Every year at GDC there's a Game Developers Rant! session (sometimes it's publishers, and sometimes another slant, but mostly developers), and every year it's amazing. This year was a vintage year, and here's one of the rants, from academic/gamedev/genius Ian Bogost - a future-dweller's retrospective of the game industry of today. Part speculative fiction, part fact... it's depressing, and sad, and true.
Working long before sustenance powders, developers were easily seduced by appeals to their physical urges. Overseers plied them with sugars and salts during the day and forced them to engorge on extravagant meals at night. Shifts extended for days at a time. Developers were even required to worship in their cells, which were adorned with plush and vinyl totems of figures from terrestrial myths of the era.
Initially, these works were limited to propaganda meant to acclimate young men to governmentally-sponsored global violence. However, after the languorous wars of the first two millennia had failed at forcible depopulation, the task of social progress was handed over to a tribe of patrons called “venture capitalists.”
They had orchestrated the rise of photo-preening software popular before the Disruption came to Silicon Valley. A new arms race commenced—for virtual attention, which the Patrons converted into financial instrument. While historians agree that ancient works like Civilization and chess still provided inspiration, games primarily became a specialized form of banking.
The upside (there's an upside!) is that the variety of independent, self-expressive games on show today is the greatest I've ever seen, and despite these wars, we seem to be flourishing an underground movement, an art movement that's capturing the hearts and minds of a new generation of game-makers. It's good. They might win.
Link.
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