i don’t quite have time to elaborate on it but i really like evgeny morozov’s talks about creativity and discovery and how the market is a really bad mechanism for capturing people’s everyday creativity and i feel like it applies here
long-ass podcast about it here: https://youtu.be/3lxPMem0USM?si=c7CLIM-M0DuGZWJW
I think “art for art’s sake”, can be a way to skip thinking through less-evident social/productive forces that underlie the creation of a material artifact by simplifying it to “creative work”. But I think the author of that piece is doing that exact thing when saying stuff like
If you are happy that only 10 people play your game, fine, I guess. However, you should ask if you can’t be bringing more people happiness with your limited time in the one life you get on this Earth.
Like, is this not just bemoaning the loss of easy discovery around pop or commercialized objects? There’s a huge difference between the possibilities present when looking at games as quantified through the format of a ‘platform’ like Steam and the possibilities extant in the hugely general creative act of ‘making games’.
Limiting it to a question of personal fulfillment & attention quantity/quality ignores how games have(& do) function. It’s true that if you make, “My Feelings on X” and assume it’ll blow up the world, that’s a bit foolish. But only if you take for granted that nobody would value or aim their ideals at anything other than pure attention.
TBF there are way too many games, trust me I actually checked through the nearly 12k games that came out on Steam in 2021 according to that chart. Do you know what is new on Steam (hint: check my random games post of the day)? Visual novels with both the art and story and voice work done by AI, one company has a new one of those coming out every week. It is entirely possible that y’all think there aren’t too many games solely because you ignore the existence of most of them.
That said that sure is a nutty article, I say as a resident of the state with the worst roads in the nation.
Okay I’m going to try to actually converse in this thread 
A work of art is fundamentally abstract and ethereal, timeless and infinitely reproducible, like a word or a number; we recognize one by its form, not the substance it happens to currently be taking. In a way, one is not made so much as discovered; the circumstances of its discovery tend to be reflected in it, of course, but this is true in the sciences as well. The digitization of art has made this remarkably obvious today but it was true long before; even media like oil painting and sculpture can be copied—it’s their design, their abstract structure, that really gives them their identity in our eyes. As such you can make a product using a work of art, but the art itself can never be the product, any more than the number 12 can. Many of our cultural ideas around art would not make sense without this: everything from the idea of porting a game to selling prints of paintings to trading music recordings to (in an absurd irony) the entirety of copyright law would hardly be comprehensible.
Earlier today in the “griipes” thread Stephen mentioned Sei Shounagon; she wrote The Pillow Book around 1000 years ago and yet the text of it is still with us. You can make a product from that text by printing it in a book and selling the book, but then the print book is the commodity, not the text itself which simply floats in the ether. Commodifying art is always like this; the commodity part is a tack-on, apart from the work itself, and the bait-and-switch that gets you to see the commodity as the work of art is part of the big culture-wide sales pitch to get you to buy it.
In this sense, I think Lily’s analogy is very apt. The set of all art is very like the set of stars in the sky; it hangs around us, twinkling, beautiful, always there for everyone and possessable by no one. It’s a silly game people play, turning away and pretending otherwise so they can sell each other little chits instead, like mortgaging your soul for a McDonald’s franchise.
“Someday, he thought, it’ll be mandatory that we all sell the McDonald’s hamburger as well as buy it; we’ll sell it back and forth to each other forever from our living rooms. That way we won’t even have to go outside.” —Phillip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly, 1977
Thanks, that was cool. I’ve had similar thoughts about the “split conversation” back then, and how it kind of felt like everyone was on the same page. I like that talk of Paolo’s too, also, I bring it up sometimes as a charming satire of the blue ocean Wii era.
I think it’s really worth drawing a distinction between trying to survive as a working artist and trying to make a killing in the marketplace. The idea that, in order to simply get by as a working artist, you have to think of yourself like a businessperson and take on risky debt or get investors involved or whatever, so that your work either has to make a big profit or you’re screwed and thus you become marketing-brained and try to scrub all the unique-and-thus-risky-seeming qualities out of your work, etc. etc., is, I think, one of the major scourges of our time, especially in the game world where a lot of people have a hard time imagining anything else. That kind of mentality in a broad sense is the cause of all of these problems, I think.
It really is possible to survive as a professional artist without treating your practice like that, though. You have to depend on people’s charity if you don’t want to try to force them to pay you for your work, so you probably won’t make a huge amount of money, but it is possible to survive that way because people will tend to look out for you if your work means something to them, thankfully; Lily and I are poor, admittedly, but we’re still here and keeping at it all the same.
On the other hand, if it’s feasible for you to work another job, you can be a hobbyist instead if that seems better to you or more practical. Some people are basically forced into being working artists by their life circumstances; others can’t stand to live any other way (I basically started out as the former and now feel more like both). Regardless, I think it’s good for a society to have full-time artists because making art full-time means you can be intensely prolific or go for big ambitious projects that would be impractical otherwise; as such, certain types of art tend to come only from those conditions. On the other hand, it’s good to have hobbyists too: being a hobbyist might mean you have to make your practice smaller in scale, but on the other hand you can really do whatever you like with the time you have under those conditions since you’re not really depending on it for anything. This ends up meaning that there are certain types of art that tend to come only from hobbyists. As such, I’d like our society to keep space for artists of both stripes, so that we can generate the most varied pool of work.
To be honest, I don’t really understand what the end goal of this take is. We have fans who support us in Brazil and Argentina; from emails and messages we’ve gotten I think they would be crestfallen if we took up this argument and quit. Surely that’s not what you’re advocating…?
At least here in the U.S., one of the main things I’ve gathered from all the tax reading I’ve been doing is that the federal government does not really want poor people to be self-employed, at least as a matter of policy, and many state and municipal goverments follow along. They might say they do but the laws don’t really seem designed that way. What they want, as best as I can see, is for you to either run a large corporation or work for a large corporation. You’re kind of aggressively penalized for trying to go it on your own, unless you’re wealthy enough to start a big business.
U.S. income tax only kicks in at around $15k–$20k and has a progressive design, so those who make more income pay a greater proportion of the tax (in theory at least). Self-employment tax, on the other hand, kicks in at $400, and is not only charged as a flat percentage across income brackets (15–16%) but also has a cap at $200k, so any self-employment income you bring in beyond $200k is free. Therefore it has a regressive design, where the self-employed poor actually pay a greater proportion of their income than the rich. Also, if you’re just a normal wage earner and file a W-2, the odds that the IRS will come after you are extremely low, but if you’re poor and self-employed you seem distinctively dubious to them (see this for an example) and if you get audited you probably won’t be able to afford an accountant or an attorney to help you, which could lead not only to heavy fees and penalties you probably can’t afford either but even jail time if you’re really unlucky.
This is all the result of years of corporate lobbying—the self-employed poor have no one to go to bat for them in Congress. In some ways it’s actually safer to be unemployed, because then you’ll just be ignored (unless you’re homeless and out on the street).
Yeah…thins out the “competition.” 
I definitely think it always makes sense to ask yourself how someone making points like that stands to benefit from what they’re saying, totally.
Yeah, I mean, what if those 10 people who played your game found something in it that gave them hope for the future, when they had all but given up otherwise? I seriously think about that whenever we release anything, just because of my own life experience. If an apartment building collapses and 10 people die, it’s not as if we say, “Pah, only 10!”
The widespread idea in our society that art is a trifling and even dubious luxury instead of a basic necessity never stops beguiling me…it feels kind of like weird religious baggage from the 1600s or something to me, maybe something that’s seeped into our culture from the kind of stern old-time Protestants that would ban social dancing and forbid the use of musical instruments in church services and so on.
How does it hurt anything for them to simply be there, though? It’s not like Steam is lacking for storage space on their servers or something, at least I don’t think. I love your random Steam games thread, on that note, I keep up with it pretty avidly. 
I think games made haphazardly with little effort can be uniquely great sometimes—I really hope we’re not about to drag Glorious Trainwrecks through the mud, that would make me really sad!
WHAT somebody made a Vania without obnoxious hit flashes?!? Totally bought. <33
Apologies if I’m derailing a step too far, but I maybe disagree with this if I’m reading it correctly? I think the material specificity of an artwork’s presentation is not necessarily divisible from its form. Although it can be less attached in terms of it’s communicability as an object of contemplation.
As a form that is in no danger of ‘too many games’, pinball machines are not just physical, but for 99% of people are only accessible by going to a place that has one for play. The market is changing, but originally, in terms of size/design/cost, these things were a mass media exhibition that didn’t make any sense as pure private property.
& as a device of exhibition, pinball machines have operator settings like adjustable rules, prices that affect design, but more relevantly, physically specific differences. The angle a machine is at affects the ball’s movement, the material it’s placed on affects the ability to “nudge” before the machine “tilts” (as does the operator’s adjustment of the tilt bob), they break down constantly through use, are modified, different parts wear in different ways, balls get magnetized over time, etc. Some machines are rarer because there was less made, like “Pinball Circus”, the only one available for the public is in Las Vegas. Or in the case of the custom Matrix machine made by the Dutch Pinball Museum, which is only available if you go to the Dutch Pinball Museum. Or the homebrew Undertale machine the person who made brings it to conventions. Etc.
Like a car, there’s a degree to which an owner is always customizing the overall experience, unlike a car, the physically specific history of each machine is the form in which they’re exhibited to the general public.
There are digital pinball simulations, and people put a big screen flat on a table to make a virtual machine resemble a physical one. But I think those (in their virtuality ) are a different form in distinct ways, not the same experience attached to a different commodity. One of those ways, for example, is that in order to ‘get into’ virtual pinball, I had to register for a bunch of forums, know what i’m looking for, follow a github tutorial, and have a certain level of computer & web savvy. To play a pinball machine, i have to go to a place that has chosen to have a specific or multiple specific pinball machines, and have a dollar.
Because of this, I would be hard-pressed to describe a platonic ‘ideal’ of pinball, part of their appeal, at least to me, is that they’re a little messy in this way, that they are inextricable from their physicality in the same way that a roller coaster is. But unlike a roller coaster, they were (for a time) mass media, pop art, broadly distributed aesthetic playthings, etc. & also, like mass sporting events, their design/purpose/history is attached to the people who were allowed and chose to congregate around them, which machines they chose to exhibit and where, who had the resources to manufacture these things (gambling companies) etc.
I think of this as being true for all forms, but pinball to me provides a helpful example (or is just on my mind). Although if you said ‘for those reasons, pinball isn’t art and the written word is’ that would be logically consistent, but very rude…
there are a lot of reasons why these aren’t really comparable
(sorry geist, I didn’t mean to reply to your post there, but it won’t let me undo that for some reason so sorry about that)
I think you might have taken what I said in a somewhat a different way than I meant maybe. Of course a pinball table is a physical object, but they’re also mass-produced. At least when they come off the assembly line, we’re happy to treat them as interchangable—again, it’s the abstract idea of the particular model of table that really makes it what it is, its layout and rule sheet and all that, and the blueprints for its construction etc. etc. Those were even the things that lead to the physical tables—they were made according to those designs and never would have come about otherwise. Sure, once the tables make it out into the world and start moving around and stuff, they may each acquire new characteristics like scuff marks and modded parts or whatnot, but each one still represents an abstract idea in its own right too, a variant on the original idea; you could pick any one of those tables and make a new design from the original plans incorporating the changes and then put that into mass production.
Even when someone makes a unique physical work of art, like a sculpture, we readily understand the idea that it can be “copied,” by someone making a close reproduction of the sculpture, especially if it’s close enough that it’s hard to tell apart from the original. If we didn’t recognize the idea that there’s some kind of abstract “design” of the sculpture, even when it’s a single object, we would have no way of comprehending the idea of a “copy.” How could we make the comparison otherwise?
That’s all I’m really trying to highlight. Obviously when you play a physical table it’s a unique experience. But, every time you play a music file through your computer speakers it’s a unique experience too; the objects in the room influence the sound, your audio equipment experiences wear over time, your body is constantly changing, etc. etc. Still, if you play it repeatedly, you understand the idea that you’re “listening to the same song over and over.” The thing that actually doesn’t change is the bits on your hard drive that describe the audio—those are almost a perfect physical incarnation of the “abstract concept of the song,” and they’re just a really long number, like the number 12.
I think this is important because people often behave in our time and place as if the idea of a work of art is itself a commodity, or should be a commodity, even though I really don’t think that makes any sense and it warps our artistic culture in strange ways. Like, the individual pinball tables of a certain model are a limited resource and bounded in space, as you note, but the plans for the table could be digitized and sent all over the world freely, endlessly, with little practical limits. Those really live in the ether, like the score for a piece of classical music or the recipe for a cake.
Anything that is digitized becomes a quantity, a set of numbers, always. What artists do, generally speaking, even if they work with their hands, is create, or you could say discover, these numbers, speaking a bit loosely. When they do work with their hands, they’re essentially creating the design through the physical medium, a bit like a programming language whose “standard” is given de facto by a reference compiler. Because human senses have resolution limits, there is always going to be some point, maybe theoretical depending on the technology but still, past which we could specify a physical work of art in sufficient detail to make a practically-indistinguishable copy—like, you could scan a sculpture all over with a special imaging system and take chemical samples of of it and so on and come up with a computer representation of it that would be sufficient for someone else to make a for-all-intents-and-purposes perfect copy. A pinball table likewise, even if it’s currently one-of-a-kind. Somewhere out there, the perfect, abstract characterization of the table exists, for our human purposes.
In this sense (and many others) I think artists and scientists are very similar, almost the same. Both concern themselves with physical phenomena to some extent, but what they produce are abstract ideas that characterize the physical phenomena. Scientists characterize their properties and behaviors; artists characterize all the things we can experience through those. This idea is powerful, because when art is thought of as research, as opposed to commodity production which it can never quite ever be anyway, it changes its character in beautiful ways. Suddenly it gives people a reason to pursue new ideas with each piece, to genuinely experiment as artists, to follow the lines of research they personally think are intriguing, to share their methods and techniques like scientists do, and not to get so stuck on ideas like copyright or being dogmatic about “the right way” to work in a certain medium or any number of things that I feel like hold back the arts in our time. If this idea were to catch on I would be so happy…who knows what would happen in the arts. I think it would be wonderful.
Okay I guess nobody replied to this video cause it’s obvious and it’s what we’re all thinking, but this is like totally an indie riff on a Grasshopper Manufacture game, yeah? I mean am I allowed to say this kind of looks cool???
i think there can never be too many games as actual creative work but there can probably be “too many” as like, return-granting economic objects, and it’s a little uncomfortable to me how often the latter category seems to fantasize about doing away with the former if it means being able to sell just a few more copies of work so meticulously designed to fit some steamspy category that the idea of it just not making money feels like an obscure crime against god (gabe newell)
i like some of jeff vogels videogames but its funny to use him as a yardstick for this, the way a straightshootin genre businessman persona that at least felt a little funny and mischievous in contrast with a more romantic period of indie games just sort of sounds increasingly doomed and frantic now that everyone is looking for the same little genre hole with steady returns to hunker down in. what is left for any small businessman in these conditions but to start talking like a final fantasy villain… perhaps we all must tend to the fruits of empire… but enough talk. have at you
i wish i could find the neocities post that talked abt the way the economic stuff in indie games now just took the form of an ever escalating list of empty demands (manage a discord! tiktok! make a trailer… every month! many are saying that just one trailer isn’t enough, anymore. get with it or perish), but like… the odd cultural mix of depression and megalomania that this produces, despair for anyone who can’t hit their tiktok targets vs the unwarranted optimism of those who can, regardless of the qualities of their work over and beyond that… like the sweatiest crypto stuff, a perpetual we’re so over / we’re so back that flattens over time into a single grimace, the crying laughing emoji made flesh, someone giving a conference talk to an empty room about how they’re simultaneously building a perpetual motion device of business which is to bring them everlasting plenty and also exactly one bad day away from spending the rest of their life in Debtor’s Jail. when the guys whose whole thing has been being the Sensible Business Expert start making increasingly fuddled apocalyptic powerpoint presentations about overproduction and spenglerian decline of empire, is that a good sign for anyone who has to live around them,
It’s one of my most anticipated if it wasn’t clear. I love the style and thought Sayonara Wild Hearts was close to perfect as a thing.
Thanks for linkback I checked it out and didn’t realize it was the Wild Hearts folks (which I didn’t really like but I absolutely want more things like it.) This looks cool and impossible to judge from a video because it’s going to live and die by puzzle design.
right, I think my thing is I see more and more people who go about their craft in this very community-management cargo cult businessy way as if it’s a natural part of the practice. people just now learning to draw trying to figure out how to price their pieces, or you take up crocheting so you must set up an etsy, etc. all fungible content for the uber machine.
even this
while I sympathise with the sentiment strikes me as overly commodified and I feel a bit icky about it.
I like art because it’s a thing all people do in all human cultures. I don’t care about use value or needs being fulfilled in top down fashion. I like it as a collective cultural practice because people and the things people have been doing for tens of thousands of years are cool.
I also like how it reflects material conditions and isn’t a pure creation of an individual’s whimsy, so maybe I should embrace the market after all …
yeah i don’t think it’s a serious comparison, i would have spent more time on it if i felt like i could’ve made it
i’m trying to harness some vibez tho
it’s a sane comparison, libraries in the modern age are based in curation by necessity and therefore there’s more quality control in a given library’s collection than there is in a free market
to me i think there are a bunch of externalities around making games vs. writing that i’d want to actually work through before moving the concept away from vibez territory, i guess that’s all i’m trying to say? it feels intuitively A Comparison so i don’t want to just throw it away like i’m insinuating 2 posts ago but yeah
There are too many games. And there are too many books and musics and movies and comics and and yeah
It’s all our fault, too
Missed opportunity to get an aging career actor to narrate the premise of the game.
