Manifesto For Videogames

Good palliative vibes only in a Ludite landscape

Let’s just start with the art and then we’ll get to the other part.

Witch Palliativa.
Digital painting, 2025.

I created this piece as a symbol and warding against dark forces of light that is now currently permiating the medium which I grew up loving and that functioned as my only comfort in trying times as a young boy, cought up in bourgeoisie domestic hell.
I’m open to discuss the symbolism contained within in the comments if any questions arise as to the intention behind this.
For example: “who is the guy standing behind her?”, “Why is it clasping a branch?” “What do Witches have to do with videogames or libertine notions of welfare state?” Etc.
I know there are plenty of thoughts around all this in my mind, but in this post I had to sort of let go of the mysticism slightly and dive into a topic that requires some….subjective scholarly dissection on my part, and that sorta took all my brain-power hostage. I needed to get it out of my system and it’s sort of a grim tale, so a slight amount of readers discretion is adviced.

Here’s a mixtape for ya with a few of my songs that you can listen to while reading if you like:

Now,

Working in the videogame-bussiness can be fucking horrible. Let’s just get that one bluntly out of the way before I try to indulge in this story of pittance & imbalance, albeit hopefully with some nuance.
It is, to some large part ( and we’re talking corpoes here, not players nor creators), a cesspool of problematic behavior towards creative individuals. Somehow I would even like to call it a vampiric sphere (wow, hows that for nuance…).
And while many actors within this sphere still show ambitions of cultural interest and diversity, I sometimes suspect that even this, as Bill Hicks would put it, is considered ”A good dollar”.
This being said, I’ve been fortunate enough to actually receive grants and investements from sources who’s agenda was more or less “we like your stuff, do your thing”. And I do believe that those times it has comes forth out of genuine respect, albeit with a slightly mystified view on creativity as is, as well as a reluctance to get involved where one does not perceive oneself to have clout.

Where I once thought showbizz meant a balance between bizz and art, I’ve now come to entertain more radical thoughts of grave inequality between the two, in an act of self-perserverance as an artist operating, first and foremost, in a very “successful” bizniz that now happens to find itself at the forefront of capitalism.

From my experience, observing the videogame cultural sphere from a structural perspective, a lot of the times an adherence for creativity and art is either completely looked over or wholly missunderstood. I believe this notion is being nurtured by the low hanging fruit of not letting oneself get past a certain prejudice which, roughly speaking, somehow implies that any “highly” creative individual has a superpower, and that it is impenetrable, sterile and unmovable; mana from the heavens, unending.
Truth is, to my mind, that creative-energy is composed out of, and mostly run by, emotional-energy; that energy which lives in your soul, heart and/or gut. The intellect only helps the draftsmanship-part of it all, and here I am also including the act of taking pre-emptive precautions to better enable a good & healthy creative flow while working, but these two are very separate sides of the same coin, alas easily mistaken for being in a sort of hermetic symbiosis with each other.
This energy then is very fragile and if you manage to break the spirit of the creative individual then you shall inevitably break their creativity as well. Also, a creative individual is generaly more in tune with their creativity if the environment around them isn’t toxic, because then their work will become toxic. Creativity is essentially just a catalyst for set & setting, tone & timing manifesting into reality through a person.

Again, from a generalized angle, holding this mana-based view of creativity shows an abundant lack of understanding, and even in some cases juvenile ignorance for it.
I’m using extra harsh language here to prove a point, because in my 2 decades of working with videogames, as an artist & entreprelleleneurrrr it’s more than once been hard getting my point across in subtle ways.

Many folks, who are enjoying affluental hierarchal positions within videgames, often operate as Black Magicians, thinking that they can demand authority based on their knowledge. Which is another way of saying that they are prone to exercise dominion over their subjects based on other values than that of mutual respect.

”Let's take Aldrich, for one.
A right and proper cleric, only, he developed a habit of devouring men.
He ate so many that he bloated like a drowned pig, then softened into sludge,
so they stuck him in the Cathedral of the Deep.
And they made him a Lord of Cinder. Not for virtue, but for might.” ~ Hawkwood

This later inevitably leads to, through ignorance, falsifying key-aspects of the videogame-expression, and doing so from a purely capitalist standpoint, a reductionist way of looking at things.
”That thing we call talent, or that thing that particular person does very good”, which we might then call art; this quote is just intrinsically a part of the same behavior and operational-pattern used when planning bussiness-ventures or projects from an analytical stand-point.
Creativity is somehow viewed merely as a mysterious cog in the wheel. Intuition plays no part in understanding the “product” you are making.
A very rare case I recently came across then; former Sony Executive Producer Shuhei
Yoshida (I believe it was) said in an interview, after leaving Sony, that he only exercised authority over other producers and not artists because he did not know how to make art and had enormous respect for the craft.

Now, take graphics, for example. Almost never is it talked about as art in an art-historical context and therefore never really adheres to the rich pool of knowledge found therein (except in a few cases when talking to, say, certain concept-artists), if this is not reductionism in effect, I dont know what is.
Additionally, somehow it also makes videogames come off as standing above any history outside its own making. But to my mind, no-one has ever really managed to pin-point or solidify what videogames actually are and/or what even objectively makes a “good” videogame. Sure, people have tried but to my mind there has not been any general consensus locked-in on the matter. Which both gives me pride and frustration; pride that we are still an outsider-artform to some extent since we don’t fully adhere to academic notions of knowledge and art, frustration because people within the medium many times do seem to operate purely in an academic fashion, paradoxically enough, now that games are “big” (humongous, in fact).
Back in, and up til, 2008 no-one really knew what was going on and it was still sorta “punk”. You make shit that looks cool and feels good. It was not even a matter of intellectualizing or mystifying these thoughts and emotions, they were just there and within that space it was easier to operate as “weirdoe” than it is now because somehow the general consensus is an expectancy to deliver sound data and predicated analysis around your artistic output, without anyone really knowing what they’re talking about so they mostly tend to recess into using tech-lingo and post 90ies bizz-notions, because thats the level the discussion has been on for almost 15 years now since Braid entered the scene and had everyone, briefly, guessing “can games be art???”
Personally I think that discussion just boils down to an individual level, sorta like quantum physics; if someone observes it and the sender has had artistic expressatory ambitions, if there then is an emotional ressonance then THAT is what I consider as art. Thus, artistic expression and art are two different things and we tend to mix them up.

”Work is only an Artwork if it is about something and it embodies whatever it is about in an appropriate form.” ~ Arthur Danto

A recent example I ran into was a discussion happening around a video on your-ego-tube where some self-proclaimed scholar (much like myself =P) preceded to entertaining ideas of ”why modern graphics are bad”. And while some points were interesting & well informed, it sort of landed on the idea that functionality trumps visual fidelity, therefore amplified visual detail or abundance is a bad thing because it screws over readability.

So, the post-modernistic idea of artistic minimalism is often held as the holy grail.
Naturally I don’t agree since I made this game a while ago.

Tbh, this makes me sad to hear. Because it shows how uneducated and ignorant we often are when we talk about the artistic & emotionally expressive aspects of videogames.

Pointillism, for example, made a point (no pun intended) out of bombarding a canvas with visual fidelity and detail while maintaining readability. No one has really, successfully, argued against this since. But here we are, sowing lies about how things are defacto layed out, in a purely reductionist way, employing subjective facts and denying objective facets.

We’ve denied ourselves the luxury of evolving the medium by frightfully clinging to ideas that feel comfortable and do not challenge our status quo. And then we end up with a crowd berating the lack of inovation in videogames while complaining about the capitalist structures that are suscepting us to the abuse of materialistic advantage and mindless acruement. It would be alot easier for us to create a healthier creative space for those who actually make the games if we acknowledged the shoulders of the giants we are standing on beyond Nintendo, Shigeru, Atari, Asteroids etc.

We are in fact merely an evolving branch of art history and cultural heritage but somehow we’ve chosen to divorce ourselves from this. And no-one is drawing the shorter straw but us who operate, to some extent, within this cultural sphere.
It is like, you know, shooting yourself in the foot.

Lemme candidly ask you this, if you are in any way part of this crazy videogame art/bizz; do you feel like its working out? Perhaps besides, in some rare cases, what your bank-account says?

Candid side-quest-pinot:

Its sort of like The War on Drugs in a way; reducing the antropological heritage by scooping up modern medicine with cultural ritualistic medicament and calling it narcotics, or drugs. Then proceeding to go to war on drugs without realizing what you are doing is not a war on drugs, its a war on people. We’ve been doing drugs since waaay before the government or society even existed. But here is the thing; drugs (and specifically psychedelic ones) are boundary dissolving and society thrives on boundaries. Me/you, us/them, black/white, male/female, straight/homo etc.

What I think is funny about tech giants today is that they we’re mostly founded by folks from back in a tech-era, when “sticking it to the man” was considered baseline behavior. It was all based on an act of defiance against structural corporate society. An idealistic vision of freedom for the individual.

And now these same tech-”guys” are, by the grace of their success, doing it themselves. They’ve sorta become the very thing their existence as computer-infatuated yoingsters considered an establishment worth fighting against, not nescessarily as a militant act, but most assuredly as an act of defiance; corporate overlords scrutinizing the freedom of others must be abolished.
But perhaps that wasn’t the idea from the start, after all. Not to express yourself as an act of communal free-speech, but rather as an act to express self-speech. It certainly seems that way now. Albeit hidden behind a powerful illusory spell known as ”doublespeak”

Or perhaps Neiche was right; one who fights monsters must take great care not to become one themselves.

So the Witch has now become a palliative force against the domination of the sun. Where they’re simply left no other measures than to commence a mere ushering in of the death of the moon as pleasantly as possible while slowly burning to ash in the golden rays of the sun.

Thx for showing up or comming back ‘ere.
Much appreciated, as I try to find new vibes
through slow-time-internet scribes.
And, please remember that these are just my subjective thoughts, not objective facts, even if it sometimes sounds like that while I’m writing.

”I do WHAT I want, you HAVE problem” ~ Quina Quen