Contemplations Upon Games and Gaming

I heard someone say the Xbox 360 era was "the early days". Wow. To me, the late '80s and the '90s were the early days. Although, admittedly, that was before I was playing any games.

To me, games run a very serious risk of not being a particularly interesting medium anymore because they seem to have no history. Nobody remembers the old titles, nobody cares about what the original experience was, and the whole industry sometimes looks like it's just a young person's game. I'm sure it's a complicated issue, so here's some notions about it.

So for example, when thinking about the earlier Final Fantasy games – some of which are my all-time favorites, but the way – they are completely and utterly different from how Final Fantasy is now. The same is mostly true for every other game; you can barely compare the recent two installments. This is because the familiar name has a compounding marketing effect: people buy because they recognize the name, and they buy because they bought the last one. So you retain the old players and hopefully garner some new ones.

And what's especially distressing is you can barely remember what exactly made the earlier game so good in the context of the time it released.

Indeed, people know all kinds of trivia about who was the first to introduce microtransactions. But who cares about that? Either it's truly about the product or it's about the extra stuff, take your pick. Hate it or love it, paying attention to something is what's making it more prominent. I mean, it's great if it's good for business and people feel like they're getting something of value out of these things, but I'm pretty doubtful about that either way.

However, the thing that I find strange here is how the public discussion is all about "what's being done to us" instead of anyone actually contemplating one day competing against existing companies or practices. This only makes sense if you are basically a child or practically impoverished, so you're lacking the means to do anything.

But isn't that strange? With modern libraries and certain tools I refuse to name anymore, it should be easier than ever to create whatever you want.

Well, that's just it: personally, the only way I'd find any of this meaningful for me in the role of a game developer specifically would be to get down there and code everything in C/C++, preferably something resembling code from 2011 or even earlier. Preferably for hardware that was made decades ago, because then it would be easier to justify lower resource usage.

It's like there's a deep undercurrent of humanity that wants two things: it wants to avoid the trivial, and it wants to pursue division of labor. That's what I want. I want rules and predictability. I want careful "does this even make sense to begin with"-analysis.

And I know why that isn't happening.

However, what I find relatively troubling though, is that the industry as it used to be is so different now that I don't particularly care to join it anymore. And maybe experiences like that help explain the one-sided public discussions as well. I no longer really like the gaming industry, the people, or the games; it's just not for me. And I don't really want to watch someone put on a show on YouTube about this either. No matter how much outrage there may or may not be about it.

No, the only games worth learning about or playing now are those made over 15 years ago, around the time the entire IT industry generally still made sense. Since then, time truly has stopped. Nothing important has happened. The moment gaming became mainstream I kind of started seeing the whole thing differently. The direction has been towards more and more psychological manipulation and less towards social criticism, satire, and games as a literary device.

I'd think of it like this: at the moment, there's way more design into it and way less hardware mastery. And incidentally, there's less depth, as well.

And indeed, generally speaking, if someone claimed that mainstream media was in the business of making people dumber, I'd believe it. It would not surprise me. People are vocal about some loosely defined concept of "social media", but that's really not the core of the problem, as far as I'm concerned.

Actually, let's take a relatively popular (primarily) single-player game for instance: Baldur's Gate 3. I might as well take that as an example since it's one of the very few recent ones I myself have played.

The game is absolutely designed to be really addictive, despite no clear monetary advantage to the game developers, unless you count possible side-effects – sexy (and relatively clever) marketing notwithstanding. You've got operant conditioning, variable-ratio reinforcement, and a relationship simulator slot-machine sprinkled with novelty, attachment and personification. The interesting part is how this differs from earlier gaming trends: it used to be long-period investment was rewarded, now it's not really about that anymore. It's about stringing the player along, maximizing those hours spent in-game using psychology as a tool. And it seems to be working; I believe Baldur's Gate 3 broke some records with respect to the amount of concurrent players or something.

And I understand: the game companies want people to be playing their games, not anyone else's. And so all the gaming money goes to fewer people, because the one game takes up all the space and time.

Eerily, all of this reminds me of how actual human relationships are now, as compared to some decades ago, as well.

Games these days are much more intelligent about how to exploit the player. And I find this may be ultimately detrimental to the industry, because people are going to figure things out sooner or later.

However, having said that, this is not necessarily a criticism. No, I think it's a valid question whether deeper application of psychology just makes for a better experience. There's some ambiguity about that, because it seems it depends on the genre. The key is in making people feel they're not manipulated, even though that's exactly what is happening.

I know that sounds completely psychopathic, but that's my honest-to-God answer to the deep and troubling question of "how to make money in modern society?" As an aside, I'm actually currently in the process of figuring out if there isn't a better answer.

And the kids? They just wanna have a good time.

The stuff most people are playing, I think, is the stuff with the least amount of involvement and that's the fastest to pick up and immediately play, usually with a competitive or real social element (as in interacting with other humans). And for that purpose, a fucking wooden stick off the backyard is equally suitable as a two-thousand-euro gaming rig is: both are fast to pick up and both are used to beat your opponent in a friendly contest of speed and reaction times.

Well, I'm just being rhetorical there. But you get the point. That's sort of the landscape, because if not for consumer electronics, I'm betting that's exactly how it would be.

As for me, I'd like to say games are like books, and on some level I do believe that, but the fact is they're drifting away from those, and towards things that pay better. All anyone really wants is a money-making machine. Things like education, research, truth, beauty, those are just nonsense in the face of making money. And if the money isn't rolling in, then you ultimately resort to violence. That's basically what I've learned from observing geopolitics.

Another angle to this is how the moment it became extremely easy to create online content everything just went downhill from there. The internet is largely fucked, and people's ability to produce good, constructive criticism has been thoroughly destroyed. At least for now.

I'm almost tempted to say the exact same thing about games, as well: if it's easy to make, then there's just gonna be more of that not-so-good stuff. Weirdly, even a bad product is more impressive when you know it was relatively difficult to make!

And it is a philosophically intriguing question: is all criticism actually ultimately detrimental, when all you gotta do is sell, sell, sell?

But what's far more interesting is how current societal structure enables certain behaviors, rewarding and disincentivizing others. Because obviously, what was so great about gaming, for example, in the 2000s may no longer work in 2026. And chances are if rich people get their way, the entire industry will be completely trivialized in the '30s.

So then you ask: what does this trivializing do exactly, if it comes to pass? For me it does the following: I won't be working in the industry, and neither is anyone else; I won't be particularly interested in games anymore because all the games I could think of are just one click away, so the time between imagining a game and playing it is effectively zero, and so I might as well skip the playing part entirely, because I already know everything there is to know about it from my imagination. The same applies to some degree to pretty much everything else as well.

And indeed, if we apply that logic in reverse, it should be equally true even without software automation: if I can imagine it vividly enough, then there's no surprise, and then there's no interest either. The way I see it is that there's nothing particularly interesting about being social or having "social skills", whatever those are supposed to be; the interest is in a society's ability to self-organize, and that's what you should look out for in this internet-age. That's exactly the problem in utilizing psychology in all the social games people play, because it has this crippling effect; it paralyzes a group of people, because they can't predict anything, and when they can't predict anything, then they can't forge a plan.

And now, as the so-called "digitalization" keeps progressing, the masses are subjected to a divide-and-conquer strategy, where the select few control all the communications hubs, and you will gain the absolute minimum in personal power from owning any machine. The thing is, if you always have to use someone else's hardware, then that someone else might as well have you use their preinstalled software, as well. And if that's the case, then there's just no real need for new software in general. Except for the one machine learning model generating all those games for you, so you can spend all that idle time sucking on universal basic income, I guess.

And I do mean "games" here, since a university education's just a game, your work is a game, geopolitics is a game, everything's a game. So why'd you buy an Xbox?

This is why it barely matters to me some international investment in hardware infrastructure, because the only solution here is to make owning a cheap computer far more valuable. Just a tip; a hint, if you will. Just putting that out there.

Still, I'm an adaptive guy, you know; I can work with that; I'd love my entire life to basically be automated away, consisting of sexy orgies and feasts and stuff, but the problem is there's no way up from there. The dominance hierarchy is still in the way, with all those wealthy people at the top, telling you what you can and cannot have.

No no. It's a horrible world being promised to us, and I sure hope I could escape from this hell somewhere nicer. It's a chore figuring out where that somewhere even is, and how to manage that.

This is exactly why everybody dreams of that "fuck you"-money. I do too. I do too.

So if what I said is true about "everything game", then it's really interesting thinking about how all the other markets work now. Something to think about.

Take it easy.