While I spend a little time reading making notes on Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread for my next series of videos, I figured I’d make a random fun video about an idea that’s been bouncing around in my head for a while.
You can just watch the video if you want, but I’ll put a text summary below if you prefer that.
Basically, I’m using Mises’s concept of the creative genius and some basic economics and entrepreneurship theory to explain why so many triple-A gaming franchises seem to turn into awful slop over time.
It’s a little more complex than you might think.
So, to start: some (not all) major gaming franchises start because some creative genius comes up with a new, innovative idea and executes it in such a way that he builds a following. Think Richard Garriot with Ultima, Notch with Minecraft, or Shinji Mikami with Resident Evil.
Mises notes that the creative genius creates because he is driven to do so. The creative genius gains satisfaction from the pure act of creation. From that, we can infer that creative geniuses who generate popular franchises are great for business, because they are willing to accept a smaller fraction of the profits from the franchise than someone not so driven.
This surplus leads to people skilled in entrepreneurship and business management working with the genius to keep the franchise going. These businessmen are not useless; they might be better at estimating a new entry’s prospective audience and therefore at deciding what kind of budget the new entry should receive, in order to be profitable.
The genius artist might not be as good at this kind of entrepreneurship, and that’s fine. As Mises notes, these types “are sometimes unfit to accomplish any other work.”
However, over time, the genius might either tire of this particular franchise, or simply want to move on to other things.
This leaves the businessman with a need for new creative people to continue the franchise.
Now, what is another characteristic of creative geniuses?
They can be pains in the ass to work with!
The problem the businessman has is to distinguish creative geniuses from plain old assholes!
This is a bigger problem than you might think; even great creative geniuses often fail to recognize other geniuses, even in their own fields!
Think of all the feuds that musical composers have had throughout history: Brahms and Liszt, Stravinsky and Prokofiev, Saint-Saëns and Debussy!
What happens is that a few plain old assholes get hired, because the businessman might be good at coming up with budgets, but he’s not necessarily good at distinguishing creative genius from insufferability.
This creates an incentive for plain old assholes to masquerade as creatives. Basically, a class of parasitic sociopaths develops which is much more numerous than the class of creative geniuses, so more and more creative jobs go to these insufferable, ideologically-possessed, purple-haired sociopaths, because the businessmen can’t tell the difference, and these works are huge, combined efforts by their very nature. The assholes can hide their lack of productivity by blending in with the crowd.
I argue that this mismatch of skills is what allows so many modern, huge game franchises to flourish, and then flop under the weight of insufferable, ideologically-possessed sociopaths.
This video is available on Odysee, YouTube, and BitChute.
Intro music adapted from a piece by Dvir Silver, courtesy Unsplash.
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