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There are too many video games

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Re: There are too many video games

#141

Post by micromacrofoot »

dvt wrote: post #50
micromacrofoot wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean if you want to point at anything for blame... at least point at government spending. More than half of federal discretionary spending is on the military. Put a few % of that towards infrastructure... For reference .003% of the federal budget goes towards the national endowment for the arts'

This is very convenient buck-passing. Local governments have a lot more impact on my day-to-day life than D.C. does.

I'm responding to a blog post that's doing much more absurd buck-passing. I'm at least putting the buck in the same universe.

Re: There are too many video games

#142

Post by Gigachad »

mitchdoogle wrote: post #123
a_t48 wrote: post #54

Let's say for the sake of argument that there is too much art out there, that we need less people writing novels and more people fixing potholes and whatnot - fine. How does the author propose deciding _who_ gets to make art? Even if you have an oracle who can assign some sort of quality number to an art project before it's made...how are people supposed to get better at it? It's going to take thousands of cruddy Uni…

Art gets made by people who have the free time and/or people getting paid to do it. People do a pretty decent job at self-selecting for who gets to make art

That’s how it works now though. So it’s not a solution to the proposed problem in the article.

I agree though, there is no problem.

Re: There are too many video games

#143

Post by xhevahir »

OP seems to believe that people avoid going into valuable, practical work because it's too demanding, or because it doesn't pay enough. Yes, the roads in Seattle are full of potholes, despite the wealth of Amazon. That doesn't mean that every Seattleite with a trowel and an asphalt bucket is in a position to do something about the problem. Has OP failed to notice that this sort of matter is controlled by enormous bureaucracies, and that the average member of such a bureaucracy--to say nothing of the average citizen--has hardly any power to effect significant change? Or accomplish anything that they can look back at and say, with satisfaction, "I did this?" It's not unreasonable for people to expect that sort of satisfaction from their efforts, and it's not totally unreasonable for them to look for it in the arts, video games, etc.

Re: There are too many video games

#144

Post by alphabet9000 »

> And don't give me homilies about [...] "All creation is precious." [...] None of these things are true.

the statement "all creation is precious" is true from the perspective of someone else that also likes to "create" things by rearranging/juxtaposing/building off of content that already exists. the more "content" that is out there, no matter how trivial it may seem, increases the amount of source material that can be sifted through to find the perfect building blocks for something else.

random examples

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clock_(2010_film)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endtroducing.....

https://www.tommoody.us/archives/2012/03/28/guthrie-lonergan...

Re: There are too many video games

#145

Post by bigbillheck »

arka2147483647 wrote: post #49

When I was young, it was plausible for a person to have read the latest books, watched the latest films, and played the latest games. I'm not sure anybody actually did that. But it was plausible. You could sample more-or-less everything, and choose what you like. Today there is so much of the stuff that you just can't. You don't know whats out there, and you never will.

> When I was young, it was plausible for a person to have read the latest books, watched the latest films, and played the latest games.

For video games, there are a couple years in the 1970s for which this might have been true, but between just the Atari 2600 and the Apple ][, there's no way anybody could have kept up with the flood.

For books, I went over to ISFDB and searched for 'novel AND english AND 1980' which came up with eight hundred and twenty three results. Some of those are duplicates, but even a tenth of that is better than one book a week, and that's just one genre.

Re: There are too many video games

#146

Post by jimmydorry »

meristohm wrote: post #121
scyzoryk_xyz wrote: post #82

This is such an annoyingly simplistic take and such poison. Some of the things this guy says are outright nasty: like should you want to make your game to have only 10 people play it. Absolutely, yes. And if that detracts you, then maybe you don’t actually want to be making them. Games, like film, like music and like all the other storytelling mediums are a form of literature. It is completely normal and has always b…

“The market” reflects the emotional state of those with the power to play it. I’d rather flatten the boom-bust amplitude, and that’s an uphill battle as those with the capital to weather the storms benefit most.

Would you also rather flatten the boom-bust amplitude of other industries? What about web development? Do we have too many social media sites?

I ask because I genuinely can't understand what would drive someone to deliberately cripple innovation in such a manner.

Re: There are too many video games

#147

Post by erulabs »

kiba wrote: post #114
erulabs wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How does the author propose deciding _who_ gets to make art? I feel like the author makes it fairly clear: those with enough privilege. If the cost of living goes to zero, we'll have near-infinite art. If the cost of living goes to maximum we all starve to death. At very least, I was very much in love with a free-living artist who inspired me greatly in my 20s. I moved to San Francisco to hangout with her and her a…

Charles Darwin accomplished building a theory in comparatively luxury. Clearly, wealth can, if not always, enable great things.

Absolutely. But if Darwin had spent his life drawing pictures and showing them to no one - and if his entire generation did the same - we would not live in the modern world.

Re: There are too many video games

#148

Post by strken »

This is so cynical it overshoots the mark and lands way out there on the other side.

Why make art that nobody wants? Because it's fun. I'm by no means a creative, but I've got a folder full of terrible drawings, loads of google docs of stories that don't go anywhere that I wrote while bored/drunk/high/inspired/depressed, and five different game prototypes on Github. Nobody's ever going to see most of them. This is fine. Doing creative things is intrinsically fun if you've got an itch to scratch.

Why do people make 30 indie games a day? Same reason my mum spent 100 hours making an anatomically accurate wire sculpture of a crab to sell for $40 to a university to hang up in the aquaculture wing. It's fun. It doesn't detract from her work - she's retired, and even when she was working, she used different skills and drew from a different pool of resources.

This is from Jeff Vogel, who's averaged about one indie game a year since 1996. I think part of his attitude comes from working for 26 years and seeing the transition from smallish studios to a gigantic winner-takes-all market. It's certainly going to be harder to make money as an indie developer now, with raised expectations and a lot more competition, and there is some value in warning people about that.

On a final note, society is also... looking pretty good right now? We came up with multiple vaccines for a global pandemic in record time, most of the roads near my house are okay, life's improving steadily in the developing world, my state government is going on a massive spree to buy more trains and remove level crossings, and I could fix a small pothole if you gave me a sack of cold asphalt and a fencing bar. There are some problems with inequality, but they seem to be tied to governments abandoning full employment policies, and I'm sure people will notice eventually.

Re: There are too many video games

#149

Post by strken »

majewsky wrote: post #41

I know this is kind of a weird tangent, but even the pony quips are factually wrong in this article: > The least popular pony is Applejack. She is also the only one who has a real job. This is, of course, a coincidence. If you actually watched the show, you'd know that Rarity owns a nation-wide boutique franchise that is depicted as highly successful.

It's not clear to me whether this is a dig at capitalists or not.
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