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feel like one way people write about AAA games from a progressive angle is to convert them from a single instance of Bad Labour (exploitative, hierarchial etc) into a smorgasbord of Good Labour (the craft and autonomy of individual rock textures)
and this can be a way to counter auteur or company narratives by placing the focus on people who get written out of those histories! but it's also.. kind of a critical convenience, in that there's always an atomic level of Good Work to fall back upon
the question of how a work is organized, or what these games are communicating by requiring these kinds of hyperspecialised labour divisions to even exist, can sort of be elided as long as you imagine a space of pure craft is happening SOMEWHERE inside the blob.
so in a sense this stratification becomes what's celebrated, in that the starker the divisions get, the easier it is to imagine isolated pockets of unsullied termite craft which can then redeem and elevate the rest of the work.
it depresses me because the approaches developed to discuss AAA are the ones get rolled out to cover every other kind of game. value-extraction machines are trained to assume this mode of organization as a neutral baseline and to act within the confines that it generates.
eg: "solo game development" has been romanticised a lot and is always, at the very minimum, collaborative in the we-live-in-a-society sense. but frankly it's weird to see the term being unpacked by people who don't actually... play small games developed this way to begin with?
like, is there an investment in understanding what this category means or could mean in comparison to studio development..? or is it just an awkward conceptual irritation which then has to be squeezed into the same sausage machine we use to help process the latter?
would people PREFER that "solo art" be composed of outsourced labour because that level of alienation is now central to how the moral meanings of these games get laundered? ha ha ha... no, i would NEVER argue in THAT much bad faith.....................
the smorgasbord model is what it is! and is probably even fine for the specific context it evolved for. but there is something gruesome about seeing it continue to outgrow that context, gradually presented as the outer limit of what's possible.
