re. earlier discussion of increased options, at this point i think that issues with the attention economy are really just issues with the regular economy. people still pay attention to a lot of different things, they just donāt exchange money for them. going back to posting short free things on gamejolt under a different name has been interesting because itās honestly a pretty similar experience to 10 years ago - the volume of people downloading is the same (c1000 per jokegame), there are still locally popular games iād never heard of, different scenes, earnest games and perverse games, etc. people are still bored and curious enough to make these things and to play them: itās like the only thing thatās vanished is the idea of making a living from it all.
but because of that absence, itās almost unrepresentable as a space: itās like the vast bulk of human activity and attention is a kind of dark matter that can only be glimpsed at the point that it involves money changing hands. which would be fine if money was a real index of interest or desire, as in economics textbooks. and maybe if people werenāt as squeezed nowadays thereād be at least a little more overlap between the two. but even then i think the universality of money as a form of representation has been hugely (and deliberately) overstated. money has its own values and limits. all commercial art tends towards pitching itself in terms of āinvestmentā or āuse valueā because those are things that money knows how to talk about, but thatās not to say they occupy a proportional amount of human attention, the bulk of which I believe is spent: zoning out, wandering around, napping, shitposting, talking to friends, other dark matter activities. one of the frustrating things about blockbuster culture is that i think the actual cultural impact of things like the MCU, AAA games etc is almost nil: there are throwaway internet memes and novelty songs which have had more impact on the way people talk, joke, imagine, etc. but because the latter are legible in terms of money as the former mostly are not the commercial works are centered as somehow more substantive as a result.
well, just venting again about rule by dead metaphor.
PLEASE
yeah - iāve said this before, but i started to feel like random smaller games that i would encounter, both free and commercial, on the whole suddenly became better and more interesting around 2015. there was plenty of stuff i liked before then, but i feel like there was also plenty of hype around stuff that was kinda one-dimensional and fell off the map really quickly. but i donāt really fully how to quantify this other than to say that the average quality of a random game iād encounter seemed to get better. it feels like more people just entered the space and got used to the tools they were using.
but thatās the exact time everyone started talking about the space as if it was dead. so these are games that mostly exist without the dream of potentially taking over the world. which is fine, of course. but itās also very insular too. itās harder to get people excited about something if theyāre not already engaged with a particular space.
my biggest thing is iām just really concerned about the waves of talented people coming in and hitting a brick wall and burning out and quitting because it feels like thereās nowhere to go with their stuff. and i think itās really mean to be all āsurvival of the fittestā about it and lecture them for having expectations too high or whatever and say that they should just enjoy making the art itself when Indie Game: The Movie type stuff and success narratives is still so much out there. i also donāt really buy the thing of just making art for artās sake. to me something is always in conversation with a particular landscape and point in time. and i donāt think itās wrong for people to want success esp if theyāve done something interesting and good and to guilt them for it. iād much rather some things i care about be more successful and some of that bland prestige indie IGF-bait not be as successful. i donāt know.
i also just went through that and it made me go through extreme depression and not really wanting to continue to try and make games anymore. iāve made myself feel really guilty because i didnāt have a desire to do an increpare and just pump out stuff seemingly disinterestedly and without promotionā¦ and thatās just a bunch of work anyway. basically itās hard to say that the status quo is in any way good if it just keeps getting replaced by endless waves of young people who burn out really quickly.
hereās some 240p shaky cam footage of what may or may not be part of an elden ring trailer
reminds me when this leaked!
and Project Beast
I donāt know what to think about that trailer. It certainly isnāt the house style of From, has me a little worried that George R Martinās influence is more prominent than I expected.
I feel like it could be fakeā¦ like the dialog about āI can only imagine what drives you to seek the elden ringā reminds me of that meme where theyād photoshop in fake dialog that awkwardly includes a movie title. like a picture of kurt russell with the caption āNow thatās what I call big trouble in little china!ā
like that seems a bit much even for george rr martin
Do not seek the Elden Ring. Lest?
canāt wait for the trailer to provide an exhaustive summary of all the lore pertaining to the elden ring itself
It sounds like the Dark Souls 3 scriptwriter may be at it again
yeah, i donāt want to argue for gamer ascetism if there is such a thing - i like feeling like iām in some kind of back and forth with public life, that people might stumble across my stuff, etc. but the most alienated and reclusive iāve ever felt making games has been trying to do commercial work: when the expectation isnāt so much that someone will find it, play it, think about it, so much as it is āif i can Screwball Scramble this thing through a dozen set of increasingly arcane and expensive PR requirements then there just might be a chance that somebody with disposable income (which rules out most of my experimental-vgame friends and peers!) will buy it and then leave it in their purchase library and never look at it again.ā
and even then my impression is that for most smaller commercial games, their real āintended audienceā by necessity just ends up being a single rich person like the Annapurna lady or the Epic FTW guy or the earthly representative of Apple or something.
the appeal of getting out of this space even temporarily is definitely that doing so feels more lively to me rather than less. itās gruesome seeing the actual chance of money being sequestered away but i donāt think thatās related to how many altgame types are in the running for it.
I canāt put my finger on why but the horse seems really underwhelming. I guess Eldon is going for wide open world souls? It also makes me think that the number of weapons will be limited at least on horseback.
Glimpsed the title as āHow Neon Cracked the Skyā, which doesnāt make any sense but sounds pretty cool.
i definitely agree with that. i think thereās definitely a big disconnect between those prestige realms and likeā¦ indie horror games played by big streamers that might be more or less a kind of exploitation work but are actually quite successful. i keep thinking about how many people iāve encountered in the wild who have known about a game like Crypt Worlds, even when no one in the IGF crowd seems to. i think the prestige realm is also kind of dying out as a whole, or at least it feels like itās an increasingly smaller and smaller niche.
but when weāre talking about more like āpopulistā stuff that doesnāt have huge production values put into it (for lack of a better term) - those things are often at the mercy of random community dynamics. if you donāt fit into a particular context of a particular community or arenāt something that a particular streamer would play and have some sort of built-in audience ready to go, itās very easy just to disappear and have no one notice you. itās also just easy to be totally misunderstood or misinterpreted. i feel like iāve seen so much stuff that just has no context to fit into, itās not prestige indie or a āpopulistā game eitherā¦ so thatās difficult. and thereās often just as much hyper-capitalist hustle mindset stuff going into the āpopulistā side anyway (sometimes even moreso). itās just a matter of if youāre targeting the one gatekeeper in Annapurna or some publisher vs. the whims of an algorithm.
but on the whole i have been more interested in the bizarre and silly and disposable feeling things i find out there than i used to, partially because i just feel like itās such a good antidote to all the stuffy and bland and terrible things i donāt like about how the āindieā space works. but iām still pretty depressed about how much stuff goes completely unnoticed and how often people who are talented and have interesting ideas kind just burn out.
I better be able to use the Hands of God while on horseback!
I gotta be honest the footage is so blurry and low res that I literally cannot form any impressions based on it. I hope itās real if only to confirm that the game is actually still in development.