The lights go down. It’s worse than you can imagine out here in California in The Games Industry, it’s time for the Real Awards show for some of the people in the audience. The stage is cleared of speakers, independent or otherwise. The crowd falls completely silent. The teleprompter kicks into high gear: it’s not just bile parody, The Game Awards are coming up and leading the pack with Game Industry Themed Sketch Comedy. There is a tiktok woman on the screen, giving green-screened comedy about the various contemptible Marketing Managers and CEO’s and CFO’s and Workplace Leaders the game industry is steered by. In moments, she’s going to be on the stage introducing herself after giving lip service comedy about NFT’s and Crypto in the Game Industry. Some people in the area bristle, but formerly inert simulacra of Executive Types have now had their programming come online and start to clap to every single joke.
I catch myself knowing part of the heart of these swords of comedian-riff of appearances at awards shows aren’t just a way to let people have some kind of recognized anguish through humor, a collective loosening of trouble at the expense of being willing to say anything around it. Looking into the game industry, through a television facing the stage, craning my neck the times it switches to static: things look uglier.
The second part of the night is like a rising crescendo into paranoia. Extreme categories are announced and taken by one of seemingly only three videogames: I know Vampire Survivors got something but the applause for God of War: Ragnarok was four or five times the noise for any of the independent creators: whooping, yelling, a froth-at-the-mouth fury for digital software to be recognized, by thralls of the studio that made it? Because it represents a triumph for the people being made fun of by the jokes meant to de-fang whatever they’re pissed at: these awards trickle down a type of cultural canon as currency. I remember the noise more than I remember who won what.
“Can we get out and come back in?” Someone at the table asks. “Well. They can’t just keep us here.” I feel the sweat trickle down my fingertips, my body is a cocktail of whatever it took to get me here on the road after two days Caffeine Travel: I have tasted at least one of every brand of sugared-up go longer brand beverage the former government scientists (which government, man?*) have helped every drink company on the planet turn into cortisol searing reality.
If I leave now, while John Romero is being presented with the lifetime achievement award: will one of these beating hearts and beady stares leap on me and tear me limb from limb, like I deserve?
The yellow-shirted staff can see it in my eyes. Sink into the plastic chair.
Mabel Addis created The Sumerian Game. It might be oldest videogame ever italicized on this website: there was a certain quietness that took over the room as soon as her award was discussed. A woman who made a highly influential piece of software almost every videogame probably has an idea from somewhere, and she never made anything else afterwards. Mabel chose to retire from that, and spend the rest of her life with her family. Hearing a show talk about the way people choose anything but the videogame industry after working in it at the beginning of the show stuck in my mind.
Even later, when the chorus died down and we all made our orderly exit into the hall, meeting face to face with Quinn and Taylor and others to discuss GDC and our feelings about it couldn’t rattle the thought free. It’s still inside me now even as the spirit of the event turns more into a loose collection of feelings. Little ones, splintering off somewhere in my body and threatening to turn into Takes or even worse, Revelations.
Taylor has a weariness in her voice at this point of the night. She’s been talking all day, and now we’re back under the poisoning halogen lighting of the Moscone Convention center. There are people up in this second-floor pit mostly on cellphones already or putting laptops next to each other. The harsh talk of job expectations and realistic career outlooks has already started for some of the industry workers attending the convention. Largely not unionized, and seemingly missing out on the kind of good taste you’d expect from an industry beset on Gambling and Investment from every side. We’re all different kinds of tired up here, and my head just wont quit spinning. A condition is coming on me, and I start regretting the last five hours. Did I shake the right hands? did I stick my neck out enough? oh god, oh god, there it is, this is how the industry starts trying to Get you.
I do like a good boy and get in the Free Beer line the next day, right at the bottom of the escalator where Epic Games has set up a titan of a booth – it’s a full quarter of the show floor and includes it’s own carpets, lounges and meeting rooms, a concession stand and obelisks of digital media. This right here is a theme park: we’re trapped in theme parks right now in videogames, as above so below. I drink my free beer and watch Man and Boy after Man and Boy walk up to the women working the booths. Sometimes, not always, a business card is exchanged. Sometimes I hear boys in t-shirts ask women who have things like “Senior Developer” on their name badge who’ve been standing in pumps on shag carpet for five hours already what they’re doing after the show. That’s the industry, right? Don’t change the structure: but quietly, assure that the culture has stayed in the same place. I can already here the male-bonding rituals happening in hotels all over San Francisco from various Teams on the ground floor. “Sure, she’s a bitch, you can still pick her up.” Sometimes, right next to me when I see crop-headed young men walk away from conversations in bleary-eyed embarrassment. The dating grounds of the socially accepted office are everywhere, and always brought around by a type of starving eyed young man who’s been tailor trained to pursue every woman he sees in the workplace. Wasn’t that long ago we saw what was going at Blizzard, remember?
I rope a nice-seeming local to the industry into a conversation about whether or not Videogames are violent enough. “Can you see something like that in VR? like surgeon-simulator, but it’s hyper realistic. A metal gear-solid spinoff, where you do real battlefield surgery.” “I don’t think I would be interested in playing something like that. Not a lot of artists would, either.”
“Well, artists are mostly perverts. I just picked up Legend of the Overfiend in a comic-store in Los Angeles.” He doesn’t reply, maybe it doesn’t register. I change the subject to the massive white board of would-be-video game ideas. “Lot of people want to make Mario, huh?” He’s got all sorts of things to say about Nintendo and how they’ve got the best brand image, that nobody else could really make Mario. “What kind of pervert do you think comes up with branding like that? An artist?”
There’s a booth of older looking women who’re wearing this charcoal blue power suits, offering services to help your VIP’s stay tethered to your mobile game. All exclusive, they provide the spreadsheets and platform, all you have to do is hand over all of your user data to find the Gacha addicts paying the most money for their pleasure house of anime girls and randomized draws. There is, in a sense, a row of these types of booths funneling people to the back of the show. We sit, we talk, I tell them I’m a programmer working for a phone-game company and the excitement rises in this woman’s voice. The conversation moves immediately away from how they do it to why they do it – ex-zynga developers who’ve finally seen the way the mobile market works. They want to sell the software to my Vice President, I see a type of disappointment in their eyes when I hand a Deep-Hell card over.
Further down that row buried between Crypto advertisements and Web3 integration platforms there’s a group of people testing out hardware advertising itself as the next solution for motion-based gaming. The next wave of VR control, it all started to sound and look a little old. E3 may not be happening this year, but the spoils of the industry refuse to move forward, or maybe there’s this feeling in my gut that none of us can grow up and it’s true. I don’t even know what’s really tugging me to do the loop again and again. Don’t even know what I’m fishing for.
While I stumble through tech and hardware in a stupor from drinking all night the night before and trying to sum up my experiences, I catch the call of the people hawking software that could safe a life in the videogames world – but there’s always them and ten more of the Web3 ravens or Crypto Integration freaks, barking at you if you even walk passed their booth. I avoid them because they remind me of myself, the lunatics crazy enough to be here on their feet and send a fishing line out at every single thing that walks passed. I’m either honest, or I’m doing journalism. I wish I didn’t see how naked and empty the booth advocating for a videogame union was, I wish I didn’t see businessmen…wait, no no, that’s not right. I’m glad I got to see it all, cuz now we know the shape of the creature and maybe next time I can start sticking forks and knives in it.
I hope to god to always find an honest salesperson in these situations, someone really in it for the love of the game, really cornering their area of the market? I stumble passed https://buddybrand.us/ and their bright yellow booth offering an inviting time. The owner seems like the stand-up kind of dopehead we’ve all turned into since it’s legal now: clean shaven, not bearing the mark of some tourist drug-rug or even displaying the type of pants you know spend most of their time crumpled up at the back of a van by a river. Getting stoned is a social experience, and they make games partnered with their own strain of Cannabis keyed to Get You Into the Experience. Triple A videogames could learn a lesson here: make smaller games with worse graphics that get me high when I play them. Of course I can’t try the product on the show floor, which to your coke-addled sales executive nervously pacing around and stealing business cards from anyone that looks young and vulnerable enough, might stand out as a negative on the hiring sheet.
What’s the venn-diagram for the sober addict out there? The guy pulling the crank on the Gacha game four or five times a day just to feel something again. What kind of upper, downer or social experience can we sell him? The brightest minds of our time want to know, they want to work for you, all the nervous eyed industry kids who’ve dropped off business cards and contact info at everyone from Epic to the more honest Canary Islands Games. I can’t focus on the negative too much. Swaths of the show floor are dedicated to regional games by country, independent, multi-level marketing scheme and technology showcases. A little overlap with Web3 in every category, but who’s counting? I’m told later in the day another sweaty-exec or hiring manager stumbles into the IGF awards section, knocking over every placard and snatching up every bit of contact info he can while he shouts something about numbers and locations on a cell-phone. He had to have the all-grey ponytail, right? Tell me I’m not imagining things.
What a crazy thought, well, back to the free beer booth. Maybe I’ll pick up that shirt after all, just to see what it feels like.
Next Up:
Walking with wizards…
Never forget me…
March Madness…