Design Refineries
Recently I’ve been grappling with what systemic effects emerge from the ways the game industry curates content. This question has surfaced as I’ve been thinking about recent rejections from shows, press, etc, for Danchi Days and Angeline Era, but also wondering about people who genuinely believe older games are ‘worse’.
Here’s four things I see as having curating effects in games:
Video Essays
Curated Showcases
Curated Awards
Storefront algorithms
(As usual… I’m speaking in terms of averages: not all showcases, or video essays, are the same!)
In each of the above, things, there is an act of curation.
A video essay tends to select, as its subject, a game that is popularly considered to be good (or is at least popular enough for people to want to click.) (“What Zelda gets right about XYZ”).
Showcases have a slight tendency to show games which have popular appeal or traditional reveal-based marketing styles, reflecting industry trends or corporate strategies
Awards shows are based around curating what some demographic of judges deems good.
Storefront algorithms have curation built in to uplift games already doing well.
In each of these cases, these four entities take as input a vast pool of games, and the output a fairly normalized, but smaller set of games. This smaller set of games captures more attention, and thus, goes on to influence the next generation of games.
Design Refineries
I think of this systemic effect as a ‘design refinery’. The four aforementioned things function to take many possibilities and refine them into fewer possibilities. They discourage certain decisions (‘ugly art’, nonstandard narrative presentations) and while encouraging others (‘good controls,’ being like Mario). What feels particularly bad about it is that it implies that game design ought to be a linear evolutionary process where games ideally coalesce into genres, and eventually output better and better games. Rather than games as human expression, they’re simply raw, crude materials that ought to be refined into a perfect steel ingot.
For example, the best deckbuilder, the best roguelike, the best action game. Why do we see so many parry mechanics? Because action games have been refined over the past 10 years to select for that. But the more and more games are refined, well, the less present the human actually is in the final game. There’s a lot more ‘actions’ in real life than just parrying things. When game design gets refined, it fools us into thinking that there are fewer possibilities than there are. That the world is measurable and categorizable into depressingly few categories.
I think it’s very unnatural and anti-human to have design refineries. Life isn’t about having perfect, predictable experiences.
I don’t think that the above four things necessarily have to create a design refinery effect. There’s ways (already existing) in which they can function to actually diversify and encourage new connections and growth in game design. But, as usual, of course there’s an implicit pressure as financial incentives underpin everything, so we tend to get the design refinery.
So in conclusion… well, there is no conclusion. I just thought ‘design refinery’ was an interesting way to capture what seems to be going on nowadays.
Let’s leave this on a more positive note…!
Games I really like recently
There's a lot of truth to this model, though I lack the background as a creator. Lots of humanity left on the cutting room floor of the refinery for being less palatable, though the breadth of humanity covers much, much more than what the most popular games reveal. Its less related to the main thrust of this model, but these refineries also put a lot of inertia behind certain stories and characters that, through shallow sequels, don't stand much on their own merit.
Its certainly recognizable that these games can and should exist, and digitally there's technically space for them, but it does feel like there are not enough stages to present the breadth of games that are available. There's lots of overlap between the 4 engines of the refinery process you mentioned, it feels like the Profit Motive doesn't allow much room for anything that isn't already gaining/having gained popularity.
Its easy to say "people are obligated to pursue profit and that controls what they're willing to spend time on creating/curating", but harder to know what to do about it. At least within the realm of creation, creating more works, more meaningful works, with the hope that the machine will notice your efforts (at the cost of adding you as another part of that refinery process) seems like the main way to be. In a world where we didn't have any bills to pay, that might be enough? Hard to feel a good way about it.
Anyways, thanks for writing this, its given me more to think about.
Artificial selection...