![]() "It’s like a wolf pack or a gang or something. "A lot of game developers have an ‘are you man enough to run with us’ attitude," one anonymous veteran developer tells Gamasutra. Which is why it’s so strange to be asking this question: Is the games industry really a happy place? "Playing all day" is what brought us all together the liberal joy of interactive entertainment is why we’re all here. And the consumer seems terminally unhappy with them both. Games media resents and condescends to its audience, and in many cases even develops aggressive vendettas against aspects of the industry it feels make appropriate targets. In this vicious cycle, where each of three parties continually fails to satisfy the others on which it most crucially depends, it’s easy to see the seeds of bitterness sown – angry developers lash out at one another in the public forum, fatigued of rivalries or disillusioned by the likelihood that they will be jettisoned from their home base like so much depleted material when their project doesn’t make targets. ![]() ![]() User policies are implemented without too much apparent regard for enormous swaths of feedback, and gamers are consistently told by a more mainstream culture that their hobby is irrelevant, cannibalized in big gulps by Facebook and iPhone. They watch helplessly while the industry seeks new ways to monetize them, casualizes their beloved properties so that a disinterested "everyone" can play (whether a game whose audience is as specific and passionate as StarCraft II’s needs to worry about "accessibility" is a fair question for the traditional audience to ask, for example). ![]() But the audience has a bone to pick, too – they’ve been promised revolution and given merely low-risk iteration. Of course, the common stressor that developers and journalists together face is the video game consumer, primarily the core gamer. Writers, reviewers and critics of all stripes cope with being made largely-lambasted "personalities" by a consumer base that often seems more interested in the writers than they do about the work being done in the field the writers cover. Some game journalists work their asses off for little pay, begging for scraps of interview access from a looming wall of corporate marketing, only to receive snide lectures from bloggers on how they’re not "real" journalists, to be privy to swaths of peanut-gallery essays about how they’re not "real" writers. And when that game ships? A sea of arbitrary, tepid reviews from an apparently-jaded reviews corps, and endless forum threads stuffed with one-liners from an audience comfortable contributing only "failget" to the discussion. And there are some difficulties that are not exaggerations: unfortunately, there are major-title studios where an 80-hour week isn’t a melodramatic legend, but a light schedule. Okay, so maybe it’s not always quite that extreme, but the fact is that the game industry is actually quite a deceptively-stressful place, and fresh-faced younguns with dreams of "playing video games all day" are in for it. You will probably enter the biz doing, as the grim adage goes, bug testing for a Dora the Explorer tie in you will probably enter games journalism blogging on UberGam3rzHell dot com for free, glad when you get one comment that says " tl dr" because at least it means someone clicked on your headline. No, in fact, there are not a million page views at the ready for your exhaustive essay on the themes of Silent Hill 2. No, the awesome mascot-based space platformer you cheerily sketched on graph paper when you were supposed to be focused on math homework is not going straight to production. Just about anyone who’s longed for a career in their favorite medium has gone through it – the crucial phase wherein the luster’s buffed off and you realize that this biz is a lot of goddamned work. ĭrill down past the surface irritation at being misunderstood, though, and find a little latent resentment. Not only is it a bit frustrating that your career seems so inexplicable to so many people, but we take our work pretty seriously, and resent having it distilled down to a pointless pursuit by some common cohort that still correlates the game industry with bleeping asteroid-blasting (and there still exists a frustrating volume of those buggers, doesn’t there?). And you got pretty annoyed, or at least you did after the fifth or sixth time someone said so. You’ve probably heard that one before, whether you’re a developer or a member of the games media. "So you just get to play video games all day?"
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