Conflicted, muddled goals are a good way to set any organization up for failure. If an organization wants to be a guild-like or co-op structure it needs to set itself up as one with the attendant member requirements (money!) and governance to achieve that or it will fail. Is the organization dedicated to providing housing for struggling independent creators, or negotiating contracts with publishers? Does it focus more on organizing new workplaces or on political work and consumer outreach? I have opinions on which answers will be more successful but I know that trying to do everything under one structure will not work. Especially when the starting prescription of any union action in this country is, âit will not succeedâ.
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return my beloved troll to its former glory
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Unfortunately FF14 is too desaturated for my tastes
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gshade baby, make ffxiv look like my fuckin avatar
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racist right-wing tech guy much easier for me to conceive of than racist right-wing tech guy who finds validation of beliefs in tepid response to Intellivision Amico
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console name ends in a vowel
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Stuart - Dead Milkmen but w/ Amico in the refrain
I think this is kind of the deal-breaker with everything. To take a turn to my personal wheelhouse we had those ginormous charity bundles filled with legit a thousand-plus games each that were purchased by a lot of people (more so the first one) and Iâd say the vast majority never looked into it beyond the few bigger name games they recognized and the ones that were recommended by others (Lennaâs Inception was likely the big winner out of this) despite literally being basically free and in their possession already. In other words you canât even force people to care about these kinda of games for the most part.
I think wanting people to be able to be to just do stuff even if it has no audience and canât make a dime is an issue remarkably larger than a gaming one, but barring a full societal shift I donât think there is a real micro-scale solution for just gaming beyond making things a bit better in the margins.
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The new(ish, its been out on switch for ages) mdickie game, wrestling empire, came out on steam. its probably the best western wrestling game released in years which isnt a high bar to clear! the coach reverses your moves and beats the shit out of you in the tutorial like riki choshu. the violence and chaotic purpose of pro wrestling is adequately represented, and the spirit of inoki shines favorably on mat dickie. but please tweet at him to add tajiri to the game, as a treat to me
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re 1000s of games and exposure to people:
isnât this problem as old as floppy drives in consoles? I vividly remember reading an article in a VG mag that did point this very problem out, and how young me couldnât fathom why more games wouldnât be better by default.
Looking at my PS2 backlog a decade+ later, I finally understood.
So one part of problem is, imho, lack of exposure.
How to tackle this?
A VG channel that gives informative reviews of indiesâ that shall not pass one-two minutes? Will be killed by advertising on platforms (even if we think everyone uses adblockers, the truth is scary).
Bundling these vids? Attention span of people is the issue.
Podcasts, Blogs? Too many, attention span.
Really, I donât see a solution to this that isnât funded by someone with big pockets that wants to sell games. But then, E3. Case closed. 
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i think i agree most with this. you cannot predict what will be popular or not and you cannot force mainstream audiences to enjoy niche games. the best you can do is improve everyoneâs life so that we can all engage in art creation, rather than the anointed few who are âcommercially viableâ or capable of finishing a hobby project after having their soul crushed at a service job.
as for history, i think that as long as evidence persists, games will be remembered and places within their context eventually. big name games have the benefit of money to make them âhistoricâ and most games get forgotten, itâs true. but thatâs true of⌠everything, really. books, movies, even people. remembering the past is always an archaeological process, even when itâs about âthe canonâ. and the internet has provided us with a very robust record to sift through.
not to be conspiracy-brained but it really is like âtrue historyâ in a way. not that itâs hard to find or necessarily âmore trueâ, but that it grants a more complete view of something, all perspectives. the people who bear the spirit of gaming in their hearts to me are the people delving into the free, forgotten, and foreign, expanding their horizons in search of history and context, devoting themselves not to a specific material outcome but to the process of remembrance.
as long as a single person keeps the flame alive, the easier it gets, too. so i donât think itâs hopeless. hereâs a personal story to illustrate.
in march someone bought a drone album i made in 2012. i donât particularly like my own music, i made it almost in a trance and itâs not particularly listenable. i was a little surprised, but what surprised me most was the message they attached to the purchase:
hey, i got this album ages ago when i was a brokeass late-teen, just came back to it recently. still really enjoy it and wanted to throw some $$$ your way. awesome experience every time.
if someone remembers my shitty album that got (checks stats) 85 downloads in 9 years, then i think anyone has a legitimate shot at being remembered. and thatâs the most we can ask for. the rest (namely: living comfortably and in harmony with the world around you, free of stress) is a larger societal problem and trying to fix it for just games or just art instead of everyone seems like futility to me
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Itâs fucked up that todd rundgrenâs daughterâs shitty real father is the better cousin. What if they were doing stuff right and making ads with Alicia Silverstone and that elf lady playing Night Stalker instead of being wild internet shitheads?
I had assumed I was just one irresponsible purchase away from being an Amico contrarian but man reason just keeps getting in the way.
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Shark Shark shaped animal crackers getting stuffed down her pants or something
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I try to remember that everything (album/game/art/w/e) is someoneâs first, favourite or fondly remembered. As long as they have access, someone somewhere will adore it and everyone could collectively adore everything with the right exposure and mindset.
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Even worse, he despises Select Buttonâs number 1 Game of All Time and its soundtrack (!?)
To each their own except here
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first of all iâm not even talking about non-commercial artists! where the hell was i talking about non-commercial game dev on here???!?!!? youâre making a whole lot of assumptions about where iâm coming from that have nothing to do with what i was saying! this is making me feel a little crazy. just because this issue has come up on here before doesnât mean thatâs what iâm talking about. and honestly itâs a little insulting to me - as if i havenât had a lot of experience in this space?
iâm talking about kids who are just entering into the industry who want to start studios and sell their stuff and are looking for publishers, etc. that was the whole point of what i was talking about! the article i linked about the development of Necrobarista is a perfect example of this. people starting studios before they really know what theyâre doing. teaching at places like NYU, so many kids want to go down this path but they have no real resources or support.
if you look at the actual membership of GWU, most people involved are young kids and students who feel they have no real path to the industry and want to start studios or get hired to work on smaller indie stuff. itâs not even necessarily that they hate the industry⌠but they see the writing on the wall, they see the hours people at studios have to work and see the odds arenât good for them getting hired on any kind of meaningful larger job before they burn out arenât very good. especially if theyâre openly queer/theyâre non-white/theyâre a woman/etc. itâs still a really fucking hard road, and most people donât want to have to subjugate themselves to it in the small hope they can be in the industry for longer. the reason for focusing on this is because of focusing on what your actual fucking members of your organization need rather than some dudes who work for studios who are brainwashed into techno-libertarian mindset and are too afraid to be involved due to retribution and are not going to be swayed by some 22 year old queers. thereâs a generation/cultural gap there. besides, unionization efforts at bigger companies largely have to originate from within companies themselves. something like GWU can certainly support that but thereâs not a lot it can do beyond that.
the whole origin of GWU was in showing up to a anti-union panel discussion at GDC run by the IGDA (Independent Game Developers Association) and saying why there should be unions. the IGDA is completely ineffective at providing indie developers with resources and support, partially because theyâre explicitly anti-union. if there has to be another organization to replace GWU to specifically be something that helps and provides resources towards indie developers and is pro-union unlike IGDA, thatâs great. iâm not categorically tied to the name of one thing or another. i just believe things can be better, and i donât believe falling back on how things have always been is an adequate or reasonable answer to the problem. there are a lot of basic problems with our current cultural landscape of how to support artists that go far beyond games. but thatâs exactly why games can be a great space to try these things out! besides itâs just really fucking hard to exist in that landscape and see all the ways people fuck each other over and how hard it is just to get basic good information and support for so many people. i wouldnât discount that experience. iâm not the type of person who just hand-waives and says âyeah well tough luck, thatâs how it isâ because i donât think it should be that way to be perfectly fucking honest!
and again - NOT talking about non-commercial artists here!! thatâs itâs own problem. i still donât know why the discussion became that, because it had nothing to do with what i was talking about above.
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If weâre talking specifically about the students coming out of degree programs and struggling to find purchase, in a world where funding for small teams is more available than ever and the path to success is more open than itâs ever been, I think the main problem is that there are something like ten times as many students going through these programs or teach themselves and want in as there are jobs or sustainable indie companies. Thereâs no way thatâs not going to create a mound of human suffering and we can talk about how these people can sustainably create things theyâre interested in or structures to catch some tiny fraction of them but theyâre mostly not going to end up getting paid to make games. And they have a voice and deserve to use it - a huge pool of human potential that canât be supported.
Who makes it past that hurdle is luck and demographics and absolutely unfair, but itâs at least something more solveable. Pressure campaigns can have some effect and just the changing nature of young people will have a bigger one â Iâve seen a big change in the junior hires in the last 3 years in Seattle area studios. But it seems likely to fade over time and cap out under leadership roles without sustained cultural pressure led by strong pressure groups and organized workers.
I donât think weâre disagreeing on the GWU or its origin or membership; I mean, I was there too, Iâve been to meetings. I think thereâs a big problem with the organization as it stands, torn between people who donât work in games but want to and people who do and need a big organization to stand up for them.
this is very believable to me because itâs consistent with one of the most frustrating things about unions that arenât totally cross-sector the way they are in Europe: often the most they can do is look after their own, eg those who already made it onto one side of the dividing line of at least having a salary (and those salaries are, necessarily, huge compared with the amount you can pull down working independently in most of these industries), and advocating for the folks who havenât yet made it that far inevitably cannibalizes their ability to do even that, because they need to stand shoulder to shoulder against management. I know media people have had a little more success with cross sector representation lately (in addition to being the most visible advocates of what a modern white collar union actually ought to do for workers), but indie game developers wanting to be media people probably confuses the issue, since many of them are in a different world from AAA game workers who could organize along more traditionally understood lines.
my union frequently requires me to take a stand in support of issues I absolutely do not believe in, such as âmy postgraduate education was good and the degree-granting it performed is essential to avoid deprofessionalization of our workâ (this is not true at all).
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