Jank Mail: Auto battling

It has been a big week on Jank. By far the main event was Brendy’s extensive explanation of why he doesn’t like auto-battler games, which continues to rack up online commentary from the tiring “let people enjoy things” (he at no point suggested they shouldn’t) to the intriguing “there is a semi-arbitrary distinction between game feel rooted in physical movement and game feel rooted in UX design” (busted). 

My point is not that these games make us lesser players or lesser people. It's just that they're not half as interesting or groundbreaking as their huge sales numbers and endless praise suggest. Just because something is powerfully psychologically compulsive doesn't make it good art. Just because something eats your time, doesn't make it worth your time. 

So much of our life is already made slick with the grease of automation. It is absurd to think of anybody wanting the self-reading book, the self-watching movie. Why would I want the self-playing game? The whole distinction of games as a medium is that they are about doing stuff. The game that leans more and more towards autoplaying threatens to nullify that distinction. With every button-to-action process that becomes autofire or autorun or autobounce, we become less a player and more an observer. Not even an observer, because that is neutral. We become a subject of the game's whims. 

Our mission is not simply to make people cross on social media, though, as I hope was proved by Hannah Nicklin's essay on desire in the eternal connectivity, as represented by (among other things) the game ELIZA.

In the non-fiction work The Mechanic and the Luddite, author Jathan Sadwoski also offers us helpful ghosts. He starts by defining that term ‘miasma’ – the toxic cloud of capitalist technoculture that pervades our daily lives. Sadowski traces how digital technology is used to produce and reproduce capital at the expense of, well, all of us. Harms are built into big tech's culture of ‘innovation’, people-as-data are a resource for extraction and exploitation, and the harmful principles of ‘rentier capitalism’ that traditionally applied to real estate have been adopted within tech as  'such-and-such as a service’. And of course, Sadowski’s text traces the latest form of technocultural exploitation: AI. He describes how AI allows capital to “[further objectify] workers as being merely extensions of machines, while also forcing people to become more mechanical in how they work and live.”

Graham reviewed Sandustry, after accidentally losing most of a weekend to optimising infinite sand machines.

The need to redesign still feels like a natural consequence of my choices, rather than something being forced upon me. I have created a bunch of problems for myself via the design of my machine, and because they're problems I feel I created, I now get the pleasure of unpicking them. The feeling is the same I get from refining a single machine in a more focused factory builder such as Opus Magnum, or the sensation of refactoring actual code I've written myself.

I summarised what we’ve learned about game novels from Season 1 of Text Adventure, which can be further summarised as: they’re routinely terrible because the process doesn’t permit them to be otherwise, although in many cases the writers aren’t helping. 

Games can’t rely on background worldbuilding to carry the story. The classic rule of “show don’t tell” is something that gets beaten out of people by veteran producers backed by decades of data showing players will ignore anything that they’re not forced to look at. In books, the writer has the luxury of total control of the reader’s gaze; the craft is in expressing atmosphere or character by indirect means. In games, the writer is reduced to writing implausible graffiti in spotlit locations and explicitly spelling out character flaws, sometimes in the first person in the first encounter.

In this week’s Total Playtime, we discussed CEOs posting through it, layoffs, and videogame-based philanthropy, before we all retired to play some games. Finally, we revealed our first set of subscriber goals, which are mostly just “hiring more writers” and we’ve already hit the first one which means a regular Sin Vega column coming your way soon.

Beyond Jank, it’s the week before Gamescom so everybody wants to announce their new thing. There’s a developer from some of the people behind Human: Fall Flat; a publisher dedicated to curating games as well as publishing them, and a developer that’s interested in satirical games about being jobless in the games industry, the market for which increases weekly. 

In concurrent developer news Compulsion Games and Double Fine are now officially independent studios again. Compulsion is “gathering information and exploring partnerships” and Double Fine is going to run Amnesia Fortnight and then have Kickstarter backers decide what gets made, which is a neat demonstration of differing approaches to risk. If you want to support either, you can do that by buying their games. 

Somebody seems to have got hold of GTA 6 and is posting daily leaks to hype a memecoin and compel Rockstar to bring back physical discs, neither of which suggest a sophisticated quarry for the sinister forces Take-Two has unleashed to track them down. The leaks themselves suggest that the game looks like GTA and contains supercars, violence and a map, which I’m pretty sure was already in the Steam description and thus doesn’t seem worth the hassle of being hounded into multigenerational bankruptcy. The laid-off Rockstar workers want merch sales not boycotts, please update your capitalist urges accordingly. 

Riot is giving up on its 2XKO fighting game because it is not making enough money. This did not surprise the developers who’d already been laid off, but the servers are staying on and offline mode will be left in perpetuity which is something. Playstation told the people it told to make a live-service Horizon Zero Dawn game to go back and take the live service out, which is another line item in the enormous cost of the firm’s failed pivot to live service.  

The Saber CEO attempted a reflective LinkedIn post and started a new fight with Chet Faliszek: the lesson is, never post. Rank-and-file Bethesda staff continue to rally against the recent layoffs, and rank-and-file EA staff see the same in their future. That weird cult game is being made by Mel Gibson’s son, funded by cannabis millions and has a snake gun. 

Warren Spector has quit making games after 44 years and 17 games because it’s “not as much fun for me any more” but left with a cheering signoff to point out that “games are not a solved problem yet” and young developers should “make people forget people like me ever existed”. Fellow Deus Ex alum Harvey Smith says it’s the worst time in history to launch a new game studio but he did it anyway and it’s going to make immersive sims. 

A bunch of ex-Epic guys are building their own engine, with blackjack, and hookers, and inevitably also AI. Roblox is being investigated by the US Senate after reporting 65,381 instances of suspected child abuse in a year. Sony doesn’t know how it’s going to afford RAM either. You can take Donald Duck and Goofy to hell in 2027. 

Let's take this to the comment section. Scarlett B ruminated on factory games in response to the Sandustry review:

I don't need to reiterate the point from the article that the best kind of factory game is one that invites you to make an imperfect machine from the start, and then has you watch it crumble under its own weight once some new requirements set in. But I'd like to add to it, that, if a game doesn't do this organically soon enough, you can do it of your own accord. A good factory game won't stand in the way of that by being too simple. I like it when a game gives me more to work with than incentive to work with all of it. The opposite of giving you much to do and little to do with, which quickly results in finding the optimum and then waiting.

Jak Marshall has a clear view on desire as mediated through technology, in Hannah's essay on desire within the Miasma.

None of us fully express our fullest truest desires online, nor can we. Desire isn't static, and many of desires contradict each other in ways I can't even fathom encoding into a machine.

kemuel makes a case for Vampire Survivors in response to Brendy's rejection of its form.

Worth considering "where" a game actually is amidst all this, though. Build-crafting and level-up-deciding shouldn't be overlooked as the fun part in-and-of themselves - they can be involved enough to carry an otherwise automated game in their own right.

When I'm playing Vampire Survivors most of my attention is on achieving the weapon fusions - what can I make with the random options I'm presented with each level-up, is my current damage keeping up with the mounting hordes of enemies, and how far can I risk stalling to get what I want before I get overwhelmed. The level up choices are active decisions that (to me at least) represent the actual Survivors "gameplay". You can get it wrong and fail as a result.

That's all for this week. Go and play some PC games.