Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw writes, "Maybe this is another of those signs of aging that have been standing out all the more to me since I turned 30, but I've been feeling more and more uneasy about all the killing people we have to do in triple-A games. I don't remember this ever being as stark an issue in the past as it seems to be now, I mean, you kill human beings in Contra on the NES without worrying about justification. Maybe it's an issue that realistic graphics brings with it."
From Horse Armor to Mass Layoffs: The Price of Greed in Gaming. Inside the decades-long war on game workers and the players who defend them.
maybe a real enemy is people who use terms like "the real enemy"
there can be more than 1 bad thing, t's not like a kids show with 1 big bad
This is very much a “dummy who volunteers themselves to the middle” comment.
The real enemy is a common phrase, people use it all the time.
Calm down.
You don't seem calm at all. Don't take this so seriously, you seem desperate responding to others defending your opinion that lacks any value or critical thought.
stop projecting
i'm not desperately dong anything, i'm tapping at keys on my keyboard bud
DEI was never the problem and it was an ignorant take to begin with.
DEI is why games like Kena Bridge of Spirits, South of Midnight, and Ghost of Tsushima exist.
DEI is why we have a huge resurgence in Japanese, Chineses, and Korean developers producing games like Stellar Blade, Black Myth, and why Nintendo & Sony exist.
DEI is why more and more games have HUGE accessibility options with both Sony and MS fully behind this.
DEI was never a bad thing, the entire purpose of DEI is representation of all people, genders, disabilities, etc…
The problem was people used DEI as a default derogatory term to describe what they believed was forced representation, which allowed colorist, racist, sexist, misogynist, homophobic, and xenophobic fools to run away with the negative DEI narrative.
Executives seem to often have an obsession with perpetual revenue growth. There is always a finite amount of consumers for a product regardless of growth. Additionally, over investment is another serious issue in gaming.
The fact that they also rarely have any real expertise in game development compounds things. They'll look at what's been successful elsewhere, lack the knowledge to properly understand why they have been successful and then force a team to 'reproduce' their badly interpreted idea of that success.
We see it so often with sequels to games that were successful too. The team are left well alone, they have a break through hit and all of sudden the money men descend on the IP and completely railroad the dev team's ideas. Usually winds up being 'make the same game but MORE'
This is true throughout all of the corporate and public sector organisations to be honest. CEO's generally move amongst the corporate world without any need to have experience of a particular industry, they simply need to rely on their senior leadership credentials. A CEO of a retail giant will just as easily transition to a CEO role in the energy sector for example.
Not defending CEOs here to be clear, I think it's a huge part of the reason the western world is so fucked up. CEOs don't need to care about the sector they work in, in fact it's better if they don't care if they want to screw everyone to make profits.
Companies don’t hire executives to break even. If the goal is breaking even then why start the company in the first place.
That's understood; it's getting record profits and expecting to always beat those record profits, and seeing anything less as a total failure. Then they lay people off and raise prices to reach those record profit levels again, just to sate shareholders. It's setting expectations way too high just to spike share prices, then inevitably falling short. It's feeling entitled to being more successful than everyone else. It's the CEOs doing all this to boost their own bonuses.
Growth benefits the company’s profits and therefore the company’s stock if publicly traded, which pleases the shareholders making them more and more rich, which is why Growth is always at the forefront of the vast majority of any publicly traded company.
More growth = More Money and the people at the top want all the money they can get. I can’t really blame them anyone would love to see their profits go from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands, to multi-millions it’s almost like a gambling addiction.
But it also goes to show someone how morals can go out the window for a lot of these people, and how amazing some CEOs are when they catch this early and provide a balance solution that takes complete care of their employees across the board while keeping the business sustainable IE: Insomniac Games ALWAYS on the best places to work list. The rest of the industry could learn.
honestly, the "real" enemy of gaming, is ourselves
if nobody bought horse armor, shitty dlc would have died almost overnight
if we stood firm and nobody bought games from companies that were bad with layoffs, it would be solved
we're the idiots supporting awful business practices, we are the ones enouraging it
I think the reality that we don't want to convince ourselves of is that without the rise of "horse armor" and DLC, game budgets would have essentially stagnated (smaller teams/smaller games), or game prices would have risen much more dramatically than they have. There was an incessant drive for bigger worlds, infinite detail, and hundreds of hours of "gameplay" over the last two decades, that while perhaps a natural evolution of things, needed a suitable funding stream to accomplish.
What...CEOs make tens of millions and that doesnt include SLT etc etc...we now have multiple editions of games, in game currency, MT's, battle passes.....and what do we get..worse game than what was coming out 20 years ago....dont drink the cool aid, its this nickel and dime crap that is absolutely leading us to gaming destruction.
This is the worst possible answer to this conundrum. Blaming the masses is blaming the only people who are constantly “told” to buy.
Consumers are the only ones not to blame here. People make their own choices all the time. Disney movies are bombing and DEInis being blamed. Has that been enough to put Disney out of business? No and it never will.
Disagree. Businesses are able to do what they do because people are bad consumers and don't think critically about purchases. Disney got away with doing shit stuff for years and it's just the last year where people got tired of it. It's not like it didn't work for 5 years or so for Disney to do the things they've done. They'll just move onto another way to get people to see movies and it will be just as bad but more profitable until people wake up and realize it.
Consumerism drives business behavior. It's not so much "blaming" as it is observing behavior. The point I'm making is that the direction that games have gone are driven by the spending. Consumers are spending on DLC and they are driving the expectation of more glitz and padded out (lengthier) games. If they continue to pay, they will continue to drive that direction until a threshold is reached that forces a change in behavior.
Corporate advertising is the most powerful force on the planet.
This is N4G for god sake, every day there are arguments between people who are Team Xbox and Team PlayStation because they’ve been convinced that having an identity built on paying money to Sony and Microsoft matters more than having one as individual gamers who can play whatever they want.
And THEN we get to the corporate advertising part: to play whatever you want is to sink MORE into the advertising pits, making it so that you can more than one specific product.
ah you're right
they were told to buy it, it's clearly impossible to avoid that
if enough people stopped supporting, it would stop
disney not stopping would only be because enough people didn't stop
Agreed. I’ve been saying for years, announce you won’t be buying the upcoming game because of the practices of the previous game, then you only have to stick to your guns once, see how quickly things change for the better.
We have to unite in what we shouldn’t purchase.
just imagine a world, fifa came out worse, nobody buys the next one until they see proof it's better and stick to it
or games being forced online for single player and nobody buys it
things would change so fast
Greed and greedy people have and always will be the main issue for everything wrong in the world. Everything is a product to be exploited for monetary gain. Even when there are things that could help progress us along for the sake of making our lives easier that thing must be exploited for monetary gains. Anything that tells you otherwise is propaganda to make you complicit.
I've never thought "DEI" (although the way most people use it doesn't match it's real definition) is the problem with games. Good games have continued to be good when they have a diverse cast, and likewise, bad games have continued to be bad. There isn't a credible example I've seen where a diverse cast has been the direct cause of a game being bad.
Matt Miller: "Every subscription to Game Informer now raises funds for St. Jude. We want you to know what that means."
I subscribed to this not knowing about how some of the proceeds go to St. Judes.
Really cool that some of the money goes there.
Even if people don't subscribe to the mag, it might bring people to the charity.
One of the main charities my wife and I donate to. They help a lot of children and being a parent of 5 children I can’t imagine what those parents go through. I’ll probably get a sub to GI because of St Jude and of course because I love video games.
Though Unearthed Arcana's content primarily consists of subclasses and spells, WOTC's latest UA drop is set to shake up Dungeons and Dragons' future.
The closer graphics get to fidelity with reality, the more responsible we have to be. Their "reality" doesn't matter. All forms of media communicate notions of how things aught to be or how the author / writer sees the world - their ingrained assumptions and preconceptions, and violence isn't exempt from this.
If we churn out games that realistically and entertainingly portray violence, we run the risk of fostering toxic ideas about violence in culture. Violence in games is deliberately created alongside carefully constructed sound design, the promise of reward thereafter, and the response of the controls, as well as the animations. We cannot forget that in reality, violence would not feel or look the same - the biorhythms are different, it would not be an entertaining experience. In violent games, violence is CONSTRUCTED in such a way as to make it fun, and it has no bearing on the actual reality of violence in physical, mental, and moral terms. We cannot allow the virtual violence of videogames somehow come to supplant the place of real violence - we cannot allow it to stand for what the reality of violence is. This becomes more and more of an issue as videogames acquire a greater power to represent reality, and reality itself is blurred. Thankfully, many of us can see past this, even intuitively, but for many others I don't think it'll be the same. I'm not saying a person would suddenly kill another person, but certainly I can see someone choosing violence in a certain scenario, and that choice being informed by the understanding and the "vicarious experience" of violence that their videogames have taught them.
It is of course a storytelling issue too. Though storytelling and narrative are inextricably linked with cultural assumption, expectation, and preconceptions. Narratives from a macroscopic level reflect a kind of progression of life on the part of the author - a kind of self-contained possibility or lifespan which carries certain messages about life and existence. A narrative is a model for a greater archetypal thing that the author expresses (sometimes unwittingly, sometimes not). Not only this, but narrative is bound up in language, and language contains and defines all our meanings. Language is necessarily political and culture-forming - it fixes boundaries on the imagination and on understanding and is a vector of assumptions about everything. When you argue the point about "ludonarrative dissonance" (that's become such a buzzword) and bemoan the lack of narrative coherence amidst ultra-violence in games, you can't claim that your argument is only concerned with narrative. For that very narrative communicates life and meaning to us on an extraordinarily deep level as I've been saying above, and is formative of culture, which is basically how we operate as humans in the world, limited in our perspectives and needing to write stories and form hypotheses about the universe around us.
Nevertheless, what Yahtzee says is a good starting point to graduate to the arguments I'm putting forward (sorry, that sounds terribly self-congratulatory and arrogant haha), and yes, I'm damn tired of playing as "heroes" that kill hundreds of dehumanised and faceless "enemies" in really fetishised and choreographed ways. It's not cool, it's not glorious, it's stupid, artistically inept, and shallow, and it's plagues videogames. It is in fact one of the reasons videogames are so stupid.
The tie between video games and actual violence is a tired argument with no facts to support it. Unless there is new evidence to the contrary, let's move on.
I just don't get the whole argument. If you're bothered by excessive killing, don't do it. In The Last of Us, in many areas you can sneak your way through and in sections you can't, they're out to kill you so your use of violence is justified. It's not like you're just out there killing people for the hell of it or because you can. As the player, you have some role in how you play the character. Use the free will that is given to you, and if you don't feel you're given the freedom to do what you want, don't play it.
I don't even get his point about killing the guy who stole the guns early in the game. It wasn't Joel who did that. Why should you feel the need to try and relate with her situation.
Violent video games are a symptom of a violent culture.
I mostly agree with yatzhee, but I don't get why the last of us is his prime example. I thought it was one of the games that handled violence the best.