Kill the CEO in your head

How do you like to think about video games? It’s a clunker of a question, but personally: When a game makes me feel some particular way, I enjoy trying to parse how and why it did that. Writing is an extension of that process.

Games seldom fail to make me feel. I am easily obsessed¹ and frequently frustrated, but I play for that cresting over the hill feeling when a game begins to reveal itself to me. I play for mastery too, and the totally irrational but nevertheless bone-deep satisfaction that comes from scratching off a virtual to-do list item. And if I’m being honest, sometimes I play because it’s easier to do than most other things. (If we’re talking about feelings, admitting this last detail doesn’t feel so good.)

But rarely, if ever, has playing a game made me wonder — or, god forbid, feel anything — about sales. I don’t like to think about games in terms of Steam charts or audience or units sold, and although I have thought about games in those terms, it does not come naturally to me. The impulse to write in that mode, I think, is driven more by social media than by the specifics of how any individual game plays. I assume (or hope, rather) that this is true for you too.

So why did business augury become one of the primary ways in which people talk about games online? Look around and you’ll see it everywhere, from people with no obvious reason to pocket-watch. (Surely they’re not investors in these companies!) Handwringing over sales; Upcoming games discussed in terms of whether they’ll find and retain an audience; Barely disguised glee over shrinking concurrent user counts. When did getting an MBA become a prerequisite to talking about games?²

My least favorite manifestation of this trend by far is when a writer or content creator says: Well, I liked such and such product, but will everyone else? It’s an unanswerable question masquerading as insight. This has been particularly prevalent around the reveal of the Nintendo Switch 2 and Bungie’s Marathon. I’m hype for the Switch 2, but will fans be willing to pay for it? Will people care enough about the new features? I tested Marathon and enjoyed it, but will enough people like it? Will it do well enough to satisfy Sony?

Skill Up’s Marathon impressions video is a good example of what I’m talking about.³ (I’m not singling him out to be mean, I promise. I just think the framing he chooses for his video is instructive.) His impressions begin with two minutes of throat clearing about whether Marathon will be “enough” for Sony, Bungie, and fans. He arrives at the conclusion that … [drumroll] … there’s no way to tell at this point. Only after that do we get the answer to the question of whether he actually enjoyed his time playing Marathon. (Spoiler alert: He liked it, but there are some parts he’s iffy about.)

This instinct to zoom out, to guess the direction of the market, is a bad habit, I think. It is a defensive crouch, a crutch, and it calls to mind some of the worst tendencies of the political press: Well, I thought the politician’s speech was thoughtful and detail-oriented, but how will it play with voters in Terre Haute? These framing devices say very little but attempt to imply quite a bit, foisting the creator’s opinion — or sometimes a totally orthogonal opinion — on some imagined future consumer.⁴  

Why indulge this speculation? If you’re a writer or video producer, tell me how you felt about the thing you’re talking about. You experienced it; I didn’t. Don’t guess what I’ll think six months from now. Do you have reservations about the price of the Switch 2? Think Marathon isn’t feature-complete, and you won’t pick it up when it goes live?⁵ Say it with your chest. Is it enough for you?

When did the termite of boardroom argot bore its way into the fleshy lumber of our speech? In a 2022 review in Bookforum, Max Read (summarizing the work of the author Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou) writes that “we find ourselves assuming — sometimes by choice, sometimes by default — the attitude of speculators in everyday life. If the world in the years before the global financial crisis was defined by the business-minded rationality of the entrepreneur — save and invest now, reap and profit later — activity in the years since is better characterized by the creative imagination of the financial speculator, who embraces, seeks to profit from, and perhaps even attempts to intensify volatility.”

I’d venture that social media, where attention is generated along the axis of this is the best/worst thing ever, abets this mode of thinking, and Read seems to agree. He writes later in his review, about Twitter: “[The platform] isn’t a deliberative space, where citizens gather to debate politics and lead society — it’s a speculative market, where traders stake out discursive positions against the value of their brands, and fans and partisans gather to imagine unlikely but not impossible new futures.”

Is a game’s “line” going up or down? Given the broad dysfunction of the video game industry — and many adjacent industries, for that matter — as well as the enormous failures of several tentpole releases in the past year (most notably Sony’s Concord) doomsaying can feel like the safest bet in town. For fans, saying a game sucks and will fail is akin to gambling with house money (as if they needed the psychological reassurance). For content creators and journalists, “I like this but it might fail” is a way to win playing both sides — a kind of camouflage that’s useful in a discursive arena where supposedly “wrong” headlines and opinions are likely to be weaponized (though I wouldn’t accuse anyone in those groups of thinking in such nakedly cynical terms).

But if the reward for participation in this market is maybe a bit nebulous, the costs are quite real. The “[Game] is TRASH?” YouTube thumbnails; the “[Game] is sinking in the Steam charts” headlines; the exhausting one-upmanship of My favorite publisher made more money than yours; and of course, the real world consequences that are necessarily downstream of any bet on any game or studio, which are so often brushed off as externalities in the speculative market. Doesn’t this all feel pretty awful?

I want games to be interesting and for consoles and peripherals to be inexpensive — goals that are, by and large, unattainable from my position at the periphery. (Again, I will boldly assume this is true of you, the reader, as well). I hold no shares in these companies. The state of their business is largely no business of mine. So why would I trade my interest in art for the vulgar jargon of the corporate executive?

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If you have a tip, I can be reached on Bluesky or via email at mikhail (at) readergrev (dot) com.

As a fun bonus, here’s the song I had looping while I wrote: Through the Long and Lonely Night, a new Dirty Projectors track written for The Legend of Ochi.

1. “Immersion” is a popular word for this, but one that also does not fully capture what it means to, in my experience.

2. The implied answer is that even if you take a very dim view of the type of person who gets an MBA, you might still imagine them turning up their noses at the pretend-MBAs discoursing about games on social media.

3. To be clear, I think his full video is generally quite thoughtful. Here’s another example, if you please.

4. Would it surprise you to learn that, more often than not, this imagined consumer has a coarser, less-forgiving view than the original creator?

5. Set aside the fact that if one were really interested in other people’s views on these things, they could report it out. Talk to people! The resulting story would be totally anecdotal, but even that would be better than just vague gesturing.