Well, like… people who survive in this industry, especially for a long time, get business brain, because their bosses all have it and if you don’t then you are going to be unhappy. So I’m using executives offhandedly here—executives and also toadies.
The last part there, I mean, I think I did mention that before. If you go back far enough that’s all you find because nobody even thought about games as a creative pursuit at all, right? It was a question of what kind of flashing and beeping machine with roughly the power of a modern calculator people in a pub were going to plug quarters into.
Honestly I just can’t help feel like this is a losing strategy now. And I’ve been through that wringer so many times, on products that combine all the best features of everything that has been the most popular along with the best in technical excellence money can buy and, as it turns out, absolutely nothing to capture the imagination, no authentic joy, just really nothing of substance to give to anyone. And yeah, almost all of those projects fizzled.
If games are an artistic product on the level of shows, movies, comics, albums and paintings then I think we are making a really serious mistake if we don’t treat them more like those things.
Actually there is a pretty interesting thing going in lit crit right now with a lot of people responding to a new wave of commercial critique which is more or less “this book has x situation and y situation and z kind of character” like you’re shopping for a used car. Except in lit people rightfully realize this is a completely insane way to write and talk about books!
I shared an office with someone from Devolver for a bit. I’ve never shipped anything for them, but I have worked on a number of titles for Humble and I’ve worked with people who shipped stuff for both Devolver and Annapurna, and the goal for all these companies is to be genre leaders, rather than followers, right? And honestly even though they have a much different feel to their releases, they all tend to have a holistic way of looking at games rather than the mechanics forward approach that a lot of developers (especially developers led by designers or programmers) tend to take.
Not everything the big indie publishers publish is good, for sure! And a really staggering number of great titles never land a publisher or just never get the attention they deserve, but the big indie pubs do have a tendency to pick winners.
I mean, you don’t actually want to be the publisher that ships an iteration of Slay the Spire that some people say is almost as good, right? You want to be the publisher who ships Slay the Spire
i am of two minds about this because yes it is absolutely positively braindead the way people have taken tvtropes or the bechdel test or randomly learning about something like the 180 degree rule in films and treat every form of media consumption like a good/bad quality checklist. people take broad academic ideas or systemic social issues or at this point literally any form of pattern recognition and have cinemasinned their brains into being their own focus group for every kind of media and it is incredibly depressing
BUT
EVEN SO
i would read a lot more books and watch a lot more movies if they were hypertagged as well as manga or anime are. like if i could go to a search engine and check and uncheck boxes in pure consumer mode to say i want this kind of romance and this kind of worldbuilding and not this kind of violence and these kinds of characters and this kind of referentiality and not this kind of politics it would absolutely rule.
I’m also of two minds about this because like… I don’t have some kind of big issue with tagging content just generally. Like you get those people who are like “content warnings are bad because students need to be ATTACKED by IDEAS” and it’s like… ok maybe settle down it is a book. I don’t think there’s anything inherently bad about it.
But it’s not criticism, right? Books are so, so SO much more than a series of fantasy situations, and critics have a responsibility to go deeper than just giving people a laundry list or a buyer’s guide.
I want to live in the tagged-up world and I think it’s because I’ll always watch/read/play interesting things rather than “good.” This often means I am a media raccoon gladly wolfing down garbage or washing cotton candy in the river. But! So much of the experience for me is thinking about the media outside the page and if I can’t connect to it in that way there’s nothing for me
I basically never care about “quality” if I can even put my finger on it. It’s all about the ideas, which too can be tagged
also just a games issue in general because i mean i have a movie reviewer who i like to read and even when i disagree with him it illuminates something about the work and serves as both artistic analysis and consumer review and it’s nice
and the situation with games as has been said a million times is that only long games are profitable, no one person has the time to play even “just the major releases” in a way that’s fast enough to be deemed profitable for an outlet–and actually have time to develop an interesting insight, and doubly so in a world where outlets already pay peanuts, and gamers themselves are all the worst parts of sports, religion, and comic book nerds combined into one making any deviation from consensus opinion seen as personal attack on their mortal soul or the metacrtiic score or “just wanting attention for clicks” which all has lead to a situation where literally no one can actually develop an [interesting and popular] critical voice. that’s not to say no interesting games criticism is being done. the interesting stuff moved from blogs to podcasts and substacks and patreons and video essays. and the popular stuff is let’s plays and videos that don’t really have anything more to say that “check this out” good/bad qualifiers
it’s more like i am saying that the very nature of the thing will not allow there to be a middlebrow roger ebert of games which would be useful i think
I mean I’m with you on the “interesting” thing but from a lit crit standpoint it seems like an odd dichotomy to me!
I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a book review really discuss if a book is good or bad. In fact I don’t think most book reviewers (at least for lit) really ever review books they didn’t like. Typically the point is that critique is also compelling writing and it has something more substantial to say about the work. Cutting that down to a list of “here’s what’s in the book on a very surface level” seems… I dunno—sad.
For games? I mean you could probably replace most written game reviews with a bulleted list of what’s in it. You could probably replace most written game reviews with nothing. I’m not really sure I need to read “‘God of War: He’s a Dad Now and Sad’ is the biggest one yet with 7000 hours of gameplay and 1.3 million achievements that gamers will love. 11/10” ever again, really.
I agree, but what’s weird to me is this incredibly demanding, entitled minority of hardcore gamers is like… honestly a problem the games press kind of created and now is hamstrung by. It’s just not that many people in terms of all the people who play games, but it’s a hyper-engaged minority no platform seems to want to regulate even when they make the entire field sort of a nightmare.
I don’t really have a broader point except I hope someday everyone moves past coddling those people
i mean some people definitely get self definition out of being the self-elected police of “quality”, others might feel totally disconnected from existing forms but not have a sense yet that this dissatisfaction is something that can be articulated or changed. in general i think people relate even to their own tastes via the forms they have to hand and that the popular whether good or bad is not so much the unfiltered version of what people really want so much as it is the ambiguous, refracted version of that as filtered thru history.
i don’t know that this is something we actually disagree about but it’s on my mind, since a thing about gen 1 indie is that a lot of those guys were invested in the idea of the existing games industry as just a bottleneck that stood in the way of people and what they wanted - which it is, but then when the designated alternatives had their time in the sun the results somehow ended up never being that convincing. and i think it’s partly because people in that space spent a lot of time hyping each other about a kind of Silent Majority who existed already in the culture and who just had to be cc’d in the right way before they’d come in and fix everything (with their wallets). there was an emphasis on the audience as something which already existed and just had to be identified and claimed, rather than as a provisional shape that had to be produced and invented and which people could see themselves in or not from there - and i think that’s part of why those audiences were ultimately only borrowed, and why a lot of earlier indie stuff seemed to go into increasingly conservative business-brain death spirals the morning after their promised majorities failed to appear.
speaking of this, i watched this documentary Us and the Game Industry awhile back for a podcast episode which follows around people like Jason Rohrer and Jenova Chen and feels like a perfect time capsule of a particular era and ideology of “indie”. my friend i watched it with described it as like a “Scientology recruitment video for the indie games industry” and that is… very accurate.
people like Jason Rohrer are in it referring to themselves in this very romanticized way as if they’re like scattered network of anarchist squatters working with the tools of the original pioneers. i remember “this feels like a new Wild West” line being very much in the air at the time. this John Carmack tweet reminds me of the way Rohrer talks in the movie:
Jenova Chen also says in an interview at Journey’s launch party towards the end of the film that he hopes the success of the game will help change the consciousness of the industry towards this idea of more “compassionate” non-violent games. i think many people who have been in the space for awhile still believe that they’re part of this project of legitimizing more serious, respectable, non violent, artistically important games. but their imagination is often lacking when it comes to envisioning how that will actually materialize (other than like, having more Annapurnas or something).
tl;dr a lot of those people definitely saw themselves as blazing a path towards something different, but it feels like the only way they assumed that would happen was through like the sheer power of their creative insights about game design and thru market validation. in terms of more radical structures of funding/distributing resources/creating more egalitarian spaces for this stuff, that mostly didn’t materialize. that’s because most of these people are techno-libertarians and didn’t believe in any of that kind of stuff. they either didn’t have the worldview capable of understanding the way the market would just absorb this stuff like it does with anything else, or that’s just what they wanted to happen all along.
but to me - that also means that some kind of more stable alternative to AAA is still a possibility! it just hasn’t even really been tried on a large scale yet. i think the best thing this space can do is separate itself from the tech industry and the sort of ideology behind the tech industry… because there is way too much ambient faith in the space that tech will answer/solve our problems. i have seen few signs of that changing for the better, though… because games are often drawing from the same pool of people who work in tech, who are way more easily susceptible and trusting to the ways the tech industry pulls the wool over people’s eyes. so that’s a big challenge.
I definitely agree with this summary of early indie games history (I think what actually happened is after Steam and the existing games press integrated indie games, the audience for III and AAA actually became mostly the same people), but I want to be clear I’m talking about gigantic real and non-theoretical audiences that are actually out there buying stuff but have little to no contact with the traditional games press.
That includes groups like younger people (I mean the average AAA player is what, 34 at this point?) who are playing some big corporate games (Fortnite, Sea of Thieves, Roblox) but primarily play much lower production value stuff like Phasmaphobia, Valheim and an assortment of weird trash games that have become huge hits (I’m On Observation Duty, etc.). So it’s pretty clear that for a large number of players even in the English speaking world, industry ideas of polish and quality are just not as important as a lot of people make them out to be. This stuff is already really big business but it lives entirely on Steam and Twitch and basically out of the hands of most publishers and press.
Like I said, I have seen a number of industry indie devs realize this market segment exists and decide to do their little trick (release a more polished clone of an existing hit) only to get eaten alive because nobody cares. Because there’s no underlying “market need”—it’s just a mostly younger audience playing games that are popular with their friends and the streamers they watch. It’s completely foreign to the way they’re used to thinking about design.
So when I talk about how I think the majority of gamers don’t care about polish, I just want to be clear that I don’t mean that I sort of intuit that they don’t based on how I think people ought to feel—this is an actual huge group of people that exists and they are already out there playing stuff.
Edit: I also wanted to bring up that the games markets in the non-English speaking world are easily 10x the size of what we tend to think of the game industry player base as and there’s another huge segment where a lot of it is still like… 20 year old games. Source: I worked on the world’s biggest IP for a couple years and nobody I talk to in games has heard of it (over 800m lifetime users or around 1 in 10 living human beings, which is sort of scary to think about)
Is this related to the whole “squeecore” thing that happened in SFF a little while back, or coming at this from a different place? Because a lot of that was about how a lot of modern SFF stuff seems built to meet the list of tropes, and then sold on it, and yeah, games 100% do that and games reviews do that, and there is a lot of overlap in audience there.
i feel like my disconnection/alienation from whatever the Indie Games Ecosystem is supposed to be is in here somewhere. it really comes off to me like the collective view of what “independent/hobbyist” game development looks like as a social space and industry is insanely distorted by subcultural mythologizing and like, white collar professionalist realism and conversations about that world tend to have huge blind spots about these things. like, Indie Games is not a space that is culturally represented by nobody solo artists making something from nothing or whatever, indie games is the name that’s been given to a wave of what are essentially entrepreneurial software development start-ups that just happen to target “disruption and innovation” in the context of the entertainment software industry, and like, the free time hobby projects of middle class STEM workers on sabbatical or whatever. it’d just be polemics to say it’s impossible but i really don’t think the priorities generally produced by being in either of those situations or occupying that socioeconomic strata is really conducive to art that feels really engaged and grounded lol, a lot of this body of work is the product of a social bubble of clean cut lifelong careerists.
to me it kind of illustrates how eclipsed our vision of what form these things can actually take are that stuff as basic and frictionless as Disco Elysium and Inscryption are supposed to be like, the great impassioned criterions of the medium and not at best breezy intuitive exercises in genre fiction that never really coalesce into any unified focus more ambitious than finding novel ways to jangle keys in your face.
i can appreciate that something like Disco is trying to reach for something but it’s sense of form is so cluelessly insulated in nerd shit and cloying at every moment to come off as cleverly executed that it really does still come off as the product of an entrepreneurial environment more interested in creating some kind of cathartic moment to moment relationship with the player that’ll produce satisfaction and attachment than in constructing something pointedly deliberate for them to see. it’s fine i guess but it does kind of bother me to see it held up so universally as like, artistically groundbreaking and the matured game or whatever when it’s aesthetic horizons don’t extend beyond and actually share a lot of DNA with the work of nebula award type speculative fiction/SF&F bluecheck ebook authors. like, how much of it’s pitch to the audience is cathartic worldbuilding intrigue and other Things That Make The Audience Feel Cool really skewed what it was trying to accomplish towards fulfilling an existing consumer desire to Explore Something Interesting and that made it really difficult to not be cold on it despite trying to give it a chance.
i don’t get what people see in the writing, i really understand what the devs meant when they were like “we viewed twitter as our competition when we wrote the dialogue” because every single line is a calculated attempt at charm or memorability that will prove the game’s paramount wit or something in a very “throw everything at the wall” manner that i found extremely tedious to read and very reminiscent of obnoxious drewtoothpaste-esque weird twitter expat podcaster guys, literally the first thing it’s self assuring affect reminded me of when i started reaching for comparisons was anthony burch’s borderlands 2 script lol, or maybe something like portal 2 which is honestly kinda just as reddit to me.
it’s not like, incompetent at what it wants to do i guess but i don’t find what it wants to do any more generative than like, the average 5/10 streaming service sci fi thing or whatever that gideon the ninth thing is, it prioritizes keeping it’s perceived target audience pleased and engaged to the preclusion of most aesthetic decisions that could genuinely challenge their audience on an interior level, and i feel like the grindset entrepreneurialism of Indie Games encourages and molds creative priorities in this loyalty building direction. it all gives me cause to have an extremely dim view of the idea that the indie game publishers are facilitating strong work.
coming back to that white collar social bubble thing, it is really a huge roadblock to a lot of these games ability to connect with me that the class of people who produce and consume them seem to only operate in reference to the discussions and narratives and priorities of their abstracted social world, with no real sense of materialism or consciousness of material circumstances. most indie games feel less expressive and more conceptual, it annoys me how often they superimpose a narrativization of life onto a game shell rather than like, aesthetically drawing a game from their own experience of life, i feel such a weird lack of convicted or developed interiority from the abstract enthusiasm for speculation that becomes the thematic thrust of them.
i was originally going to post something that effected a lot of these points in the games you’re playing thread because i tried the Supraland demo and i was genuinely kind of floored by how devoid of inspiration it felt in comparison to how praised it apparently is. i got on this track of thought by wondering how it’s possible every dude who retires from software dev to make his Dream Game thinks the whole “nostalgic game tribute with vague lost childhood/coming of age themes” is something that’ll connect real deep with people, that tunic game seems like the exact same thing and i don’t understand what i’m supposed to get out of it other than “distracted for a few hours”. like seriously why do they all think it’s so fucking compelling to spend half a decade or more trying to meticulously recreate the emotional throughline of the lego movie, it genuinely reeks of some kind of insane suburbanite cultural insularity that goes way way beyond games themselves.
i think part of holding games to the standards of other art forms is actually having a dialectical conversation with what other mediums are doing and experimenting with, maybe more of an eye towards what makes games the same and not like, special and unique and epic or whatever. games recursively referencing their own canon annoys me but it bothers me more that referenced works in other mediums require some type of broader canonization by populism or by passing the judgement of some media aggregation system or scene.
tbh in a big picture sense this is probably more emblematic of a wider cultural attitude that compulsively suggests art needs to justify itself and is definitely beyond the scope of a prescriptive answer like “games people should read more books and hang out with people that arent exactly like them!” but i’m stuck thinking about this kind of thing a lot in working on a game lately. i see a lot of recursion in the game spaces in front of me and it prompts me to realize the stuff happening there has very little if anything to do with me. it’s been making me fixate on figuring out my detachment from indie games in, uh, this level of detail lol, ig it’s important to me to be deliberate about why i’m trying not to make something like this
I mean fwiw I thought Superliminal was pretty… missable.
So, I don’t disagree with anything you’re saying but I feel like I should clarify that when I talk about an artistic impulse in game development I’m discussing it from the standpoint of literally being allowed to have your own ideas at work like, you know, most people have had doing commercial art before 10-20 years ago when it was simply decided that the entertainment industry should consist basically of planned, centrally controlled markets.
I think it’s fair to point out that from the outside, something like Outer Wilds is still a “commercially viable game” rather than a revolutionary act. But, you know, A24 movies are still commercially viable movies. People are also divided on whether A24 is a high water mark in art house cinema revival or just another recycling of existing ideas from real artists for genre tourists. But this is honestly not a debate I’m even interested in participating in.
My goal is that we get to have ideas at work instead of being told what to make by a marketing executive because it was popular the last time. It’s about being in touch with a culture, even if it’s a popular culture, rather than following a 30 year plan that shareholders have signed off on because it shows numbers all going up.
Because to me, like… this is my trade. I’ve evaluated other options and they’re working in programming for tech companies that are trying to make the world into a big prison or working in marketing for tech companies that are trying to make the world into a big prison.
Should games have a viable radical queer art scene? Sure, fine art and music should also have a viable radical queer art scene that isn’t basically just pretend. We should probably not live in a society that profoundly oppresses people into working someone richer for them, like, at all.
But I’m not really trying to reform games as a cultural instrument on some deep level. When I started working in games full time I worked with a lot of really interesting and creative people making and selling basically whatever they wanted. We put stuff in games just because we felt it was poignant or just because it was goofy and made us laugh. Now it’s like I have to do Warhammer again even though it bombed the last time because two guys who individually make 100x my annual salary shook hands (this isn’t an actually true story because if it was I wouldn’t even be allowed to say so, but it did nearly happen if I hadn’t quit a place I was working at).
And when I apply to positions at indie game companies and talk about what I’d be working on their response is like “the only games that make money in our segment are shooting galleries” or “cozy games are huge right now.” Everyone wants to be Disney and forgets that even popular art is made by artists and craftspeople, not by outsmarting markets or signing brand deals.
So my critical position on this stuff is maybe more like… William Morris than Donna Haraway. I’m not asking people to reconceptualize their relationship to society and technology (even though, yeah absolutely it would probably be good if we did) so much as pointing out that the machine hurts the workers and it makes bad clothes that fall apart.
