videogame things you think about a lot

King of Posters King of Posters 2000
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AAA is weird because I’ve literally never been around more talented or driven people in almost any pursuit but the entire enterprise is fully driven by executive handshakes, IP logic and market analysis (i.e. doing whatever the last guy did). The problems with AAA are just the problems with cog life in any business—all the biggest decisions are made by the least talented people with the least direct experience and the least accountability.

Even outside of the somewhat anti-big-game-company ethos here, most people I know are starting to ask why so much of video games just feels like more of the same now, but to executives there’s just nothing better than a Marvel movie model where they just ship the same thing over and over with minimal investment and maximal returns.

There’s good stuff in AAA—Elden Ring, Death Stranding, etc. but most of those come about because the boss is some kind of weirdo who actually wants to make something. I don’t think making good games is actually very complicated (from an artistic standpoint, at least—every part of game development is kind of baroque and frustrating and constantly broken), but rule number one is probably that you just need to actually want to do it and not just be trying to guess what it would be like to want to do it in order to fulfil some extrinsic motivation. I mean how often do you meet incredible musicians who don’t listen to music or incredible painters who don’t really care about art?

A lot of people I think feel like this must be some mechanical issue of team size or budget or time or markets but from the inside my opinion is just that games have been colonized by exactly the same business monoculture that’s fucking up literally everything else in the world—a meaningless chess game of market success for no one and no reason.

If indie games fare better I think it’s less because big teams are inherently bad and more because there’s absolutely no reason to get into doing them except artistic need. Prospects are so cartoonishly grim that every business guy I know who thinks starting a game company is a good move winds up pivoting to crypto scams almost instantly.

So that’s kind of my 2c on the whole thing—there’s no magic to it; people make culturally vibrant work because they care about the culture and the work and have some personal artistic drive. Big businesses usually don’t because they’re dominated by a culture of moving pieces around to try to win.

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someone i know who works at a more respected AAA company was talking to me at GDC about how the reason his company keeps the team size for their projects around at 80 or whatever vs. a company like Ubisoft is once you get past a certain size it just becomes impossible to manage a project in any sort of coherent way. also “AAA” game dev up until some point in the mid-2000’s was closer to what an “indie studio” is now and never reached the scale of what we think of it being now - so that whole ecosystem is pretty new.

also: re the crypto scam thing, it feels like a good chunk of the indie people i met over the years who didn’t end up trying to pursue it full time (which is most people) ended up working in tech in one capacity or another. not saying they’re into crypto scams, but games seem to serve as a funnel for the tech industry in a lot of ways (which bothers me because i think tech is doing more objective evil in the world).

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I have a lot of specific criticisms of big development but I really do believe the major pathologies are team size and self-selecting middlebrow taste. Up to the studio level all the big heads I’ve known have been super into games and driven to gain respect but they’re working in a culture that strictly defined the bounds due not just to market realities but the culture around them and what the developers on the project actually like. Tell the bulk of the AAA developers that they’ll be working on a Marvel game and it will make them more enthused about the project.

I don’t think making good games is actually very complicated (from an artistic standpoint, at least

I can’t let this one pass! My worldview is anchored on, basically no one knows how to make good games and they’re interesting because people are so bad at anticipating interesting dynamics out of simple rules. Even the best developers can barely tell if an idea is good or not.

Happily it means there’s not much stopping someone from accidentally making something amazing their first game out.

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Biggest teams I’ve been on have been 100-200 people and while project management effectiveness has varied they’ve almost all been united in the fact that the IP, style and most of the major ideas were already set by executives before a creative person even got to look at it. It’s really demoralizing to join a team and be asked for your input only to realize they basically just want you to “feel valued” and the only person whose opinion matters has already put their foot down, but them’s the breaks.

Yeah, the games programmer to Salesforce/Google/Weird Crypto Company/etc. pipeline is real. Once a lot of people enthusiastic about games realize it’s literally just a job and they’re never going to have an ounce of artistic freedom the second question tends to be “who will pay me the most money to do effectively the same work” and as it turns out most of those companies are either running a scam or trying to turn the world into a giant prison.

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This is why live games and early access are interesting to me at all

That they tend to make things worse is not inherent to the model. It’s interesting to see different hands at play over time

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See I guess by good here I mean that it has some real artistic merit in the medium. Marvel games just don’t, you know? They literally cannot. Like Harry Potter and Star Wars, the IP only exists for business reasons and should have been buried over a decade ago. Whether you still maintain childhood enthusiasm or are burnt out and jaded from watching your beloved childhood memories exploited over and over in an experiment to see how much you’ll pay to recapture a shred of their fading ghost, I honestly just expect people to understand what the difference is between that and like… spiritfarer or disco elysium. Even if you don’t personally enjoy those things!

I won’t say where, but I’ve seen a CEO react with absolute unbridled enthusiasm most people reserve for life-changing works of art to pre-pro work for the most generic military shooter I can even imagine. I’m not crazy enough to actually say it but all I could think is “are you fucking insane? This just looks like everything!” until I realized that, yes, that’s the point. This business is a game company and just repeating everything that exists out there means it’s a video game and a market exists for it, which by definition makes it good.

Which honestly is sort of what I mean. That’s not “liking games” in the way that people I know who like games would mean it. That’s just liking products, which is business-brain.

So I guess I should clarify here that I’m not really talking about a technical dimension of good, or even likeable or competent. I’ve played some really cobbled together experimental games that are still at least works of art in the sense that they emerge from someone’s actual artistic drive—the kind of stuff that has that distinct and imitable humanity to it.

I’m not sure, honestly, that the drive towards perfectly executed games is even a good one. We all like it when things don’t crash and when mechanics aren’t frustrating, but attempts to create the perfectly smooth, Body Without Organs version of a game with infinite potential and zero resistance kind of tend to wind up… not good? Horizon Forbidden West is maybe the closest to this I’ve seen. It is a perfectly unblemished egg in which you can proceed effortlessly in any direction and there’s always just enough impulse to keep you moving and it’s honestly pretty bad.

Conversely, most of the things I really think are profoundly great are at least to some extent broken, frustrating or “bad.”

So when I’m talking about good games offhandedly I’m mostly talking about like… something that has stuck with me for years and I still think about as just artistically excellent, rather than something where, you know, I wanted to play forever and never got annoyed.

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I hear the call of the void and it whispers “the tornado section of Crisis City is no more horseshit than Caelid”

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I miss the days when no one expected to make any money from indie game development. So you weren’t shooting for what might sell or worrying about the largest possible audience. You just had an idea that might succeed or fail (and the “failures” were often more entertaining than the successes).

I like to see modern indie games that are direct descendants of things from that era. Sometimes by the original developers (such as Celeste) and sometimes by others who run with an idea (such as Getting Over It). There are also cases such as Karel Pool’s Medieval Clash, which I believe started a little genre but was never acknowledged.

The closest thing I see to this now is what people are doing in Dreams for PS4, but there’s only so far you can push that.

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a videogame culture thing i think about a lot is a career advice post from a hiring manager type who said they like to tell people they did something wrong in the interview just to see which way they react:

  1. uh, uh, i fucked up. please execute me with a sword [bursts out crying, tries to grab a bunch of branded pens while running away, trips over a chair, headlocked by security and pants fall down revealing tiny dick, all the character artists are standing aroundtaking pictures and saving them to the “tiny dick - reference” folder on their work PCs]
  2. thanks for the feedback… i really feel like i can elevate my art to the next level once i onboard this critique :slight_smile:

and i always imagine like
APPLICANT: GREAT question. now i have a follow up ask: how do we take my piece ‘in the penal colony’ from merely epic… up to awesomesauce.
INTERVIEWER: mr kafka, we are pleased to announce you just won yourself a writing position on Borderlands 4.

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I always feel like what people are often circling around in this discussion (I know I am) is really just the idea of, like, unalienated artistic production.

The history of video games is pretty weird for art because A. it’s in living memory and B. it gets captured and devoured nearly instantly by commerce, so aside from early teletype games, video games basically just were products for the first couple decades of their lifespan, until kids who grew up with ataris started using them to do… you know, basically what humans have been doing with paint and chisels and stretched animal skins for millions of years—trying to do artistic work within a culture as a person with ideas.

Whereas this is just something we take for granted in every other artistic pursuit! There are literal boat loads of supermarket novels written by teams of people about middle aged danger men with outrageously large hands but nobody would ever put these together with like… The Tiger Flu and say these were both simply products for different market segments. We just understand that these are fundamentally different kinds of thing.

In the early indie games scene, like with the novel for hundreds of years of its existence, the fact that there wasn’t even an inkling of money or career in there meant there was just no reason except for artistic production to do anything. But the fact that for games that comes after decades of multi-billion dollar commerce for some reason leads people to not even realize what kind of thing they’re dealing with here

(edits because typing is a challenge today apparently)

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this is probably my favourite novel set in vancouver

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It’s outrageously good!

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I work in AAA as well, so a lot of my malaise is just sort of a “what am I even doing” kind of feeling. I’m also very burnt out from shipping the game in 2021, then crunching on live season “content” for the past several months nonstop until now, and I can’t muster the excitement.

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(deleted post because it was not meant to be a reply, but was on accident)

Today, a videogame is about “core pillars” and “key demographics” but 20 years ago, a videogame could be about a guy trying to get a sandwich but then aliens invaded, and they had a gun that shot chickens, which explode.

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FWIW I did enjoy the Spider-Man game a lot, maybe we just need to give them Marvel heroes who do inherently cool stuff like swing around.

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Sure, I think we agree on how they like games, but I think it’s the same relationship to the Product as the audience has; not constructed from business value but from the small consistent unexamined moderately pleasurable exchanges meeting or gently exceeding expectations.

That’s generally how I define middlebrow: high-quality production that seeks as its highest goal to set and meet expectations. The greatest sin, then, is challenging assumptions or delivering something else than what’s promised.

heck yeah

I’ve got my own hangups about craft and occasionally need a good poke to tell the difference between bad bad and bad to serve the purpose of the product (that urge! to correct things when I think, no, that’s not how you do it)…but as I spent my time in the Big Studio Dungeons explaining, I’m always for something that has one thing it really cares about, damn the consequences, vs something polished that aims only to do nothing too badly.

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And getting back to this, I think this is the deepest seductive part. That there’s a ton of space within commercially-viable games to make cool stuff and it’s always so easy to accommodate it just a little bit more, developers find themselves inching away from personal stuff to more mainstream work because they’ll still enjoy what they’re making and the work they’re doing.
If it’s a choice between a personal moment that nobody you show it to really understands and something that clicks and functions with satisfying mechanical precision it’s really hard to stick to your guns and not make the people around you happy.

And to that end, the loss of the energy and emerging criticism of indie work that blossomed in the early '10s really hurts these spaces. From what I’ve seen they’re regrowing a little bit in insular university and patreon communities but it’s really hard to have discussion and the critical competitive/cooperative environment that a tight scene provides. A huge amount of what criticism there is requires a minimum bar of commercial appeal to even see a work.

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Despite myself I did like the new Spider-Man, for at least a few hours, mostly because they preserved the excellent swinging game back from Spider-Man 2 (of whose sequels only a few didn’t pare down) and managed to push the Arkham ‘rhythm combat’ style a little past its cul-de-sac. But the thought of consigning that huge production to at least a decade of sequels to what started out as a pretty conservative return to begin with is pretty bleak.

well better that than Ratchet

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idk if anything is as bleak as sunset overdrive’s fakeout ending that namechecks neogaf

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gimme