The reduction of art forms to a product under capitalism.
Instead of the artist being able to express their creativity and share it with the world, art instead becomes the artist being forced to guess the demands of the non-artistic.
Capitalism hates the artist, because art is unpredictable and unreliable and personal, which is what makes it exciting and unique. Capitalism needs steady predictable productivity that it can sell to it's conservativly trained public, and so it is the antithesis of the artistic process. This is why they are desperate to replace artists with AI.
Good post. Also drives marvel slop.
Interestingly what we end up with as a result is a procession of increasingly mediocre derivative works. Eventually they get so shit they are rejected by the same pea brained audiences that drove their creation in the first place
This is why, while making games is my main hobby, I could never, ever do it as a career. The freedom to make what I want without worrying about profitability is worth more than all the money in the world.
When the moniker "gamer" started to reach my ears in the late 90s I was like "hell yeah I'm a gamer. I am a guy who plays videogames." I didn't broadcast it to the world but if someone asked if I played videogames I'd say "yeah, I'm a gamer."
Over the years my interactions and observations of the gamer community shown me almost nothing but toxic bullshit. It flipped me. Now if someone asks if I'm a gamer I'll say "no, I'm just a guy who plays videogames."
Part of it is growing up and being disgusted with the arrested development masquerading as a badge of honor. Snobbish elitism from the formerly bullied nerds. The clique bullshit. And because of the nature of extremism in some places/circles its just gotten worse. There's a celebration of racist opinions that's gotten bolder. I mean, it's always been there, there's the suspect dude who always played for the German team in the online WWII shooter who talked about "historical accuracy" and probably dropped the Gamer Word but that word was ubiquitous so it got lost in the sauce. These days they congregate on social media and feed into each other. Like containment on 4chan broke.
Reasonable opinion post locked by Reddit, classic
The comment section was probably a shit show
First thing you learn as a game dev: Do no listen to gamers. They demand unrealistic and impossible things. Every gamer wants a game that caters to them and them alone, no matter how much time and effort would be required to make their idealised version of a game. People will complain about games based on how they would like them to be, rather than how they actually are. Video games already give the most amount of fun vs money spent out of pretty much any form of entertainment, and for most gamers, it still isn't enough. They are the most entitled and demanding audience in history.
I worked at a couple "AAA" studios and I learned long ago to never read the fan spaces. It sucks because there are some thoughtful and extremely insightful comments, sometimes, but they are bobbing in an ocean of garbage.
It extra sucks because social media policies prevent you from messaging that really insightful person and saying," you're right and everybody here loves your post." Even though you really, really want to.
MC in the Fable trailers is "ugly"
She looks like a regular person
HOW DARE
This is also partially the fault of capitalism, anti-social shut-ins who spend all day being whiny and precious about their media slop are the most dependable consumers and organic promoters in the eyes of the companies putting said slop out. So for years every press release and piece of marketing content was designed to appease these chuds, because if some weirdos somewhere take ownership of your franchise's success without you paying them anything, they are basically volunteer marketers, even though you are just feeding their unhealthy dependence on their fandom as the sole source of life purpose and community, enabling them to continue sidelining the work of unpacking the traumas that made them this way.
I still want to be a developer. I still fuckin hate gamers. It's an amusing little internal contradictive dichotomy. God willing, I will be the what happens when Suda51 and Donald Glover perform the fusion dance; games Black as fuck, dripping with surrealism, and outright derogatory toward whiteness. I want to piss off the kyles.
What genre of game are you interested in making?
I don't think there's just one genre, is the thing. I'm always torn between the most-unlikely, open-world crime sim in the vein of Saints Row because there is no worthy competitor to GTA on the market, the relatively more constrained idea of a fighting game, and the almost-lowest common denominator of old-school, sci-fi esque, absolutely-unreal boomer shooter. Way I see it? Too many rpg maker games exist. I know other devs like to talk about 'no just make something simple first and move up', I've heard too much rpg maker slander to want to start there, y'know? I've been spending the past couple years just learning languages to serve as a foundation for everything else.
If you're interested, I could DM you an invite to a communist gamedev Discord server I'm part of. The userbase is pretty small, but the people there are really friendly and helpful, and they'd love the kind of stuff you're wanting to make.
Maybe when I've got a bit more put together than a pitch and a concept document; I do appreciate it though.
this seems true for pretty much any male-dominated hobby, men ruin everything they form communities around. its true for games, guns, history, military, sci fi, martial arts, metal music, anime, etc.. how do straight men even stay attracted to straight women, they gatekeep each other out of their hobbies (or rather, men gatekeep both women from 'men's hobbies' and men from 'women's hobbies'), idk how any straight couple survives without shared interests other than fucking. like the stereotypical boomer couple doesn't do anything together except eat.
You forgot cars, the worst dudebro'd hobby
yes, i definitely feel that as someone that loves offroad vehicles and racing in general
God, as someone who's casually into the hobby model building community, it's fucking insane. It's like you reach a weird black hole of the worst of the worst, because they're not just a model snob, they're a model snob within their special interest.
That kind of dipshit doesn't actually like video games, they like being catered to. A whole expressive medium reduced to consumption and marketing. Something something people don't talk to each other anymore.
The gamers you make the games for won't criticise your game unjustified. They are not found in chats of streams on hate trains. Your game will be played by those as well, they just give you extra money from sales. Money you can spent to improve the game for the people, who do appreciate it for what it is. Thats the way I see it at least.
I had a completely different experience watching the summer speed run showcase and fundraiser this past few days, so much love and support for positive things. I just wish I could get over my own nervousness and insecurities and try streaming myself, speedrun or not.
Gaming is a bunch of different nerdy subcultures in a trench coat, many of them really chill, some of them really toxic. Most speedrunning, indie, retro, and modding communities in particular are cool. There's also a "gamer" culture that insists that it's the only one and it owns all the cool things in these subcultures without participating in them, which is mostly focused on recent and upcoming AAA games, and it is just the most toxic horseshit there is. But those people actually don't interact with smaller gaming cultures despite insisting they own the umbrella, so you're unlikely to run into them outside of AAA gaming spaces, large twitch streams, and reddit.
Meanwhile over on Reddit games there is constant bitching that they're was too much politics in the donations and they just wanted the games to be played without all that politics in the show.
yeah SGDQ was incredible this year, just a perfect showcase of the creativity and community that games can foster. I was hooting and hollering during the kaizo race.
The, Super "Sonic Save the World" World, run by Shoujo was
Consider the bias here.
We know people are more likely to make comments when upset about something.
Unless people are blown out of the water, normal people are probably just watching the stream.
g*mers suck
This is pretty normal. I know few service workers who like their clients even if they enjoy their work.
I mean, I don't like how the new Dragon Age looks, but that's been true since Dragon Age 2
I also don't harass people about it
My favorite design aspect of any RPG was the tactics of DA1 & DA2. It blew my mind and I loved it. Then they went away, DA3 was a nightmare for melee rogue play because tanks were preprogrammed to chase the main around the battlefield. Melee rogue say hello to a dragon to the face. No, melee rogue, you will never stab the back leg because the tank will always try to join you back there. I will always be annoyed by that abrupt switch. I hope for better in DA4, where I will once again, and always, play a melee rogue.
That said, ofc I’m buying it. After the first round of patches. As are most of us. We all know that isn’t Solas and I’m sure we all want to know what Flemeths final plan is.
Plus, the worlds favorite bard is back.
There’s bitching and then there’s not buying. Two different things. That said, vocalizing maybe creates changes for the sequel.
I think I saw some thumbnails of videos of chud gamers whining about this post on YouTube being shoved down my feed for some reason. Naturally I just told YouTube to not recommend this shit because i assumed those videos were just hog ragebait
That first Dragon Age trailer did look ass, but I generally agree.
G*mers yearn for Battlefield 69 with generic operator guy and even less combined arms and lesser enjoyable gameplay.
Nah, this specific sort of nerd doesn't hold online military shooters in much regard, thinking they're for kids and normies. They consider themselves as having more patrician, refined tastes. (Insert wanking motion here) Their ideal game would be made in Japan, be mechanically complex and have lots of fan service aimed at horny straight dudes
Nah, this specific sort of nerd doesn’t hold online military shooters in much regard,
And honestly that take still pisses me off-- not with you, with the kind of kyles that have that take but for all the wrong reasons. Me, I feel disgust in the idea of making literal war, in our world into a game. The gamification of imperialism turns my stomach in ways that I can't even sufficiently articulate; and I'd have inordinately more respect for the shooter space, first- and third-person, if it stayed in the creative, wholly-fictional spaces that birthed it. The Dooms, the Quakes, the Unreals, hell, even the Halos because even while Halo's military slop too, they were (once) futuristic, hard sci-fi, and bordering on apocalyptic.
I have none for the CoDs, the Battlefields, the Armas, or whatever the fuck else multicam-infected gamified-atrocity pentagon-foreshadowing horseshit that EA wants to shit onto the average kyle's plate. But the average kyle isn't thinking that way about it. I fuckin hate 'em.
People everywhere complain on social media about everything. It's not just gamers.
Moviefuckers like Critical Drinker are just a derivative of Gamer.
True, but fuck gamers
