FBXL Social

Not to make a discussion about vidya too philosophical (even though I'm going to anyway), but it's a show of how the teleological and deontological are linked. You can't separate the two for long.

If you're a massive global megacorp and your telos is making money, then you might assume that as long as you do things that make more money then it doesn't matter which rules you follow. The problem is, people get to choose what they buy, and they get to choose what they play, and if you make slop with all these anti-gamer things, eventually as the video game industry is discovering the customers go away and your company is in big trouble.

For some devs, their telos isn't making money but being part of some cultural movement and engineering social change. The fact is, it doesn't change anything with respect to fulfilling your duty as a developer to your players. People say "video games were always political", and that may be true, but they weren't always political *first*. People used to tolerate the political messaging in games a lot more because the games were a lot better, and because the games were fun people would buy them to have fun and would accept the messages as part of the ride. Once game developers gave up on their duty to their players to make a fun and engaging experience first, the customers gave up on their role as players and moved on to something else (or as steam statistics show, they keep on playing 10 year old video games from the era where video games were fun.)

For completeness, some devs in following the telos of making money act to engage in social change. That may appear at first to be deontological, but it's just the means to an end, not fulfilling one's duty or principles, and eventually the ESG money runs out and your company gets sold to a Chinese megaconglomorate.

So what is that duty to players? That's a tough thing to say, because it isn't always the same thing. Video games can be engaging and entertaining but not be conventionally fun. Spec Ops: The Line fulfilled its contract with its player not by being a terribly fun generic military shooter, but by taking the player on a journey that made them feel increasingly uncomfortable with the implications of the narrative scaffolding of the modern military shooter and linear storytelling in video games. Even a game like thief isn't about conventionally fun activities, but instead hiding in the darkness waiting for a chance to sneak into the next room, but it's held in very high regard as a game that fulfilled its duty to the player.

Entire platforms have been taken down by the failure do to right by the player. The Atari 2600 died because the video game industry was focused on making cheap slop, and part of the success of Nintendo later was the "Nintendo seal of approval", a promise that the games you buy would meet at least a very basic level of quality. Smart phones were on track to become the largest gaming platform on the planet, but most people avoid the platform like the plague because the games generally fail to meet player expectations.

We're seeing a total media landscape collapse besides just gaming at the moment because this concept doesn't apply just to video games, but to other forms of media such as TV, movies, music, and even novels. Western markets for these forms of media have collapsed, and part of the reason is that they refused to follow the rules and do their duty.

As a counterpoint to the many examples of video games which failed deontologically and thus failed teleologically, I'd propose Stardew Valley as an example of a video game which succeeded deontologically and thus overwhelmingly succeeded teleologically. The one guy making the game wanted to make a certain type of game, and put his all into it, and kept his promise to the player, and even years after its release, Stardew Valley is still a highly successful game. As an example of a game that started off by breaking its promise, but ultimately largely kept it, No Man's Sky started off as something most people considered just more slop in part because it broke so many promises, but in the end it ended up succeeding because it ultimately did do its duty to the players. In doing so, it ended up succeeding in the telos of making money and today is held as a gold standard in saving a game from the scrap pile.

There was a study people often cite in management circles about old rules -- they took a bunch of monkeys, and when a monkey started climbing a rope to get to a banana they'd spray every monkey with freezing cold water. Eventually any time a monkey started to climb the rope, the other monkeys would beat them up to stop them. Over time, they replaced the monkeys, but the new monkeys learned to beat up the monkeys who tried to climb the rope, and eventually there were none of the original monkeys left but all the new monkeys would beat up any monkey who tried to climb the rope, even though none of them had any memory of getting hit with the hose. In management circles, this is used as a warning not to just keep doing things a certain way "because that's how it's always been done", but you can also take the opposite lesson: That just because you don't know why a certain thing is done a certain way doesn't mean there's no reason. With the influx of money people into gaming, and the huge influx of doe-eyed college kids who think they know everything who are getting into the field because they're cheap and work 190 hours a week for a 40 hour salary because it's their dream property they're working on, a lot of the lessons that built the industry are being lost.

Another problem comes from Genesis -- Moses formed a compact with God, and led his people for 40 years, but in the end he got cocky and yelled to a rock "Hey rock, make water because I said so" instead of paying proper respects to God -- and God did make water, but he also cursed Moses to never set foot in the promised land. A lot of old game devs were super successful by following the rules and eventually started to think the reason they were successful wasn't because they were following the rules but because they could do no wrong. You see that sort of hubris from some game developers who used to do great work but today are filled with hubris and disregard both the rules and their players, assuming that the customers will always return. They do for a little while (the water does come out for Moses), but many of those developers are now developing failed games and their careers are effectively over. We saw this long before the modern era, with examples like Daikatana -- John Romero saw himself as a patron saint of gaming who only needed to be released from the damning constraints of id software. At Ion Storm, he developed Daikatana -- a game that even after 25 years of patches by the community is just barely playable.