T w e n t y S i d e d
So, it’s been nine months since Dad’s been gone, and about seven since I began writing here. This has offered a lot of time to mope and brood, or, you know, ‘think’, whatever you want to call it. In that time, I’ve had a lot of writing ideas. Everything from games I’ve had thoughts on, to projects I’ve been working on; D&D, commentary, Minecraft, you name it. I’ve had enough material that I could likely kick the site back into at least three or four posts a week, but…Houston, we have a problem.
See, there’s sort of an elephant-in-the-room issue that makes talking about, well, anything feel redundant and repetitive. I want to talk about my love-hate relationship with Stardew Valley, my reasoning for having a thousand ‘smart’ devices, my favorite children’s MMO, and every issue I have with Wizards of the Coast. But, at the end of the day, what I have to say about all those things has a common denominator which would get old to write about very, very fast.
Everything is a monopoly, and every creative decision I want to talk about boils down to money, not actual people. People are interesting, they make independent decisions and sometimes bonkers bad ones. Nuance and storytelling, ignorance and narrow world views, those are things we can talk about. Why CEO #34 made a piss-poor decision that will only really hurt employees and consumers and land him with a four week paid holiday isn’t fun and snappy conversation, it’s fucking depressing.
I won’t lie to myself and wish I was was alive and grown three decades ago when money hadn’t sunk its claws into the video game market. I’m queer and physically disabled, the testing to confirm my diagnoses didn’t even exist back then, but, god, I wish things were more interesting now. Why does the protagonist feel so bland in (insert franchise here) game? Oh, that’s easy: money. Why doesn’t this really cool tech exist even though it would help a lot of people? Oh, another easy one: money.
This means even bad decisions on a writer’s part make me feel like shit to complain about. Because, you know what, if it’s stupid enough to feel like I have a real opinion on it, at least that’s a human error. It’s sort of like a mistake in your box of grocery store sugar cookies. Like, oh wow, it’s different from the others, cool. As long as it’s edible I don’t really care, and the error makes it more interesting than the two hundred other boxes.
Like I said, I’m not as politically averse as my dad was, but that doesn’t mean I want to turn this into an anti-capitalist, angry echo chamber. I am frustrated, but frankly I’m not changing the world by bitching about it, all I’d end up accomplishing is being pissed off all the time and taking a bunch of internet people with me.
So, here’s what we’re going to do. Because there are still opinions left to have, and it sucks to feel like I’m at the mercy of this stupid elephant. This post is here, and I will jovially link back to it when money is the core of an issue, acknowledge it, and move on. CEO #34 gets enough attention, and my energy is better put enjoying the bit of humanity left in this stupid industry.
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Smart approach. You can tap the sign whenever you need to, and get on with talking about literally anything else that matters or is fun. Bonus points for this part: “I’m not changing the world by bitching about it, all I’d end up accomplishing is being pissed off all the time and taking a bunch of internet people with me.” It’s entirely correct – “setting the world to rights” isn’t praxis, it just fills the same hole in the soul on a temporary basis, and most of “the Discourse” boils down to just that.
Yeah, “don’t make me tap the sign” is a great description. Now there’s a sign to tap.
Well, it’s not like Shamus didn’t talk about money when he ran the site. There were loads of articles about decisions that had been made by games companies and the consequences thereof. Thing is, it’s not just ‘Money’ ‘, it’s ‘Where is the money going?’ ‘Why isn’t the money going to this priority?’ ‘Where else could/should the money go?’
Also, was there a golden age of creativity in vidoe games? That seems like a rose-tinted view to me. I saw a lot of bad games back in the PS1-PS2 era, and there was famously a crash (hey, according to Google, more than one) back in the 1980s, brought about by money…
Yeah, Shamus’s “thing” was often pointing out “this decision isn’t even ideal for making the most money!”. I’m not sure he was right (like, I think he tended to underestimate how profitable it can be to cynically exploit a cash cow while spending just enough to pretend to care about it) but it made for interesting discussions for sure.
As others have said, I’m not sure that things, even in the video game market, were that much different or better 30 years. Following along with the CRPG Addict’s plays of games from the “olden days”, there are a lot of cases where all the issues that we can see today wrt money showed up there as well, from unique games not getting the support they needed because they didn’t fit the model of what was seen as profitable to games being rushed out to make money because the previous game in the franchise was a hit and they wanted to milk the cash cow. So those issues may not be more dominant than they were in the past.
Also, I watch a lot of different things to talk about them on my own blog, and it actually seems to me that money is less of a factor in creative failures today than you might think and that it might have been in the past. It seems to me that a lot of the issues I, at least, am having with new things is their attempts to be artistic without properly understanding their genre and being overly impressed with their own artistic and creative abilities. The reason I’ve soured on the Star Wars and Marvel franchises despite for a long time considering them reliably entertaining is not because of cash grabs or executive interference but instead because they moved from primarily being entertaining to primarily being artistic and so vehicles for the creatives to play with the universes they way they wanted to play with them and promote the messages they wanted to promote, which isn’t necessarily bad if you make a good movie doing it. This is more clear for Star Wars than for Marvel, given how Abrams and Johnson kept trying to yank the ST to the style they wanted to do without regard for what had come before. And the reason I dislike “Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin” even though I loved “Pretty Little Liars” is because the former brought in creatives from “The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina” who turned it into a serial killer story which a) doesn’t fit well with the original series and b) wasn’t done all that well besides, not because it was a cheap money grab.
So, from my perspective, there’s actually more to talk about from an artistic/creative perspective than from a money one. I have really come to believe that today’s creatives — at least the ones running the shows — don’t understand the genres they are in and aren’t aware of what has gone on before, and this is what hurts the modern works. For example, in horror a number of times I have pointed out that a movie has hit the FORM of the tropes its using but doesn’t pay them off and doesn’t use them for anything, which makes it look like a strange “cargo cultism” where it looks like they feel those elements NEED to be there but have no idea what those elements actually provide, and so they all fail. That sort of thing can’t easily be explained by money.
It only takes half a step back to blame almost literally anything on money: the people at the top are the ones who put those particular artists (or whoever) that don’t actually get what they’re supposed to be doing in charge of whatever it is they’ve messed up, because the people at the top got there not by actually being able to tell which artist should go on which project, but because Money. This can apply to anything from entertainment to day jobs to politics.
But indeed, it is more interesting to talk about why a thing in particular has such mismatches than complain about the Money problem, since in the end there’s always somebody at the top who got there because of Money rather than true understanding, so Money applies to everything. Even the people at the top will then blame their ill-fit for their jobs, if revealed, on Money- because “shareholders.”
At which point the argument becomes whether the broken system itself is a natural occurrence or if it was created to serve a particular interest, and the answer is of course both, and also that the system has been in place for long enough that those actually responsible are long dead and there’s no one to actually blame today. Which means blame must revert back to those with the power to shape the system or choose not to participate, but that would mean people personally accepting responsibility for their actions, which people don’t like to do.
Well, sure, for any product that can be bought and sold or with any work that’s done for pay, you can trace things back and argue that in some sense the issues were caused by Money, but as noted above often the issue is that the things that the Money people would want to see or do aren’t what happened. In the cases I talked about, it seems to go even further, where the powers-that-be that were supposed to be thinking about money instead were thinking about how great the ART or CREATIVE aspects would be and screwed it up. For example, for “Pretty Little Liars” all the moneyed interests would want to simply take the same premise of the original and use it (but from what I’ve heard trying to take the same premise and “modernize” it caused some issues for the “Charmed” reboot that weren’t about the money and were instead about how the creative people tried to do that) but they decided to do a “cool” serial killer thing instead that didn’t really work.
Or, to use another example, you can argue that the Mass Effect trilogy ended up the way it did because of Money, but the more interesting discussion is about the artistic and creative decisions that were made that weren’t made because of Money but instead because it seems that’s what the creative people wanted to do.
While I agree that the money side of the business CAN cause problems, I think it is wise to keep in mind the following maxim:
“95% of everything is crap”.
This is true whether the devs have money problems or not. I think capitalism gets blamed for a lot of problems that are really caused by the fact that most things just naturally suck.
When a great series turns into a dud, that’s just regression to the crappy mean.
I think this feeling you’re having is a very common one as you grow up and you start to realize the societal infrastructure behind everything you consume. A former goalie for the Montreal Canadiens, Ken Dryden, wrote, “Nothing is as good as it used to be, and it never was. The ‘golden age of sports,’ the golden age of anything, is the age of everyone’s childhood.” He was responding to the idea, prevalent at the time in the discourse, that the hockey of Dryden’s day – the 1970s – wasn’t as good as the hockey of the 1950s and 60s. There was too much money in the game of the 1970s, you see, and people in the 50s and 60s used to play for the love of the game. Of course, now people will argue that Dryden’s time was one of the peaks of hockey and you’ll also find people who argue that the 80s were the best with Gretzky or the 90s were the best with Lemieux and Jagr. And everyone is right in their own subjective way. Final Fantasy is famously named Final because if the game didn’t sell the team was going to get out of the video game business and go into a field that actually made money. Because the people who make the games have always had to feed their families and fix the windows and all the other mundane stuff.
The most stupid regression I’ve heard this year was how Argus, a device that was true transhumanist-style let-the-blind-see-again tech and had thousands of blind people using it, had its company, Second Sight Medical Products, bought by a bigger medical company and it said “what the fuck is this miraculous tech being developed eating up our bottom line? Shut it down.”
So everyone who implanted it went blind again after a firmware update shut it down…
It was extra infuriating for me because just last year I had made a presentation on transhumanism and one of the technologies I presented was Argus.
https://www.insider.com/people-with-eye-implants-risk-going-blind-when-device-expires-2022-2
This is real, not sci fi?? That’s insane.
This is real AND Sci-Fi. That story’d fit a Cyberpunk setting to a T!
Also, the less I think about microplastics and how THAT became a problem the healthier I will be (mentally, because bodily the microplastics are killing us all possibly faster than climate change).
This is quite clever and I laughed out loud. Keep up the good work.
I love your father’s long posts on here about e.g. “The Golden Age of Video Games” and the comparative expenditure on story vs graphics, and attempts to capture widespread audiences, leading to the former becoming diminished while the latter becomes more fancy without making the games more interesting, in most AAA games at least. That was indeed even a big part of the analysis on Mass Effect, I believe, which drew me to this place. A long-form series on your thoughts on the effects of this sort of commercialism on the games would be really great and I think in keeping with the site to date. I.e. not a political rant against economic structures and societal outcomes but one (as it sounds it would be) focused on what symptoms you have seen in games and your thoughts on the reasons for why this happens, with the series of example games you gave. It would probably be a bit like that Blood Sweat and Pixels book by Schrier, or indeed the sort of articles I’ve loved reading on here. The fact that Stardew is one of them is very interesting indeed, indie darling that it is. Especially coming from a Life-Sim enthusiast such as yourself. Games have become very bland in some parts, your father pointed out the bland shooter of the 2000s taking over, it would be very cool to see the next generation of this complaint, in both senses of that phrase. So if you fancy the gaming rant, I’m sure people here would like to see it :)
Edit: you mention narrow world view and ignorance – it’s worth noting that even if I do or don’t necessarily end up agreeing with the framing of what constitutes those things, it’s always enjoyable to read the opinions, I find myself seeking them out for the in-head-argument haha. But it might be divisive if it gets a little too far from the gaming side of things.
And like the similar articles that exist on the website already – there is the silver lining of the multitude of great games also coming out. The Hollow Knights and so on.
A couple of thoughts:
First, while “rant” is the internet’s default mode, “rave” is also an option. I suspect there will be less elephantiasis if you try to do a significant number of posts about things that are done well, things you enjoy, things that made you think/feel a lot, etc.
Second, if Big Money seems to be the root of most of the problems you’d like to discuss, perhaps it’d be good to move away from the Big Company games and try out more indie stuff? Fewer resources may mean that a lot of it has fewer accessibility options, and Sturgeon’s Law applies, but there are still plenty of labors of love out there to check out and enjoy.
Hope this random stranger’s opinion helps, at least a little bit. Keep up the good work!
Echoing some of the voices above, while money is the root of most evil that doesn’t mean the results are not worth looking at or analysing. Boiling down the conversation surrounding the WotC licensing situation to “they want money” is factually correct, but it doesn’t explain why this is detrimental to the customer, how it affects the tabletop landscape* or how it presents a shift in market philosophy of the company regarding this product line.
Similarly, I believe Shamus at one point said something to the effect of “recording a good line costs the same amount of money as recording a bad line” so “corporate greed” is not necessarily the be-all and end-all answer to questions of why a given choice, particularly creative one, was made. It’s obvious why Andromeda was made in the ME universe even though it has little actual connection to it outside of the set dressing, but does that matter for saying the drug substory was stupid? Or the Archon was completely ineffectual as an antagonist? And even if we argue that a lot of it can be traced back to money, like risk aversion, the desire to leverage an IP without caring for its actual content or context, or maintain a franchise whether it makes sense or not I say, heck, go for it. Just because the reason for a thing being stupid is obvious doesn’t mean there’s no point in talking about it. Bring it up to light, point at it, ridicule it, make us laugh and shake our heads at it together!
*For example, I was unaware that to many people actively playing tabletop, particularly USAians, D&D was basically the one system in existence and apparently just the prospect of the licensing changes opened up the market significantly for some of WotC competition.
Shamus, for better or worse, simply did not value money the way normal people do. Which seems counter intuitive since value is what money is supposed to transfer. Regardless….
Shamus was a obnoxiously huge fanboy of john Carmack, as anyone who knew him even a little knew all to well. Carmack believed, as did Shamus, that making things for the express intent of making money would sometimes fail to do so. Instead of trying to make make money, just make it as good as possible. Create something awesome, and the money will follow. Trying to make something for money rarely also creates something awesome.
Shamus believed “awesome” predicates “profitable”, not the reverse.