shoutouts to this tweet for leading me to the word i've always wanted to talk about this::
started writing a pretty long essay about game design and mmos last night but i lost like an hour or so of work on it tonight due to a sudden power outage and it was the boring part i feel sickened imagining writing out again. plus this ended up being a little longer than all the words i lost tonight but i got a lot more done with them. and i'm realizing that despite all the specific examples i was bringing up mmorpgs are kind of just an old form of service games that are everywhere now, and probably saddled with a lot of the same...well, problems.
i have a lot of sympathy for many of the people who work on stuff like this. for years they make decisions that are sensible, correct, what people ask for. they're working to move elements of the game away from being "bad" and turn them into something that's not as bad. and all while working under what to me sounds like a form of ultimate creative death in having to work on the same thing for a fucking decade or whatever and being saddled with unfortunate decisions made at the start of the project when nobody knew what was going to happen.