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This is one of the main reasons I was happy to leave the game industry after eight years of doing it. Working incredibly hard to build a product served to a gr

This is one of the main reasons I was happy to leave the game industry after eight years of doing it. Working incredibly hard to build a product served to a group of people that are often hurtful emotionally stunted man-children is just a deeply demoralizing experience. Obviously, many gamers aren't like that. But a fucking whole lot of them are, and they are extremely vocal, and it doesn't take many of them to suck the joy out of the job. Imagine a bar where every time you walked in the door a half dozen dudes invariably turned around on their barstools and told you your clothes look like shit, your face is disgusting, you hair style is stupid, you smell like trash and, you should just fucking kill yourself now. How often would you want to go there? Unfortunately, I think games themselves often encourage this mentality. Most games are about making the player feel empowered inside a virtual universe that exists purely for their own exploitation and satisfaction. The whole point of playing games is to get an escape from the consequences of our actions. People that are strongly drawn to that or spend too much time in that mindset are basically training themselves for a toxic mindset when it comes to interacting with actual humans. I think a lot about this talk by Max Kreminski: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvlZinAvpwg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvlZinAvpwg In there, if I remember right, he refers to many games as "entitlement simulators", which is a profound truth.

belfalas 4y ago
> Imagine a bar where every time you walked in the door a half dozen dudes invariably turned around on their barstools and told you your clothes look like shit, your face is disgusting, you hair style is stupid, you smell like trash and, you should just fucking kill yourself now. How often would you want to go there? Replace the word 'bar' with 'school' and this sounds like a write-up of my much of my pre-university experience.
- corrral 4y ago
  I'm convinced that junior high and high school, at least in the US, amount to mass child abuse. Like, structurally, that's just what they are, almost unavoidably without totally changing how they work. Even decent school experiences are, by the standards of the adult world, crazy-bad. How many people have anxiety-nightmares for a decade or more after graduating high school? How many unavoidable experiences in life so consistently generate that kind of thing? How many develop sleep disorders in school, that follow them for life? Depression? They're really, really bad. I had a quite good school experience and that ~6-year span is still, as I approach 40, far and away the worst part of my life. It's not even close. Nothing else half that bad has lasted even one year, let alone six.
  - jjav 4y ago
    > I'm convinced that junior high and high school, at least in the US, amount to mass child abuse. Like, structurally, that's just what they are, almost unavoidably without totally changing how they work. > Even decent school experiences are, by the standards of the adult world, crazy-bad. Why is that? What is different about US schools? I (nor my spouse) have any experience with US mid & high school but I hear things like this so I worry, having a young child now in the US, still many years away from high school. In contrast, I can't think of anything bad about my (non-US) high school days. As a math geek I certainly wasn't in any hip group, but everyone was nice and it was a good experience. Now 30+ years later we're all still in touch and have reunions and meet whenever paths cross and remember those days fondly.
    - jdlshore 4y ago
      It's not just US schools. I have a distant relation in Norway who suffers severe bullying in her school. In contrast to the Portland schools my kids go to, teachers take a hands-off approach to bullying, believing that it's the kids' responsibility to resolve it themselves.
      - akulbe 4y ago
        Portland schools suck. The elementary school down the road from us was doing some crazy s*t a few years ago, bunch of neighbors pulled their kids out.
    - corrral 4y ago
      - ~8 hours in school per day, often in buildings with minimal natural lighting. During the Winter, this may mean almost no sunlight all day (no recess, like in elementary school). Wanna make people depressed and give them SAD that'll stick with them long after they're adults? Just do this to them for a few years. - Intense workload. We consider it bad when a job takes more than 8 hours a day from you. Schools routinely take 10 or more (math classes were the main culprit, at least in my case). Hope you don't have any other plans... oh look, many kids do, so now they're in actual hell. - To add to the above: super-strict and rapid turnaround expectations on work. You cannot put something off until tomorrow because you're feeling really bad today—it was only assigned today, sure, but it's due tomorrow. Some stuff had longer timelines, but many things were the due-within-24-hours sort (again, largely math's fault, at least in my case) - Bizarre mind games where people tell you insane stuff like "enjoy this, these are the best years of your life" and "you think this is bad, just wait until you're in the real world! This is just trying to get you ready for the expectations of adult life!" Like, I've not only worked cushy high-paid white-collar jobs, and I've never worked in an environment remotely as bad as school grades 7-12, nor with those kinds of strict expectations, nor with such inhumane treatment. When a workplace is consistently close to as bad as school, it's news (Amazon warehouses). - Jail-like conditions. Need to stretch? Need a quick stroll for your legs? Need to take a piss? Beg the boss and hope they're in a good mood. Granted, some workplaces are like this too (again: Amazon warehouses), but most of those at least give you a couple 15-minute breaks in addition to your lunch (passing periods don't count, they're typically only 5 minutes and you'll spend most of that grabbing your stuff and getting from A to B) - Sitting in classes all day is about as bad and mentally/physically exhausting as sitting in meetings all day, for similar reasons. Ask most people how they feel after a full day of meetings. Expand that to a whole week. Expand that whole week to 6 damn years. Yikes. All of that is purely about the schools themselves, setting aside their strong tendency to foster awful, abusive, bullying dynamics that students cannot escape, both among students and staff. Or problems with school start times and teen sleep patterns (shit, as an adult I've rarely needed to wake up at 6:50 for anything, and if I did and I hated it I'd at least have some realistic hope of finding a way to change that pretty quickly) I think all that makes it survivable (and I mean that literally) are the Summers and multiple long holiday breaks. When school's in session, it is brutal like few other involuntary (or de facto involuntary) activities are. [EDIT] OH! And crazy-high expectations of self-organization and perfectionism. Here in the "real world", honest mistakes are taken in stride and my schedule and work-tracking are much simpler, plus I have a ton of support on those things. Even college tends to be far more lenient on those things than high school. Again, I had a pretty damn good school experience, as those go, and my school wasn't one of those high-pressure ones you hear about in SV or wherever, and it was still terrible in these ways.
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  Indeed, my life began the morning after I graduated high school. The only people from then whom I'm not in touch with but would like to be, have unsearchable common names and don't sign up for those class reunion websites. (I know, I know, I could find them with more effort. But really, why bother?)
  - rurp 4y ago
    I did not enjoy high school. Others have had it worse, but it was mostly something I had to endure. A teacher in my senior year said something about how some students have the time of their life in high school, while others turn the page after graduating and never look back. Despite being an obvious thought, it kind of blew my mind at the time. The idea that I could choose to have a completely different life as soon as the school year finished filled me with all sorts of positive thoughts. Unsurprisingly I loved college and the newfound freedom I had to make more decisions about my life. I guess the takeaway I have is that high school sucks more than it needs to for many students, and reminding kids struggling through it that things can get much better afterwards can be emotionally helpful.
    - AlbertCory 4y ago
      You were lucky. I wish someone had said that to me.
barrysteve 4y ago
He refers to open world games that don't push back against the player, as feeding a colonialist desire to conquer and complete. He posits that the player never learns that he can't have it all and thus learns to be entitled. Not sure if entitled is the right word as a lot were power fantasies that focused on rising stats and increasing combat abilities, rather than strictly speaking titles. The pursuit of more flowing rewards naturally drags the player into a position which looks like entitlement. Morrowind did it better than the later open world games, you had to level up a lot to access dangerous areas that could kill you. The dumbing down and excessive ease in games had been commented on since the original prince of persia. The games community acts like a bucket of crabs, pulling down anything above it and ripping it apart to feed. The greed for more digital nurturance is exactly why the industry is profitable and getting the drug just right is an art. But the greed is also what drives the crabby trash talk.
- xg15 4y ago
  Just wanting to note that a lot of the hate is coming from gamers who complain about games being "too easy", "too dumbed down" or "too casual". Chalking this up to modern games not having enough grinding honestly feels like exactly that kind of crab mentality itself.
  - barrysteve 4y ago
    >Chalking this up to modern games not having enough grinding honestly feels like exactly that kind of crab mentality itself. Hope my post didn't come across that way. Morrowind's storyline and side-quests didn't feel grindy and learning how to break the system and level up quicker was part of the fun back then, before internet guides were a normal way to break the meta. Skill has gotten really 'unpleasant', there's a lot of first person shooters that have features that require a lot of unnecessary discernment. Recoil that doesn't act the way it should, wikis full of extra item knowledge needed, dual monitor just for maps, hyper-precise timing and firing. A whole raft of "unfixed bugs" left in the game that you have to know. It's not so fun to be skillful at a game. Getting through Prince of Persia in one go without resetting feels heroic. Killing some random guy in an fps because he didn't understand the recoil mechanics and getting a bunch of loot is just abusive. I can understand people wanting skill and difficulty that feels good and willfully accomplished against the odds.
chrisco255 4y ago
"entitlement simulators" what? I'm sorry but how are Fortnite, Call of Duty, Elden Ring, Minecraft, etc entitlement simulators? That's really scraping the bottom of the barrel for a narrative there. Lol at "speedrunning" being an indicator of colonialism impulse. It's as if the author of that talk is looking at the world through entitlement tinted glasses, heavily steeped in anti-colonialism and postmodernism and cannot see anything but. Any time you run any kind of business, whether it's retail or video game production, your most vocal feedback will be negative. People are 10x more likely to complain about a bad experience than rave about a good experience. Social media just makes it easier to amplify the negative feedback, since it's far more likely to go viral. Add to that the fact that people can get clout and even earn their own following from doing entertaining takedowns of bad games and you get an adversarial attention economy that people pick up on. You really have to develop a thick skin and roll with the punches.
- matheusmoreira 4y ago
  Completely agree with you. No idea why you're being downvoted.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- _nalply 4y ago
  I usually don't play computer games. But I know Minecraft because my children play this game. To understand the game dynamics, I played Minecraft for a few days and watched Youtube videos and consumed other contents about the game. I am sure I don't know many subtleties and the Minecraft subculture, but this is not neccessary to understand what "entitlement simulator" means: I watched how my son casually killed a villager's llama then did not even pick up the remains. I asked him why he killed that animal in the game. It seemed to belong to someone! He was genuinely surprised by my question. Now I understand why he killed the llama. He had power. He had entitlement. He did it just because he could. Minecraft gave him freedom. I need to understand this because I don't want this attitude near me in real life. Luckily my son seems to know the difference between the game world and real life. But, wow, was I very surprised by the callousness of that action!!
3qz 4y ago
> Imagine a bar where every time you walked in the door a half dozen dudes invariably turned around on their barstools and told you your clothes look like shit, your face is disgusting, you hair style is stupid It’s real and it’s every gay bar
jpe90 4y ago
I’m glad you’re in a better industry now, and I’m extremely grateful that you wrote up your blog posts and books while dealing with that. They’ve been instrumental to my journey in programming.
- munificent 4y ago
  Thanks, I'm glad I'm not in games now too, though I'm not bitter about the time I spent doing it. There are some downsides like infantile gamers and crunch, but a lot of upsides too. Making software designed purely to entertain and bring joy to people can be really gratifying. Getting to work with interdisciplinary teams with artists, designers, and audio people is a rare but very rewarding experience.
scotty79 4y ago
> he refers to many games as "entitlement simulators", which is a profound truth When I started playing Heroes of the Storm (MOBA) I though... "This is stupid, why would I play a game where I'm loosing roughly half of the time regardless of what I do? I'm playing games to experience how winning feels not this bs." Somehow I learned to enjoy HotS, but I still think that single player games that simulate the process of going from loosing, through learning and development to winning to getting stupidely overpowered are the essence of gaming. Initial losses are necessary, so I hate games that initially let you win for too long. But the last stage where you are actually winning nearly always is also very crucial for the full enjoyment. I wouldn't say escaping from consequence is the point unless you mean consequences of real world that are punishing you hard for even trying to achieve something.
pandaman 4y ago
20+ years in the industry. I think you are a little bit entitled. It does take a lot of effort to make even a crappy game, I have shipped my share of those myself. But the customer is not your elementary school teacher, who awards gold stars for the effort. The customer paid a ton of money (for HN readers $60 games might be cheap but they are not for the most people who buy games) for something he or she hoped to like and it turned to be something that had been shoved out... Imagine a fancy restaurant, with $$$$ menu where you order a confit de canard and get some undercooked chicken nuggets with ketchup? Will you ask if the chef having a bad day and how could you cheer him up?

belfalas 4y ago

> Imagine a bar where every time you walked in the door a half dozen dudes invariably turned around on their barstools and told you your clothes look like shit, your face is disgusting, you hair style is stupid, you smell like trash and, you should just fucking kill yourself now. How often would you want to go there? Replace the word 'bar' with 'school' and this sounds like a write-up of my much of my pre-university experience.

corrral 4y ago
I'm convinced that junior high and high school, at least in the US, amount to mass child abuse. Like, structurally, that's just what they are, almost unavoidably without totally changing how they work. Even decent school experiences are, by the standards of the adult world, crazy-bad. How many people have anxiety-nightmares for a decade or more after graduating high school? How many unavoidable experiences in life so consistently generate that kind of thing? How many develop sleep disorders in school, that follow them for life? Depression? They're really, really bad. I had a quite good school experience and that ~6-year span is still, as I approach 40, far and away the worst part of my life. It's not even close. Nothing else half that bad has lasted even one year, let alone six.
- jjav 4y ago
  > I'm convinced that junior high and high school, at least in the US, amount to mass child abuse. Like, structurally, that's just what they are, almost unavoidably without totally changing how they work. > Even decent school experiences are, by the standards of the adult world, crazy-bad. Why is that? What is different about US schools? I (nor my spouse) have any experience with US mid & high school but I hear things like this so I worry, having a young child now in the US, still many years away from high school. In contrast, I can't think of anything bad about my (non-US) high school days. As a math geek I certainly wasn't in any hip group, but everyone was nice and it was a good experience. Now 30+ years later we're all still in touch and have reunions and meet whenever paths cross and remember those days fondly.
  - jdlshore 4y ago
    It's not just US schools. I have a distant relation in Norway who suffers severe bullying in her school. In contrast to the Portland schools my kids go to, teachers take a hands-off approach to bullying, believing that it's the kids' responsibility to resolve it themselves.
    - akulbe 4y ago
      Portland schools suck. The elementary school down the road from us was doing some crazy s*t a few years ago, bunch of neighbors pulled their kids out.
  - corrral 4y ago
    - ~8 hours in school per day, often in buildings with minimal natural lighting. During the Winter, this may mean almost no sunlight all day (no recess, like in elementary school). Wanna make people depressed and give them SAD that'll stick with them long after they're adults? Just do this to them for a few years. - Intense workload. We consider it bad when a job takes more than 8 hours a day from you. Schools routinely take 10 or more (math classes were the main culprit, at least in my case). Hope you don't have any other plans... oh look, many kids do, so now they're in actual hell. - To add to the above: super-strict and rapid turnaround expectations on work. You cannot put something off until tomorrow because you're feeling really bad today—it was only assigned today, sure, but it's due tomorrow. Some stuff had longer timelines, but many things were the due-within-24-hours sort (again, largely math's fault, at least in my case) - Bizarre mind games where people tell you insane stuff like "enjoy this, these are the best years of your life" and "you think this is bad, just wait until you're in the real world! This is just trying to get you ready for the expectations of adult life!" Like, I've not only worked cushy high-paid white-collar jobs, and I've never worked in an environment remotely as bad as school grades 7-12, nor with those kinds of strict expectations, nor with such inhumane treatment. When a workplace is consistently close to as bad as school, it's news (Amazon warehouses). - Jail-like conditions. Need to stretch? Need a quick stroll for your legs? Need to take a piss? Beg the boss and hope they're in a good mood. Granted, some workplaces are like this too (again: Amazon warehouses), but most of those at least give you a couple 15-minute breaks in addition to your lunch (passing periods don't count, they're typically only 5 minutes and you'll spend most of that grabbing your stuff and getting from A to B) - Sitting in classes all day is about as bad and mentally/physically exhausting as sitting in meetings all day, for similar reasons. Ask most people how they feel after a full day of meetings. Expand that to a whole week. Expand that whole week to 6 damn years. Yikes. All of that is purely about the schools themselves, setting aside their strong tendency to foster awful, abusive, bullying dynamics that students cannot escape, both among students and staff. Or problems with school start times and teen sleep patterns (shit, as an adult I've rarely needed to wake up at 6:50 for anything, and if I did and I hated it I'd at least have some realistic hope of finding a way to change that pretty quickly) I think all that makes it survivable (and I mean that literally) are the Summers and multiple long holiday breaks. When school's in session, it is brutal like few other involuntary (or de facto involuntary) activities are. [EDIT] OH! And crazy-high expectations of self-organization and perfectionism. Here in the "real world", honest mistakes are taken in stride and my schedule and work-tracking are much simpler, plus I have a ton of support on those things. Even college tends to be far more lenient on those things than high school. Again, I had a pretty damn good school experience, as those go, and my school wasn't one of those high-pressure ones you hear about in SV or wherever, and it was still terrible in these ways.
AlbertCory 4y ago
Indeed, my life began the morning after I graduated high school. The only people from then whom I'm not in touch with but would like to be, have unsearchable common names and don't sign up for those class reunion websites. (I know, I know, I could find them with more effort. But really, why bother?)
- rurp 4y ago
  I did not enjoy high school. Others have had it worse, but it was mostly something I had to endure. A teacher in my senior year said something about how some students have the time of their life in high school, while others turn the page after graduating and never look back. Despite being an obvious thought, it kind of blew my mind at the time. The idea that I could choose to have a completely different life as soon as the school year finished filled me with all sorts of positive thoughts. Unsurprisingly I loved college and the newfound freedom I had to make more decisions about my life. I guess the takeaway I have is that high school sucks more than it needs to for many students, and reminding kids struggling through it that things can get much better afterwards can be emotionally helpful.
  - AlbertCory 4y ago
    You were lucky. I wish someone had said that to me.

barrysteve 4y ago

He refers to open world games that don't push back against the player, as feeding a colonialist desire to conquer and complete. He posits that the player never learns that he can't have it all and thus learns to be entitled. Not sure if entitled is the right word as a lot were power fantasies that focused on rising stats and increasing combat abilities, rather than strictly speaking titles. The pursuit of more flowing rewards naturally drags the player into a position which looks like entitlement. Morrowind did it better than the later open world games, you had to level up a lot to access dangerous areas that could kill you. The dumbing down and excessive ease in games had been commented on since the original prince of persia. The games community acts like a bucket of crabs, pulling down anything above it and ripping it apart to feed. The greed for more digital nurturance is exactly why the industry is profitable and getting the drug just right is an art. But the greed is also what drives the crabby trash talk.

xg15 4y ago
Just wanting to note that a lot of the hate is coming from gamers who complain about games being "too easy", "too dumbed down" or "too casual". Chalking this up to modern games not having enough grinding honestly feels like exactly that kind of crab mentality itself.
- barrysteve 4y ago
  >Chalking this up to modern games not having enough grinding honestly feels like exactly that kind of crab mentality itself. Hope my post didn't come across that way. Morrowind's storyline and side-quests didn't feel grindy and learning how to break the system and level up quicker was part of the fun back then, before internet guides were a normal way to break the meta. Skill has gotten really 'unpleasant', there's a lot of first person shooters that have features that require a lot of unnecessary discernment. Recoil that doesn't act the way it should, wikis full of extra item knowledge needed, dual monitor just for maps, hyper-precise timing and firing. A whole raft of "unfixed bugs" left in the game that you have to know. It's not so fun to be skillful at a game. Getting through Prince of Persia in one go without resetting feels heroic. Killing some random guy in an fps because he didn't understand the recoil mechanics and getting a bunch of loot is just abusive. I can understand people wanting skill and difficulty that feels good and willfully accomplished against the odds.

chrisco255 4y ago

"entitlement simulators" what? I'm sorry but how are Fortnite, Call of Duty, Elden Ring, Minecraft, etc entitlement simulators? That's really scraping the bottom of the barrel for a narrative there. Lol at "speedrunning" being an indicator of colonialism impulse. It's as if the author of that talk is looking at the world through entitlement tinted glasses, heavily steeped in anti-colonialism and postmodernism and cannot see anything but. Any time you run any kind of business, whether it's retail or video game production, your most vocal feedback will be negative. People are 10x more likely to complain about a bad experience than rave about a good experience. Social media just makes it easier to amplify the negative feedback, since it's far more likely to go viral. Add to that the fact that people can get clout and even earn their own following from doing entertaining takedowns of bad games and you get an adversarial attention economy that people pick up on. You really have to develop a thick skin and roll with the punches.

matheusmoreira 4y ago
Completely agree with you. No idea why you're being downvoted.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
_nalply 4y ago
I usually don't play computer games. But I know Minecraft because my children play this game. To understand the game dynamics, I played Minecraft for a few days and watched Youtube videos and consumed other contents about the game. I am sure I don't know many subtleties and the Minecraft subculture, but this is not neccessary to understand what "entitlement simulator" means: I watched how my son casually killed a villager's llama then did not even pick up the remains. I asked him why he killed that animal in the game. It seemed to belong to someone! He was genuinely surprised by my question. Now I understand why he killed the llama. He had power. He had entitlement. He did it just because he could. Minecraft gave him freedom. I need to understand this because I don't want this attitude near me in real life. Luckily my son seems to know the difference between the game world and real life. But, wow, was I very surprised by the callousness of that action!!

3qz 4y ago

jpe90 4y ago

I’m glad you’re in a better industry now, and I’m extremely grateful that you wrote up your blog posts and books while dealing with that. They’ve been instrumental to my journey in programming.

munificent 4y ago
Thanks, I'm glad I'm not in games now too, though I'm not bitter about the time I spent doing it. There are some downsides like infantile gamers and crunch, but a lot of upsides too. Making software designed purely to entertain and bring joy to people can be really gratifying. Getting to work with interdisciplinary teams with artists, designers, and audio people is a rare but very rewarding experience.

scotty79 4y ago

> he refers to many games as "entitlement simulators", which is a profound truth When I started playing Heroes of the Storm (MOBA) I though... "This is stupid, why would I play a game where I'm loosing roughly half of the time regardless of what I do? I'm playing games to experience how winning feels not this bs." Somehow I learned to enjoy HotS, but I still think that single player games that simulate the process of going from loosing, through learning and development to winning to getting stupidely overpowered are the essence of gaming. Initial losses are necessary, so I hate games that initially let you win for too long. But the last stage where you are actually winning nearly always is also very crucial for the full enjoyment. I wouldn't say escaping from consequence is the point unless you mean consequences of real world that are punishing you hard for even trying to achieve something.

pandaman 4y ago

20+ years in the industry. I think you are a little bit entitled. It does take a lot of effort to make even a crappy game, I have shipped my share of those myself. But the customer is not your elementary school teacher, who awards gold stars for the effort. The customer paid a ton of money (for HN readers $60 games might be cheap but they are not for the most people who buy games) for something he or she hoped to like and it turned to be something that had been shoved out... Imagine a fancy restaurant, with $$$$ menu where you order a confit de canard and get some undercooked chicken nuggets with ketchup? Will you ask if the chef having a bad day and how could you cheer him up?