This is one of the main reasons I was happy to leave the game industry after eight years of doing it.
Working incredibly hard to build a product served to a group of people that are often hurtful emotionally stunted man-children is just a deeply demoralizing experience.
Obviously, many gamers aren't like that. But a fucking whole lot of them are, and they are extremely vocal, and it doesn't take many of them to suck the joy out of the job.
Imagine a bar where every time you walked in the door a half dozen dudes invariably turned around on their barstools and told you your clothes look like shit, your face is disgusting, you hair style is stupid, you smell like trash and, you should just fucking kill yourself now. How often would you want to go there?
Unfortunately, I think games themselves often encourage this mentality. Most games are about making the player feel empowered inside a virtual universe that exists purely for their own exploitation and satisfaction. The whole point of playing games is to get an escape from the consequences of our actions.
People that are strongly drawn to that or spend too much time in that mindset are basically training themselves for a toxic mindset when it comes to interacting with actual humans.
"entitlement simulators" what? I'm sorry but how are Fortnite, Call of Duty, Elden Ring, Minecraft, etc entitlement simulators? That's really scraping the bottom of the barrel for a narrative there. Lol at "speedrunning" being an indicator of colonialism impulse. It's as if the author of that talk is looking at the world through entitlement tinted glasses, heavily steeped in anti-colonialism and postmodernism and cannot see anything but.
Any time you run any kind of business, whether it's retail or video game production, your most vocal feedback will be negative. People are 10x more likely to complain about a bad experience than rave about a good experience. Social media just makes it easier to amplify the negative feedback, since it's far more likely to go viral. Add to that the fact that people can get clout and even earn their own following from doing entertaining takedowns of bad games and you get an adversarial attention economy that people pick up on. You really have to develop a thick skin and roll with the punches.
But I know Minecraft because my children play this game. To understand the game dynamics, I played Minecraft for a few days and watched Youtube videos and consumed other contents about the game. I am sure I don't know many subtleties and the Minecraft subculture, but this is not neccessary to understand what "entitlement simulator" means:
I watched how my son casually killed a villager's llama then did not even pick up the remains.
I asked him why he killed that animal in the game. It seemed to belong to someone!
He was genuinely surprised by my question.
Now I understand why he killed the llama. He had power. He had entitlement. He did it just because he could. Minecraft gave him freedom.
I need to understand this because I don't want this attitude near me in real life. Luckily my son seems to know the difference between the game world and real life.
But, wow, was I very surprised by the callousness of that action!!
You play video games for long enough and the symbol of "llama" wears off and it starts to become a symbol of "crafting ingredient for this recipe I need" and then later on it becomes "a series of button presses on the road to a speed run goal".
The callousness is not against the animal. The callousness is against an uncaring mathematical system he wants to get through and towards his own goals.
He doesn't see llamas in the real world as a mathematical abstraction, nor does he see human ownership of animals as arbitrary developer code.
That's not your son being entitled, that's him being entertained in a sandbox. Even without video games your kid will stand up action figures and kill some of them with the others. Even without action figures at some point he'll play a game where killing is part of the play. Even animals in the animal kingdom do mock battles with their fellow lion cubs and wolf pups. It's completely natural.
If your son thought he was "entitled" to that place it would be a form of entitlement.
Most children start out feeling entitled. Learning that the world doesn't exist for their benefit is something that is learned. Even games teach you the concept. The game doesn't care about your goals and won't modify it's rules just so you can reach those goals. You learn while playing the game that there is a system there you need to work within. You can learn to exploit that system to reach your goals but the system itself won't modify itself to meet your goals. Games don't teach entitlement they teach you how to understand and adapt to a specific system to reach your goals.
The whole point of video games is to get to do things you can't do in real life, and explore what kind of person you are through that experience.
When a video game presents you with a verb, a possible action you can perform, in this case to cause damage to what's in front of you, of course players will experiment what happens when they use that verb on pretty much everything.
Do you also experience moral panic when you erase a pencil drawing of a llama? That's what your son did. He erased a symbolic representation from the virtual canvas of his Minecraft world.
This is a recognized phenomenon. Games are simulations of reality, almost always with softer rules, and players are essentially gods within that simulation.
> Imagine a bar where every time you walked in the door a half dozen dudes invariably turned around on their barstools and told you your clothes look like shit, your face is disgusting, you hair style is stupid, you smell like trash and, you should just fucking kill yourself now. How often would you want to go there?
Replace the word 'bar' with 'school' and this sounds like a write-up of my much of my pre-university experience.
I'm convinced that junior high and high school, at least in the US, amount to mass child abuse. Like, structurally, that's just what they are, almost unavoidably without totally changing how they work.
Even decent school experiences are, by the standards of the adult world, crazy-bad.
How many people have anxiety-nightmares for a decade or more after graduating high school? How many unavoidable experiences in life so consistently generate that kind of thing? How many develop sleep disorders in school, that follow them for life? Depression? They're really, really bad.
I had a quite good school experience and that ~6-year span is still, as I approach 40, far and away the worst part of my life. It's not even close. Nothing else half that bad has lasted even one year, let alone six.
> I'm convinced that junior high and high school, at least in the US, amount to mass child abuse. Like, structurally, that's just what they are, almost unavoidably without totally changing how they work.
> Even decent school experiences are, by the standards of the adult world, crazy-bad.
Why is that? What is different about US schools?
I (nor my spouse) have any experience with US mid & high school but I hear things like this so I worry, having a young child now in the US, still many years away from high school.
In contrast, I can't think of anything bad about my (non-US) high school days. As a math geek I certainly wasn't in any hip group, but everyone was nice and it was a good experience. Now 30+ years later we're all still in touch and have reunions and meet whenever paths cross and remember those days fondly.
It's not just US schools. I have a distant relation in Norway who suffers severe bullying in her school. In contrast to the Portland schools my kids go to, teachers take a hands-off approach to bullying, believing that it's the kids' responsibility to resolve it themselves.
I was beat to the ground several times a month all of high school - often by 3 or 4 people. I took care of my friend after having been stabbed at a party. 2 of my friends were killed before I graduated. I’ve been shot at and had guns pulled on me “for fun”.
The education was terrible as well, but I don’t blame the teachers or staff. They were doing the best they could.
Outright bad schools in the US are incredibly bad. I had no idea how bad until my spouse substitute-taught at a couple of them, a few years back. Like, fear-for-your-life-every-day bad. Like, there's a 100% chance that at least one kid you're in class with will be in prison for killing a classmate before you graduate. That kind of bad. That's a whole other matter from completely ordinary US schools being a very bad experience, and far more grave. Those places are straight-up misery machines. Shameful monuments to our moral inadequacy.
I think the difference as far as how the problems might be addressed, is that ordinary schools are bad in ways that are basically on purpose, while the worst US schools are bad largely due to catastrophic society-wide failures that aren't really the school's fault, and hardly within their ability to even begin to fix.
- ~8 hours in school per day, often in buildings with minimal natural lighting. During the Winter, this may mean almost no sunlight all day (no recess, like in elementary school). Wanna make people depressed and give them SAD that'll stick with them long after they're adults? Just do this to them for a few years.
- Intense workload. We consider it bad when a job takes more than 8 hours a day from you. Schools routinely take 10 or more (math classes were the main culprit, at least in my case). Hope you don't have any other plans... oh look, many kids do, so now they're in actual hell.
- To add to the above: super-strict and rapid turnaround expectations on work. You cannot put something off until tomorrow because you're feeling really bad today—it was only assigned today, sure, but it's due tomorrow. Some stuff had longer timelines, but many things were the due-within-24-hours sort (again, largely math's fault, at least in my case)
- Bizarre mind games where people tell you insane stuff like "enjoy this, these are the best years of your life" and "you think this is bad, just wait until you're in the real world! This is just trying to get you ready for the expectations of adult life!" Like, I've not only worked cushy high-paid white-collar jobs, and I've never worked in an environment remotely as bad as school grades 7-12, nor with those kinds of strict expectations, nor with such inhumane treatment. When a workplace is consistently close to as bad as school, it's news (Amazon warehouses).
- Jail-like conditions. Need to stretch? Need a quick stroll for your legs? Need to take a piss? Beg the boss and hope they're in a good mood. Granted, some workplaces are like this too (again: Amazon warehouses), but most of those at least give you a couple 15-minute breaks in addition to your lunch (passing periods don't count, they're typically only 5 minutes and you'll spend most of that grabbing your stuff and getting from A to B)
- Sitting in classes all day is about as bad and mentally/physically exhausting as sitting in meetings all day, for similar reasons. Ask most people how they feel after a full day of meetings. Expand that to a whole week. Expand that whole week to 6 damn years. Yikes.
All of that is purely about the schools themselves, setting aside their strong tendency to foster awful, abusive, bullying dynamics that students cannot escape, both among students and staff. Or problems with school start times and teen sleep patterns (shit, as an adult I've rarely needed to wake up at 6:50 for anything, and if I did and I hated it I'd at least have some realistic hope of finding a way to change that pretty quickly)
I think all that makes it survivable (and I mean that literally) are the Summers and multiple long holiday breaks. When school's in session, it is brutal like few other involuntary (or de facto involuntary) activities are.
[EDIT] OH! And crazy-high expectations of self-organization and perfectionism. Here in the "real world", honest mistakes are taken in stride and my schedule and work-tracking are much simpler, plus I have a ton of support on those things. Even college tends to be far more lenient on those things than high school.
Again, I had a pretty damn good school experience, as those go, and my school wasn't one of those high-pressure ones you hear about in SV or wherever, and it was still terrible in these ways.
Covid has made this even worse, as they are not poorly ventilated disease pits.
I've met homeschooled kids. They are fine. A cousin was Waldorf schooled from K through 12. He's turned out great.
And what you describe is the better schools.
The bad schools are even worse. And the really really bad schools are even worse. People who live near them and can manage either move, or scrape the money to send the kids to Catholic or private schools.
Completely agree. Schools aren't built around what's best for people. They're a mass education system that aims to teach multiple tens if not hundreds or thousands of students all at once. To achieve that, they need all this prison-like organization to manage all those individuals. This also benefits parents who are out working during school hours. There are so many students they can't afford to know them personally and individually evaluate them, so they use these inhuman mass testing practices under artificial conditions. Applying those tests to the whole student body is too hard, so they do it infrequently which means mistakes have huge impact on evaluation which means nobody can afford to make and learn from mistakes.
I remember when I went to High School in France, I lived in the country side so it took an hour by bus to go there which means that I left home at 7:05am and would come back home at 7:10pm 4 days a week and, on Wednesday, I'd do 7:05am to 1:10pm
Between this + homework and the stress in the last year to get in the grande école I wanted lest I miss my one shot at it, it was the second most grueling work schedule I've had. The only time I worked longer hours was when I worked for a tiny Japanese company and we slept at the company in order to meet a project deadline (the contract we had with our customer meant we had to meet the deadline but it didn't matter if it was a buggy mess since bug fixing came after).
I don’t know it must be people dependent I guess. I was in the same situation distance wise from high-school than you also in the French countryside and it was some of the easiest of my life.
Workload is low. You don’t have much courses. The material is easy. I was an awkward teenager but all in all people were pretty nice. I don’t really have a complaint about high school.
Prépa was annoying however but mostly for the pointlessness of it all. Looking back I probably should have left to do something else after the first year but I can’t deny it was a good choice for my career.
I did a prépa intégré and it was significantly easier, mostly because, I lived on campus, I didn't have to commute (I get car sick so close to two hours of bus every day was tough in high school) and I didn't need to stay all the time in a school. When I had free time, I could go back to my place...
So, I guess it's not the workload so much as the butt-in-chair, long hours always being in the same place. Similar to being in Japan actually, low productivity, but long long hours... I also had a lot of stress/anxiety in making sure I get admitted to the school I wanted so I did a lot of busy work to make sure my grades were perfect above and beyond just learning and understanding the materials. In retrospect, it was overkill and pretty much un-needed.
Interesting response. Most of the above points sound to me like saying school was bad because there were classes and one had to study and do projects. I mean, sure, kids would rather play all day but there's nothing bad about having classes and having to study.
My school days were shorter at 6 hours, although if one wanted to do any of the extracurricular clubs you'd end up hanging out at school 1-3 hours afterwards. Most kids did, but it was optional.
I can't comment on what public school is like from the inside since I was lucky and my parents homeschooled me. But from the outside when talking to my friends it did indeed look like a form of child abuse. It's sad because, while you can opt out in theory the way my parents did, it requires a lot of sacrifice on the part of the parent.
Either you spend money on private schools if you can find one without the same pathologies as the public school or you have to give up one income in the family. Not everyone can afford to do that although it's easier than some people think. Public school is mostly subsidized child care for many so it's not easily changed and getting enough public funds to employ enough qualified people to reduce the worst pathologies to a manageable level is pretty expensive.
Indeed, my life began the morning after I graduated high school. The only people from then whom I'm not in touch with but would like to be, have unsearchable common names and don't sign up for those class reunion websites.
(I know, I know, I could find them with more effort. But really, why bother?)
I did not enjoy high school. Others have had it worse, but it was mostly something I had to endure.
A teacher in my senior year said something about how some students have the time of their life in high school, while others turn the page after graduating and never look back. Despite being an obvious thought, it kind of blew my mind at the time. The idea that I could choose to have a completely different life as soon as the school year finished filled me with all sorts of positive thoughts. Unsurprisingly I loved college and the newfound freedom I had to make more decisions about my life.
I guess the takeaway I have is that high school sucks more than it needs to for many students, and reminding kids struggling through it that things can get much better afterwards can be emotionally helpful.
He refers to open world games that don't push back against the player, as feeding a colonialist desire to conquer and complete. He posits that the player never learns that he can't have it all and thus learns to be entitled.
Not sure if entitled is the right word as a lot were power fantasies that focused on rising stats and increasing combat abilities, rather than strictly speaking titles. The pursuit of more flowing rewards naturally drags the player into a position which looks like entitlement.
Morrowind did it better than the later open world games, you had to level up a lot to access dangerous areas that could kill you. The dumbing down and excessive ease in games had been commented on since the original prince of persia.
The games community acts like a bucket of crabs, pulling down anything above it and ripping it apart to feed. The greed for more digital nurturance is exactly why the industry is profitable and getting the drug just right is an art. But the greed is also what drives the crabby trash talk.
>Chalking this up to modern games not having enough grinding honestly feels like exactly that kind of crab mentality itself.
Hope my post didn't come across that way. Morrowind's storyline and side-quests didn't feel grindy and learning how to break the system and level up quicker was part of the fun back then, before internet guides were a normal way to break the meta.
Skill has gotten really 'unpleasant', there's a lot of first person shooters that have features that require a lot of unnecessary discernment. Recoil that doesn't act the way it should, wikis full of extra item knowledge needed, dual monitor just for maps, hyper-precise timing and firing. A whole raft of "unfixed bugs" left in the game that you have to know. It's not so fun to be skillful at a game.
Getting through Prince of Persia in one go without resetting feels heroic. Killing some random guy in an fps because he didn't understand the recoil mechanics and getting a bunch of loot is just abusive.
I can understand people wanting skill and difficulty that feels good and willfully accomplished against the odds.
I’m glad you’re in a better industry now, and I’m extremely grateful that you wrote up your blog posts and books while dealing with that. They’ve been instrumental to my journey in programming.
Thanks, I'm glad I'm not in games now too, though I'm not bitter about the time I spent doing it. There are some downsides like infantile gamers and crunch, but a lot of upsides too. Making software designed purely to entertain and bring joy to people can be really gratifying. Getting to work with interdisciplinary teams with artists, designers, and audio people is a rare but very rewarding experience.
> Imagine a bar where every time you walked in the door a half dozen dudes invariably turned around on their barstools and told you your clothes look like shit, your face is disgusting, you hair style is stupid
> he refers to many games as "entitlement simulators", which is a profound truth
When I started playing Heroes of the Storm (MOBA) I though... "This is stupid, why would I play a game where I'm loosing roughly half of the time regardless of what I do? I'm playing games to experience how winning feels not this bs."
Somehow I learned to enjoy HotS, but I still think that single player games that simulate the process of going from loosing, through learning and development to winning to getting stupidely overpowered are the essence of gaming. Initial losses are necessary, so I hate games that initially let you win for too long. But the last stage where you are actually winning nearly always is also very crucial for the full enjoyment.
I wouldn't say escaping from consequence is the point unless you mean consequences of real world that are punishing you hard for even trying to achieve something.
20+ years in the industry. I think you are a little bit entitled. It does take a lot of effort to make even a crappy game, I have shipped my share of those myself. But the customer is not your elementary school teacher, who awards gold stars for the effort. The customer paid a ton of money (for HN readers $60 games might be cheap but they are not for the most people who buy games) for something he or she hoped to like and it turned to be something that had been shoved out... Imagine a fancy restaurant, with $$$$ menu where you order a confit de canard and get some undercooked chicken nuggets with ketchup? Will you ask if the chef having a bad day and how could you cheer him up?
Working incredibly hard to build a product served to a group of people that are often hurtful emotionally stunted man-children is just a deeply demoralizing experience.
Obviously, many gamers aren't like that. But a fucking whole lot of them are, and they are extremely vocal, and it doesn't take many of them to suck the joy out of the job.
Imagine a bar where every time you walked in the door a half dozen dudes invariably turned around on their barstools and told you your clothes look like shit, your face is disgusting, you hair style is stupid, you smell like trash and, you should just fucking kill yourself now. How often would you want to go there?
Unfortunately, I think games themselves often encourage this mentality. Most games are about making the player feel empowered inside a virtual universe that exists purely for their own exploitation and satisfaction. The whole point of playing games is to get an escape from the consequences of our actions.
People that are strongly drawn to that or spend too much time in that mindset are basically training themselves for a toxic mindset when it comes to interacting with actual humans.
I think a lot about this talk by Max Kreminski: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvlZinAvpwg
In there, if I remember right, he refers to many games as "entitlement simulators", which is a profound truth.