@JohnnyCanuck is right in a bunch of important ways, but there is one additional factor to consider. The reason the Hollywood guild system works the way it does is because no one is contracted to any given studio. It used to be that actors and writers were required to have locked-in contracts - they couldn't work for anyone else - but that hasn't been true for a long time. (There are exceptions: writers and actors can choose to have multi-picture/script deals, in exchange for an up front wad of cash, but it's not the norm outside of the really heavy hitters.)
A standard union protects a worker's existing job, and helps that worker negotiate terms for an existing job.
A Hollywood guild protects a worker's future jobs - because the one they have now will absolutely not be the one they have in 2 years, a year, maybe even in 6 months. This is the nature of the Minimum Basic Agreement (MBA): it dictates minimum terms of employment. It's not designed to give writers/actors the best deal, it's designed to give them the least shitty deal the studios will agree to.
Why does this matter?
It matters because what most people think of as "Hollywood" is all the extremely pretty, extremely powerful, extremely prolific actors and writers who make lots of money and show up on magazine covers and in media podcasts. (No writer is showing up on a magazine, I don't care how pretty he is.) But the MBA is there for the day players, the low rung people, the staff writers, the gal who had one spec script produced in her career so far.
What the WGA managed to achieve recently with its negotiations is an absolutely phenomenal success. But it still only really impacts the MBA - the minimum basic agreement!
So... uh... why does this fucking matter?
The game industry doesn't really have superstars. It doesn't have the equivalent of Tom Cruise and John August. At least not at scale. And the ones who are that shiny are usually studio heads or creative directors, not "employees." So they wouldn't be covered by a union anyway (which cannot apply to managers - i.e. anyone who has authority over other workers).
Suggesting that the game industry adopt the Hollywood guild model is to suggest forcing a pear into a box shaped like an apple. The MBA protects low level employees in their future employment, and isn't really all that great - at least not the way most non-insiders think. It still results in a ridiculous number of workers making poverty wages.
Is that what you want a game voice actor to have? A minimum basic agreement for their future employment? A programmer? A graphic designer?
No. You want them to be in a union.[1] Which will protect their current jobs and create conditions for advancement, sufficient income at the lowest tiers and long term stability. None of which the Hollywood guilds really do.
[1] The distinction between a union and a guild isn't a "real" one in modern U.S. law, strictly speaking. But conceptually, as above, a union is for people in regular employment with a single employer, and a guild is for (effectively) contract workers. The terminology of "guild" came from the older, pre-industrial idea of "the X workers guild" (masonry, carpentry, bricklaying, etc.), which were really just social organizations that sorta kinda acquired enough power to flex their muscles against the people who were contracting them by having minimum demands in solidarity within the guild (does that sound familiar...?). Guilds eventually "became" unions in the modern sense, once people were working with single employers over a long term. Put simply (and a bit stupidly), unions make contracts between workers and companies; guilds make contracts between workers and their industry. Part of the reason gig workers (Uber/Lyft/etc.) in California have been more active about getting better terms is because that state is super familiar with how guilds work, which is exactly what gig workers need, since their employment is with the industry as a whole (they can work for more than one company), not so much with a specific company. (It's also why they're having a much harder time - because California employers are super familiar with all the shenanigans Hollywood studios use to suppress the guilds that feed into them.)
Maybe I misunderstood something in your explanation. But afaik, jobs in the videogame industry are very much like freelance jobs and the position you have today is going to be very different from whatever you will be doing in 2 years or whatever. Heck, you are lucky if your contract lasts more than six months. Same for VFX jobs.
Jobs in the video game industry (especially AAA) are mostly NOT freelance. Most are full time employee positions. Even non-AAA and specialized studios that do work-for-hire tend to have employees. Certain parts of the video game industry, like art and QA tend to be contracted or outsourced, but even then the contractors are often provided through a 3rd party company that employs and provides benefits. Contracts for engineers, designers, writers come into play for shorter periods to ramp up numbers during production and fill gaps. But that’s usually a small percentage of the team.
I haven’t seen anyone mention Kenshi, so I guess I will.
Kenshi is a post-apocalyptic, RPG, RTS, city-builder hybrid. You can play as one individual character, or you can build up a squad to roam an entire continent full of towns, people, and everything else that wants nothing more than to push your face into the dirt and watch you squirm. It’s an intensely brutal game, but one with an aesthetic that I can’t get enough of.
There are different races of playable characters (from humans, to hivers, to shek, and skeletons) all with their own different stat bonuses and handicaps. If you lose a limb, you can either find someone who sells prosthetics or just leave that character crippled for the rest of the game.
There’s kind of a story, but the game is mostly just you existing in this world and learning about it. There are plenty of different factions you can join or help out, and there will be consequences for choosing a side.
It’s also incredibly moddable, with the steam workshop having thousands of mods already.
Surprised I haven’t seen I Takes Two here yet - it’s a tour de force of genres.
If you never played this game and want a close to perfect coop experience, you should definitely give this a try. It’s perfect for a session with your SO, and it doesn’t rely on neither massive skill nor gaming experience.
I loved every bit of the journey that me and my wife was on with It Takes Two.
Check out neebs gaming on YouTube. Excellent and very funny. I also highly recommend their subnautica series, not to give too much away but it follows a different script than the story in the game. It is amazing, and the quality of their videos is top tier.
Been plugging away at Armored Core 6. I’m kind of over it. It’s been a fairly average experience and at this point I’d like to wrap up the story and move on to something with a little more meat.
Uhm I’m new here. Do I tell about the game I’ve played in this week, or what will be played on the next week?
If it’s the first one, then I’m in the middle of siphoning as many titles as possible from the Karling and Makedon dynasty in Crusader Kings 3 as the Piast family with Polania/Poland. Somehow I’ve managed to create an heir from the Piast family to the Byzantine Empire just with marriage. Karling dynasty still has 2+ kingdoms and several duchies. Another priority is to take Jerusalem from the Muslims.
Games you played last week makes more sense in my opinion, since you can potentially talk more about that (since you actually played them already), but you can of course also just say what you plan on playing next, and maybe others can give tips or answer questions.
I finally finished Baldur's Gate 3. Loved it. I immediately started again with a Ghost Recon team, where everyone is a rogue assassin/fighter battle master build so that you can get a ton of actions, create opportunities for advantage, and then get bonus sneak attack damage. It's working really well so far, and I've done more than half of the content in Act 1 with this team, though to be fair, of course the game will be easier when I know what's coming around the corner.
I also started up System Shock, a game that sorely needed that remake and shows that the difference between what made it good back in the day and what would make it good now are basically just graphics, controls, and UI.
I’ve played through BG3 around launch, and have been lurking the web, looking at what others have done. Right now, I’m also watching a streamer play through the game, and everything I’ve seen really makes me want to do another playthrough. Act 3 was a bit rough at times though, so I think I’ll wait for some more patches or a Definitive Edition, if Larian does it like Divinity.
Same, my friend and I gave up on Baldur’s Gate and will let the developer “finish” tweaking it. I like what Larian tries to do in its games, but I really, really despise the need to mash the quick save button after anything representing even minor progress because you might stumble into TPK combat while exploring. This happened to us in Divinity and when we got a whiff of the same in BG3, we wrinkled our noses and left the game.
I subsequently went on to play CP2077 v2.0 and really enjoyed myself, which I just “finished” yesterday with a satisfactory, bitter-sweet ending.
That’s awesome. I’m at the tail end of my first playthrough, but I’m already thinking about and all druid run with Halsin, Jaheira, Tav, and a respecced origin. I think druid is flexible enough to pull it off. How are you finding system shock, then? I never played it originally but have played many of its ‘spiritual sequels’ in terms of immersive sims. I was tempted to harken back when the remake came out but never bit the bullet.
I played the beginning of the original release some years back and found the controls unusable, even with a mod that "fixes" them. This new game adapts the way the original basically has a console printout for everything you look at and interact with while still allowing it to control like a modern first person video game. I'm not very far in it yet. Only about an hour. But it's one of those games where you're scouring for resources and navigating a map with keycards and turning the power back on and such, and it does all that well so far.
Finished Divinity: Original Sin 2. Beast became a god and everyone loved him. Some of the fights in the final act were kind of bad, and I wasn’t a fan of the “twists” at the end. Still good overall, and I’m glad I finally beat it after over six years.
Quake 2 got patched and the game-breaking bug I had got fixed (constant CTD in a specific room in a level), so I can finally play it again. I mopped up the rest of the levels for the second expansion, Ground Zero, which had a disappointing final boss. The levels also got a bit more confusing for me, but the remaster added a compass, which shows you where to go next, so it wasn’t a big deal. Now only the new campaign, that was made for the remaster, is left, and I’ll try to finish that this week.
Now I’m debating whether to start Pathfinder: Kingmaker or go through the Pillars of Eternity expansions. I kinda want to play Pathfinder more, but I just put 150h into D:OS2, so going straight into another one of these massive RPGs might just lead to some burnout (I did want Divinity to be over by the end, but that was also because parts at the end weren’t that fun for me). The White March expansions for Pillars 1 might just be different enough to serve as a pallet cleanser (even though it’s still a CRPG).
I’ve been crushing maggot-filled mutant satanist-skulls.
The latest patch for Darktide finally made it functional for me.
If I cap it at 60 fps it does not crash every 20min anymore.
Darktide really did not like my Ryzen 9 3900x and rtx3080 “ufo rated” rig.
But now it works at least, and it’s fun.
Maybe a bit boring maps though.
I’ve just dipped my toes into Darktide on xbox gamepass. I love the visceral, impactful feel to melee combat so far. I have been playing with one friend so have come afoul of the lack of communication with others that don’t chat, but so far have found it to be acceptably stable in terms of gameplay
Baldur’s Gate (in act 3 now), Lies of P, and just dipped my toe into Warhammer 40k Darktide. It’s quite nice having very different games to bounce between.
I’ve got Cocoon waiting a well. I heard it’s quite short so maybe I’ll boot it up on an evening where Lies of P is kicking my arse too much lol
No man’s sky for the first time. It’s fun for a bit I think. Dunno if it’s “I’m gonna play this forever” fun - seems a bit repetitive. But it was on sale and it’s amusing enough. I tried it out because I thought starfield was so boring, and felt like playing a space game.
Ibplayed for like 60 hours the past 2 weeks. I still like it, i never found it too repetitive, because there are so many things. Like i still see completely new things every now and then.
The tutorial is quite long. After you have a ship, you can abandon the questline and just do whatever you want.
Requires reading the wiki a lot, but it lets you do whatever you want.
Gunship battles with aliens on the surface? ✅ Dogfights with pirates in orbit? ✅ Arbitrage and space merchant trading? ✅ Planet exploration and flora/fauna identification? ✅ Base building? ✅
Starfield is indeed boring but NMS isn’t much better IMHO. It is better, but I agree that it gets old quick.
Depending on your tolerance for jank, you might want to check out “X4: Foundatons” for a great space empire game. Start in a one-person scout fighter and work your way up to whole fleets, build stations, pirate, trade, explore, etc etc.
Not quite the same thing, but one thing I have seen is players that stream slower-paced games chatting with remote viewers.
On Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, Vormithrax, is well-known for this, and watching his videos has often been recommended on Reddit as a way to learn the (quite complicated) game, as he tends to walk people through what he’s thinking about while playing.
Obviously, that doesn’t work with every game genre; they have to be able to field suggestions and questions from viewers while concurrently playing. But for turn-based games, I think that it can work well.
Between Diablo sessions, I've been replaying Metro: Last Light (the original, not redux), and man, I am having a blast. I absolutely love that game. Out of the three Metro games, it's probably my favorite. Even choosing to be stealthy is a lot of fun. I've been playing with a silent revolver/Kalash/Ashot combo, and I can't wait to get my/Artyom's hands on the Kalash 2012.
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