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Feb 3, 2022·edited Feb 3, 2022Author

So I have always tried not to talk about politics in my public discussion. There's already too much of that. But I'm getting uncomfortably close with all of this. So I am going to try to keep things more abstract and away from concrete political issues.

Also, I don't want to talk too much about "socialism", because everyone uses that word to mean something different these days. My wife grew up behind the Iron Curtain, and in my house, when "socialism" is brought up, it means a very specific thing. We aren't fans.

But you may not use that word to mean total state control of the economy. So it's a discussion unlikely to produce more light.

Anyway, thanks for the great comments! I'm flattered to be worth the time.

EDIT: Someone came in and posted the same comment 1000 times. I banned the user, but I can find no "Remove all comments by user" option. Am I missing something obvious? This is definitely a feature that should be there.

(I wish I could pin comments.)

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Feb 3, 2022Liked by The Bottom Feeder

I understand that this blog post will come to many people as a collection of inconveniences, and so I hope you are not chastised for what I perceive to be a pure intent to internally search for answers and warn people. As for myself, I found this to be an invaluable reminder of the privilege in which I operate.

Over the mid-way of my twenties, still a young man by the account of many, I found most of my life to be empty. The predilection of the people surrounding myself is for unlimited consumption of content, delusion, denial of the essential truth that our lives demand sacrifice, that all time is borrowed. With much struggle I have come to realise that the only moments I feel satisfied are when I am solving a problem that exists outside myself, when I am working in a job which serves others. That I have wasted so much time learning about an increasingly large pile of games or movies, useless trivia mostly, and eschewed meaningful career goals such as being an environmental officer because I neglected to put effort into learning to drive brings me immense guilt.

So, I thank you for your meditations, not because they were directly written to benefit myself, or even that they were intended to depict a reality that others believe, but because you tried to be honest.

And I shall end it on a good note, I find this post to be life affirming. I am about to start working in a career that directly benefits people and have spent an enormous amount of time over the pandemic period to filling the pot holes in my own life - even if that means I end up playing a few less games.

May you have good health.

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Feb 3, 2022·edited Feb 3, 2022

Have you ever worked an actual job in your life? Not in high-school or part-timing during college - actual full-time, have-to-do-it-for-the-next-30-years job. If I recall your bio correctly, you never did. That would explain why you romanticise them - the actual jobs, including the ones which are the biggest service to community, suck and have always sucked. Just read Bukowski for reference. The menial jobs like fixing potholes suck for obvious reasons, while the white collar "information society" jobs suck because they always involve working on hopelessly complicated problems (whether it's improving the Windows kernel at MS or improving economic policy at a government agency) with a large group of uncoordinated people.

People over centuries have sometimes gone as far as murder only to avoid working in jobs. Now, we're finally (and perhaps temporarily) in a state where many ordinary people can somehow sustain themselves for years without having to work. They often put those years into pursuit of their art, with a hope that it'll generate income. Even if it doesn't, working diligently at your craft is very good for you, and much better than alternatives of drinking and gambling that people have often chosen in the past.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that the society runs and have always ran on economic exploitation and under threat of starvation ("get to work or else") - and the US is currently a wealthy and happy enough place that it's perhaps temporarily ran out of people to exploit, hence there isn't enough people to fix those potholes for cheap.

So, I posit, if millions of people can "waste" time pursuing their hobbies such as art, it should be celebrated, not lamented. It testifies to how much the US "has arrived" as a society. If, like you say, this state is temporary (which I believe it is - there should be a leveling of global living standards happening in this century), then the problem will just self-correct itself as the country gets less wealthy.

Also, most people don't have the resources to sustain themselves while they work on failed indie games for their entire life. Most of them will perhaps give it a shot for a couple of years and then (begrudgingly) join or re-join the workforce. They'll still end up giving decades of their lives to The Machine, so there's no major harm in them indulging themselves for a couple of years.

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Feb 3, 2022·edited Feb 3, 2022

I have a very different view of the cause-and-effect here. I don't think the issue is a lack of social prestige associated with pothole-filling. If there was someone willing to hire enough people for a large enough wage, people would take the work and fill the potholes.

But not many of those people would be switching from making art. Because while 12,000 games in a year might be a lot, it doesn't actually represent many *people* relative to all the other things people are doing, especially since we're really talking about the long-tail of small-or-no-team indies. If we took everyone in the US making games nobody plays, or music nobody listens to, or books nobody reads, and convinced them all to do something else, it'd be an tiny blip in the economy. It'd be pretty big deal to those industries, of course: the remaining game-makers (especially those near the edges of wherever we draw the cut-off) would have a much easier time reaching audiences. And I suspect this is why it seems so relevant to you, why the causal relationship seems so clear.

(If the pay was high enough and the hours humane enough, people might even fill potholes while intending to make indie games nobody will play in their spare time, for the same reasons humans have always told stories and played music for their friends and family after doing what they need to do for survival. I'm not sure how to maintain a sustainable global industry of art-for-pay, but art as a hobby will always exist.)

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Not trying to be rude, and I’m not there yet, but I don’t think you can argue your way out of a midlife/existential crisis. I hope you figure things out, but this is as much about those 10k Steam games as it is about potholes. I guess starting with “It’s hard to look back at your life’s work and wonder if you took the wrong path.“ would have saved a lot of digital ink.

As for the points made in this post, they should probably be questions, not statements. As it is, it reads like you’re trying to justify how you feel, not trying to find any truths. Like how the fact that 30 games get released per day on Steam is validating your thoughts, even though it’s a glorified indiepocalypse post, just a few years late.

In your initial thread, the issue was that these games weren’t played by anybody. It briefly became about people wasting their money and education on schools that can’t promise success. Then it’s about the fact that playing games at all is a waste of time, which directly contradicts the initial point.

And I guess “Does entertainment have any value?” is a valid question, but the answer is that it’s subjective. It’s on you to decide what’s valuable. Society thinks things that make money are valuable, you seem to think things that fix the world are valuable. But here, this is about self fulfillment, which can take many forms. And if that has no value, then why are you even trying to fix the world?

You also mentioned music and films, but this is more than just entertainment. It’s about religion, or science too. Scientists are valuable, right? Except sending things to mars doesn’t really solve our problems, maybe. And biologists who need to hit a certain number of publications per year to keep their funding will definitely be able to randomly find a bacterium that’ll teach us how to cure cancer. Especially when funding is based on the potential application (usually by industries) of research, that won’t reduce our chances at all. (Heh, maybe I already had my existential crisis)

But back to games and potholes. Steam has potholes too, but those aren’t the amount of games published every year. It’s the discoverability.

The fact that these games aren’t played IS a problem. Not because their creators wasted their time, but because they probably have an audience. For example, games like Super Auto Pets or SNKRX were relatively successful, but nowhere near the amount of Vampire Survivors. People who play VS would probably also like those two games, but the majority probably haven’t heard of them. It’s pretty sad to think that our favorite game probably already exists, and we’ll never know about it.

But should we ask people to stop making games (not by gatekeeping tho!) while we figure stuff out? Should we ask people to stop driving while we fix those potholes?

As for the price of schools.. yeah that sucks. If only people knew that the best way to get good at making games is to make a lot of games- wait stop no don’t tell them that there’s too many games already.

Honestly the issue isn’t that there’s too many games. People don’t need degrees or the absence of a full time job to publish games or Steam (hence why there’s so many). IMO, what probably pushes people to go all in on games is the stories of the Moldenhaurs mortgaging their house twice to make Cuphead, or the way Ember Lab gets presented as underdogs, even though the brothers’ father was at the head of multiple Disney parks.

Anyways, I think the industry does have a problem with how success is showcased, and how the methods mostly aren’t criticized. And school should definitely tell their potential students what the world looks like. But at the same time, schools need to run, even in countries where they aren't for profit, and you still end up with teachers whose job is mainly to make people learn how to be teachers, thus producing approximatively no external value by the rules of this post.

But what does it all mean for this post? Probably that attacking people for doing what they love isn’t how you solve those issues, nor find answers to your personal doubts.

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Why make art nobody wants? Because fuck you is why. Making art nobody wants is a sacrament of defiance, a way to leave scars on a world that isn't worth saving.

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People create because they want to create. People don't do shit jobs because those shit jobs come with shit pay. You talk about the problems with Seattle's roads. Lets take a look at what road crews make in Seattle: 54% of road crew jobs pay less than $38,500 year. At 2,000 hours/year, that's $19.25/hour, a mere two dollars an hour more than Seattle minimum wage. Again, 54% of those jobs pay LESS than that. But lets not merely compare it to the minimum wage, lets compare it to a living wage. Can you make enough money doing road work to live a reasonable life? Well... if you're lucky. That's just about enough to get by alone, by the numbers I'm looking at. But you won't be socking away money for emergencies or a comfortable retirement and you definitely can't afford to support a spouse or children. And how are your career prospects starting as a road crew employee? You can move into being a construction worker, or you can work on sewers instead! Wow!

So imagine you're a young adult, fresh-faced and full of ambition. You want to do something with your life. Is it a viable strategy to accept a job in a field where you will do difficult physical labor at hours that will permanently damage you? (A lot of road work is completed at night, take a look at mental and physical health stats for night shift workers)

...no. No, people don't want to do that. They will if they're forced, but that's not a shining example to set up as ideal. The ideal we should be setting up is one where people at least have the time and energy to pursue more than their job. And that means paying people more, and working them less. Fortunately, we have the secret to doing just that, and it's automation. Unfortunately, there's no will to adapt automation to reducing human misery, for fear that it will "destroy jobs" (jobs which nobody wants to do anyway).

To make our crap, we offshore our jobs to people working in crap conditions on crap items. There's no value in automating that because human labor in other countries is cheap. And since there's no value in automating what we offshore, there's no value to automating work on our own shores (this is a giant logical fallacy, of course, but I'm giving insight into the psyche of those who are holding back automation).

So, the solution is obvious. Throw off the cherished illusion that rugged individualistic capitalism is a good thing. Look at society as a whole rather than a collection of individuals. Take care of the society, which means taking care of the people who support it. Compensate the road workers well. Now that you've done that, begin work on reducing the labor needed, and as jobs are automated out, take care of those people, as they are still part of society. Train them to maintain the machines rather than labor manually. Let them learn how to make more and better machines, to keep the metaphorical and literal trains going. But don't just do that to the jobs here in our American Empire, do so elsewhere too. Build great automated factories that take a fraction of the labor here and teach/help/allow other countries to do the same. Each iteration of this cycle improves the world. But all of this, every single step, hinges on one axiom: We are more than a collection of individuals.

As long as we're mired down in the individualistic bullcrap America peddles and refuse to develop systemic help, we'll never make progress. An individual going to a soup kitchen and volunteering for an afternoon sure seems like it does some human good, but it changes literally zero systemic problems. If the entire indie games industry quit their projects and ladled soup, there would still be the same homelessness problem in a year. Because that's still a collection of individuals acting individually.

I honestly believe this country, and perhaps the world, is simply doomed. We don't have the vision and the foresight to make the changes that need to be made. We're stuck with a fractured system that can't agree on incremental changes to the status quo. We act as individuals multiplied by our wealth. How do individuals with no wealth make systemic change? It's impossible. Many people see the fall coming, but there's nothing that can be done. I'd like to sell you all on a dream where we, the people, band together and seize change through either entirely legal means or ethically justified direct action (which is just a sanitized way of saying civil war), but that doesn't happen in reality anymore. Frankly, it's barely happened ever. White folks like me would like to point at the civil rights movement, but an honest looks shows that fight's far from done. That kind of sweeping, successful change only happens in video games and movies.

So, we make and play video games. We fiddle while Rome burns, but unlike Nero, our fiddles are on layaway.

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This shit fuckin sucks, dude.

It also displays a fundamental lack of understanding of multiple areas / disciplines (economics, government and resource allocation, how a real person's fucking job works, etc), as well as is extremely callous towards artists who just want to express themselves. But mostly, it just fuckin sucks.

These past few weeks really have changed how I look at you, your work, and your place in the gaming landscape. Incredibly disappointing.

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cockfoster

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I think people's tastes are varied enough that there are STILL niches that haven't been explored well that can lead to successful games. Your average indie dev probably couldn't make those though.

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Ok, so, I'm an indie dev working on a starvation salary to make my dream of making games for a living a reality. Despite the fact that your article raised a lot of my hackles, I'm going to engage with it in good faith, because despite what my hackles say I think you're also arguing in good faith but I do think you take a few logical leaps.

Firstly, you say "Nobody wants this many games!" and then cite how much the average game sells on Steam. That's a logical fallacy: it's likely 90% of those games were not shown to potential customers, so those customers had no idea those games existed. There are about 26m users on Steam, so even if each user bought only one game this year, that averages out to hundreds of thousands of sales per game, if you assume (wrongly, but this is for the sake of argument) that those sales are distributed equally. So there are enough players: the main problem is the algorithm shunts them to games that are already popular. That's not a games problem, that's a 21st century problem in the same category as "Why is facebook destroying democracy?"

Second, you say that because you are unlikely to make a game that sells well, you should not try, because the odds are stacked against you. This is true, but it has been true about every artform, forever, ever since there was commercial art. The odds of writing a 19th century novel that made it into a serialised paper were probably slim. The odds of your rock band being picked up by a major label was as much about luck as talent. The odds of writing a novel that will get published by a respectable well-placed publisher are incredibly slim. This is not just games, and this is not just about The Algorithm making it hard to break through (although I do think The Algorithm makes the whole thing unnecessarily hard, by the way). This is just art being a niche that many people want to do (because it seems fun), and there being limited places. Ask any novelist.

Thirdly, you seem to be under the impression that one can either make video games, or make a difference in the world. You even imply that just *playing* a game (alone, in a room of your own) means you're not getting out there and making a difference. I think this is false: firstly, the implication that playing games = no social work is just wrong. People can't be on all the time, they need time to relax, ergo games. But also, if you make games you can 1) put positive messages in those games about cultural things you care about 2) organise or be part of bundles or fundraisers 3) point your social media audience towards causes that you care about. None of these are as straightforward as just filling in a pothole, but I would much rather raise thousands of dollars for charity to preserve a green corridor in the amazon than fill in a pothole - and that's something I wouldn't be able to do without an audience. (Incidentally, I'm not making that example up: our game was part of this bundle https://itch.io/b/1164/world-land-trust-bundle which raised over $70k. I'm sure our game was only a small part of that, but each game helped make the bundle look more appealing to people overall, and maybe one day I'll make a game that can headline that kind of bundle.)

This bit I find really interesting: "I'll write all the games I want, while I can. BUT. Suppose the rest of the world starts saying, "Um, actually, we don't want to bust our humps making crap for debt forever. We're tripling our prices." Then my whole world goes to pieces."

Absolutely! And when that happens, I will adjust. I would like it to happen sooner, frankly, because the world we have is unfair and unjust in many ways, and the sooner underprivileged and exploited people say "no more" the better. But I'm one person, and I alone will not bring the great revolution to pass, so I see no point in worrying about what-ifs. If the world is fundamentally restructured tomorrow to be fairer and someone says I have to scrub toilets now to hold up my end of the privilege, ok, I will be very happy to do that. But until then, what am I meant to do?

The only thing I can do, really, is make art and be nice to my friends. It's all I'm actually genuinely good at. So until things change, I am going to continue complaining about the algorithm, and I am going to keep making stuff. I am also going to warn younglings ahead of time that their dream of making games will be incredibly tough, and that they must be prepared for that. But the idea that this automatically means we "need" fewer games is, I think, quite misguided.

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Jesus, you made so many games… how do I not end up like you (no offense) :(

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It's a good post but let's be honest, the root cause very much is capitalism. Excluding that as the cause is the same as excluding potholes as causing a bumpy ride, since they're part of the road that brought us here.

The laptop you use to program was built with resources mined by child slave. The coffee you drink was picked by child slaves. The abundance you have is caused directly by capitalism. At the same time, capitalism wants to remove funding for roads. Potholes are directly caused by capitalisms destructive influence on politics and infrastructure.

Art will always exist, no matter the economic system. Heck, Tetris is a communist game and it's one of the most popular games of all time. It is perfectly possible to identify capitalism as an issue while also maintaining games as an art form.

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Feb 3, 2022·edited Feb 3, 2022

I'm not sure if this is an original thought, but maybe it's not so much that there's too many games, rather that global distribution has made it so a ridiculously tiny amount of games can meet the demand of the entire world. In a way, a few people are hoarding artistic fulfillment just like billionaires hoard money. It's nuts that a single person (say, Chris Pratt) can basically supply the demand of the entire world for leading movie actors, depriving probably thousands of people of jobs who might be really good at it.

If people could be persuaded to only consume movies/art/games that were made in their local region (or some other slice), that would create many jobs per region and allow many more people to feel creatively fulfilled and useful. Since art is really subjective, I doubt anyone would even notice if their region's media is as "good" as the next region over. It would just be like a few decades ago when there was less media available.

Just a thought experiment really, but I do think that people's need to feel useful is very important.

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In terms of the gaming world… entrance requirements are lower than ever. Gaming companies are bigger than ever, and, the whole industry itself makes both movies and music seem quaint comparison. The number of games may seem mind boggling, but … it tracks with the sheer astronomical scope of the industry.

We've gone from Pong, to multi-billion-dollar acquisition deals. Microsoft's purchase of Activision-Blizzard at $68.7 billion dollars is more than a third the expenditures of the entire Apollo space program, and yes, that is adjusting for inflation. This little novelty industry some thought would die a fad, now, by sheer dollars, *IS* modern entertainment.

On the other point… Honestly, I don't see much intersection between our failing infrastructure and the rampaging Godzilla the gecko of gaming has since evolved into. Gaming is a matter of markets and demand, for good or ill, the capitalism you bring up. Infrastructure, meanwhile, is the realm of governments and governance, civil necessity as opposed to direct economics. Take away the gaming and… you'd probably just end up with more boring, non-gaming software engineers and just as many pot holes.

More broadly speaking, the private sector, leisure, art, necessity, or otherwise, can't really be held to account for the fundamental breakdown of communal scaffolding that make this civilization thing work. That's up to the leaders of society, who are invested with the power to make those decisions, and by extension, the responsibility and blame. Sure, you and I can vote and campaign and do all that political stuff, but it can't be our lives, nor should it be, nor should it have to be.

Yes, there are massive implications of global inequity and economic systems, societal priorities, cultural values, and all that big brain stuff right there, but… I just don't see much intersection between the sustainability of a specific private industry and a local city government stooging up basic road maintenance.

But... circling back to gaming? Maybe if the people in charged played more SimCity with the transit advisor who'd have an absolute, all-caps meltdown the instant you skimped on your road maintenance budget, you wouldn't have so many pot holes...

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Feb 2, 2022·edited Feb 2, 2022

I think your claim that the vast majority of games come from "affluent children of empire" (presuming you mean NA & Europe mostly) is increasingly wrong. Look at the ever rising amount of games coming from China, for instance.

I also think what you portrays as the huge problem (that millions of people waste enormous amounts of time & energy playing games and consuming other art) would not be fixed by there being less games. Say all the game developers of the world would only be allowed to release a total of 500 new games per year. Do you genuinely think this would reduce the amount of time spent playing games?

I don't. I think we'd spend just as much time playing games, it's just that the chance of us playing the same games would increase, and more time would be spent on few time-sink enormo-games than many little indie-games.

You also seem to forget that people have been creating art for as long as they've had (free) time to do so. When you include Itch.io, homebrew games, et.c, you ignore that these games are mostly created by people who do it for fun, because they like to create stuff just like their parents and grandparents did. Would the world become a better place if they took up painting instead? Is it better to create a painting that you can maybe sell for a hundred dollars and that will hang on someone's wall and only be seen by them and their friends? Or more likely create a bunch of paintings that will only end up in some attic or other? This is also art that nobody wants, as you put it. But you probably wouldn't discourage your kids from learning to paint if they wanted to.

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