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.
Thank you for reading! Yeah it's always tricky to know what one can do. It's a very easy age to throw your hands up and just let the bulldozer of sludge games take its course, or to just call it a day at 'well we need to overthrow the current system...' but like, I feel like no side to the argument has any definitive proof as to what actually works with e.g. changing games, so it definitely doesn't hurt if someone with interest in games takes a moment to think about creative ways they can do something to improve things! This reminds me a bit of the relational playworld idea I had earlier this year: https://melodicambient.substack.com/p/living-in-the-relational-playworld
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.
Thank you for reading! Yeah it's always tricky to know what one can do. It's a very easy age to throw your hands up and just let the bulldozer of sludge games take its course, or to just call it a day at 'well we need to overthrow the current system...' but like, I feel like no side to the argument has any definitive proof as to what actually works with e.g. changing games, so it definitely doesn't hurt if someone with interest in games takes a moment to think about creative ways they can do something to improve things! This reminds me a bit of the relational playworld idea I had earlier this year: https://melodicambient.substack.com/p/living-in-the-relational-playworld
Artificial selection...