DragonMinded

this site is for finding out that you don't belong in cliques. the design of it is extremely fucking isolating and i don't think it is worth my mental health to even fucking log in anymore, even to just check the webcomics that i love keeping up with. holy fuck you could not design a worse interface for being social if you tried.

Customer: SLAMMED PRIUS (LOWERED PRIUS)
DMV: COULD BE SEEN AS A SEXUAL REFERENCE

Verdict: DENIED

item i saw in a dream that made me laugh so hard i woke up at 4AM
proof:

it's massively massively feasibler than ever before for one-person devs/tiny studios to rapidly iteratively make stuff, all kinds of stuff, from the fancy-graphic'd to the deliberately lo-fi, than it ever has been before, with fewer limitations, because of the same tech advancements that are mostly marketed via boring shit like a realistic building exploding or a couple of photorealistic guys punching each other.

the actual cost of making games is now almost completely decoupled from their graphical fidelity and that's a good thing. every task in game dev takes less time than it ever took. everything is cheaper to do.

so when you see a big company grind their workers into paste forcing them to deliver more and more on tighter and tighter schedules, please be aware that it has nothing to do with graphics or hardware or gamers' demands for anything, and everything to do with the capitalist thinking that says: oh, you can work twice as fast now? i will give you half the time

I don't want to speak for Joe here but it feels like this post is in conversation with this thread, and I think multiple things are simultaneously true here:

• Graphics technology has plateaued, ie increases in the visual quality and aesthetic appeal of games are no longer driven primarily by new technology. And thank goodness for that! It was killing us.
• Hardware will continue to get more powerful because, as Joe says, more horsepower and capacity give devs more freedom to iterate, more headroom to be "inefficient" in the particular ways that get us good creative results quicker and less painfully. (That said, I am in favor of the console hardware generation rat race ending; console generations are no longer about expanding the creative medium of games, they are about marketing and tribalism and exclusion, and they have disastrous environmental footprints.)
• We are living in the shadow of the AAA game industry's decades-running ideological project I call the aestheticization of capital, the careful cultivation of an ideal consumer (yes it's a gross word and yes that's why i'm using it here) that perceives and responds primarily to the deployment of capital in games. The companies with the most money would prefer to cut off 99% of their competition by gating success on who can spend the most money on a game. We see this not just in gamer dudes online pissing on any game that doesn't bring Last Of Us 2 production values, but in the incessant whining about random indie game prices on steam forums: with "value for money" as the quanta, the thing of highest importance is how expensive a game looks.
• But because hardware is no longer the primary driver of how expensive a game can look, the capitalists running big game productions have doubled down on the now-antiquated conventional (bad then, bad now) wisdom of the 90s and 00s: throw more people at it! Crunch them til they drop! Work harder, not smarter! Throw out perfectly good tools for worse, newer tools that support the current hotness! Rely on the inexperienced but exploitable labor of young people, so nobody ever learns to expect any better! etc.
• And yet at the same time, the capitalists want to keep telling the same story they've been telling for decades, that it's simply the power of the PS5 that makes the billion dollar game look so good, don't worry about those labor relations happening under the hood to get that billion dollars on screen.
• It is natural to look at all this and see straight through the artifice, and conclude that the technology drive is what's behind it all, and if we stopped that dead in its tracks, things would start to improve. But I think it's critical to understand the relationships between technology and capital here. Over the 80s and 90s and 00s, the capitalists built up all these narratives to link "the concept of technological advancement" with all the ways the creative space of games was expanding during that period, in the minds of their customers, simply because that was the most effective world view for selling them new hardware every 5 years. But in the 2010s and today, that narrative has frayed, and we're seeing the more fundamental ideas at play here - capital, labor, creative control, the shaping of mass perceptions of value - more clearly. This increasingly manifests as crisis, and so much in the past 5+ years - the consolidation, the layoffs, the creeping conservatism, the victories and setbacks of labor power - spins out of that.

So I think we need a deeper consciousness around games and technology and capital. The old narratives are crumbling, but they're holding on very strong. In reality, we know what makes games better, what allows more people to make games, what is better for the creative medium of games - what nourishes humanity, the most, about games. I don't think stopping the clock of technological advancement at 1995, 2005, or today gets us any closer to that. I think we need more equitable systems of labor, more open technology and platforms, a greater diversity of tools, a greater diversity of voices, and way way more noncommercial work (entrepreneurship in 2024 is the Wile E Coyote tunnel of social mobility). "Tech == Progress" is just one of many illusions we must tear down to get to that better world.