Let games run free

Oh this is the most eloquent phrasing of something ive been railing against for years!

Aww thank you so much, that's really sweet of you to say and I'm chuffed to know you feel similarly!

I moved into games in my 30s and was baffled at how most of the communities are comprised of aspiring business gurus working on games as if they are any other interchangable product, looking for a target for their entrepreneurial skillset, or by industry realists who, by seeing one too many Ten things your game must have lists, no longer remember there’s any other way. I still dont get why they're so suceptable

I'm not entirely sure myself, but I think it probably does have something to do with the time in which they originated, at least as far as things over here in the U.S. go. Like, I think of the commercialization of games as really getting going here circa 1980 or so, with e.g. Wizardry pioneering the expensive-prestige-game-in-a-fancy-box model and the like (what there was of game dev culture prior to that was often quite different in tenor I think and adorably so, e.g. https://archive.org/details/Whattodoafteryouhitreturn). That was also a time when the commercialization of personal computers themselves was picking up steam, and the prevailing attitudes I've encountered in source material from then (e.g. magazines, newspapers) about both PCs and computer games has a lot of the same mix of wide-eyed we'll-be-so-rich Silicon-Valley-itis and hard-edged "think of our market research, this is business" kind of attitudes that you're describing today.

It probably also doesn't help that when they got a huge boost in popularity in the '90s as the price of hardware came down, even though there was a burst of experimental activity in the early-mid '90s with the "multimedia CD-ROM" etc., the popular view of them I remember from that time was that they were mostly shallow entertainment for children and maybe the odd "computer geek" here and there, so I think a lot of the experimental work done in games then went mostly unacknowledged by people who were involved in preexisting artistic undergrounds (with a few exceptions like the Residents and William Burroughs etc.), and that particular strain mostly faded away by the late '90s/early 2000s. As a result, I think a culture coalesced around games where there's like, a thriving commercial industry, a small academic scene that's mostly neglected by the mainstream culture, and little real underground or avant-garde to speak of, something we still live with more-or-less today. It's kind of sad to me that in this society, this maybe suggests that it's basically guaranteed that if an art form is popular, it will have a commercial industry with a size in proportion to the form's popularity, people will make sure of that, but whether or not it develops a thriving underground or an academic scene are both kind of left to historical accident. It's a little harder for me to speak to locales outside the U.S. in that regard but the situation in other countries where games are popular seems broadly similar.

One thing that does seem really strange to me about games though is that it's not as if they don't have some sort of organic life outside of the mainstream commercial industry and academia—obviously tons of people of all ages make their own games and have since the form began—but even in the smallest-scale settings, people largely seem to follow the mores and aesthetic standards set down by the commercial industry. That seems so strange to me (as I guess I discussed in that essay) because the ways the large commercial studios tend to make artistic decisions are greatly constrained by their market positions and the pressures on them as for-profit businesses. The proverbial bedroom developer has no need to worry about things like that—they're free to just go for whatever they think would have the greatest artistic effect in their eyes, or even just whatever pleases them casually in the moment or w/e—but for some reason so many people even just working as hobbyists seem to be able to envision their own success only in the style of commercial studios. It seems really hard for many of them to be able to just think like, "If I love the game I made, it was a success," or, "If I make a game unlike any that game before, it will be a success whether or not the game is 'good' or 'bad'," or anything else along these lines—instead they think of making the front page of Steam and getting high marks in major industry mags and stuff, presumably followed by an influx of investor cash for the next game that would pressure it even more strongly to prioritize profit above all else.

As a musician, I've run into people who also have an attitude like this in music—like, who hope to get signed to major labels and kind of design their whole act around that, and even go to marketing workshops for musicians and conferences and stuff. But like, with all the bands I've ever been in, we've always had an attitude like, "I guess if we start making a lot of money for some reason we'll figure out what to do about that then," and otherwise our questions have always been more about the music directly and our stage act and stuff more just in themselves. I don't feel like it's especially hard to find musicians like that, even among professionals; I think a lot of both musicians and "music fans" tend to feel even that it's rather gauche to approach music with a marketing mentality, that it tends to make tasteless, forgettable music without much original character etc., so that you should avoid thinking that way even if you do depend on your music for your income.

Although I can see in terms of the historical trajectory how games have tended to avoid having developers like this (with some exceptions of course), I'm perpetually confused every year why it stays that way even though I feel like all the ingredients are there for a healthy underground aside from people's mentalities (widely accessible cheap-to-free equipment and tools, easy means of independent distribution, an art form with a lot of folk enthusiasm behind it, etc.). The closest I think I've seen one to coming together firsthand was when I initially got "seriously" involved in game development in the early 2010s with the scene around Glorious Trainwrecks and freeindiegam.es and so on; however that world has mostly been blown to the wind by now having made an unclear impact on the larger gaming culture, like the "multimedia CD-ROM" era before it, with the mainstream culture mostly seeming to have shrugged the challenge to it off by just commercializing indie games more aggressively in that case. Maybe the dynamics operate on 20-year cycles and the early 2030s will also see a burst of experimental activity in games followed by another long lull. I wish I knew what it would take to make it more of a consistent thing than that though.

the virulent commercialisation of games breaks my heart daily, ill join you in the bunker

Hurra hurra!

Let me know when you upload it to the new site  ❤️

Will do ^^