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Stop Personifying Game Studios

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This morning’s blog post is admittedly going to be a bit of a wild ride. It is a topic that I have been kicking around in my skull for a few weeks now. I hope to do it even half the justice it deserves. Lately, I have been on this binge of consuming the Old Man’s War series by John Scalzi. I’ve been listening to these in Audiobook form while playing Path of Exile, and I love this so much. While I still read books, there is something about listening to the narration while my nervous energies are channeled into a video game that has largely been committed to muscle memory at this point. I feel fully engaged, and it has rapidly become my “happy place”. It also helps that so far this series has been amazing.

I was looking forward to this series because John Scalzi at this point was a known property. I backed into his works differently than most, and the very first novel that I read was Kaiju Preservation Society. I consumed this over the course of a few evenings of staying up well past midnight reading from bed. A few months later I did the same with Redshirts, and after having consumed both… I knew that at some point I would have to read the series he is most known for “Old Man’s War”. This made logical sense because at this point I had consumed two different books from the same author, so it was highly likely that I enjoyed their particular writing style. It was a safe bet because well-established authors tend to bring with them a similar vision to the material that they write.

This does not work for video games. Video Games are a combination of lots of different creatives pouring their energies into a single project. While we love to elevate a single figurehead at a given studio… each game is a snapshot of the state of that company at that very moment. While there are certain tropes that a given studio might have… I can say that Starfield feels like a very “Bethesda” game. I can say this because it is approaching problem-solving in the same way I have experienced in other Bethesda titles. I cannot however state that Starfield is a great experience, because Bethesda created it. It was created by a wide number of individuals who took inspiration from previous titles, but the game being fun and engaging was not a certain thing. I would be surprised if anyone that worked on Fallout New Vegas for example, worked on Starfield. The games were created by wildly different casts of individuals, but we as gamers… have this bad habit of trying to compare them as equivalent products.

So when I approached Diablo IV, I brought with me all of the emotional baggage of having played thousands of hours of games in the Diablo franchise. I also brought with me the emotional baggage of having grown up idolizing Blizzard as a studio. So when I played the game, and it felt bad… it was very hard for me to reign in my disappointment and keep myself from turning into a rabid poo-flinging monkey. I still think that Diablo IV is a bad game, and I think that because I am a core ARPG gamer… and quite frankly the game was never targeting me in the first place. I also think of Blizzard as this storied monolith of a company that encompasses so many fond memories… when in reality they have not produced a new game that I enjoyed since 2013. Sure I enjoyed the heck out of Legion, but that was an expansion to a game that came out in 2004.

Similarly when I approached Mass Effect Andromeda or even Anthem… I brought with me the memories of hundreds of hours spent with each and every Bioware game to that point (save for Jade Empire, I never got into that). I enjoyed Andromeda quite a bit, but it was a pale comparison to the greatness that was achieved over the course of the three games in the Mass Effect trilogy… and even then… they didn’t really stick the landing in that third game. With Anthem I brought my expectations of what a Bioware MMORPG looks like… because Star Wars The Old Republic was a phenomenal experience… and once again I was sadly disappointed. While there was some cross-over between these teams… each game represented a brand new version of what the studio was trying to produce, and as a result, was a completely different product offering.

As gamers, we have this bad habit of personifying Game Studios. We treat them as though the organizational structure itself is capable of pooping out phenomenal game experiences that are similar to those we have had in the past. Sometimes even studios believe this themselves… see the information that came out about the launch of Andromeda and how it was expected that the “Bioware Magic” would somehow pull together a brilliant product in the end. The games that we have loved were snapshots of a moment in time… that may or may not ever happen again. Personifying the Studio as having these indelible properties that can recreate that experience… is only setting us up for heartbreak, disappointment, and eventually failure.

Truth be told… we as gamers with our unrealistic expectations are not entirely to blame for this problem. Game Studios themselves and games media in general are also stoking this fire. How many times have you seen a project being marketed based on where the devs working on it came from before? Hell, the entirety of studios like Dreamhaven seems to be a large dish full of member berries trying to stoke nostalgia about the imagined “good ole days” of a specific studio. The thing is… You would be hard-pressed to find a single game studio out there that does not at least have one person who used to work for Blizzard or Bethesda or Bioware, etc. The game development community is extremely fluid and because of the lack of stability and the tendency to burn a team down after release… means that folks have to go whenever they can to keep a paycheck coming in. Since around 2005, there has never been a time where I have not had at least one close friend working for Blizzard… but the thing is… none of them have really stuck around for more than a few years at a time.

We would be so much better off if we could approach each game that gets released with a fresh set of eyes, and ignore the many-tentacled hype machine. This is part of the reason why folks seem to respond so glowingly to anything that is truly new to them. For example, we are seeing this sort of glow-up happening right now with Baldur’s Gate III, because for so many people Larian Studios was an unknown property. However, for me, I have been playing their games since at least Divinity II, and was definitely there for the fledgling roots of what we are seeing in BG3 with Divinity Original Sin. All of that said though, it is so pure to watch players embrace a game on its own terms… and for its own merit. It is equally heartbreaking when a game that is genuinely good but still a little rough around the edges due to launch constraints, gets memed into oblivion by Streamers and YouTubers.

The hype cycle sometimes inflates a game to proportions that it never could have lived up to. Cyberpunk 2077 is one of these situations, but quite frankly… so was Mass Effect Andromeda. Both were games that given time and attention could be turned into something beautiful. We are seeing this redemption arc with Cyberpunk, but given the financial backlash instead saw with Andromeda the entire Mass Effect series killed off for the better part of a decade. So while I lay the blame squarely at the feet of the gamers for trying to treat the game studios in the same way that I am treating books by a single author… aka John Scalzi. I also blame the studios themselves, the marketing departments, and the 24-hour gaming news cycle desperately seeking anything that even smells a little bit like news in order to fill content deadlines. I fail miserably myself at this all the time, but I also know I would be far happier, or at least less grumpy if I allowed myself to approach everything without expectations.

That is it… that is my soapbox and now I will stand down from it. Expect more blog posts about me talking about some nonsense that I am up to in Path of Exile tomorrow. I can only handle so much seriousness at once, and even with Path of Exile, I have had to deliver myself a dose of realism. I had a lot of hype built up going into the Path of Exile II announcement, only to walk away disappointed and afraid that this game I was pinning my hopes on… was not really going to be what I wanted to play. Instead, now I am trying to stop thinking about it and just enjoy what I enjoy. It feels deeply weird that I am not engaged in the Zeitgeist right now, and not feverishly playing either Baldur’s Gate III or Starfield… while having at the same time enjoyed both. I’m trying to plot my own course independent of FOMO, and right now… my brain craves the familiar rhythms of Path of Exile.

I have no clue what point I was really trying to make this morning, and I definitely doubt that it will make any difference. I hope you have a most excellent day… but now my cats want me to feed them.

Internet Ephemera

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Friends… there are times when I feel my age. Namely when I get something stuck in my head from the early years of the internet. Essentially for me, there is this time from the late 90s to the existence of YouTube where the internet was a wild place. Instead of Social Media you had forum culture, SlashDot, Ebaums World, and New Grounds. It is still a marvel how in an era of so many disconnected islands, things still managed to go viral. If you were “very online” it is certain that you know what the above image represents… and you are finding yourself singing along to it in your head without me needing to post a compilation video where it loops for 10 hours.

The first one of these that I remember was Hamster Dance, which is itself just a page filled with animated gifs that has a looping wav file. The “song” only lasted a few seconds and was an extremely sped-up loop of a portion of Whistle Stop from the 1973 Robin Hood movie. If you are really curious about this page, there is apparently a CBC deep dive into the story behind it. What matters more was the fact that it was a signpost on the internet that everyone of a certain age knew about. It was even printed out in various physical guidebooks to the internet that inexplicably existed from the era. I think things like this achieved a state of virality, just because there was so much less content being created. While I started fucking around with HTML circa 1993/94ish… most people were completely in the dark bout how to craft any sort of online content until the mid-2000s. So when something novel and interesting sprung up, word tended to spread quickly.

It is now time to bring this discussion around to what is actually stuck in my head right now. In the era of the internet prior to YouTube… video was very much an unsolved problem. Sure you had RealPlayer and QuickTime… but the proliferation of motion video did not really happen in a large way until Macromedia Flash came on the scene. Download speeds were a problem as most of the folks online were still connecting through a 56k or worse dial-up modem. I believe I managed to get DSL in 2000, but I was one of the very first people in my town and Cable Internet existed… but was still very limited in its reach. Instead of transferring frames of video, Flash allowed you to effectively transfer a number of highly compressed assets and vector animation paths, that were then recreated into something that resembled video on the end user’s machine through a browser plugin.

This created an explosion of websites sharing short looping animations. “Look at my Horse” mentioned above is one of these from Weebl who also gave us “Badger Badger Badger“. The one that is stuck in my head however comes from Rather Good, and features a duo of crudely mashed-together characters known collectively as “Spongmonkeys”. This pops into my head at the least appropriate times… and I am forced to belt out “We Like Tha Moon!”. I was working at a small startup with my good friend Chuck/Vernie and for whatever reason… we got this stuck in our head for weeks. There was a whole series of these videos featuring these abominations, but nothing really hit as hard as the first one. It is when you get to the “We Like Cheese We Like Zeppelins” that tends to make me lose my shit.

If people remember these now, however… they tend to be referred to as the “Quiznos Rats“. How “We Like Tha Moon” got stuck into my head recently is because I saw a meme talking about how no one would believe you that this was a commercial. It wasn’t just a commercial… it was a Super Bowl commercial. The mid-2000s was this time when advertisers had no clue at all how to deal with advertising to an internet-enabled audience. Meme culture existed, but no one really knew what to do with it once it left some random forum of friends. What these ended up being is a weird sly nod to the aggressively online like me… and completely fucking baffling to random Grandmothers in Wisconsin. Everything was weird in the heady days before the Dot Com Crash.

So you might be asking yourself… “Old Man Bel, Why are you talking about this nonsense?”. The other day I came across a video that made me “lose my collective shit” in a way similar to those classics of a bygone era. The problem is… it is so damned ephemeral that I could not track down the original version on TikTok. I could not embed the version posted on Mastodon, and in order to get something with enough permanance to feel comfortable sticking it in a post… I had to download the damned video and generate a nonsensical unlisted YouTube video. None of the original sites surrounding the content I have talked about today still exist. RatherGood seems to have been sold off probably several times over, and Weebl to the best of my knowledge has not existed for a very long time. What we have instead is crappy Youtube copies of the originals that were made in an era of postage stamp resolutions. Even then… only the most popular things remain. I was looking this morning for another video from RatherGood called “Jamie and the Magic Todger” and could find no version that still played.

I guess it concerns me that there is this entire era that just is ephemeral. I already find myself questioning my memory of these things. Did they really exist or did I just imagine them? We will likely always have David After Dentist as long as YouTube still exists, but Charlie Bit My Finger appears to be gone from the site as apparently it was sold as an NFT. We are living in the worst timeline. I guess the slow death of Twitter and Reddit, have made me contemplate the mortality of internet culture. Things that I once took for granted, like the ability to watch Charlie the Unicorn any time I want… now suddenly seem a bit less certain when I am not really certain that YouTube actually turns a profit. The end of the era of unlimited VC funding seems to be over, and it does make me wonder if there is a way to archive all of this for future generations. Like I am not necessarily saying that We Like Tha Moon, rises to the level of high culture… but it is at least important to me.

Anyways… Happy Thursday. Sorry to be a downer.

Existential Dread

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Good morning friends. Every so often on my blog I have a post that I put zero effort into syndicating. This is going to be one of those posts. So if you are here and reading it… that likely means you are amongst my most loyal and devoted readers. In the before times I was your average mild-mannered aging fat software developer and manager, working out of a maze of cubes just like everyone else. My team has NEVER needed to be in an office to do our work, but we existed in a culture that placed a high premium on “butts in seats”. When the pandemic hit we were the first team to go fully remote, and as such acted as the canaries in the coal mine to vet how well it would work. The thing is… it worked amazingly well and at least in part due to some planning and heavy use of the Teams environment… we sort of set the pace for the other teams as they went remote. Now we scan forward and I’ve been working fully remotely for over three years at this point.

For a while, I tried to do a hybrid schedule of a few days in the office and the Lion’s share remote… but the days in the office were just giant wastes of time. I cannot really tell you when I last was in the office, but when I was it was for a very short in-person meeting before going right back to my home office. Next week however I am going to have to be present and in person for a training course that is only offered once a year. So that means I will be in a room with other humans from 8 am to 5 pm Monday through Friday… and I have to admit I am terrified of this. It is summoning forth so much anxiety that I have begun having “Return to Office” nightmares very obviously sparked by it. This morning I woke up about an hour before the alarm was set to go off and just could not go back to sleep. My mind reeling with all sorts of minutiae that I was trying to figure out how to deal with.

The thing that is terrifying me the most… is knowing that I am going to have essentially all of my work peers in the same training class with me. They are all very extroverted folks and many of them have said more than once how much they miss being in the office, or how much they miss seeing me on the regular. The thing that terrifies me the most above everything else… is contemplating dealing with lunch. I know I will need to run away and hide by myself in order to calm down enough to confront the afternoon session. However once upon a time I was really good at masking my antisocial and introverted tendencies. I pretty regularly went out to lunch with coworkers, because it was the sort of thing that was expected. Working remotely for three years has caused me to jettison behaviors that were stressing me out all along… and I am terrified of what this week is going to do to me mentally.

The thing is… it will probably be fine. I do this thing where I make problems out to be way bigger than they are out of the anxiety of actually doing it. The hardest part about attending anything… is getting out the front door. When I am in the situation I tend to relax into the environment and go with the flow, but I know it is going to be way more stressful than it used to be because I am simply not adapted to it anymore. Truth be told I barely leave the freaking house. On the weekend we make a few trips out for supplies, but during the work week, the furthest I am out of the house is hanging out in the backyard with Greybie. I’m trying to tell my brain to calm down and that everything is going to be fine… but my anxiety is working everything up into a frenzy.

The other thing that is stressing me out is… normally next week would be the week I lock down everything into place for Blaugust but it is VERY unlikely that I will blog at all, given the tumultuous shift in my schedule. So I am trying to scurry around this week and make sure everything is finished because next week… is essentially going to be this void. I will come home from training every night and crash, and will likely be unable to summon cogent thoughts… let alone write something worth reading. Anyways… every so often I make one of these posts where I am brutally honest with my readers. I never syndicate them because it feels weird to let you all into my thought process, let alone publicly broadcast my weaknesses to the world.

My blog is often times therapeutic. There is something about writing things down that allows me to turn them over in my head and process them a bit better. Usually, when I make one of these posts I start to feel better almost immediately, and I am hoping that this time it has that effect as well. I shared a picture of Josie in part because I felt the need to do something to apologize for this giant wall of text. Also, I sort of wish I had her life because she does not give a fuck about anything most of the time. Anyways… I’ve wound down this little written panic attack for now. Tomorrow I will likely write about game things. Today however is devoted to existential dread.

Magic Blue Smoke

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Good Morning Friends. This is going to be a bit of a light spoiler day because yesterday I caught up with the last few Marvel movies that I had not seen. First I finally got around to watching Black Panther Wakanda Forever. I was not entirely certain how a film without Chadwick Boseman would go, but in the grand scheme of things I think it went pretty great. I’ve always liked Shuri, but what I really liked was the quirky scientist character she was allowed to be. Shuri as Panther was also enjoyable but did not feel as uniquely “her” for lack of a better term. I thought overall the film was enjoyable but lacked the clear focus that the first film had. I think that is the problem with the current crop of Marvel films… they feel like they don’t quite know what exactly they are building towards. The highlight of the film for me was further world-building and seeing both Namor and Talokan.

Ant-Man and the Wasp Quantumania was another big world-building movie bringing us finally to the Quantum Realm. Again I think that the movie itself was fun, but lacked a lot of the focus that the earlier outings had. It sorta felt like a D&D campaign where your GM just kept throwing new faces and locations at you without giving you much in the way of the backstory behind any of them. We know Kang is a big bad because we have been told over and over that he is a big bad, but it feels like it isn’t something that has necessarily been earned. For Thanos, we saw the effects of him long before he took the field, so, as a result, he was a bad guy that we fully grasped and respected without having to keep explicitly stating that “this dude is really powerful and bad”. I enjoyed the spectacle of the movie and the settings… but it doesn’t feel like we got enough time with any of it to really matter before booping us back to reality again.

In electronics work, there is a term called “Magic Blue Smoke” that happens when you phenomenally screw something up. There are usually some sparks, the air is filled with the smell of ozone, and a little puff of blueish-grey smoke billows up from the object. After this point, it is completely dead and no amount of poking and prodding is going to bring it back from the dead without replacing some major components. I feel like the Magic Blue Smoke has left the Marvel projects, and while they are interesting spectacles they are missing both the core focus that the pre-endgame sequence had and also missing a lot of the heart. I think this is what happens when you truly stick the landing and complete the story in a largely satisfying fashion, and anything more just ends up cheapening the experience. I’ve felt this a few times before with franchises, and I think Marvel as far as movies go is “done”. I still enjoy them for what they are, but the magic is gone and I am uncertain it will ever truly come back.

I feel similarly about Final Fantasy XIV and how Endwalker was the extremely satisfying conclusion to a ten-year journey. I’ve struggled with returning to the game because I no longer have that narrative driving me forward and making me want to crave more knowledge. FFXIV is still a technically competent game and I am sure will keep producing interesting content, but the journey I was on has finished. I am uncertain what the next journey is going to look like, but they will need to hook me in the same way they did with A Realm Reborn in order to get me to commit to following the next one. I’ve reached a level of maturity in gaming to understand that is what is happening, and not that the game is somehow “worse”. In fact the game is probably in the best state it has ever been in, but the adventure I was on has finished.

Looking back with wisdom… I think this is ultimately what caused me to peel away from World of Warcraft. At the end of Wrath of the Lich King, the story had reached a conclusion and we had dealt with all of the “big bads” left over from the Warcraft RTS lineage. I know I struggled with Cataclysm but was never entirely certain WHY I struggled with it so hard. It was an expansion of changing the base world and lacked the big adventure aspect of the other expansions of going someplace we had never gone before. More than that however it featured a central story arc that I did not care about in the least. I’ve never much cared about the Dragon storyline and Deathwing just seemed like a convenient reason to revamp some of the older zones that were showing age. Arthas and Illidan were what kept moving me forward into new content, and with them forcibly retired at the hands of the raiding players… it felt like I had reached the logical conclusion of the game.

I think we’ve reached this point at least with Marvel where the best stuff is happening on the smaller screens. Loki, Wandavision, Werewolf by Night, Ms. Marvel, She-Hulk, and event the somewhat maligned Moon Knight are doing extremely interesting things. The movies just seem to lack the same spirit and creativity that is being played out in short-run series form on Disney Plus. I mean Star Wars has also suffered from this problem for quite a while where the Dave Filoni-verse represented the best and brightest of what was available for that setting, and the movies were hollow shells. Disney will always chase big box office gold, but I think maybe that era is over. I find myself enjoying the more focused and personal stories of the series. For a while in the Marvel films I have been waiting for another conflict to erupt that feels as good as the sequence that ultimately ended with End Game, but I am no longer certain it is coming. I think maybe that was a once-in-a-lifetime event, and now that it is concluded the entire concept of what a “Marvel Movie” is needs to change.

I’ve seen a growing dissatisfaction on social media for awhile surrounding the Marvel releases, so I am pretty certain I am not alone in thinking the original focus of the films is finished. I am not sad that I watched either the second Black Panther film of Quantumania, but neither made me necessarily excited for what is to come. I am sure I will keep watching these films in the future when they come to streaming media, but I think I am done with the “going to the theater” phase of the Marvel cinematic experience. I am way more excited about what is happening on the small screen than anything I know coming to the big one.