North Korea is the weirdest country in the world, part 2

Continuing my previous blog post, here I'll deal with the absolutely worst dark side of North Korea: The concentration camps.

While the amount of information about the North Korean concentration camps is extremely limited, what we know is extremely likely at least close to the truth. This information comes from several sources, including satellite imagery, radio and other surveillance, and the testimony of the few defectors who succeeded in escaping these concentration camps and the country. While it is, of course, not 100% certain that all the information is completely accurate, the overall picture is nevertheless most probably at least close to correct (particularly because eyewitness testimony of defectors can largely be corroborated by satellite imagery.)

The North Korean government is so utterly totalitarian, controlling and paranoid, that any dissent, no matter how minor, could land you in a concentration camp. And not only you, but your entire family with you, just as punishment. (This, of course, is designed to act as an even bigger deterrent: If you misbehave it will not only be you who will be sent to the gulag: It will be your wife, your parents, your children, and probably even your siblings.) 

What makes the North Korean concentration camps special is how utterly unique they are. While concentration camps have existed for almost as long as humanity itself, the North Korean ones stand out because of how unlike anything else they are. It's probable that never before, during the entire history of humanity, have there been concentration camps like that in the world. Some might have been somewhat close, but not the same.

There are several things that make these concentration camps unique in the history of humanity:

1) Their sheer size. These are not just some encampments of a few city blocks in size, or the size of a small industrial area, like most of the camps from history. These concentration camps are absolutely enormous! The size of a big city! The fence surrounding these camps (which has been repeatedly confirmed with satellite imagery) not only covers the living quarters and buildings, but large forested areas. They usually are of the size of an entire town plus a good chunk of surrounding forest.

2) The infrastructure within these concentration camps. When one thinks of "concentration camp", the image of rows and rows of barracks immediately comes to mind, like the prison camps of Word War II, with perhaps some factories and other buildings at one side.

However, that's not what these North Korean concentration camps contain (once again corroborated by satellite imagery). Instead, they are often built like enclosed small cities in themselves: They often have a central plaza (with, rather obviously, statues or paintings of the two Dear Leaders), a central promenade, and buildings that somewhat resemble a town or small city, with pretty normal-looking roads, and surrounded by forested areas, agricultural land, and of course factories farther ahead. At a quick glance one would easily confuse them with just normal North Korean towns. Only them being completely surrounded (at quite some distance) by a fence and dozens and dozens of guard towers, and with a couple of very clear guarded entrance gates, gives away that they aren't normal towns.

3) Many inhabitants were born inside the concentration camps, and have never left in their entire lives. Moreover, they know pretty much nothing of the outside world.

Where it becomes absolutely dystopian and a stuff of dark sci-fi is that the few defectors who have successfully escaped tell that not only are the inhabitants kept in a complete information blackout, but moreover they are being told that there is no use in even trying to escape because the entirety of the outside world is a completely uninhabited wasteland, a toxic desert where they would die in a few hours, a few days at most. They are told that the fence surrounding the area is actually to keep the outside dangers out, and that it's way too dangerous for them to venture out. That the town where they live is the only safe place in the world, and is the only place where people still exist.

4) And, rather obviously, these are forced labor camps, where all people from about age 5 up are forced to work for 10 to 12 hours every day. (The propaganda being, obviously, that they need to do that work to survive, that it's necessary for their entire population to be able to live, that everybody has to do their part, and anybody who is lazy and doesn't participate will be harshly punished because that's necessary for the survival of everybody.)

There have been myriads of concentration camps during the history of humanity, but nothing compares to this. Some might come close, but not quite. The sheer physical size, the infrastructure, the buildings, the multi-generational inhabitants, the absolutely insane propaganda fed to the inhabitants, it's just astonishing. It's literally like Shyamalan's The Village meets dark dystopian sci-fi. (There was an episode of a sci-fi TV series, I think it was Stargate, that depicted a concentration camp similar to this, in other words, the inhabitants were multi-generational and had been fed the lie that the entirety of the rest of the world was a dangerous polluted uninhabitable wasteland and thus it was too dangerous to venture outside. As far as I know, this plot was heavily inspired by North Korean concentration camps.)

Why many modern triple-A games are worse than 15 years ago?

It's a trope as old as humanity: Everything was better in the past, nowadays everything sucks. Music 25 years ago was awesome, modern music is trash. Movies 25 years ago were great, nowadays they are nothing but CGI slop. And, of course, video games in the past were better than today: They might look prettier (well, at least sometimes), but they are worse in most other ways.

However, at least when it comes to video games, particularly certain long-running franchises, this is not just the nostalgia filter speaking. There are many objectively measurable ways in which many newer triple-A games are objectively worse than equivalent triple-A games of 15 or even just 10 years ago. There are, for example, myriads of compilation and commentary videos on YouTube making direct comparisons between such games.

Some examples include:

• In a war game from the early 2010's you could shoot a building with a tank, and its walls would crumble, and if you kept shooting at it, the entire building would crumble. In a modern game in the same game franchise if you shoot a building with a tank, nothing happens to it.
• Likewise shooting at a wooden fence with a firearm would destroy it much more realistically in many war games 15 or so years ago. 
• Water effects tended to be much more realistic in many triple-A games 15 or so years ago than in equivalent games (even within the same game franchise) today, such as when wading through the water, shooting at the water, how transparent the water is and how it distorts the ground, etc.
• Many other effects, such as explosions, smoke effects, the effect that projectiles had on walls and so on and so forth, often (and perhaps a bit surprisingly) looked significantly better and more realistic in the older games than today, even within the same franchise.
• Many games had put significantly more effort in making grand-scale physics look more realistic, such as how it looks when an entire high raise building collapses, or a big element (such as a huge antenna) falls off the top of the building.
• Overall, and somewhat ironically, game physics tended to be more polished and look more realistic 15 years ago than they look in many similar games today.
• Many visual effects, such as lighting and reflections, looked better 10 years ago than they look today in some games that have RTX support, when RTX is turned off (in other words, they have to rely on the same rendering techniques as the games from 10 years ago.)
• Many modern games are much heavier to run than games 10-15 years ago even when the graphical and visual quality are set to be very similar (ie. they are on pretty even and comparable ground for comparison.) In fact, many modern triple-A games look objectively worse than games 10-15 years ago when their graphical settings are tuned so that they will run at about the same framerate at the same native resolution (ie. no upscaling) in the same PC.

And all this even though the budgets of these triple-A games are much larger today than they were 15 years ago, even within the same game franchise.

This is not to say that every single video game published in 2025 looks worse and has worse visual and physics effects than the best games published in 2010-2015. However, there is a clear trend that can be seen with many triple-A games, especially when it comes to long-running franchises.

What has caused this?

There are probably myriads of reasons for this, but here are some of the possible reasons:

1) There is less talent and passion today in big game studios

Many of the game developers in big game studios in the era between about 2000-2015 were "old-timey" demo coders and hackers of the 1990's. Computer nerds who learned and coded graphically impressive demos and games out of sheer passion, and who had a great talent, knowledge and coding skills. Many of these people could code in one day something a thousand times more impressive than a modern university graduate could code in a month, and that's no exaggeration.

These "demo coders" and hackers grew up and many of them went to work in the gaming industry, for these big game studios such as EA, Ubisoft and so on. And they brought their talent and passion with them. They would, for example, spend a week implementing very detailed and accurate building crumbling mechanics and physics so that buildings could be destroyed with tank fire, just out of sheer passion and accomplishment.

This is, in fact, one of the reasons why game mechanics jumped in leaps during that era of about 2000-2015, and why many games, particularly towards the end of that era, are so impressive even by today's standards.

However, starting from about that 2010-2015 time period and forward, many of these big game studios started changing. They grew bigger and bigger, budgets grew bigger and bigger, and they became more and more what could be called "industrialized". Many of these big game studios stopped making games out of sheer passion, and instead it became just a means for making money. Deadlines became tighter, overtime and crunching became the norm, and management became less and less tolerant of time being "wasted" by these "demo coders" spending a week or two polishing some irrelevant detail in the physics engine of the game. On top of that the politics of not just western society at large but also within the video game industry was changing, and these game studios started prioritizing things other than talent and expertise.

Many of these 90's "demo coders", who were in the industry out of passion and love for their craft, got fed up and left these studios. Indeed, there has been a quite massive exodus of "old-timey" coders from many of these big studios, such as EA, Ubisoft and several others. Some of them have created their own smaller studios, and others have just moved to something else entirely, being fed up with an industry that just doesn't suit them and their passions anymore.

Thus, these big game studios have been replacing the old "demo coders" with new recruits who have less talent, less knowledge, less skills, and significantly less passion for low-level game development. People who will not spend a week polishing some particular mechanic or effect because they love doing it and have the knowledge and passion to do it. And even the few old-timer hold-outs who still cling to their jobs in these game studios are often held back and hampered by company-internal politics and the new self-entitled recruits who are not there to make great games but to boss others around.

2) Scrum may be hindering polish and innovation

Software development companies, big and small, just love Scrum, and have been adopting it over the last 15 or so years. Scrum is an "agile development" framework that is supposed to make software development more efficient and effective by having the process go through a clear set of steps and plans, where the project is divided into tasks and sub-tasks, which are clearly planned and defined, and which are put into a timeline and sort of priority list, where every programmer takes or is assigned tasks, weekly and daily meetings are held in order to figure out where everybody is at in their current tasks, and to see what to do next.

Among the hundreds and hundreds of similar software development frameworks, Scrum has become a clear favorite and is almost universally used. It has become the de facto standard, and often contrasted with the exact opposite, in other words a complete "wild west" form of "cowboy programming" where everybody does whatever they feel like with little to no supervision, planning, testing, or anything.

There are many good things about Scrum, and when well implemented (which isn't actually easy) it can improve software development. There are also bad things about Scrum which can hinder polish and innovation, particularly in large video games.

One of the major problems with it is that, when tightly implemented and used, it ties the hands of the developers and puts an extremely bright spotlight on everything they are doing: Developers are not free to do whatever they want, and have essentially no leeway on what to do (other than at some level choosing which tasks to do for the next Scrum sprint.) There are no "side projects", no "hobby projects", no "experimentation", no "let's try this to see if it works", no "let's polish this feature a bit, even though nobody asked for it." Every single task, to the most minute level, is clearly defined and assigned to every developer. "Person X does task Y, person A does task B. Period."

Sure, developers are free to suggest and even create new tasks that they come up with, like "research and implement a way for buildings to be destructible by tank fire." However, in a tight Scrum framework they usually are not free to just start doing those tasks: The tasks need to be approved in a planning meeting, and added to the next Scrum "sprint" before anybody can start doing them.

And what happens when the higher-ups see such a task? They start asking "do we really need this? Is this really necessary? There are more important and urgent things to finish first." Such "unnecessary" side tasks are never selected for the next sprint, and thus are shoved aside and forgotten. The developer who had the inspiration and passion to do that kind of task never gets to do it because his hands are tied and he is, essentially, not allowed to do it because he has to go through the process, reveal what he was planning to do, and have it approved. And, thus, "unnecessary" development often does not get approved.

And, thus, Scrum often kills polish and innovation in video games. It removes freedom from developers to engage in new ideas, in what they are passionate and talented about. Suddenly higher-ups start scrutinizing what they are doing, and denying them these "unnecessary" side projects because there are "more important" tasks to do first.

3) Technological innovation is making games worse

Many people have noticed and commented on the fact that technological innovation when it comes particularly to graphics hardware is actually, and very ironically, making games worse.

One of the most prominent examples of this is smart upscaling: This is a technique that allows a game to render at a lower resolution and then for the smart upscaler to scale up the result to the display's native resolution in a way that looks better than a naive upscaler (in other words, the picture doesn't become blurry or pixelated, but retains small details as much as possible.)

The original intent for this feature was, of course, to allow a bit weaker hardware to play games at higher resolutions with decent framerates. After all, weaker gaming hardware on the PC has always been a bane of every gamer who can't afford a top-of-the-line gaming PC: They always need to either lower the graphical quality or the resolution, or both, of new games in order to be able to play at a reasonable framerate. Well, no longer! Now they can play at their native display resolution with pretty much the highest graphical quality, even on weaker hardware! This allows even weaker gaming PCs to play games that are visually almost indistinguishable from top-of-the-line PCs. The trick is that behind the scenes the game is actually rendering at a significantly lower resolution, which is much faster, and then the smart upscaler makes it look almost like it had been rendered at native resolution in the first place.

However, this technological innovation had a huge negative side effect: Many game developers started taking it as an excuse to not to have to optimize their games like they had to do in the past. Why optimize the game to be able to hit that golden 60 frames per second at native 4k, even on high-end PCs, when you can just use the smart upscaler and make it look so? Why spend time optimizing the game when you have this wonderful tool that allows you to bypass all that?

The end result has been, of course, that new games still run like crap on weaker gaming PCs. The smart upscaling technology didn't help those one bit. With only few exceptions, not much changed. Well, except for the fact that games are now looking worse than before because the smart upscaler isn't perfect: It does a decent job at adding missing detail, but it can't beat the game being actually rendered at the display's native resolution in the first place. (Ok, to be fair, there a few situations where the smart upscaler actually produces a better-looking result than when rendering at native resolution. But this is a very hit-or-miss thing: Most things look ok, a few things look actually better, but many things look worse.)

RTX is, of course, the other technological innovation that's causing games to look worse than they did 10 years go, when RTX is turned off (ie. they have to rely on the same rendering techniques as in the past). The developers just can't be bothered with making non-RTX graphics to look as good as they did in the past. 

In other words, technological innovation has made game developers lazy, and the end result is often worse than what it was 15 years ago.

North Korea is the weirdest country in the world

There are many YouTube videos (as well as outright documentaries broadcast on TV and other publication platforms) made by people who have visited North Korea. And all of them paint a picture of it really being the weirdest country in the world.

Many have said that, at least from the point of view of outsiders visiting the country, North Korea is like a real life version of The Truman Show. This is probably actually quite an apt description.

When foreigners visit the country, not only are they very tightly watched and chaperoned everywhere they go, and maintained in a very strict and tight tour schedule, but every single thing they encounter, no matter how tiny, is tightly scripted and acted, and the vast majority of the things they see is nothing but glorified facades and stages.

Visitors are, quite obviously, kept only in very tightly controlled (and extremely limited) parts of the country, where they can only see what the government wants them to see. They will be accommodated in one of the very few luxury hotels in the capital city, and their tour schedule will strictly take them to tightly controlled locations in order to see tightly controlled performances. And, of course, "tour guides" will be constantly chaperoning them everywhere, and extremely likely a bunch of unseen government agents (who are not only watching the foreigners, but also likely the "tour guides" themselves, to check that they perform their duties exactly as commanded and do not deviate in any way.)

These "tour guides" are always extremely happy, positive and wanting to give a good time to the visitors. So much so that it quickly starts feeling a bit uneasy. 

Needless to say, the visitors are absolutely and categorically forbidden from going anywhere on their own, without being chaperoned. (Even if in a few places they are seemingly allowed to wander around on their own, they will still be very closely monitored.) 

The country is famously and notoriously poor, always on the brink of complete economic collapse and famine, yet in these tightly guided "tours" everything will look as luxurious and grandiose as possible. Luxury hotels, luxury restaurants, grandiose monumental museums and event halls, streets that look like straight from the richest parts of Japan or South Korea, with (seemingly) dozens of restaurants, karaoke bars and so on. Obviously the visitors will only be guided to a couple of them; they can't themselves choose which one they will go into. Quite likely the rest are just empty inside, with only the outside facade making it look like there are businesses inside, when in fact there aren't.

It's like one big Hollywood studio set, spread around the capital city and a couple of closeby towns.

Not every single person that the visitors will see is a tightly controlled actor (like in The Truman Show). Many of the "normal citizens" strolling around, particularly in the middle of the capital city, may be, well, "normal" people rather than governmental agents. They may well be normal citizens living their normal lives in the buildings around. However, even their behavior is tightly controlled.

This is because only the citizens who have shown the most and strongest loyalty to the ruling party, to the leaders, those who have accomplished themselves in this regard and shown that they are good Korean citizens, are allowed to live in the center of the capital city, particularly the areas where foreigners are allowed to visit. These people have been inculcated and indoctrinated since childhood to be extremely loyal to the regime, and they know very well what will happen to them if they were to show any dissent whatsoever, no matter how minor. They know perfectly well that especially when there are foreigners nearby, they are extremely closely watched and monitored, and they know what will happen to them if they don't smile and show happiness to the foreigners, as if they were living the best lives possible.

So, in this sense, also normal regular citizens that foreigners might see are also "actors": They are tightly ordered to act happy, and even if they were to talk to the foreigners, to only say certain things. Deviating from this even slightly would be catastrophic not only to them personally but also their entire families.

Foreigners will be toured through dozens of different museums, exhibits and demonstrations. There may be musical performances, dancing, martial arts demonstrations, all kinds of things. All tightly choreographed to give the foreigners as a good picture of the country as possible. 

The actual reality of things still sometimes manages to seep through all the choreography and facades, though.

The visitors may be driven along a huge multi-lane highway to their next destination... but the highway will be virtually empty, with only the very occasional other car driving in the other direction. Something you pretty much never see in actual rich countries. Ironically, such highways will often look outright post-apocalyptic.

The visitors may be taken to huge luxury restaurants and offered luxurious five-star meals... but the restaurant will often be completely empty other than for them. Dozens and dozens of empty tables around them, with nobody else there. Perhaps one or two of the other tables with some people in them at the very most, but often not even that. It is amply clear that the meal was prepared only and solely for the foreigners, and there is no other activity in these fake restaurants.

What makes this whole thing bizarre and weird is the question of "why?"

Why is the North Korean government so insistent, so obsessed, with keeping up appearances and giving this picture to foreigners? Everybody knows that it's all fake, that it's all for show, that it's all staged, that it's nothing but theater with expensive props, just to try to give foreigners a false picture of what the country is like.

Everybody knows this. Doesn't the North Korean government know this? They must know that nobody believes them. Or are they really so utterly delusional that they honestly believe that their theatrics are actually fooling the visitors and the rest of the world?

The thing is, it's not just the theatrics, the acting, the choreography and the facades: It's how much it costs. The North Korean government has spent and is spending absolutely humongous amounts of money to keep up this facade. And for what? For a few hundred visitors per year? They are literally burning through enormous amounts of money and resources to try to convince a few hundred people per year that it's a great country. And this even though everybody knows it's all fake.

So why? Why all the theatrics? Why spend so much time, effort and money on foolishly trying to create an illusion that is fooling nobody? Are they really this delusional?

It really is the weirdest country in the world.

North Korea is not the only country that's as totalitarian, oppressive and tightly closed. Perhaps less known and less famously, but not in any way less totalitarian and closed, is Turkmenistan. Trying to visit that country is even harder than North Korea, and the government is not much better there. But the thing is, Turkmenistan doesn't even bother trying to keep up a facade to the rest of the world. (Well, except for their international airport, which is absolutely humongous and mostly empty of any passenger traffic. I suppose they are trying to keep up some kind of facade for people who land there on connecting flights. Which there are something like a hundred per day. On an airport that's designed to handle tens of millions of passengers per year.)

One theory that I have seen is that North Korea isn't actually engaging in the theatrics for the foreign visitors. That they know perfectly well that they aren't fooling anybody from the outside. Instead, they are doing it for propaganda purposes for their own citizens. In other words, all these "guided tours" of foreign visitors gives them video footage that they can then broadcast in their own country through their propaganda TV channels to the citizens. The message being: "Look how great, rich and prosperous our country is! Look at all these luxuries, look at all these huge monuments, these huge exhibitions, these huge luxury hotels and restaurants. Even foreigners are in awe at our luxuries and our culture!"

North Koreans living in the countryside in poverty and famine may well be convinced by all this propaganda that the country indeed is great, rich, grandiose and powerful, and these citizens' own situation is just very regional, unfortunate and unusual, and that if they just work hard enough, also their life situation will improve and become like it's shown on TV.

(The same governmental propaganda also paints a picture that the rest of the world, particularly South Korea, is living in utter poverty and misery, most of it being controlled by the United States, which is exploiting the rest of the world, and that North Korea is the only free and prosperous country that is not under the heel of America. That North Korea is essentially a paradise, one of the richest and most prosperous countries, thanks to them keeping America out. Most North Korean citizens believe this because they don't have any other information about the rest of the world than what is shown on their TV.)