This month, the ace journal club talked about Lord of the Rings.  The case for an asexual Frodo is more compelling than I thought.  We also talk about several asexual literary theories.  It’s a fun one.

Making Indie Games is Like Buying a Lottery Ticket | Jason Schreier (video, 20 min) – Jason Schreier educates people about basic facts of indie video game production.  Now, I’ve spent a lot of time in the indie game player space, as well as the game critic space.  I see Indie games routinely celebrated as the artistically superior form, unlike those ultra-high budget games that all kind of blend into each other and get monetized to hell.  Be that as it may, I’ve often wondered if indie games are actually worse for laborers, since they offer so little job stability, and it’s basically a bad financial decision.  Granted, these days all the big studios are laying people off–but still, it’s “only” 33% that experienced layoffs, whereas I’m pretty sure that fraction of indie games that fail is well over a third.

NO-ONE IS GOING TO BUY YOUR GAME | illomens (Click the play button, it’s an essay on a static page) – This manifesto argues that your video game is not a commercial project, and that frees you from a lot of irrelevant conversations that assume video games are commercial products (such as the paragraph above).  I have technically sold a game for money, so I have been excluded from the target audience of the manifesto, but I still basically agree with this.

It’s important to make a distinction between indie games and hobby games.  Indie games are framed as scrappy underdogs, but we’re still talking about big budget mass-marketed commercial products.  People talk a lot about the incredible number of games on Steam, like 21k last year, but this datum is somewhat problematic because it also mixes in projects that aren’t trying to be commercial.  For hobby devs, the fact that making a game is like buying a lottery ticket is mostly irrelevant, it’s just a perk.

Competing for a Minimum Wage Job at Sony | Game Arcadia (video, 25 min) – Jenna Stoeber discusses an old trash reality show where the prize is to work in QA at Sony.  It’s a metaphor for how working towards a dream job at all costs will open you up to a lot of abuse.

flying is getting worse, here’s why | Answer in Progress (video, 20 min) – Sabrina looks into airlines and learns that they operate on very thin profit margins.

I feel like leftist analysis of any industry often settles into some sort of “greedy corporation” narrative as the source of all problems.  Sabrina does explore the narrative, so I see lots of commenters attaching to that as the definitive explanation, despite that not actually being her conclusion.  Yes corporations are greedy, and legally required to be greedy, but a theory that can explain everything doesn’t actually explain anything.  Anyways, profit margins are like $8 dollars per ticket, so how much better do flights get in the hypothetical world where CEOs fart rainbows and airplane passengers seize the means of production?  What makes flying suck is that it’s very easy to do price comparison and hard to do quality comparison, so the airline market is in a race to the bottom for lower prices.  There are policies that could address the situation (e.g. penalties for delays, or better transparency about fees), but these come with tradeoffs, mainly higher prices.