The one where I dissect the “too many videogames” tweet
The world is full of opinions, and not all of them are good, so I should know better than to lose sleep over tweets, particularly since that’s exactly what Twitter wants me to do, but some stuff won’t leave me alone until I work through it, so I will do that here.
Yesterday’s hot take of the day came from Jeff Vogel. It goes like this:
“So pointing out the world doesn’t actually need 10000 new indie games a year on Steam will make some people super angry. Note: that’s almost 300 games a day. Suggestion: Think I’m wrong? Prove it by going out and actually trying 1% of those games. (Yeah, I didn’t think so.)”
I’ve been to my fair share of linguistics classes, and this type of tweet, let’s call it “the hard pill”, is masterfully designed for engagement. Vogel knows what his doing. His phrasing is inherently antagonistic, as are his follow-up tweets. He didn’t think about privilege, or issues of visibility, or game dev communities outside of capitalist-imperialist countries, and he didn’t mean the hopeful gamedev student either, despite what he later claimed after the tweet had already blown up. Vogel enjoyed, in his own words, becoming the bad guy of twitter, as if one bad take had propelled him to a new celebrity status instead of being something most people would swiftly forget within 24 hours. The existence of this blog may prove him right.
If I were a smart person, I’d stop here. I’m not a smart person.
If you apply a solely capitalist lens to this assertion, the argument that anything that doesn’t sell is a waste of time is always valid. Under the most capitalist framework, nothing is ever free. We can never make up for what we cost. But Vogel also insinuates that in lowering the overall output, we would arrive at a sort of golden ratio of supply and demand. Anyone who has ever released a surprise hit knows such a thing does not exist.
In response to the tweet, many people have argued that you can make a game for art, which by the definition of art is a game that exists for the sake of beauty or emotional expression. I would like to slightly distance myself from this as well, solely based on the fact that I don’t know what people mean when they say art. The base definition of art is something that exists solely for beauty or as emotional expression. As such games can very well exist only as art. But as the great “are games art” debate proves, many people also think of art as a higher form of culture, and with that come several messy potential interpretations.
One such interpretation is that some people calling their games art may look for a way to legitimise its existence. The industry still clamours for legitimacy outside of the capitalist framework of the billion-dollar industry, because a lot of the people who make games, professionally, may or may not be sad bullied geeks who wanted to go to film school. In the face of headlines about addiction, kids emptying their parents’ bank accounts for loot boxes and school shooters, a lot of game developers still feel insecure, and that insecurity may lead to a strong desire to defend (and look proudly on) anyone who wants to make a game. Wanting to be proud of what you make isn’t at all wrong, and neither is saying that the video game industry itself is as unsustainable as most models under capitalism. What the tweet suggest however, is that we can attain sustainability essentially by gatekeeping, which is funny because the industry already does gatekeep, oh boy does it ever.
I reject the argument of making video games as art because I want to take another step back. Don’t make a game as anything. Make things you have no expectation of, precisely because you can allow yourself to be that selfish. People work hard all their lives, and they still get tripped by capitalist systems that mean them harm. I grew up writing fanfiction, and I carry with me the thrill of being out there. Social media has made many things about numbers but making things and then putting them somewhere to be seen can be hugely rewarding. Do you have to use Steam for this? No, but that wasn’t the argument. I don’t want there to be a need for things to be seen, either, because then we arrive back at a capitalist argument. A common argument for maintaining the Dreamer program in the US was that any immigrant could become the next Steve Jobs, and I hated that so much. If you made something, for whatever reason, it will have served a purpose by existing. If you want to upload it to Steam then that is simply making use of a system that exists for that purpose. Enjoyment is a selfish act under capitalism. Be selfish.
Vogel’s tweet encapsulates such a classic capitalist mindset — instead of working on the system itself, we sell it off as a meritocracy and hope that the problem fixes itself, even if the way to the solution drives thousands of people to despair first. We have devised the tools for people to make something regardless of whether it is needed or not, so the appearance of people who want to curtail that freedom was inevitable. Often, these people have arrived where they are through struggle that isn’t necessary anymore, which is an attack to the pride someone people feel for having made it to the top of the system. They won’t allow you to take “shortcuts”. Developer Joakim Sandberg put this very well by saying the tweet reminded him of the time a bunch of redditors gamed the stock market with Gamestop stocks only to be stopped by the system.We can’t blame people for using the tools they’ve been given in whatever way they see fit, but some people are just very good at blaming people instead of the systems that enable them.
Let me be honest — in writing this blog I recognise my personal connection to the topic. There is a well-meaning version of the hard pill, the truth you may not want to hear, and I’ve been dealing with it for most of my life. I receive a lot of well-meaning advice. Most of it I’ve never asked for. People extrapolate from their own experience, and that experience just doesn’t have to match yours at all. In most cases it won’t match, and privilege often blinds us to how a lot of what we are saying in fact isn’t universal.
But there is a disproportionate number of times that I’ve been told to quit before I’ve even started. My transition into games writing is a good example for this. It’s a very competitive field, writers tell me, and really, writing isn’t all that. None of this advice has ever taken my skill into account, or my happiness, only the potential unhappiness that is sure to follow. When a white man tells me a field is competitive, as a black woman I veer wildly between thinking that makes it impossible for me and thinking that what they perceive as struggle may be easy for me as a minority — as someone used to struggle.
I staunchly believe that even if I end up quitting something, the way at which I arrive at that conclusion will be wildly different if I make a good attempt at it than if I don’t. If you have the means to attempt something difficult, you should do it, because the only one who stands to potentially gain from you not doing it is the well-meaning person who has, intentionally or not, served as a gatekeeper to the thing you want. People who dispense “hard truths” are sure they can help you by saving you pain, but I increasingly believe that the person who really wants to help you doesn’t stop you but finds ways to support you and thus preserves your autonomy to make your own decisions. We’ve raised people to be individualists, and when they express an individual desire, we stop them. I don’t know how that’s supposed to work out. What I do know is that people don’t react well when I tell them I can do their jobs as well as they do, and that it makes me happy even if that sounds hard to believe. I’ve selfishly decided that’s enough of a reason to keep going.