Although the general news story has probably already been seen on N4G, there are new arguments to be raised against Marla Jo Fisher's "Video games were invented by the devil."
This article is NOT a duplicate, since this article's analysis and arguments against her go far beyond the average forum post on N4G.com.
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.
'I truly believe that video games were created by Satan to turn otherwise normal children into his drooling, glassy-eyed stooges. After my son plays them at his friends’ houses, he comes home irritable and testy for the rest of the day.'
He could just be like that because he realise how over protective his mom is. Just saying.
'Even though his skin is normally mocha-colored, after a day spent in a darkened room with a controller in his hand, he comes home with a sickly pallor.'
SKIN DOESN'T WORK LIKE THAT. AT ALL EVER! Spending 6 hours in a room with a source of light and most of the rest of the day in daylight does not cause pale skin. Not that I've noticed.
'But, with other priorities like a new bike and sewing machine, no Wii got purchased. Plus, Cheetah Boy got a C on his report card,'
Maybe you should have got him that video game console, not having one clearly didn't raise his grade.
'On one horrible afternoon that scarred me for life, I even saw a kid walking out of the public library playing a Nintendo DS.'
OH GOD NO!, a kid in a library being quiet.... THINK OF THE CHILDREN. I hope she relises you can get books on those DS's plus DS GAMES require a lot of reading... pokemon requires a lot.
'We have family friends whose son has a DS he’s allowed to play only in the car. Often, when they come over, he pesters his mom over and over to go out to the car, because apparently there’s not enough fun to be had in our house without this boy and my son sitting in the car playing the DS.'
Did they both go to Nazi camp or have they just got the stupid gene?
'When do kids ever think these days? When do they ever have brains free from electronics long enough to ponder the universe? To think of things that might someday lead them to a cure for cancer?'
You seem you be forgetting one thing. VIDEO GAMES REQUIRE INTELLIGENCE! You know GTA you just listed heres a couple skills one needs for playing
-Team Building(online)
-Communication(online)
-Reading(You reada surprising amount of well written English in more relevant dialecs)
-Map Reading (yeah really)
-Basic mathematic appilites(With MMO's that's taken to the next level)
-Hand Eye co-ordination
-Route planning
-Choice making
-Recourse managment
-Logic problems
See intelligent though.
'If Sir Isaac Newton had been playing a DS, I’m sure he never would have noticed the apple falling from the tree, so he never would have formulated the theory of gravity.'
Well that was trully dreadful. You used a hypothetical situation to prove a point. If TV was invented would Isaac have noticed the apple? No. LET'S BAN TELEVISION.
Oh and BTW with the computer the thing that plays these video games and such the Nazi's might have one. So yeah.
'I was too weird for most of the other kids to play with, so I spent most of my time reading obsessively, which of course only made me more of a dweeb. The difference is, in all that reading, I was actually learning stuff about the world, in a way that kids today never will.'
One of these books was Mein Kampf and the others you burned? Look freedom is a good thing, a great thing. Video games cause harm only to those who will allready be harmed.
'I was also learning to think creatively, spell and build my vocabulary to the point that I was able to get a job as a professional writer, where people pay me to ride on fire engines, go on ride-alongs with cops and insult the makers of video games.'
YOU READ IN VIDEO GAMES! QUITE A LOT ACTUALLY! I don't suppose you use maps in these books, recourse management, communications and mathematics. So yeah games are better than books. You read tons in pokemon and most games and those are relevant dialecs. And let me tell you something because of video games I became interesed in books and comics like The devine comedy.
'My kids do play games, outdoors in the fresh air, where they’re building their muscles and hopefully a lifetime habit of fitness.'
And buidling some sort of fun machine? Look GIVE your children what they want and let them learn from their mistaes... we all do. Life is not about perfection but inperfection
'What are the kids who play “Grand Theft Auto” learning? How to be carjackers? How to be pursued by police?'
Yeah because in real life you press the 'x' button to break into a car /sarcasm
How to be pursued by police, why do you need to learn to do that. Seems easy enough, break the law. You never learn how to be pursued by police, you learn how to EVADE police.
Article-0 Gamers-1
Games is a viable form of media, which is still VERY young so don't expect great works in terms of story. How long did it take for the written language to evolve before anything great was written. Games have delt with a wide amount story points very respectfully, I'm not saying games are perfect story mediums hey have a lot to improve before they become respected. Look if you don't like it fine, but don't ban your children from it. How would you feel if your parents banned you from reading my little pony because of the heart of darkness.
Buy him a god damn game, sit down with him as he plays MW2 and talk to him about it. That's the best thing it really is. Don't hide him.
The Nazi's came to power not because they where adored, but rather ignored by many. By ignoring this medium you will never manage a thing he'll still play games the difference is how Britain compares to France.
Britain has long ignored drinking, France has allowed drinking from a young age. But which I country has the worst problem? Britain, ignorance is not bliss.