I kinda assumed people understood the messages behind Battlefield 1, Death Stranding, and Helldivers 2, lol. Most of the messages are telegraphed pretty clearly.
People play games for escapism, not to be reminded of politics. Not every story needs deep political roots, people just want to have fun and forget about real world bullshit.
It’s not a very popular opinion it seems but I agree, I rather like a bit of mindless escapism sometimes, not everything has to teach me a lesson, sometimes things can be just fun. Not that we can’t have both, of course.
And that also doesn’t mean you can discredit the message of a game just because you don’t like it or want to engage in it. But so many people play a game with a strong political message, and then complain constantly how it’s ruined by it. Okay so don’t play it play something else.
what is your art if it’s not engaging with the issues of the time? What is your art if you’re claiming that it’s not political? Because the point of art is to tell the truth, and you’re lying.
Say what? Are they referring to just a specific type of art, like political art?
That part’s wild to me, when people are like “This villain in your story seems to have said and done bad things? So that means you agree with them, yes?” No! Of course not! It’s the literal villain in the story, man!
But there is no utilitarian point of art. It exists to express ideas and to tell truth. I think maybe a lot of people get upset because from their point of view, they are paying money, and they have this relationship where it’s like “If it’s not giving me what I wanted out of this transaction, then it’s bad.”
To be honest, “If it’s not giving me what I wanted out of this transaction, then it’s bad.” is a heuristic that works well for most things we buy. If I buy candy and it doesn’t taste good, it’s bad. If I buy a car and it breaks down, it’s bad.
I think the real problem is that some people see games as a product and others see it as an art piece. Some games fail at being either, some succeed at both.
A thread of the problem is likely the publisher/developer conflict of interest. When the two can’t come to an agreement, the end result usually fails horribly in both aspects.
Now compare that narrative experience the Super Mario Bros.
Im sure it’s been done, but i would love to see interpretations of a First Time User Experience of OG mario if it came out today.
I cant tell you how many games ive just noped out of because i just want to actually play the game and not read or listen to either dialogue or forced tutorial railroading for 20+minutes (even 5 minutes of NOT being in control of what im doing is annoying) when you start a new game.
Even character creation can impede just wanting to get started. Let me come back later, or engage with that as i PLAY the game. Injecting extensive dialogue or forced interactive tutorial should be a reward or a much appreciated rest from the action, not a burden i must bare.
Not every game needs to be story rich to be fun, thank you vampire survivors
But on a serious note, something as obvious as “Managed Democracy” and quitting your job by signing up for “Early Biovat Reprocessing” and the characters literally saying things like “HELLDIVERS NEVER DIE!” Before being obliterated by a 380? It’s satire. Satire is funny. Like hahaha look at stupid Facist regime, I’ll role play along to get into the mood of the game because the idea is so fucking dumb it’s funny with amazing gameplay.
It’s willful ignorance at some point. I don’t think media literacy has much to do with it. It’s simply listening for what they want to hear, then ignoring the rest, just as real facists desire.
I feel like it also has to do with lots of games featuring elements of (or full-blown) violence as part of their regular gameplay loop.
Yeah, in Helldivers 2, you’re committing genocide for insidious political reasons. But in Pokémon, you’re committing genocide, because you’re a ten year old and your neighbor gifted you a pet.
Normally, the genocide part would be the very obvious red flag for something political going on. Instead, you need to be aware of why precisely you’re doing the genocide this time around.
Such genocide elements are usually also paired with fun gameplay (because violence is easy to translate into gameplay), and with a terrible story, so it’s understandable that people would skip all the story elements.
Conflating Pokemon and genocide really reduces the value of genocide. That it might be a tongue in cheek accusation towards our livestock and animal treatments … but genocide.
Like calling everyone Hitler and a nazi. Or groomer or…
Stardew Valley was released in 2016. My understanding is it took 10 years to make (Eric Barone worked at a movie theater, and when he wasn’t at work he was working on the game) and he’s been supporting and releasing new content for the game for 8 years now. The Wiki pages for the characters contain the artwork for the characters he’s drawn, and redrawn, and redrawn over the years.
He basically won the cozy farming genre, it’s time to move on, for his own health if nothing else.
He seems very happy to keep working on it and he’s bringing on help as he needs. He’s even taking breaks from other project to prevent burnout. Seems like he’s practicing good balance. Why does someone need to move on from a passion project they’re approaching with a level head and have invested their career in?
Terraria was released in 2011, and still gets free updates with similar frequency to Stardew. Minecraft alpha was released in 2010.
Sure, Eric won the cozy farming genre. He is also clearly passionate about the game. Maybe looking out for his own health is exactly why he continues to dabble with the game.
If he is enjoying his work and able to continue living as he is doing it, then why must he “move on”? Why can’t he continue to make content for Stardew? Why are you thinking he is “unhealthy”?
These giant corporations don’t even have to be quiet about it anymore, there’s just no consequences. They couldn’t care less about you, me, their customers, or their employees.
They care about being able to hire labor, which we provide, and they care about revenue and profit, which we also provide. Not defending any behavior, but the consequences in a healthy economy would largely come from customers, potential and current employees. Failing that, large issues would be overcome by regulations, or at least enforcing existing ones (codified rules against monopolies, for examples, are just words if not enforced).
Without consumers willing (and able) to make sacrifices (like paying higher prices) to reward good corporate behavior, and to avoid companies with purely short-term profit motivated behavior, this is what we can and should expect. Nevermind companies are rewarded by shareholder and investor support based more on profits than.how those profits were made, especially when many of those shareholders feel forced to turn to the stock market to fund their retirement, as pensions are so increasingly a rare option.
Would voting for fresh representatives possibly increase instability in out daily lives? Is that instability a possibly necessary cost of maintaining effective regulation of the investor class that has captured our legislative system to their own benefit?
There are systemic problems at play here- not to downplay the choices this individual company made, but the focus could be on the larger forces at work. If your first reaction is that boycotts and choices by consumers and employees, no matter how organized and widespread, do not work, then I ask you, dear reader, to consider what might work to make the necessary systemic changes, and what, if anything, you can do to help make them happen.
The investor class has made it clear what their playbook is, as they have time and time again thru history: explotation, and as much of it as they can get away with. The question then becomes what us, the ever-increasingly exploited, are going to do about it.
no war but class war.
ed:I hope that didnt come off as disagreement- just trying to voice frustration with a side of “everyone who agrees with you please take a moment to think about the big picture, and what you can do about it” because I’m also tired of this slide into an increasingly boring dystopia
Without consumers willing (and able) to make sacrifices (like paying higher prices) to reward good corporate behavior, and to avoid companies with purely short-term profit motivated behavior, this is what we can and should expect.
I think consumers have spoken, at least in part. What money can be made doing this job is more easily made on YouTube.
Which sucks due to the innate near-inability of a Youtube video to carry an argument without a visual component well.
It’s why podcasts can be decent for some topics, but youtube is just someone talking a podcast into the camera for 45 minutes, and all of it would be ~5 minutes reading a single paragraph at most if it were in written form but you really really realy got to chase those ad-impressions.
Non-textual forms for textual content have really been their own destructive blight on internet content. :'(
I get my gaming news from YouTube podcasts, mostly; at least those two do employ people actually doing some of that same type of work. It doesn’t really matter how good Schreier is at his job when I’m not going pay for a Bloomberg subscription and someone else can more cheaply copy the same content and tell me what it said. The video format gives me more of a dialogue with the person who did the work. Plus ads are much more easily defeated on a web page than on YouTube, though they are still partially defeated.
I find myself immediately opening the video transcript for many videos. creating a well made video that offers more than a few paragraphs of text is often a challenge
Buying out competition and throwing out the workers confident that investors won’t back a small dog against a big one
In an investor run economy, competition means you might lose a bet. For an investor its better to reduce competition than lose bets. This is originally why anti trust legislation was created: The market needs to be forced to compete or it will amalgamate into a giant blob of noncompeting assets.
High taxes exist to reduce accumulation of assets and slow down the snowballing effect of huge investors. This is what the trump tax cuts look like.
This is originally why anti trust legislation was created
If you look at the history of anti-trust legislation, some of its first uses and biggest targets were labor organizers. Under the Sherman Antitrust Act, one of the first and most notable cases was the US lawsuit against the Workingmen’s Amalgamated Council (also known as the “Triple Alliance” of teamsters, scalesmen, and packers) over what was then the largest labor action in US history.
It wasn’t until the 1914 Clayton Antitrust Act that unions were granted safe harbor from anti-trust provisions. And it took until 1941 for the courts to finally fully decriminalize labor actions - a process that was ultimately reversed starting in the 1960s under Nixon, and extended under Ford, Carter, and then Reagan.
High taxes exist to reduce accumulation of assets and slow down the snowballing effect of huge investors.
That’s the Keynesian approach, certainly. But the Chicago School that came to dominate US economics during the Volcker Era suggested instead that we can adjust the Federal Funds rate to keep malinvestment from derailing an economy. And that this strategy means asset accumulation is now safe and profitable for large corporate interests.
Large investment banks are actually good, because they give us a steady and constant flow of price information on a private market. And since price discovery is the real goal of regulation, the advent of these mega-banks means we can let the institutions regulate themselves without any conceivable downsi- sound of the 2008 market crash
The problem is that ad-driven businesses are price dumping by tricking people into using their services by telling them it’s free, and thus killing the market for everyone else. I am not turning my adblocker off. I do not expect “free” content in perpetuity. I expect the “free” content business model to die off.
Yeah, unfortunately many people seem to default to complaining about things while continuing to consume what they are fed. And not change anything, of course.
Because content distributors haven't thought of another way to get money. The only other thing they came up with is subscriptions. Some have thought of donations, but they haven't banded together to come up with an alternative. It's weak and totally mid.
Outside of straight cash and ads, off the top of my head a user could give a website data, content, or computing power. Which, as I kept writing this, I’ve found aren’t perfect alternatives.
Personal data collection seems compelling, since the data can be sold to hungry data brokers looking to optimise their ads, but tech-savvy users want to keep their data safe, either by using plugins to block ads and tracking, or by not using your website. And you’d also have to have no soul to do this.
User generated content gives users a reason to engage and return, and it also means you could save money that you’d have otherwise used to pay someone to make content. If you rely on this too much though, ethical concerns become apparent - last I checked, Reddit mods are unpaid.
Volunteer computing could maybe lower costs by offloading some server calculations onto volunteer’s computers when idle, but I don’t know if it could even be used for that. It’s probably a non-starter for websites, too; to a user it would seem like your site was asking them to install a crypto miner.
… this comment is getting too long and doesn’t really have a point. But I can’t let the 45 minutes I spent writing it go to waste so easily. Hm… what if I combined all 3 ideas?
Yes, a website that asks you to volunteer idle computer time to train an algorithm that can both be outsourced to other companies and used to analyse your personal data, which itself can be given to other companies and used to reccomend you posts you are more likely to comment on, adding value to the website! Surely this has none of the flaws that I described before.
Bro $4,000 OLED TVs are riddled with rows of home screen ads. What are you talking about that paid content has no ads? ALL CONTENT HAS FUCKING ADS. This has gotten absurd. Fuck ads.
Man…you said the issue with all of this is people not willing to pay to remove ads. I’m saying that even when you buy expensive products, you still have ads. So ads are everywhere, regardless of whether you pay or use free products. The entire business model is fucked. That’s what I’m saying. I’m not sure what it causing the confusion here.
I was saying that people will run an ad-blocker, but also refuse to pay directly for content.
And then complain that nobody makes good content.
I’m saying that even when you buy expensive products, you still have ads.
Sure, but that’s not really related to the topic. “Why are there ads in the products I pay for?” is a different issue than "Why are there ads in the products I don’t pay for?
Yea. Separate but related issues I suppose. I just feel like even when we pay tons of money for expensive products, we will get ads. Even modern cars are collecting an obscene amount of data even though we pay a shit ton of money for them. It’s completely out of control.
This is the big one. people have grown accustomed to an unsustainable system, problem is wages are still so stagnanted so nobody has money for 10 subs to things.
I hate how this is phrased as “redundancies”. IGN literally JUST bought these outlets, they haven’t had time to dig into and examine the organizations they acquired; it’s just straight into the Corpo playbook of “lay people off and let the dust settle where it may”.
These are people, not “redundancies”. They contributed in the old organization, and they could contribute in the new, but they never even got the chance.
It amounts to the same thing, though. Whether you got a few months pay to carry you through or not you still lost your income, and there’s no guarantee you’ll ever find a job that matches it in pay, benefits, etc.
Read the guys comment again though. They say their issue is with calling them “redundancies” in a language sense. But it’s not sugar coating it or anything, that’s the legitimate term for what happened.
You generally don’t buy a business and then figure all of that out. You figure it all out and then buy the business. IGN already would have 100% known the managerial setup at these companies.
What should happen is not always what does happen. There are tons of examples of brain dead companies and rich people buying companies they dont understand and then ruining them because of that.
Generally when companies like this are bought it isn’t to acquire the talent. That’s legitimately what needs to be taken into account when it comes to things like antitrust. You want to buy out this company, are you buying it because you want their talent to join with yours to make something better? Cool. We’ll let you do that provided you do it today fair and competitive manner.
Any other reason for wanting to buy this company is going to need to be pretty heavily scrutinized.
aftermath.site
Aktywne