i recently watched this fantastic documentary on text adventure games by jason scott and they mentioned the problem of “how do we get more people to play these games”. you see these veterans and amateurs burn out trying to make these games profitable while a select few is still hustling out there and saying, “There’s an audience that is clamoring for this. We just need more visibility.”
as the enlightened redditor i am (i don’t use reddit), the answer is clearly somewhere in the middle: there’s definitely people out there who would love these text adventure games and more broadly, niche titles in general. i’m defining “niche title” broadly here: the stuff that’s not on storefront pages like Steam or consoles. there’s people who would love to immerse themselves in these text only worlds if they knew (i count myself as a recent convert) or people who would go “holy shit, this indie game is kinda cool”. and there’s definitely this David and the Goliath appeal: the underdog communities can beat goliath with more support from the outside.
i get that, but i wonder how many people will actually play these titles even when good visibility is there.
i think about this a lot when it comes to indie japanese games. games are getting translated, people like me write about ‘em, and many blood has been spilled over polemics going “We need more diversity of discourses in games!” and i sorta wonder if much has changed.
sure, more people have picked up titles like Astlibra, but there’s a reason they’re niche, right? even with all the mass marketing these titles could’ve gotten, they weren’t going to find a lot of players. i’ve read that Zork and Myst were bestselling titles people bought as toys that did cool things, not as how we understand video games. i would agree that people probably bought Myst to show off their epic graphic cards and Zork because a computer speaking to them is very funny. those are interesting exceptions that did spawn entire genres… but their successes have not been replicated due to this toy factor.
so the passionate subcultures and communities that stuck around and talked about these niche games aren’t getting bigger. but they aren’t getting smaller either. in an interview with ZUN of Touhou that i am slowly translating, he mentions how his sales never changed throughout the years, even when Touhou as a "genre" has gotten bigger. the audience demographic clearly changed, but he thinks there’ll always be the same percentage of people in the entire world who would play these shmups. people may dip in or out, but the number of people should be the same. it can’t grow or diminish.
after years of writing about subculture, i somewhat feel similarly: perhaps, not as deterministic as ZUN does but rather even if we somehow mitigate the material restrictions, made niche games more accessible through articles and better engines, and expand visibility (all important things that we should be doing regardless), i still expect we won’t get that many people.
this is perhaps the fate for a lot of niche titles. they are niche because they are aimed at a specific audience. while i am also sure there are people who would enjoy interactive fiction but haven’t heard of it yet, it still requires literacy and people who love to imagine and think through what they’re reading. shmups and rhythm games are notoriously inaccessible, despite attempts to make them more friendly to newcomers. and so on.
there will be success stories where a title breaks out of the cage and hits the mainstream. thinking of titles like Fata Morgana for example: it seems like some folks know that visual novel, even if they’ve never tried it. but amidst all that success, people don’t really branch out and explore.
part of that is the current material conditions we are in: we are stuck using Steam and other spaces. then, there’s the more ideological/cultural conditions like orientalism and the looking down on smaller games. but i also think, in the end, the people who do go beyond these conditions and try another visual novel may still find issues with these titles and can’t gel with them for whatever reason.
Baba is You is another interesting title to think in this light: it’s a largely successful puzzle game thanks to its intuitive logic rules, its low cost is inviting, and the game itself lets you play many puzzles in most states of the game. lots of people explored and applied these principles in greater detail — and few people have explored further than a few titles that directly contributed to this game.
i think my role as a writer documenting these subculture works is not to make people play these games. i mean, it’d be nice to see folks play more visual novels. it’s where i’ve invested money and time into developing and theorizing about. but honestly, i just expect not that many people will play these games for a number of reason.
and i think we should respect that. even if The Post-Scarcity Indigenous-Respecting States of America ever come into existence, there’ll always be something limiting people picking up some game: it could be motion sickness, the game is impossible to play without sight, so many reasons that may still make us drop the game and do something else more palatable. the most niche games can’t be played by everybody.
instead of simply seeing ourselves as pseudo-marketers of the niche games, i think the role of writers and theorists like me is unraveling commodity fetishism. one of the most interesting videos i’ve watched recently that expounds on this is OneShortEye’s video on Owl Quest. at first, you think you’re watching some kusoge (and you are), but in order to get the joke, you have to understand Sierra Online and the people who worked in this company that inspired the creator of Owl Quest to make whatever the hell that is. each step of the video is the OneShortEye interviewing people whose titles made this kusoge possible. and the stories they have in this history are important and humanizes the production. in other words, we don’t simply see a kusoge as a commodity but as an array of humans and their social relations that culminated into this product.
i don’t think everyone can do this kind of documentary. i certainly can’t simply due to geography reasons. but i feel that subculture media writers are best at stripping commodity fetishism away and showing their viewers the kind of effort and labor had been put into these games. not everyone is going to play the King’s Quest series, but hearing the stories that made them possible is more than enough.
that’s what i think when i read someone on twitter going “I can’t play Zork but I admire the game from afar.” that admiration is valid and we can certainly supplement it by providing analysis, criticism, interviews, and other forms of evidence to validate the existence of the labor-power expended on these niche games.
the issue isn’t simply that niche games are invisible but rather we haven’t gotten the right lens to see them as labor-power. unfamiliar eyes can only see these titles as commodities and they can only shrug and say “not for me.” that’s valid if we simply leave these titles as commodities. but anyone who sees people working on this craft, expending a lot of effort and sweat into them, and more is going to end up reappraising this “product”. we may not get it, but the expenditure of labor-power is real and we wanna validate it.
and the role of criticism on spaces like here then is helping that validation. we shouldn’t be simply trying to get people to play these games (again, that’s more of a bonus) but to help the non-players to understand why people have put their labor-power into this. my analysis of games and other media i write about, i hope, should come across as me trying to assess and explain to people what kind of effort these creators are doing to an audience that may not know how to appreciate it. in a way, i view my own articles as teaching people how to appreciate them as much as they can, even if they don’t plan to try them.
i really think we should be less married to the “get these niche titles out there” mindset and think more about the labor and craft behind these games. thinking about that section in the documentary on text adventure titles, i respect these creators and also empathize wanting to make these titles into a full-time career. but even if that was possible and “the titles did get out there”, they may not be compensated well for their efforts. people may not view their games as products of their labor-power but as commodities. and that just means playing into the capitalist game.
so yeah, i don’t believe everybody will start running to play interactive fiction titles if they’re slapped on billboards at Times Square. even if they did, it won’t solve the recognition problem: everyone wants to see their efforts recognized in some form or another. instead, criticism should help murder the commodity fetishism and let people see the games as true craftsmanship. much like how people need to be trained to understand how to view paintings, what folks need really is criticism that teaches them how to understand these games as labor-power regardless of whether they play it or not. analysis that helps people look at labor clearly is good analysis in my opinion.
anyway, i’m going to watch Ordinary Sausage videos. bye.
p.s. i mirrored this post on dreamwidth because it would be easier to find anything long-form for me than cohost lmao. this should've been a dw post.
