Like I said downthread, I wasn’t really looking at derailing this thread by starting a debate, but to clarify my position, the industry as it exists today collapsing is entirely okay with me. I’d be happy to live in a world where all games were freely distributed public domain solo endeavors, small collaborations, and the rare larger (but still not this large, likely) productions organized as public works or naturally-occurring oddities.
When were games ever like that. Even in the microcomputer era sole bedroom coders were still selling their titles to publishers to make some money out of it. What your suggesting sounds like a horrible experience where everything is stuck in early access forever but with less reason for people to finish their project as no one has put money down.
whether or not games were ever like that isn’t actually relevent to the point they made, also tons of unfinished games are basically already sold as complete.
What they were describing was basically a society that relies on a gift economy, which has already existed in the past, and still exists in some places and forms today. We’ve been brainwashed by capitalist societies to think that would be a “hippy-dippy, fantasy land” because capitalism and bartering are what is natural to us, but it’s been shown that a gift-based economy is what a lot of uncontacted tribes use. It’s also how a lot of friend groups interoperate - hell, start a minecraft server (some other survival game will do) with your friends right now, and you will almost certainly naturally default to using a gift based economy.
Uncontacted tribes also don’t have advanced medicine (though not to say they haven’t discovered a great deal of important things on their own) or well… videogames. If you want to live like that more power to you, but for all the faults of modern society it has massive benefits as well.
I think there’s plenty of middle ground to be found where we can have our cake and eat it too even if it looks wildly different from what we have now. Gift economies just don’t work when you have billions of people involved. It’s ultimately more efficient to give people money and then they can spend it on what they need or want. Even the idea of a corporation or company isn’t inherently broken, people will always have a need to organize themselves to create efficiencies and build bigger things than they could on their own.
Capitalism is shit, the concept of money, and organized labor, is quite good.
Uncontacted tribes are not the only ones that have used such systems; plenty of other societies throughout time have used similar systems, some quite recently even. It is not antithetical to modernity. For a recent example of a society that used a gift economy, you can look up “Korean People’s Association in Manchuria”. I was using uncontacted tribes merely as one example to illustrate that the idea that bartering and capitalism are “natural” and “how it always worked” isn’t true, despite that being what many believe.
It’s ultimately more efficient to give people money and then they can spend it on what they need or want.
Why is it more efficient, exactly? In a gift economy, you don’t have to give anyone money for anything and won’t starve for not having enough money. In a gift economy, you help each other where possible and do things such as art or science for fulfilment and not because you have to put food on the table. Someone who can help, but rarely does, slowly begins to get shunned by the rest of society.
EDIT:
To read more on gift economies and anarchism in general, you can read:
Petyr Kropotkin’s Conquest of Bread is a good one; that’s more theory
George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia; a sort of memoir of Orwell’s time in Catalonia fighting alongside anarchists
Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed; a sci-fi story about a futuristic anarchist society living on a planet that mutually orbits another planet that is inhabited by other societies.
How do I get a computer?
My neighbors do not make computers.
The next 100 towns over don’t either. (at least not in whole)
Do I go to the computer people in taiwan with a bunch of stuff the engineers and manufacturing technicians need?
How much time would I have to spend to do that?
Wouldn’t it be nice if we agreed on a medium of exchange that represented my labor, fair share, or value to society that I could just send electronically and could be exchanged again locally for what they need specifically?
It sure is the way we lived naturally in small tribes, but that’s not tenable at a certain point and it’s why almost every society that has grown to a sufficient size to make good use of it has invented some form of currency.
Money isn’t the problem, it’s the way it’s used.
Also society is so large there’s no way to have that level of accountability for everyone unless you create some neofascist social credit system.
If people want to live in a fully-automated luxury space communist utopia where everyone is free from want and able to make and release games for free as passion projects, that’s great, and a worthy goal to work towards, but promoting piracy on principle without concern for how developers will be supported during their work in the context of our current capitalist society is somewhere between naive at best and self-serving rationalization at worst.
like, the game industry is incredibly exploitative, even if piracy does causes direct harm to it, thats honestly a good thing, it is set up to benefit publishers and share-holders over anyone else, especially the people actually making the games. supporting the end of that isn’t “hippy-dippy”
Games are made to make profit, Bethesda made it and have legal rights to distribution, without profit games would not be made at this scale.
I’m not really sure what you are trying to say to be honest.
Like I said downthread, I wasn’t really looking at derailing this thread by starting a debate, but to clarify my position, the industry as it exists today collapsing is entirely okay with me. I’d be happy to live in a world where all games were freely distributed public domain solo endeavors, small collaborations, and the rare larger (but still not this large, likely) productions organized as public works or naturally-occurring oddities.
When were games ever like that. Even in the microcomputer era sole bedroom coders were still selling their titles to publishers to make some money out of it. What your suggesting sounds like a horrible experience where everything is stuck in early access forever but with less reason for people to finish their project as no one has put money down.
whether or not games were ever like that isn’t actually relevent to the point they made, also tons of unfinished games are basically already sold as complete.
I didn’t really see much of a point made, just some hippy-dippy, information wants to be free man, fantasy utopia that will never work.
What they were describing was basically a society that relies on a gift economy, which has already existed in the past, and still exists in some places and forms today. We’ve been brainwashed by capitalist societies to think that would be a “hippy-dippy, fantasy land” because capitalism and bartering are what is natural to us, but it’s been shown that a gift-based economy is what a lot of uncontacted tribes use. It’s also how a lot of friend groups interoperate - hell, start a minecraft server (some other survival game will do) with your friends right now, and you will almost certainly naturally default to using a gift based economy.
Uncontacted tribes also don’t have advanced medicine (though not to say they haven’t discovered a great deal of important things on their own) or well… videogames. If you want to live like that more power to you, but for all the faults of modern society it has massive benefits as well.
I think there’s plenty of middle ground to be found where we can have our cake and eat it too even if it looks wildly different from what we have now. Gift economies just don’t work when you have billions of people involved. It’s ultimately more efficient to give people money and then they can spend it on what they need or want. Even the idea of a corporation or company isn’t inherently broken, people will always have a need to organize themselves to create efficiencies and build bigger things than they could on their own.
Capitalism is shit, the concept of money, and organized labor, is quite good.
Uncontacted tribes are not the only ones that have used such systems; plenty of other societies throughout time have used similar systems, some quite recently even. It is not antithetical to modernity. For a recent example of a society that used a gift economy, you can look up “Korean People’s Association in Manchuria”. I was using uncontacted tribes merely as one example to illustrate that the idea that bartering and capitalism are “natural” and “how it always worked” isn’t true, despite that being what many believe.
Why is it more efficient, exactly? In a gift economy, you don’t have to give anyone money for anything and won’t starve for not having enough money. In a gift economy, you help each other where possible and do things such as art or science for fulfilment and not because you have to put food on the table. Someone who can help, but rarely does, slowly begins to get shunned by the rest of society.
EDIT:
To read more on gift economies and anarchism in general, you can read:
Petyr Kropotkin’s Conquest of Bread is a good one; that’s more theory
George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia; a sort of memoir of Orwell’s time in Catalonia fighting alongside anarchists
Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed; a sci-fi story about a futuristic anarchist society living on a planet that mutually orbits another planet that is inhabited by other societies.
How do I get a computer? My neighbors do not make computers. The next 100 towns over don’t either. (at least not in whole) Do I go to the computer people in taiwan with a bunch of stuff the engineers and manufacturing technicians need? How much time would I have to spend to do that? Wouldn’t it be nice if we agreed on a medium of exchange that represented my labor, fair share, or value to society that I could just send electronically and could be exchanged again locally for what they need specifically?
It sure is the way we lived naturally in small tribes, but that’s not tenable at a certain point and it’s why almost every society that has grown to a sufficient size to make good use of it has invented some form of currency.
Money isn’t the problem, it’s the way it’s used.
Also society is so large there’s no way to have that level of accountability for everyone unless you create some neofascist social credit system.
If people want to live in a fully-automated luxury space communist utopia where everyone is free from want and able to make and release games for free as passion projects, that’s great, and a worthy goal to work towards, but promoting piracy on principle without concern for how developers will be supported during their work in the context of our current capitalist society is somewhere between naive at best and self-serving rationalization at worst.
like, the game industry is incredibly exploitative, even if piracy does causes direct harm to it, thats honestly a good thing, it is set up to benefit publishers and share-holders over anyone else, especially the people actually making the games. supporting the end of that isn’t “hippy-dippy”
Maybe he simply remembers Shareware differently.
Even share ware was usually a portion of the game and you had to pay for the rest wasn’t it?