2013-02-18
Explanation
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.