{"id":902,"date":"2014-10-11T14:29:22","date_gmt":"2014-10-11T14:29:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theindiestone.com\/binky\/?p=902"},"modified":"2014-10-11T15:04:38","modified_gmt":"2014-10-11T15:04:38","slug":"on-games-industry-ignorance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theindiestone.com\/binky\/2014\/10\/11\/on-games-industry-ignorance\/","title":{"rendered":"On Games Industry Ignorance"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I was a kid, you could pretty much ask me about any<\/em> game, any<\/em> developer, and I’d have had quite a lot to say on the matter. The number of games released was comparatively tiny and the number of people involved in production also comparatively tiny. On the C64, you could name a musician and any true gamer could pretty much rattle off a list of their work. Because you were so restricted by choice on these early platforms, you pretty much took anything you could get. You’d buy a game because Rob Hubbard, Tim Follin, Chris Hulsbeck, et al<\/em> did the music – balls to whether the game was any good.<\/p>\n

Given this dearth of choice, you were pretty much able to convince yourself something was great even if retrospectively it was a bit shit. I spent a lot of time swooning over Dragon Breed<\/em> on the C64 not because I particularly enjoyed side-scrolling shoot-em-ups, but because they did some incredibly fancypants stuff with the graphics – more sprites onscreen than seemed possible on the C64, rapidly alternating colours to produce impossible hues, giant boss characters. It was this general vibe of loving pretty much all games ever which led me to pursue a career in videogames.<\/p>\n

But the games industry kept growing. By the time I had graduated University and was looking to get my first games industry job, the games industry was already a bit of a monster. The PlayStation 2 had just been released so despite this ballooning, games – and particularly games graphics<\/em> – were starting to get a bit exciting. But chatting to co-workers, some of whom had been making games since the Spectrum days, it started to become clear quite how small a grasp anyone had on games as a whole. Nobody knew about everything, no-one even knew about most<\/em> stuff. These people had encyclopaedic knowledge about everything pre-1996 or so, but after that? Impossible, there’s just too much data and time is limited.<\/p>\n

\"GamesInterest\"<\/p>\n

Not to scale: Diagram on the left should be a microdot<\/em><\/p>\n

By May of this year, more games had been released on Steam than in the whole of 2013<\/a>. You can argue for tighter curation, but whether or not all these games should<\/em> be on Steam it is an indication of the vast number of games being made. Add to that console games. Then add mobile \/ tablet games. Then Facebook games… The ridiculousness becomes staggering. Nobody<\/em> can have a grasp of this behemoth any more apart from in a statistical sense.<\/p>\n

So the point is, nobody<\/em> is an authority on the games industry as a whole. Nobody<\/em> represents all game developers, or all gamers. No movement can be easily pigeonholed as about X, or Y. Nobody can sample a statistically insignificant set of games and draw broad industry-wide conclusions. All anyone<\/em> is representing is their own opinion regardless of how dressed up as ‘fact’ it’s presented, in the context of the tiny fraction of the games industry (or even indie industry) which they’re interested in and know anything about. There are a handful of well-known and vocal developers in an ocean<\/em> of people you’ve never heard of who’s opinion is unknown. Number of followers\/subscribers does not indicate righteousness, just popularity or contentiousness.<\/p>\n

This is my ignorance: 99.9999% of the games industry and games and I’m not an authority on anything<\/em>. I suspect everyone else, no matter who they are or what they’ve made, of similar general ignorance and I try to read and watch commentary and interviews with this in mind.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I was a kid, you could pretty much ask me about any game, any developer, and I’d have had quite a lot to say on the matter. The number of games released was comparatively tiny and the number of people involved in production also comparatively tiny. On the C64, you could name a musician…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-902","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-games","category-rants"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p326tq-ey","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theindiestone.com\/binky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/902","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theindiestone.com\/binky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theindiestone.com\/binky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theindiestone.com\/binky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theindiestone.com\/binky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=902"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"https:\/\/theindiestone.com\/binky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/902\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":925,"href":"https:\/\/theindiestone.com\/binky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/902\/revisions\/925"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theindiestone.com\/binky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=902"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theindiestone.com\/binky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=902"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theindiestone.com\/binky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=902"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}