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There are too many video games
- blinks 5y agoImagine making this same point about books: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Books_published_per_country_per_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Books_published_per_country_pe...
- HeckFeck 5y agoKing Solomon felt the same way 3000 years ago. And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh. [Ecclesiasties 12v12]
- pessimizer 5y agoIt's been done. There are too many books.
- solarmist 5y agoHe does. 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...
- dvt 5y agoHe does. > Spotify now gets over 60000 new songs a day. Amazon now has millions of books. My country has over 550 scripted TV shows in production. It's a weird point to make, and not really supported properly.
- mudita 5y agoThe point has been made about books before, see, e.g. gwern: https://www.gwern.net/Culture-is-not-about-Esthetics https://www.gwern.net/Culture-is-not-about-Esthetics
- hashmal 5y agoOr 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.
- pkaye 5y agoThat is where universal basic income comes in place so everyone can work on the fun stuff they want to work on.
- smashem 5y agoSounds like an interesting theory. Who will be the ones that do the productive work that pays for UBI?
- ModernMech 5y agoI 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.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jpindar 5y agoThe ones who don't want to be poor, which is most people.
- 0xdeadb00f 5y agoMaybe 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.
- dahdum 5y agoNot close to enough money even if you take all of it from them. UBI would be on the back of the middle and upper middle class.
- jodrellblank 5y agoThe 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".
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- pessimizer 5y ago> 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.
- claudiulodro 5y agoWithout shoes, the soles of your feet will eventually harden. Without art, your soul will eventually harden.
- musicale 5y ago1. Working at home I usually spend more time listening to music than I do wearing shoes. 2. Making shoes these days means working in a sweatshop somewhere, which isn't an appealing dream. 3. Disney makes more money from music soundtracks than from shoes, so you can see which one they might want to promote. 4. Musicals are a popular animated film genre; shoe-icals, not so much.
- trixie_ 5y agoPeople say all the time, "why spend all that money on space when there's so many problems on Earth?" Why do people never say the same thing about all the money spent on video games and Starbucks? Which is arguably a lot more money.
- rlayton2 5y agoThose 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.
- kiba 5y agoSpace 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.
- flutetornado 5y agoIf 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.
- ModernMech 5y agoTrust me, people have a lot of opinions on video games being a waste of time and money. You should have heard my parents when I was a teenager.
- SllX 5y agoWell that’s not really a fair comparison. 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.
- ModernMech 5y agoThis 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.
- solarmist 5y agoI 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. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30185251 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30185251
- kiba 5y agoIt'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.
- sorry_outta_gas 5y agoyeah, I don't know about that, my indie game phase was fundamental to my carrer in 'hard' science. computers are great creative outlets for selfexpression toying around with games isn't a bad thing I also find the shoe making thing is a bit odd because for a lot of people it's a similar creative outlet.. for this person it's blogging
- HeckFeck 5y agoThis 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. And thus, the economy was saved.
- solarmist 5y agoI 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.
- krapp 5y agoWe'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.
- solarmist 5y agoSure, 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.
- dvt 5y ago> 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.
- ModernMech 5y agoI really think this post is best read as the author trying to convince himself that he should abandon his own indie video game project.
- bloodyplonker22 5y agoHe has probably already abandoned it and he's trying to convince himself it was the right decision.
- kzrdude 5y agoHe's been doing those games for life (ok, for 25 years now), so I have a hard time thinking that he would quit now.
- micromacrofoot 5y agoI 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'
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Mikeb85 5y agoImagine saying there's too much culture... 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).
- IndexCardBox 5y agoOr 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.
- shmerl 5y agoInterestingly 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.
- derfnugget 5y agoSeems 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.
- v-erne 5y agoI 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)
- aeternum 5y ago“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
- myhf 5y agoi want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and i'm not kidding
- renewiltord 5y agoWell, I can make you an incredibly dumb game in an hour in Love 2D for $1k if you want to satisfy that need.
- burntoutfire 5y agoFairtrade games?
- friedturkey 5y agoOdd 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.
- Mikeb85 5y agoThis. 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.
- jbluepolarbear 5y agoIf 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.
- Shadonototra 5y agoor: they got so much in VC funding that they don't know what to do with the money anymore money incorrectly spread teachers starving, making an indecent low amount of money; as a result
- thewakalix 5y agoThe existence of VC funding is directly responsible for teachers starving? I don't see how that follows.
- JetSpiegel 5y ago
- zaptheimpaler 5y agoThe majority of these indie games are made by teens and college students with little or no expectation of making a profit. Kids made games or other art decades ago too, but distribution was never as free and easy as today. This is all good..
- onion2k 5y agoWe can't even maintain what our grandparents built. Companies in our grandparents era paid taxes that paid for infrastructure.
- akshayverma99 5y agoThere are too many games that people don't wanna play Maybe stop remaking pixel art platformers over and over again. One look at the itch.io and its very clear what kinda games there are too many of.
- paulryanrogers 5y agoPixel 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.
- majewsky 5y agoI know this is kind of a weird tangent, but even the pony quips are factually wrong in this article: > The least popular pony is Applejack. She is also the only one who has a real job. This is, of course, a coincidence. If you actually watched the show, you'd know that Rarity owns a nation-wide boutique franchise that is depicted as highly successful.
- strken 5y agoIt's not clear to me whether this is a dig at capitalists or not.
- mrintellectual 5y agoI'm curious as to why there was a dip in the number of new Steam releases in 2019...
- Legion 5y agoPremise: 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.
- arka2147483647 5y agoWhen 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.
- sk0g 5y agoThat'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.
- mitchdoogle 5y agoNo, 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
- bigbillheck 5y ago> 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.
- f00zz 5y agoSounds like this guy needs a new hobby, maybe metalworking?
- dahdum 5y agoAren'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. I don't see the problem.
- jvanderbot 5y agoAt 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. Nothing wrong with that.
- selimthegrim 5y agoSurely you mean duplication here.
- a_t48 5y agoLet'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.
- erulabs 5y ago> 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.
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- danShumway 5y ago> 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.
- jdhn 5y ago>Why create just for the sake of creation? 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.
- sk0g 5y agoIronic, for a blog post without a coherent reason to exist in the first place.
- trinovantes 5y agoI 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
- neiman 5y agoBuild 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.
- friedman23 5y agoYeah, 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.
- scyzoryk_xyz 5y agoThis 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.
- meristohm 5y ago“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.
- jimmydorry 5y agoWould you also rather flatten the boom-bust amplitude of other industries? What about web development? Do we have too many social media sites? I ask because I genuinely can't understand what would drive someone to deliberately cripple innovation in such a manner.
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- Melatonic 5y agoThis guy has his head so far up his exhaust that fan he thinks his cities infrastructure is suffering because "too many people want to create games" ! Spoiler: The infrastructure is suffering because someone, somewhere, much higher up the food chain, is not willing to spend the money on it.
- sk0g 5y agoTime spent hard skills that can transfer to software engineering, movies/TV shows, scientific simulations, robotics, etc. is not wasted. If you've wasted your time on projects and now feel burnt out, that's fine. Doesn't mean the world is ending around us. I hope the games the author built were more coherent than this article...
- Feneric 5y agoI 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.
- shahbaby 5y agoHaven't read the full article but the title resonates with me. Are you going to spend 100 hours reading a single book? Watching a single movie? Listening to a single song? Of course not. But you can easily spend that much time on one good video game. And there are A LOT of excellent games out there. More than what any one person will be able to experience in their life time. So there certainly seems to be a kind of saturation in the gaming market.
- qq66 5y agoIn Iceland, 1 in 10 people will publish a book. Very few of them will get rich off it. The human need to express is older than agriculture. It's older than civilization. Creation is an essential part of what it means to be human.
- scotty79 5y agoDon't we need strict copyright enforcement because otherwise nobody would be crating anything?
- danShumway 5y agoWe'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.
- mrkentutbabi 5y agoI’m loving this article! Looks like there are many commenters that expressed negatives toward this article. But this article resonates with me!
- TillE 5y agoThere'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.
- sharkjacobs 5y agoI 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.
- vsareto 5y agoThis article misses it. 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.
- fxtentacle 5y agoOh 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.
- wink 5y agoI 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.
- mitchdoogle 5y ago10s 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.
- eBombzor 5y agoWow 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.
- meristohm 5y agoSensational 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.
- blockwriter 5y agoMuch 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.
- lariati 5y agoSpot on. Writing, music, painting, poetry, now video games. I think the entire idea is false anyway. There is surely a waiting list for a government job with a pension filling pot holes right now. The author of this article probably just lives in a bubble of developers, writers, musicians, painters...
- fhood 5y agoAssuming 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.
- Krisjohn 5y ago"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.)
- porknubbins 5y agoThe 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.
- xhevahir 5y agoOP 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.
- alphabet9000 5y ago> 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. random examples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clock_(2010_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clock_(2010_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endtroducing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endtroducing..... https://www.tommoody.us/archives/2012/03/28/guthrie-lonergan-recent-music-videos-2012/ https://www.tommoody.us/archives/2012/03/28/guthrie-lonergan...
- strken 5y agoThis 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.
- v-erne 5y agoMeanwhile 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.
- strken 5y agoRemember 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.
- bayofpigs 5y ago
- CodeGlitch 5y agoRegarding 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.
- GaelFG 5y agoI 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.
- burntoutfire 5y agoA 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.
- jokoon 5y agoI kind of agree that it's a problem, but I'm more concerned about average quality.