giwake

giwake

@giwake

game developer, I think?

  • they/them

i make games and music, sometimes.

profile picture by @thewaether!!!

moving to https://bsky.app/profile/giwake.bsky.social

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giwake
@giwake
johnnemann
@johnnemann
bruno
@bruno

honestly yeah I think Palworld's biggest crime is just being successful. I don't mean this in the sense of defending it; I mean in the sense that I resent that by selling however many copies, we're getting discourse about what seems to be – for all intents and purposes – just an edgy-marketing version of yet another default-unreal-character-animation-ass survival-craft game just like the hundreds of others you can buy at Harbor Freight.

I think there's something to the idea that people right now feel like creativity and expression are under threat (from many vectors) and so they want to backlash harder at the slop, but ultimately... it's slop. There has always been slop. But what's truly galling is when you can't ignore the slop.

bruno
@bruno

And like, some of the backlash is probably also because the developers seem to represent themselves as basically... slop kings? champions of slop? they seem to want to make a publicly and deliberately pro-slop argument.

and you know, I think this pro-slop position has traction right now because there's this subset of people who... god I don't even know. I don't want to get into their heads, y'know? I'm honestly just putting them into the category of people who don't seem to want to live in a society that I don't know what to do with. I don't know what you do with someone who is resolutely pro-slop. I don't know what you do with the "I cum to GAN tits" crowd. I really don't. I am very tired.

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in reply to @bruno's post:

nic
@nic

yeah I can't put my finger on it but I feel like there's multiple colliding subconscious fears generating all the discourse - AI, loving pokemon/defending nintendo, asset flipping - such that I can't even see the whole shape of it, and I'm too tired to try and unpack it

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bruno
@bruno

yeah I don't want to unpack it, I want to just... put an inside-out plastic bag on my hand, gather up both palworld and palworld discourse, and throw it all into the garbage and never think about it again

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in reply to @bruno's post:

Crabbit-Slater
@Crabbit-Slater

I only found out about this game that I'm sure 10 years ago woudv'e been an [adult-swim] skit and I feel like I'm speed running mental illness.

the real take home message for me is that marketing works?
not just works, but ultimately supersedes all other considerations in this medium?
I've seen this happen before with the peak of kickstarter and early access where devs would make obviously outlandish claims and then rake in the money before folding or burning out.

imo the best course of action is just to continue making things that you yourself enjoy and proceed accordingly

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kadybat
@kadybat

You literally cannot go and make kusoge on purpose. Kusoge is beautiful because it happens on accident. The best kusoge is that produced with the intent of making a good game--for example, the vast majority of Sonic Team's catalogue.

That the Palworld team is intentionally trying to make kusoge, to be the "kings" of slop, is just... it rubs me the wrong way, you know? it's gross.

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miscu
@miscu

the gaming audience, even the ones that think themselves as more proactive than your average joe, are critically unable to differentiate between an effective treadmill and what they would consider "good game design"

marketing did most of the heavy lifting, and the survival/crafter/progression template convinces them it's actually good because in their eyes, anything that releases dopamine = great game

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miscu
@miscu

with that genre I can compartmentalize the inherent emptiness to just enjoy the big numbers and colorful effects. at least you know what they're about in 30 minutes versus the 10-20 hour progression grind of a survival-crafter

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SignalsAndLight
@SignalsAndLight

I find myself pushing in the opposite direction more and more when looking at stuff like this and trying to understand why the audience is enjoying it. I just am not sure what's productive about looking at something that's peaked in the "all-time concurrent players on Steam" and going, "There's nothing here, and everyone who thinks there is must be [insert derogatory simplification of a human here]." I cannot think of a game with millions of players that doesn't have object lessons to offer about what people enjoy in this medium. It would blow my mind if this was somehow the exception.

If I were a fan of either Pokemon or survival games, I would've just opened it myself to get a sense of it instead of jumping on the stream of hatred I've seen in every social space I currently inhabit. As it stands, I just read all of these reactions, feel confused at why people who complain about reactionary culture tend to turn these topics into black-and-white conclusions, raise some questions about that, and move on because I wasn't the target audience anyway. I can say a lot of the animations on the "Pals" in there are pretty good and visually entice me more than anything I see in the latest Pokemon entries at the minimum.

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miscu
@miscu

something being popular is not in and of itself confirmation of good game design. progression systems have a proven track record of being a shortcut straight to the brain's pleasure centers, and because of how often game-playing audiences perceive game quality as a measure of how good it made them feel in the moment, it's resulted in more and more mainstream games adopting shallow power advancement mechanics

the survival-crafter genre in particular is absolutely lousy with a template design of "get tool to get materials to make better tool" ad infinitum. beyond filing off just enough of the pokemon serial numbers to launch on console/PC gaming platforms (in contrast to mobile platforms where outright theft is more permitted), what is meaningfully different about palworld to set it apart from, say, conan unchained? it's functionally the exact same progression systems but the human resource has been aesthetically substituted for pokemon lookalikes because it makes for an attention-grabbing marketing point

I would absolutely argue that it's indicative of how successful you can be by abandoning any creative principles, copying off of what other games are doing, and slapping an attractive gimmick on top of it. as long as you tune the skinner box just right, people will even say it's good with a straight face. it really isn't more complex than that, and for anyone wanting genuine creative expression, there's nothing positive to take away from this particular game's success

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SignalsAndLight
@SignalsAndLight

I've written and said the first sentence you wrote many, many times when I was younger, and I'm just finding less and less value in looking down on everyone in the world and their interests all the time. That's really what it boils down to.

Regardless, "top historical player counts in Steam" is not just generic popularity. If it says nothing else, it says there was a gaping hole in the market that could've been filled, and a studio putting less effort managed to do it while others put up their nose at the idea of even trying for whatever reason. You can call survival games "lazy skinner boxes," sure, but if I liked them at all, I'd personally be thinking, "How do I put something into the hands of people looking for this sort of experience that feels more thoughtful and creative without rejecting why the audience adores this gameplay loop."

I've talked to enough players in real life, having real human conversations, about genres that I called "stupid skinner boxes" when I was younger to know that however I feel about the experience, these are real humans extracting real human experience and having real human feelings about it. Invalidating that is a dead-end avenue, and I vent about dead-end thought processes about the worse elements of culture all the time -- but it doesn't go anywhere. I'm not saying this comment is a strong first step at anything, but I'm personally just trying to speak to thinking about these things more constructively.

Or just, like, don't make work for the people who like this sort of thing and reject them and focus on people who have superior taste. Those are the two paths.

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miscu
@miscu

hey dude, I've been at the very least passive about this topic, but save the condescending "oh you're just a young upstart" sentiment. I'm a 34-year-old adult who has worked at a senior/producer role in AAA projects for over a decade

all I'm seeing here is the same repeated appeals to populism as a substitution for any meaningful argument for the creative work being discussed. if the beginning and end of your point is "it's popular, so it's worth discussing" then I don't see much reason to keep bothering with this. call of duty is popular, candy crush is popular, countless things I could list here which embody the rampant cynicism overtaking this medium and have nothing valuable to take away from for anyone actually trying to make impactful art

to be brutally honest, I don't see the fucking point in even working in games if you're out here like the palworld devs to make a quick buck off of slapping together unreal assets, a copy-pasted design schematic, and a discount bin "haha kids property but guns and slavery" shallow parody. if you think there's any nuggets of wisdom to be mined from this game's success beyond "copy whatever everyone else is doing and commit borderline theft from the most popular IP in the world", then you seriously need to expand your definition of what legitimizes a creative work beyond the dollar bills it raked in

this site is not resetera, it's a place mainly populated by queer leftist indie devs who are fundamentally not that psyched about mainstream game design ethos and will not be impressed by this lame-ass grandstanding about your supposedly elevated perspective of "don't say mean things about consumers"

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