifests in several ways:

He devaluates his own opinion, by labeling his own opinion as “pseudo” philosophy, perhaps in the fear of scorn by fellow Godoters if they would ever notice it, which means that Godot followers would treat this person to be conspiring against Godot on the same side (again, this has elements of us-vs-them mentality).
He is likely to have doubts about Godot. But he seeks external confirmation within the circle of Godot contributors to suppress his doubts (see “Confirmation bias”⁴ phenomenon and Groupthink section).
Despite having such bright ideas, the “book”, as he puts it, he still sees the book as anti-propaganda (or, if we “correct” his expression, he probably meant to say “anti-Godot propaganda”). I was definitely pro-Godot for the past years. But due to the cult nature of it, I cannot take a position of pro-Godot, but this position is definitely not anti-Godot either. At most, this is all about cult deprogramming of Godot. No matter how perfect Godot may appear to outsiders of the cult, this destructive cult state is pretty much like “a fly in the ointment”, and as old proverb tells: “A rotten apple spoils the barrel.” Unfortunately, this pervasive, invasive, viral cult state will likely never be lifted from Godot. This is explained in the Afterword.

The above is pretty much cult apologist’s behavior (it doesn’t matter whether such behavior is conscious). This reinforces existing foundings that, even the smartest people on Earth are still susceptible to cult manipulations, including the author of this book. 😊

However, we could also interpret this person’s intention as net positive. You may have figured that cults usually block information which exposes them as cultists. Imagine that someone shares a link to this book in the negative aspect. This way, there’s a chance that the discussion won’t be blocked by cult leaders, but at the same time, this would create doubts. To doubt something is very beneficial for eliminating limiting beliefs. Doubting is the critical thinking tool which facilitates the process of cult deprogramming. I would like to believe that this is the actual case. 😁

People got curious about this all, so a link to this book has been shared, by the same person who got apparently disappointed (?) by the author of this book.

The project manager of Godot appears, and replies:

He has been banned half a year ago after multiple warnings following breaches of Code of Conduct and general disruptive behavior.

If you haven’t, read No Longer a Blue Robot which describes this incident. You should also be aware that Godot’s CoC is only used for punishment purposes rather than as a guideline. Even if you don’t break rules, you may still be banned! See Authoritarianism - Governance for proofs.

Someone replies:

You know, it almost read like fair criticism until I have read the “He has been banned following breaches of Code of Conduct” part.

WAIT WHAT, GOOST’S CREATOR?*

Notice that this person had a good impression that the book reads like a “fair criticism”. No wonder: I’ve spent a great deal of time and effort collecting, organizing, and finally writing down everything there is related to Godot cult, with actual facts, evidence, and testimonies.

But then, see what happens: this person reads a message by Godot’s project manager (see previous quote), and instead of trusting own judgement, such a person chooses to believe the authority instead, which is pretty much bootlicking in this case (see “Appeal to authority”⁵ logical fallacy and bias).

Almost immediately, this person is then surprised by the fact that the I’m also the creator of Goost, a somewhat popular general-purpose extension for Godot. Indeed, I’m not a hater of Godot, unlike how Godot cult followers want to present it.

A Russian maintainer of Godot, who we covered in previous sections, also suppresses doubts in Godot followers:

This rabbithole goes deep, but I’d recommend not following it.

He absolutely knows the fact that his troublemaking actions are covered in the book. This hypocritical behavior is certainly typical to Godot leadership. He’s definitely not interested in people knowing the truth about his “Russian Warrior” personality that he attempts to hide from the sight of Godot contributors.

Someone replies:

Yeah, I’m kinda sorry for asking about this, probably not something this community is interested in rehashing. 🙂

Here again: there’s anxiety and fear that this topic might not be tolerated to be talked about in Godot community. Community members of healthy communities (where critical thinking is not discouraged) usually don’t fear nor regret asking these kind of questions.

Perhaps this expression of regret of asking a question about this originated from warnings via private messages that this person might have recieved from cult leaders of Godot, such as Juan and Rémi, which is totally possible given previous instances of such intimidating behavior by Godot leadership. We can only guess here.

In general, these patterns of behavior are quite typical to Godot followers: they will go as far as to renunciate their previous beliefs so their now false identity/opinion becomes in alignment with cult leaders’ claims, basically showing unquestionable attitude to cult leaders. Hint: you can find some examples of this behavior in the Authoritarianism section, namely in the proposal which contains lead developer’s “you don’t have my consensus” reference. I don’t want to mention a particular member here directly, due to the ethical dilemma which stems from this, again (not to be confused with the person whose opinion we have covered here already).

Case C

Before describing this case, let me provide some background about myself.

As you probably already know, I discovered Godot in 2017. I didn’t want to become an engine developer for the sake of it. I wanted to find a game engine to make games! I had a very clear use case, and I needed to find a perfect tool to implement my game ideas (I couldn’t be more wrong picking Godot).

A particular game idea that inspired me came from Worms: Armageddon (W:A, in short). In fact, I started playing this game in 2012, and many other old-school players are still playing this game up to this day, despite the fact that this game was created in 1999. The reason why people still play this game is two-fold: first, it has unique gameplay mechanics; second, there exist maintainers-volunteers who have access to W:A’s source code granted by Team17, so the game (semi-officially) receives bug fixes, modernizations, and even new features. Even a sequel of Worms, namely World Party (WWP), which basically uses the same underlying W:A engine, didn’t receive this level of maintenance as W:A currently does.

After a long break, I started to play some W:A games again in 2023. I’ve been chatting with various players on W:A’s semi-official Discord server. Then, someone shared a link to a personal website of a W:A maintainer. Let’s call this maintainer Vladimir P (abbreviated from his real name, which is available publicly), in the same style of the Worms mascot, Boggy B. By the way, you can unlock various W:A goodies by typing boggysentme in the main menu. 😉

Anyways, I got curious, so I proceeded to Vladimir’s website. Guess what! I was dismayed to discover that Vladimir P wrote a blog post called “Modding for Godot”⁶. You can imagine my reaction, this was quite unexpected for me! Why on Earth would Vladimir P choose to touch Godot topic, especially when he’s mostly interested in low-level stuff. I read his blog post, and decided to leave a comment (I’m a former maintainer of Godot, after all). I mostly agreed to what he said about Godot and its modding capabilities. The only concerns that I have expressed was the following:

He presented Godot on par with Unity (by describing it as “not too unlike”), this is very misleading to new Godot users (ironically, especially when Godot’s lead developer himself tells community that they shouldn’t compare Godot to other technologies, as you’ve hopefully discovered in Authoritarianism section, reacting to Godot vs Unity meme). I’d like to emphasize that, while comparing technologies should be welcomed, presenting technology on the same level as other marginally related software create false expectations to say the least, and what Vladimir P did was to present Godot as if it’s just an open-source version of Unity, but nothing can be farther from the truth. Many Godot followers who have at least some experience in game development would actually describe Godot on par with modern GameMaker (due to expressed level of simplicity, in-house built-in scripting language, etc). This kind wishful thinking, namely when Godot followers want Godot to become equivalent to Unity, is what creates this false expectation, when wishes substitute reality.
His writing style makes a hidden assumption that it’s sort of “easy” to create Godot mods for an ordinary user out there, especially when Godot users comprise mostly of hobbyists. For your information, the reason why there is currently little public information about modding Godot games (despite being open-sourced for nearly a decade now) is that Godot isn’t really designed for that in the first place, so you’ll have to deal with various workarounds that are highly likely to break with each (even minor) version of Godot. If you read the Reverse engineering section of Vladimir’s blog post, it’s obvious that he received a copy of the source code for the game that he decided to create mods for. It’s usually quite a luxurious opportunity to have access to the source code for modding purpose, so the rest of the analysis is based on this fact. Not all developers may have access to the source code of a particular game, unless you’re a creator, of course. But then, if you have access to the source code, it’s certainly easy to make mods for everything, regardless of the engine used. That said, it’s totally possible to mod Godot, of course. But this still remains an advanced topic.

I have assumed positive intentions, and I thought that Vladimir P simply got affected by Godot’s propaganda to some extent, just like other Godot followers, despite the fact that Vladimir is quite an experienced developer, so all I did was to potentially clarify the above, not to mention that I also express my own opinion on this as a former maintainer of Godot.

Unfortunately, his reply was passive-aggressive:

Well done on your book I guess?

You can read the entire comment section and judge for yourself. What’s worth to note is his last intimidating reply (emphasis mine):

Well, I just looked at your “book” and realized it’s an entire hate website criticizing Godot.

Get some help, my dude. This isn’t healthy.

Since you’re nitpicking at my wording and trying to draw out contradictions out of nothing instead of addressing my questions, I conclude that you’re not here to participate constructively, so I am going to delete further posts from you.

For readers: my experience with interacting with the Godot community has been only pleasant (this incident, if it even counts, notwithstanding), as well as second-hand impressions from participating in the ΔV community (which is made in Godot).

As you see, the behavioral model is all the same, which describes a Godot cultist, see Glossary section. Mental health insinuations, labeling genuine criticism as hatred and frowning upon semantics (figuring out semantics is quite important, if we cannot agree upon a term, a discussion cannot be fruitful), and threats of blocking further replies (information control): this is exactly what describes a behavior of someone who’s part of a Toxic Cult. I have not invented this! This was studied for decades by cult experts. As promised, he deleted my final post.

The following is the text of my post that Vladimir P immediately deleted once I decided to post my final words, which explains the rest (even criminals have a right for a final word, by the way):

I have answered your questions (there was only one pertaining to your post specifically, by the way). I have also said that I mostly agree to your assessment. At the same time, you ignored my own question. Note: just because you think that you asked a question doesn’t mean that you asked a question in practice. Having clarified this, may I ask you: what kind of question I haven’t answered?

I’m quite tolerant to your accusations, you know. You’re not acting in good faith by telling me and others that what I say isn’t healthy, and labeling my conclusions as hatred. For your information, I voluntarily contributed to Godot’s development for years, and many people outside of Godot community generally agree to what I say.

I assumed good intentions, and I used to think that you’re just a victim to Godot’s propaganda, but according to your replies so far, your comments convinced me that you’re a typical cultist now. If only you read the book, you wouldn’t say this. Of course, I also fallen victim to Godot, just like others, that’s why I wrote the book.

If you want to delete my reply, it’s your choice. But these kind of threats (as in: “I’m going to delete your posts”), along with insinuations regarding mental health, is exactly what describes cultic behavior. If you want to reinforce this and prove to readers that you’re a cultist, deleting posts is the concluding and definitive thing that you can do.

I invite you to ponder upon this.

For readers: Godot community is extremely welcoming, as confirmed by Vladimir’s feedback, but this is the essence of toxic cult groups: extremely welcoming on the outside, yet abusive on the inside, and in cases when people (outsiders, in cult terms) criticize such a group.

I posted the above response on my Twitter as well. Some people reading this may definitely disagree to what I said, and this is expected, since they may share a similar authoritarian mentality, especially Godot followers. But here’s another twist to the story above…

Days later after this incident, when I decided to play W:A again, I couldn’t join any online game. At all. I wondered what happened. With the help of W:A community, we have investigated that, I was likely IP-banned from interactions from all worms-related services and websites that Vladimir P officially managed. So, not only Vladimir P deleted my post(s), but he also added the entire range of IP addresses of an ISP that I’m using in Ukraine to the blacklist. In practice, this means that even if my dynamic IP changes, I won’t be able to play any online W:A game again, nor visit other worms-related websites such as Worms2D wiki. So, this blockage will also affect other people on the same ISP network, who are not guilty of anything.

By the way, W:A community members said that Vladimir P has decreased his activity or even abandoned everything related to W:A, starting from 2021. This is at the time when Vladimir P might have discovered Godot, especially when he wrote that blog post about Godot in 2022. I have also presented his repository as an example of how tests could be organized and written for Godot in 2020. In either case, looks like W:A community lost Vladimir P here. 🙃

The morale of the story is this: choose your tools and community wisely. The toxicity of Godot has proven itself to affect not only Godot-related stuff, but also other communities where Godot has an impact, to the point of potentially destabilizing and destroying the entire community.

Ironically, my journey with Godot started with my passion for W:A, and I’ve found myself back into W:A… With a peculiar Godot twist. 😁

Case D

The more I read about this the more delusional/unstable/mentally unwell cyberreality seems. He’s grasping for straws in every post, calling Godot donators fake, attacking dev’s LinkedIn profile, accuses the devs of gaslighting because 4.0 dared to have bugs, he links a godot justice manifesto (?!) which reads like an insane person ramblings.⁷

This Godot cultist talks about cybereality’s post that we covered in Groupthink, also see Reviews and Testimonies. This particular cultist exhibits signs of being part of a Toxic Cult, which manifests as making insinuations about mental health.

Ironically, the cultist employs strawman arguments:

“calling Godot donators fake”: cybereality raised an issue that many donors on Godot’s funding page⁸ used randomly generated (hence cryptic, lacking clarity, and potentially misleading) names to remain anonymous. Now, Godot has opted out of this practice and started using a label such as “anonymous donors” explicitly, but the majority of those donors still remain anonymous, raising concerns whether those donations are real in the first place. The fact of employing this randomly generated names technique is questionable to begin with, as it contradicts the transparency and clarity principles declared by the Godot project.
“attacking dev’s LinkedIn profile”: cybereality simply linked the LinkedIn profile of W4 Games to highlight the contrasting descriptions between W4 Games’ mission statement on their official website and their LinkedIn page representing W4 Games. The W4 Games⁹ official website does not contain words and phrases like “online gaming,” “cloud platform,” and “online multiplayer,” whereas W4 Games’ LinkedIn page does. Moreover, that LinkedIn page is not publicly available; one can only access it while being registered at LinkedIn.
“accuses the devs of gaslighting because 4.0 dared to have bugs”: cybereality accused mostly Juan, the lead developer of Godot, who consistently refuses to accept existence of bugs and/or limitations, presenting them as features or outright making the person feel like they allegedly don’t “understand” the inner workings of the engine, despite contradictions. See for instance Waiting for Philosophy.
“he links a godot justice manifesto (?!) which reads like an insane person ramblings”: cybereality didn’t link Justice Manifesto directly when raising his own experience, but only as a way to suggest that he’s not the only one bringing up the issues with Godot. Additionally, this was presented as if cybereality and the author of this book are the same person, which is misleading. This resulted in misunderstandings from other users leading to false conclusions, but gladly, some of them eventually pointed out that:
- “When you puplically call someone delusional/unstable/mentally ill, at least do the bare minimum of research. You are mixing multiple people into one. The author of this justice manifesto is not cyberreality.”
- “This site is owned and maintained by a different person, not Cybereality.”

There are other notable mentions and references coming from this book at that Reddit thread, if you’d like to laugh! 😁

Blue Robot Cult, “Outwardly welcoming, inwardly abusive”… <sarcasm>I am sorry, I haven’t received my daily abuse. Can someone please make sure to rend my pound of flesh?! </sarcasm>

Is this dude serious? I laughed when I clicked the link. I was taken aback when I saw how serious this person is in his feelings against us (not just Juan and Remi). Cyberreality really does have a lot of animosity against those of us who actually like this tool. (S)he (I honestly don’t know) seriously espouses that the Godot Community is a cult, “but it isn’t a bad thing.” Sorry, anytime something is labeled a cult, it is with a negative inflection. There’s no getting around that. Also…all of you “blue robot” users are guilty of suffering from cognitive dissonance.

While I agree that we are passionate about Godot, I would be willing to bet that 99.9% of users are stable-minded individuals who do not sacrifice small goats to our lord, blue robot; it is an open-source project after all. Feel free to bring your knives only if you want to.

Please read Case B to understand that the author of this book doesn’t hate members of the Godot community; he’s only against Godot cultists (see Glossary), but even then, they are treated with irony and an understanding of their nature. The name “Blue Robot” only bears symbolic, humorous, and ironic meanings and definitely does not imply “sacrificing small goats to our lord, blue robot” (even though that’s what the Godot community tends to portray in social media, again, as so-called “jokes” about themselves, see Cult Leader).