It has been... a really horrible week for workers in the game industry (and particularly in games media, which, of course, is my specialty). I'm not going to link, but we've had a story almost every day about major layoffs at huge, moneyed, successful game publishers—and in the last two days, there have been layoffs at Giant Bomb and the news broke today about layoffs at VOX media as well (where I worked—at Polygon, specifically, from 2013-2016).
I am... depressed about all of this. I just went through the layoff process at Fanbyte, and still have... obvious feelings about it. I was very, VERY lucky to land on my feet at Gamedeveloper, but I will never feel fully safe and stable in this field, no one does. No one can!
I am terrified by the prospect that corporate media companies will so totally replace us with AI (this isn't a "they took our job!" thing, it's that I don't trust a c-suite exec to treat people like people. As the quote reads from this utterly damning piece:
The vision of a dark future where robots sap up jobs is a common refrain in journalism. But a former staffer says more familiar tactics to boost margins — like the layoffs that have gutted teams at CNET — are top of mind for remaining employees.
“They do not fear AI more than they fear the numerous layoffs Red Ventures has insisted upon,” a former employee says. “Everyone at CNET is more afraid of Red Ventures than they are of AI.”
I cried a bunch yesterday, I'm not too proud to admit it. And uh, it would help if we lived in a less hellish country/reality where health care and other benefits were provided to human beings (I'm in the US, so, of course, I can only speak to this. I'm also a (very) part time healthcare worker, so I feel very, very strongly about this).
Again, we've published a piece almost every day this week about layoffs. It's GRIM.
We also published two really rad Developer Insights pieces this week that... helped me a bit. They won't erase layoffs. But they got me excited about game design and game development during a tough week, and maybe they can serve that for others as well.
The first is a piece on the design of Patrick's Parabox, which sounds like a game I need to play imminently!
It's full of that pure, uncut, delicious design philosophy chat that I truly love:
Q: Patrick's Parabox feels of a piece with Hempuli's Baba Is You, in that the game is constantly introducing bizarre new twists on the premise, and challenging what you thought you know about it. How do you feel about that comparison? Is it accurate?
A: Yeah, definitely an accurate comparison in that sense. I think both Baba and Parabox are based around core systems with similar flavors—abstract, modular, powerful, and with a certain special mind-bending feel to wrapping your head around it, like learning to “think with portals” in Portal. Both games are also fairly diligent about exploring the depth of their respective systems, making puzzles out of edge cases, and adding natural extensions of the mechanics. It’s delightful when puzzle games have these twists, and it was a joy discovering them myself when when working on Parabox! I attribute these twists to how inherently deep or versatile these puzzle systems are.
We also published a similar Developer Insights piece on The Professional, which sounds like a true delight:
I don't remember the exact quote or the context, but I remember hearing Bennett Foddy talk about how much there was to explore within simple movements like walking that most games reduce to a simple button press. I'm definitely drawn to that idea, and I like zooming in on things design-wise.
Both A Firm Handshake and Klifur were, to some extent, built around the interesting movement that arises from the combination of inverse kinematics and physics simulation. A Firm Handshake started as an attempt at doing crowd simulation on top of that, but then I ended up making a handful of scenarios with the player character interacting with a smaller group of characters in the scene. All three of these games could be described as attempts at getting away with not doing any animation, and The Professional is maybe the logical conclusion of that idea. The player has to animate the character entirely themselves. That idea appealed to me.
When I get depressed, I turn to... interesting thoughts on game design (or grappling, that's the other go-to). That's what I have in this world, and I'm glad I do.