Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

This comic takes the popular saying "Don'''t hate the player, hate the game" and reimagines how professionals from different academic disciplines would rephrase it. Each panel is labeled with a field and shows a red-haired man speaking to a dark-haired woman. The "Normal" version is the standard saying. The Sociologist says: "Don'''t hate the player. Hate the social dynamic that produced him." The Economist says: "Don'''t hate the player. His selfish behavior is improving outcomes for everyone." The Biologist says: "Don'''t hate the player. Hate the effectiveness of his evolutionary strategy." The Psychologist says: "Don'''t hate the player. The player had distant parents and is using feigned confidence to create emotional distance." Finally, the Mathematician says: "Don'''t hate the player. Hate the game. I believe we'''re playing a variant of the trust dilemma."

The humor comes from how each academic lens transforms the same colloquial phrase into discipline-specific jargon while revealing something about how each field views human behavior. The sociologist blames systemic forces, the economist celebrates selfishness as a market virtue (echoing Adam Smith'''s invisible hand), the biologist sees dating as natural selection in action, the psychologist pathologizes the behavior as a coping mechanism, and the mathematician reframes the entire social interaction as a game theory problem.

The votey panel adds a final category: "Cartoonist," who simply says "Don'''t hate the player. Hate the game" -- the exact same as the normal version. This is a self-deprecating joke by Zach Weinersmith suggesting that despite cartoonists often tackling intellectual topics, they ultimately just repeat the conventional wisdom without adding any specialized insight.