The California Problem

tags

Videogame Development

A personal history of the 21st century game industry. Art, Indies, Innovation, The Market

Notes

intensity of the rhetoric around a certain subset of games, especially when placed in tandem with how tiny and narrowly focused the insights it felt like you could glean from each of these things as experiences was.

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the main point was that these weren't new things at all. they were heavily informed by a fascination with the o�ten underappreciated artistry of mechanically simple 80's video games and the hippie-infused New Games movement of the 70's.

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The Californian Ideology

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collision of right-wing neo-liberalism, counter- culture radicalism and technological determinism

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development cycles of AAA games had become increasingly more expensive, high stakes, and sti�ling of innovation.

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games wanted more and more to be taken seriously as consequential art, but also didn't want to have the same scrutiny level applied to them as other art.

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never were allowed to stop for very long to interrogate what questions the themes of games like Passage or The Marriage presented, and what they may say about troubling dynamics in gendered relationships. they were more just signifiers that represented that the possibility of deeper expression was there, and should be taken seriously and given more scrutiny. but the moment you applied more scrutiny and started to ask questions about the themes in the work, that was o�ten handwoven o�f as irrelevant

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an entity that is both transformative but also empty, without any particular meaning assigned to it. a squishy container for the over- romanticized ideal of transformative or meaningful 'play' that was poised to take over the space around it, but didn't correspond to anything in particular or make a statement about anything in particular. an object that signified importance in some kind of vague, market-friendly way, by virtue of simply being in the space at that particular time and place. a response to games like �lOw that were so focused on the act of expression without having much of any interest in what, exactly, was being expressed. a perfect commodity, basically.

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i was not interested in doing some fuckin' apps, i was interested in art! and you'll put up with a lot of bullshit in order to get to the thing you think you really want.

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of course all the people with dollar signs in their eyes didn't want to talk about some weird free web games you played.

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i had unending fantasies about moving to Europe (a thing i had absolutely no means to do), a place where i thought people really would understand the true value of art, rather than being forever stuck in the hyper-capitalistic hellscape of America.

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games as "harboring both absolute genuine eccentric outsider freaks who cannot exist in another space due to being very marginalized and needing it as a form of expression… and also very conservative people who find other forms of culture too free-wheeling and open- minded for them and use games as a way to escape from a world that freaks them out." although distinctions between those two groups aren't always so easily made,

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just another re�lection of a larger trend in Silicon Valley: an industry absolutely built on top of the free labor of open source developers.

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it's not so easy to cleave the utopian, communal side of games that celebrate the passion of creative expression from the cutthroat business landscape

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tech industry people are, broadly, not very friendly to art!

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classic anti-intellectual standby propagating around that says that people who make art for art's sake must be elitist snobs with trust funds

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that people who make artsy niche games are intentionally kneecapping themselves by making inaccessible art that a lot of people won't want to actually experience. inaccessible to whom exactly (vs. AAA games) is always a question that should be asked here.

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how do you know people making some random ass weird art games at little to no cost are always going to be engaging in commercial suicide when compared to the the frankly unsustainable production costs and labor practices behind so many AAA games now? how are the economics behind any of this remotely stable?

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an unprecedented freak hit like Minecra�t could not reasonably have started out trying to turn into what Minecra�t turned into.

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i continue to operate in a space around things that are seen as hopelessly niche and uncommercial because - that's what i do right now, and what the hell else am i going to do?

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sure, we all have to survive: but what does survival really mean when what you need to do to achieve it (unless you're one of the lucky ones) is constantly changing?

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in some way, a hypothetical industry where everything is infused with the essence of a cryptic art game with quirky visuals and weird mechanics is the opposite of what i want. when everything is up to the winds of the free market, creative destruction of an existing order is the law of the land. radical niches either wither away and die or get absorbed into the mainstream.

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all of this just lends an air of disposability and a feeling of trend-riding to potential deeper expression that could spring forth on a longer term basis from these waves. if you want to make a case for the real artistic and historic value of a particular work or group of works, being seen as just another market trend is not a great way to do that.

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there's not a whole lot you can really do, short of changing the entire economic order that we all exist under. and we all know how that's been going lately.

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mini manifesto of: "Technology sti�les creativity" and the idea was to force designers to focus far less on technology than on design, with the intent of producing less derivative works.

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the amount of movie envy that perpetually exists in the game industry.

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'Content Creators' fondly reminiscing about a part of Zelda game they played in their youth on their youtube channel for 800k subscribers doesn't have quite the same ring to it as Martin Scorsese writing about how attending Fellini premieres in his youth profoundly changed him as a person. the environment that produced filmmakers like Fellini was shaped by huge upheavals of the social and political order that profoundly changed how film was viewed in broader society. and the fact is: so many of these game industry people who want video games to be a serious, consequential art form are unwilling to commit to what that actually means.

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a very specific trend i call the "One Clever Mechanic (1CM)" school of design.

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a surplus of new specialized production techniques which led to a focus on novel, memorable, funny concepts. easily presentable mechanical gimmicks had potential to become an excellent selling point

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whenever this crowd was hit with anything too weird and freaky for them that took this personal game mantra too seriously, they instantly would launch into "finish your game please" mode and hit people with treatises on the importance of polish.

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audiences are less interested now in being introduced to obscure mechanics and clever gimmicks that they feel condescended to by the high and mighty game designer.

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ambient interest in just occupying worlds that are going to provide a reasonably pleasant experience that doesn't demand too much

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instead of ex- industry programmers who were inspired by the simplicity of 80's games, i now see more comic artists and animators in�luenced by the art of 90's and early 00's games leading these projects.

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the long-time consumer fixation on a game's graphics is still here, just in a more trendy #aesthetic image blog form

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the job of artists is just to create individual portfolio entries for aspiring content monopolists to use for leverage in the baroque hypothetical struggle to become the new net�lix. in the same way that a portfolio piece is maybe less meant to act as a work in itself than to indicate a more general sense of potential

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being productive and hitting a schedule and self promoting and doing all the little babyproofing features implicit in making work for a paying customer rather than just for a curious human being. but it somehow feels base and churlish to complain about this stu�f when it gives you access to money (not actual money, just ‘access’, sorry).

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"i remember when the initial framing of 'valuing yourself ' enough to charge money came from people near homelessness so it’s been weird watching it get generalised into almost a secular prosperity gospel

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the framing is always precarious indie devs having their livelihoods stolen by debauched leisure-class hobbyists when it feels like half the people making stu�f for free have already been pushed out of 'the real economy'

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so much of what holds cultural value is le�t up to shi�ts in the market.

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i o�ten see audiences broadly considering a game published by Annapurna or Devolver as part of a greater body of work of publishers with very little interest in following or even being aware of the larger body of work of the creators.

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bland, smug bourgeois e�fort meant to make liberal audiences feel better about themselves that wasn't properly engaging with the tools of the medium.

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"auteur"did not generally describe directors who controlled all aspects of their production in an obsessive manner, i.e. your Stanley Kubricks. directors with that amount of power largely didn't exist yet,

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Hollywood was very cagey about this idea of the director as primary artist.

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the thing that provides real leverage against abusive bosses (whether they have an 'auteur' moniker assigned to them or not) is better labor protections.

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attempt to erase games made by primarily one or two people as a serious or worthy part of the conversation.

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many game design 'rules' now read like the old "180 degree rule" in Hollywood used to read: perhaps there's some practical utility to those rules when putting together a work that a large number of people will experience. but they are also rules imposing a specific mode of artistic creation by companies underestimating the capacity of audiences, and unwilling to take larger risks.

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if you are not interrogating more deeply how norms created by the markets that produce these rules, you are just giving the game industry a complete license to define what kind of experience is valid

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queer-themed games that are banned from Twitch because of their sexual content. this ban has been criticized for disproportionately impacting games from marginalized developers, while giving special treatment to certain popular AAA games (i.e. The Witcher 3).

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one thing i can guarantee it won't be is fixated on pure 'innovation' for the sake of innovation, or the religious belief in creative destruction of prior spaces by new technologies. if video games are to be saved, it will happen by redeeming their past.

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this larger continuity between artists who may not necessarily like each or even respect other to me is compelling, and provides a deeper understanding of what motivates them. in summary, Dead-Wifery takes what that group it is poking fun at started and moves forward in the spirit, if not always the intention, of their work.

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i've just been experiencing an overwhelming feeling of… there has to be something else. there has to be something beyond the market that matters.

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