rolling thread of stuff worth reading on videogames

Interesting fact: the IDGA is against unionization for its members.

http://www.jetlaw.org/2018/03/24/unionization-within-the-video-game-industry-is-a-looming-threat/

I wonder what the real underlying rationale is here, other than “the leadership of the IDGA are clearly on the take from the publishers” - and of course it probably is that simple, or worse, they’re just sissies

This was good on the push for unions, GDC this year and the IDGA: https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/7xdv5e/after-destroying-lives-for-decades-gaming-is-finally-talking-unionization

tbf we're talking about an industry noted for the odd political maverick

Jen MacLean, IGCA’s executive editor, is worried unionization may improve working conditions, but may also have unintended consequences. While increasing game developer’s leverage, MacLean raised concerns of unions controlling the jobs developers take, the projects they work on, and potentially force companies to be understaffed. She also discussed union abuses in other industries, specifically the construction industry.

i mean i think it's pretty obvious the underlying rationale is def 'we are deathly afraid of the terrifying power of our capitalist overlords'

(also can we not call people 'sissies' pls)

I totally forgot the connotations my bad

Time to dust off the old craven poltroons

*lowers cudgel*

devvvine’s link is much better than mine btw, everyone should read the whole thing.

I’m now curious about what a national union for developers in games might mean for developers, period.

"MacLean raised concerns of unions controlling the jobs developers take, the projects they work on, and potentially force companies to be understaffed."

lol this is classsssssic union-busting rhetoric, based around confusing people about what labor contracts actually look like. you negotiate over conditions of work, you don't magically become the owners and management of the company (sadly).

i know i'm violating the principle of the thread here, but man speaking as someone who's loved jimmy maher's writing up until now, this series he's doing on civilization is excruciating. he's been regurgitating fukuyama for months now. god, i hope this isn't a shark-jump.

I’d buy an album titled Regurgitating Fukuyama

i googled "jimmy maher civilization" since i had no clue who he was, and the first thing that comes up is a post with a ludwig von mises quote at the top

oh, that's probably the post that prompted you to bump this, rushomancy! it does look excruciating. he was good in the past, i guess?

Fukuyama is pre-regurgitated iirc

most of his writing is good, yeah. his series on tetris is pretty great.

Had no idea Francis had written a book about Tetris, very interested in his lapsed neoconservative take

https://www.themillions.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/570_AmisTop.jpg

otm. he's usually a solid in-depth historian of pre-web games/computing culture, but this series on Civ has been painful, a liberal amateur history of everything that has happened. Started just fine when he was on home ground - business and personalities at Microprose, the narrative of development - but just flat summarising of ideas over the last few articles.

haha i've been trying to push back in the comments and i do appreciate him engaging with me but he ultimately concluded that we were talking past each other and that's kinda true because our premises/paradigms are soooooo different.

he is unbelievably worth reading on video games though.

in its worst moments, the civ series reminds me of precocious high school student essays on world history. huge armchair theories that explain everything, timeless correspondences where x always gives rise to y, economics/colonialism sidelined or inconsistently treated.... massive revenge of the grand narratives. he's so good on video games though. the best moments of the civ series still let that peek through, whenever he gets back to the actual game and tries to close-read the stories its mechanics are telling, he's on more solid ground. the first half of the most recent one on the game's economics is pretty good at doing a takedown of overly broad cross-time generalizations based on this game. maybe he's having second thoughts.

The idea to show the ideological premises of something like Civilization is awesome, but the last posts it's been more about explaining what he himself thinks about the world that Civilization doesn't explicitly agree with. The one on Religion was when I got off.

haha yeah I saw you there Dr C (thinking "hmmm is that the ilxor or another Dr Casino?"). He's so good natured, but it's a hard gap to cross.

yeah he's thoughtful and considerate and meticulous and thorough and usually has a lot to offer on any topic he addresses - but here he just doesn't seem to have anything to say that fukuyama didn't say already, which is a disappointment.

the thing is that the series has gotten me to think a lot about that game! and the kinds of assumptions baked into all such games. like the idea that the tradeoff mechanic is between cash, productivity, science research, and "luxuries"... he chooses to interrogate different aspects of that but it's really striking that it's "luxuries" and not "infrastructure" or "essential social services" or whatever. something that's passed by me unexamined since age 10, playing hundreds of hours of that game, and now to my eye strikes me as a profoundly reaganite way of thinking about the thing, a bunch of unnecessary goodies that are just placating people. IRL people don't turn to civil unrest and overthrow the government because of a lack of "luxuries" so on its face the game's logic is goofy. so, y'know, this got me thinking about that.

idk eventually he'll be done with civ and back to, i hope, deep dives on all kinds of crazy old gaming software and hardware history. when he's working in his own field the armchair theorizing is nowhere to be seen - he has this close-grained attention to the interrelationships between business decisions, personalities, technological developments, game genres., etc., that's so fantastic. you can learn mountains from practically any random article on there.

he is /unbelievably/ worth reading on video games though.

Yeah, he is great. Still great.

You guys are fuckin’ nerrrrrrrrrds

I want Mordy’s take now

https://kotaku.com/this-is-the-coolest-thing-ive-seen-in-vr-1826010054

interview with the creator of very cool psychedelic artsy VR

ugh Tim Rogers

^

tim rogers will tear this board apart

I love Tim Rogers unreservedly and if he does actually publish a novel I will buy and read it

Also I think he is cuet

Xopher Wailord Barnett > Tim Rogers
5/14/18 12:33pm
I’m sick of seeing Tim Rogers’ pseudo-intellectual hipster face.

Tim Rogers > Xopher Wailord Barnett
5/14/18 12:37pm
yeah, me too

i like tim rogers a lot and can understand why someone wouldn't

post an interview w a female game designer, get 7 posts trying to out-dog the dude interviewer. :-/

did anyone watch this video and see the other games that this developer made? they look amazing. Paloma Dawkins makes these games of psychedelic worlds with hand drawn trippy line art animation. she is partially funded by the NFB of Canada, something i have always held in high esteem for producing so many great (and personally experimental) works of art like the work of Norman McLaren.

her work is very collaborative - they have designers and artists and musicians, a lot of them students just making things to make new work. as a former art student myself, it's always cool to see cool new stuff coming out of the art school community.

the one about the universe full of hands sounds neat. it is her response to the election of 2016 and is intended to express a painful & emotional experience, with harsh sound design, a sensory-overload-driven overwhelming fps.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEu_9bKdKQk

i didn't have time to watch that interview last night. but just finished it, and wow! she's amazing

the games definitely look interesting

Single Player As Local Co-Op

that is great

loved that, brought back memories of playing games with a friend on his dad's computer and splitting up roles, Elite especially where one person was the pilot and the other in charge of missiles/hyperspace/trading

dont think i ever divided roles like that with people, but there was always a lot of tagging in and out

i think the original smash bros was the game that killed 'single player as coop' for my childhood crew, that game raised the bar immensely for how much multiplayer time you could sink into it without getting bored

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKn9yiLVlMM

id heard about this noclip documentary for a few weeks now. it's pretty good! making me curious about Morrowind

for me nothing will ever say "we built a world for you" like they have taken you from the imperial city-- first by carriage, then by boat-- to the east. to morrowind. we can remember it for you wholesale.

i really wanted to like that bethesda documentary but after the 15th time it cut to the same shot of the parking lot of the bethesda studio i had to turn it off. there are some interesting nuggets of information in those interviews but i lost my patience waiting.

sadly, when i saw the phrase "Single Player As Local Co-Op" i assumed it meant the move where you're yourself and you try to use both controllers at once. like taping NES controllers to a table so you tap buttons on both controllers without them sliding around. which is a profoundly depressing activity as a young child, if you keep going with it

haven't watched that noclip doc yet. i remember that during oblivion development, bethesda's testing department was apparently one guy on a couch.

https://youtu.be/zvm0CN3tQFI?t=14m47s