i haven't released a non-collaborative game for some while, so maybe that disqualifies me from talking about the "do solo devs exist" thing. but tbh it depresses me a lil bc like, what are we gonna do with the answer?

let's enthusiastically say that the individual is the totality of social relations and that the bedroom dev belongs to the same spectrum as the ubisoft worker. natural follow-up question: do they work the same way? in what ways are they the same and in what ways are they different? what does each imagine their role to be? can they draw upon the same materials, the same techniques? do they both need to learn Jira? and in what ways do these materials and techniques feed into their work's own imagination, perspective on the world around it? how do the different social structures each sits within - different relationships to peers, friends, families, testers - affect how each approaches the question of value in their own work, and hence the work itself? paid qa vs busy friends? how does working vs not working under an NDA affect sensibility? who does each imagine to be their peer, their audience, their rival?

some more: how does this affect how each one "places" themselves, artistically or in terms of self-image. aaa devs like to compare themselves to guys in renaissance workshops, solo devs to poets. how do these comparisons affect their ways of seeing, the ways of seeing embodied in the work? how does it affect their view of history itself? are they each working in the same realm or do the differences in their relations to their tools lead to new and dissimilar realms of aesthetic discovery?

replace "solo dev" with "someone who doesn't have to talk about their artistic choices with another human." how does this change the the directions their work can go in? what needs to be fixed and specific, and what gets to remain shadowy and indistinct? how does this affect the content of a game, how does it affect its aesthetic, political, sexual imagination? are there structural reasons why "love" in one format means "killing 5000 dudes to save your ambiguous romantic-interest-slash-daughter" while in the other it might be "callously stepped on by gamer girls while they play super smash brothers" - can we imagine these being switched around? to what extent does each type of developer have to worry about being delisted by the request of a payment processor, or blocked by twitch, and how does THAT affect their work and their own sense of what they're doing? their sense of the political meaning of the form itself? to say nothing of more basic questions around phynance, legal liability etc.

different ways of working generate new aesthetics which themselves require different kinds of criticism to tease out and talk about. but this is the wrong answer, bc thru no fault of anyone actually writing about these things, we can't have any other kinds of criticism - we just get the one, adapted to the shape of whatever's making money at the moment. and the tendency of that criticism is not only to ignore that anything else exists, but to deny that anything else does exist, or might ever exist - everything has to be imagined as just a tiny, failed version of the product form, the same thing but with less "scope" and perhaps less self-awareness as well. the same priorities, the same potentials, the same direction and the same history, the same pleasures, the same ideas. the question of what a "solo game" is or might be lies buried in the ReedPop coffers along with their internal reports on that canadian river they leaked mercury into. all the rest of us can do is try to keep these questions open, and part of that is cultivating a certain distrust of a critical scholasticism that assures us we don't need to think about it - that the right answer is whatever involves least change from whatever we're already doing.