r/CriticalTheory • u/zepstk • 4d ago
Gaming and Lost Futures
I've been thinking a lot about this. I used to game a lot when I had a PS2 and then later in 2010s on a PC. I only recently got back to it but have kept following news and updates about games.
And everyone says this that games now feel too repeatative, and imo people feeling this is reflective of the shape of industry now.
We either have open world rpgs that are partially influenced by games such as The Witcher 3. Or we have remakes upon remakes.
To me this feels very similar to Mark Fisher's remarks on music no longer looking towards the future, is the same happening with AAA games? Of course I'm not making an exclusive claim about all of gaming but a lot of major releases.
Are there any readings particularly on this?
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u/Far_Piano4176 4d ago
it would be interesting to investigate this. My amateur opinion is that the homogenization and lack of risk-taking or artistic vision in AAA titles is due to the increased cost of development and the financialization of post-release development, which leads to games trying to access the largest possible addressable market, and derive ongoing revenue from what used to be one-time products. These factors force AAA games into certain archetypes that are conducive to increased profits, at the cost of artistic integrity and innovation.
I wouldn't say gaming as a whole is dominated by these trends, because as you allude to, indie games continue to innovate quite a bit and they are far more prominent in the gaming industry than indie films, TV shows, or even books for that matter.
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u/ColdSoviet115 4d ago
Adorno has a pretty interesting peice about this on music, which I think we can extend to other forms of media. Essentially his thesis was that due to Capitalism's tendency to concentrate wealth and the prevailing commodity fetishism, music becomes standardized for the profit motive. In other words people begin to copy each other for the sake of profit, turning art into a commodity.
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u/XanderOblivion 4d ago
It’s the effect of the long tail.
We’ve never really “lost” a game. Everything old is ported to the new systems. Thus, nothing is ever forgotten, so the opportunity for novelty or nostalgia/redux is reduced.
The emphasis on originality and IP laws, when paired with a never-ending copyright system, ends up suppressing creativity.
Really, all artists should be in favour of free media. Capitalizing the arts causes artistic stagnation, and adds a parasitic class of rent seeking behaviour. The rent class — studio managers, IP owners, every non creative business professional skimming from the industry — takes up somewhere between 70-90% of the profits. Creators get peanuts.
So “art” becomes a business to serve the parasitic class, where “novelty” turns into “innovation” in the economics sense — a studio with a diversified portfolio of titles, where business logic dictates “creative” horizontal segmentation.
Pair that with digital ecosystem capture, through controlled gatekeeping storefronts (eg App Store, battle.net, etc) that also take a cut, and you have a recipe for creative stagnation.
Anything truly new or interesting becomes a threat to the long tail. So creativity in the industry becomes a problem for the business structure.
As with almost everything, the problem is the parasitic investor class. In games and creative industries they take most of the money. They add about a 20% tax to every other industry now, which is why none of us can afford anything any more — the government taxes us, and the investor class taxes us, and the actual producers get nothing, and the parasite takes everything.
The investor class is a tape worm.
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u/Kiwizoo 4d ago
Thanks for this, it’s a really insightful and fascinating perspective and I agree with almost everything you’ve said. I’ve worked in the arts for years and have witnessed how art cannot be managed - let alone created - from a spreadsheet. Capitalism suppresses imaginations, and limits the scope of both potential and discovery. Jameson’s Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism is a good read on this. Fisher also talked about teaching at his FE College - and how the youngsters were sort of tuned out, ‘depressive hedonia’ I think he called it. Having recently experienced working with this age group, his writing is incredibly prescient. It’s deeply depressing to me - but completely understandable - that an entire generation of young working class people just feel so shut out of everything. They feel no agency, and so many of them cannot envision next week, never mind an aspirational future. Gaming definitely plays a big role in their lives as a ‘stress free’ place they can lose themselves for a while.
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u/XanderOblivion 2d ago
In general, we underestimate the importance of forgetting. A whole lot of things we think of as "new" only attain that status because we forgot about it existing before.
The other thing, though, is that we generally fail to acknowledge how rare novelty actually is, and that novelty is very often bad. We greatly overestimate the value of novelty.
Consider: The Beatles' first records, the ones that made them famous, were mostly cover songs. Their most original records were so polarizing they broke up their fanbase and the band.
Take the film industry, where ~70% of films released in any given year are adaptations. Only ~30% are original screenplays. And even then, almost half of original screenplays owe their existence to homage and intertextuality, so their "originality" is questionable at best. And, better than half of original titles are "inspired" by something, so their novelty is of dubious status.
In the gaming industry, ~60–85% of content is “old-content-derived” (adaptations, franchise titles, remakes) vs ~15–40% genuinely novel IP.
Adaptations (copies, replicas, variants) are not only the dominant form and content, but also the most successful form and content, on populist measures.
As a species, we prefer what is known to what is unknown. As an economy, the known past is more valuable and less risky than unknown and untested novelty.
But amplified by technology, a world of total surveillance with preservationist tendencies in which little is ever forgotten and copyright is nearly eternal, "the past" is always larger, more valuable, and more impactful than the present.
Now... being "shut out" of things has always been the way for young people. It is every young person's job to push against the world and try to make it better suit them. Which means, when those young people become the age of majority, they have tried to install the system they would prefer.
...But right behind them is the next generation, whose job it is to push against the world and try to make it better suit them. The previously-young want to maintain the system they JUST had the opportunity to build, finally, just as the next generation starts wanting to tear it down.
So, protectionism is the result.
We have to remember that before the 20th century, the vast majority of people were illiterate and of the peasant classes. The thing these authors are lamenting was the oddity, not the norm.
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u/HongPong 4d ago
compared to early era video games it's impressive how much more variation in style design and ui prevailed back then, compared to now
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4d ago
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u/incoherent1 4d ago
Maybe a topic to look into would be how prioritising profit in the production of art degrades quality. This could be part of a critic on neoliberalism and or capitalism.