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My intuition is that films and TV have dropped off a lot more in the last 8 years than videogames, with some incredibly vivid and memorable successes very recently. While the Sweetbaby stuff has definitely tainted a lot of AAA games, the kind of games most affected are those that were mass-market slop anyway. I can’t think of many titles where it’s true to say “this would be great were it not for the DEI nonsense”.
I would suggest that the reason for this is that the total number of people designing video games is growing much faster than the same number producing TV and film*. If you had mentioned Stardew Valley and Dwarf Fortress, you'd have one- and two- man games, but Rimworld and Factorio are small groups heavily inspired by mods. The newest Factorio expansion came about because they hired a modder who did it for free. The dedicated auteur, working alone, is thriving in video games in a way that is not true for hardly anything else.
*The existence of the youtube professional is the comparable medium. These are episodes of TV, or sometimes movies, and they pay the bills. It isn't exactly high art, but this is where a similar sort of small enterprise is thriving.
I would argue that game devs are worse than ever, even the auteurs.
By way of comparison, I was listening to a podcast Dan Carlin did, talking to some boxing historian. And they mused over the fact that most athletes today are better than they ever were. I mean, just look at the records for any particular sport.
And then there is boxing. Boxers of old had a much higher pace of fights, as well as much more polished defensive capabilities because they didn't want to risk injury and losing their meal ticket. While a champion today might have 20 fights, a champion back in "the day" might have 200. Compare anyone who has competed in 200 events versus 20, and who is superior is usually obvious.
If you don't buy that argument, there is always the story of The Beetles, and how they played tens of thousands of hours of gigs before they emerged as The Beetles and went down in history.
Game devs these days might ship 2 games in 10 years. In the 90's it could be as much as 10 or 20. Look back at id software's pre-Wolfenstein days for Softdisk for instance. For a good chunk of the 80's and 90's, if you weren't on a yearly release schedule or higher, you were struggling. It wasn't until the late 90's that id software and Blizzard took on a "when it's done" attitude, but even that might be 2 or 3 years tops. Concord was supposedly in development for 10 years.
On the plus side, bugs actually get noticed and fixed now. We don't usually get deus ex style "hey we broke a bunch of maps, all the plasma weapons, and some random character interactions, have fun dealing with that for the next 25 years. Dev's out"
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I would suspect that boxers and musicians of today lack something that old-time pugilists and rockstars had: chemical enhancement to aid that greater grind.
Games specifically take longer because they're often scoped bigger, are more complex, and the technology that builds them is more complex. In a few hours, one could crank out a barebones Mario-style platformer in 2D. Making that same game into a Metroidvania-style game would take an order of magnitude more time (let's say weeks). Make it 3D, and the time horizon for development extends to months at the minimum.
id Software managed the pace they did at Softdisk because their games were relatively simple, used simple graphics, weren't (yet) trying to push the limits of what was possible with computer games, and knew the hardware they were targeting (in the days before the Pentium and 3D accelerators). That Romero and Carmack were fairly skilled definitely helped, but in hindsight, you might not expect that looking at Rescue Rover or Dangerous Dave.
Games can be made in short timeframes like the old days, but you will notice the difference that lack of extra time makes. Go look at any game jam on Itch and play a few submissions, they're often very barebones, sometimes obviously crude, and typically quite short on content.
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Why does a shorter development cycle mean that game developers in the past were better? I mean yea, I'm not sure any modern game developers could come up with fast inverse square root but I don't really follow the inner workings of modern games so maybe they are doing equally shocking things and I just don't know about it?
I do think there is something to be said for raw numbers of fights. A similar thing happened in baseball where basically every record based on sheer volume has some unbreakable record from 1910 when pitchers pitched complete games every day. This is undoubtedly largely a result of player pay, if your pitcher has a 300 million dollar contract you are going to treat him like a priceless artifact and handle him incredibly gently, you're never really going to want to push him to the absolute breaking point. When contracts were at most a few hundred thousand a year, yea you can ride him like freaking Secretariat until his UCL turns to dust. So I think there is some truth to the idea that the most resilient players today are probably being held back from achieving their true potential out of fear of injury. Nolan Ryan definitively shows that some humans are capable of throwing at modern speeds for a vastly higher volume of games than pitchers today ever approach.
And lets lump @HalloweenSnarry in with this too
My point in bringing up id software's Softdisk days, or Westwood's workmanlike porting jobs, or Bullfrog's start writing business software or ports, is not that these were obviously geniuses from the jump, who've godlike talent was plain as day in everything they did. It's to point out you don't get good at anything working on a single project for 10 years. You need to crank out 10-20 workman like finished projects before you make your first Doom, or your first Command & Conquer. I'm not harping on the notion that the programming was better (though I think it was), or that the games had better core gameplay loops (though I think they do). I'm pointing out that these game developers racked up feedback on their products at a much faster pace than game devs today who slave away on a single mediocre arena shooter for Sony for 10 years straight.
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Well, like I said, depends what your threshold for bullshit is. I'm so fucking exhausted by it, I nope out the moment I see "Body Type" instead of male or female, or if a game lets you pick your pronouns. Is that petty? Perhaps. Am I missing out on otherwise good games? Once again, perhaps. I just fucking can't anymore. I'm tired. And yet those are increasingly standard features across AAA and indie games. Even a lot of those Switch games being held up as standout titles in a world of AAA slop are getting that nonsense.
It doesn't seem petty to me at least. I have much the same reaction. It's often not even because things are obnoxious in and of themselves, but because I know (given the current climate) that they are likely to be deliberate inclusions of politics. Like, 20 years ago I wouldn't have thought much about "body type A/B", but these days the odds are very high that someone made the game that way as a deliberate reflection of their culture war beliefs. And like you, I have very little patience for it because games (and other entertainment) are my escape from all the unpleasantness of the world. So when they push it back in my face, it's so much more annoying.
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I'll be frank, this does look like deliberately seeking to be offended by woke, given that phrasing "male/female" as "body type" is about one of the least intrusive things ever. Are you "exhausted", or are you hypersensitive?
One side of this political debate believes in consciousness-raising uber alles. They deliberately seek opportunities to shoehorn (and then brag about shoehorning) their values. They want people more aware of this stuff and why they do it.
It works. People become "hypersensitive" (aware) as a result. Some people appreciate it and go along, some won't. But they don't get to pretend it isn't a result of their actions.
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I don’t think so. It’s just that after a certain saturation point of woke, you just get tired of picking up a game that you just want to turn off the world for a while and play in another universe. Except you don’t ge5 to escape because the designer insisted that he can’t keep away from real world politics for 10 minutes.
I feel the same way, I’m rewatching old sci-fi movies from the 1980s because honestly it’s absolutely refreshing to jus5 see a story that doesn’t have to preach at you.
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Hypersensitive, perhaps. Deliberate seeking, certainly not. I can assure you that the reaction (to the aforementioned video game features) is as spontaneous and vigorous as the left’s reaction to, say, confederate flags and statues.
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You ever have the same argument with a family member over and over again for decades? To the point where the moment they slip in an oblique reference to your deep seated differences in world view, all those negative feelings come rushing back in. Especially because they give you a look when they do it that says they know exactly what they are doing? And yeah, the people who don't know might look at your (possibly restrained) anger towards what you know is a direct provocation like you are being over sensitive. But your antagonist knows exactly what they are doing.
It's like that.
Horse!
Mule!
Horse!!
Mule!!!
HORSE!!!!
MULE!!!!!
(Fiddler on the Roof, referenced by Slate Star Codex, March 2016.
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This is just the "what does it matter to you that we support Basic Human Decency, seems like you're the problem" gaslighting trick everyone's seen a billion times. It's manipulative and vile, and weird to keep using on someone who's immune to it.
"Our world-view is Basic Human Decency/Objectively Correct Reality; therefore, explicitly acknowledging it as true is un-remarkable, while disagreeing with it, or even not explicitly affirming it, is Shoving Your Politics In My Face."
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What do you have against basic human decency? What it looks like is exactly the same as wokes getting triggered by a nonmixed heterosexual family because it's a dogwhistle for fascist racism or something.
And if I were, in fact, aiming to manipulate, it's not like I would be cowed by you declaring that you're immune to my manipulations.
Who gets to decide what basic human decency constitutes. Your basic human decency many be "enabling the delusions and fetishes of mentally ill people" for others.
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Out of curiosity, what's your opinion of Christian Rock as a musical genre?
"Basic human decency" is an appeal to shared values. When the values are not shared, the term loses all meaning. Making an appeal to shared values when values are not shared is straightforward deception. Attempting to change the definition of "basic human decency" to point to some novel, bespoke value set you invented five minutes ago and which have no buy-in from even a significant plurality of the public is an extremely central example of dishonest rhetoric.
The history of the Culture War over the last several years has essentially been a case study in the long-term downsides of such a strategy. The strategy burns scarce trust that cannot be replaced, with woeful effects for the community in question long-term.
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Yes, that's the party line I'm talking about, thank you. It's an effective consensus enforcer, I'll give it that.
We're on the motte, if anyone of the two of us is enforcing consensus it's you and your plentiful ideological allies with the "party line" and "manipulative trick" dismissals.
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Show me an example of a woke person advocating for "basic human decency" for someone who they consider privileged.
No, I don't think you'll be convinced by any example of people I'd assume are "woke" advocating for what I consider "basic human decency", since you ask for such an example as if it's supposed to be vanishingly rare.
You think correctly and it is vanishingly rare. You're probably redifining "woke" to mean "basic liberal".
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See I care less than I did a few years ago. My politics haven’t changed, but I think I’m probably less afraid of these people than I was, so I’m more willing to accept it in the “weird quirks of a foreign culture” way.
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