Tuesday, August 6, 2013

The Talk of Magicians

today marks the 5th anniversary of the first release of Braid. i was going to write a eulogy of sorts, but it came at a bad time and i decided that Braid has already been picked apart so endlessly that i didn't feel a particular desire to contribute any more to it. then it occurred to me i already had an unpublished but article from early March of this year with some added edits i made today that delved into some of the issues i was planning on bringing up in the Braid post in a strange, roundabout way. it seemed oddly apt, and i don't quite know why this article never made it online anyway. so... without further ado, here you go:

(be warned, there are some spoilers for Corrypt!)

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The Talk Of Magicians




"If Corrypt had more-polished graphics and sound, and were a bit longer, 100X-1000X as many people would play it...and it would make a good living for the developer"
Braid developer Jon Blow tweeted. Other commercially-successful game devs followed suit: Hundreds developer Greg Wohlwend said in the same twitter conversation that he and Spelltower developer Zach Gage "agree(d) with jon" and that if Corrypt dev Michael Brough “worked on the visuals, the game would then be more accessible to outsiders". Blow, Wohlwend, and Gage then laid out advice for Brough on how to sell his game. Brough had for some reason set the original price on the app store at 1.00, which he changed to 2 dollars shortly after. "Part of it is building a name for yourself. these designs are good enough that you could build a base of people who would pay $10/$20 for whatever you do..." Blow said. Wohlwend agreed, and emphasized that by setting the price higher he'll "grow a following that will pay for (his) quality game design."

A few weeks prior, New Zealand-born, UK-based game developer Michael Brough posted on his blog re: his future prospects of full-time game development: "I expect to keep going for another year or two and then have to give up and get a real job". Indeed - according to his post, the only thing that brought Brough much money in 2012 was his game Vertex Despenser, which was a part of an Indie Royale Bundle that just happened to contain a pack of several titles from the commercially successful Serious Sam franchise in it. Still, 2012 was a productive year for Brough: he had four of his games in the app store: O, Glitch Tank, Zaga 33, and Corrypt. Shortly after making this post, his game Vesper.5 was nominated for a Nuovo award at this year's IGF. Brough's recent shout-outs for Corrypt from more high profile game devs like Blow, Canabalt creator Adam Atomic, and NYU Game Center director Frank Lantz (in an app store review) have also no doubt helped him get some more exposure since then. He even has been profiled recently in an issue of Wired.

But the value of this kind of social currency is becoming increasingly vague and hard to parse. A month after Brough's post, UK game developer Sophie Houlden, in a post reviewing her past few years as a full-time indie, wrote "I have enough money left to eat for a month, maybe two". Her situation is not particularly unique among indies. Brough's lack of app store success shows how difficult it can be to make any degree of living off selling one's games on distribution services. And Steam Greenlight, a supposed help for users to vote for lesser-known developers to get sold on the popular digital distribution service Steam, is not exactly what one might call a friendly venue for slightly offbeat developers like Brough or Houlden either. Putting aside the controversy surrounding the 100 dollar entry fee, one look at the list of Greenlit games and you'll see a very conservative cross-section of the "indie" community. Many even appear to be unfinished (On Greenlight, Houlden tweeted: "Greenlight is great, how else would unfinished games get a steam deal instead of hundreds of finished games!"). If it's much of a surprise to anyone that these are the games the Steam community would choose to put on the distribution service, they haven't been paying very much attention. But it does certainly dispel the oft-repeated cliche that the best or most interesting ideas eventually rise to the top.

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Walking into the world of a Michael Brough game feels like stepping inside of a machine that has existed for a very long time before you ever entered into it. His obsession with hyper-intricate backgrounds with interlocking networks of symbols, like these circuit board-style designs for his game Helix feel like occupying the nervous system of a living being - which makes no concessions to you, nor does it make any effort to translate its logic into human language. There's a constant tension between this alienness and your in-game character, of just being in the environment and then having to manipulate it to serve your own ends and progress in the game.

Brough's games are also particularly notable in the way they have no seeming desire to make concessions to players while still being somewhat approachable and "game-like" in terms of mechanics. He does all the visuals and sound in his games - and largely because of this consistency, across genres and styles they all feel like self-contained worlds. These worlds can be cryptic and unfriendly, often hostile to many players. The Wired article (somewhat bafflingly) describes them in its title as "ugly".




This "ugliness" is actually a highly-refined, organic style of Brough's that somehow manages to feel both coarse and delicate. Brough has been using this style across a majority of his games, but Corrypt addresses the possible intent behind the aesthetics by encoding strong environmental overtones into it. In Corrypt, your character awkwardly shuffles through and pushes a series of boxes and manipulates the environment to complete side quests and collect mushrooms and gems and keys. After your character pushes enough boxes to collect enough items, he has the power to spend them as currency to buy magic from a magician (which other NPCs in the game warn him to stay away from). Buying magic allows the player to completely alter the fabric of the environment, permanently destroying and warping it in all kinds of maddeningly unpredictable ways, in order to gain every last gem. This process enacts a lot of fear and anxiety in the player, especially as he or she moves further along, from seeing what her or his actions have wrought.



It's hard not to see the magic in the game as some sort of allegory on human beings' never-ending thirst for more resources, and the irreparable damage it enacts on the environment. It suggests, especially taken with his other works like Vesper.5, that environments are delicate spaces that need to be accepted on their own terms in order to really be understood at a deeper level.

These greater themes seem to be absent in the little critical writing that does exist about his games - they're not mentioned anywhere in the Wired article, nor in this detailed critical reading, which focuses solely on the mechanical aspects of his games. The strangeness and beauty of the environments become a marginalized backdrop to a game seen as only remarkable from a design perspective - something the game even seems to mock with its flat looking aesthetics and its big, square block pushing and its few mock-JRPG miniquests in the beginning.

Not only have Blow and other well-known devs failed to understand that these subtle aesthetic choices are actually an integral part of the experience of playing Corrypt - they've actually completely missed what the game is trying to communicate in the first place. The more I think about it, the more the gap in perspective and intentions between designers of "polished games" like Blow and more self-expressive, experimental types Brough seems to widen. Maybe this also explains Brough's seeming indifference about how he priced Corrypt in the app store.

Many commercially-focused indie devs might like to say that they intend to use their games to create a deep, thoughtful space through the design. But it's hard to skirt the reality that those devs are often just aiming to create smaller-scale, slightly off-beat versions of already commercially successful formulas. And when they aren't, the focus on polish and polish and on this somewhat impossible goal of reaching a mass audience - in a way that becomes oddly prescriptive and cynical and self-limiting about content, and erasing of the circumstances of those like Brough who maybe don't have the time or money or interest to endlessly "polish" one game. Like Blow et al aren't aware that making something which might not be accessible, or at least their conception of accessible, to a large audience could be anything but a lazy and self-defeating artistic choice in the end. Like they're almost offended that Brough refuses being their protege or following the same career path as them. The message to Brough in Blow's and others' tweets seems clear: either play by the rules or don't expect to make any sort of living off what you're doing.

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Still, Brough is lucky. His struggles reaching a wider audience were just recently profiled in more detail in the previously mentioned Wired article. It remains to be seen whether this exposure will let him keep making games full-time - but in private conversation, he told me "I want to be clear... I don't want to be using the image of poverty to get attention" and that him and his wife are comfortable for now. He also acknowledges his privilege in a recent blog post: "If I'm any good at what I'm doing now, it's only through having had the chance to devote an incredible amount of time to it. I'm fortunate. Being able to put years of unpaid full-time work into something before seeing anything back from it is an incredible privilege."

If we know anything about games, we know that the people who make and sell games will need to find ways to make their games resonate with larger audiences outside of "gamers"  if they want a higher degree of cultural penetration. What this might mean, though, no one can really say. Successful indies are, after all, a privileged minority. I strongly suspect that a small percentage of games in the App Store (things like Spelltower, Hundreds, or Canabalt by previously-mentioned devs) make a vast majority of the money, but without anything concrete to prove it, it's still not a particularly rewarding path for most developers to take (to put it lightly). "Indie games" as we know them are barely now five years old, but the idea of a freak, Canabalt-type success now seems all but impossible now, let alone a Minecraft-level one. But the narrative that gets endlessly picked apart and reiterated and grossly fetishized by the press and by vulture-like indie devs is the one of the commercial success stories like Minecraft or Braid or Super Meat Boy - even though Sophie Houlden's (or thousands of less well-known developers') experiences are much more typical.

To Blow or Wohlwend, a talented designer accepting that his or her artistic choices aren't going to make she or he a lot of money might sound like bad a move. But then, the idea that any self-identifying artist finds this to be a not sane or valid perspective to have about his or her art just shows how insane and money-fueled the current climate of videogames, indie or not, is.

It shouldn't be so revolutionary to suggest that the world of a Michael Brough game might be giving players something meaningful - not just mechanically, but aesthetically, that commercially-focused devs like Blow or Wohlwend's games are not. In a world where a majority of indie games aren't known at all outside a relatively small group of insiders, his search for depth, both mechanical and aesthetic, certainly shows a much greater respect towards the works of very un-techie factions of the visual art and music world than his aesthetic's detractors' do.

The excitement that veils something much more sinister - the odd obsession with an unobtainable systemic perfection, often fueled by unrelated emotional pain or longing fostered by society - the thirst for money masked in frenzied experiments to remodel human behavior - an utter cluelessness and indifference to different modes of values or anything and anyone not in the room. This is the language of tech culture of the early 21st century, and the language implicitly embraced by Braid (even if it tries and fails to be critical of this from within). It's a language that just serves as another sad mirror, another small subset of what we are enacting on the earth and all the pain it causes - social, spiritual, environmental. It's a language that Corrypt, in all its seemingly insubstantial, clunky, box-pushing glory, is acutely aware of. It's a language that Corrypt is very critical of in both its aesthetics and design, in a way that Braid misses the boat on.

Conventional wisdom says that in the current market for indie/mobile/social games, players will eventually reach a point when they become so turned off by the absolute oversaturation of  disposable mass-market dross flooding distribution services. Talk is cheap, and talk, in the end, usually fails to account for people's changing needs and values. Then, we can hope, they'll start to actively seek out things which are more mechanically and aesthetically rich. But this could also be false optimism. Maybe the culture of games is so deeply channeled towards the most surface, dumbed-down communication in that the only hope for the future is the freaks coming in from the outside and trying create an entirely new model. Thankfully, Michael Brough is happy to oblige.

Whatever happens, let's pray to God the shovelware market suffocates itself sooner than later - because right now, Brough's games are some the few that offer any sort of real, untainted route out of the unending waves of shallow, manipulative entertainment. Maybe we'll even reach a point in the future where all the highly calculated programmers and businessmen with seemingly unending confidence and resources who make games - or, as Corrypt would call them: magicians, come face to face with a reality they can't undo anymore.



15 comments:

  1. Very nicely written, and it's great to see praise for Michael's excellent work. I've always found it depressing that it's never the game part of games that gets praised - it's the art or the sound or the story. They can support a game of course, but they are not the game itself. Michael Brough's works are always stunningly beautiful as games.

    You should maybe check out more from the roguelike scene if you're interested in design over form. Lots of interesting stuff happening there :)

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  2. re pricing: the first thing i released on ios was Glitch Tank (which is a longer & better game than Corrypt), i arbitrarily priced it at $2, and nobody bought it (not literally nobody but near enough, it was something like 100 sales in four months, which is just absurd for that game). and the response i got from some more financially successful game developers was "well what do you expect, should have been a dollar". i am now pretty certain that this was awful advice, jerks, and so i agree with that part of what Blow etc. were saying. but at the time i was still trying it out, i figured i make enough games that it didn't hurt to experiment. going to ask for more next time.

    what you make both reflects who you are and determines who you are: a warning for those who would transform themselves to serve the market

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    1. I get into a lot of arguments with people over the price war. Like, "hey, lower prices means HUGE SALES because eventually you hit a point where people will buy literally anything regardless of whether or not they give a shit about it."

      But, like, for people whose sales are honestly not primarily limited by the asking price—i.e. anybody with an unusual style or relatively poor access to "eyeballs"—this is just lost money. If you could sell on average 100 copies of something a month for $20 a copy, you could probably live! Not well, but you could make it work. You, and most people, don't see the benefits of that market scaling, though, and now you're stuck dealing with lower expected price points.

      It fucking blows me away that LITERALLY the first successful indies of the post-shareware generation poisoned the entire market by tanking prices way below what anyone else could compete with through deep sales and bundle discounts, just trying to squeeze that last drop of money so they'd get enough to not have to work again for 51 years instead of just 50 years.

      Thanks, jerks. :(

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    2. I tweeted this to Michael Brough when I first found out about Corrypt. I wanted him to charge for a PC version. Just buzz that this game from an unknown (to me) developer was an interesting puzzler would have been enough to get me to pay $5 on PC. Now that I've played his game I will easily pay any reasonable amount for his next game (depending on scale). I wouldn't expect to pay less than $10 and certainly wouldn't question $20 for this size game, because now I'm a Michael Brough fan. I believe that is part of what Jon Blow meant by building an audience and sometimes that means having your first thing be cheaper.

      I also think that indies overvalue the mobile market. Everyone has a computer. Some people have smartphones and a smaller amount of people feel like playing games on them and an even _smaller_ amount are willing/able to pay for those games. For a game like Corrypt that isn't seriously enhanced by the mobile nature of the iPhone, it makes more sense to target your audience availability to "roughly anyone," which translates to "people with computers and money." You can release on iPhone too, but I feel like that devalues the game like JB sort of implied (people are only willing to pay so much for an iPhone game. $3 is a lot on iPhone, $5 is practically free on PC).

      As for the graphics and sound, I think Corrypt is already perfect. And in this way, I believe Blow to be wrong, both theoretically and in practice. Braid was an amazing game with beautiful art and sound, and it's part of what introduced me to the world of indie games. However, Jon Blow has spent an incredible amount of time on The Witness, and every blog post I see refers to graphics. I trust him to deliver an amazing experience, but I can't help feeling like he's wasting his time on too much art because he believes that will sell the game. Minecraft graphics are simple and yet still beautifully deliver the mechanics (and made a ton of money). Why spend so much time on advanced foliage graphics? I could be wrong so I'll let the game be the answer.

      But Corrypt is perfect. It's beautiful, detailed, and evokes the right emotion; but it's also the appropriate scale for an indie to make and _actually release_ himself. It's fine to take your time creating something great, but people playing your game is the true value of the art.

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  3. It seems like my reply is too long for your character count, so I'm going to post this as 2 comments. Here goes!

    1/2 -

    I have to admit i am a little bit surprised to name-dropped here.
    I think it's possible that you are misreading the intentions of the comments greg and I offered, and perhaps jon's as well, although I am nowhere near familiar enough with him to really back that up.

    I love corrypt, and I honestly don't think Michael should change anything about it. I'd guess that Greg agrees. I agree that if Michael changed the graphics on corrypt and had a better business model (whatever that means) he'd probably make more money, but that doesn't mean he should go ahead and do that. I have my share of failed-to-make-money-because-of-aesthetic-choices-i-made games that I'm ultra proud of too (Bit Pilot would be one of them). I also have a horde of new media art and sculptural work that never makes any money and yet is somewhat respected and has shown.

    I promise I'm the last person to ever preach to someone about how they should be making money and bending over to the mass market.

    I do though feel that sustainability is important in life, and that no matter how you choose to be an artist there are affordances that you have to put up with. If you decide to forgo money entirely and instead opt to marry rich you're indebted to your partner, if you go for grants you're indebted to the government, if you get a sponsor you're indebted to them. If you get a side-job you have to spend your time doing that, and if you try to figure out how to expand your audience to a sustainable size you're indebted to them. If you make no money, you're indebted to the government. There's no true freedom in opportunity to make art, and there's no way to disentangle our output from money and viability. Money is a huge component of our lives and even if we could remove it from our art entirely our experience would probably seem extremely foreign to most of the world who has to deal with it.

    I think part of being an artist for a living is coming to terms with what it means to do something 'for a living'. To really do this means coming to terms with money and what it takes to be free to express myself the way I want to. That meant for years working to figure out where my interests converged with a mainstream public. I put out a lot of games that were about shapes and colors and simplicity that leads to depth. Every game I've ever made has been a personal exploration to find something beautiful or fascinating and then figure out how to show it to others to engage their curiosity and give us something to talk about. And those years were definitely frustrating. I remember lamenting about how unfair it was that I was making games that people loved but yet I couldn't make money to survive. And lots of people, many of the people that tell Michael that he'll be fine, told me that I would be fine, that eventually I would make something that worked… And I did, SpellTower was a staggering success for me.

    But the lesson I learned was subtle and I guess it doesn't translate clearly on the short-intonationless-twitter that we all rely on. SpellTower didn't do well because I crumbled to the pressures of Mainstream. It did well because I got better at communicating what I love to an audience that shares my interests. When people told me I would make money and would be successful I don't think they were telling me that just because they thought my work was good. I think they told me that because they could see that I was driven to connect with people in that way. (I'm not saying I have this ability or not, or it's noble or not, its just how it is, and how I think people were thinking of me). They saw that I wanted to be able to tell thousands of people about the things that I was interested in, not just a few hundred.

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    1. 2/2 - (edited because I accidentally double posted a paragraph. whoops!)

      And learning how to connect with people doesn't mean being obsessed with fame or being ultra rich, it means being realistic about how the world works and finding a way that fits with the way you work.

      And I think, from what i've read that Michael has written, that he is interested in this as well. I suspect strongly that he wants his beautiful work to reach a wide audience. Whenever I've suggested "business strategies" to him or other indies, its not a takedown of his work, nor is it a prescribed guarantee of success (if it was that easy to get rich selling your stuff for 1$ everyone would be rich). What I suggest is the methods of interrogating your own work that worked for me. All the things I thought about to connect the work I was making to the people who I thought would be interested in it.

      The hardest thing in the world is to find success without sacrificing your principles, so go in knowing it'll be painful, but thats what makes it so special, thats why so few people find it — it's a risky thing to attempt. But like all risky things, the trick is working on it: talking about success, thinking about how other people found it, thinking about what you care about and how that meshes up with how the world operates. The only way that we can make this hill less steep is by working together, and learning from each-other, even from the people you don't agree with. Business strategies are like game mechanics in that if you clone them you get a shitty version that doesn't really work, but if you understand them you can shape them however you want: famous, recluse, rich, sustainable, fans, culture, whatever.

      Judging by his writing I'm pretty sure that Michael, like many of us, wants to have more people engage with his work, and he'd also like it to be a little more sustainable, theres nothing twisted or wrong about that.

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    2. Zach, your comments here (and some of Jon Blow's on Twitter) continue to push a really dangerous idea of success, where it's the inevitable result of good, hard work.

      For example, you say "if you understand them you can shape them however you want: famous, recluse, rich", as if once you understand them, being rich is merely choice. Or the way you're so certain everything will "be fine." Similarly, Blow's described his advice as "ways not to be poor" and said the advice "consequently [makes] hundreds of thousands of (currency)". But it's very easy to find older and longer-working game designers making as brilliant games where "the way the world works" is so stacked against them and their voice they will never find success without first changing the world.

      Your statements, and Blow's, are not probabilistic or contingent. You are offering them with the blind certainty of someone who has made a lot of money. But that outcome is not inevitable, no matter how good the work is. And some creators are necessarily doing work so far out of the band of what could be commercially successful there's literally no way to get rich from it, no matter how much they "connect with people."

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  4. Well written and thought-provoking stuff. Corrypt definitely exploded my brain a little bit in that way only games can. And I agree that more polish isn't always a positive thing—I can think of some of my favorite albums whose superficial "flaws" are part of their appeal.

    But I take a little bit of offense at your sweeping generalizations about "highly calculated programmers" and the "excitement that veils something much more sinister - the odd obsession with an unobtainable systemic perfection, often fueled by unrelated emotional pain or longing fostered by society."

    Calling Blow's reach for whatever platonic-ideals are floating around his head "sinister" and "odd" seems unnecessarily harsh. Yes, independent game creators may be dominated by white male programmers. But can we welcome Brough's unpolished (indiepunk?) aesthetic without using value judgements about what essentially boils down to neurodiversity? I'm just asking.

    Sounding the alarm that we shouldn't let some ill-defined "tech culture" infect our precious indie scene with a sometimes slightly aspie take on game design is an oddly exclusionary move for someone attempting to defend a minority position like Brough's...

    I think they were trying to help :p And artists do need to make more money. But talking about Corrypt can only help artists with different takes be more successful, so I do hope you keep on doing it.

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    1. "Calling Blow's reach for whatever platonic-ideals are floating around his head "sinister" and "odd" seems unnecessarily harsh."

      At the same time, I think the core message of Braid is that this kind of search for Platonic ideals easily - maybe even necessarily - becomes sinister and odd. And I think this is what Liz is alluding to when she says Braid "tries and fails to be critical of this from within". That specific crit of Braid appears to have been ignored by most people reading / commenting, though.

      I also think if you don't notice the (very-well-defined and straight up sociopathic, not "aspie" (ugh)) "tech culture" taking over all mainstream discourse in incredibly disgusting ways, you're probably just not looking very hard.

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    2. I live in San Francisco, so I'm reminded daily of gross examples of tech culture's overreach—looming company buses with tinted windows shuttling people making $150K a year to create things of questionable value between gentrified neighborhoods. A general slavish worship of the free market. A population of mostly straight white males where the bell curve's tails are VERY distant. This isn't mainstream America, obviously, though. I'd love to hear your thoughts specifically about tech culture and mainstream discourse.

      I was just complaining that some of Liz's language felt a bit antagonistic towards programmers. And I don't think Braid is "shallow, manipulative entertainment" for having spent a year or two in polish mode.

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    3. The point is, I think programmers can handle a little antagonism. SV-style practices are America's do-no-wrong golden boy right now. Even though plenty of that comes from mediocre or non-programmers who can throw around the right buzzwords, every programmer and IT worker in the Western world right now basks at least a little in that glow. Even as far away as I am today in Berlin, I see signs of the same bullshit startup culture forming. I say this as a programmer, who has worked inside and outside of the Bay Area. Programming will not save the world, and programmers and those who manage them need absolutely constant reminders of that right now.

      I don't want to speak for Liz, but I don't think she called Braid "shallow, manipulative entertainment" (viz, one game can't be "waves"). But the attitude its production embodies, which is the same attitude Gage and Blow are pushing, is also the attitude that creates and justifies that wave. See Blaine Allen Brown's comment about The Witness above, for example - whether it's because of marketability or a "purely artistic" obsession with an unattainable perfection, Blow's comments about that game show him falling into bullshit of the same genus, if not the same exact form, as today's AAA titles. (And really, I don't think the two reasons are very different.)

      The challenge needs to be to the root ideas about marketability and production and art under capitalism, not about how to change games to thrive within their existing constraints. Most of the games I consider most important - dys4ia, as a common example - simply cannot. There is no way to "tweak the graphics" to make a game about HRT commercially acceptable. Pointing out that Corrypt can be "just barely" changed to find that level of commercial acceptance, and say "well that's not *so* bad", is also to show a willingness to throw brilliant games that can't do that under the bus.

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    4. re: dys4ia et al's inherit "unmarketability" and how we should see that as a strength instead of a weakness. yes yes yes. that seems like the real discussion worth having here and I agree with you 100%.

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  5. As a massive fan of Michael Brough I'd like to give my underpriced 2c. For me, as an enthusiast amateur game designer, one injustice for which I can make a palpable difference is the fact that people like Michael Brough and Anna Anthropy are not in the 'fuck you' money category of wealth from their games and insights into game design. It is heart wrenching to see @auntiepixelante tweets that involve trying to make the rent every month. A large part of this tragedy is that the production and sale process of games is really good at anointing the new hotness every couple of weeks which at the moment largely plays on people's nostalgia (Gunpoint, Rogue Legacy), and then is terrible at turning outsider art into money if you don't hit the jackpot. (I'm ignoring Kickstarter for the moment because with a very few exceptions (FTL) it has yet to prove it is capable of getting people to actually make games.)

    Zach talks about alternative revenue streams like grants, sponsorship and so on; but these don't exist for games in the scale and spectrum that can even support a few stellar talents in a way that lets them continue to work unfettered by worrying about basic income.

    I'm also wary about Zach's statement about connecting to people. With apologies to Michael Brough for using Corrypt as an example, this game simply wouldn't work if the block pulling puzzles at the start weren't hard enough to make it a real accomplishment to get to the second half of the game. But they're hard enough that about half the reviewers (as opposed to critics) writing about this game clearly haven't made it beyond the block pulling stage of the game.

    There are games worth making which can only be played with a minimal level of ludic literacy which means that they won't connect with a wider audience. I jokingly tweeted asking 'Is Michael Brough gaming's Velvet Underground' to try to capture the fact that in many ways he is (unintentionally) a game designer's game designer and it is entirely (and depressingly) possible his corpus of work will never capture the imagination of enough people outside of that field.

    And Kevin, no offense, but I hope Michael Brough and Anna Anthropy reject 'our precious indie scene' and everything that statement stands for.

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  6. I really enjoyed this, the post and the conversation. Thank you.

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