This is somewhat theoretical and somewhat based on observation, so take it with a grain of salt. I am not privy to the inner workings of most game studios, so I have to do some extrapolating. But there are glimmers of insight at times into why things go wrong, such as the disaster that was Anthem’s development: https://kotaku.com/how-biowares-anthem-went-wrong-1833731964

Mistreatment of workers, management who flip flops on what they want, tools that are not fit to purpose, and more.

Beyond this, there are capitalist factors like how some games get designed to be more about extracting money than being fun or interesting. See “Let’s go whaling”, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNjI03CGkb4

But what I’m focused on here is more about things that go wrong even when intentions are good and people are trying to make a genuinely good experience. We could try to say that most of it comes down to capital not caring about quality and leave it at that, but I don’t think it’s that simple. One of the elements that the video game industry is known for, is exploiting authentic passion in people who choose to work in video games. Another element that it’s known for, and I don’t know how true this still is right now, but I remember it being a thing in the past, is that equivalent jobs in other industries tend to pay more and have better treatment for workers.

So I think it’s safe to say there is a lot of good intention going around among the working class of game developers. Yet games still tend to have many problems in development.

Ego and advancement

The easy target for criticism here is ego in management. Game directors with grandiose visions that don’t account for the time and labor it takes to fulfil them. But it’s not only them who are encouraged to focus on their own advancement. Regular grunt workers are encouraged to do much the same under capitalism and further encouraged in the individualist mindset of self actualization and self fulfillment.

Want better pay? A more advanced position? Job security? Being able to say you worked on XYZ project at a company that did something meaningful for it is important. It doesn’t sound impressive in the same way to say that you worked on a team who accomplished something meaningful. How much did you do? What tasks did you complete? How were you useful, so that you can be useful in this other company over here?

Whether you have the ego or not, it’s often made about you. Your performance, your contribution, what you as an individual bring to the table.

This is a mistake that individualism continually mistakes. The success of an organization is not the sum of the skill of each individual employee. People who can complement each other’s strengths and shore up each other’s weaknesses will do more together than people who can act like “rockstars” as individuals. But individualism and the structure of capitalism actively disincentivizes people from viewing organized work in this way. It instead encourages the “rockstar”, the “great man theory” figure who looms larger than life and carries the project to victory against all odds through weight of their sheer “talent.”

In reality, the closest thing to real such figures are not “rockstars” in their profession, but are highly skilled organizers. They can appear from a distance as if they are larger than life because they are skilled at getting other people to do more together than they would do alone. The individualist perspective takeaway here would be that they should be celebrated as astounding organizers, people whose “talents” are difficult to grasp because they are so beyond the normal, the average, the mundane. The more collectivist perspective might look more like that they symbolize the value of careful, studious, and dedicated organization.

In other words, the individualist only sees a “great man”. The collectivist sees a symbol of “us” at our best, together.

Chaos glommed together

Looping back to video games in particular, these are heavily creative projects, complex and unwieldy. Developing them is often not a linear, well-treaded path. A lot of experimenting can happen and a lot of ideas will only ever become half-realized. This kind of context is surely one of the worst places you could have individualism so heavily going on. Instead of having a process through which something is iterated on and refined, you will more have a process through which something chaotic and scattered has to be glommed together into a rushed whole before a deadline is reached. And the primary motive is not to make something that is greater than the sum of its parts, but for the individuals involved to have something that looks good on a resume and fulfills their sense of individualist, creative pride in a job well done.

This can still produce good work some of the time. It’s not like it prevents all success and produces nothing but dreck. Many a game has aspects of it which are memorable and enjoyable, and get a cult following, if nothing else. But many a game also has aspects of it that seem out of place, confused, disjointed, or outright unfinished. Some of this can be laid at the feet of poor management, but it’s also a matter of plain consistency of themes and design, and accountability for the work of others; that is, if you see it as work that is partly your own, rather than work done by someone else, whose work won’t matter so much on your resume.

Games, like any other project, work best when people are working toward the same thing, in a way that is agreed upon as something of value to work on. But the culture of individualism and capitalism encourages them to work toward their own thing, or to work toward the confused “visions” of an individualist leader who is reading the tea leaves for signs of a breakthrough in design that will make their place in “great man” theory. This is consistently going to have disastrous results.

My chaos

Now you get to tell me where you think this is accurate or not, and so on, so that hopefully we can arrive at something better than what it started as. Because I am no “great man”. :)