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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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Is the problem that the culture is dying, or just that the medium is getting stale and rote? As a parallel, let's look at the video game industry, which started a lot later than the film industry, and was doing novel and interesting things until a lot later. But more recently, games have felt more churned out and "by the numbers", at least from the bigger studios. I have a friend who works for Sega who tends to agree with this take. I think the problem is that we need new mediums, where people have to learn how to express something real again.

Are you talking about indie games or AAA games? Because both seem to be doing fine to me. Some AAA games are unispired, but not all.

The easiest explanation is market dynamics.

Notice what these examples have in common: they were already capital intensive. Now the price has skyrocketed which has led to consolidation and blandness.

In the case of movies the middle class of film has mostly died (moving to streaming or just gone due to lack of DVD revenue) and big movies cost more to make now due to CGI and effects. So the movie budget has grown faster than inflation (compare Top Gu 1 and Top Gun 2).

In the case of games I don't think the pricing has kept up with inflation, let alone the increasing complexity (the better our TVs and graphics cards the more detail studios need to add) so game developers have become prone to all sorts of bad strategies to squeeze more money out of the gamers - which corresponding harm to the end product (games as a service and microstransactions are the obvious, loathed examples)