Simon Moon @simon_moon@anarchism.space

my favorite way to make enemies: when told that my self esteem might be too low, reply with "maybe yours is too fucking high"

i pointed that out on the bird site and got a lot of likes from people who proceeded to tell me how right i was and how wrong outgroup was and how there needed to be more independent thinkers like me and their ingroup. it was actually kind of upsetting because i was talking about all of them.

the myooler report has totally fucked the bird site.

i keep seeing the left and the right claim of each other "this totally destroys their narrative and confirms ours, outgroup is desperate now, look how they're scrambling to justify their narrative"

neither side seems to think their narrative has been "destroyed" and lots of people are using the term "brainwashed" to mean "member of a competing cult"

i wasn't sure i was going to like it here but i do

im new here and i know not many people can see this but recommend me some people to follow if you're one of the lucky few right now most of my timeline is this bot that tweets about different bottles of nail polish and i mean that's cool but there's only so much of that i can care about

thank you

distressing to note that no matter how many times i have asked when appealing suspensions that Twitter still will not tell me "who is the snitch?"

Broke: i made a new Twitter account because i still haven't learned my lesson

Woke: i made a new Twitter account because they don't fucking tell me where i can and can't go

i got a little lost in my thoughts (sorry knew that was going to happen) but a lot of this has been asking around in my head lately and as i watch the industry I've always felt a certain guilt for being so passionate about disturb the passion/guilt balance in a seriously toxic way. the people doing this don't understand the damage they're doing.

they're fucking things up for everyone and making a killing doing it, and when the industry has to struggle back to its feet they'll already be gone.

it's approaching the point where people seem you the store and then try to sell you everything in it on top of that. oh and there's a game in there somewhere. we guess.

this wouldn't bother me if every conversation I've had about the future of games didn't involve some slippery Polo shirt bullshit about what the profit model could be.

SELL THE GAME. like, the whole game. it's still a pretty fuckin good profit model imo. if it's good enough people will want to buy more shit for it.

corporate greed is something I've learned to live with to a large degree in games because they can be insanely expensive to make, and big corporations (for better or worse) have a proven track record of putting up the dough.

also I've until recently been able to tell myself that people are getting exactly what they're paying for.

it's an inconvenient realization for people who work in games and many are simply in denial, especially if they want their work to count for more than just being a fancy shop that sells character skins. I'm one of these people. i think games still are and should be the product. more and more, our corporate masters do not see things this way.

i don't think this will last, it's a bubble that i believe will pop, ruining many careers in the process.

not all will deserve ruin.

so the game stops being the product and becomes the retail environment. maybe it's a retail environment that will become a game if you spend enough money but there will always be the registers up front, it never stops being the store, even if some party of it does become a game.

something i think it's incredibly important to point out before i go on: as i see it, the F2P model is designed to exploit the children of neglectful parents.

"you can't get the folks to buy you a new game? THIS ONE IS FREE! HOW CAN THEY SAY NO TO THAT? oh wait, you want to do that mission? that's $2. i bet they're wing to cough that up, it's less than a game, and i mean, you're already right here. look, your friends are queuing for it."

things are more complicated now. MMOs demonstrated that the game could be a vehicle for almost anything else you cared to sell. server access, digital trinkets, removal of some artificially imposed nuisance (e.g. buy an XP boosts so you can level up at a reasonable rate).

the vehicle's quality matters because it's what gets the customers in the room and keeps them there but it is no longer the product. once this realization was made you saw a lot of people stop selling games.

first thing i ask myself now when i see a new game is "what are they actually selling?" back in the day there were pretty much only two answers:

they are selling this very game and that's it

they are selling some movie on which this game is based

gonna be spamming random thoughts about the video game industry and my ambivalence regarding enormous corporate influence over the medium and it's creators and why i never cared before but am starting to now. it's gonna be a lot of TL;DR and idk who's even gonna find it interesting but it's weighing on my mind since i can't imagine myself being happy in any other industry.

the people who are good at making actionable plans at work are being slowly replaced by people who are instead good at appearing behind people's desks to drop undocumented tasks their laps that no one else knows about before vanishing to parts unknown so they can ignore all their emails i feel like it's a microcosmic reflection of what's happening to the games industry as a whole as it's starting to make me twitchy and anxious