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7/15/2025, 6:32:54 AM
> The closest that most of us come to a direct experience of the centerlessness of the "videogame industry" is an encounter with the game studio. As a gamer in late vidya, you increasingly exist in two, distinct realities: the one in which new game announcements are provided without hitch, and another reality entirely, the crazed Kafkaesque labyrinth of "game studios", a world without memory, where cause and effect connect together in mysterious, unfathomable ways, where it is a miracle that anything ever happens, and you lose hope of ever passing back over to the other side, where things seem to function smoothly. What exemplifies the failure of the game industry's world to live up to its own PR better than the game studio? Even so, the universality of bad experiences with game studios does nothing to unsettle the operating assumption that the industry is inherently efficient, as if the problems with game studios weren't the systemic consequences of a logic of the Industry which means organizations are so fixated on making profits that they can't actually sell you anything.
> The game studio experience distils the financial phenomenology of late vidya: the boredom and frustration punctuated by cheerily piped PR, the repeating of the same dreary details many times to different poorly trained and badly informed operatives, the building rage that must remain impotent because it can have no legitimate object, since - as is very quickly clear to the gamer - there is no-one who knows, and no-one who could do anything even if they could. Anger can only be a matter of venting; it is aggression in a vacuum, directed at someone who is a fellow victim of the system but with whom there is no possibility of communality. Just as the anger has no proper object, it will have no effect.
> The game studio experience distils the financial phenomenology of late vidya: the boredom and frustration punctuated by cheerily piped PR, the repeating of the same dreary details many times to different poorly trained and badly informed operatives, the building rage that must remain impotent because it can have no legitimate object, since - as is very quickly clear to the gamer - there is no-one who knows, and no-one who could do anything even if they could. Anger can only be a matter of venting; it is aggression in a vacuum, directed at someone who is a fellow victim of the system but with whom there is no possibility of communality. Just as the anger has no proper object, it will have no effect.
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