Slashdot Mirror
For Game Developers, It's About the Labor of Love
Nerval's Lobster writes With "GamerGate" and all the debates over who counts as a "gamer," it's easy to forget that games are created by people with a genuine love of the craft. Journalist Jon Brodkin sat down with Armin Ibrisagic, game designer & PR manager for Coffee Stain Studios, the Swedish studio that made Goat Simulator, to talk about why they built that game and how it turned into such a success. Brodkin also talked to Leszek Lisowski, founder of Wastelands Interactive, about the same topic. While these developers might debate with themselves (and others) over whether to develop games for hardcore gamers, or jump on the mobile "casual gaming" bandwagon, they'll ultimately in it because they love games — a small but crucial detail that seems too easy to forget these days.
You've got it all wrong. Programmers and artists get to keep all the love, while the owners of the company get to keep all the money. It's a win-win.
Except for those basement-dwelling gamergate scumbags, who decided to act out what they were being accused of.
That's what makes it a labor of love. You're doing it because you love it -- not because of the pay or benefits. e.g., "I love making sandwiches. It doesn't pay shit, but it's a labor of love..."
Which group are you talking about, the "journalists" or the "gamers"?
But you're right. Basically the entire thing is fake. The whole thing about "gamers sending devs death threats" is actually just a bunch of trolls from Something Awful who aren't even involved trying to play each group against each other for lulz. (I'd link to the thread, but once they got caught them sending identical death threats to both "GGers" and "anti-GGers", they deleted it.)
Unfortunately people fell for it, so we got a bunch of stories about the "rampant misogyny amongst gamers" and bullshit like that while ignoring the death threats sent to GGers. (White men receiving death threats isn't news, after all.)
At its core, GamerGate is gamers upset about how devs can and do buy reviews from game journalists. The problem is that the whole "labor of love" thing swings both ways: you have devs who are passionate about making games and reporters who are passionate about playing them, so you end up with this relationship where the devs basically pay off the reviewer to give them coverage. Sometimes in the form of sexual favors, sometimes just by giving them builds before anyone else can.
But, yeah, just about anything you read about GamerGate is fake and is just another method of pushing forward the annoying progressive "nerds are misogynists" meme we hear about constantly. (See Slashdot's monthly "why aren't women going into IT" concern trolling articles.)
Yeah because political corruption on a grand scale should be ignored, right?