Malcolm & Simone Collins discuss the viral controversy around the game Pragmata — a title that explicitly celebrates fatherhood and pronatalism. Is “dad corn” (games that stimulate parental instincts) as sinful as traditional porn? How should we think about masturbating evolutionary pathways for bonding with children?

In this unfiltered Based Camp episode, they break down:• Why Pragmata triggers leftists• The difference between healthy vs toxic ways to engage with parental instincts• Why gamers actually have more kids than non-gamers (with data)• Hassan’s “gamers are unfuckable losers” take demolished• Deontology vs consequentialism in faith, gaming, and family formation• Historic Christian attitudes toward sex, beauty, and pronatalism

A must-watch for anyone interested in pronatalism, video game culture, evolutionary psychology, and building high-fertility families in the modern world.

Video Game Developer Dads

Here’s the spreadsheet referenced in the episode.

It includes:

* 30 notable male video game developers

* Key games/works

* Father status: Father, Childless, or Unknown

* Children count where available

* Evidence summaries

* Source URLs in both the main sheet and a dedicated Sources sheet

* A Summary sheet with formulas and a pie chart

Summary results:

* Fathers: 20 of 30, 66.7%

* Explicitly childless: 2 of 30, 6.7%

* Unknown/publicly undocumented: 8 of 30, 26.7%

Episode Transcript

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Corn, what it does is all humans, because of evolutionary reasons, have a collection of pathways that cause pleasure when you do things tied to the birthing and rearing of the next generation.

if you’re here saying pragmata is not core, right? Functionally, how is it different? If I’m in my room and I’m playing pragmata, which I’m playing the game, I am fathering a fake child while I have real children downstairs. Mm-hmm. How is that not as ghoulish as masturbating to a fake woman when I have a real wife in the other room?

I, I- Hmm.

Simone Collins: That’s a really good point.

Speaker: And if you’re like, well, it’s not as bad when I engage with it because I don’t have real children yet, and it’s like, well, that’s about the same as saying it’s not as bad when I engage with it because I don’t have a real wife yet.

Anything that distracts from your tasks of [00:01:00] getting one of those things is equivalent in its sinfulness.

Speaker 8: And if you think I mean Stoji and hair splitting here, one, remember, I can’t make the same take on this that every other conservative commentator has had. I’ve got to have something new and fresh, so keep that in mind. But two, , right now, everyone’s so excited because this is the first time they have seen a game that is meant to masturbate the instinct to be a parent and father a child.

And so they are excited about it because some of them didn’t realize they had this emotion.

Speaker 10: And in getting people to realize that yes, playing with children is actually fun and something they want to do and having children of their own is something they want to do is a fundamentally good thing that this game was released. But the warning against the masturbation of this pathway and how toxic it can be is going to be made evidence in the years to come as people can with AI simulate children.

Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. I’m excited to be talking with you again after a few days break. Of course, our audience would know that. But we were in [00:02:00] DC talking with political plays and now we are back and there is an episode that everyone’s been asking us to do, and we are not gonna have the take that you imagine on this one which is about the controversy, which has come downstream of a game named Pragmata.

And the controversy basically goes bunch of leftists saw this game and they were either mad at it because they said it promoted pronatalism, which it very explicitly does the first scene in the game before you meet the little girl Android who you’re supposed to form a bond with.

One of the characters is talking about fatherhood and the other guy’s like, “Oh, it must be really hard.” And he’s like, “No, it’s like the best thing ever.” So it’s very explicit. Oh wow. It’s, it’s not like a, “Oh, we accidentally made a game that made people wanna become dads.” It’s the core theme of the game.

Okay. Then some of them are mad because they say that the little girl is sexualized which, I mean, she’s not, although I will say her face design is a little weird to [00:03:00] me. Like, it, it does not look like the face of someone of that age. Do the people who point that out, like, make a point around that.

Speaker 4: If you’re upset that I don’t have the standard conservative take on this game, I, I want to have as true or honest of a take I have to the extent that it is also something new that you haven’t heard before and is intellectually stimulating because if it’s just let’s dunk on progressives for being icked by a game that promotes traditional value systems, that’s boring.

You’ve heard that already, right? So let’s, let’s try to dig a bit deeper than this. But here what I’ve done, just for those of you who have not seen, because her character in the game is supposed to be the equivalent of a six-year-old girl, here is her face next to a bunch of six-year-old girl faces. And I hope you can see that these two things, , they’re not the same.

There’s something off about her design. And, and that’s okay. , But if you have a six-year-old girl, it would be really striking to you. And so it’s weird that conservative [00:04:00] commentators keep saying that there isn’t something off about her design. , To me, it feels dishonest and I don’t like that in our space.

Speaker 5: By the way, if you’re confused as to what looks off about the head, the number one thing is its relative size to the body. Six-year-old girls have heads that are much larger when contrasted with their body than this individual’s head. The second is its thinness and high cheekbones, which are much more adult features.

Um, again, not the game’s fault. They were trying to size down an adult actress, but, , it is very noticeable if you have a six-year-old daughter, .

Speaker 11: By the way, if you think I’m exaggerating here,, I sometimes use AI to age up our children so I can see what they’ll look like when they’re in their 20s or 30s or whatever.

And I did this to my daughter once recently, but the AI made a mistake and only aged up her face. And I have never seen a picture that looks more like the Pragmata girl. , And it’s very creepy in this context because it’s a bit more exact, but you will see she looks more like this than she does a normal human girl of that age.

Malcolm Collins: That said i- [00:05:00] i- i- she clearly was in the story and was in the context of the fan base is not particularly sexualized, except on Reddit. They made a Reddit thread and they had to shut it down because it just was nothing but sexualized, but that’s, you know, Reddit, leftist, blah, blah, blah, they do them, right?

Simone Collins: Well, that’s the internet. The Rule 42, this is ... I don’t understand how that’s weird.

Malcolm Collins: And then the right comes in and they laugh, laugh, laugh at the leftist and they go, “Ha ha ha, so funny.” You see a little girl and you immediately assume that, you know, you should see her as sexual and that’s a self-report and then the right also says like, “Ha ha ha, you know, how...”

That’s basically the core thing the right’s saying in, in, in so many words. And I think so much of the wider conversation is being missed because of this sort of myopic surface layer investigation of this. So the first thing that we’re gonna be exploring in this is the question that has a pretty clear answer.

Is pragmata [00:06:00] corn? And the answer is yes. Just not of the type you are used to consuming. So what makes something corn, right? Like- Yeah,

Simone Collins: well, the people literally, I don’t know if it still exists, but there was a s- subreddit for food, corn and-

Malcolm Collins: No, no, no, no, no, no, no. That’s not what I’m talking about.

I’m not talking about- Different. ... it’s analogous too. Oh. I’m saying it is literally corn.

Simone Collins: Oh my gosh. So- Okay.

Malcolm Collins: Corn, what it does is all humans, because of evolutionary reasons, have a collection of pathways that cause pleasure when you do things tied to the birthing and rearing of the next generation.

Simone Collins: Oh, I see. Where

Malcolm Collins: you’re making this. And there are many types of corn which hit these pathways in different ways. Ooh,

Simone Collins: so like owning a cat or a dog that you overcare for.

Malcolm Collins: Well, I’ve always said that that’s a type of corn. Yeah. But I, I wanna point out that it is not of a type [00:07:00] different than other corn.

There are ... So for example, somebody can say, “Well, it’s not corn because you don’t masturbate to it. “ And I’m like but we say that when women read, you know, sexy monster man books, they very rarely masturbate to those and yet I, I wanna eff a monster is still very clearly corn. There are people say, “Well, people aren’t having sex in it, so it’s not corn.”

Everyone Is Wrong About Pragmata (The Pronatalist Game)