History is littered with the twitching corpses of cash-rich outsiders who looked at games and said, "All we have to do to win is the EASY PART: Make a game."
"I invested billions in this cool hardware! Now let's do the EASY PART."
"I have this great movie IP! Now let's do the EASY PART."
"I own a trillion-dollar company! Now let's do the EASY PART."
"I procedurally generated some rare items! Now let's do the EASY PART."
"But seriously. I'm a libertarian. Just so we're clear. This will scale better if you do the EASY PART for free."
Oh, the optimism. You can't even launch a f'ing rocket. 😂
How do you expect to make a game?
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
Every once in a while I return to an older essay to see if I still agree with Past Me. This is one on reaching broader audiences, multiplayer and how games achieve cultural significance.
In the ensuing years, the market shifted rather decisively towards many of these trends.
- Multiplayer is now a dominant driver of revenue.
- Streamers market the emotion of gameplay
- Mobile and casual markets exploded with some games reaching hundreds of millions.
But as is the lesson with most technological shifts, it is a matter 'And', not 'Or'. We still have single players games. We still have traditional male markets. We still have niches who feels ignored by the broader culture.
A great blindness of technologies is how easily they are coopted by systems of values.
The Internet, for example, is this wonderful bundle of connectivity technologies and standards.
But despite early marketing, there is nothing inherently about it that makes it Open. Or Free. Or Good.
These were true. Until they weren't. You can censor the internet. You can use it for evil. You can twist it to the needs of a specific regime.
Scaling human systems beyond the natural constraints of how humans scale is almost always unethical.
Some natural human constraints that I've looked into seem to be:
- Number and strength of human relationships (Dunbar)
- Rate at which relationships and trust develops
You can't just 'friend' someone and make friends. That may work for a database. It does not work for human biology.
The joke goes: An expert game designer is 20x more effective than a newbie. They are correct 20% of the time instead of 1%.
Why are game designers wrong 80% of the time? 🧵
Sometimes they are wrong by a little. Sometimes by a lot. Is it poor planning? Are they morons? An expert painter does not produce a completely broken picture 80% of the time. Why is this so hard?
I lay a lot of blame on the much larger gap between authoring a thing, experiencing the thing and revising.
- Many types of media (like drawing or painting) allow for real-time 'self-playtesting' with the author as the playtester.
- Game design does not.
Read the Spirit AI interview on RPS with interest. It shows how hard it is to have a conversation about community moderation.
Three perspectives:
- Wronged user
- Moderator
- Social designer
1. User perspective: "I have been wronged/abused/etc. Mods should make it stop immediately. They are clearly in the wrong from a unarguable moral standpoint if they do not." Black and white, zero wiggle room.
2. Human mod perspective: "OMG, torrents of comments. Cold reality: It is very difficult to track all conversations, reports, etc. We do our best, but often even minor games would need lots of human bodies just to keep up with players 24/7. Budget is a thing too."