A week of mood-boosting features on the brighter side of games.
I’ll be honest with you though: I had no idea what to call this week. We went through Joy Week and Positivity Week and Good Vibes Week, but none really sat right. I’m not sure Optimism Week is perfect either – optimism has its flaws, which I’ll get into – but ultimately it felt like the best fit.
What we knew we wanted to do was host at theme week that, hopefully, felt a bit uplifting. Writing about video games has been a strange practice these past few months – or really past few years. What is still ostensibly an escapist pastime for many, often explicitly designed to spark joy, has become a gloomy one to report on. I’m not sure if you’ve experienced similar, but when people outside of games ask me how it’s going in my industry I often find myself doing a quick mental calculation: how honest does this person want me to be? How much will they care about what goes on in this world that still seems to puzzle far too many who aren’t a part of it? How long have you got? Things are quite bad. And they’ve been quite bad for a while. And they’ve been bad in so many different ways it’s hard to know where to begin.
We should get all this out in the open before I go on. The state of play in video games today is this: developers – ‘western’ ones in particular – are going through a period of unprecedented cutbacks, with tens of thousands losing jobs and an extraordinary amount of talent, earned over decades of work, leaving the industry forever. It’s a situation at least partially driven and certainly exacerbated by executive mismanagement, with those same, maliciously incompetent or just plain malicious executives continuing to earn grotesque compensation as they go. Those who aren’t subject to the whims of shareholders might face playing the role of reputation-launderer for human rights-abusing regimes instead. Games are getting more expensive again, just as an inflation-driven cost of living crisis sweeps much of the world. Hardware pricing is a disaster, thanks to war, tariffs, and most of all the shortages created by AI. It’s harder than ever to truly own your media, and that’s only getting worse as we move away from physical discs.
It goes on. Gacha, blind box, and other pseudo-gambling mechanics are rife, including – often especially – in games rated for children. The most popular game for kids has a reputation for being a home for predators and exploitation. Aggressive engagement-bating is now the norm, as games flounder in the attention war with algorithmic social media. Investor money is flowing away from games and into AI, with players now forced to be on perpetual lookout for unscrupulous developers or publishers peddling undisclosed, plagiarised slop. The ‘creator economy’ of Twitch and YouTube has collapsed, leading many to hop from outrage to outrage, arbitrarily drawing games into pointless, miserable culture wars as their only means of pumping the viewership, distracting those viewers from the actual causes of their woes as they go. And games journalism itself, of course, is in a state of peril too – partly of our own making and often, as with the developers it covers, simply because it’s owned by venture capitalists who need a bigger margin, or shareholder capitalists who can only think in quarters, or just people who don’t know or care enough to do any better.
So: it’s not going great! And I think it’s as important now as it’s ever been that we cover all that bad news in its fullness. Games journalism is not political or economic or wartime journalism but it is still journalism, and it’s still our duty to cover these issues with tenacity and refuse to look away. And so it’s worth putting this out there explicitly, as it’s been a genuine concern of mine as we discussed how to do this week: this is not us hiding from the reality of video games, and it’s hopefully not us doing a spot of the old glib “video games have the power to forge new connections” corpo-bollocks either. It’s essential that we don’t minimise the problems, ignore them, or retreat to empty hype or platitudes.
But it’s just as important that we don’t wallow in the misery either. It is also our duty to give readers something great to read, to be a place people enjoy and feel glad to have visited, and to be a site that can recognise and celebrate something joyful, genius, or inspirational when it’s there. If you spend too long looking at and thinking about all that’s wrong then it will consume you entirely – there’s just too much of it. And more than that: a little escapism is not immoral. In fact it’s really very human. For many people – not all; games are not a monolith! – that is part of the reason they turn to games in the first place. (This is one of those endless dilemmas with talking about video games: how much escapism is too much? I’ve never found the right way to answer that, and I’m not going to attempt it now either.)
Really I could put all this in much simpler terms. As we approach the end of a particularly bleak summer of news in video games, it feels like all of us could do with a bit of joy, positivity, good vibes, and the rest. We need reasons and reminders to be optimistic too – and they do exist. And so this is our best attempt at offering a bit of that, alongside all the regular programming: a week of features about optimism, or that inspire optimism, or that remind us why we got into this whole video games thing in the first place. Thank you as ever for reading, and we really do hope you enjoy it!
