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Comment by interrealmedium | Hacker News Reader

That's it, I am done. No more serious IT work for me. I am going to become a gamers consultant. If there are people who care enough to make things like this, there must be people who would pay decent money for "professionals" to come in and optimize their factorio game, or their minecraft builds, or to make them feel good about their solution to a Zachtronics puzzle.

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You joke, but Factorio is a sufficiently "crunchy" logistics game that it has prompted me to study a number of serious topics, from learning linear programming to determine optimal production ratios, to dipping my toe into learning about the broader subject of systems dynamics, with stocks, flows, feedbacks, and so forth. I maintain that it's an excellent educational tool for these sorts of subjects.

> minecraft builds

Yeah that's the whole point of Roblox bucks for example, paying creatives for their builds

No doubt, gaming support has been a serious business for a while. Far beyond the gold farming, item trade, and "pay me for voice chat" underground. I'd take a bet that almost everybody reading this who cares about cloud providers has come into contact with companies who started out by providing servers and administration services for Counter Strike or Minecraft.

I’m guessing you’re mostly not serious, though I acknowledge there may be a market for what you describe.

As a lifelong gamer since the Commodore 64 (since parenthood scaling it way back to mostly crewing a tank in Hell Let Loose with two friends, or a ttrpg with same), looking back it feels like I took refuge in a medium (single-player games) ultimately less valuable than other-format stories, like books, film, and radioplays. What I’m driving at is a feeling that I’ve enjoyed elevated layers of luxury that may be an indicator of too much idle time for too many people in US culture. Is this a common mindshift with age?

Escape has a place, but a whole industry built around spending so much time in abstraction layers feels like a problem if it’s not helping us relate to each other better.

Video games are just a younger medium than books and movies. Even TV needed more time to be seen at a similar level to movies in terms of art.

We're getting there though. The past 15 years have given us many masterpieces of gaming that can absolutely be considered art, and they're becoming more and more common. As this happens more and more, the medium is taken more and more seriously.

Many games still suffer from feature-creep by way of trying to please users demanding "content". This incidentally make them feel like the primary goal is to waste time rather than to experience a high quality story. In other words, there are still too many "Big Bang Theory" and not enough "Breaking Bad" so that is why it still feels less valuable.

Because I told you I just binged The Queen's Gambit, you wouldn't look at me like I wasted my time, you'd ask me about the story. If I told you I just binged TBBT, you'd just think I'm nuts. (No offense if you like TBBT, it was a decent sitcom for a couple seasons, but … hey, you do you).

For example, I just finished Control. A wonderful, high quality game. Great storytelling, great mechanics, and … a crapton of completely useless busywork that is just there because it's expected to be there. A talent tree, repeat random side-missions, a crafting system, etc. None of this is useful to the core game. It's a shame because I believe if it had done less in terms of busywork mechanics and maybe focused a tiny bit more on puzzles, that game could have been a masterpiece of the same caliber as Portal and Portal 2. (Can you imagine if Portal 2 had a talent tree and a crafting system?)

Instead, it's a Season 7 of Game of Thrones. Great production value, but so hit and miss in terms of final quality because of avoidable mistakes. Could have been so good, you know?

Thanks for reminding me about Portal, and for the TV analogy. It might have been a Gamasutra article about games also being works of art, and a young medium (tabletop games, too, have both come a long way and have room to grow). We certainly have a plethora of options for how we spent our time alive.

The key is in streaming your work.

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