jake
16d ago
The loss in quality in video games must also be mentioned. I don't know enough about the field to understand how improving technology has changed it; I assume as engines and graphics continue to improve, the demands for their effective functioning also rise, so studios, to a point, need to hire more people than teams of the past. At the same time the lovely little LOZ-riff indie title Tunic was mostly done by 1 guy, and while to modern standards for graphics and length it's unremarkable I do think its brilliance, and of course the other 1-guy masterclass of Stardew Valley reveal the core problem in the gaming industry: too many people.
Halo 3 to the day is one of the most technically impressive games ever made and compared with modern studios it was a skeleton crew of some dozens of staff. The campaign, though quite brief compared to CE and 2, is memorable, has excellent setpieces, and still holds up (just played through it again.) After the campaign, their attention was not spared when it came to the multiplayer. First was a robust replay system, it wasn't the first replay system, but it was fantastically done, I filled my 360 hard drive with noscope clips I was able to pull via downloading the replay at the end of a match, then cutting the segment from the replayed game, often recording at additional angles for pierce-through-multikills or sniper ricochet shots. Then there was the excellent map editor, allowing significant customization of what weapons and vehicles spawned on maps, where players spawned on maps, and the gameplay rules for those maps. Where Zombies had been a popular custom game mode in Halo 2, they gave it full support in the Halo 3 mode of infection and variants of maps designed to have fortified positions from which to mow down the endlessly-respawning zed team. The real meat of these were basically gone at the launch of Halo 4 despite it also being on the 360 and "despite" them having significantly more employees. Again I don't know the field, but I know enough to know about Brook's Law. What are all those extra hires really doing?
Overproduction of managers/elite is a known thing, I'm sure someone else has made the observation of this really seeming to be a problem in everything, overproduction of ostensibly qualified workers for every sector. Video games went from very niche to an industry where single companies could make a billion dollars per month, it's no wonder so many people started graduating after an education pipeline meant to get them in the industry, in whatever specialty. People who didn't really want to work on video games, but think it's something they could do because they like video games, or people who didn't think much of their options. A lot of them being "writers" who would prefer to be authors or working in Hollywood, but while they don't have the chops to do any of that, they have a degree and they know someone in the industry or especially they fill the right checkboxes, and they're hired in and their incompetence makes it into the game, either in the writing or downstream of their slow and low-quality asset/programmatic work on the game.
All that said, my GOAT stack is the probably-normiecore of Cyberpunk 2077, Baldur's Gate 3, and Red Dead 2. It's a good time to be playing games, industry struggles ignored.
tl;dr: IMVHO, because of the size of the industry, too many people resort into working in video games rather than the earlier days of the field being mostly obsessive nerds powerfully driven to create
Also, AI is coming for video games just like it's coming for Hollywood. Bug testing and QA may never go away, but in our lives we will soon enough see a wide field of auteurs like Eric Barone and Andrew Shouldice, except they'll be putting out titles on the level of Deus Ex and Halo.
jake
16d ago
When I saw the second Dr. Strange movie and Benadryl's character was invited or spoke of the coming wedding of his former love interest played by Rachel McAdams I said to myself "He's gonna be black." He was. When I opened Helldivers for the first time and the cinematic played I didn't know the camera was going to shift to the spokesman's family, but if I did I would have correctly guessed his wife would be black. When the only information I had about the Fallout show was a white woman lead I knew she'd have a black love interest (if she wasn't gay). If I see a mom-coded woman in a commercial the expectation most congruent with reality is if there is a person also in the commercial coded as her partner they will not be white, and this is a pattern so frequent my normie Fox News father and even my normie-leftie brother have separately remarked to me about how all the media they consume, primarily sports so mostly advertising, features interracial couples, most commonly white-woman-black-man.
The Western institutional left is abundantly clear about their desire, intent and efforts to reduce and ideally ultimately eliminate white ethnicities. It is the most perfect case of denying out of one corner of their mouth and bragging out the other, they will not break stride as they say "It isn't happening, racist. It's great that it's happening." That intent is attempting to be realized in casting for shows and films and advertising. The interracial pairing is not "novel" but remarking on it being a thing that has happened is no response. Nobody's saying this has never happened before, what they're pointing out is the obvious politics behind the sudden preponderance in all media of one of the least common pairings in the real world.
Casting a woman to lead a television adaptation of a media franchise primarily consumed by men is a separate expression of the same thing. They are not attempting to meet the expectations and wants of their audience, they are attempting to be proscriptive, views and profits be damned.
Probably generally fair but as Fred Brooks wrote the Mythical Man-Month in 1975 it seems appropriate in talking about overstaffing issues in software projects nearly 50 years later.
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