probably the best game releasing in march
2 Likes
No explicit heirarchy in the creative organization of a company has nothing to do with whether a company is co-operatively owned.
8 Likes
Open Beta this weekend on PSN
1 Like
no knock on the deadcell guys since at least they tried but I wish in general there was more sense of the economic/organizational elements that prop up an artistic work as being part of that work, part of the statement it’s making and the values it’s arguing for and the wider view it’s proposing about how to live in and think about the world, rather than just a meaningless logistical decision you can bulldoze your way through en route to the real work. if something requires making some other group of people push through grinding subaltern dogshit in the background is it worth doing? if it involves establishing a whole hierarchical caste system from scratch is it worth doing? I know there are arguments about practicality and so forth, but beyond all that - isn’t it also a simple artistic failure if your big dream project depends on treating other people like shit, or at the very least establishing power networks where it’s inevitable at least some of them will end up being treated like shit?
I mean this goes beyond videogames (and possibly encompasses “any piece of art created on a computer” in general), it just depresses me that in indie games at least aesthetic high-mindedness tends to mean “imagine the very best game you’d be able to make if you were a millionaire or funded by a millionaire”, and not “imagine making work which would not depend on the continuing existence of millionaires.”
26 Likes
We have a worker-equity system in Silicon Valley and it’s really not great. Only the already privileged are able to sign up for the risk that half their compensation might be worth zero. And to understand the value of a given amount of equity, you need visibility into the entire accounting books of the business, but that’s kept secret from employees – and even if were transparent, most employees wouldn’t have the accounting and business background to interpret it.
Today’s Silicon Valley system is dog-eat-dog ultracapitalism, but it evolved out of left-leaning 70s counterculture about worker empowerment. I think the same thing could happen again, because structurally equity favors the privileged. Just pay people higher salaries IMO
4 Likes
in general I’m wary of giving up completely on worker ownership on the basis that it’s at least as fraught for any of the reasons you mentioned, but I do think this point is always worth making, that a lot of the current nightmare scenarios / apathy / bad takes followed on from periods of people fighting really hard to get changes and if you can point to another example of that progression you should take every opportunity you have to learn from it.
2 Likes
in the vice article there’s no real throughline between the co-op organized workplace facilitating the kind of studio that would be able to make a dead cells and dead cells as a video game, despite it being a pretty easy thing to do (co-op allows everyone to get really good at games released on the internet → studio develops skillset allowing them to harness the action rpg roguelite zeitgeist for dead cells to be good)
even in the kotaku article that profiles the studio there’s nothing about how their organizational structure manifests in their games outside of some vague lip service to “everyone has a say” and “everyone gets paid the same”
at the same time there’s this really flawed approach toward the way giant games are covered where even in the most nakedly “someone made arbitrary decisions that the lower workers had to implement” titles, the design and implementation is still generally approached as an obelisk of “development” as opposed to trying to figure out how managerial hierarchies have manifested through games
this is such an erasure of labor to the point where I as a student in a game development master’s program had to ask multiple professional designers what their average work day looked like to see if I was doing it “right” or not - not many people understand how games are made at all, much less how decisions made at the top or bottom manifest throughout. and this lack of curiousness even happens within a studio itself - I would say that a large part of my complaints about working at a game dev company are based around how the studio itself doesn’t seem to understand how management structures work their way into games
7 Likes
And the way they described their problems of ‘making everyone happy’ shines through in what they released – if they felt like it was a burden to convince their team entire, they would trend towards simpler, more agreeable output, and the way their narrative is the pop-simplified, internet-jokey version of Dark Souls, the way way their art style restrains itself to a fairly narrow definition of cool. I think the game shows an evident lack of specific direction on the more abstract elements of worldbuilding and writing, exactly the things you need someone passionate to drive.
2 Likes
A friend’s game just got a release date:
3 Likes
4 Likes
so to do this from the whole invisible-labor-borne-of-misunderstanding-economic-and-organizational-elements-being-a-part-of-a-creative-work topic,
death stranding is in a really, really strange place for me
because I can definitely see the appeal of FINAL KOJIMA unleashed on the unsuspecting masses and I don’t want to limit his ability to say interesting things considering how the industry is barrelling full steam ahead in the other direction
buuuut when his appearance on conan o’brian’s show happened and it turned out that conan was in the game, it really put me off of the whole thing entirely because it seems like from the outside that kojima’s approach to this whole thing is getting to hang out with kinda famous people and then like magic they appear in the video game, except the magic is a bunch of employees that get swept under the kojima name, despite the fact that he’s still pretty good at crediting people
like, the video in which conan announces that he’s in the video game literally erases all the labor that went into texturing and rigging and animating the character? and it’s treated in the broader gaming press as though it’s this amazing thing that conan o’brian, a person who has achieved a small amount of video game fame by talking about how uninterested he actually is in video games (I love that), has deigned to appear in a video game and kojima’s presence is so magical that it happens without any labor at all and look at all of these famous people having a good time with each other while the people doing the work go completely unnoticed for years
what kind of message does that send? what is your aspiring game developer supposed to take away from this experience outside of “I guess games are magic if you’re really famous”? how trivializing is it for game labor when the process of putting a famous person into the game is literally presented to the public with no questions about how that was done? and how fucked is it that the games press has generally not even critiqued this presentation because conan o’brian did it?
so I dunno I would rather there be a hundred more small games than a single death stranding sorry
13 Likes
3 Likes
I don’t think there will ever be a very large audience interested in the production of entertainment
I am very worried about celebrities becoming the face of games and commanding a lion’s share of the budget away from production staff, though! I was not unhappy that Beyond: Two Souls’ movie-poster packaging was attached to a game regarded as a disaster. Games are not about actors or characters; they’re about players working inside a bounded system, and the player’s experience should be centered.
1 Like
Well…the people who sew Tom Holland’s Spider-Man costumes don’t appear on late night with him so…?
maybe they should
4 Likes
I agree but I also remember when Todd McFarlane started his toy company and posted pictures of the asian workers hand painting the figures in the back pages of Spawn one issue and then the very next issue caught a bunch of flack from readers for using “sweatshop laborers” or whatever and it’s just like, where did those people think their toys came from you know.
1 Like
I believe that is the intended (salutory) effect
3 Likes
Pretty sure the same people are still hand painting the toys in a sweatshop though.
Unless they aren’t. I’m trying to find out just who actually makes the toys now and the information is not readily accessible (
) so I’m just going to assume they’re still being made in poorer countries.
It’s just funny because Todd McFarlane was clearly real excited to show people his operation and give everyone a peek behind the curtain and he just ended up upsetting people instead.
I think people should be credited and recognized for their work and contributions and we should all stop worshipping false idols of celebrity and definitely shove everyone’s face into how the sausage is really made but somehow in the end the sausage still gets made wtf.
my favourite is still when videogame press people have full knowledge of crunch practices but still buy into the idea that that’s what gives these things an indefinable extra layer of quality, based on absolutely nothing besides the words of management themselves, aka the exact people who have the most riding on presenting this stuff as something other than venal incompetence.
the next time I work on a videogame i’m just gonna murder some hitchhikers to drink their “life essence” in safe knowledge that videogame people will go out of their way to give me the benefit of the doubt about whatever the effects were meant to be.
“wow, these cloud textures are great - I can really sense how hitchhiker life essence gave them their extra edge”
“I don’t approve of murdering hitchhikers, but there’s something undeniably impressive about a game built on that level of sacrifice”
“perhaps we honour the memory of those hitchhikers when we buy and play the game that their spirits are trapped within ($29.99)”
28 Likes