There are too many video games
bottomfeeder.substack.com
bottomfeeder.substack.com
I feel like the author makes it fairly clear: those with enough privilege. If the cost of living goes to zero, we'll have near-infinite art. If the cost of living goes to maximum we all starve to death.
At very least, I was very much in love with a free-living artist who inspired me greatly in my 20s. I moved to San Francisco to hangout with her and her amazingly cool and smart friends - living on couches and doing art. I felt like a sell-out that I couldn't make it in that world and got a "real job". I found out later that she had several million dollars to her name in her early 20s. I somehow had missed the implication of her text "stopping by my dads house in the Marina, be there in a minute".
When you find out that most free-living artists have financial backing - well, the rose-tinted glasses come off quick.
That said, props to any actually desperate-artists out there. I tend to think it's a bit of a mythic trope, but I'm sure some do exist.
Maybe the issue there is taxation, not art? If we're going to get into a debate about people owing stuff to society, I think looking at estate taxes, property taxes, etc... is probably a lot more reasonable than getting mad at them for doing things they enjoy with their time.
I think it's a very easy trap to fall into where we sometimes look at opulence/privilege and get mad at the good things that come out of that (life/job security, freedom to experiment, etc), rather than the consolidation of resources and wealth that enable those outcomes very selectively and that deny other people access to the same conditions.
And there's lots of different life philosophies about how to deal with millionaires/billionaires from lots of different political perspectives, but in all of them from the most Capitalistic to the most Socialist, guilting people over not being passionate about charity blue-collar work is probably less helpful and less reasonable than guilting them over not paying back money (either through charity or taxes) into the systems and common social resources that are currently supporting them and their lifestyles.
"I'm a millionaire, but I got a normal job so therefore I don't need to feel guilty", feels weird to me. That's not really practically changing anything about other people's conditions.
Which is of course fantastically unpopular and will never happen, so people will continue to brutally compete for who gets to make art instead of doing grunt work
1. burnout, as someone else pointed out.
2. a very good troll :)
3. A somewhat poorly guided but honest attempt to dissuade people from joining the games industry (possibly mixed with 1.)
As someone who started their career in games and left - he's not wrong. The games industry is kind of shit. It doesn't pay well, the hours suck, and you might work for months or years on something that either never sees the light of day or nobody ends up playing (not to mention that in the beginning you're somewhat replaceable, there's a dozen young developers who would love to be in your shoes) - and this is just the life of a salaried game dev - the indie life is even harder.
...on the other hand, the projects and problems are interesting/unique and the people in it are some of the most wonderful I've ever met. I miss shipping games, even though I bailed out of my own volition. I don't blame anyone for wanting to join, especially as a young developer.
I remember at the age of 19 or so being asked (paraphrased) "why the hell would you want to do that?" by an ex-Bungie developer (and now good friend, even if we haven't chatted for a while) when I said I wanted to join the games industry. For better or worse I persevered, showed him I had some potential as an engineer and eventually he helped me get some interviews and a job. But I'd ask the same question of any young developer who came my way hoping to get in.
So I guess I agree with what the author is trying to say (the games industry is full-up! are you sure you want to try and squeeze in?), even if I don't agree with words he's using to say it.
There are 8 billion people in this world, and the Playstation 2 is the highest selling console ever at 155 million[0].
In a world of 3 billion computer and internet users, 12,000 Steam games a year doesn't seem like that much too me.
The real problem is that all the sales are going to go to the top 1% of games.
But here's another truth that dispels the author's main point: I can make one or two games a year, but I can play dozens of them.
Game developers that see this problem should be encouraging people to develop games - and buy as many indie games as they can afford.
In a world where everyone is making art at 1x and buying art at 10x, then many many more people can make a living from their art.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_game_cons...
I agree though, there is no problem.
I’ve been escaping into videogame-land during most of my free time (I’m a homemaker & parent of a disabled kid), and while it’s helped me get along with my spouse (release valve, maybe?), it is not the healthiest solution in the long run. Okay for now, and I understand I have a lot of work yet to sync my real and ideal selves (where I know in the moment what I’m feeling and have agency to decide what to do next, rather than picking up the pieces later).
Author's conclusion: people are spending more time on pet creative projects.
Better conclusion: the barriers to distribution have fallen so low that pet projects which existed in the past but never left the bedroom are now available to the world.
What might have just sat on a DAT cassette or floppy disk in someone's closet many years ago now becomes an upload to streaming music catalogs or game services.
Indie game devs are usually making things at home during their downtime. As far as I know, there’s no volunteer hobbyist bridge repair club, so they’re not really taking away from anything. Meanwhile you have companies that have an easily replaceable service like Slack selling for nearly 30 billion dollars. That’s what’s swallowing up money and consuming the time of people who’d otherwise be making something useful.
they got so much in VC funding that they don't know what to do with the money anymore
money incorrectly spread
teachers starving, making an indecent low amount of money; as a result
No disrespect to teachers, but if they’re starving then maybe they should find a job that’ll pay their worth.
That said, part of the reason you don’t see them is because of licensing and certifications. And people don’t want to be responsible for peoples lives for free.
I guess it's a job/career version of "social media is making us all lonelier." Everyone wants to be a creator like everyone wants to be an influencer...
Okay, sure, but why are we doing that? I feel like it's something more fundamental that's gone off the rails. This is a form of society-wide coping mechanism until we can identify and try out solutions to whatever that fundamental issue is.
Most artists work crushing hours in sweatshop conditions, or are constantly gigging on the razor's edge of subsistence, with what little value they produce going to expenses or middlemen. Then the internet decides everything they create should be free whether they like it or not. We value the companies that distribute art and put celebrities on a high pedestal, but that's a different thing than putting creators and artists themselves on a pedestal.
The reason no one is fixing potholes or bridges or whatever is the taxpayer doesn't want to pay for it. If the pothole isn't right in front of their driveway, or the bridge isn't on their commute, or their kid isn't going to that particular school, then people consider any taxes spent on it to be theft. We no longer have a society, we have millions of individuals that happen to share a landmass in common but little else.
Humans are very well tuned to equate occurance/mention of a thing with prevelence of that thing, so because the internet amplifies provokative thoughts/comments/ideas and buries concensus/1+s/me toos our colletive sensibilities are being thrown completely out of whack. Add in that there's no feedback mechanism to chastise undesireable opinions (or even actions), as there is in in-person communication, and you have a recipe for the chaos we are seeing.
This just strikes me as an incoherent rant from someone whose games obviously don't sell. IMO you can never have too much music, books, recipes, or games. Culture is important and as we get closer to a post-scarcity world people will expend less effort on survival and more on art and culture. Or space travel and technology that we don't need (but which we have to create because humans are curious).
If it's their free time, why should they spend that contributing towards fixing his bridges or maintaining his roads? Does the author do that? I know I don't, I just pay my taxes on my earnings like everyone else, occasionally volunteer, and do whatever I want in my free time.
I don't see the problem.
2. Making shoes these days means working in a sweatshop somewhere, which isn't an appealing dream.
3. Disney makes more money from music soundtracks than from shoes, so you can see which one they might want to promote.
4. Musicals are a popular animated film genre; shoe-icals, not so much.
Here is the central thesis. There’s a lot to get through before you get to this.
Writing a game nobody plays discharges your energy and creates the feeling of achievement, but it's all empty calories and then your car falls into a sinkhole. If your game succeeds, it’s even worse. Your customers are now also expending all of their energy too, playing your game alone in a room. Meanwhile, sinkholes.
THAT is why I say there are too many indie games. They aren't sustainable. There is too much time wasted, and that will be true until time is applied to making the world work and bridges not fall down and food be in stores. Probably your time.Instead of improving things we already have, we decided to move to the 'frontier', or worse, demolish perfectly good streets.
computers are great creative outlets for selfexpression toying around with games isn't a bad thing
I also find the shoe making thing is a bit odd because for a lot of people it's a similar creative outlet.. for this person it's blogging
But society will only be saved if you can unite the gamers, pool together your combined knowledge from playing too much games, and put it to use in productive tasks in the real world. All those hours levelling up in game skills, finally proven IRL.
And thus, the economy was saved.
Why do people never say the same thing about all the money spent on video games and Starbucks? Which is arguably a lot more money.
It's easier to criticize the actions of others than to take responsibility.
From that perspective, it's no wonder why people think it's a waste of space, because they saw no meaningful purpose. Meanwhile, we're doing the opposite of terraforming Earth, by making it more unlivable everyday.
Space research is usually funded with taxpayer money (this is changing, but a fair amount of SpaceX’s revenue is still NASA contracts). Games and Starbucks are funded by folks after-tax wages. In both cases it’s money that they earned, but they have a lot more individual agency with the latter portion of their wages than the former portion.
It's not a bad question though. Someone who wants space exploration should think about that question and be able to answer it in a meaningful way.
Our culture is dominated by those entities that can make massive capital investments and industrialize culture. For a variety of complicated reasons, I would point this out as the issue. It is rather the successful entities, and not the apparent failures, that produce the problem of over saturation. I am forgetting the name of the movement, but contemporaneous with Schubert's lifetime, there was a kind of at home arts movement. The bourgeois were still not spending their free time filling potholes, but no one was aspiring to a salaried post in the grand facade of entities with immense capital reserves and an industrialized capacity to influence culture. If we were less atomized and a greater appreciation of our cultural expression was common, I believe it would be easier to come to grips with talent, or our lack thereof. It is no sin to lack talent. It only makes talent all the more incredible.
I think the entire idea is false anyway. There is surely a waiting list for a government job with a pension filling pot holes right now.
The author of this article probably just lives in a bubble of developers, writers, musicians, painters...
There are a lot of games. Bad games. Boring games. Unoriginal games. Half-assed games.
You know what there isn't an excess of? Great games. Games which serve particular niches really well. The "colony sim" genre has enjoyed a bit of a renaissance since RimWorld proved you can have a big niche hit without replicating the entirety of Dwarf Fortress' detailed simulation - but there still aren't a ton of interesting games in the genre, such that even a highly derivative game like Going Medieval gets a ton of interest.
And that's just one niche! There are many others. Make a game you love, make it great, and you can probably succeed. Don't make boring crap that nobody wants to play.
> The least popular pony is Applejack. She is also the only one who has a real job. This is, of course, a coincidence.
If you actually watched the show, you'd know that Rarity owns a nation-wide boutique franchise that is depicted as highly successful.
We as society highly value art and artists and celebrities. But we don't value helping random fellow citizens that we've never met. The result is that people are eager to make art, but you won't find a similar level of motivation for repairing infrastructure or playing taxes to enable repairs.
But if our infrastructure gets bad enough, life becomes frustrating for everyone. And genuinely helping others might be more fulfilling than making art that nobody cares about. So I'd support the conclusion that we need less people making art alone and more people helping others.
I bet for every published indie game there are 50 paintings or drawings someone made and has not published - or musical performances not even recorded. I don't see anyone complaining about those. It's kinda like telling people what not to do in their free time. And I am 100% sure not all of those games mentioned were made as a way to make money or NOT in the creators' free time. Maybe they have aspirations to professionalize, but that's not the point.
Because you can? I don't necessarily disagree that there's too many videogames, but of all the things to get upset about, too many video games is really at the bottom of the list of things to get upset about.
Spoiler: The infrastructure is suffering because someone, somewhere, much higher up the food chain, is not willing to spend the money on it.
Later in his post, he generalized to all media but keeps the details video game specific.
Basically, I feel like his point is that we've put creators, of all forms of media, on such a high pedestal that we're neglecting the mundane things that keep life running smoothly.
Basically, a job/career version of social media making us all lonelier, I guess. Everyone wants to be a creator like everyone wants to be an influencer...
> Spotify now gets over 60000 new songs a day. Amazon now has millions of books. My country has over 550 scripted TV shows in production.
It's a weird point to make, and not really supported properly.
I don't have data or facts to share, but I have a strong gut feeling that people who consider art (in a very broad meaning, including entertainment, games, music, etc) to be a commodity are not only missing out, they make the world a worst place to live in.
And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh. [Ecclesiasties 12v12]Couple low barriers to distribution with a culture that encourages constant hustling for money and this is what you get.
I love this quote. However, the correct interpretation is not that too many people are making (or playing) games, but that too few people get any sense of achievement from the stuff they get paid for. My trick is to spend some creative energy on optimsing my shitty job. Then at least I get the sense of achievement AND get the crap work done quicker. (I kid. My job isn't that bad. Mostly.)
Video game tooling got good enough that the velocity increased massively from 20 years ago where companies were writing their own engines. There might be more folks working in games, but it's probably not the sole reason for the increased output. The team size for indie games shrunk dramatically while quality simultaneously went up due to tooling improvements.
There's lots of supporting work for assets and logic that can be plugged in to game engines. Even when you need your own stuff, there's other forums to get that work as needed. This is distributed and shared work now instead of being under one studio roof. Plus the tools for producing that stuff probably got better too. The efficiencies are compounding.
There's also been success with much simpler visual styles (Stardew), meaning not as much work needs to go into 3D modeling and advanced stuff like that. The worlds you play in now didn't necessarily have to get bigger either. Again, Stardew switches screens like old RPGs. It didn't seek to render a bigger world than games that came before it.
Same for the distribution platforms. You no longer need a slow corporate entity to handle making physical disks and shipping them worldwide. This lowers the barrier of entry by a lot when combined with the previous gains.
This author got used to the incremental graphics and technical improvements being marketed by game companies and thought that's how it always would be. That part still exists, but it's just in a much more crowded space these days.
If we take this line of thinking to the extreme we should all be eating soylent brand gruel and eating a couple vitamins and all our excess output should go into finding the cure to any and all diseases.
Companies in our grandparents era paid taxes that paid for infrastructure.
The human need to express is older than agriculture. It's older than civilization. Creation is an essential part of what it means to be human.
Kids made games or other art decades ago too, but distribution was never as free and easy as today. This is all good..
I've had to turn on Steam's family mode as I don't really want that type of content.
Recall the Golgafrinchans. His argument is that our society is pushing more people out of the "thinkers" and "doers" category into the "useless" category, and that if they had our population breakdown they'd need to shove a lot of entertainment producers on Ark B.
There's some truth to it but also some falsehood. I think the reality is a bit nuanced.
Maybe stop remaking pixel art platformers over and over again. One look at the itch.io and its very clear what kinda games there are too many of.
While it did cross over to excessive at some point, I learned and moved on. Now I'm not living the game dev dream of my youth but enjoying an easier life as a boring programmer/manager. And I still enjoy simple and complex games alone and with family.
Ask yourself instead if the thing you are making should instead be an improvement to some other thing, or if you want to use your time on earth to make a potentially-similar thing that is focused on your immediate neighborhood.
Nothing wrong with that.
For 10+ years Vogel has written blog posts about stubbornly making it in an increasingly hostile indie game market, and he's always sounded a little bit proud and a little bit scared. Now the pride has turned to shame and the fear has turned to dread.
Western society is in decline, and the fault and symptom is that so many people are making and playing video games, the work to which he has dedicated his life.
the statement "all creation is precious" is true from the perspective of someone else that also likes to "create" things by rearranging/juxtaposing/building off of content that already exists. the more "content" that is out there, no matter how trivial it may seem, increases the amount of source material that can be sifted through to find the perfect building blocks for something else.
random examples
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clock_(2010_film)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endtroducing.....
https://www.tommoody.us/archives/2012/03/28/guthrie-lonergan...
Are you going to spend 100 hours reading a single book? Watching a single movie? Listening to a single song?
Of course not. But you can easily spend that much time on one good video game.
And there are A LOT of excellent games out there. More than what any one person will be able to experience in their life time.
So there certainly seems to be a kind of saturation in the gaming market.
Why make art that nobody wants? Because it's fun. I'm by no means a creative, but I've got a folder full of terrible drawings, loads of google docs of stories that don't go anywhere that I wrote while bored/drunk/high/inspired/depressed, and five different game prototypes on Github. Nobody's ever going to see most of them. This is fine. Doing creative things is intrinsically fun if you've got an itch to scratch.
Why do people make 30 indie games a day? Same reason my mum spent 100 hours making an anatomically accurate wire sculpture of a crab to sell for $40 to a university to hang up in the aquaculture wing. It's fun. It doesn't detract from her work - she's retired, and even when she was working, she used different skills and drew from a different pool of resources.
This is from Jeff Vogel, who's averaged about one indie game a year since 1996. I think part of his attitude comes from working for 26 years and seeing the transition from smallish studios to a gigantic winner-takes-all market. It's certainly going to be harder to make money as an indie developer now, with raised expectations and a lot more competition, and there is some value in warning people about that.
On a final note, society is also... looking pretty good right now? We came up with multiple vaccines for a global pandemic in record time, most of the roads near my house are okay, life's improving steadily in the developing world, my state government is going on a massive spree to buy more trains and remove level crossings, and I could fix a small pothole if you gave me a sack of cold asphalt and a fencing bar. There are some problems with inequality, but they seem to be tied to governments abandoning full employment policies, and I'm sure people will notice eventually.
Im not sure where Im going with this but somehow I feel that that You should not mistake Your inner optimism with what is really going out there.
I'm Australian. I see Russian aggression in the Ukraine in a historical context that includes a lot of proxy wars very far away from me. Sure, it probably sucks to be Ukrainian right now, but they're ~44 million out of ~7.8 billion. Maybe one day it will be our turn to be invaded, and that will be very bad for us, but I hope my inner pessimism won't be confused for what is really going on out there.
Its not that far, world is really small. For me its even worse because I live only few hundred kilometers from Ukraine border (its only half a day drive by tank if I calculate correctly).
And wars sometimes have tendency to extend their reach beyond what You would expect. If I remeber correctly Tobruk was defended by 14000 Aussies (and I think that was way before any kind of attack on Australia took place).
I believe that capitalism works only because people need incetives that are aligned with society needs. Otherwise they will work really hard on stuff that uses resources but will not be part of sustainable system.
UBI probably won't pay enough to have high-speed internet in a two bedroom apartment in a popular city center eating at fancy restaurants three meals a day. It will be the absolute minimum to not die if you can't work. So, people will probably go to work to have a better life than that, but at least have something to fall back on if it doesn't work out. Having a fallback means startups, volunteering, self-care, all sorts of good things. The risk of starving to death living in a cardboard box goes to zero, which prevents a lot of people from doing a lot of things. It's a very real possibility in the current world.
I think people that read this site don't quite understand what "real life" is like in America. There are no paid sick days. If you don't report to your shift, you're fired. If you're lucky, you very carefully fill out the right paperwork and keep your job this time as a courtesy. (There is no federal protection here; for example, FMLA doesn't apply during your first year or so at a job. Some states do a little better, but with remote work, you'll find that most of the jobs are in states without protections! Happened to a friend, though their home state also offers no protections.) While you're sick, you still have to pay for rent and food. UBI is the acceptance that corporate America isn't going to cover routine events like receiving medical treatment. It won't enable people to party 24/7 for 80 years on the taxpayers' dime. It just means you don't starve to death if you get unlucky.
People will continue working to do a little better than merely existing, if they're able.
In fact Thomas Paine wrote:
"To understand what the state of society ought to be, it is necessary to have some idea of the natural and primitive state of man; such as it is at this day among the Indians of North America. There is not, in that state, any of those spectacles of human misery which poverty and want present to our eyes in all the towns and streets in Europe,"
But it's pretty weird to blame crumbling infrastructure on the pursuit of art when in reality suburban sprawl is already financially unsustainable with or without artists
For those who have a caldera of a story bubbling up, by all means get it out! For those who want to make art for the money/fame/power/etc, maybe don’t? Though I’m not telling anyone what to do directly, I might vote for regulation that supports a living wage for work closer to our basic needs, freeing up more people to be creative for the joy of it and without the pressure of money.
If you've wasted your time on projects and now feel burnt out, that's fine. Doesn't mean the world is ending around us.
I hope the games the author built were more coherent than this article...
You can look at a lot of infrastructure through this lens. Why is our Internet so far behind other countries? Is it because of a lack of workers? No, it's because of a mixture of monopolies, government capture, and both over and under regulation. We make it hard to invest in Internet infrastructure without serious effort from lawmakers and companies, meanwhile we don't regulate the companies that we are funneling public funds to. We give money to Comcast to set up Internet connections, and it doesn't do it, and then we give them more money instead of punishing them.
Meanwhile, the very notion of improving this infrastructure is itself political and constantly debated. At best, our infrastructure projects are rolled up into an increasingly dysfunctional political system where parties are purely interested in maintaining power and opposing each other. Add onto that an unhealthy dose of individualism that teaches us that people shouldn't be paying to maintain common infrastructure and that asking them to do so is theft.
This take is also really disconnected from the reality of gig-workers and factory workers (and out-of-work individuals) across America, including in Seattle. It is not the case that everyone is privileged enough to not work and therefore we have a shortage because too many of them are making art. There is a large population of people in the US who feel forced into oppressive jobs, and companies literally rely on their desperation in order to maintain an underpaid workforce. We have willing workers in America, but a nontrivial number of them are trapped working for Uber and fighting off homelessness.
What does it say about government spending, about the barriers of entry to doing other work, and about the amount of resources we're devoting to infrastructure in general that those people can't get better paying jobs than Uber? It's just so out of touch to act like the potential workforce begins and ends with programmers/artists. Get out of the tech bubble and talk to normal people; the reason Seattle isn't paying to fix potholes is not because there is no one left to fix the pothole, and it is definitely not the worker's fault that they haven't done their civic duty to push blue-collar market wages down far enough.
Today there is so much of the stuff that you just can't.
You don't know whats out there, and you never will.
For video games, there are a couple years in the 1970s for which this might have been true, but between just the Atari 2600 and the Apple ][, there's no way anybody could have kept up with the flood.
For books, I went over to ISFDB and searched for 'novel AND english AND 1980' which came up with eight hundred and twenty three results. Some of those are duplicates, but even a tenth of that is better than one book a week, and that's just one genre.
Games, like film, like music and like all the other storytelling mediums are a form of literature. It is completely normal and has always been like this when it came to distribution - everybody wants to tell stories, but only a select few do it so well that they get to do it for a living. And only a few (usually big, industrialized) efforts take 90% of the market.
In my company we make simulation systems for teaching a complex medical skill. If the small local game dev industry/community did not exist we wouldn’t either. The awesome talent that is developed and flows out of games is extremely valuable. The tools and methods that come from gamedev are awesome too and drive innovation themselves. Gamedev delivers value, even when it’s not immediately obvious.
I myself wanted to make films and went to film school as a young man. But I have since pivoted towards becoming a PM (and I still use video in my work). Film school, with a focus on film production was the best practical education in management. I would never tell anyone that there are “too many movies made, you shouldn’t make more”.
Also this person talks about “solving the problem”. The problem doesn’t need solving, the market for these things readjusts and emerges accordingly. And it always has. “We” are not “teaching” young people to do anything, they do the things themselves and making them allows them to grow and develop.
I ask because I genuinely can't understand what would drive someone to deliberately cripple innovation in such a manner.
This is metaphor stretched too far. How is Quake 3 Arena or Hearthstone a form of literature?
What in the world does this have to do with people creating art? Maybe the crumbling infrastructure is emblematic of poor leadership (N.B. we aren't allowed to blame Democrats for running Seattle into the ground in tech circles), corrupt politicians, poor city planning, etc.
I get it, let's blame the musicians (what?)! The point is genuinely completely devoid of any through-line.
> The reason a young, enterprising indie dev can churn out product is because that person is surrounded by cheap products made overseas in punishing conditions by people we never see. These are the delicious fruits of Empire.
What a "college freshman" take on things, I wouldn't even know where to start.
For reference .003% of the federal budget goes towards the national endowment for the arts'
We don’t respect grunt work. We only respect art.
Our society’s values do not align with our society’s needs.
I’d like to see more praise and recognition of plumbers, builders, and, well, people that keep the wheels of society moving.
Instead, everyone must go to college and be some artist or otherwise high society. Trade schools are looked down on. And it’s hurting us.
As a game developer that grew up in Seattle, what he says resonates with me.
Also is any of this really ever the end workers fault?
Pay a fair wage and people will do the work - but it still has to get organized higher up
This is doubly true of careers in academia.
Conversely, it’s quite smart to be a plumber or builder in Seattle today monetarily.
We play down the role of cultural values in the choices people make.
Very good builders might not exist today because of the lack of social incentive to get them into the right place. They'll work towards making yet another crud app.
The problem with Seattle isn't that plumbers aren't respected, it's political/economic in nature. It's NIMBYism and zoning laws and literally pricing workers into homelessness. I'd like to see more praise of plumbers too, but Seattle's problem is not a shortage of plumbers, it's rent.
Particularly:
> If you are happy that only 10 people play your game, fine, I guess. However, you should ask if you can't be bringing more people happiness with your limited time in the one life you get on this Earth.
The idea that people making video games for 10 people are making so much money that they're skewing the local economy or driving out plumbers, the idea that the reason potholes aren't fixed are because workers are in short supply instead of, I don't know, government spending on public resources -- this is just so silly.
People making games/music for niche audiences can't go out and fix potholes because potholes are on public roads. The city needs to pay people to do that. If blue collar workers can't afford to live in Seattle, the city needs to look at high-priced tech companies that are actually making enough money and paying large enough salaries to influence local economies and politics: ie, FAANG tech companies with massive audiences.
> Give up your dreams of the easy life sitting and making art indoors.
To be clear, nobody stays in indie game development because they want an easy life. The pay is nonexistent. If anyone is looking at indie art as a way of having a comfortable existence they should definitely stop doing that -- not because they're wasting valuable resources, but because actually they're going to be eating ramen for years and then picking up a normal job for a major tech company once they completely hit rock bottom, at which point the overvalued venture-capital space will use them to price all of the plumbers out of the city.
I exist almost exclusively in tech circles in and around Seattle, and we blame existing leadership for tons of problems. This seems so weirdly divorced from reality that it smacks of ideologue speak.
Are there specific Republican views that you think are anathema?
- support for deporting illegal immigrants
- opposition against affirmative action / DEI programs with forced quotas
- opposition against defunding police
- support for stronger punishments for property crime
- disdain for homeless encampments
- disdain for the combination of higher taxes + increasing welfare programs
- support for building more housing that doesn't require a years-long environmental review and low-income units (although this is changing)
- opposition against redistributing local K-12 school funds state-wide
- any suggestion that the higher poverty and crime rates seen in [insert race/ethnicity/sex/gender/religion/etc] could possibly even 1% be caused by culture and not 100% caused by systemic discrimination
Any of these will immediately get you labeled as an alt-right nutjob even though I personally think many are quite reasonable positions to have.
Try wearing a MAGA hat in Santa Monica. The arguments here that it's just as cool to be a Democrat as it is to be a Republican is so divorced from reality, I feel like I'm being gaslit. Even on dating apps folks use "moderate" as a euphemism for "conservative" -- I've literally had this conversation on dates before.
Nobody is saying that. This is true of perhaps no location in the country. Also, wearing a MAGA hat is a behavioral subset of "being a Republican". Half the Republicans I know think MAGA hats are "gross". I think you're letting feelings of political hostility push you into rambly territory a bit. You keep loosening your phrasing to be more high level "Democrats vs Republicans".
and then vote again for Democrats when elections come. I'm not picking on you in particular, or on the Democrats, in other places it may be the Republicans, but it seems to me that the American society is so much split that when it comes the time to vote, most people will vote for the party that ostensibly is more aligned with their values, irrespectively of the fact that they are doing a good job.
I mean, a bad Democrat is better than a good Republican because at least it is not a racist cunt (or, from the other side, a bad Republican is better than a good Democrat because at least is not a woke idiot).
It looks like in the past it was different, maybe the position of the two main parties were closer so it was not much of an issue, but right now I think that the USA would benefit from a more pluralistic approach to the elections
> maybe the position of the two main parties were closer so it was not much of an issue
I think the parties were further apart, actually. They almost completely overlap in terms of policy outlook and - tellingly - donor class. Maybe the flames of culture and race war are being stoked by the Tuckers of the world in part because there is no major meat-and-potatoes differentiator anymore.
Except this is a fantasy - no ones passion is being a garbage worker, road worker, or plumber. They are hard dirty jobs. Hell, I'd even argue no one really wants to be a doctor or a nurse - because they are equally hard, dirty jobs - often dealing with death. Without the promise of payment, none of those jobs would be done.
The reality is we need to better compensate "hard jobs", so that people strive to do them.
We certainly are allowed. And others are allowed to disagree with us, even harshly. Too often criticism is painted as being "shouted down". What we are not "allowed" to do is be sarcastic/snarky about it, which is, theoretically, good. That way lies political shitposting.