Let's say for the sake of argument that there is too much art out there, that we need less people writing novels and more people fixing potholes and whatnot - fine. How does the author propose deciding _who_ gets to make art? Even if you have an oracle who can assign some sort of quality number to an art project before it's made...how are people supposed to get better at it? It's going to take thousands of cruddy Unity indie projects to make a single Undertale or Stardew Valley. The more crappy art we have, the more good art will come later, as artists either get better or luck upon a good idea combined with the perseverance to make that idea a reality.
Read through some other posts - author is a game developer who founded his own company. This post feels like one of three things:
1. burnout, as someone else pointed out.
2. a very good troll :)
3. A somewhat poorly guided but honest attempt to dissuade people from joining the games industry (possibly mixed with 1.)
As someone who started their career in games and left - he's not wrong. The games industry is kind of shit. It doesn't pay well, the hours suck, and you might work for months or years on something that either never sees the light of day or nobody ends up playing (not to mention that in the beginning you're somewhat replaceable, there's a dozen young developers who would love to be in your shoes) - and this is just the life of a salaried game dev - the indie life is even harder.
...on the other hand, the projects and problems are interesting/unique and the people in it are some of the most wonderful I've ever met. I miss shipping games, even though I bailed out of my own volition. I don't blame anyone for wanting to join, especially as a young developer.
I remember at the age of 19 or so being asked (paraphrased) "why the hell would you want to do that?" by an ex-Bungie developer (and now good friend, even if we haven't chatted for a while) when I said I wanted to join the games industry. For better or worse I persevered, showed him I had some potential as an engineer and eventually he helped me get some interviews and a job. But I'd ask the same question of any young developer who came my way hoping to get in.
So I guess I agree with what the author is trying to say (the games industry is full-up! are you sure you want to try and squeeze in?), even if I don't agree with words he's using to say it.
> How does the author propose deciding _who_ gets to make art?
I feel like the author makes it fairly clear: those with enough privilege. If the cost of living goes to zero, we'll have near-infinite art. If the cost of living goes to maximum we all starve to death.
At very least, I was very much in love with a free-living artist who inspired me greatly in my 20s. I moved to San Francisco to hangout with her and her amazingly cool and smart friends - living on couches and doing art. I felt like a sell-out that I couldn't make it in that world and got a "real job". I found out later that she had several million dollars to her name in her early 20s. I somehow had missed the implication of her text "stopping by my dads house in the Marina, be there in a minute".
When you find out that most free-living artists have financial backing - well, the rose-tinted glasses come off quick.
That said, props to any actually desperate-artists out there. I tend to think it's a bit of a mythic trope, but I'm sure some do exist.
Absolutely. But if Darwin had spent his life drawing pictures and showing them to no one - and if his entire generation did the same - we would not live in the modern world.
> When you find out that most free-living artists have financial backing - well, the rose-tinted glasses come off quick.
Maybe the issue there is taxation, not art? If we're going to get into a debate about people owing stuff to society, I think looking at estate taxes, property taxes, etc... is probably a lot more reasonable than getting mad at them for doing things they enjoy with their time.
I think it's a very easy trap to fall into where we sometimes look at opulence/privilege and get mad at the good things that come out of that (life/job security, freedom to experiment, etc), rather than the consolidation of resources and wealth that enable those outcomes very selectively and that deny other people access to the same conditions.
And there's lots of different life philosophies about how to deal with millionaires/billionaires from lots of different political perspectives, but in all of them from the most Capitalistic to the most Socialist, guilting people over not being passionate about charity blue-collar work is probably less helpful and less reasonable than guilting them over not paying back money (either through charity or taxes) into the systems and common social resources that are currently supporting them and their lifestyles.
"I'm a millionaire, but I got a normal job so therefore I don't need to feel guilty", feels weird to me. That's not really practically changing anything about other people's conditions.
After reading the post and comments, it feels more like the author (Jeff, maker of the Avernum series) is cautioning against too many of us moving too far away from life-sustaining activities like maintaining infrastructure (and I would add: teaching and parenting effectively, farming, using our bodies to do most of our work, practicing being more in tune with other life on Earth).
I’ve been escaping into videogame-land during most of my free time (I’m a homemaker & parent of a disabled kid), and while it’s helped me get along with my spouse (release valve, maybe?), it is not the healthiest solution in the long run. Okay for now, and I understand I have a lot of work yet to sync my real and ideal selves (where I know in the moment what I’m feeling and have agency to decide what to do next, rather than picking up the pieces later).
Art gets made by people who have the free time and/or people getting paid to do it. People do a pretty decent job at self-selecting for who gets to make art
This completely misses the point of art. Art is just an outward expression of thought and feeling, desires, fears, hopes, pain, pleasure. The problem is not that there is too much art or too many games, the problem is there is not enough TRULY artistic art or games. Most games now are created for profit and not because someone is trying to create the world they love. Likewise a lot of “art” created now is made to be sold and not for its own sake. This does not mean something cannot be art but intended to be sold but if it’s design revolves exclusively around whether it will sell the most copies then it is not truly an expression of the inner self but rather an expression that more external possessions would be nice to have.
One answer is "no one, at least not full time, we're gonna try and get by with existing works and amateur quality art"
Which is of course fantastically unpopular and will never happen, so people will continue to brutally compete for who gets to make art instead of doing grunt work
Premise: the author has access to many more pet creative projects than ever before.
Author's conclusion: people are spending more time on pet creative projects.
Better conclusion: the barriers to distribution have fallen so low that pet projects which existed in the past but never left the bedroom are now available to the world.
What might have just sat on a DAT cassette or floppy disk in someone's closet many years ago now becomes an upload to streaming music catalogs or game services.
Odd to focus on games when Seattle is propped up by a tech industry with people being overpaid by hundreds of thousands to make useless apps and websites.
Indie game devs are usually making things at home during their downtime. As far as I know, there’s no volunteer hobbyist bridge repair club, so they’re not really taking away from anything. Meanwhile you have companies that have an easily replaceable service like Slack selling for nearly 30 billion dollars. That’s what’s swallowing up money and consuming the time of people who’d otherwise be making something useful.
If the company hires you for a job and they’re happy with your work, you’re not overpaid. Companies are desperate for engineers that the price has inflated, the value of engineers has gone up because no one wants to make useless apps or websites without being paid.
This. Games are IMO more valuable to society than quite a few startup products. Of course the real value of startups is in the money that employs people which then goes back into the economy, whether or not the startup survives.
Volunteer hobbyist bridge clubs would be kinda cool.
That said, part of the reason you don’t see them is because of licensing and certifications. And people don’t want to be responsible for peoples lives for free.
I feel like his point is that we've put creators, of all forms of media, on such a high pedestal that we're neglecting the mundane things that keep life running smoothly.
I guess it's a job/career version of "social media is making us all lonelier." Everyone wants to be a creator like everyone wants to be an influencer...
Okay, sure, but why are we doing that? I feel like it's something more fundamental that's gone off the rails. This is a form of society-wide coping mechanism until we can identify and try out solutions to whatever that fundamental issue is.
We're not doing that. The author seems to assume that so many people are creating new art nowadays that the entire rest of civilization is being left to rot, but that's simply untrue, and a false dichotomy.
Most artists work crushing hours in sweatshop conditions, or are constantly gigging on the razor's edge of subsistence, with what little value they produce going to expenses or middlemen. Then the internet decides everything they create should be free whether they like it or not. We value the companies that distribute art and put celebrities on a high pedestal, but that's a different thing than putting creators and artists themselves on a pedestal.
The reason no one is fixing potholes or bridges or whatever is the taxpayer doesn't want to pay for it. If the pothole isn't right in front of their driveway, or the bridge isn't on their commute, or their kid isn't going to that particular school, then people consider any taxes spent on it to be theft. We no longer have a society, we have millions of individuals that happen to share a landmass in common but little else.
Sure, but it damn well "appears" that we are. I think this the fundamental issue that the internet causes.
Humans are very well tuned to equate occurance/mention of a thing with prevelence of that thing, so because the internet amplifies provokative thoughts/comments/ideas and buries concensus/1+s/me toos our colletive sensibilities are being thrown completely out of whack. Add in that there's no feedback mechanism to chastise undesireable opinions (or even actions), as there is in in-person communication, and you have a recipe for the chaos we are seeing.
This is so true and this story plays out in all kinds of online discourse, especially social media and politics. IMO probably the most difficult problem we face as a society/species at the moment. Creates a lot of opportunity for bad actors to manipulate the narrative and twist reality.
Seems like you're burnt out and you're trying to burn out everyone else as well. I create games in my free time for fun. I enjoy it. I have a game on Steam. It's not great but it's not nothing. And it's mine. Negative energy is what will make the world crumble, and this is a blog post full of negative energy.
I think Your reaction is why this blog post is on point. Everybody is thinking about themselves and their innner emotions, nobody is thinking about the system. Author is right that the sheer amount of artistic content created at this moment is unsustainable. And sooner or later this all will end when people doing actual work will come with forks and torches (this is of course a metaphor - I personally rather expect getting rid of dollar as global currency than actual people attacking artists)
This just strikes me as an incoherent rant from someone whose games obviously don't sell. IMO you can never have too much music, books, recipes, or games. Culture is important and as we get closer to a post-scarcity world people will expend less effort on survival and more on art and culture. Or space travel and technology that we don't need (but which we have to create because humans are curious).
Aren't all these indie games he's decrying being made on free time? Whether they are working day jobs, in school living on debt, or living with their parents, it's still their free time. Society isn't supporting the vast majority, and the experience they gain is very valuable. Show me a failed indie developer and I see someone who can at least ship.
If it's their free time, why should they spend that contributing towards fixing his bridges or maintaining his roads? Does the author do that? I know I don't, I just pay my taxes on my earnings like everyone else, occasionally volunteer, and do whatever I want in my free time.
> Art is what we teach our kids is the most valuable thing. The Disney movie Coco is about a boy from a family of shoemakers who wants to blow them off and be a musician. Disney will never, ever make a movie about a musician who dreams of making shoes. Even though, well, try going a week without music and then a week without shoes and see which is more necessary.
This post gets weirder and weirder as it goes on. It seems to end up at a place suggesting that society is going to crumble around us as everyone spends their time making and playing indie video games. I think that’s a little sensational, to say the least.
Here is the central thesis. There’s a lot to get through before you get to this.
Writing a game nobody plays discharges your energy and creates the feeling of achievement, but it's all empty calories and then your car falls into a sinkhole. If your game succeeds, it’s even worse. Your customers are now also expending all of their energy too, playing your game alone in a room. Meanwhile, sinkholes.
THAT is why I say there are too many indie games. They aren't sustainable. There is too much time wasted, and that will be true until time is applied to making the world work and bridges not fall down and food be in stores. Probably your time.
This could be a premise for a computer game. Society collapses because too many people spent time making and playing indie games.
But society will only be saved if you can unite the gamers, pool together your combined knowledge from playing too much games, and put it to use in productive tasks in the real world. All those hours levelling up in game skills, finally proven IRL.
All we have to do is restructure our entire civilization to work under Minecraft rules. Everything, literally everything must be made out of modular, arbitrarily attachable cubes.
I think it's a bit more than just that, but yeah, it's not very well defined or detailed. A bit of a jobs version of everyone wants to be an influencer on social media, but it's making everyone lonelier.
It's crumbling around us in part because we decided to overspend on infrastructure we don't need for one of the most inefficient form of transportation.
Instead of improving things we already have, we decided to move to the 'frontier', or worse, demolish perfectly good streets.
Those might be the same people who say "why do you do research in field X, rather than on cancer research?". Why do you have a job as an admin rather than go back to school and become a cancer scientist?
It's easier to criticize the actions of others than to take responsibility.
Space colonization is simply jumping third or fourth steps removed from the dream of making our Earth more livable and more ecologically diverse, or learning how to build and make an acrology.
From that perspective, it's no wonder why people think it's a waste of space, because they saw no meaningful purpose. Meanwhile, we're doing the opposite of terraforming Earth, by making it more unlivable everyday.
If space colonization leads to mining resources from asteroids and offloading the environmental costs of such mining from earth or get us building materials strong enough to give us a space elevator or space factories sending their waste into the sun, you wouldn’t be saying this perhaps.
Space research is usually funded with taxpayer money (this is changing, but a fair amount of SpaceX’s revenue is still NASA contracts). Games and Starbucks are funded by folks after-tax wages. In both cases it’s money that they earned, but they have a lot more individual agency with the latter portion of their wages than the former portion.
People do say similar things about video games and Starbucks. "A cup of coffee per day" is often used as a barometer when charities want you to donate to them.
It's not a bad question though. Someone who wants space exploration should think about that question and be able to answer it in a meaningful way.
Much of the problem being identified here is not a matter of waste, but rather a question of taste. I read a very good biography of Kafka by Reiner Stach that described how dominant literary culture was in Prague at the time. Writing seemed closer to contemporary athletics. Bankers, businesspeople, and upwardly mobile people often encouraged their kids to be writers first, and practical secondarily. The endpoint for sports is more obvious than the endpoint of writing, or music, and even especially game design, but a culture-wide appreciation and perception of the medium in question could better triage candidates for cultural survival. Does the author of this newsletter also think there are too many pick-up basketball games vis a vis potholes? I agree with others that have made the point that this has more to do with the lower barrier of entry to market.
Our culture is dominated by those entities that can make massive capital investments and industrialize culture. For a variety of complicated reasons, I would point this out as the issue. It is rather the successful entities, and not the apparent failures, that produce the problem of over saturation. I am forgetting the name of the movement, but contemporaneous with Schubert's lifetime, there was a kind of at home arts movement. The bourgeois were still not spending their free time filling potholes, but no one was aspiring to a salaried post in the grand facade of entities with immense capital reserves and an industrialized capacity to influence culture. If we were less atomized and a greater appreciation of our cultural expression was common, I believe it would be easier to come to grips with talent, or our lack thereof. It is no sin to lack talent. It only makes talent all the more incredible.
There's been a lot of rumbling for the past decade or so, mostly from misguided indie developers, that there are "too many games", as if there was ever a time when marketing a game was easy.
There are a lot of games. Bad games. Boring games. Unoriginal games. Half-assed games.
You know what there isn't an excess of? Great games. Games which serve particular niches really well. The "colony sim" genre has enjoyed a bit of a renaissance since RimWorld proved you can have a big niche hit without replicating the entirety of Dwarf Fortress' detailed simulation - but there still aren't a ton of interesting games in the genre, such that even a highly derivative game like Going Medieval gets a ton of interest.
And that's just one niche! There are many others. Make a game you love, make it great, and you can probably succeed. Don't make boring crap that nobody wants to play.
Oh wow, that's a depressing read but the guy might be right.
We as society highly value art and artists and celebrities. But we don't value helping random fellow citizens that we've never met. The result is that people are eager to make art, but you won't find a similar level of motivation for repairing infrastructure or playing taxes to enable repairs.
But if our infrastructure gets bad enough, life becomes frustrating for everyone. And genuinely helping others might be more fulfilling than making art that nobody cares about. So I'd support the conclusion that we need less people making art alone and more people helping others.
I think this argument falls flat because for some things (mostly digital, or even interactive, like games) people are more likely to publish them.
I bet for every published indie game there are 50 paintings or drawings someone made and has not published - or musical performances not even recorded. I don't see anyone complaining about those. It's kinda like telling people what not to do in their free time. And I am 100% sure not all of those games mentioned were made as a way to make money or NOT in the creators' free time. Maybe they have aspirations to professionalize, but that's not the point.
Because you can? I don't necessarily disagree that there's too many videogames, but of all the things to get upset about, too many video games is really at the bottom of the list of things to get upset about.
Later in his post, he generalized to all media but keeps the details video game specific.
Basically, I feel like his point is that we've put creators, of all forms of media, on such a high pedestal that we're neglecting the mundane things that keep life running smoothly.
Basically, a job/career version of social media making us all lonelier, I guess. Everyone wants to be a creator like everyone wants to be an influencer...
Or about movies! Although, to be fair, a similar mindset creeps in that field too: it ceases to be art, or moving stories, or mind-changing ideas from movie makers. Now it's all about content, and how much it is consumed.
I don't have data or facts to share, but I have a strong gut feeling that people who consider art (in a very broad meaning, including entertainment, games, music, etc) to be a commodity are not only missing out, they make the world a worst place to live in.
Or maybe just the barriers to entry have significantly fallen. I remember making stupid games on my C64 back in the day, the difference was I didn't have a way to get it to people beyond my immediate family and friends.
Couple low barriers to distribution with a culture that encourages constant hustling for money and this is what you get.
"Writing a game nobody plays discharges your energy and creates the feeling of achievement, but it's all empty calories and then your car falls into a sinkhole."
I love this quote. However, the correct interpretation is not that too many people are making (or playing) games, but that too few people get any sense of achievement from the stuff they get paid for. My trick is to spend some creative energy on optimsing my shitty job. Then at least I get the sense of achievement AND get the crap work done quicker. (I kid. My job isn't that bad. Mostly.)
Video game tooling got good enough that the velocity increased massively from 20 years ago where companies were writing their own engines. There might be more folks working in games, but it's probably not the sole reason for the increased output. The team size for indie games shrunk dramatically while quality simultaneously went up due to tooling improvements.
There's lots of supporting work for assets and logic that can be plugged in to game engines. Even when you need your own stuff, there's other forums to get that work as needed. This is distributed and shared work now instead of being under one studio roof. Plus the tools for producing that stuff probably got better too. The efficiencies are compounding.
There's also been success with much simpler visual styles (Stardew), meaning not as much work needs to go into 3D modeling and advanced stuff like that. The worlds you play in now didn't necessarily have to get bigger either. Again, Stardew switches screens like old RPGs. It didn't seek to render a bigger world than games that came before it.
Same for the distribution platforms. You no longer need a slow corporate entity to handle making physical disks and shipping them worldwide. This lowers the barrier of entry by a lot when combined with the previous gains.
This author got used to the incremental graphics and technical improvements being marketed by game companies and thought that's how it always would be. That part still exists, but it's just in a much more crowded space these days.
Yeah, the general public has bad priorities, why aren't we spending every cent on finding the cure to cancer? Surely figuring out the cure to cancer is more important than Marvel movies or the next Call of duty? Well, the average person's wallet doesn't think so.
If we take this line of thinking to the extreme we should all be eating soylent brand gruel and eating a couple vitamins and all our excess output should go into finding the cure to any and all diseases.
OP seems to believe that people avoid going into valuable, practical work because it's too demanding, or because it doesn't pay enough. Yes, the roads in Seattle are full of potholes, despite the wealth of Amazon. That doesn't mean that every Seattleite with a trowel and an asphalt bucket is in a position to do something about the problem. Has OP failed to notice that this sort of matter is controlled by enormous bureaucracies, and that the average member of such a bureaucracy--to say nothing of the average citizen--has hardly any power to effect significant change? Or accomplish anything that they can look back at and say, with satisfaction, "I did this?" It's not unreasonable for people to expect that sort of satisfaction from their efforts, and it's not totally unreasonable for them to look for it in the arts, video games, etc.
Regarding Steam, had anyone else noticed the increase in adult related games? As in full on porn "interactive stories". Are developers now getting so desperate that they've turned to porn to fund their industry?
I've had to turn on Steam's family mode as I don't really want that type of content.
I think they always had a ton of them, and they did generate money, but I remember a debate some years ago about I-dont-remeber-wich-game with "totally nsfw content" and Valve explicitely said they were open to the genre (probably to contrast with epic game or a platform like that). So developpers published their game on here too.
A lot of people here say that the glut of video games is because "the society values art highly, while it undervalues regular jobs". I disagree. The main cause for video games overproduction IMO is that, the "real" jobs (fixing potholes etc.), are unpleasant and demanding in all kinds of ways (having a boss, having a fixed schedule, having work to external expectations, dealing with unpleasant physical conditions), while making a game at home is basically a very nice and insular activity - no boss, no deadlines, complete creative freedom. It's basically the best job there is in a sense - that's why people are taking shots at it. If it comes with extra societal appreciation, it's just a nice added bonus on top.
I think his point is that our society is putting too much value in entertainment sorts of goods like art, sports, literature, etc. and not enough in things like infrastructure maintenance, science, teaching, etc. He's not saying we don't need any entertainment, just that we don't need anywhere near as much.
Recall the Golgafrinchans. His argument is that our society is pushing more people out of the "thinkers" and "doers" category into the "useless" category, and that if they had our population breakdown they'd need to shove a lot of entertainment producers on Ark B.
There's some truth to it but also some falsehood. I think the reality is a bit nuanced.
The narrow economic point about it being hard to sell a new game might make sense as a warning to new indie developers, but everything else is an unhinged luddite rant against how people want to spend their free time. There is not some pool of labor that would otherwise be fixing infrastructure or building whatever the author happens to think is worthwhile if only it wasn’t being squandered on personal projects. He might as well go on a rant against the number of puzzles or ship in a bottles being built. There will always be tons of bad art and thats absolutely fine.
Pixel art platformers are easy to make and have the capacity for timeless fun. Try not to be too harsh. My kids drawings are crude but I appreciate them for what they are to me. Games and art I made as a kid and teen were also mostly for fun.
While it did cross over to excessive at some point, I learned and moved on. Now I'm not living the game dev dream of my youth but enjoying an easier life as a boring programmer/manager. And I still enjoy simple and complex games alone and with family.
At a global scale, everyone-in-the-search-space view, there is significant duplicity. That's life. If you look hard enough, you could find games, songs, books, paintings, even people that are essentially indistinguishable from each other. Yes, there's lot of artwork in the world.
Ask yourself instead if the thing you are making should instead be an improvement to some other thing, or if you want to use your time on earth to make a potentially-similar thing that is focused on your immediate neighborhood.
I think that Jeff Vogel is a genius, an original thinker with a tremendous amount of creative energy and drive, like Steve Jobs, or John Carmack, or Terry Davis. But geniuses can be wrong, a lot, and this particular article reads like his own intrusive thoughts of anxiety and self loathing spiralling out of control and being given voice and broadcast to the world.
For 10+ years Vogel has written blog posts about stubbornly making it in an increasingly hostile indie game market, and he's always sounded a little bit proud and a little bit scared. Now the pride has turned to shame and the fear has turned to dread.
Western society is in decline, and the fault and symptom is that so many people are making and playing video games, the work to which he has dedicated his life.
> And don't give me homilies about [...] "All creation is precious." [...] None of these things are true.
the statement "all creation is precious" is true from the perspective of someone else that also likes to "create" things by rearranging/juxtaposing/building off of content that already exists. the more "content" that is out there, no matter how trivial it may seem, increases the amount of source material that can be sifted through to find the perfect building blocks for something else.
This is so cynical it overshoots the mark and lands way out there on the other side.
Why make art that nobody wants? Because it's fun. I'm by no means a creative, but I've got a folder full of terrible drawings, loads of google docs of stories that don't go anywhere that I wrote while bored/drunk/high/inspired/depressed, and five different game prototypes on Github. Nobody's ever going to see most of them. This is fine. Doing creative things is intrinsically fun if you've got an itch to scratch.
Why do people make 30 indie games a day? Same reason my mum spent 100 hours making an anatomically accurate wire sculpture of a crab to sell for $40 to a university to hang up in the aquaculture wing. It's fun. It doesn't detract from her work - she's retired, and even when she was working, she used different skills and drew from a different pool of resources.
This is from Jeff Vogel, who's averaged about one indie game a year since 1996. I think part of his attitude comes from working for 26 years and seeing the transition from smallish studios to a gigantic winner-takes-all market. It's certainly going to be harder to make money as an indie developer now, with raised expectations and a lot more competition, and there is some value in warning people about that.
On a final note, society is also... looking pretty good right now? We came up with multiple vaccines for a global pandemic in record time, most of the roads near my house are okay, life's improving steadily in the developing world, my state government is going on a massive spree to buy more trains and remove level crossings, and I could fix a small pothole if you gave me a sack of cold asphalt and a fencing bar. There are some problems with inequality, but they seem to be tied to governments abandoning full employment policies, and I'm sure people will notice eventually.
Meanwhile 100000 russian troops is being placed around ukraine border, 20% of russian households does not have indoor plumbing and some of people I know still does not believe in pandemic.
Im not sure where Im going with this but somehow I feel that that You should not mistake Your inner optimism with what is really going out there.
Remember Afghanistan vUSSR, Chechnya, and Ukraine v1.0?
I'm Australian. I see Russian aggression in the Ukraine in a historical context that includes a lot of proxy wars very far away from me. Sure, it probably sucks to be Ukrainian right now, but they're ~44 million out of ~7.8 billion. Maybe one day it will be our turn to be invaded, and that will be very bad for us, but I hope my inner pessimism won't be confused for what is really going on out there.
Its not that far, world is really small. For me its even worse because I live only few hundred kilometers from Ukraine border (its only half a day drive by tank if I calculate correctly).
And wars sometimes have tendency to extend their reach beyond what You would expect. If I remeber correctly Tobruk was defended by 14000 Aussies (and I think that was way before any kind of attack on Australia took place).
Assuming the author is primarily directing this sentiment at people attempting to make a living in indie dev, then I agree with them. Or at least with the larger purpose of dissuading people from "following their dreams d'art" as a primary rather than secondary occupation. They should be discouraged. They should live in a world where it is common knowledge that pursuing acting, or film making, or writing, or gamedev as a focal point of their life is really stupid. Because actually accomplishing that is ridiculously bullshit hard, while sinking crippling amounts of time and money into the training is relatively very easy. If you want to spend your life making indie games more than anything else in the whole world and are driven towards it with single-minded intensity then you are unlikely to be dissuaded by everybody telling you it is a bad idea, and thus might also have the drive required to weather the punches.
The implication of your comment is that people only do productive work now because they are forced to, to avoid starvation. And that you think such a system is fine. Because if you thought people now do work which interests them, you'd still think that in a UBI world, and if you thought the current system wasn't fine, you wouldn't go straight to "but who can be forced to do horrible things if we take the forcing lever away? That would be bad".
This is not about being productive. Productivity on its own is meaningless - when I draw I can work really hard but the effects of my work are literally wothless from the point of view of society.
I believe that capitalism works only because people need incetives that are aligned with society needs. Otherwise they will work really hard on stuff that uses resources but will not be part of sustainable system.
Probably people that "want more" than whatever the government stipend buys them. I would probably change nothing about my day to day if I the government started paying my living expenses, except worrying less about what happens if I become unable to work.
UBI probably won't pay enough to have high-speed internet in a two bedroom apartment in a popular city center eating at fancy restaurants three meals a day. It will be the absolute minimum to not die if you can't work. So, people will probably go to work to have a better life than that, but at least have something to fall back on if it doesn't work out. Having a fallback means startups, volunteering, self-care, all sorts of good things. The risk of starving to death living in a cardboard box goes to zero, which prevents a lot of people from doing a lot of things. It's a very real possibility in the current world.
I think people that read this site don't quite understand what "real life" is like in America. There are no paid sick days. If you don't report to your shift, you're fired. If you're lucky, you very carefully fill out the right paperwork and keep your job this time as a courtesy. (There is no federal protection here; for example, FMLA doesn't apply during your first year or so at a job. Some states do a little better, but with remote work, you'll find that most of the jobs are in states without protections! Happened to a friend, though their home state also offers no protections.) While you're sick, you still have to pay for rent and food. UBI is the acceptance that corporate America isn't going to cover routine events like receiving medical treatment. It won't enable people to party 24/7 for 80 years on the taxpayers' dime. It just means you don't starve to death if you get unlucky.
People will continue working to do a little better than merely existing, if they're able.
The robots. The concept of UBI is precipitated on the idea that the gains from technological innovation have been unequally distributed since the founding of the country. It has just been getting to the point where it is very evident to many people now.
In fact Thomas Paine wrote:
"To understand what the state of society ought to be, it is necessary to have some idea of the natural and primitive state of man; such as it is at this day among the Indians of North America. There is not, in that state, any of those spectacles of human misery which poverty and want present to our eyes in all the towns and streets in Europe,"
The real secret is to be the guy who can fix the robots - the new blue collar. Doesn't matter which way the world turns out - either way you're living comfortably and coasting below the radar.
Private equity will own the robots. UBI is not all roses. It will be a way to give the masses a way to live their lives with a minimum amount of dignity and prevent a complete revolt once all jobs are gone through no fault of the people. This will likely also close off the remaining avenues to escape the lower middle class into upper classes. Whoever acquired capital early on wins and everyone else is stuck like in the centuries past. Think about it. Most of the 'new' billionaires are from tech which was an odd fork in history that the old elite clearly didn't see coming. Now the new rich will be pulling that ladder up from behind them once the robots do every job and UBI gives you a bread and circus.
Until they build a robot to fix robots. The real secret is to be the guy who designs robots, because robot designer will be the absolute last job to be automated :P
I presume the same people doing productive work today. I think it would be a great net positive if all the people who want to sit around and do nothing all day would just go and finally do that, rather than getting in my way all the time at work.
Maybe not people doing "productive" work, but the people who pay most of the UBI would possibly the billionaires and corporations who have dodged taxes since their conception.
You are completely missing the point of his post. His point isn't that people can't work on what they want, his point is that people aren't working on "important" things.
I agree that there are too many video games nowadays that it's impossible for most of them to be financially sustainable
But it's pretty weird to blame crumbling infrastructure on the pursuit of art when in reality suburban sprawl is already financially unsustainable with or without artists
Sensational title with subtext of: practice doing things that are closer to the land, obscured by fewer abstraction layers. That’s my take, anyway.
For those who have a caldera of a story bubbling up, by all means get it out! For those who want to make art for the money/fame/power/etc, maybe don’t? Though I’m not telling anyone what to do directly, I might vote for regulation that supports a living wage for work closer to our basic needs, freeing up more people to be creative for the joy of it and without the pressure of money.
10s of thousands of games is a drop in the bucket compared to the total gaming market. There are an estimated THREE BILLION people playing video games around the world.
Build computer games is both harmless fun and the dream of many people. So surely you shouldn't take a mortgage to do that with so many games in the market, but otherwise this article is the worse motivational talk I've ever seen. Let people buy games. It's harmless, it's fun, and some of those games will end up having an effect on the world.
We're having major debates right now in the US over whether or not the federal government should invest into infrastructure at all and how much it should invest, and to phrase that as "nobody wants to work" is utterly backwards. Nobody wants to pay to maintain bridges, and whenever we try to set up funds to pay for fixing bridges, it gets funneled towards grifters because of an equal mix of privatization/government corruption/lack of transparency.
You can look at a lot of infrastructure through this lens. Why is our Internet so far behind other countries? Is it because of a lack of workers? No, it's because of a mixture of monopolies, government capture, and both over and under regulation. We make it hard to invest in Internet infrastructure without serious effort from lawmakers and companies, meanwhile we don't regulate the companies that we are funneling public funds to. We give money to Comcast to set up Internet connections, and it doesn't do it, and then we give them more money instead of punishing them.
Meanwhile, the very notion of improving this infrastructure is itself political and constantly debated. At best, our infrastructure projects are rolled up into an increasingly dysfunctional political system where parties are purely interested in maintaining power and opposing each other. Add onto that an unhealthy dose of individualism that teaches us that people shouldn't be paying to maintain common infrastructure and that asking them to do so is theft.
This take is also really disconnected from the reality of gig-workers and factory workers (and out-of-work individuals) across America, including in Seattle. It is not the case that everyone is privileged enough to not work and therefore we have a shortage because too many of them are making art. There is a large population of people in the US who feel forced into oppressive jobs, and companies literally rely on their desperation in order to maintain an underpaid workforce. We have willing workers in America, but a nontrivial number of them are trapped working for Uber and fighting off homelessness.
What does it say about government spending, about the barriers of entry to doing other work, and about the amount of resources we're devoting to infrastructure in general that those people can't get better paying jobs than Uber? It's just so out of touch to act like the potential workforce begins and ends with programmers/artists. Get out of the tech bubble and talk to normal people; the reason Seattle isn't paying to fix potholes is not because there is no one left to fix the pothole, and it is definitely not the worker's fault that they haven't done their civic duty to push blue-collar market wages down far enough.
“So many (too many) books are published every year, and it seems everyone is writing a book. Perhaps we should all be reading more and writing less!”
— Tracy Chevalier
Wow what a depressing article for me considering I just lost my job and I was wondering if I should get into what he calls 'art' for a new path in life.
When I was young, it was plausible for a person to have read the latest books, watched the latest films, and played the latest games. I'm not sure anybody actually did that. But it was plausible. You could sample more-or-less everything, and choose what you like.
Today there is so much of the stuff that you just can't.
You don't know whats out there, and you never will.
> When I was young, it was plausible for a person to have read the latest books, watched the latest films, and played the latest games.
For video games, there are a couple years in the 1970s for which this might have been true, but between just the Atari 2600 and the Apple ][, there's no way anybody could have kept up with the flood.
For books, I went over to ISFDB and searched for 'novel AND english AND 1980' which came up with eight hundred and twenty three results. Some of those are duplicates, but even a tenth of that is better than one book a week, and that's just one genre.
No, it's never been plausible for a person to consume all new films, games, and especially not books. I suppose you could use some list, say the NYT Bestseller list and strive to read all those, which is somewhat plausible, but those lists are still around and probably more people now strive to do such things than in the past
That's a good thing, because the alternative interpretation is that even non-mainstream tastes and niches are being catered for, when that wasn't the case before.
This is such an annoyingly simplistic take and such poison. Some of the things this guy says are outright nasty: like should you want to make your game to have only 10 people play it. Absolutely, yes. And if that detracts you, then maybe you don’t actually want to be making them.
Games, like film, like music and like all the other storytelling mediums are a form of literature. It is completely normal and has always been like this when it came to distribution - everybody wants to tell stories, but only a select few do it so well that they get to do it for a living. And only a few (usually big, industrialized) efforts take 90% of the market.
In my company we make simulation systems for teaching a complex medical skill. If the small local game dev industry/community did not exist we wouldn’t either. The awesome talent that is developed and flows out of games is extremely valuable. The tools and methods that come from gamedev are awesome too and drive innovation themselves. Gamedev delivers value, even when it’s not immediately obvious.
I myself wanted to make films and went to film school as a young man. But I have since pivoted towards becoming a PM (and I still use video in my work). Film school, with a focus on film production was the best practical education in management. I would never tell anyone that there are “too many movies made, you shouldn’t make more”.
Also this person talks about “solving the problem”. The problem doesn’t need solving, the market for these things readjusts and emerges accordingly. And it always has. “We” are not “teaching” young people to do anything, they do the things themselves and making them allows them to grow and develop.
> Games, like film, like music and like all the other storytelling mediums are a form of literature. It is completely normal and has always been like this when it came to distribution - everybody wants to tell stories, but only a select few do it so well that they get to do it for a living.
This is metaphor stretched too far. How is Quake 3 Arena or Hearthstone a form of literature?
It is. It’s not high literature or even recognized as such by critics, but 1. It means something to someone out there and 2. There are plenty of references and repurposed components in that that do come from the recognized serious literature. Everything is a remix, everything is being continuously repollinated and crossed over. Some works are more derivative than others.
“The market” reflects the emotional state of those with the power to play it. I’d rather flatten the boom-bust amplitude, and that’s an uphill battle as those with the capital to weather the storms benefit most.
> This is a whole another blog post, so I'll paint with broad strokes for now. My city, Seattle, is crumbling. We don't have the energy to maintain the roads, and our bridges are literally falling apart. We can't even maintain what our grandparents built, let alone make any grand new projects.
What in the world does this have to do with people creating art? Maybe the crumbling infrastructure is emblematic of poor leadership (N.B. we aren't allowed to blame Democrats for running Seattle into the ground in tech circles), corrupt politicians, poor city planning, etc.
I get it, let's blame the musicians (what?)! The point is genuinely completely devoid of any through-line.
> The reason a young, enterprising indie dev can churn out product is because that person is surrounded by cheap products made overseas in punishing conditions by people we never see. These are the delicious fruits of Empire.
What a "college freshman" take on things, I wouldn't even know where to start.
> we aren't allowed to blame Democrats for running Seattle into the ground in tech circles
I exist almost exclusively in tech circles in and around Seattle, and we blame existing leadership for tons of problems. This seems so weirdly divorced from reality that it smacks of ideologue speak.
I work exclusively in tech circles around L.A. and even being remotely sympathetic to Republican views is anathema. San Francisco is ideologically way more entrenched even though, ironically, their city is a mess, much like Seattle.
Again, that doesn't mirror my experience around any of those areas at all. I lived in LA and the bay area for almost a decade. Plenty of people wanted different tax structures, reduced regulatory burden on businesses (especially small businesses), reevaluation of existing expenditures over increased taxation, etc.
Are there specific Republican views that you think are anathema?
> Are there specific Republican views that you think are anathema?
Try wearing a MAGA hat in Santa Monica. The arguments here that it's just as cool to be a Democrat as it is to be a Republican is so divorced from reality, I feel like I'm being gaslit. Even on dating apps folks use "moderate" as a euphemism for "conservative" -- I've literally had this conversation on dates before.
>it's just as cool to be a Democrat as it is to be a Republican
Nobody is saying that. This is true of perhaps no location in the country. Also, wearing a MAGA hat is a behavioral subset of "being a Republican". Half the Republicans I know think MAGA hats are "gross". I think you're letting feelings of political hostility push you into rambly territory a bit. You keep loosening your phrasing to be more high level "Democrats vs Republicans".
Not OP, but any of the following will immediately get you labeled as a Republican (said with disgust), racist, Trump supporter, or bootlicker:
- support for deporting illegal immigrants
- opposition against affirmative action / DEI programs with forced quotas
- opposition against defunding police
- support for stronger punishments for property crime
- disdain for homeless encampments
- disdain for the combination of higher taxes + increasing welfare programs
- support for building more housing that doesn't require a years-long environmental review and low-income units (although this is changing)
- opposition against redistributing local K-12 school funds state-wide
- any suggestion that the higher poverty and crime rates seen in [insert race/ethnicity/sex/gender/religion/etc] could possibly even 1% be caused by culture and not 100% caused by systemic discrimination
Any of these will immediately get you labeled as an alt-right nutjob even though I personally think many are quite reasonable positions to have.
Most of these are severely exaggerated, in practice (in the context of your starting assertion). You can find individual cases to support any assertion against either party.
Being sympathetic to Republican views does not equal also not criticizing democrats. And from what I see in LA everyone loves talking shit about everyone. Bring up the 2 party system and you will get pretty wide consensus from anyone.
Many of the people I know consider many Republican views anathema, and blame Democrats for running Seattle into the ground (in the way the phrase is being used here). What you're expressing sounds more black and white than reality.
> and we blame existing leadership for tons of problems
and then vote again for Democrats when elections come. I'm not picking on you in particular, or on the Democrats, in other places it may be the Republicans, but it seems to me that the American society is so much split that when it comes the time to vote, most people will vote for the party that ostensibly is more aligned with their values, irrespectively of the fact that they are doing a good job.
I mean, a bad Democrat is better than a good Republican because at least it is not a racist cunt (or, from the other side, a bad Republican is better than a good Democrat because at least is not a woke idiot).
It looks like in the past it was different, maybe the position of the two main parties were closer so it was not much of an issue, but right now I think that the USA would benefit from a more pluralistic approach to the elections
Totally agree, for the most part. With the exception of Ann Davidson, western WA generally won't elect anyone with an R by their name. Polarization is a part of this (I won't get into the weeds here, but The Last Guy was popular in part due to the perception that he was "owning the libs", and as high-minded as coastal liberals consider themselves, there's a sneer not too far off for any southern accent or 'unenlightened' viewpoint).
> maybe the position of the two main parties were closer so it was not much of an issue
I think the parties were further apart, actually. They almost completely overlap in terms of policy outlook and - tellingly - donor class. Maybe the flames of culture and race war are being stoked by the Tuckers of the world in part because there is no major meat-and-potatoes differentiator anymore.
Game devs are the lowest paid developers. And, in my experience, the most talented. Something is compelling us to do it beyond money.
This is doubly true of careers in academia.
Conversely, it’s quite smart to be a plumber or builder in Seattle today monetarily.
We play down the role of cultural values in the choices people make.
Very good builders might not exist today because of the lack of social incentive to get them into the right place. They'll work towards making yet another crud app.
> We don’t respect grunt work. We only respect art.
The problem with Seattle isn't that plumbers aren't respected, it's political/economic in nature. It's NIMBYism and zoning laws and literally pricing workers into homelessness. I'd like to see more praise of plumbers too, but Seattle's problem is not a shortage of plumbers, it's rent.
Particularly:
> If you are happy that only 10 people play your game, fine, I guess. However, you should ask if you can't be bringing more people happiness with your limited time in the one life you get on this Earth.
The idea that people making video games for 10 people are making so much money that they're skewing the local economy or driving out plumbers, the idea that the reason potholes aren't fixed are because workers are in short supply instead of, I don't know, government spending on public resources -- this is just so silly.
People making games/music for niche audiences can't go out and fix potholes because potholes are on public roads. The city needs to pay people to do that. If blue collar workers can't afford to live in Seattle, the city needs to look at high-priced tech companies that are actually making enough money and paying large enough salaries to influence local economies and politics: ie, FAANG tech companies with massive audiences.
> Give up your dreams of the easy life sitting and making art indoors.
To be clear, nobody stays in indie game development because they want an easy life. The pay is nonexistent. If anyone is looking at indie art as a way of having a comfortable existence they should definitely stop doing that -- not because they're wasting valuable resources, but because actually they're going to be eating ramen for years and then picking up a normal job for a major tech company once they completely hit rock bottom, at which point the overvalued venture-capital space will use them to price all of the plumbers out of the city.
>we aren't allowed to blame Democrats for running Seattle into the ground in tech circles
We certainly are allowed. And others are allowed to disagree with us, even harshly. Too often criticism is painted as being "shouted down". What we are not "allowed" to do is be sarcastic/snarky about it, which is, theoretically, good. That way lies political shitposting.
I mean if you want to point at anything for blame... at least point at government spending. More than half of federal discretionary spending is on the military. Put a few % of that towards infrastructure...
For reference .003% of the federal budget goes towards the national endowment for the arts'
I mean why have a local or State government if you’re just going to treat them as a convenient receptacle for tax money that originated locally with basically no responsibility over the local status quo?
I think the author has his whole idea backwards here. We should be looking to lift everyone out of having to work in sweatshops so that everyone can follow their passion, be it making games or other art. The author instead believes we should tear down everyone who has achieved their passion and drag them back to the sweatshops. Both scenarios might be "equal" in terms of how much labor gets done, but one is clearly worse than the other when it comes to quality of life.
> We should be looking to lift everyone out of having to work in sweatshops so that everyone can follow their passion
Except this is a fantasy - no ones passion is being a garbage worker, road worker, or plumber. They are hard dirty jobs. Hell, I'd even argue no one really wants to be a doctor or a nurse - because they are equally hard, dirty jobs - often dealing with death. Without the promise of payment, none of those jobs would be done.
The reality is we need to better compensate "hard jobs", so that people strive to do them.
Interestingly while there are more games, I kind of played less games on average in the past year. Plus I already have a big backlog of games to play so I haven't bought much either.
