{"id":4431,"date":"2022-12-29T23:17:36","date_gmt":"2022-12-29T23:17:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/?p=4431"},"modified":"2022-12-29T23:17:36","modified_gmt":"2022-12-29T23:17:36","slug":"games","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/2022\/12\/games\/","title":{"rendered":"Games"},"content":{"rendered":"

I played Elden Ring on a PS5 this year. I played some Noita on my laptop. And then I stopped caring completely.<\/p>\n

Too many things are not right in games.<\/p>\n

Games are labor<\/h5>\n

Maybe you don\u2019t work enough in your life but I do and I don\u2019t want to do it again \u201cfor fun\u201d. Fuck that. I don\u2019t want to gather shit, I don\u2019t want to level up, I don\u2019t want to go there do that, go back there, being told what to do, go there collect that. Enough of this. The wandering in digital worlds sure, I\u2019ve done that for decades. I\u2019m wandering in books and cult movies these days.<\/p>\n

The business model of games has lost its mind<\/h5>\n

Everything is about crafting abuse that can\u2019t be seen. It is lucrative as hell, but the peer-pressure induced culture destined to make you buy more and more and more, and bet more and more and more is not right. And never will. I know, it\u2019s everywhere now. It kind of got really efficient and scalable thanks to games. Remember how cute gamification looked in 2010 and now you can\u2019t go grab a taco without an app, a leaderboard and some utterly meaningless \u201cquest\u201d to go after to collect \u201cpoints\u201d? It\u2019s horrendously dehumanizing.<\/p>\n

Game developers<\/h5>\n

Seeing many, many game developers that I respected and trusted come out as manipulators and abusive folks in the past few years, has been sobering. I\u2019ve also had the most unprofessional interviews ever with game studios, by far. Again, really sobering.<\/p>\n

The graphic treadmill<\/h5>\n

Today we have games in Real Time Ray Tracing in 4K with 1995 pathfinding<\/a>. It is so jarring. Insanely realistic lighting with game states that we had when the PS2 was hot, is nonsense. It feels like nothing progressed, really. Shaders better than ever simulating clothes, hair, flames, wind, shadows all over the screen but the NPCs still can\u2019t hear me drop from 30 feet right behind them. It\u2019s nonsense.<\/p>\n

The graphic treadmill is insanity and a 13 year old boy thirst trap.<\/p>\n

The aimlessness of game design<\/h5>\n

The discipline is way too often about \u201cme too, I can make a [trendy game design based off 90s nostalgia]\u201d<\/em>. Very few explorations. Insanely low progress in themes and worlds. For a profession that combines all other entertainment it\u2019s quite amazing how generic games feel, consistently.<\/p>\n

I understand! Making games and<\/em> making a living off of games is extremely hard so in any design decision you tend to go for the most sound and secure approach: a first person shooter with zombies, for instance.<\/p>\n

The issue is that game design has been doing this for twenty years on a loop, now. That\u2019s half of video games\u2019 existence. That\u2019s a problem.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

So yeah, time for me to go on a sabbatical about this entire thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I played Elden Ring on a PS5 this year. I played some Noita on my laptop. And then I stopped caring completely. Too many things are not right in games. Games are labor Maybe you don\u2019t work enough in your life but I do and I don\u2019t want to do it again \u201cfor fun\u201d. Fuck […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4431"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4431"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4431\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4432,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4431\/revisions\/4432"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4431"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4431"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4431"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}