ILV-83

tired: esports aren't sports because they're video games

wired: esports aren't sports because they're proprietary artifacts tied to one specific manufacturer, rather than a set of rules anyone can make equipment for

I think this post genuinely hits upon a big reason why games-as-sports will never be as ubquitous as physical sports, and also the only reason why game publishers pour so much money into trying to make it happen; Game companies want a sport that they have a monopoly on, and players don't. Monopolistic practices are antithetical to the kind of accessible universality that makes a sport something anyone can pick up at any time or start their own organization for. Game companies will never allow that, and so we'll never have it.

it is genuinely dire to think about what the intersection of computers and IP law has done to culture

"games" used to be things you could adapt, could play in the dirt with rocks and sticks if you had to. now they're vastly more interactive, sure, but the vast majority of them only work on one platform, degrade over time, and come in an inscrutable format that's illegal to tamper with. because that's the default state of software

notice how new boardgames these days are always branded and proprietary, not generic rulesets like games that have survived from other periods of history are?

notice how even some of the oldest games of all - taking sticks out of a pile, that sort of thing - have branded versions with special injection-molded parts

Games as a service kind of ruined the indie game space Honestly. Not even in the way of like "predatory business practices spreading" . Indies are largely still free of those. But the expectations of people playing games have moved in a really weird direction, I think.

Once an indie gets to a certain level of notoriety, I see a lot of people looking at it when it's no longer receiving updates and declare it as "abandoned". "The devs took the bag and ran", "They stopped caring about this project", and so on. And I dunno, it hurts me a little bit to see that; players expect a game to have a neverending stream of new content.

Minecraft isn't exactly an indie but I think it's an excellent example of a game that should be finished by now but is still receiving updates. A ton of them are just single-feature additions that really don't do a whole lot other than giving Microsoft excuses to promote Minecraft more. More power to the devs, tbh, I love it for them, but I also feel like you could just leave it as is and let the modding community have their way with it

Adding this to the main post also:
Finishing a painting doesn't mean the painting is dead. Completing production of a movie doesn't mean the movie is dead. Why are games pronounced dead the moment we stop adding more content to them? I can still enjoy a painting that the artist hasn't touched with a paintbrush since the 14th century. I can still play a videogame whose devs haven't worked on it since 1995.

This is more of a rant than anything else sorry I have worms in my brain maybe

Maybe it's just my old millennial trait, but I find the constant push for meaningless updates à la Minecraft actually puts me off playing the game. Being forced to start a new world every time there's a major update and a lose all my progress. I would have been happy to play more Minecraft or Valheim or effin' Stellaris if they didn't update the game so often and force me to restart to get the new content (or deprecate the old file format so I need to restart even if I didn't want the new content).

Okay in the case of Stellaris they also changed the basics of the game and took away the bits I really enjoyed.

still a pretty good game but it feels like at some point in the 2010s games started "adding mechanics solely to keep you from playing the game the obvious and desirable way with the tools provided to you" and i hate it

One of the many reasons why the Mass Effect series got constantly less fun when they made new installments.

Damn. I was looking forward to that!