It’s very interesting to me reading these past few posts while reading a book about the animation industry transitioning to a more Hollywood system (with its constraints and liberations) during the late 1920s and early 1930s. Very similar anxieties and angst being worked through now in videogames it seems to me. I think the late 2000s and 2010s was this industry’s 1928-1934 like it was for seven-minute cartoons.
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He still talks like that. Apple is probably a very good partner for him.
funny thing is, I was working with them and pitching a narrative design that was maybe somewhat more interesting than this, but then they managed to hire a writer and made the decision to integrate The Story That Puzzle Games Have. Of course, my narrative was entirely abstracted, conceptual, superimposed metaphysics onto a game shell…but games aren’t inherently narrative objects, right? They straddle between clockwork machines, intense engineering, and prescriptive narrative spaces and there are confused demands that all projects satisfy all these traits.
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lol i just realized i meant to type Supraland and not Superliminal
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ahahaha
Supraland is intolerably teutonic
I don’t understand how it escaped Roblox
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To return to topic, I feel like I sympathize with Sam Porter Bridges a lot because I also cry every time I connect to the internet
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Wreckless: The Yakuza Missions for Xbox really really needed a freeroam mode. One time during a mission I wandered around the game’s excellent realization of Hong Kong and found an elevator to an underground chamber that was not used for anything. I wonder if there’s a way to run a trainer on the xbox to just run a mission indefinitely
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dunking on disco elysium with this much energy (and this is a rare response, afaik, so it’s interesting), i gotta know what floats your boat instead just for reference
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the best thing about supraland was the weird german ditty during the end credits
oh I think about the Land Shark gun from Armed and Dangerous all the time
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3ds eshop going offline means that nobody is going to experience the excellent and weird Dillon’s Dead Heat Breakers, a game that TFs your Mii into an animal in the opening cutscene of the game. A game where you hire NPCs in a hotel bar room. A game with Tower Defense + Top Down Beat em Up + Driving Combat gameplay. It’s so weird and charming, and is going to be lost to history because there was never a physical release in NA
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Been reading this convo with interest because I work in a weird corner of the industry where I am not the one green lighting shit but I am part of a green light process. It’s taught me a lot about how these executive handshake deals work and why shit gets made and funded and all I’ve taken away from it is that risk rules everything.
The kind of risks a corporate exec is willing to take are different than the type of risks a random individual will take with themselves and their health and future. Neither group is more or less conservative with risk than the other, they are just working with different piles of money and moving in different social groups with different ways of thinking and talking about risk and success and their future personally. A risk for one is a success for the other. Things that are not risks for indies (shipping something niche and of the heart) are reputational and business risks to someone who’s expected to only ship big ass things.
Another way to think of it is that many indie commercial games are smaller and humbler than AAA games not because they are made by teams with less resources (stick with me on this) but because the kind of products they tend to become are legitimately less popular than the big polished ones I’m growing sick of. It’s not that the team makes something small because they’re scrappy, but that the scrappy products are gonna exist no matter what, but the only teams anyone will fund to make them are similarly small. Selling 100k copies is a risk for an open world game, but a success case for some visual novel. The small game and the big game are all fully existing in the same commercial world with the same types of guys handshaking, they are just being judged against different risks. There is no difference here really. So yeah I agree with the quote: commercial indie games are not culturally represented by solo artists. They are not culturally represented at all because they are a figment of risk and expense and shit.
I guess what I’m saying is that there is a joy and a freedom to art made outside this system of risk and I have given up searching for it in that space. I want art made by indulgent explorers who risked nothing to give it to me. I want art from people who are sharing something with me and daring nothing. And I can only find that art for free! Most of the time anyway, haha.
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kinda makes me glad I never tried shopping my hobby project around to publishers because I guessed they’d reject it. Also it always seemed like they wanted a near-final prototype being shown off to “prove” the concept. I also forgot to put in screenshake
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I shoulda let those porno people publish my game, I bet it woulda been a fucking nightmare but maybe I woulda gotten some complimentary ahegao hoodies, maybe coulda sold those for a few bucks like 4 years ago
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Canceling the game now after thinking of someone making a Laura D titty mousepad, can finally move on with my life, thanks for the support everyone
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It’s called “Winback” because you’re trying to “Win Back” your wife.
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i’m conflicted about this idea, though it might just be semantics/differing definitions. so much of the art i treasure was/is made as a result of a profound and difficult commitment at great cost. commitment to making new and challenging art requires at minimum the possibility and necessity of artistic failure. and ambitious, absolutely uncompromising (that is, autonomous, which is i think what you’re getting at) work of this kind right now under capitalism for all but the very wealthy demands a degree of deep personal investment without hope of proportional market recompense, which is compounded by the work involved in sustaining a life on top of that. i absolutely believe in a socioeconomic system which materially supports human endeavor unconditionally, but it feels counterproductive to wish for uncommercial work which also dares nothing, unless that work is relegated to minimally risky forms circumscribed by the restrictions capitalism places on life inside it, which is ultimately not that different from the blandness of commercial indie in the first place.
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Yeah I guess what I mean is that I don’t believe the (what I consider capitalist lie) that real daring art is when you sell your house to fund your indie game, or similarly the lie that real daring art is when you crunch and battle your leaders for the right to execute your vision. I think we tend to see these as stories of heroism but I don’t believe anymore that the things people make under those conditions escape the constraints of funded capitalist art-making. Like, the risks created by scale and suffering under capitalism no longer impress me. It’s not that I want all games to be free micro projects but that I want to see what people make when they are not reverse mortgaging thier house or whatever, because when you mortgage your house you end up making a necesarrily constrained range of shit.
Edit: rather than saying I scorn suffering under capitalism let us say that I scorn financial martyrdom under capitalism. Selling a house you have to make an indie game has always been my number one example of this because it always inspires the questions: how did you have a house? Was this really a good choice? Etc.
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right, i’m 100% with you there. the valorization of “quitting your day job” is entrepreneurial capitalist garbage; the goal is to abolish financial martyrdom in order to enable and support “risk,” unfettered experimentation, creative failure, free time, in all aspects of life.
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Yeah I think our differences here are just semantic. To me here risk is financial/health/safety risk.
That also means that to me, weird creative choices are generally only risks in the sense that they could make a product a failure, and in most cases “failure” means: we could get fired, we could get reassigned, my team could get shut down, etc. If my job isn’t riding on my creative work then I don’t really see the creative choices I’m making along an axis of risk. If the biggest consequence of creative failure is just “my work didn’t impact everyone I thought it would in the way I predicted” then it’s not emotionally or materially a risk to me and I prefer that, haha.
I do get though that thinking of creative choices as risky is a whole emotional and motivational thing for a lot of people. I’m not gonna argue with that because it clearly works for some folks, but I’ll just say that after going through the meat grinder at work enough times, I just handle those choices in a different region of my emotional world, or whatever. A risk is: I could die. Take that away and suddenly I’m free to do my art soulscreams in peace haha.
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yeah like it’s semantics but personal risk aside, for the art i find most rewarding, i don’t feel like it’s risky at all - it’d be like calling an anteater “risky”, it’s just something that exists, and is working on some internal drive. whether it gets to be The Biggest Anteater In The World or just wanders off a cliff is in a sense immaterial bc both possibilities are already built into the shape of the thing itself. the work isn’t risking failure, it’s seeing where you can go once you’ve already acknowledged the possibility, or inevitability, of a certain kind of failure. what i like about hobbyist stuff is that it acknowledges its own triviality from the start, and then keeps going anyway!
coversely a thing i find really exasperating about financialised art is that nothing can ever afford to actually shut the door behind it on the way out!! art games - but maybe also profitable! profitable games - but maybe also art! i’m leaving you for good - or am i! who knows! put dinner on for two, just in case! well, goodbye forever! see you soon! i’m leaving for antarctica! forgot my coat! before i go please accept this ticket to my one-man show, “the bravest man alive: taking risks day after day in the 21st century”, coming soon to a motivational event near you.
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