Our Flappy Dystopia

The problem isn't capitalism. The problem is that people are so wrapped up in first-world problems and distractions from anything meaningful that they actually believe something as trivial as Flappy Birds is worthy of expending any emotion whatsoever.

how our societies are organized by valuing people and things by their monetary value above all else structures how we talk about games

and

The mainstream culture of games development demands you are from a class of people who could go into computer science or digital art training and have enough resources to handle an industry that has a terrible track record with labor issues.

But the application of these ideas to Flappy Bird and Candy Crush misses the mark. From everyone I've heard from, the backlash against these games stemmed from the fact that they are addictive, dull, and not creative; capitalism was not a significant factor.

If one of the usual indie darlings had made Flappy Bird, it would be hailed as a "brilliant, hardcore, minimalist free-to-play flying game with ingenously-simple touchscreen control, procedurally generated obstacle courses, and 8-bit-styled graphics that recall the glory days of NES."

I also found it really surprising that the author didn't mention Minecraft, which somehow graduated from being an Infiniminer clone to being an original IP you can sue over. Not coincidentally, today there are only "Minecraft clones".

Ehh....to the extent people are complaining that it looks like Super Mario, they're complaining about infringement upon a Japanese game, so the xenophobia complaint doesn't really hold up. I thought most people hated Flappy Bird because it was difficult, pointless, and so addictive that they had wasted lots of time on it despite the other two flaws.

There are? In fact, there's more now than ever, especially with the popularity of postmodernism in a large variety of media publications.

Now, I agree with you on "weird free games" that are excluded from mainstream attention. They're not profitable. But then again, being countercultural has never been profitable. What's more: most people don't want to play art games and minimalistic, philosophically motivated indie productions. They want the next multiplayer Call of Duty game. It's a sad reality, but it is what it is.

I have to ask you, however... why are you specifically referring to minority artists? Minority in the sense of intellectual disposition, or in the sense of demographics? If it's the latter, then minority game developers are very rare to begin with. That's not really a fault of institutions not giving them attention.

You also imply that all art games or games developed by minorities deserve attention. This is not the case. I consider myself to be open-minded when it comes to a good art game with a message, but there's tons of underproduced crap that masquerades under the banner of art to make up for its mediocrity.

It doesn’t sound nice when it’s constantly called out, does it? Because it isn’t. There is a price tag to participating in games. The mainstream culture of games development demands you are from a class of people who could go into computer science or digital art training and have enough resources to handle an industry that has a terrible track record with labor issues. The standard success story of someone in the games media is a person who can afford to keep up with the newest products and has the resources to write for free or low-wage for about two years. Important conferences, even when you’re invited to speak, often cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars to attend.

This is all true. Crunch time and low wages are notorious.

The idea of success outside the conventional method of capitalism, which is intersectional in its effects, is met with contempt.

This is obviously true for AAA companies who want to keep their hegemony, but I honestly doubt most people are hostile to unconventional business models for indie games. Quite the contrary, such endeavors are becoming more popular and people are getting more receptive to them. I'd blame contempt on a lack of imagination more than anything.

The conversation of what is and isn’t a game is often, intentionally or not, used to assign value to already established gaming conventions that benefit the established system and marginalize works that do not look like it, and therefore threaten it. Mobile games are often slated as ‘casual’ games, which people in the gaming press and development overall side-eye as a genre of games mostly just looking to grab people’s money.

Except casual games are a legitimate distinction. This also includes their business model. As for people berating hardcores versus casuals, that's largely an in-joke.

Except, well, that’s ALL of AAA games, such as the hype around how much Grand Theft Auto V made despite that it was profiting off of flagrant sexism and racism.

Uh... GTA V may not exactly be the most social justice-friendly game out there, but it portrays the grisly aspects of the real world as they are.

Dong is considered an outsider. Who is he? From Vietnam? Oh, that explains this ‘knock-off’ rhetoric people are using.

It’s because the gaming community set up a success narrative for certain indie, mostly white, mostly men, mostly from English-speaking countries, developers who strive to make smaller games competitive with the big dogs.

And here we go, people... the reason there was a backlash against Flappy Bird was because the developer was Vietnamese! IT WAS ALL RACISM!

Hate to break it to you, but Flappy Bird was a painfully generic and dead simple Helicopter clone with graphics that imitated (not saying stolen from, but imitated) Super Mario Bros. People were mostly baffled at the insane success of such a, quite frankly, stupid game.

Because of social justice activism and outside pressure from a society that sees gaming as grotesque, awareness about how exclusionary games are is at critical mass and the industry is scrambling to answer. It has no fucking clue how to market to and include minority members of their community and in the world at large. So when Farmville, Peggle, Candy Crush Saga, and Flappy Bird appeal to this mysterious audience big budget and scrappy indies can’t seem to tap, it’s foul play.

I can't believe this author is legitimately defending games like Farmville and Candy Crush, which are deliberately designed to be highly addictive, while having a highly grinding gameplay and then carelessly exploiting its players down to the last penny. All this coming from an anti-capitalist, too.

But that's how the gaming industry works. Like any other industry, it exists to make a profit. The gaming community isn't some misogynistic wasteland of sexism and racism. If you can even claim there's one coherent gaming "community", that is. There's plenty of subcultures separated from each other. The main problem with gaming is the immaturity of its audience.

Ultimately, more social justice drivel. Can't have enough of it on HN, I guess.