Image by Nicholas “Sparth” Bouvier, 2018

My brother is visiting me in Berlin this week and we were talking over some of our frustrations with our highly specialized work. We both work in digital marketing fields. Being a specialist in the modern capitalist system can be a great way to make money. If you choose to become really good at a very specific thing that companies need, you can do very well. The problem with this is that a lot of the time the work can lack variety or a sense of meaning. Are we making the world a better place by tracking and optimizing marketing channels? It’s needed and useful for the companies we work for, but a little disconnected from meaningful outcomes for us or the customers we want to serve. It also can get very myopic, looking at details and drilling into and optimizing minutiae. This is part of the nature of highly specialized, highly skilled work.

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
-Robert A. Heinlein

I brought up the above quote from science fiction author Robert Heinlein to give a counter-example of what being more of a generalist would look like. Someone who can do many things and move between domains. I think that this approach is at odds with capitalist life since the logic goes “Why do something you’re not specialized at when you can just do more of the thing that you are a specialist in, and then pay someone who is a specialist in the needed skill?” This logic I believe falls prey to the common fallacy of most economists which thinks of humans as “rational economic actors”. Basically they model humans as capitalist robots without desires, subconscious minds or emotional motivations. Honestly, I think most of modern economics is total quackery, a kind of veneer of scientific rationalization based on a kind of Newtonian-physics-of-value. The main purpose of it is to rationalize why capitalism is actually very scientific and reasonable, which it isn’t. Capitalism like all markets is full of complicated, irrational actors aka humans.

The specialist economic model turns us into assembly line workers in which we repeat specialist tasks and then distribute our earnings to other specialists in exchange for the goods and services we need to survive. This produces an explosion of specialization and complexity, which lead to the current conditions of modernity, technology etc. I would personally argue that our current outcomes, while rich in complexity generally speaking are not doing such a wonderful job of supporting the non-economic needs of humans for things like meaning, connection, variety in life and overall feelings of satisfaction and fulfillment. We could also discuss the value of complexity and whether it actually leads to stable and sustainable human civilizations.

Since Heinlein has already introduced insects, I’m reminded of a wonderful short story by Bruce Sterling in his collection “Schismatrix Plus”. In it there are rival factions of humans who favor bio-hacking vs a cyborg trans-humanist ethos. They are both competing to take over an asteroid colony of insectoid aliens. Basically giant ants in space. Drama ensues and (spoiler alert) in the end the queen-like entity which controls the hive awakens a conscious, intelligent avatar to respond to the threat of the colony’s enslavement and dispatches the intruders, revealing that the colony has survived for thousands of years precisely via it’s rejection of complexity and even individual consciousness. We could have a fun discussion about whether creating complex modern civilizations are actually a pro-species-survival evolutionary adaptation. Based on the legacy of Western technological civilization and our legacy of genocide, extinction of species and climate change, I’d say it’s pretty strongly debatable whether any of this was a good idea at all. Perhaps a topic for a longer blog post.

Some people of course feel that the human race made a wrong turn at the introduction of agriculture, which is another fun discussion to have for another time. I think that the persistent feelings of alienation under the specialized, assembly line lifestyle of contemporary late capitalism is an indicator that as a culture we’ve made a wrong turn, and the bounty of technology and complexity that’s ensued may not be a worthwhile trade off. Ricardo Semler, who I’ve discussed before, places a great emphasis on wisdom, seeking it out and optimizing for it. Our explosive pursuit of complexity and carbon subsidized material abundance externalizes costs onto the natural world, including human life.  It particularly impacts the lives of those lower on the white supremacist west-lead capitalist hierarchy. I think it is proving to be unwise in the long term, and therefore is worth challenging. One way for those of us in the west to challenge this is to choose not to follow the dominant, specialist economic actor narrative and begin to withdraw some of our energy into local, family and community economies in which we meet our needs more directly without interfacing with the macroeconomic structures, a process some, including David Holmgren, refer to as downshifting. Downshifting may in fact become a more involuntary process if we encounter economic or ecological hardship in coming years, so thinking about it now may prove wise.

What the process of downshifting will look like for each of us is a question, and probably one worth thinking about. I think the potential for more localized, human-scale and varied activities like cooking, fixing things, growing food and caring for children and elders are all great examples of human activity that is important, meaningful, rewarding and not incentivized by the macro-scale market or capitalism in general. Refocusing some of our energy on these human activities has potential to both withdraw our energy from a harmful economic machine and to enrich our individual lives.

Image by the incomparable Jean “Moebius” Giraud, 1938-2012

One of the key skills of being an independent artist or anyone who works on their own projects is self discipline. The ability to be a bit inflexible with oneself and motivate oneself to do challenging things. To work hard when you’re alone at home surrounded by distractions, or to follow through when you’re tired or feel you deserve a break. I have been doing this for many years and am pretty good at it. In fact at times I am so good that I risk over working and burning out.

This is a hard balance to find. How do you set limits when you love what you do and are in charge of the schedule? For me I do well with momentum and streaks, doing things in a routine ways consistently over periods of time. Every Saturday I do a bit of work on this, every morning I do certain routines. The steadiness and feeling of momentum keeps me going.

But then something happens which blows those things up. Today my son fell on the steps in the train station on the way to school and hurt his leg (it turns out it’s just a bruise, after doctors and xrays, he’s fine). As a result my daily routine and rhythm are totally scrambled. This is a bit scary as I feel like it threatens my momentum and my system that’s been going well lately.

But as much as systems and structure are helpful, we are human and the world is messy. Just as we need to show compassion to others, we also need to show it to ourselves and keep perspective. I didn’t slack off today or choose to disrupt the routine. It’s foolish to cling to a pattern if it’s so brittle that breaking it will disrupt your progress. So here I am, finding balance between internal structure and external chaos and allowing myself a little suppleness, a little flexibility. The trees that can bend and blow in the wind don’t get blown over.

Image: HASUI, KAWASE (1883 – 1957) Title: UDO TOWER IN KUMAMOTO CASTLE Dated: 1948

When it rains there are various types of beings out and about in the city. Among them are humans, plants and ducks. The humans are hunched and feeling put upon by the cold water falling from the sky. The plants are very pleased. The ducks are indifferent. What if you could change your orientation to the weather and instead of being a person, pretend to be a plant or a duck?

Orientation to the environment matters, and is largely within our control if we’re paying attention. I find this rather silly idea reasonably easy to apply to rain and wet weather. I simply think “I’m a plant, look at all this water! It’s great!” It’s absurd, I’m not actually a plant and I’m still getting wet. But it helps me to reorient and escape from the whole mentality of “why is this terrible thing happening to my wonderful self?!?” It also helps me to not take my own extremely mild suffering too seriously. Not getting upset about suffering makes suffering much more pleasant. Much of the time being upset about the thing is as much work as whatever pain the thing actually causes is to endure.

The next step is to try to apply this type of thinking to more complex situations. What is the being that would be indifferent to this situation or better yet, pleasurable? It’s a fun and silly question that I find useful to think about.

Lately the main rappers that I’ve been listening to have been Lil Baby and Gunna from Atlanta. They’re part of the post-Young-Thug, post-Future autotune sing-rapping movement that’s gotten super popular in recent years. I got into Gunna first through some of his cameo’s with Young Thug and then discovered Lil Baby through him. Nowadays Lil Baby seems to be at the top of the game, including having two features from noted culture-watcher (or vulture depending who you ask) Drake. This song Money Forever is not one of his most popular, but it’s one of my favorites. It combines the casual, woozy but rhythmically tight sing rapping with a beautiful beat by Quay Global, who also produced Baby’s breakout hit My Dawg. Quay’s beats are some of my favorite that Baby raps on, the two have a great musical chemisty. Life Goes On, with Gunna again and featuring Lil Uzi Vert, is another very strong track by them together.

A lot of Atlanta trap music can take on a menacing, downbeat quality but Baby, Gunna and Quay together have a great ear for kinetic, bounce flavored and uplifting instrumentals which provide a rich bed for their melodic vocals. The result is full of energy and feels good to listen to. I assume that many folks reading this site are not hardcore hiphop fans and so I always feel a bit weird talking or writing about hiphop to an audience who are not already fans. To a huge degree, like any genre based artwork hiphop is intensely contextual and defined in relation to other adjacent work, so it can be hard to understand the mesh of cultural references that make something unique or interesting to insiders. For many people, modern hiphop will be alienating with it’s intense materialism, violence, glorification of drug abuse and misoginy. This is of course a valid response and I’m not here to convince anyone to enjoy it or to argue in favor of it’s values. On the other hand, I grew up with this music and have been listening and following it through a significant part of it’s lifetime and mine and it’s a big source of pleasure for me.

I grew up in New York, but I was always upper middle class and was never truly immersed in the conditions from which hiphop arose (poverty, racism and systemic exclusion). So what does it mean for a 39 year old white man like me? And why do I like it so much? For me I think there are a few key emotional takeaways from gangsta rap music, and I imagine these are true for some others as well. First, the aggression in the music is cathartic and a way for us to inhabit and to some degree feel or express emotions like anger and violence in a context which is social acceptable. I watched an interview with Scottish battle rapper Loki (who is himself a brilliant leftist thinker, a surprising person) and he explained that rap music was only one of the contexts where he was allowed to express anger. There is also in the ‘fuck you, I do what I want’ attitude of gangsta rap an opportunity to vicariously escape from the complex forces which entrap and enclose us in modern life. Most of us cannot just do whatever we want, but the idea that maybe we could, and that someone out there is, is somehow reassuring. I find also in rap music an attitude of resilience and a call to struggle and overcome. This should be unsurprising to anyone familiar with the experience of Black people in America. For me, facing my own much less serious struggles in life, I find the relentless unwillingness to give up embodied in the music encouraging and valuable. To my ears, for all it’s talk of designer clothes, women and drugs, this music is about triumph over adversity through personal determination, a message I find valuable.

Money Forever, Verse 3: Lil Baby

I used to sleep on the floor for a mattress
Getting evicted, that shit was embarrassing
My mama didn’t have it, we made us a palettes
I had to share with the roaches and rats
Keep gettin’ money these voices keep telling me
I went to prison, it made me a better me
I can’t get no job, I got too many felonies
I been on probation since I was like seventeen
I done got me some stripes in the hood like a referee
I used to walk into school with that fire on me
I’m gettin’ money, ain’t really got time to beef
I don’t know why these lil bitches be lyin’ on me
I’m the jungle forreal where them lions be
I’m goin’ apeshit, they callin’ me Willy B
These niggas be sayin’ they gon’ rob me but we’ll see
I’m gon’ make every nigga with ’em fear me

https://genius.com/Lil-baby-money-forever-lyrics

Image: ccbbtt by Manolo Gamboa Naon

This morning there was a train drivers strike in Berlin and as a result it took me two hours to get my son to school, instead of the usual 40 minutes. The trains not running meant everyone got into their cars, therefore traffic was completely snarled, the buses and trams were packed and everything backed up and slowed down. I believe that workers, including those providing important functions, should have the right to strike and so I feel some solidarity with the strikers, even though it totally threw off my morning. What it got me thinking of though was how fragile the order of the city is. What a complicated and generally highly functional machine it is. In the morning within a window of a few hours everyone gets up and moves all over the place going to work and school, and then we reverse the process in the evening. What a delicate dance! In Berlin generally speaking the transit system is excellent, one of the best in the world. New York where I’m from also has a generally very good transit system although it’s been neglected and allowed to deteriorate heavily within recent years. For cities, the quality of transit has a huge deal to do with the quality of daily life.

Seeing part of the usual daily order fall out of sync with everything else and experiencing the ensuing chaos put me in a bit of an apocalyptic mindset. We live in a system which is so highly interdependent and complex, if any single part of it truly fails it can really wreak havoc on the rest. Lately I’ve been worrying about the financial markets and the climate. Both are deeply interlinked, with fossil fuels providing energy subsidy that keeps markets afloat, and heavy weather having the potential to inflict catastrophic damage that can disrupt markets. The political struggles in the US to pay for (or completely fail to pay for, in the case of Puerto Rico) the recovery from recent hurricanes is an indicator of this I’ve been watching. The capacity of the US government to bail out regions affected by heavy weather is not endless and we can see in the political fighting about disaster funding a harbinger of political struggles to come. We can also see who will be abandoned when hard decisions must be made by looking at the treatment of Puerto Rico. Poor people of color will be the first to be sacrificed when the government can no longer save everyone.

Recently people on Twitter foolishly mocked Alexandra Ocasio Cortez for suggesting that climate change is a social and racial justice issue. But we need only look at the failure to help Puerto Rico to see a glimpse of how this plays out. Funds were made available for Texas, because it votes Republican and is a source of campaign funds, and the people of Puerto Rico were left to suffer and die. Recently Ocasio Cortez has been one of the loudest voices championing a Green New Deal, a proposal to mobilize the American economy to transition to green energy and respond to climate change. Contrast this approach to that of the previous neoliberal Democratic politicians with their arcane and toothless concepts of ‘cap and trade’ in which a kind of stock market for pollution credits was created. The new generation of leftist politicians, as typified by the fight for a 15 dollar minimum wage, recognize that bold and audacious ideas are both newsworthy and motivating to their constituents. Incremental change is not exciting and doesn’t motivate people to fight. Bold goals do. Seeing a generation of politicans starting to organize around these ideas, like the Green New Deal, gives me reason to hope.

Image: Scrutiny by Darkcloud013

In honor of it being Sunday I am re-posting an article I wrote a few years ago, with minor edits.

Failure is scary. We’re all familiar with the fear of failure. We’re so familiar with it that most of us wrap ourselves up in a cozy, safe blanket of not doing anything. If we don’t do anything, we can’t fail! Ahhhh, safe. For those of us who manage to stick our feet out of the blanket and try, we often try a little. Not trying too much is also pretty safe: “It’s no big deal–I was just messing around.”

Trying involves risk. We risk our precious self image of being clever and talented. Of having really good taste, of being different and special. Do we know anyone like this? The smart guy? The cynical and sarcastic girl? The ones who are always ready with a clever remark about why something is not really that amazing, or kinda obvious, or been done better by so and so?

It feels good to put things and people down, because it means we’re smart enough to see their inadequacies. We’re smart! We’re part of a club. In this club, there’s a big glass window we can look through to see the other people. On our side, there’s a buffet, and some nice drinks. The other people are out there, on their hands and knees, digging in the mud. It’s dark, and it looks cold out there. And a bit undignified.

Except–wait a minute–why are those people out in the mud getting all the attention? They’re making art that’s dumb, obvious, and cliché! Why are they the ones showing films, publishing books, staging plays, releasing songs and albums? We’re smart and clever and witty!

We’re offended to see them trying because we are not. This reflects badly on us and points toward something we don’t want to see, our fear. We’re scared because actually trying means we might run into something really scary: our limitations. We don’t want to have limitations! We don’t believe in them. We’re part of the smart club! Listen to our clever comments! Dick wrote a very funny parody of a popular song! And Jane just wrote a scathing review of that guy’s new novel. We’re creative too. We don’t want to get down into the mud and scramble around and try to bring back up something good. The mud is dirty. And what if we don’t find anything?

Or worse: what if we do find something? If we find something in the mud, suddenly there’s risk. We have to lift this thing up and say “Look, here’s my thing!” But what if people think our thing is also dumb, obvious and cliché? As long as we don’t find anything, we can continue to pretend that our thing is down there hidden somewhere in the mud, and it’s awesome, and it’s better than everyone else’s. No, it’s much more comfortable over here on this side of the glass. There’s no mud, and nobody ever gets dirty. It’s very comfortable over here, and we’re all very clever and warm and safe, thank you very much.

Meanwhile, we stay on this side of the not-trying glass and talk amongst ourselves. We tell each other that one day, we’ll actually try really hard. We’ll try once it gets a little less dark, a few degrees warmer, and the mud isn’t so thick, and wet and cold. What we do is going to be amazing. We’re so much smarter than those guys out there in the mud.

But then, as we sit in our comfortable chairs on the cozy side of the glass, something uncomfortable happens. On the other side of the glass, out on the edge of the dark, one girl digs deep down into the mud and pulls up something awesome. We see it, and we know it’s awesome. We say to each other: “It’s kind of obvious.” And it is. It’s obviously awesome, to everyone who sees it.

This is definitely not fair. We were full of ideas. We were clever. Those people over there in the mud make stuff that’s dumb and obvious and we know better. In fact, we are better. All that digging around in the mud, it’s embarrassing. We’ve seen them fail! We’ve seen them hold up things that are not just dumb, or obvious, but both dumb AND obvious. It’s pathetic! We would never do stuff like that. We would never make anything that wasn’t perfect. We’re too scared to.

Lately I’ve been playing Michael Brough’s game Cinco Paus. Like all of his work, it’s singular, deeply considered and rewards thoughtful exploration. I’ve played many of his games but probably have spent the most time with 868-Hack and Imbroglio. I’m not very good at any of Brough’s games but enjoy them a great deal. Brough’s games share many tropes with the Roguelike genre but sidestep some of it’s sprawling maximalist complexity by transporting the genre to mobile platforms. Roguelikes, for those unfamiliar, are characterized by turn based gameplay, simple (often text based) graphics, randomly generated levels and a focus on emergent, combinatorial complexity, among other things. Being a community of pedantic nerds there is in fact an official agreed upon convention for ‘true’ genre membership which is called the Berlin Interpretation, created at the Internation Roguelike Development Conference of 2008. The creation of this type of ‘official’ genre definition is fairly unique among stylistic communities which usually police genre membership in a more informal and haphazard way, so in that regard is sociologically interesting. In another regard genre policing is deeply boring and horrible but I digress.

In many ways Brough’s games actually do satisfy the strictures of the Berlin Interpretation but discussing that for more than a sentence would make this piece terribly boring. Instead I’d like to think through how the imposition of limits, the shrinking of an idea to a tiny phone screen allows thought to crystallize in beautiful ways, looking specifically at Cinco Paus. For people who enjoy thinking about games as systems of rules, roguelikes and their adjacent offshoots represent a kind of pure expression of this. Because the game is randomized every time, it’s impossible to memorize sequences of moves or ‘brute force’ ways to overcome challenges like looking up answers on the internet. Instead we have to try to understand the underlying system which gives rise to the unique experience of each playthrough and thereby increase our skill and progress deeper into the game.

In Cinco Paus, Brough deploys the familiar roguelike trope of randomized the levels or (highly abstracted) dungeons that the player must explore but in a restrained, minimalist form. The game is made of five rooms which are composed of a grid of five by five squares. The levels are formed by placing walls randomly on the resulting grid, along with enemies (frogs, shrimp, chickens and ghosts) and items to collect. Many roguelike games spend a great deal of energy complicating these environments and treat exploring these generated dungeons as one of the main areas of interest. I myself have spent a great deal of time thinking about this in the creation of my tool called Strata, which aims to help game developers using Unity make roguelike games. Instead of focusing on exploring a physical space Brough instead chooses in Cinco Paus to explore the combinatorial space of rules, embodied in the games weapons: five magic wands.

You start the game with five wands arrayed across the top of the screen, each imbued with magical powers. Importantly, you do not know what those powers are, and they change every game. The wand always shoots a ray in a straight line across the board, but what that ray will do is unknown. For example sometimes it might pass through walls, kill frogs but not shrimp and teleport things it hits. Each of these wand powers is represented by a tiny drawing which appears next to it as it’s powers are activated. Whether the wand is shot up, down, left or right also impacts how the powers are activated and revealed. As we begin the game we need to first try to use all our wands in various situations to understand what they do. As it becomes more clear we can try to deploy them in skillful ways to navigate the dungeon, collect points and survive.

The idea of discovering the hidden properties of a magical item is a theme from Roguelike history, dating back to the game which spawned the genre, Rogue. In Rogue you could find potions as you explored the dungeon. They would have a color, but that color would not indicate the effect initially. Instead you either had to use it to find out what it did or use a magic scroll to identify it. Some potions had helpful effects, like healing, and others had unhelpful effects, like blindness or confusion. Roguelikes being the tricky complicated mazes that they are, of course these potions were not universally helpful or unhelpful, for example in some cases you could escape being killed by a medusa by being blind. In Cinco Paus Brough takes this concept of identifying unknown items and essentially makes a whole game out of it. By taking one concept from this larger, more maximally complex genre and stripping away or minimizing almost everything else he allows us to focus deeply on a single idea. The result is wonderful and rewards time invested with moments of surprise and delight. The more you understand all it’s moving parts, the more you can combine and experiment with them in a way that feels both extremely playful and rewarding. The fact that this type of rich strategic play is available on a mobile phone screen with a simple swipe and drag input system is illuminating.

Brough’s games are all a kind of masterclass in restrained, yet rich game design but it’s worth discussing the aesthetic packaging as well. Brough does all his own visual art and sound and the result is idiosyncratic and not in the style of ‘traditional polished game art’. For me this personal, auteurist approach makes the games feel all the more like a singular work of art, but some have criticized the approach, finding it amateurish. In Cinco Paus, in my opinion, Brough reaches a new plateau with both the art and sound that hopefully will quiet some of his detractors. For the art he continues in the drawing style of Imbroglio but with a more refined and beautiful use of color and line. The music and sound which function together as a single collage are perhaps one of my most favorite aspects of the game. Using processed guitar and burbling synthesizer gloop, heavy in spacious echo and reverb, the result is unselfconsciously beautiful and surreal at the same time. In Imbroglio there’s a wonderful mechanic in which each space moved by the player triggers a single guitar note or sample, creating a very satisfying, participatory procedural musical experience, but due to some of the melodic choices Brough makes he continuously undermines the harmonic structure with dissonant flourishes. This feels to me like a kind of self-consciousness, a desire to not make something too harmonically ‘simple’ or easily pleasant, but in Imbroglio it rang false to me. In Cinco Paus Brough has allowed the music to be beautiful and focuses the weirdness on spatialization and texture, which for me works wonderfully and is a choice I’m delighted in.

There isn’t a smooth way to introduce this fact, but in Cinco Paus, as the title may indicate all text in the game is inexplicably in Portugese. This choice, for those of us who don’t read the language, contributes further to the exotic, inscrutable and alien air of the game. I assume this adding of a layer of indistinction was the goal as we the (I assume) mostly English speaking players try to puzzle out the unfamiliar words. It’s a bizarre and interesting choice, which goes well with the game’s boldly ornamental and kitschy choice of typography. There may be some attempt to sabotage easy use of search-engines as well, since the items are not clearly named being identified only by visual icons.

If you’re interested to play Cinco Paus, as you can imagine I recommend you do, you can find links to it on Brough’s website. My Twitter friend Raigan Burns also kindly recommended to me some great resources on learning to play (or play better in my case) that will take you beyond the basics when you are ready. I also recommend this effusive article by NYU’s Frank Lantz, who is clearly also a fan.

Image: Tianjin Binhai Library by Ossip Van Duivenbode

We are in a time of democratization of the production of creative works. Working at Unity in the games business, our mission statement has been that we are “democratizing game development”. Now more and more companies are adopting this as part of their mission as well. The playing field is being leveled and more and more people are entering the game making space, and almost all other creative product spaces as well. Technology across the board is making it easier and easier to make almost every kind of thing. This is a good thing on balance. The more people we have creating, the more diversity of voices we have, the more interesting work will ultimately get made. I think there’s also a kind of network effect where more people making interesting things and sharing them and having a creative dialog accelerates the depth and fluidity of the creative conversation and quality of the work. In the past we would have to create a work and then wait months or years for it to reach the public and our community of creative peers, and then usually wait months for feedback to come back. This process has now been collapsed into days, hours and minutes. We can live stream our creative process and receive feedback from our audience in real time, which is pretty amazing.

On the other hand, this results in an ocean of new work to explore. The chances of having an individual piece of work discovered randomly are lowered and more and more we are competing for people’s time and attention. Makers of creative media are running into the challenge of audiences just not having enough time to consume all the work that we’re making. Paolo Pedercini has given a wonderful talk at Indiecade Europe (transcript and slides here) with some imaginative solutions to the problem of too much democratization of culture entitled “Indiepocalypse Now”. Some of his solutions are pretty wonderful, including introducing universal basic income to give people more time to consume cultural works, and making games for animals.

My feelings about this ocean of creative works are varied. On one hand, there is a crowd of people who angrily shake their fists and say “There are too many games being made! The marketplaces are being flooded with crap! No one can make a living!” I think one of the main motivators of this anger is the feeling of loss of a privileged position. Specifically in games, in the past if you were a member of a certain elite who had technical training, access to computers and the internet and the time and money to make a game on your own, your chance of getting one of the spots on a storefront like Steam were much better. There was less competition and if you did get on the store, you were virtually guaranteed an income. There’s a dynamic here of a privileged group being divested of their privilege, and being angry about it. I don’t take the side of these people. If what they are creating was not unique or interesting enough to compete in this landscape, oh well. Their elite status was previously artificially supported, a kind of subsidy of privilege. We see this in many fields in which mediocre white men are propped up by systemic factors, even though they are actually dumb and boring. It’s probably not a great loss to the world that they don’t get to make their mediocre work and earn a living from it. In a sense the new ocean of content is more of a meritocracy. Those who make work that stands out are rewarded, and those that make more of the usual basic whatever starve into obscurity. Of course the reality is more complex, but this is one facet of it.

The ocean of creative work continually splashing onto the internet however does present a challenge, especially given the fact that this process is only going to accelerate. Pedercini’s solutions of liberating more time or going after new types of audiences are good ones, but I think that we also need to consider the roles of, and opportunities for intermediaries in this era. One player we’ve seen arise in the game space that I am a big fan of is Itch.io. Itch created an open and inviting, easy to use space to invite all types of people to upload and share their work, with a uniquely generous ‘pay what you want’ revenue share model in which game developers can choose how much of their revenue to share with the platform. They also did a terrific job of curating creative and unique games for their home page, which made it worth visiting in and of itself, to see what weird stuff people were making. By it’s nature this makes it somewhat niche, and in my opinion this more of a solution than a problem. Game developers are drawn to Steam because of its huge audience, but it’s a huge generic audience that is mostly interested in very run of the mill, commercial titles. It’s become the Walmart of PC gaming. The main thing that Walmart type institutions have to offer value wise is cheap prices and the idea that you can drive to one place and buy literally everything. But in a digital landscape, how valuable is this? With a well designed store and a companion app (which Itch has, and is great) there is much less difference in terms of convenience. Importantly, Steam has also to an extent followed Itch’s lead by moving in a more open direction, allowing anyone to sell on the platform if they pay a fee (which is less good than Itch which is totally free). And Steam has essentially abandoned any attempt at human curation in favor of a heavily algorithmic approach, which in my opinion feels cold and uninteresting. It’s very rare that Steam recommends me anything I actually want, whereas the human curation on Itch is something I always find interesting to check out, even if it’s not precisely what I was already looking for.

Epic Games, makers of the Unreal Engine and mega-hit Fortnite have announced that they are opening their own store which, judging by their press release, seems to be aimed directly at solving some of the problems which Steam has ignored. They plan to curate games from the beginning and also offer a more favorable revenue share to developers. I think that this is a net positive for the game space as Steam has grown moribund and taken for granted it’s monopoly-like grip on the PC gaming space. Hopefully some competition will force them to actually invest in and pay attention to their platform and it’s developers needs. An interesting program which Epic is also launching is an opportunity for community creators including streamers and cosplayers to earn revenue while promoting games. Importantly I don’t know how this will work, so it may end up being terrible. Potentially though, I think this is one of the most important and interesting aspects of their new platform.

The video games industry has long benefited from unpaid fan labor in many forms. Fan creators invest massive amounts of time, care and money into creative work which centers around their favorite games. So far, that exchange has been massively one sided. They pay to buy games, and then pay to enrich those games communities with their labor. The rise of community created gaming video content as a massive driver of sales and attention has shifted this dynamic somewhat, with content creators assuming a newly prominent role and creating opportunities for them to monetize via things like ad revenue and sponsorship. If the mainstream games industry is wise it will recognize that this is fan work is valuable and effective labor and create opportunities for those creators to monetize what they are doing within the existing marketplaces.

Steam took a step in this direction with the creation of it’s curators system, allowing users to create lists of games and review them, but stopped short of allowing them to monetize this as a business. There is an existing business model for this which anyone who is familiar with internet marketing will recognize, which is affiliate sales. Affiliate sales are when someone promotes a product that they didn’t create via a custom link, and earn a commission on any resulting sales. In the internet marketing world (think “make money online” courses) the commission rates on these types of sales can be fifty percent. They recognize that those sales would not have happened without the labor of the people promoting, and therefore compensate them very well. I believe that a model like this could offer a great solution to both of these challenges: on one hand it creates an opportunity to mobilize an army of curators and authentic grass roots marketers who help to create visibility for the things they actually already love, and on the other hand encourages and creates a stable platform for these same fan and community workers to monetize and make sustainable the work which they are already doing in this space. Whether or not Epic with their new store or someone else will understand and take advantage of this opportunity remains to be seen, but my prediction is that whoever does will be rewarded handsomely.

Image: Still from Paratopic by Arbitrary Metric

I read a good thread on Twitter a few days ago that I wanted to digest here. User @docsquiddy, the developer of the game Paratopic, writes:

“speaking purely from a “what people buy” perspective, if your goal in games is to make enough money to fund another game, you need to do TWO things:

1) make an *experience* that people need to have

2) remove as many barriers between the player and that experience as possible”

I think this idea of focusing on experience in making and specifically marketing games is really important and useful. It’s a kind of right brain / gestalt thinking about games that many of us are missing when thinking about game ideas. Because many of us put on our game designer hat when thinking about the next game we want to make we tend to think in terms of mechanically focused genres or lists of features. There are many, many unsuccessful ‘platformers with a twist’ that illustrate this. People are thinking about their games in a sort of formalist design sense “I will take genre X and add innovation Y and therefore have made a noteworthy game”. This approach, when not combined with experiential gestalt thinking has the risk of making stuff which feels fussy and sterile. It’s a kind of mechanistic working through of a game mechanic with a series of different color schemes and mechanical variations, but limited emotional and aesthetic impact. I won’t pick on any particular games as examples but you can probably think of a few.

I think part of this is the idea that the main value that indie creators have to bring to the market is a kind of ‘innovation as virtue’. The thinking goes “We indies can experiment with bold new ideas that the boring AAA mainstream cannot, therefore we are valuable and needed.” And of course in the wider ecosystem of games there is some truth to this, but it misses the point that this is generally speaking not what motivates players to buy a game. The thesis of Doc’s Twitter thread is that most consumers buy a game because the prospect of having an experience has been dangled in front of them, and they find the prospect of having that experience enticing. The experience represents a gestalt of art, mechanics and aesthetics or to use a more nebulous but evocative term the ‘vibe’ of the game.

Do you want to go to this place and have this experience? This morning I was thinking about Bloodborne, part of the Souls-like genre created by From Software. My experience of Bloodborne was made interesting due to the deployment of the ‘hard but fair’ mechanical aesthetic, but what I remember and what gives me a feeling of wanting to return was the palpable atmosphere of the world: the gothic, dream-like strange and hostile spaces I had to traverse, that unique feeling of space looping and wrapping in on itself, the elegantly connected level designs. It all sticks in my mind and makes me want to re-experience it, to be in that place and feel those feelings. The combination of the surface aesthetics, oblique narrative and challenging mechanics all hook together and resonate nicely with one another. A dark world like this should feel difficult and threatening. The mechanics reinforce the vibe.

Looking at Paratopic, Doc’s own game (which I haven’t played), we get the sense that he’s walking his talk. The game is more or less an atmosphere delivery system. The choice of abstracted Playstation One era low-polygon art, the green fog and ominous music. There is a palpable feeling transmitted, a kind of David Lynch meets Silent Hill aesthetic package which very clearly telegraphs the aesthetic experience you probably will have if you buy it. Notably the marketing material for the game does not focus on mechanics or what you will be able to do in this world, instead it just presents a taste of what the experience of being in the world will be like.

There is an ongoing discussion in the world of game makers about whether aesthetics and narrative or ‘pure’ mechanics are more important. I tend to fall a bit to the mechanic focused side as I’m almost purely uninterested in most people’s idea of story in games. That being said, thinking about this subject I am a great lover of the experience of being in a world that games offer, as distinct from a story being revealed by narrative dumps and cutscenes. I think this is why the indirect world building and lore revealing of a game like Bloodborne is so appealing. There is a feeling that there is a story that animates the world, or at least a history, but we are simply existing and interacting in it. In purely pragmatic terms if you are making a game you want to sell, I think paying close attention to the experience and feelings you want your player to experience is well worth doing, whether it is your primary concern or not.

The entire thread is here, and worth reading:

 

Weird observation.

I see a bunch of games get noticed for unique and clever mechanics at various shows that end up not performing well when they hit market

— doc (@docsquiddy) November 30, 2018

I try to meditate every day. It does me a tremendous amount of good in terms of my overall mental health and general daily sense of having my shit together. I highly recommend it to anyone who hasn’t tried it. It’s not hard and you don’t need to be good at it to get benefit. Nowadays in fact a whole industry has sprung up around commercializing meditation, which is pretty weird, but probably a good thing on balance? Apps like Headspace and Insight Timer turn your mobile device into a meditation aid, and can be genuinely helpful. I’ve tried both. Headspace is good, and probably the most popular. Andy Puddicombe, the voice of the app is a good teacher, but with it’s cute animations and required monthly payment plan it all feels a little slick and packaged for me. This slickness is probably useful as a kind of mindfulness ‘gateway drug’, smoothing the path for people who might otherwise not try it. Probably my chief complaint about it, along with the whole ‘mindfulness’ movement is the desire to erase Buddhism from the meditation picture.

Buddhism is the tradition out of which the current mindfulness trend grew and while it is a pretty user friendly religion with it’s acceptance of science and relatively open, un-dogmatic approach it still brings a lot of non-commercial concepts like suffering and death to the fore. There’s a great article by Mike Powell called “Meditation In The Time of Disruption” for The Ringer which articulates many of these thoughts about the commercialization of meditation better than I can. I understand why these companies want to strip away Buddhism from their marketing plan in order to present it’s techniques in a vacuum, but I think it’s a bit unfortunate. I have been interested in Buddhism since I was a teenager, starting with reading the Zen books I found in my father’s library. Zen Flesh, Zen Bones by Paul Reps is probably my favorite of those. About five years ago I went through a period of intense change in my life, much of it difficult and all of it happening over a period of about six months. I went through the death of my father, separation from the mother of my kids, the loss of a long time job and a process of internal transformation in a very short time period. During this time I dove more deeply into Buddhism and it offered thoughts and tools to deal with what I was going through, meditation chief among them, but also a kind of loosening of my clenched desire to control and a greater acceptance of the constant change that comprises life. Since that time I’ve been meditating off on and on, with the goal of doing it daily but also long periods where I stop and start again. Generally speaking as life gets more challenging or stressful I’m reminded to meditate, and it helps a lot. Lately I’ve been under various degrees of stress and have been meditating very consistently.

Insight Timer is the other mindfulness app discussed by Powell in his article and I prefer it over headspace. It takes a different, less curated and more open and social approach to meditation. When you open the app it tells you that ‘4,612 people are meditating now’. This reminder of your participation in a larger community I find pleasant, and the pages of the app are filled with profile pictures of other meditators and their comments on the various meditations on offer, which are, appropriately generally very nice and helpful. Comparing Headspace and Insight Timer we find a parallel to the ‘open format vs walled garden’ dichotomy we find across the tech world. In this regard Headspace is more like Apple with it’s slick design and focus on a tight, carefully controlled experience with a single host. Insight Timer on the other hand takes an open approach hosting thousands of different audio files of meditations across a huge variety of topics, similar to the approach of the PC ecosystem, Android or the Open Source movement. Less slick but also less controlled and walled in. Buddhism is present on Insight Timer, but only as one of many possible types of meditation. I vastly prefer this heterogeneous approach.

The meditations I’ve been listening to on Insight Timer the most lately are by Tara Brach who blends Buddhist and western psychological practices. The recordings on offer by her are wonderful and I’ve been really enjoying meditating with them. She’s written a book called ‘Radical Acceptance’ which I’ve heard great things about and would like to read soon, so maybe we’ll return to her in these pages. In the meantime, if you’re thinking about giving meditation a try, both Headspace and Insight Timer are great places to start, though having tried both I’d say I prefer Insight Timer myself.