First section would be about how existing as a tool for corporate profit harms the medium. It'd talk about things like concentration of the industry under a handful of companies, predatory microtransactions, the rise of subscription-based platforms where players never really own the games they play, how series like Call of Duty serve as propaganda for the American military industrial complex.

Second section would discuss how video gaming might be different under socialism, based and my own experiences with other nonprofit hobbyist developers - artistic expression over spectacle, an end to predatory monetization models, making the hobby accessible to people who can't afford expensive consoles or gaming PCs, etc.

  • CarbonScored [any]
    ·
    1 year ago

    As always on the innate link between Capitalism and video gaming, I like to link people to the Godot Game Engine official doc on Encrypting Save Games. Sadly since removed to avoid arguing (cowards).

    Encrypting save games

    Why?

    Because the world today is not the world of yesterday. A capitalist oligarchy runs the world and forces us to consume in order to keep the gears of this rotten society on track. As such, the biggest market for video game consumption today is the mobile one. It is a market of poor souls forced to compulsively consume digital content in order to forget the misery of their everyday life, commute, or just any other brief free moment they have that they are not using to produce goods or services for the ruling class. These individuals need to keep focusing on their video games (because not doing so will fill them with tremendous existential angst), so they go as far as spending money on them to extend their experience, and their preferred way of doing so is through in-app purchases and virtual currency.

    But what if someone were to find a way to edit the saved games and assign the items and currency without effort? That would be terrible, because it would help players consume the content much faster, and therefore run out of it sooner than expected. If that happens, they will have nothing that prevents them from thinking, and the tremendous agony of realizing their own irrelevance would again take over their life.

    No, we definitely do not want that to happen, so let's see how to encrypt savegames and protect the world order.