Gaming Under
the Influence
[Aug 16/2022, 9pm]
E.136

Only Bad Games are
“Harder to Make These Days”

Developers out of 343 Industries have recently offered insight into why they believe “games are harder to make these days”[i]. Amongst the items on their list of reasons are enhanced technical expectations and the intricacies of running, updating or maintaining online games. Not one of these things is integral to a good game; this serves as a list of features proper to many games precisely as bad.

We have argued that a good video game, like a competent work of fine art in any medium, is created for the intrinsic merit of its concept: a game maker, as much as painter or composer, must perceive his idea as beautiful , an end in itself, apart from any instrumentality to human ends.

This because there is a distinction between the good of the work, the good of the “workman” and even the goods of people who come along to enjoy the work. We have previously remarked on the “tyranny” of the artistic object: “precisely given the ‘individual’ soul of the work in its conception, there are ‘strictly determined ways of realizing it, depending on the pure exigencies of the work itself and brooking no liberties’. According to its conditions as an original being or individualized creature (not merely the essential part of one) in the mind of the artist, each work will intrinsically possess ‘undeviating rules of operation through which [it] will well and truly be what it ought to be’, rules particular to each artistic conception [as to an original species]”. A work lacking such an internal regulating formal cause is nothing but an instrument, like a broom for sweeping or car for driving.

This might suggest our response to 343’s insights. They have not spoken to anything involved in the conception or even material expression of an autotelic creative form. They have instead provided a list of ways in which modern games are parasitized from without by [what Maritain calls] “theses”: intentions “extrinsic to the work itself, foreign importations which impose an alien rule and end on the work”[ii].

When an artist conceives a work to accomodate the social interaction or “fun" of those who perceive it, to demonstrate some abstract idea or earn him profit, his work is not produced according to its own inner logic and for its own good, but partly for this reason and partly for others, like two men rowing a boat in opposite directions. Every item on the provided list is a thesis, a goal tangential to, or even in competition with, the end of producing an autotelic concept with no necessary human instrumentality.

So 343 seems to be saying that running a digital social club or casino might prove harder than making a game.

Meanwhile, tiny dev teams have proven that making a God-honest video game is easier than ever. Impressive use has been made of widely-available toolkits to produce, for a modicum of the price, games far better than anything from 343 or their peers, despite lacking [the accoutrements of a video-game social club and casino:] 8k graphics, online functionality, community management, abundant design staff, complex tools or constant updates.

[i] https://twitter.com/Unyshek/status/1557787860882710528

[ii] https://maritain.nd.edu/jmc/etext/art7.htm