i think this is sort of by design? i mean there is sort of a learned helplessness to games because of the insularity of the industry and people just being more cagey about speaking out in general. and the fact that the games industry was birthed out of an extremely anti-labor environment. everything is sort of displaced onto the individual and any failures people experience in the industry are treated more of a failure to innovate (either on the part of the individual or the part of the large companies) instead of… just a shit working environment.
but it also goes back to people buying into the libertarian dream of the tech industry and just kind of passively waiting for new technology to solve old problems. and then having no answer when so many problems turn out to have nothing to do with technology. because it turned out they didn’t account for that. because everything is so STEM-inflected even when it doesn’t really make sense for it to be.
but yeah it leaves everything feeling like a very unstable series of unrelated isolated events rather than something that’s connected at all. which i guess part of the attempt for this is to connect more of those threads. and realize that it is all related to each other.
to me tbh the breaking point is all the indie publisher shit because it feels like such a mirror of where the industry went in the 90’s and into the situation that made small scale games a commercial/industry impossibility and that indie games were reacting to in the first place. and it’s like - not particularly down to just repeat history here and act like it’s not what’s happening.
(and also maybe partly a justification from me to myself of why i’m doing the EGW stuff)