And it makes a lot more sense as a post-hoc categorization, like it started as - an aesthetic definition and classification. We read it as pernicious once it starts to define works from the outset and begins to have clear, enforceable boundaries.
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Marketing wags the dog, we’re just not used to seeing it for something anodyne and (possibly) appealing in games
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this just caused me to have a momentary period of enlightenment about the difference between art and product, which is probably not all that profound, but, like, that promise of fulfilled expectations is pretty much the exact thing i want from a hotel room. i would be absolutely livid if a hotel i stayed in offered me anything unsettled, uncertain, or ambivalent. hotels are not art.
at the same time though sometimes i feel like video games dont need to be either. i enjoy comfort. but yeah it’s really a waste if this is the horizon of ambition for the entire medium.
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wholesome or horror
what to expect
a bird in her townhome
or a slice of the neck
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yeah like oh that game is wholesome as a descriptor hits a lot different than WHOLESOME IS THE MARKETABLE GENRE YOURE A PART OF. corporate sponsored good vibes make me sick. also unproblematic media is boring and unchallenging for the most part, turns out you don’t really need to think if something is just telling you that youre valid over and over while cute animals frolic and no one ever dies
if i directed e3 id start the wholesome games slideshow up, and the screen would say WHOLESOME but then an adventurer man on a vine would CRASH THROUGH the letter W, changing the word to HOLESOME and itd actually be a promo for a new pitfall game
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i wish the venn diagram of ‘i want shorter games with worse graphics’ camp and the ‘wholesome games’ camp wasnt almost a circle because these are two concepts i want to be completely seperate from eachother
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without knowing too much about what was behind it, my approval of the the shorter games / worse graphics message was based entirely around the idea that this was for labor reasons, not like, aesthetic preferences. i guess i may have been wrong about that though?
i mean like i would not mind people backing off of the bleeding edge of technology or promising 80 hours of content if it meant the people making the games were treated like humans and not instruments of endless crunch
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I guarantee you the lives of game workers would not improve if games were shorter and/or had worse graphics or weren’t chasing tech or the addressable market shrunk. It’s not like people will stop creating systems to distinguish and value qualities of games and begin…spending equally on all produced game work? It’s still a competitive environment, there’s no de-escalation.
It’s such a weird rallying cry totally divorced from the actual pressure points that can be pushed: labor->owner, studio->publisher, studio->platform holder.
I think a clear phrasing the meme is trying to express is, “big-budget game development is unsustainable and I don’t appreciate its competitive benefits”, which, well, yeah. But that really doesn’t have much to do with the working conditions, as anyone who’s worked for a small business can allege…
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Sorry this is becoming a huge and probably too serious tangent, but can you expand on this? Is it just that if games that took less time to finish with normal size development teams sold well, the companies would just higher fewer people to do it so they could continue to spend less per person? I don’t disagree with you at all and obviously don’t actually know anything about how it works, I just don’t really understand what you’re saying here.
its NOT about aethetics even though cheaply made shit appeals to me universally more than polished AAA, my point was they’re conflating the two as the same kind of thought and it bugs me for the reason you posted
its a pushback against polish and focus tested watered down padded out nonsense, the labor thing is a side dish because working for yourself is more appealing than working for someone else. to say that no matter what you’ll get exploited is completely blackpilled ESPECIALLY when its an idea not an actual labor movement.
working conditions arent just a thing you can correct with a meme
anyway on further thought wholesome games is going to have the exact same fallout as ALTgames, the gaming community is incapable of not wanting credit for nebulous ideas
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Well, in order to make a game you’re going to estimate the amount of work it will take and then hire a certain amount of people, give them a schedule, and do it. You’ll crunch and overwork people because you planned poorly, not because your budget was larger. You’ll hire temp workers because your company is trying to eke out lower labor costs per unit of work, not because the scope is bigger.
Small studios operating under the freedom of ‘good enough’ scope and technical demands are subject to the same failures and are just as susceptible to poor hours and benefits as large studios, and in my experience, moreso, because they tend to have less experience and are likely insolvent past their one current project.
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Roguelites are wholesome roguelikes.
Nethack has me needing to Focus on the Family.
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Wholesome DEFCON where you direct UNICEF donations on a map
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This is really true, and it’s a hard benefit to measure. Small groups and businesses can be much better to work at because you can so much more easily feel like your work is meaningful and important and you’re directly responsible for your success. On the other hand, HR departments exist for a reason! and the scope of petty tyrannies a small business owner can express is terrifying.
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i dont think these people are thinking about it from a buisiness perspective at all
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For my part I gave no thought at all to the potential labor considerations - I would literally enjoy shorter games with worse graphics
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yeah like in a pure sense of thinking thats exactly how i feel
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what do you mean by worse though? Because I feel like you might actually mean “better”
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Totally
Getting back to the overriding aesthetic concern to provide comfort – I think a lot of this is driven by games being so damn long. You can’t have a rough or terrifying or bracing experience if it asks you to return night after night after night.
Short story is a hard form for games both because the way they’re made asks for modular, mathematical reuse and iteration and because the player’s learning experience asks for repetition and mastery. I think that’s why most successful short forms have been light on game mechanics, like walking and exploration and adventure games.
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It’s obvious but active participation fatigues too. It can be incomparably easy to e.g. witness televisual violence vs doing game violence or especially being subjected to it. (Reading is a special case because everyone’s theater of the mind operates at a different fidelity.)
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