Fight Club said:
This rant has two parts: Economic rant & VG dev rant. (The economy one is more interesting, IMHO)
Firstly that, have you ever stopped to think that our lives might be better if everything weren't so convenient? When is the last time you were ever in a survival situation? I know me and my friends are some of the least motivated people I've ever met and whether directly or indirectly, it is because of the quote above. There's nothing for us. There's no way to prove our worth. There's nothing to be passionate about. We live in a reality where we can spend our days doing absolutely nothing productive at all and we will NEVER be in risk of any kind of harm, mental, physical, or financial. You would think this was paradise with all the benefits we're provided but I just find it boring.
What's worse is there seems to be a lot of people who accept this as something wonderful. America has gone to the service industries and the general public seems to think that's absolutely fine. This country's backbone used to be industry. At the end of the day, you could hold a physical product in your hand and say "I made this". Today, America's backbone is defined by people who wash cars, paint toenails, run cash registers, and wait tables. There is no end product. We generate enough revenue with bullshit that we can afford to import real commodities from other countries.
That causes two major issues in my eyes... the first it means that if the economy ever crashes, as it is now, we have nothing to fall back on. We have no ground floor. No safety net. Just freefall. And if our society had gone completely to the service industry, we would be down and out. Thank God that we've managed not to completely sellout our industrial heritage. Secondly, it makes us far too complacent. Take these boards for interest, you're seeing post and member decline. Why? Because it's a very stable and well preserved forum but it can be DREADFULLY boring. There's no passion in anyone's posts. It's either worthless spam or people agreeing with one another. Any time someone goes to ruffle feathers, people sound the alarms. This forum and America both needs to bring fire and passion back in a big way. And it's because basic human instincts like passion and surivial are no longer needed that we've become these pathetic peaceful shells of human beings.
That ends the first rant.
The second rant also refers to the quote. People do dream of being millionaires, movie gods, and rock stars. It bothers me, as a gamer, that game developer is not on the list. That's not anything against the quote. It's against the general mentality of people. I passionately believe that video games are the best entertainment and art medium. It combines everything music and movies can offer and adds the one thing they cannot: choice.
I desperately believe it is the future of this nation's entertainment industry. What bothers me is that people fail to recognize it. I think one of the reasons they do is because the video game industry is self-defeating. It is one thing to have friendly competition. It is a completely different matter to halt the industry's progression as a whole by hoarding valuable technology. Actors can act for any studio. Musicians can sing any song. If a developer goes to reference another developers work or employ their own idea, there's a lawsuit.
It's not just copywrite issues either, a developer will withhold technology just to get an advantage in the business but it fails to help the entire industry develop. A lot of very creative people create terrible games because it is such a lengthy process that the final product is a bastardation of the initial concepts. If companies shared resources, game development times could be halved. Across the board, games would have better graphics, physic engines, and gameplay. However, since they refuse to help one another, games are often flawed even after ridiculously long development times.