Yellow Paint, Layoffs & The Gentrification of Games | Dancing on the Walled Garden

I’ve got a story to tell you. It’s about a classic game, but not in the way you might think. See, I was born in 1997, so when I talk about having played Ocarina of Time as a kid, you gotta have the proper context. We had that special GameCube Collector’s Edition, released years later. My first Zelda game was Wind Waker, so I was travelling backwards in that game-design timeline. So, we’re kids playing OOT going through the infamous Water Temple, confusing and difficult; my sister was consulting

a walkthrough whenever we got truly lost. A benefit of having played the game years on. So I’m using the Iron Boots to drop down, down into the drenched depths, but then as I snap the camera around a corridor I notice… this. This open sea, this color-changing void in the middle of nowhere. Eye-catching pinks and greens meant to be ignored, since it’s just the game’s out-of-bounds area. And do you wanna know what I thought? ‘I bet I could get over there.’ (static) Cause, when I was that age, I di

dn’t think critically about game design. I couldn’t differentiate what a game was trying to show me and what I was just incidentally caught up on. I… thought I could swim around outside of the temple! I spent a solid 30 minutes, much to Marina’s dismay, looking for some kind of door or passage, some mechanism of the game to escape its bounds. And… I never did find it, but what I did find was a passion for getting out the map. (music) If video games, media in general, is asking us as an audience

to suspend our disbelief, to step outside of ourselves and be immersed in the show- then what happens if something goes wrong? When it does? You’ve heard the phrase ‘the show must go on’, but some mediums quite literally do. The software that makes up a video game is liable to keep running even if you escape its projected walls. Jumping out of bounds to places where if you’re lucky, there’s a secret level. Or a cute little easter egg. More likely, however, forcing your way out of a play area rew

ards you with disappearing textures and half-rendered rooftops. And yet, as far as the game is concerned, you’re still 'playing' it, you’re still in the confines of its code. Though you’re risking a crash. A program behaving unpredictably isn’t comparable to, say... a play in which an audience member jumps onto the stage claiming they’re Godot and have finally arrived! They’ll shut down the play. But a video game will keep running until the player hits some kind of invisible trigger, a clip or f

lag in the programming sense that instantly kills the player and respawns them, or maybe even advances them to the next level as a failsafe. If the player can sneak their way around these points of security, though, then the out-of-bounds are theirs for the playing, until they get caught or get bored or shut it down. All of these options, however, are decisions made by humans. Developers accounting for potential problem areas where players could get stuck, or players choosing to reengage with th

e game’s intended fiction. Uniquely, however, the players can move beyond the scope of what the developers deemed possible, move in and out of the game’s fiction as they see fit. Discover things that QA testers... probably noticed, and were ignored about. So long as the controls are still working a player can find their own kind of presence in the world. The mechanisms of movement still function, it’s the world they’re moving in that’s broken. And while this isn’t a gameplay mechanic in most agr

eed upon senses, it is, nevertheless… gameplay. There’s no moderator there to stop them from calling it that- any systems in place to prevent misbehavior are hollow threats once the player is outside of the game’s rules. Unlike a movie which stops, a play which is called off, the video game continues to operate under prior pretense, its control scheme and UI and music, as the player steps into their own, decided upon game. Hopscotch in hollow blocks. A new playground. Let’s draw a circle. It can

be hard to make it symmetrical, but let’s just try to make it at all, yeah? Inside this circle, are all of the things that make a game… immersive. Where emotions for characters we know are fiction can still bring real tears. Inside this circle, we all agree to certain rules. Ephemeral rules as to allow us to partake in play with limitations unlike reality. You need to run around these plates, but only after hitting the ball with a stick in midair, and nobody in the stands gets to help. The prom

ise of a murderer, a werewolf, confined to paper cards that still let betrayal sting. Real terrain and the scale of combat with plastic guns that fire foam darts. Getting tagged means you’re out, but it’s not the dart that enforces the rule. It’s the people. In this space is play. This entire concept could be called the ‘Magic Circle’, but, it doesn’t have to be. Confining ourselves to a single concept would be alienating. While Johan Huizinga’s 'Homo Ludens' is the pointed source of this concep

t’s name, as writer Hector Rodiguez aptly points out- Huizinga’s application of the magic circle is a bit... prescriptive, rather than descriptive. Treated as though the social aspects are, themselves, somewhat innate to life with high intelligence. I’d argue it’s a little more freeform than that. For more on this, you can read the article, or pick up Jesper Juul’s 'Half-Real', a book all about this concept I only learned about AFTER RECORDING THIS VIDE- Maybe you know this feeling, these passiv

ely agreed upon rules, as something like ‘suspension of disbelief’, or I guess even ‘committing to the bit’? The actions all the participants agree to, societal and structural, to participate in something that reality does not provide by default. Whatever this nebulous feeling is called, it’s real, you can capture it. You can even record it! A Let’s Play of a story driven game, containing all of the player’s emotions and decisions. Livestreams in which the chat is just as engaged despite not hav

ing control. The people watching at home; they’re a little further away from the action, but all the same, they’re still part of the game. Part of our memories, our love of games. The audience isn’t playing by the same rules as the players, but they are playing by rules. This circle, magic or otherwise, ends naturally when the game concludes. It is only culled preemptively by extenuating circumstances. For example, and for our purposes, when a player’s actions are so interruptive as to make the

intended game impossible. …but people cheat at games and get away with it, don’t they? Enhancing their performance or automating their aim. High scores get faked, fans invent false rumors of secrets that persist today. These people are still players, though ones who are deferential to a detrimental definition of ‘play’. Ruining it for everyone else. Audience members can do this too. Ever heard of stream-sniping? Or watch a fan run onto the field during a ballgame? They’re all breaking the rules,

but not their own fun. Not unless they suffer consequences. (footsteps in grass, ambient city sounds) What is it about defying authority that’s so alluring? Why is loitering somewhere you’re not technically “allowed” more appealing to some than designated occupation spaces? See- I’d argue, once you pass that first threshold of criminality, trespassing, you’re already outside of the law. Why not do some other fun shit while you’re there? That’s why as kids we’d smoke cigarettes on the roof of th

e abandoned convenience store- if we were caught we were caught, the only punishment we could get was losing further autonomy; and thus there we were most free. (echoey footstep) So obviously, life at large is more complicated than that. Plenty of laws exist for great reason, were somebody to defy literally all rules for the sake of it, *ugh*- there’s a road one could go down there that winds up deep in Libertarian county, so let’s just remember restraint is key. We’re talking about games here.

When software is creating its own limitations, a video game enforcing its own rules, who exactly is ensuring compliance other than the player and the game’s own expectations? If you were to find somewhere a developer forgot, just the right corner or wall or prop, you could exit this space, into the void of the unintended. Walk on the fine line between playing and cheating. And if you’re careful, the circle remains unbroken. The program will keep running with the assumption that you’re playing al

ong. Then, as you want, you can walk back into the true playspace, pick up where in the game’s plot you left off- or somewhere you’d prefer to be let off. The circle only shatters when the game is shut down otherwise softlocks, but in doing so there are no longer bounds to be outside of. Consequence free. Know that I’m not arguing in order to make games out of games you first must literally get outside of their maps. The bulk of games don’t feature movement in a way that allows for this specific

kind of escapism. It’s just my favourite example. It’s a metaphor, you following? Allow me to visualize with… this, larger ring, representing the true limits of what a game can theoretically allow. Here is where you can find all the strange, chaotic behaviors that are not per say intended functions of games but still very much are fabrics in their cultural tapestries, even if you’re seeing it from the other side. All of *this* is what games are made for, all of *this* is what players wind up ma

king of games for themselves, given time. Speedrunners, wavedashing, bug bounties, machinima, L is real. The never and nothing games in reality defined by undefinition. Trade servers, hidden killer games- spaces where breaking players’ own imposed social rules ends in social punishment. Roleplaying servers in non-roleplaying games: shit, I got more hours out of Valve products playing socially-enforced gamemodes than intended ones. Games have limits to have challenge to have meaning. But by break

ing those limits, we, the audience, introduce our own meaning. To wit, studios respond to this behavior by adopting, adapting, or attacking- legal action is unpopular, but embracing the creative and chaotic side of gaming is a technical balancing act. Level editors and mod tools aren’t enough without players wanting something made that you can’t provide. The players must discover it all for themselves. Maybe they just need a little nudge. (static) As kids, my friend Xander and I challenged each

other to a race in a game called I Wanna Be The Guy. It started as who could beat the game faster, and very quickly became who could beat Mike Tyson faster. The first boss. For those not in the know- this was an absurdist tough-as-nails media-mishmash platformer in the late 00s from a solo dev. A game that’s actively trying to kill the player. And for those of you who remember I Wanna Be The Guy, hearing we played it as kids... may have Game Overed you instantly. *giggle* Call me crazy, but I’m

a big fan of intentionally hostile game design. Of a developer anticipating player behavior and countering it, either to direct them to another solution, or, honestly, just for a laugh. Kazio Mario comes to mind, or maybe even Dark Souls; at least a video game that wants you to suffer *wants* you to feel an emotion at all. …maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. Point being, games can have irritating and/or immersion-breaking moments designed to suggest something to the player. Point them to a diffe

rent action. A guiding hand, or a closed fist. Glaringly obnoxious incidents in games blind out duller, more mundane ones. In time enough, imperfect memories blot out anything but those glints. ‘Ocarina of Time is a great game, except for the Water Temple’. ‘I love Dragon Age: Origins, except for the Fade’. ‘Halo holds up, except for The Library’, ‘Fable 3 was great, but grinding the gold for the good ending? Peter Molyneux owes all of us financial compensation!’ Some of us literally. Yet, were

you to play those games again, an old crop of issues would bountifully remind itself at you. Games don’t have to be perfect to be amazing, but gamers tend to remember old titles as classics, trash, or not remember them at all. But these… flashpoints of dissatisfaction can later become focal points of critique. In a way, that can be useful to a developer; people will remember their irritation with an isolated, specific part of the game, and subconsciously associate all their grievances with the p

art that they hate, even if those problems have nothing to do with each other. ‘That game was a great platformer, except for the ice level’. Or- maybe it was a sloppy platformer by today’s standards, and that problem was exacerbated in certain segments. But it’s not like games are trying to make bad levels on purpose… at least not without a good reason. These things are just tidbits of knowledge players and developers alike pick up over the years, intuit with enough time with similar hardware, s

imilar games. Intuition, however, can be learned and unlearned. For example… the visual language of video games has shifted over the years. When playing a game, we’re agreeing to certain basic mechanics: how to participate in the world the software creates, and what counts as participation. Some of these are fairly intuitive, joystick moves you around, you can figure that out just tilting it. A is an Action button, you can figure that out by pressing it. But… how do you teach a player to look up

when so much of the real world visual focus is defined by horizon? How best to tell them what plants are player-interactable and which are purely decorative? If a player can climb walls, how best to indicate which walls can be climbed? What makes certain spikes read as lethal and others as just damage? If a car can be opened and climbed inside, how do you let the player know that, when so many other vehicles are simple props? This dichotomy of static vs dynamic elements is important to video ga

me design, but it didn’t necessarily start there. Logistics came first. On older hardware, sprites that move independently of a screen scrolling kept precious memory occupied, regardless of player input. Computers need time to process the visual output, so if it takes the hardware longer to render frames than the game’s framerate itself, the game has to hold on previous frames to finish processing. Sprites aren’t required for this behavior, mind you, they were just the typical culprit. That's wh

y Mega Man 3 runs like trash. This slowdown of processing speed must either be limited, or accounted for. Sprites get used sparingly and specifically. The behavior of sprites in something such as a platformer is... uniquely recognizable, especially to older gamers. Mobile objects are rogue factors, they're the only things moving in the world without the player moving first. Static but interactable objects share the quirks of their hardware rendering. There's a certain… flicker; desynced motion,

delayed rendering, telltale of a sprite masquerading as backdrop. As video games turned 3D, dynamic models adopted some of this technical fault. If an object seems particularly high-definition, or lit unlike anything else in the room, you can probably interact with it. You know in old cartoons and anime, when there's a piece of the background that isn't painted like everything else, but instead drawn at a different level of detail? And thus clues you in that the ‘solid ground’ the protagonist is

standing on is gonna stop being solid real quick? In a very literal way, this is a fault of the animation process, but an aesthetically accepted one. And in a video game, a visual element which cries out for mechanic. With senses constrained to sight, sound and very limited feel- secondary indicators like these will have to do. Not to mention noise added by old televisions blurring lines in anime and games alike, accounting for these seams. CRTs were the ubiquitous final output of the era, and

media was created with that in mind. But, as we get better displays and more complex images to render, this dividing line between static and dynamic elements becomes more and more distracting until it eventually… vanishes. And everything looks real. Trees react to wind but are no less backdrop. Waterfalls may roar to no one but themselves. What is one crate to another if the whole world is themed to being convincingly real? How am I to know which details are useful in a sea of details for detail

s' sake? The difference between props and environment has become so indistinct, that games must inform the user of their playable pieces more directly. A glow, UI prompt, or outline. This isn’t a bad thing, it’s basic game design, but depending on its frequency can still break immersion. A shiny object or waypoint popping up to railroad the player back to intended play. So, how do we indicate to the player what’s worth paying attention to in the world, make that interruption of import more immer

sive? Well if we’re being direct... we could just paint a sign? (static) I’ve got another story, it’s shorter this time. There’s this brilliant game that released a little while back, Teardown. Destruction simulator, heisting game, has some really satisfying voxel-based physics. Often, the object of the game is to secure several pieces of loot from across the map with the most efficient route you can find, as once you grab that first item, an alarm tolls and a countdown starts. So while preplann

ing, deciding what path to follow to hit every spot and grab up as much loot as I can, I’d use a can of spraypaint to plot my route. Literally draw yellow arrows to keep me on track to my objective, something that stands out even when blurred from motion against the bulk of the game’s color palette. This shade of yellow, like the kind used for road paint, is good at catching one’s eye when everything else looks more or less… plain. Grey and blue and deep black. A key to visual game design is tea

ching the player to pay attention to a certain color scheme, or exaggerated visual cue, and have them associate it with types of play. Left 4 Dead used pointed floodlights to shepherd players in the right direction, just as Resi 4 Remake uses yellow paint and tape. There’s a trope you’ve heard about before, or if not you’ll cotton on to now. Yellow ledges, ladders, pipes: whatever it takes to get players’ focus. If your game’s art style is defined first as looking realistic, then the absence of

reality, visuals out of place, makes for great direction. Kayin, a game developer who made a title called - oh look at that - argues in the linked article that games have always used this style of direction, even down to the color. Yet in the current era, players have too many titles and developers too little wiggle room to risk letting players get lost enough to give up playing. And she’s right. It’s not about the paint, it’s about what it represents. Here’s another… complaint you’ve heard befo

re: all AAA games look the same. Some edgy dudes on a colorful yet realistic scape glow while punching or shooting the bad guys. A grand oversimplification of compounding issues in the games industry. There’s this idea among those who finance games but don’t play very many of them, that graphics shall keep looking more realistic as the years go by, and thus, apparently, grow more “immersive” or somehow be “improved”. It’s our own Moore’s Law, and just as doomed. Because, as it turns out, reality

looks… a way. One with working eyes can look to see the detail of life, the fidelity of texture. Nothing is requiring reality render itself this way, save for the limitations of light. It simply is. Computers, though, default to rendering pixels arranged in common ways, the less common the more complex. Text is an easy one, graphics are harder, realistic graphics- well, hardware is pretty powerful these days, but that’ll require some software trickery to render without deep performance hits. Ga

mes don’t all ‘look the same’, the AAA market is simply limiting itself to what are considered profitable, and “safe” visual mediums. Reality, as an aesthetic, suits a design pipeline of disparate artists without much direction beyond the specific models and textures they’re tasked with. Without clear art direction, ‘make it look real’ is ubiquitous. And, there are finite ways to make reality from render visually compelling. We had a good eight-or-so years in the 00s using greyed out dustbowls a

nd dirty smear to be similar to reality, blurring the seams, but with modern tech we can go further. So why not showcase the real? The superreal? Reality is impressive, at least, according to the data. It’s the same thing people mean when they say all Marvel movies “look the same”, technology has allowed for artists to mimic reality in an agreeable way, yet the aesthetics allowed for within that technology are, themselves, limited. Hollywood used to fill scenes with matte paintings, now with dig

ital graphics. And films are written accounting for this production method. They’re still using real actors... for now, captured on screens green and blue- but it’s all in an attempt to generate something pretty, cost-effective, yet still recognizable as ‘real’. Confining ourselves to current day programmers’ best attempts at enhanced realism means every computer game has the same tell-tale signs of simulation breaking through, and similar aesthetic cues trying to grab your attention. Not as mec

hanic, now just as noise. If you play enough ‘realistic’ looking games, you’ll start recognize the patterns, no matter how expensive your machine is. The overwhelming blur and filtering used to mimic details fading naturally in the distance, some occasional flicker or low-resolution texture pop-in, and bright, colorful glows, floating sigils, outlines, sprites and screen-space occupation. Many of these tricks are cheap, in the rendering sense. Saves on performance. Shows the player where to go.

Blend it all together to a final render, and you get a beautiful looking world with… some eye-catching exceptions. Strange shadows, flickering of the void and torchlight- was that shine I saw revealing a secret to me, or was that just some weird clipping issue? Is that texture a waypoint or just a bug? All the glitches and gamification become one and the same. Absence of reality makes itself a mechanic whether you intend it to or not. But when your goal is to look as close to real as possible, w

ith the same rendering solutions, over time every studio is competing to be as efficiently “safe” as possible. Our UI can be fun, our character designs market-researched, but looking unrealistic is saved for the most successful, brand-synergetic multiverses. From your friendliest shade of paint to your quirky style of directory. This is what happens when you want to make a space in pursuit of profit that appeals to everyone: you’re alienating anyone without cash, especially the people who would

have been there anyways! It’s the same way every city claims to be unique. Cities being run for profit, not unlike games, want you to feel at home at cost, the comfort of ownership with the perpetual price tag of rent and commerce. Tourists with capital are seen as more important than those who wish to stay at minimum pay. Cutting every cost behind the scenes to present the most streamlined version of a shared experience. Consistently unique, identically individual. Casting barriers to cordon de

railment from AB-tested vistas, punishing those who dare try with banishment. Entertainment and culture walled off, populous presupposed, directed by little else than algorithm and yellow signage. But the yellow paint isn’t the fucking problem, it’s a solution to an imposed one. Video games are being gentrified, man. From a publisher’s point of view, the ideal game is a consistent yet repeatable experience. Papering over anything deemed ‘broken’ with barricades or just deleting the material alto

gether. Each loop on that closed, contained circuit is another pass by the gift shop. Tailoring your play to be conducive to sale. The phrase ‘pay-to-win’ might’ve just entered your head, but first thought’s not always best thought, yeah? Pay to save time, pay to circumnavigate inconvenience. Pay before the game is delisted forever. Pay to have fun- your upfront cost just gets you into the theme park, but you have to pay for the rides whose operators have long since left. A publisher seeking to

optimize their product production pipeline will happily shed those pesky game developers once a satisfactory model, a repeatable mold, is constructed. Every developer responsible for the mechanisms seen as most “useful” to gamify is let go by their profit-seeking publisher once the essence of their work is extrapolated. Can you look at the consistent layoffs in the games industry, this past year and on especially, and see not the death of creativity? If you rip any new developer intent out of de

velopment, then there’s nothing left but mimicry. Noise on noise. At least a space designed poorly is a space designed at all; I’d rather a bad game from humans trying their best than a streamlined, gentrified, realistic, AI basked husk of a project. An apparition of arcadic value, quarters turned dollars turned revenue streams. Make the consumer purchase the hardware, rent the software, and flit impulse buys all along. Shut down the servers as soon as maintenance fees risk cutting into record p

rofits. Moments, gone and forgotten. Save for players, remembering, as they will, the worst of a game. They’ll remember unmoddable games as having developers who didn’t care about the community, online-only games for their downtimes: “Yeah, I loved that game, except for how annoying it was to play. Hey, are the servers working now? Oh they’re shut dow-” They’ll think of the AAA grind, and in time, associate the game’s fiction and play with it. And who can blame them? Me. I can! But I blame the e

xecutives far more. Instead of making games for pay which allow for experiences, these are experiences for pay which allow, fleetingly, for games. As I’m saying all of this, a couple titles might be coming to mind. The recent Suicide Squad, or Starfield, The Day Before or Palworld. ‘Soulless’ is a word I’ve heard used to describe all of these. Titles that try and hit all the notes of what a game is supposed to be, supposed to play like, and then do every single one of those just barely. You’ve g

ot your bad guys, crafting, surviving, looting, shooting- you get funny video game bugs; streamlined imperfection. Your absurdist humor, your meta commentaries, your dancing around if not outright ignorance of the real societal issues these titles aestheticize themselves to. Good games have dogs you can pet. Good games have fishing mechanics. Good games have numbers to increase by fractions of percent. Good games wink at the fourth wall. Good games have worlds open in name alone. Good games have

voice acting, player customization, and factions to choose from. Good games have different endings and characters attractive to mainstream and celebrities you’ve heard of. Good games harken back to imperfect memories of games you’ve loved before. And once you start playing, you want desperately to find that fun again. But so much of it is behind a price tag, or an artificial time limit. Maybe you’ll pay more to satiate your faculties’ sunk cost fallacies before time runs out. There are good ide

as in these AAA nightmare games, folded somewhere in the sea of monetizable mechanic. Asking “What makes a video game successful?” is a question that’s hard to answer with formula, but investors want a formula. If your game isn’t pre-guaranteed to be the next big thing, then you have to play it safe. So instead the question becomes “What makes a successful video game?” Go and get whatever that is, put it all together, patch the gaps with AI and IP, then generate the next hit content unit to spru

ce up that quarterly report. Aren’t you having fun yet? (static) (silent shuffling) It’s not a stretch to say that many AAA games these days wind up vacuous products. But let’s take care not to criticize this problem at its surface level, gamers though we might be. Let’s not make synonymous an uninteresting game with an uninterested development team. Good people work very hard on terrible games, and terrible people work very hard on great games. To compare, I don’t blame every individual journal

ist at rag publications for corporate puff pieces. They’re victims too. And some of them probably suck, but that can be true separate from if their work is any good, if it’s allowed to be any good. Before it’s all stripped away and automated and if, if, these people can put up with it, maybe the final output won’t be as bad. Maybe their name won’t be forever tied to a tainted title. If you ever find yourself upset with a game, asking “what were the developers thinking”, try to free yourself from

that self-imposed line of questioning. Because there’s a broader question that’s a lot more fun to answer: are you enjoying yourself? Is the soul that’s left engaging you? If not, that’s okay- maybe there’s little to no ‘soul’ left there at all, but better to continue the search elsewhere than to keep digging, keep spending. The shell of a ‘video game’, as a modern games industry financier would see it, does not default to a soul. I’ve played innovative titles trapped into the busywork of AAA m

echanic, and mediocre games over-reliant on breakout aesthetic in place of actual material. Yet all of this- all of this equivocating as to what even is an indie game, what’s AAA, what’s quadruple A, what is a game, what even is a soul- is a dance we’re told to step by these corpos, by these game studios, by these publishers, landlords of art who wouldn’t know soul if they had their own to compare. Embracers of creatives’ Active Vision, to CD Project with product until it will Take-Two an intera

ctive profit. ItsSony Epic-h, defined by market Cap-Commerce itself gamified. Ubisoft not to notice developers Nex-on the line, their pay best measured in the Tens’cents. If you Nintendo stop it, Unity is key- developers coming together as Brothers, Warnering about this Sega-mented consolidation of the Electronic Arts. The games industry must unionize. Blaming developers for incompetence is blaming machinists for a crappy product, yet sometimes the designs they’re given to work with are just fla

wed. Often the conditions they’re expected to work under are untenable. But when a product launch flops, someone’s gotta take the fall. If a game algorithmically destined to ‘succeed’ does not, then to those with the money, the people who designed the game simply ‘failed to meet expectations’- and are replaced. Which is to say, laid off. Fired. Thousands of people who worked to bring games to life lost their jobs in 2023, brought to tens of thousands just including January of 2024. Or maybe this

is the first you’re hearing of it! Games journalists have always been devalued and mocked by players and publishers alike. They’re asked to prove themselves worthy via output volume, then are ultimately disregarded then discarded as convenient when their reporting is deemed ‘unimportant’ as synonym for ‘unprofitable’. Influencers are better marketing, apparently, so why keep themselves accountable to the press? At time of writing, not a week goes by without another several hundred industry posi

tions lost. Be it closure, downscaling, or automation- these are people who were working on beautiful things in a system that only understands numbers. Sacrament, does it not break your fucking heart?! We could argue developers lazy, or uninspired- or, overworked or underpaid. But they’re all breathing the same poisoned air, choked by the same concentrated formula of Game that’s sucked up every release with cash behind it and spit it all back out with further microtransaction, user data collecti

on, forced online connectivity. Live games as a service making dead games sans servers. The industry has consolidated. It’s taken our games with it, but not the people who made them. Took everything beautiful and then closed it off and now charges admission. A walled garden built on the fault line of the inner circle. So… let’s love what little we have left, broken as it might all be. Reject the painful and profitable death of medium while appreciating what's left of its media, of art both drawn

and discovered. I’ll keep having fun finding spots to clip out of every damn map I play, since, well, I love seeing the world from perspectives unaccounted for. Modders will keep adding guns into Baldur’s Gate because it’s funny, it makes people laugh, and maybe they learn new ways to code. Speedrunners will keep making and arguing new definitions of “beating” a game, as there’s value in the fight. In the race. The spectacle streamed for charity. The new generation rediscovers GMod, and learns

how to animate. Ambitious fans resurrect dead MMOs for love of the work lost, for their memories… however imperfect it may be. For every game suffocated by formula there’s ambition for artists to make something sincere. There are dances so beautiful that they surpass any wall. For the less you’re free to dance, the more fun to dance at all. Thanks for dancing with me, and take it easy. (music) (meow!) Sheri: Come back. Austin: Why? Austin: (gasp) (both giggling)