Just off the cuff, I feel like the question DS, RDR2 and TLOU2 raise is whether we should be valuing certain game design premises on whether they really provide anything of value that is comparable to their size and budget. Could the same results be achieved with different (usually smaller) means? I plan to unpick TLOU2 for what it did well to sieve out whether the AAA space is really providing us much value even if it does generate novel bits and pieces. The problem is people want to put the power of massive corporate support into genuinely creative projects which just leads to a lot of Faustian contracts that are hard to ignore but often overshadow the projectâs true worth.
The environments in TLOU2 are probably the biggest example of this. The level of detail and number of unique assets is frankly Baroque to the point where weâre getting very little benefit (slightly better but ephemeral feeling of real places) compared to what is being achieved technically and in terms of labour.
The ânewâ stuff is much smaller by comparison but I donât have time (right now) to get into every point I liked and why it could probably be achieved differently.
TLDR TLOU2 could be massively scaled down and lose very little?
oh i mean i definitely think these things have paid their way into artistic credibility. iâm sure that in places they contain An Idea or An Intention but i also think this is really the bare minimum you can expect from any creative work, and âthe bare minimumâ is the bar these guys have paid a lot of money to set for themselves in the first place. and part of the way they maintain that bar is by pretending more interesting works just donât exist, or donât matter because they donât pass some spurious qualification. plenty of games are made by and for lgbtq people but how many of them have enough money for a fawning guardian article that relegates the non-blockbuster history of this format to an irrelevant aside?
(i mean making fun of guardian articles is maybe a cheap shot as iâm pretty sure they signed a faustian pact to keep publishing some of the dumbest people alive in exchange for making keir starmer the head of the labour party, but nevertheless)
if we want to talk about intentional creative choices or small discoveries, of the kind that iâd hope would be intrinsic to the act of human consciousness navigating the world with or without a budget, then we would have plenty to chew on if we just looked through someoneâs deviantart account of pregnant snoopy iconography. how do they represent snoopy as pregnant? what artistic choices do they make to get closer to whatever real psychic charge they get from this idea? itâs interesting to think about and i mean that sincerely! people make small discoveries and have interesting ideas all the time, in every format. but most of them are lost to the wind and at least one contributing reason why is because works with huge amounts of capital are inherently able to terraform cultural life to their advantage. rewriting history is part of how they secure their investment: for every one conscious thought in these works there are a million that had to be buried in order for it to be celebrated.
so from this perspective i just donât think thereâs a need to engage with these things at all. anything genuinely new and unique theyâre doing comes at the cost of an enormous exploitative hierarchy, anything else is probably being done better somewhere else. anyway, there are plenty of hobbyist works that do things AAA âcanâtâ do, by dint of their inherent clunkinesses of scale and dependency on investors and the kind of people who are able to survive and get promoted in that system to begin with. how come the discussion is always about what we could be missing out on if we donât keep these things around rather than what weâre already missing out on by allowing them to exist? how many people have to be sentenced to QA hell in order to support the aspirations of the auteur CEO?
this is the framing I use a lot to get myself really angry about all of it
like, weâve decided to take the worst parts of auteur theory and used that to underwrite an entire industry of labor abuse just so these men in power can go âbut videogames, see, they can have a Pointâ
and the points theyâre making are rarely any more interesting or provocative than your average TV show; Iâve talked to my brother and my cousins and neither of them have any real understanding of how mechanics contribute subtextually to a game or aesthetic theories or even like, film studies, but both of them have pretty much admitted that there havenât been any interesting mainstream game stories told in a while, and have been successfully pointing out the very strange dissonances that arise from a bunch of white cis men making stories about LGBTQ+ people in TLoU2âs specific case
like, this disengagement is already happening with my brother and my cousin and it might be BECAUSE they donât have any real stake in videogames being âââââââââartâââââââ" like everyone else in the industry seems to need them to be. thereâs been a lot of handwaving and justification around this industry because we canât have any cracks in the rhetorical armor around it - otherwise theyâll see that all of this time and effort is being used to, in the words of tim, â[animate] an underpants-wearing monkey drinking a can of Hebrew Coca-Cola for a videogame cut-scene that was, quite frankly, skippable anyway.â
there was a part in a recent waypoint podcast where they mentioned that if you look at actual sales figures etc, the last of us is actually way closer to young sheldon than any actual prestige tv.
I think the big thing missing from the schreier stuff is just how bad itâs gotten as far as fandom in games (and media in general) goes
because yeah, the working conditions in retail are mostly awful and being a professional game dev is pretty far removed from that, but you donât have a fan of walmart going into a store and getting mad at an employee on behalf of walmart, which is a thing that happens very specifically in industries that produce big cultural works. not to say that it canât happen in places like retail, but the real danger of the industry is that itâs turned its own damn consumers into scabs - itâs not even people who just need the money, itâs people who would do the work for free just so that they can prove their own gamer credentials
like I remember having an actual labor organizer who was moving into helping with hollywood unions come visit at one of the GWU bay area meetings and one of the biggest questions she had was centered around how easy it was to replace current workers. some of the other people at the meeting tried to frame it as this kind of supply and demand thing, where thereâs a lot of supply (potential employees) for a small amount of demand (game dev jobs), but thatâs also the case in hollywood. so I tried to talk about this dynamic of consumers acting as scabs for companies and someone else that wasnât as close to the industry said that the cultural shift would come eventually as we started to get unions going and I wouldnât need to worry about that dynamic
but itâs like, I donât think he understood that the industry has already organized? itâs just not for labor rights. and thatâs kind of the big missing piece from the unionization conversation imo; not only do you have to get workplaces organized but you have to deal with this massive, massive culture of people who have entire identities based around their consumption of video games, that have then had those identities SUCCESSFULLY COMMODIFIED via twitch and youtube and razer and asus, which have become the dominant form of how people engage with videogames these days. thatâs not just going to go away imo
Can you expand on how consumers would act as scabs? In terms of making boycotts difficult?
I like framing the way that game workers are acculturated as fans as part of the culture issue we need to break. I donât think itâs all that major among people whoâve been through the ringer a few times, but itâs one of the major class markers between QA and other workers.
well to me itâs a lot of like, AAA using their fear of review bombs and gamer anger to realign aesthetic goals in a way that makes it hard for those in the industry to even fight for what they want creatively, much less in terms of labor
like, the firings of jessica price and alison rapp from arenanet and nintendo respectively were mostly driven by consumer rage against them for reasons that werenât great
and itâs had very real effects in organizing most notably with the SAG-AFTRA strike of a few years ago where they reached an agreement that a lot of the union thought was pretty mixed, mostly over the bonus structure stuff they ended up with. the union wanted secondary payment on games that sold more than 2 million copies (âresidualsâ), the companies wanted a bonus per-session, gamers said that voice actors didnât deserve residuals because game devs didnât get residuals, some game devs agreed. so gamer anger over this kind of stuff caused the conversation to go toward âvoice actors shouldnât get residuals if the rest of the team doesnât get residualsâ as opposed to âeveryone working on the game should get residualsâ. itâs gamers getting game devs mad at other game devs, and it resulted in a compromised agreement that lowered the bargaining power of the union
I worked at Starbucks and dozens of occasions when someone verbally harassed me because I wasnât smiling and making eye contact up to Starbucksâ âfinish and connectâ standard.
Gamers are a shitty demographic but the product-as-identity isnât unique to games by any means. Thereâs a negging fourth wall monologue about Starbucks fans in Youâve Got Mail.
Melee combat. Itâs hard to anticipate when a combo string will and wonât continue and the arbitrary rules arenât worth mastering given how much of the time you spend in melee combat.
Random skinny scars being able to pull a jacked woman out from under a truck and to her feet in like a second without resistance.
Every love interest has pregnancy drama and are unlikeable. Like Dinaâs character is basically impulsive, pregnant conscience for Ellie. Owen has no positive character traits except for he jokes around a bit.
imo one of the grimmer things about TLOU2 is how much it shows that holier-than-thou straight dude liberal dipshits like druckmann are the only people in AAA whoâre allowed to write about queer folks. even if a queer writer was able to climb the ladder to where they can influence big budget stories, The Fans would harass them out of the industry & dox them and their families
instead, we get to watch straight dudes fuck up our stories and get lauded for it
I donât agree with that article and Carolyn Jongâs thesis that consumer violence movements harm the unionization cause; like how that article ends, contemplating it pushing workers together, Iâve seen people see it as cause that they need to get better protections from their worker. I donât think itâs an accelerationist argument but Iâve seen people realize they need to ask for protection from this from their employers and talk about protecting each other. Game unionization still seems largely a project of indies and academics, unfortunately.
I saw a lot of poor behavior during the SAG-AFTRA strike as well; people not realizing that others getting benefits only reflected poorly on their own able to wring money out of their employer.
Thinking about lowering the difficulty to mitigate the amount of time I spend scavenging. Itâs really boring to run through the environments and look for supplies that are (at least to my poor eyes) hardly perceptible against the background. I donât want to make the combat any easier since itâs already predicated mostly on patience than skill with executing mechanics. The number of enemies is the challenge, and I know on lower difficulties there is less tension because of that.
Itâs just this scavenging suuuuuuuucks.
Auto collect is cool but sometimes opening a drawer and waiting for the auto-detect to activate after the lengthy opening animation really kills the pace. Like 19 hours in I was also tempted to just tune the difficulty just to make scavenging and the other mundane stuff easier. Iâve made the companion AI more aggressive which is a neat feature I wish more of this kind of game had.
