10,000 Bulletins: No One Can Stop the Presses! (Part 1)

[Alyx]

Going ‘Hey, this trend is bad and late capitalist hell’, is fine, good even, but also weird when it is ignoring the seemingly larger more obvious example hiding in plain sight.

Is the boutique stuff worse than the mainstream?

I am inclined to think modern boutique gaming products are not as bad as the modern mainstream gaming products. From what isn’t being said, I seem to be in the minority there, but we aren’t having that conversation for whatever reason?

p.s: This post is a reply to formulasofsexuation’s post instead of a general post in the topic by accident and I don’t know how to edit it to not be a reply. lol.

[ellaguro]

i can’t speak for others. for me the boutique stuff is very often annoying because while many of us have no stake in/control over the big mainstream stuff, we do with the boutique stuff. so it’s extra frustrating if you see some sensibility dominate that you don’t connect to or relate to, or you see people position themselves in ways you don’t really like to promote it, because that’s supposed to be your alternative. not to mention that stuff like the commerical indie scene is really just propped up by random spurting fountains of tech money that people with more proximity to it are just going to get the benefit of, regardless of the merits of what they do. and that’s a problem when so much of that space presented itself as some kind of meritocracy for so long.

i feel this way a lot about like the commercial indie scene in general, because that’s easily the thing i’ve spent the most of my time around in the space. for me - i’m already so disconnected from mainstream games and their discourse, so why would i spend tons of time complaining about it? i literally am not even a part of that world at this point. and most of the time it’s the same complaint over and over anyway that you can’t do anything about. with other stuff that presents itself as some kind of squeaky-clean alternative, it is really irritating when it just exposes a lot of the unfairness and randomness of the space.

it’s not like you can complain about the boutique stuff on a place like twitter either without having one of the devs passive-aggressively replying to you or people getting oversensitive and upset because they have some personal stake in this thing being the trendy non-mainstream thing. i stopped talking about stuff like the Playdate on twitter for that reason.

tl;dr i fully support people’s right to complain about this stuff. the idea that we should be some equal opportunity complainer who spends more time complaining about the mainstream because they’re worse on scale is exceptionally silly when most of us are already exceedingly well aware of all the problems with the mainstream to begin with. so i don’t really understand the pushback

[Felix]

@ellaguro

tl;dr i fully support people’s right to complain about this stuff. the idea that we should be some equal opportunity complainer who spends more time complaining about the mainstream because they’re worse on scale is exceptionally silly when most of us are already exceedingly well aware of all the problems with the mainstream to begin with.

agree wholeheartedly w/ the rest of your post but I believe @u_u was contrasting complaining about all other consumer products with the same fervor as us leaning into neogaf thread territory here (ie, “I’m upset this exists”), not just mainstream games

are mainstream games just consumer products? well, shut up

[doolittle]

I think I complain about the PS5 and its shitty mandatory controller enough to afford my expressions here but alas

[Felix]

for the record I think it is pretty healthy to take a step back and acknowledge that we seem to have catastrophically escalated the stakes of someone electing to produce entertainment technology

like I’m not going to stop doing it because, well, here I am, but neither should this observation be read as offensive?

[doolittle]

I was cool until my annoyance and mild criticism of the consumer good received meta-criticism that I was being the dumb, bad kind of person

[shelter]

@Alyx

Going ‘Hey, this trend is bad and late capitalist hell’, is fine, good even, but also weird when it is ignoring the seemingly larger more obvious example hiding in plain sight.

this feels remarkably disingenuous given the stated values and interests of the people whose criticisms we’re talking about

@Alyx

I am inclined to think modern boutique gaming products are not as bad as the modern mainstream gaming products. From what isn’t being said, I seem to be in the minority there, but we aren’t having that conversation for whatever reason?

“modern mainstream gaming products are better than modern boutique gaming products” - selectbutton.net

[Felix]

personally I frequently have to confront the lingering sense that I used to vaguely reject consumerism and now I just minmax it, so I am always happy to actually receive criticism from the outside world that matches my internal reprobation

I feel this way about everything all the time though

[shelter]

anyway this made me lose it today

Palworld - Announce Trailer

i want to make a pokemon sweatshop that builds me guns for my militia

the bit where a character picks up a crying sheep and uses it as a meat shield against a barrage of lasers and then throws it away

[Alyx]

@shelter

this feels remarkably disingenuous given the stated values and interests of the people whose criticisms we’re talking about

It’s certainly not meant that way.

As far as I can tell I share a lot of the same underlying values as the people who are criticizing the boutique products, but they seem to hate them, and I like them, and I’m curious about what causes that divergence and I don’t think the discussion so far has really managed to discover that point of divergence.

When comparing the Game Boy and Playdate meauxdal seemed to suggest ‘competitiveness’ was important and that a problem with the Playdate is that it is underpowered compared to modern systems. That seems like the point where our views diverge which is why I addressed my curiosity about these critiques being applied to the Playdate and not the mainstream. There seems to be more to it than the mainstream just being too big and obvious a target.

[Felix]

there is also a perniciousness to being a videogame consumer that leads a person to act like they have purview over the entire domain of products, including weird one-offs – remember how novel it was for eg killer queen to only have an arcade release for so long, think about how weirdly little coverage there is of all these oculus exclusives in gaming press because no one was actually playing them despite all the money going into them – and I think the response to playdate is a particularly fascinating example of that. panic being an apple shop is illustrative here; apple is determined to never be directly comparable to other products in the spaces they share, and that’s had an obviously negative impact on their curation of apple arcade. if the playdate attracts a disproportionate amount of criticism by existing in this liminal toy space in the first place – and that’s sort of a simplification too; most independent creators aren’t commissioning their own teenage engineering hardware – then I think it’s fair to examine how the medium views itself.

[Sakurina]

@u_u

i do not feel great about the gamerverse’s sense of entitlement to ethically object to products they don’t want to buy penetrating the forum

I basically don’t bring up the playdate at all on the site because it always turns into this shit and I have better things to do than try to defend why I am cautiously excited about something to a hostile audience, it’s a poisoned topic like stadia where people get really fucking mad if you dare to think anything positive about it

[doolittle]

Stadia is conceptually good and almost the opposite of the Playdate (games everywhere)

But don’t worry, I won’t post on this again

[Tulpa]

The playdate deserves particular ire because it’s a naked example of commodity fetishism, above and beyond the already implicit commodity fetishism of buying new videogames, it specifically turns the gameboy form factor into a totemic object of veneration, and positions itself as a luxury good. That’s 10000x grosser than a ps5 or whatever.

Don’t get me wrong, all consoles and pcs are basically ethically gross but the playdate is an egregious example of how video games are tainted by capital

[Felix]

me talking to my wife about her mother: wait, why are you upset, we’re having a good conversation here!

me talking to my forum about the playdate: wait, why are you upset, we’re having a good conversation here!

[Alyx]

@Tulpa

That’s 10000x grosser than a ps5 or whatever.

I don’t agree with that.

The Playstation 5 with 0 games is more than twice the price. The odds of any given unit not failing in 5 years probably isn’t great, but who cares because it’ll be time to buy the Playstation 6. What does the Playstation 5 do that the Playstation 4 doesn’t? Who cares, buy it so you can keep gaming until the next system.

Pay more than twice what you would for a boutique system, and for that you get a system that will throw ads in your face every time you use it, force system updates so Sony can keep you from ever playing games other than what they’ve gotten a cut on. The system will never stop reminding you that it isn’t yours, it’s Sony’s, you just pay to use it.

The Playstation 5 is not less gross or less nakedly tainted by capitalism.

[Felix]

apoplectic double standards on pricing/perceived luxury (that are not without merit, either) is also pure apple, panic should be proud

[Tulpa]

My problem with the playdate is that it is selling games as signifier of childhood nostalgia and not games as things to be played. That’s what I mean by calling it a commodity fetish unlike the more expensive mainstream consoles.

Otherwise, comparing the playdate to the ps5 isn’t fruitful, It’s more like a bougie version of one of these things

at 10 times the price for 10% as many games.

[Alyx]

I have something like that (not that exact one). It was super cheap.
It can play Game Boy games, NES games, and Genesis games.
I use it sometimes instead of my Game Boy or my NES, or my Genesis.

It rocks.

It’s mostly for playing old games, though some creators making new games for old systems let you buy roms, so it is possible to get some new games for it, but in the world as is, you can’t get very many new games that way.

[meauxdal]

ultimately i think playdate is a totem, an object to destroy with rage that might better be aimed at capitalism. it just happens to cross the gaze in just such a way, and this happens to be the place where i disseminate

i looked at the youtube premiere for the playdate update and it has hundreds of thumbs ups and zero thumbs down and every comment is rapturous applause and i mean - it seems to be bringing these people joy. how can i argue with that?

i just want to want better. i want to be excellent so i can have the self-worth to reflect on its lack in the world. i want to bring as many people joy as possible! we should all want that, maybe, but we’re busy surviving instead

playdate will probably be perfectly fine and maybe i shouldn’t have the “right”, don’t possess the authority or care enough to educate myself, to speak any darkness against the joy it will surely bring.

but

what does playdate enable? what experiences does it aim to provide? what assumptions does it make? who is it for? like busted said, these meta-discussions are exhausting but i think they naturally arise. at this moment, this product - these thoughts follow.

when i make music i want every possible ear, but is this sustainable? my music is all pwyw, after all, and hardly anyone hears it or pays for it.

do these niches only exist now by shooting at the higher notches of class? can you only win if you follow the money? the price-insensitive?

buy into the fundamental assumptions of our economy and
compete in the struggle for dollars?

mozart for portions of his life subsisted on commissions from nobility. it’s nothing new. keita takahashi probably got paid to make a game for this thing. maybe that’s how it has to be.

can the beauty mozart composed even be entirely extracted from each miserable requisite preceding its creation? we should pay everyone to exist!!! how many artists have we failed to allow to produce their inevitable beauty in seek of endless profit???

and from this window i view the playdate and i bask in confusion! i am alarmed at how boiled my frog has become