It's Not Just a Game Anymore

This article feels (several times) longer than it needs to be to make its point, but the comparison between Roblox and Minecraft in particular feels emblematic of the past 15 years.

Minecraft has user-generated content and is a highly social game. But what it isn't is optimized. Notch has plenty of personal failings, but he isn't a businessperson or a product manager, he was just a guy making stuff he thought was cool and fun. He wasn't sitting there tracking conversion rates. He didn't have a dashboard indicating average Time-To-Diamonds for new players, and he certainly wasn't creating a platform where thousands of others could all optimize in parallel.

Roblox, on the other hand, is optimized. And predation is, at least in part, an emergent property of a business optimizing its metrics (and of its employees optimizing theirs). No product manager ever got fired for increasing revenue or improving user retention, so they just continually do things that do that - in ways that throw other things under the bus, because those things are not their job.

It feels emblematic because that same parallel-optimization-turned-predation has been happening to everything else, too. It's why your Pizza Hut pizza sucks now, it's why you can't buy a TV that doesn't track you and insert ads, it's why you can't get takeout without having to go "no, I'm not tipping, skip >:(", it's why the front page of CNN is full of crystal-woo-level health advice, it's why almost everything you eat is meant to push overconsumption, it's why a toaster from 1965 still works but one from 2019 doesn't, it's why every phone and Windows update installs shitty mobile games and Facebook, and on and on and on.

Games just make it obvious because the optimizations are (mostly) visible. And even then, for every example you see, there's another you don't.