There is an argument which runs like this: a short-sighted obsession with systems and process has left us without any kind of cultural or political horizon. We become ensnared by our own self-serving support structures while the foundations collapse beneath us, leaving us hanging. There is the overriding sense that something is terribly wrong, but we press on, eating through the nausea, because we cannot conceive of anything outside the current system – we cannot imagine better.

The prospect of real change is frightening and painful to those of us with comfortable lives, so we ask for sedative and anaesthetic, chased down by delightful fantasy.

If I don’t like how I’m feeling, I just press the button in the middle of the controller, transporting myself back to a gentle undulation of vector synthesis and calming cobalt, overlayed with a neat colourful grid of pleasurable options.

Just-World Beliefs

You could say that games are complicit in our infatuation with escapism; at times, they also channel our inveterate partisanship and aggression towards others. Leigh Alexander has argued that mainstream games in particular tend to obviate nuance, establishing clear and comfortable narratives of power, justice and truth which spill over into the ideology and rhetoric of their fanbase. Not only that, they are complicit in the maintenance of archaic power structures within society itself.

This may not just be conjecture: research demonstrates how values portrayed in fiction help to distort our conception of the world…

Take a study of television viewers by the Austrian psychologist Marcus Appel. Appel points out that, for a society to function properly, people have to believe in justice. They have to believe that there are rewards for doing right and punishments for doing wrong. And, indeed, people generally do believe that life punishes the vicious and rewards the virtuous. But one class of people appear to believe these things in particular: those who consume a lot of fiction. In Appel’s study, people who mainly watched drama and comedy on TV — as opposed to heavy viewers of news programs and documentaries — had substantially stronger “just-world” beliefs. Appel concludes that fiction, by constantly exposing us to the theme of poetic justice, may be partly responsible for the sense that the world is, on the whole, a just place. This is despite the fact, as Appel puts it, “that this is patently not the case.”

Jonathan Gottschall, Why Fiction is Good for You

When universal justice is viewed as the status quo, there is no requirement to show compassion for another person — after all, they have only got what they deserved.

The Money of Destruction

If the production of games does not have a positive cultural outcome, perhaps it’s still possible for game development itself to be fulfilling as a profession?

The problem is that those who wish to create games of any kind are compelled to operate within the “gaming culture”, an environment where discussing your work in anything other than anodyne literal bullet points is instantly cast as a malicious attempt to manipulate and dissemble in the service of financial gain, an unjust deviation from the formalised mode of product and consumer. The evil snake oil salesmen and their work then become fair game for anyone searching for a target.

Developers come to accept this behaviour as normal, primarily because it is the heat from the reaction they have instigated. This type of interaction arrives with such frequency that it eventually saturates to become noise. At that point it is either habituated and finally tuned out, or the entire system is rejected and creators are forced to move on to a different medium.

Here is a self-fulfilling prophecy: if you say “developers only care about money” frequently enough then it becomes true. You have created an atmosphere in which the only acceptable discourse takes place in the columns of an annual report.

The other side of this conversation is, of course: “Who cares what people are saying as long as it sells?”

It feels like indie dev culture, like the big indie dev culture is so market focused? With the #indiepocalypse articles and the steam sales chart math, it feels more like a tech cultre than an arts culture, more interested in optimizing a killer app than making some kind of artistic ground. In that sense, games criticism, at least the kind I write doesn’t really have any place in the industry market structure.

Zolani Stewart, in discussion for my post The Shock of the New

It is still possible to make a significant income from games, so perhaps the best response is to treat the whole thing as industrial production?

An entirely mercenary approach would make sense if the market for games were rational, but it isn’t – it’s hit-driven and entirely unpredictable. This is the financial equivalent of “Here Be Dragons”:

I don’t need to expatiate on discoverability: the challenges are self-evident.

If you’re making a game, you are competing against everything else in the world for attention, that depleted fossil fuel. This is inherently irrational behaviour and it does not make sense financially: it is a lottery; there is no good reason to take part in it.

There’s only two things developers can really do to boost their chances:

Be more newsworthy

Spend money on advertising

On the surface, this seems fine: developers want to make interesting games, and newsworthy means interesting, right?

As writer, media strategist and PR-stunt huckster Ryan Holiday writes in his eye-wateringly self-dramatising disquisition on media relations Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator, “the most powerful predictor of what spreads online is anger.” Reasonableness and complexity, he says, are out — you want to be negative but not too negative. Sadness is unviral: it results in low arousal and depressive inertia, so people don’t share it as much. Anger is king, but fear, excitement and laughter all play their part.

Max Clifford’s infamous PR strategy for GTA in the UK is a classic example of this philosophy in action, but countless other developers and publishers have subsequently attempted to leverage predictable sources of anger for attention.

There are undoubtedly other, less pernicious methods of raising awareness, but the core of the problem is that people need their valuable attention for more important things right now.

Our response as developers should be to consider our position, but instead it’s to escalate — it’s to wave day-glo dicks in people’s faces. If you don’t happen to have the stomach for this, you can pay for online advertising and entrust your distraction techniques to well-honed algorithms — this is hardly an improvement.

As our space becomes noisier by the week, we can expect an ever-more-unpleasant loudness war for the attention of customers.

You Cannot Be Serious

Let’s reverse course. Perhaps the way to redemption here is to ignore the culture of games and the way that they are marketed, put commercial concerns aside and focus solely on conveying a positive message?

Indeed, creators outside the mainstream often do this: they let their work speak for itself, perhaps with the hope of instigating change.

You might remember there was a time back in the noughties when it was easy to find articles about how games were going to change the world… It didn’t particularly happen. There are a lot of serious games, and there are even quite a lot of good, thought-provoking serious games that provoke useful insights about real issues. But it’s hard for a game to compete on engagement when a designer’s attention is diverted between crafting the experience and expressing an agenda. That was true when my generation were bought BBC microcomputers by optimistic parents so we could play educational games, and it’s true now.

Alexis Kennedy, The Importance of Games in Difficult Times

Sure, you might have a chance at a microscopic amount of influence, a twitch of the needle somewhere. But the psychological effects discussed in Appel’s research above required continuous exposure to an entire culture’s worth of values over a long period of time: to effect real change you would need to first challenge the entrenched values of the entire mainstream industry. The prospects don’t look good…

I thought that cheaper tools, a broader range of creator communities, more cultural diversity within the traditional “male power fantasy” environment, and a shift in priorities toward touchable, expressive, and humane types of works would be a net gain for an industry widely misunderstood. Most of all I dared, regularly, to suggest that better treatment of women, both as characters as well as employees and audience members, was one key way toward a more sophisticated and diverse future for the medium. Despite that reasonable belief, the industry model whereby wealthy white men peddle power fantasies that throttle everyone else’s needs out of consideration remains alive and well. In fact, we can probably expect it to grow, as interest in interactive entertainment bleeds out of the traditional “gaming” space and into other areas of technology such as virtual reality, augmented reality, and artificial intelligence.

Leigh Alexander, It’s Time For a New Kind of Power Fantasy

Shouting Into the Toilet

Direct social change through a singular work of art, or even a movement, has always struggled to push beyond the theoretical. What about simply “expressing something meaningful”?