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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
> 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.
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?
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
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?
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.
> 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".
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.
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.
>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.
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).
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.
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)
“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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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
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).
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.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 216 ms ] threadLater 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...
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
It's easier to criticize the actions of others than to take responsibility.
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.
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.
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.
Here is the central thesis. There’s a lot to get through before you get to this.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30185251
Instead of improving things we already have, we decided to move to the 'frontier', or worse, demolish perfectly good streets.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For reference .003% of the federal budget goes towards the national endowment for the arts'
We don’t respect grunt work. We only respect art.
Our society’s values do not align with our society’s needs.
I’d like to see more praise and recognition of plumbers, builders, and, well, people that keep the wheels of society moving.
Instead, everyone must go to college and be some artist or otherwise high society. Trade schools are looked down on. And it’s hurting us.
As a game developer that grew up in Seattle, what he says resonates with me.
Also is any of this really ever the end workers fault?
Pay a fair wage and people will do the work - but it still has to get organized higher up
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.
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.
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.
Are there specific Republican views that you think are anathema?
- 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.
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.
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".
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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).
Couple low barriers to distribution with a culture that encourages constant hustling for money and this is what you get.
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.
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.
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,"
[1]: https://heavy.com/news/2019/06/thomas-paine-ubi/
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.
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
No disrespect to teachers, but if they’re starving then maybe they should find a job that’ll pay their worth.
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.
Kids made games or other art decades ago too, but distribution was never as free and easy as today. This is all good..
Companies in our grandparents era paid taxes that paid for infrastructure.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Today there is so much of the stuff that you just can't.
You don't know whats out there, and you never will.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
There are 8 billion people in this world, and the Playstation 2 is the highest selling console ever at 155 million[0].
In a world of 3 billion computer and internet users, 12,000 Steam games a year doesn't seem like that much too me.
The real problem is that all the sales are going to go to the top 1% of games.
But here's another truth that dispels the author's main point: I can make one or two games a year, but I can play dozens of them.
Game developers that see this problem should be encouraging people to develop games - and buy as many indie games as they can afford.
In a world where everyone is making art at 1x and buying art at 10x, then many many more people can make a living from their art.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_game_cons...
I agree though, there is no problem.
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).