fools-pyrite

computer toucher; RPG enjoyer


MOOMANiBE
@MOOMANiBE

I take no pleasure in diving back into the discourse hole but I really feel like I need to discuss a conflation I'm seeing again and again, because it genuinely bothers me; a consistent repetition of words like 'gamers enjoying slop' or 'shovelware' or etc.

I think a lot of this discussion so far is an unconscious combination of a bunch of concepts. Let's separate it out as best we can.

I think a lot of these terms and discussions about "gamers, they have no taste, they just want to eat from the trough like pigs" come from a combination of sentiments around three elements:

  • AI art, which, to my mind, is a topic I'd describe as anti-labour. A lot of times arguments about this, I think mistakenly, drift into its capacity to create large amounts of low quality content, but bluntly; no one views dwarf fortress as a threat and they shouldn't. I don't think the ability to create large amounts of low-quality content is new, and I think the fears people are experiencing here are more about being replaced than they're about gamers at all.
  • Plagiarism, which is a problem, but a very complex topic for game development. We all, of course, know that most game mechanics aren't copyrightable, so in the games space this is mostly a moral argument, with a lot of messy nuance. And in some cases, playing with taking others' work is something we consider desirable - we can say 'plagiarism is bad' while simultaneously celebrating the freedom to fuck with mickey mouse as much as we want, for example, and reproduce his films for free. I think the truth of "what kinds of mimickry are offensive" varies from person to person based a lot more on their individual feelings than we'd like to admit.
  • "Lazy/Low-effort" game development - This is is kind of the reason I'm here making this post. I am here to defend low-effort games. Bluntly; I think a huge part of the magic of the Flash era of game development was the ability for people to throw something weird, satirical, funny, silly, or jokey incredibly quickly and get it in front of a huge audience. Think about the classic "you have to burn the rope". It's a game that's over in literally 20 seconds, all for the sake of a silly little song. That is a form of "low-effort" game development. How about games that use free assets, like the famous Oryx's sprite pack, or the huge number of RPGs like Rad Codex's or Astlibra that use royalty-free online music? Is that a form of lazy game development? Or a common accusation for shovelware is just reskinning other games. But a huge percentage of indie darling Kairosoft's games are modified reskins of each other. Are we okay with that because the differences in theming and the small extent of modification is "enough"?

The honest truth is that I think Shovelware is a bogeyman. It's a term we apply when we feel like a game has crossed a line of derivativeness or lack of creative vision. And it's always existed, going back to when making physical copies of games was the only option. Many of those bad, bad games have become industry legends in their own right - do you really feel that classic kusoge like Cheetahmen are a threat to the industry because they're low-effort and creatively uninteresting? I don't especially. I similarly don't think it's a sign of some recent dire portent.

What I really think this is is a mixing of dislikes. People look at something that seems low-effort or shovelwarey and feel that it strays into plagiarism, or it has the itch of anti-labour practices, and it gets all wrapped up in a mental bow - This is the bogeyman of "bad games"; the low effort content hates creativity and fun, and it is coming for you!

But it's not. I think it's completely accurate to say there's a rising wave of anti-labour practices among leadership in games right now, and that's very legitimate to be worried about. But the idea that this means finally the Gamers have betrayed us and are going to go eat at the trough of anti-culture is simply not borne out by any current reality, even ones where a game you think is skeevy sells pretty well. Frankly, the reality of being an indie developer for me is understanding that my tastes will never match up with the mainstream, and that I may never understand why people flock to even such "high effort", non-shovelware entries like year after year of call of duty. I have mixed feelings about it, but I don't think it's a sign of the death of culture any more than the other things I've brought up in this overlong post. People just like all kinds of shit.

I'll continue to be out here advocating for weird unloved games every IGF - even the "low-effort" ones, if they've got something interesting about them. I think silly jokes and one-offs and strange bashed together sets of concepts that some person like is art in the same way that if I make a shitty sketch of mickey mouse wearing a master chief helmet it's still art, even if everyone thinks it's in bad taste - and I want it to have a place in this industry. I need it to have a place in this overly expensive, gatekeepy-ass industry. It's so hard to make games. Let's at least not damn vast swathes of them accidentally in searching for words to condemn the dislikes they're adjacent to.


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in reply to @MOOMANiBE's post:

It also feels to me like part of the issue is the hot game of the moment that kicked this off is it's a rip off (I could put air quotes around that but honestly some of it veers too close to the original inspiration and I kinda think that's great but the shoe at least sort of fits, and I want to emphasize by not using quotes, that I really don't care in this case. Call me when they rip off Cassette Beasts or something) of a beloved franchise and very aggressively points out some of the issues with said series. Also very shallowly but look sometimes a blunt hammer is fine. It's a weird mix of legit concerns and examined bias towards the single most capitalist games franchise this side of FIFA.

Anyways I mostly wanted to just comment as a way to nod in agreement with you I think this is all well said.

This is a huge part of my problem going back a few years with the conversation around AI in general - people have started aiming their sights at things that are not LLMS or similar tech but at just.. procedural generation in general, a technique that has been a cornerstone of video games almost since the very beginning, and which entire genres are built around. We did not just have years of roguelike renaissance just to determine that 'procgen is bad actually'.

dwarf fortress is fundamentally the king of "generating EXTREMELY large amounts of uninteresting text/detail"; the best stories about it are yanked out of that sea of randomness that you get from every character's profile, every carven tile's description. Therefore, if one is arguing "generating tons of crap" is the fundamental problem, you have to get past the question of "okay but DF does that and people love it and it hasn't killed games"

That's fair, but I think it's a different conversation having "large amounts of low quality packaged inside one product" and "large amounts of low quality products flooding storefronts" because the second one is the one that slowly kills the industry, and I feel that's the point people are actually worried about (but it still isn't a new problem, like you said)

I mean I'm talking about judging games as "low quality" on an individual level here; worries about discoverability and storefront slots are very nearly an entirely different conversation.

I really misread that first section then haha, sorry. I've never seen people worried about it in that context - if anything I see way more people complaining about lack of content, which annoys me

low effort and reuse is good but i hate games with low heart. i don't know how to quantify that but to me kairosoft games clearly have heart.
this new pokesploitation game doesn't feel like it has any, but i haven't seen much of it so i could be wrong. it seems kinda cold and industrial.

I mean this is the point I'm getting at, which is like; some of these points truly are lines of personal preference, crossing a specific personal threshhold. I don't think that's bad or invalid! I think it's just important to acknowledge that personal pref and structural trend are not the same, haha

genuine not-meant-to-be-accusatory follow up question: do you find “low effort” games any more or less defensible when like, comparing them on a corporate vs individual scale? or alternatively, does profit as the primary motivation for something’s creation soil the notion of a good “low effort” game for you? tossing in games as art vs games as a product adds yet one more thing to the already messy list of conflations here but at the moment it’s the angle that gets to me the most

I feel like this is kind of impossible to tackle any other way than case-by-case, but I'm generally more sympathetic to smaller studios than I am to megacorps, yes, because I have a general rule that actions taken by people with more power are potentially more dangerous and bear more responsibility.

I don't particularly care about profit motive, generally speaking? I think when profit motive is damaging to games it's usually more directly damaging to the development process rather to than games culture - like gambling mechanics and the like - and like all art it's a very complicated interplay; like I'm never gonna condemn my friends for taking art commissions so why would I condemn a dev for making a living?

It's all hard, esp in indie where motivations can vary deeply wildly even among very commercial products. Sometimes someone makes something really safe not because they're being cynical but because they want to make something like a thing they love. Naive joy can give birth to bland mimickry just as easily as cynical profit motive, is the point I'm getting at

The best way to kill yourself stone dead creatively is to convince yourself that something is 'fake popular', that there is some spookity-spooky false consciousness where the audience doesn't really like the things it likes, and you know what should and should not be popular and why.

It's dipshit fanboy thinking, and it will lead you and your career off the edge of a cliff tout-suite.

it honestly feels like 95% of this falls out of someone saying "i don't like this" and not knowing how to let it sit at that without having to turn that into an empirical, objective truth - "i don't like this because it is bad and therefore nobody else should like it either"

i feel like it happens so often in games, "X genre is objectively bad" or "linear games are objectively bad" and it just leads to people getting into louder and louder arguments and hotter takes over it because every subjective opinion has to get turned into the hottest, most maximalist hot take on the biggest sandbox

except yeah it's louder this time because pokemon is so many people's golden calf franchise that thous musn't besmirch

(also idk it feels like i keep circling to this over and over and maybe it's tangential to the low effort games starting point here but also i dont think it's entirely divorced - look at how people who want to justify disliking a thing will tear things apart at the tiniest detail, like seams on a shadow or whatever, in order to get to decry a "lazy dev")