{"id":701,"date":"2025-03-15T13:22:32","date_gmt":"2025-03-15T19:22:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/marginalnonhermit.com\/?p=701"},"modified":"2025-03-15T13:22:32","modified_gmt":"2025-03-15T19:22:32","slug":"misess-creative-genius-and-the-downfall-of-triple-a-gaming","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marginalnonhermit.com\/?p=701","title":{"rendered":"Mises&#8217;s Creative Genius and the Downfall of Triple-A Gaming"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<iframe id=\"odysee-iframe\" style=\"width:100%; aspect-ratio:16 \/ 9;\" src=\"https:\/\/odysee.com\/%24\/embed\/%40MarginalNonHermit%3A3%2Fmises-creative-genius-and-the-collapse-of-triple-a-gaming_edited%3A9?r=8gvoByECHNgc2BfQ5o91oxf89bpi1Ui4\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"\">While I spend a little time reading making notes on Kropotkin&#8217;s <em>The Conquest of Bread<\/em> for my next series of videos, I figured I&#8217;d make a random fun video about an idea that&#8217;s been bouncing around in my head for a while.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"\">You can just watch the video if you want, but I&#8217;ll put a text summary below if you prefer that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<!--more-->\n\n\n\n<p class=\"\">Basically, I&#8217;m using Mises&#8217;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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"\">It&#8217;s a little more complex than you might think.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"\">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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"\">Mises notes that the creative genius creates <strong>because he is driven to do so<\/strong>. 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 <em>they are willing to accept a smaller fraction of the profits from the franchise<\/em> than someone not so driven.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"\">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&#8217;s prospective audience and therefore at deciding what kind of budget the new entry should receive, in order to be profitable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"\">The genius artist might not be as good at this kind of entrepreneurship, and that&#8217;s fine. As Mises notes, these types &#8220;are sometimes unfit to accomplish any other work.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"\">However, over time, the genius might either tire of this particular franchise, or simply want to move on to other things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"\">This leaves the businessman with a need for new creative people to continue the franchise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"\">Now, what is another characteristic of creative geniuses?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"\">They can be <em><strong>pains in the ass<\/strong><\/em> to work with!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"\">The problem the businessman has is to distinguish creative geniuses from <strong>plain old assholes<\/strong>!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"\">This is a bigger problem than you might think; <em>even great creative geniuses often<strong> fail <\/strong>to recognize other geniuses<\/em>, even in their own fields!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"\">Think of all the feuds that musical composers have had throughout history: Brahms and Liszt, Stravinsky and Prokofiev, Saint-Sa\u00ebns and Debussy!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"\">What happens is that a few plain old assholes get hired, because the businessman might be good at coming up with budgets, but he&#8217;s not necessarily good at distinguishing creative genius from insufferability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"\">This creates an incentive for <strong>plain old assholes<\/strong> to masquerade as <strong>creatives<\/strong>. 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 <em>insufferable, ideologically-possessed, purple-haired sociopaths<\/em>, because the businessmen can&#8217;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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"\">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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"\">This video is available on <a href=\"https:\/\/odysee.com\/@MarginalNonHermit:3\/mises-creative-genius-and-the-collapse-of-triple-a-gaming_edited:9\">Odysee<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/DV5sX3xWbSI\">YouTube<\/a>, and <a href=\"https:\/\/old.bitchute.com\/video\/URgbfi83OKWV\/\">BitChute<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"\">Intro music adapted from a piece by Dvir Silver, courtesy Unsplash.<br><a href=\"https:\/\/pixabay.com\/users\/sonican-38947841\/\">https:\/\/pixabay.com\/users\/sonican-38947841\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>While I spend a little time reading making notes on Kropotkin&#8217;s The Conquest of Bread for my next series of videos, I figured I&#8217;d make a random fun video about an idea that&#8217;s been bouncing around in my head for a while. You can just watch the video if you want, but I&#8217;ll put a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":348,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27,3,6,26,82,2],"tags":[242,241,240,37,129,217,66,96],"class_list":["post-701","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture-creation","category-economics","category-essay","category-gaming","category-philosophy","category-video-link","tag-creative","tag-creative-genius","tag-creativity","tag-economics","tag-entrepreneurship","tag-funny","tag-ludwig-von-mises","tag-mises"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/marginalnonhermit.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/books-25.jpg?fit=638%2C235&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marginalnonhermit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/701","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marginalnonhermit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marginalnonhermit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marginalnonhermit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marginalnonhermit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=701"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/marginalnonhermit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/701\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":702,"href":"https:\/\/marginalnonhermit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/701\/revisions\/702"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marginalnonhermit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/348"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marginalnonhermit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=701"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marginalnonhermit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=701"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marginalnonhermit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=701"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}