The Games Industry Makes Me Sad

 

Let me just put it out there from the jump that this is not going to be a post bitching about the state of games themselves.  There is a lot to be said about the state of releases in an industry that's swamped year in-year out with remakes and sequels, an industry whos "best" game of the previous year just yoinked the plot of a PS1 game, the mechanics of a SNES game and the UI of a PS5 game smushed them together and made them French.  There's a discussion to be had there but that's not what I'm on about here.

I want to look back a little bit, to when I was a naive young boy.  A time before widespread use of the internet (my age is showing, I know, shut up) when most of the things I'd hear about games came from rare snippets on TV or magazines bought from the local supermarket.  One topic that always fascinated me when it came up was when development teams would get talked about, specifically Japanese ones.  Offices filled with people passionately bashing away at computers to make the latest and greatest games.  I remember hearing specifically, sometime around the Dreamcast era, that Japanese developers would quite often stay late at the office working on their projects, sometimes sleeping under their desks and then just waking up to resume work right away.  "Wow! That's so cool, these guys are so passionate about making games, I wanna do that, I wanna be like them" my young, idiot-ass thought at the time.  The sad reality of it though is that working like that sucks ass, even if its something your passionate about.  You may recall around the time of The Last of Us 2 coming out about the discourse around crunch culture, people working insanely long hours and burning out or suffering various mental and phsyical ailments as a result.  My dreams of developing games professionally got crushed by the staff at my high school because of my lack of general ability in maths was too much of a wall to overcome, according to them, but it was saddening to grow up and discover that the reality is not that these people are sleeping under desks and missing their commutes due to passion, but due to necessity and weird unwilling company loyalty, in a lot of cases.  Not a situation I would ever let myself fall into 

So my attention shifted, I may lack the skills to dev but I certainly have the skills to play games and write about them.  Having opinions on the media and reporting on industry happenings was something that a younger me rather liked the idea of.  But then, once again, this aspiration was mostly crushed by the reality of what being in games-media spaces is like.  An industry full of people who have no idea what they are talking about, writing bullshit in order to push magazine sales or, in the modern day, get ad revenue clicks.  A field where you aren't expected to have a deep understand or any real experience with a game before you review it, but where you play it for as short a time as humanly possible so that you can get a review up in time for release in order to drive traffic.  Not having any real opinions of your own but brown nosing indie developers and large publishers so that whatever outfit your writing for can recieve various perks such as early releases or even funding.  It sounds like a fucking miserable experience and judging from the joyless, skilless assholes that make up the majority of games media and games writing, I think if I had entered that side of the industry I would have left the mortal plane considerably earlier than intended.

So then I got older, I studied Japanese and became fluent and so the first thing I thought to maybe dabble in was game translation.  Well that turned out to be dogshit as well.  I started by doing a little freelancing, a few jobs for what mobile visual novels that I found on a website called Upwork.  The pay was low but it was a start, a foot on the ladder.  I figured if I kept plinking away at it then maybe I'd build a bit of a repuation, a bit of a portfolio and I could work my way up into higher profile things.  But then I got one job where the guy I was emailing back and forth with ended up just ghosting me after the job was complete and I didn't get paid.  I'm not working for free, so I took to looking for a salaried position somewhere and while I found some things I could qualify for, the salaries for these jobs are bullshit.  At the time, I wanted to get into translation as a way of escaping the English teaching trap a lot of gajin in Japan find themselves in, but the salaries for any positions I found usually only matched or were lower than the school I was working at.  Translating stuff is way harder than singing the alphabet to 3 year olds so I didn't really feel like adding the extra stress for basically no extra money, fuck that shit.  When my options were getting ripped off or extra stress for no reward I just bit the teaching bullet until I eventually got into translation and interpreting for an automotive company.  Not what I want to be doing per se but getting to use my Japanese and earning a real salary is nicer than having the field of education drain my soul

 All is not lost though.  Thankfully we live in an age where doing things by yourself is not only possible, but with a bit of luck and a bit of skill can even be profitable.  Working for a big game studio making things at the behest of investors and crunching so hard I never see my family sounds like shit, but engines and tutorials are avaliable and I can dev in my free time.  Thanks to services like Steam and Itch there's even avenues to put it out there.  The enthusiast press may be full of metrics driven idiots who couldn't tell a 3DO apart from a Sega Saturn but the mass adoption of social media and YouTube means it's extremely easy to just write your own shit and publish it to your own spaces and, once again, with a little luck even turn that into a living.  Translation is a bit harder to think positively on but at least I get to do it for real money even if its not about games.  A shame because the state of the average JP to EN translation for video games is actually embarassing, I'd like to do something about it, but without the coin behind it I'm happy to just play in the original text

So if the industry is making you as sad as it makes me on occasion, don't give up, just ignore it and get out there anyway.  Let me know about your indie projects so I can continue to avoid all this bullshit too.