{"id":1840,"date":"2020-11-19T15:55:18","date_gmt":"2020-11-19T15:55:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.molleindustria.org\/blog\/?p=1840"},"modified":"2020-12-14T15:33:23","modified_gmt":"2020-12-14T15:33:23","slug":"games-without-players","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.molleindustria.org\/blog\/games-without-players\/","title":{"rendered":"Games Without Players"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Cover artwork by Christopher Locke, Modern Fossils series<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This is the transcript of a talk I gave at the 2020 Play Festival.<\/a> The festival normally takes place in Hamburg but was moved online due to COVID.\u00a0 It’s a sequel to my previous Indiepocalypse talk<\/a>. The Google Slides can be found here<\/a> , a pixelated video recording is here<\/a>.
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Today I\u2019m gonna talk about games without players. And not just as a thought experiment, but as material necessity As a possible way to deal with the contradictions of the attention economy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Indiepocalypse Zine<\/a> by pizzapranks<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the last decade we have witnessed a democratization of the means of production of videogames.
\nAnybody can make games thanks to tools, communities, attitudes. And thanks to the opening of digital distribution channels.<\/p>\n

The most successful companies today don\u2019t make money by selling content, services or commodities but by distributing it, by controlling their marketplaces. When we democratize the means of production and distribution we should expect a proliferation of cultural producers and cultural products.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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More recently people have been to talking about the Indiepocalypse in games.
\nA phenomenon related to:
\n*The seemingly exponential increase in the number of releases.
\n*The decreasing sales and revenues, even when take into account quality and reviews.
\n*A winner take all distribution of sales and time.<\/p>\n

These are trends that threaten the commercial sustainability of independent game making<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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We can argue about the statistics, we can argue whether having \u201ctoo many games\u201d is good or bad, but regardless I believe there is a inherent tension and a crisis of overproduction.
\nBecause games need to be played. Playing takes time. And our time, our attention, is a scarce resource. A resource that is contended by many industries, Social media, online television, our employers and so on…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The amount of free time we have, and the way we spend it didn\u2019t change much in the last 15 years. At least in the US (where it\u2019s regularly tracked).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The time spent playing games did increase, but not by much.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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A couple of years ago I gave a talk<\/a> about possible and impossible ways to continue making games in this crisis of attention (you can find it online) Some solutions I outlined were:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Finding new audiences Human and non human.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Demanding more free time.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Making games that colonize new spaces and context in our lives.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Decommodifying games. Funding culturally valuable games as a public goods, so they don\u2019t need to find large paying<\/strong> audiences.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But there\u2019s another approach that involves rethinking not only what games are but also what their place and purpose in our lives is.
\nIt\u2019s the idea of games without players. Or the idea of partially, gradually, decoupling games from an extremely competitive attention economy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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This process is already happening organically with esports, and youtube streamers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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You don\u2019t have to be a committed player to be part of the gaming community. Millions of people consume games passively.
\nAnd you can do that while doing other things: maybe the stream is on another tab or another screen.
\nGame spectatorship fits our fragmented attention better than being totally immersed in a game.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Another early indicator was the popularity of Farmville and many social games that kind of run in the background.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Like Neko Atsune, which is a virtual pet collecting game. You have to check now and then, it’s more of a pleasant compulsion than a game in the traditional sense.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Farmville may not be as popular anymore but many top selling games on mobile are clicker games Also known as idle games or incremental games. In games like Cookie Clicker you can progress with little action, you can keep them running at work, or while you are playing other games.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Clicker games started as a parody of Farmville. Cow Clicker was a minimalist distillation of the addicting Facebook games circa 2010. But people got really into it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Universal Paperclips, a more recent hit in the genre, is also ironic and… self-aware. But most of idle games are not really jokes, and they are not satirical.<\/p>\n

The most notable precursor of idle games was Progress Quest which satirized leveling and grinding in RPG games. It doesn\u2019t even require clicks. You just run it and it plays itself. Your hero kills monsters, collects loot, levels up.
\nIt\u2019s a zero player game or a self playing game.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Self playing games have always been quite popular in the art world.
\nIf you want to put a game in a museum, if you want to make art with games or game engines, it helps if they are not interactive.
\nA game that plays itself looks clever, subversive. The artist mods or breaks a commercial game in a purposeful way creating an enigmatic object that is in dialogue with generative art. And besides, a lot of people are not comfortable with interacting with computers in a museum anyway.<\/p>\n