ewo

ewo

@ewo

ewo gameing

  • she/her

mountain hare
prolific lurker

log inask
ewo
@ewo
aidan
@aidan
highimpactsex
@highimpactsex

getting people to play niche games?

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.

Mightfo
@Mightfo

I really like what kastelpls said here about not seeing games etc as commodity/product/etc.

Interest should be more diffused away from The Big Things That Soak Up Attention, but we should keep in mind that not everything is going to get the attention it deserves. Everything can get some, but here's the thing:

There are more things that you would absolutely love in life than you have time to engage with. We make more art that we appreciate than we have time to engage with.

Even if you were aware of every game/subgenre/book/whatever, its an intersection of knowing what you want + knowing what the actual experience/quality will be + picking between 100,000 other exploratory options in this same vein.

Once you find out you like a subgenre you ignored before, you may go into more! Or maybe the itch is scratched. Or now youre wondering about other subgenres you didnt explore.

Theres more art that youd enjoy a lot than there is time to engage it, even with perfect info.

And popular products give arbitrary unrealistic expectations. There was an experiment ran with a music site where there were two versions: One where you can see views, and once where you cant. For the ones where you could see views, random songs would accidentally snowball more and more views because other people would notice they got a lot of views.

Related: https://cohost.org/hecker/tagged/creator%20economy Hecker has some nice posts on this sort of thing, with data.

Ultimately, those sorts of lopsided things may make you feel like "Well if X mediocre-to-me Big Popular Thing gets 1 million sales, then this Absolutely Wonderful thing that I love to death should get that much attention too!" But that's just not realistic and not everything can get that, especially since we are going to keep accruing wonderful creations.

I suspect that even if you evenly divide everyone's attention, the resulting number that an individual piece of art would get would not be very high. But that's ok.

Of course, this doesnt mean that you should give up on finding things that youll really love because theres always going to be stuff that you miss. You should listen to why your friends deeply adore something and consider engaging with it with their reasons in mind. But ultimately things arent just a matter of awareness->fairness.

hecker
@hecker

Art is a community not a commodity

This to me is the key sentence: "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." The folks at 65DaysofStatic have said similar things. This to me leads to at least two conclusions.

First, non-mass-appeal art is important to you to the extent that you know the people making it and feel part of a community with them, or at least a kinship with them. I don't do games, but I do listen to music. I may purchase music by a person X I follow on cohost (or who's rechosted by people I follow), knowing full well that there may be dozens if not hundred of pieces similar in style and quality available on Bandcamp or wherever. But I don't know the people who made those, and I do know X and the other people who know X.

Second, we don't need to de-commodify the entire economy to allow non-mass-appeal art to flourish (bread is still a commodity, as are iPhones), or even the economy of mass-appeal art. But we do need to provide people a way to survive and make a living, at least of sorts, when they're not making art.

I think of my favorite go-to example here, the people who created American modernist poetry in the early 20th century. They weren't MFAs or state-sponsored writers, they were bank clerks and insurance executives and physicians and librarians and people who had some money from family or inheritances. But they were also, and more importantly poets, and part of a community of poets, a community whose works ultimately became important to people other than themselves. But their poetry was first and foremost important to them, and if that had not been the case it would not have been important to anyone else.

What then is the role of the critic? I leave that as an exercise for the reader, but I think kastelpls has provided a large part of the answer.

You must log in to comment.

in reply to @highimpactsex's post:

highimpactsex
@highimpactsex

yeah, i am mostly thinking that it’s a solvable challenge since these material conditions can be changed. there’s no doubt it’s difficult, but as someone writing about japanese subculture media and reading about how japanese people engage with these works, the discoverability problem is far less exacerbated.

there’s more indie game sites ala Newgrounds (freegame-mugen) and websites that compile reviews and articles ala JayIsGames (Mogura Games) in japan. mainstream japanese websites are also covering them to a lesser degree. and there’s a rather visible group of japanese people exploring the world of itchio games.

the discoverability problem is still there, but it isn’t discussed as much. most indie developers in japan are considering how to monetize their games and make a living. the japanese impetus for monetization and going into steam as of late come not only from Bad Economics there but also a desire to get more eyes into their titles. all just because they reached the capstone of what is possible in the japanese market. so i think the japanese case is interesting as a place where the issue isn’t being too owned by algorithms and visibility but rather “i am actually not that interested in playing these niche games and therefore i don’t care”.

so i am thinking — alongside this interactive fiction scene, my own experiences collaborating with visual novel enthusiasts and publishers in this fledgling industry, and so on — about what we do with the majority of people who honestly won’t care. there will always be people like you or me looking for niche experiences, but many will be satisfied chilling out playing Apex Legends and that’s it. their opinions should be respected too (and i recently learned Apex actually has an option to convert voice chat to text, which is miles ahead of most competition). it is kinda pointless to criticize what they cannot like; we all have things we just don’t like.

but at the very least, we can still learn why others like ‘em. that’s kinda why i think discoverability, while an important issue, is going to be temporary in the long run. it’s a “walled garden” issue that we will hopefully someday overcome, but i am also thinking about the major problems that still remain.

and there’s always going to be creators who want to be invisible because they don’t want to be too known to the world. the JD Salingers of the world doesn’t want to be “discovered”, but we should instead recognize they did put effort into their works.

login to reply
illuminesce
@illuminesce

As a game dev for a niche (interactive fiction) game, I can usually tell players who don’t often play IF or VNs because I get comments like, “tldr” or, “omg please less text.”

If I wanted the game to have a broad appeal to people I would have put less words and more explosions. But I didn’t because I like words better.

I really liked your stance on anti-commodification and showing the labor and craft put into niche games. Thank you for putting this out there!

login to reply
highimpactsex
@highimpactsex

yeah, in a way, i'm arguing for respecting the developers who don't care about getting the limelight since all they care about is Doing the Craft. as long as a critic/player is able to see this effort, i think it's fine.

thanks for reading :-)

login to reply
spankminister
@spankminister

As someone who loved Text Adventures growing up and took a crack at writing a few something like 10 years back, I both found a subculture where I could connect with people who loved the things I loved, but also an incredibly insular community that had sort of calcified around very specific rituals, processes, and orthodoxy. In some ways it's like the Twitter threads where Western game devs decry design choices that are "obviously not best practices game design," combined with indie filmmakers at Cannes making movies for each other, catering to very specific tastes.

It was actually playing another game, The Beginner's Guide, that helped me process how I felt, and what I actually wanted. The push and pull of "wanting an audience to appreciate and recognize my effort" versus "uncompromising on my own vision of what I wanted to make" was something the characters in that game were having to reconcile, as did I.

That's not to say that much of the community writing about IF is wrong. But I see it like a professor in academia acting as an advisor: intelligent and insightful, but also the avenues of inquiry that got them to their position encourages them to make copies of themselves in their successors. I absolutely agree with your premise that new blood needs to added if the medium is to survive. But I'm almost coming at it from the opposite perspective, that it cannot sustain itself as the broad range of expression it could be if everything is released in a "competition" format as the same handful of people rush through it as a to-do list.

login to reply
highimpactsex
@highimpactsex

i’m too new to IF to opine much on this community aspect (literally just discovered it a week ago and been binging all kinds of IF then) but i do find it strange that everyone has to do IFComp. it’s even mentioned in the documentary. i’ve never heard of a community that only sees action by one game jam.

my unfounded speculation about that because the intfic community emerged before indies really took off, they’ve never felt the need to diversify until it’s too late. that said, i do think if we take a step back from the people who constantly use IF, people are getting interested in another kind of IF. inkle’s and failbetter titles are well-known outside the intfic scene for example. and there’s stuff like The Suffering of Sir Braunte which uses ink to tell its dank story. so there’s clearly some interest and people back then (like Rock Paper Gun) were writing about IF too.

indeed, i think another issue is that people don’t really write about them. when i first saw the works and essays of emily short, i thought she should’ve been regarded as a genius or pioneer. her literal spouse is behind the Inform engine too. and yet, few people have heard her outside her contributions to the Fallen London series.

likewise, i’ve been getting into the works of Porpentine and my queer friendos have been going “wtf have we not heard of her”. i actually think this is a critical failure of journalism/criticism; due to the SEO nature of writing (gotta deal with recognizable titles), you would never hear of great works like howling dogs.

it’s possible that the intfic scene got owned because it’s unable to open itself up to the wider community. the parser community, i’ve read, is very stubborn. IFComp is honestly too scary to enter (i did consider submitting a game but realized i need to polish it very hard to be considered seriously by judges). it’s a somewhat strange community that i am hesitant to really dive into and that’s likely why “new blood” can’t enter into the mix.

but i think the blame doesn’t have to entirely reside on them. i understand their efforts might be “too little, too late”, but i honestly believe the reason that even happened is because people just don’t write about anything but the recognizable stuff. my own impression so far is that this community, in response to its diminishing prominence, feels like there’s nowhere to go but even deeper down the hierarchy. they have no idea how to go up. i think that’s somewhat depressing to think about.

which is kinda why the role of critics is to elevate their writing and show they are in fact worthwhile to study. there’s no point in analyzing the big titles for the nth time but radical works like SPY INTRIGUE are practically unheard of except in the community itself. and those works have much, much broader appeal than the intfic scene is led to believe.

people like me need to write more about stuff like that. it’s really our duty/responsibility. the critic’s role is to elucidate the laborpower of these artists to a public that hasn’t learned to appreciate them yet. teaching them to read is the way of criticism.

login to reply
spankminister
@spankminister

Yeah, right about when I entered IFComp, text adventures went from "thing I vaguely remembered from my childhood" to replaying the entire works and re-reading the essays of the authors you mentioned. Certainly my submission lacked polish in some places, but the thing that really frustrated me was how the competition format often focused on those elements, and the insightful work by Short, et al. and the constantly roiling "How should I tweak my work to do well in IFComp" thread crystallized into orthodoxy. I do love a lot of parser games, but as you pointed out, it's hard to bring new blood into a situation like that. How many new filmmakers would there be if your work was only released into a film festival where the audience was just Tarantino and Coppola, comparing your long take to Scorsese's?

login to reply
highimpactsex
@highimpactsex

indeed, i also talked about how the "orthodoxy" has become quite gatekeep-y at times with twine games (but not Inform because you can't do much with styling parser games). and this has also hurt real titles like SPY INTRIGUE which was only "rediscovered" by emily short and others to be actually quite good.

there really needs a proper jam/competition where new people can just join in and don't feel like they need to compete with the big people.

login to reply
pieartsy
@pieartsy

yall I've been in the IF scene for a bit and a lot of what you're saying is demonstrably untrue.

  1. a lot of the stuff about insular community and academic design practices disappears when you look at say, the tumblr IF community (primarily centered around Twine and Choice of Games games). and from what I've experienced on the forums, people like Andrew Plotkin and Mathbrush/Brian Rushton and other "big names" are exceedingly pleasant, welcoming, and willing to support and help people, including newbs. Don't believe me? Check out this thread which starts unpleasantly (and with similar complaints about insularity and elitism) that then turns into a bunch of newbs testifying to how welcoming the forums and space in general are. https://intfiction.org/t/im-done/58480/20

  2. there are SO many other competitions that aren't IFComp, and they're not that unknown (in the community anyway).

  1. I don't know where yall's idea that you have to submit to IFComp came from but it's not the prevailing opinion at all (or at least not currently).
login to reply
highimpactsex
@highimpactsex

apologies, i'm mostly making sure i don't talk too far out of place as someone not that deep into the community.

but at least for me, i got it from jason scott's documentary which had people there talking about the IFComp stuff. it's obviously old at that point, but it had people like plotkin himself wondering about the community and whether it can really go up. i'm somewhat aware it might be outdated info, but that part gave me the impression IF wasn't dying but it had difficulty attracting new people.

and i did read for example how twine games were heavily discouraged or at least criticized during the 2010s. i know porpentine saw some criticism for doing her thing. though, i'm also aware the whole "queer twine" movement was very hectic and a lot of behind-the-scenes bickering occurred between them. that somewhat concerned me.

so that's sorta where my knowledge began and end. i am aware of things like Spring Thing (also brought up in the documentary if i recall correctly but the organizer there was part of the doom and gloom) but have not looked deeply into it. my basic knowledge of it is definitely outdated or at least distorted by what you've described.

but i did look into the other stuff (and it's not part of the post since it's irrelevant). and it made me think about my own participation in the visual novel community, which is in a very strange position these days. and part of it i've related to my own experiences doing vns. if that is untrue, i apologize.

login to reply
pieartsy
@pieartsy

it's ok. I just got a little tetchy when the broad claims about the IF communities flaws were being made by someone who's been aware of it for one (1) week and someone who (afaiu) hasn't been in it for a decade. a lot can change in a decade, and the barrier rn is a lot lower than you think.

I don't expect people to know the current Status™ immediately but I would prefer if broad claims about the IF scene's perceived flaws be made after perceiving it a bit more, ykno?

that said, I don't mean to scare you off or anything. I would be excited to see your games (if you want to write them) in any competition I mentioned, whether IFComp or not (and Spring Thing 2023's games just dropped!)

and your post itself is on point!

login to reply
highimpactsex
@highimpactsex

dw, i get that. if someone said stuff like this about the subcultures i'm in, it gets annoying quick.

i will say learning about the other competitions out there is cool. still need to go back to my twine game so i'll try to get most of it done.

thanks!

login to reply
jcolag
@jcolag

I'm coming into this conversation late, so I apologize for anywhere that I just repeat something that someone else has said. But overall, I see two problems in this situation.

First, interactive fiction itself. As many have said over decades (I was on the newsgroups in the '90s, own that documentary on DVD, and still follow a couple of people on the Fediverse, for context), the community is...self-limiting. They're always happy to have new people, and acknowledge the existence of new ideas, but if you ask for advice, they'll probably respond with an essay written by a big name in the community (Short, Cadre, Plotkin, etc.) old enough to have started paying off its student loans. If you ask about selling, they'll tell you the story of that time that Granade (I think it was him) launched a company and it failed, so it'll never work. And the best games are the classic games, but not those classic games, just these.

I don't know what the solution is to get people interested, but none of them has ever done outreach beyond buying a few ads on social media. There aren't (making this up as I go along, so don't take any of these as useful) deals with up-and-coming K-Pop bands to cross-promote, interactive fan-fiction posted on the major repositories, or paying influencers to try out and talk about some games.

The other, broader problem is that indie work in general is only barely discoverable by the most motivated searchers. You can find a thousand think-pieces on the latest announcement for the teaser for the trailer for the full-length trailer for an MCU short, but basically none of the "geek culture" blogs does a "hey, have you taken a look at this zero-budget independent web series? (Or if they do, they're still talking about The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, as if people stopped making video a decade ago...)

That's a broader cultural problem, that people happily boost advertising from companies that don't need the help, but don't take the time to look for something new. And I definitely don't have any way of fixing that, other than to be the crackpots that we want to see in the world.

And I feel like that division brings up an interesting point: Each medium has its own independent creators, wondering how to break into the mainstream. They could start collaborating and pushing other kinds of work in front of their audiences. Would IF still be obscure if self-published novelists, no-budget film producers, and local garage bands talked about it with their fans, increasing the chances that someone you know now shares the interest? And vice versa? What if this appealed to anti-monopolistic activism, too? I'm rambling, but everyone probably gets the general idea.

(And I apologize for venting. Like I said, I've partially followed this discussion for over thirty years, and it touches a nerve that it still hasn't moved forward.)

login to reply