The Case for Asset Flips
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 23 ม.ค. 2019
- or, "Why you should just use itch.io"
---
SONGS USED:
Julio y Agosto - Vals
Musette - 2 Mars
Pauline Oliveros - Horse Sings from Cloud
Julio y Agosto - Estación
---
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Referenced video by Videogamedunkey: • Game Critics
Proofread by:
god469suck: / god469suck
Jack Saint: / lackingsaint
Curio: / @sophiefrommars
The Right Opinion: / @therightopinion
Hbomberguy: / hbomberguy
And Nine0uh, for the rap verse: / thejimijj
---
LINKS:
My Music: patriciataxxon.bandcamp.com/
My Twitter: / patriciataxxon
My Patreon: / patriciataxxon
---
dedicated to bennett foddy - เกม
![Love, Death + Robots is Kinda Sexist (feat. Jack Saint) [SFW VERSION]](/img/n.gif)
Yes, I made this because Rags has a video arguing a pretty similar position but he did it so poorly that i felt sorry for him.
oof
That's quite charitable of you. 👍
Big kin, bröther
Well, I mean, that's not surprising. Rags never came across to me as good at convincing people, which that sentence alone is a case in point.
(woah oh)
"Art is not made in a bubble, art is communication and has real world consequences" is a beautiful statement
I firmly believe this qualifies as a music video.
Yeah
You are correct.
Really enjoyed this video, you raised a lot of thought-provoking points, and was a pleasure to proof read it.
I think your point towards the end about being able to take away something positive from what could be considered a harmful product is an interesting one, it's hard to tell exactly what alternative realities would take place if we took a factor out of circulation.
Although a creative person might see something positive in a possibly harmful/hateful product, it's hard to say whether they would've seen the same without that, maybe they would've stumbled on that idea through another product, and whether the possible negative effects are considerable enough to negate that, and that yields a further question of whether we have to confront those negative effects to fully understand them, or whether we will normalise them. The possible routes are completely endless.
I always think about the idea of time travelling, and how things really are incredibly collateral. It's hard to exact the social effect of many pieces, as they are so subtle, and work in tandem with many other societal influences. It's why the rather disagreeable (imo) "video games cause violence" narrative was worked up for decades, because of the existence of so many other variables, many of which completely unrelated to entertainment altogether.
Anyway, before I go too much off on a tangeant I'll say good video, loved the music, I like penis, and I look forward to what's to come.
The intellectual has spoken
@@TheRightOpinion I love your videos (totally not a fanboy)
holy shit
Gay
"I think your point towards the end about being able to take away something positive from what could be considered a harmful product is an interesting one, it's hard to tell exactly what alternative realities would take place if we took a factor out of circulation."
In Counter-Strike you can play as a terrorist and it's been more or less consistently successful for almost 20 years, while professional competitions to this day give out million dollar prize pools.
PUBG uses a fair amount of assets from the Unreal marketplace, yet it managed to become a huge steam hit. Part of how it maintained a level of “acceptability” could be because the game doesn’t call attention to its use of pre-made assets (getting over it highlights its asset usage in narration) and that people liked the game, so no one gave a shit (for a while). I’d imagine that accusations of a game being an “asset flip” only come up when a game is considered bad by the discourse, causing everyone to try and dig through asset shops to try and find a match.
I am sitting here without my jacket and without my pants and want to learn how to dance
I don't know that I fully agree. For instance, I don't think curation and gatekeeping are the same thing (though there is some overlap between the two). You've conflated the two, ignoring that curation can play an important role in how art is presented and/or sold. I'd go so far as to argue that curation itself is an art form, which is why there will never be objective standards for curation. "Quality control" is more often than not done in the name of curation. While it may include gatekeeping at times, it doesn't need to. I agree gatekeeping is usually bad but there's nothing inherently wrong with wanting a curated experience.
I also think many of these asset flips are made with malicious intent. Intent needs to be considered here. You've largely ignored it. Developers attempting to scam buyers (in more ways than just a poor experience) is more of a problem than developers flooding the market. I also think poor interface is a problem for Steam but that argument presupposes an interface that makes navigating all these games is possible (something that hasn't been demonstrated).
I get what you're saying though. I think you make some good points. I enjoy your videos (even when I don't fully agree with your points) and your music.
I think many of these problems (like you've pointed out in a previous video) stem more from the flawed way in which we buy art and support artists, so any solution that doesn't address the underlying problem will ultimately be imperfect for art and artists.
In defense of Eric on your first point, I think that he never talks about curation, or at least from the way I understand curation to mean. This is sort of semantic, but I think its important. My understanding is that for steam to effectively do curation it would accept as many games as it currently has, but make more visible the games which it finds to be important/good/interesting. Gatekeeping on the other hand would look more like a filter into steam itself; either stopping or removing games which steam has problems with. What I'd say Eric is arguing (at least initially) is that he is opposed to gatekeeping, not curation.
The problem we have here is that any "curation" filters games right off the bat through yet another sujective barrier.
If a curator is to say "assest flips are all banned", then we have no chance of ever seeing a good one. That would be an example of a curation filter that sounds fine, but after watching Eric's vid, one can see the problem in its prerogative.
It's the same thing with hate speech, sadly, even more when it comes to something being "blatant", for that word in itself is subjective.
@@shocknawe i think the real problem here is eric never stops to interrogate what really separates a digital homocide asset flip from a bennet foddy game
that's understandable but the answer is intangible, and as far as i know unfilterable. for lack of a better term, the answer is effort. foddy flipped assets but put effort into making those disparate assets work together, to achieve a vision he had. he undoubably tested his game as he went and fixed and changed things. digital homocide didn't really do any of that, they slapped things together and pumped it out, hoping to trick people into buying what they think is a cohesive whole but instead getting a barely-cobbled-together mess
the fact that eric doesn't really talk about this and instead implies that there's no difference is pretty telling to me. he's either not thought about this, which i highly doubt, doesn't think the difference is important, which is possible i guess, or doesn't actually see a difference at all
i'd really like to see a sequel to this video so eric can address stuff like this. i like that i disagree with him so much since it challenges these thigns i've believed because i've always believed them but the fact that i'm still no letting go is interesting. am i being stubborn or is there a genuine problem with eric's interpretation. i'm really interested!
@@KTSamurai1 or perhaps he doesn't trust human judgement even in "obvious" cases. Because a cursory look through research on the consistency of judgement is not very encouraging. In order for it to be objective you'd need to be able to write an algorithm for it, all strictly defined features, that will erase the subjective aspect and I don't see any way to do that. How do you create a universally accepted operationalizable definition of "effort"? Or "working together"? Or "vision"?
That musical interlude hit me really hard. Not even sure why. Don't usually expect to tear up during a video essay but hey I'm fine with that
It hit me good too. I am having issues with my own art and it just made me SO SO happy 💛💜💙❤. Worry about 'worth' less and make more!
This is all great, but there's a fundamental point where I think I diverge from your perspective: You're using "asset flip" to describe any game largely made from pre-made assets. To me, an asset flip is a senseless assembly of pre-made assets *presented* as a game, but not intended for players to use (how Jim Sterling uses the term, as opposed to how flipping houses actually works). Flippers of this second kind thoughtlessly pile up whatever junk they can find, write their name on it, and sell it as something new. Getting Over It is great precisely because it's the antithesis of that: It's honest, it's purposeful, it's original, it's more than the sum of its parts, and it couldn't be made from anything other than junk. The problem with most asset flips isn't that they're shit, or that they're made from shit. It's their malicious intent. They're the troll posts and phishing emails of game development, and they give the people you talk about in your song a bad name.
This, exactly. There's absolutely nothing wrong with making a video game of prebought assists or the like--It's that the video games that do this, are typically always made with the intent of making solely a quick buck and nothing else. See the "Simulator" craze that happened last year (or was it 2017?)
A select amount of this were genuinely interesting or at least niche concepts I could see working (Bear Simulator as the main star) but so, so many were simply made to capitalize on it and nothing more. Nothing but empty sandboxes with the intent to make a cheap dollar off the simulator in the name.
Getting Over It is different from something like Loli Simulator; one has merits due to it's intent, it's creative expression, and the honest intention of the creator.
@@cushiebutt3948 Though I would draw a distinction between low-skill, low-effort games (absolutely vital); terrible games (eye of the beholder); cynical, profit-driven games (anything with a high budget. Thanks, capitalism!); and fake games. The first three categories should not be stopped because they are good, even when they are bad. The final category is, imo, all bad. The problem is that while fake game devs clearly are out to cheat people, their strategy for getting away with it is to technically meet their legal obligation to the customer while still tricking them out of their money, so how do we exclude them without also excluding the rest?
The traditional answer is to recreate the medieval guild system by only letting in the big publishers. The TH-camr answer is to hire a large team of unaccountable game testers to judge whether the game is worthwhile according necessarily fuzzy standards.The modern answer is for the platform to algorithmically bury anybody they've never heard of. I want to stop these people, I really do, but I don't know how. If they really are like spam and forum trolls, moderation should help, but it'll only get us so far, because if the standards to which games are moderated are high enough to make a difference, we'll lose the well meaning people.
So essentially a Digital Homicide Studios game is a shitty tracing on DeviantArt, while a Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy is a Picasso painting.
As a wrinkle to this, it just reminded me of how some people would upload shovelware, knowing nobody would buy it, and then give away game keys with the intention of taking a cut from people selling the _trading cards._ This is obviously on Steam's head and they were exploiting one of its most cynical aspects (even as it also benefits Steam since Valve gets a cut, too) but how does one categorize that kind of game? Is it fake? Is it cynical and profit-driven? It's obviously exploitative but is it enough that we should care?
I don't really have answers to this but it seems like an interesting extra dimension to the problems of a free-for-all capitalistic game platform.
I suspect ET's answer to that would be that the "intent" doesn't always matter. Even if the intent of the product was never to be playable, what matters is if someone finds some creative use of that unplayable garbage. I mean, you might get inspired by birds singing outside, but the birds never intended for you to hear them, let alone get inspired. Yet that inspiration is something positive.
There is definitely a point beyond which there's absolutely no redemption, but thing is there's really no objective definable observable thing that separates one from the other. I think that's the key point.
There’s also the aspect of Steam being a platform run by actual people at some point. A school shooter game should have the right to exist somewhere, but I don’t think Valve has any obligation to be that game’s megaphone. You could say that there isn’t really any Steam competition, but that’s a flaw in the market.
Sr. Squib does that game have a right to exist?
Sure, I guess.
Does Steam have a legal obligation to not allow hate speech being a profitable venue?
Yep.
Hit the nail on the head
You know, Hatred (just the existence of the game) gave me an idea for a different game where you play this giant, hulking, intimidating guy who just wants to make people happy and help them out with stuff. And the world starts out being dark and cold, but your character makes it brighter and happier. It would ideally end by you actually stopping the guy from hatred from blowing up the nuclear plant he blows up at the end by sympathizing with how he feels and explaining that hurting people won't make him feel any better, and that the Hatred guy can chose to live (or something like that).
Then someone made Dropsy, and I was like, "Hey, someone more or less made that video game I kind of had a vauge idea for. That's neat."
...my point is that something deeply emotionally effecting may have come from Hatred, and that's kind of cool.
Was literally think of Dropsy while reading this before you got to the "Then someone made Dropsy" part. lol.
Much as I'm for your laissez-faire interpretation of art, I think I'm still onboard with Jim Sterling when it comes to cynical regurgitation of slapdash assets with no intent beyond trying to recoup the cost of buying the assets (if they even bought them in the first place) and/or making a few dimes in Steam's card market.
Why? I simple statement that boils down to "I disagree" is not very helpful.
@@santiagoacosta777 thanks for pointlessly disagreeing.
I'm not here to type up an essay-length rebuttal to each of Eric's points, but the long and short of my opinion is: Steam is a store, not an art showcase. A store should curate what it does and does not sell, lest it drown subjectively worthwhile products in utter dross (as defined in my original comment), hurting both the developers of such worthwhile games and the potential audience for them. As per Eric's own comment in the video description, itch.io is closer to an artistic free-for-all and seems much less concerned with sales.
@@CrudusViscus I think this gets at the problem very well. The way Patricia talks about Steam to me sounds an awful lot like old flash game sites, in fact it really reminded me of Kliksphilips video about his own adventures in flash games. But the problem is that Steam is a store and I don't have infinite money to give every game a try, and sometimes some really shit games can look like alright ones (and by this I mean literally unplayable games as in they wont even launch and I have spent money on that). Giving every game a chance is a very different thing from paying for every game because like simply the realities of capitalism is that I don't have that money. And if Steam isn't gonna give refunds on every game then it's damn well their job to make sure that at least every game on their platform is playable because otherwise using it becomes a genuine risk.
And like that's why flash game sites to me seem a lot more similar to the vision Patricia has, they are completely free most of the time and it is just a showcase of what the developers can do. The reason why it's fine for those sites to have some utterly terrible shit on it is that the only real cost in me visiting them is my ISP I guess. It's way more similar to small art galleries which are also often just free and you can go in and look and then if you like a particular piece you can buy it or support the creator in some way. And like some pretty solid games have come out of flash game sites and then gone on to become more fully developed games like Bloons TD.
Basically Steam can't both be a games store and a front for all games and she touches on this a little bit but I think that's the core.
Would be surprised if anyone sees this, but tbh? Even if steam was solely an artist showcase I’d have no problems with it curating it’s content even overly judiciously. Curation is indeed it’s own form of communication and this art, just as much as criticism. The only issue is that steam has such a monopoly on the space of gaming that you kind of have to go there to get any sort of audience; that’s something that needs to change.
Eric, you make some of the absolute best things (in my eyes).
Whoa, get out of Pete's eyes, Eric! He needs them for peepin'!
awwww thanks
In my eyes and in my ears!
@@AnnDVine *They, I believe but i don't want to speak for +Peter Coffin
senpai noticed u
16:39
This kind of artsyle was actually used in a game before Hatred came out. A game called Madworld where the entire game is black and white with the only colors used being yellow for the UI, red for blood and blue for... alien... blood...
It's actually very similar to hatred in that you're going around killing other people for fun, however instead of it just being you going on a rampage, you're on a game show and it's great.
Play Madworld guys, it's on the wii and it's really good.
I dont have anything else to contribute, I just got reminded of a good game because of that bit.
I was gonna comment exactly this
Ah the electric saw game?
Hey! It’s my favorite TH-camr and person-who-is-objectively-wrong-about-Undertales-Soundtrack!
But tbh, thanks for making this. Helped me organize a lot of thoughts I’ve been having on this stuff.
But I can't recall him saying that the undertale soundtrack is any good.
Would you be so kind and direct me the video where he is making such an insane claim? :)
near the end of "My Experience with Undertale"
he has since softened his mind a little bit and doesnt think its the worst thing ever, also likes chiptune now (as he states in THIS video, 5:42)
@@CecilyRenns Well, I can't find anything wrong there. :D
this is art.
It is!
Hey, Eric, this is my opinion regarding the last part:
I believe that focusing on what an individual might gain from a work of art, in this context, is wrong. When we, as a society, ban hate speech (or death threats, or child pornography) we are not implying that literally no one could get anything of value by being exposed to such speech. But rather than we, as a society are worse off by having such speech around. Of course banning some forms of speech is a restriction of a very important right, so should be very careful to only ban that which is undoubtedly necessary. But, in my opinion, hate speech falls in that category.
Hate speech is controversial, but what defines it. Especially with entertainment and art. Like is hatred hate speach because of it's characters morbid thoughts and ideas?
100% agree with Nasst. Also, I think he's conflating a private company taking something offensive off their platform with a government banning something. It's fine for Steam to take down something they don't want to promote, and doing so has no effect on that thing's ability to exist elsewhere.
The best way to make your point is to break into song.
Your honesty in your uncertainty when coming to conclusions to your ideas/arguments is extremely refreshing to see. It takes a lot of courage to admit to a public audience that you don't have a clear answer to the problem you're discussing.
this is like a giant @ at jim sterling
come at me jim
@@Patricia_Taxxon jims a good guy but he needs to like, understand artistic critique a bit more idk
Eric Taxxon I mean... there ARE games on Steam that lack executable files. So... go, game quality control! (?)
@@Patricia_Taxxon I wasn't around when you were on Hbomb's stream, In fact I don't know whether or not you and Jim were on at the same time, but I would have loved to hear you two discuss the idea of Asset Flips while Harry futilely tried to get the Beavers down the hole.
I had to leave early to make room for new guests, but anytime jim wants to talk im all ears.
This video is shockingly beautiful, just to look at. I love your style and its so clear that you put so much care and work into it. Definitely one of my favorite people on youtube!
17:58 "in today's political climate"
this is one of those pieces that turns the lefty video essay into an artform. it's great .
I consistently agree with your defenses of the existence and legitimacy of so called "bad art", but I do think there is a thin line you danced over without (enough) comment, and that is using deception to shill a game. At least some of the time, when people demand quality control on steam, they are talking about banning developers and games that delete negative reviews and discussions, obscure the actual nature of their game, or just sell non-functioning pieces of software (or as you mentioned, outright malware). I'm not suggesting you aren't aware of this distinction, I just think it could have used a more explicit mention. (Interestingly, this wouldn't even be a problem if we just stopped living IN A CAPITALIST NIGHTMARE HELLSC-)
As to the latter part of the video, "censorship" is a strong word for what steam actually did, which was deplatforming. If Valve allows hate speech on steam, that means they are giving it a platform and bear partial responsibility for it. Not giving it a platform seems like the morally correct, or from their perspective, optically prudent decision. Censorship is something a lot of shitlords like to cry out, and I think calling what happened with Active Shooter "censorship" is giving them a bit too much credit.
In which Eric Taxxon uncovers the obvious and yet somehow elusive revelation: it's not the fault of the art, or the artist, but of the market.
The problem somewhat persists outside of free-market economies however. In any system with limited resources or space to devote to artistic pursuits (or any pursuits), you're going to run into issues of gatekeeping and curation. I'll use the USSR as an example here, which had official ministries of culture which supported a limited number of jobs for artists, writers, etc in each branch of the arts. You can probably see the problem already. By which process were the "good" artists selected? You can probably guess. The issue of curation, gatekeeping and resource-usage (in the case of Steam, our time and attention of sorting through all the malicious junk) doesn't go away when you remove the market (although some of the incentives for creating junk do).
@@XRXaholic I see your point, but my counter-point would be that that is still the limitation of the market, even if the market is not free. This problem will always exist until we eliminate resource scarcity, yes, but that in and of itself shows that the problem IS resource scarcity, so the very thing that leads to creation of market forces in the first place.
Heya Eric! I work at a studio that makes interactive exhibits, and “asset flips”, or at least specifically purchasing assets, are incredibly important for our work. Often, we struggle to get our projects made on time and purchasing assets or tools to use in the process of creating our work helps us greatly. personally, I view the things that we create as completely unique, worthwhile creations.
In all honesty, what makes asset flipping necessarily distinct from finding open source code online? Or free assets that you take and change around, or just use outright? Is it the money that we spend on those assets? Something I’ve thought about a lot.
I’ve been viewing art as this much more fluid definition as of late, and I definitely think your videos have helped me reassess how I view not only my own art, but all art.
As an addendum, what makes asset flipping necessarily distinct from collaborative work creating assets? If you are a big studio, looking to fill up your game world with detail but don’t have the skills or time to create hundreds of unique assets, then flipping assets can add so much to your creation.
I think there's a difference between using purchased assets to create a unique experience and just what some game devs do which is comparable to just taking someone else's art and calling it your own. I don't think there's something "wrong" about it per-say especially when said assets are available to everyone but people see it as lazy and for good reason. In the case of Digital Homocide not only did they asset flip they couldn't even make a playable game out of it.
The way Jim Sterling (who coined the term) put it is that he was fine with people using store-bought assets in their games. It was just people cobbling together games entirely out of disparate assets with no real vision behind them, or in some cases just uploading whole asset packs. The straw that broke the camels back was an asset pack called UnitZ, which was a generic zombie survival thing that at least a dozen different people all uploaded copies of to Steam under different titles, with no effort made to actually transform it in any way.
Hi Eric, long time listener, first time caller! I wanted to respond to the thing about Active Shooter and Hatred, and subject matters being "beyond reproach". I'm pretty long winded when I write stuff, so be warned. It's also sorta tangential. I hope I make some sense.
I'll start with saying that I generally agree with all that you said at the tail end of the video. "I want to make this, but good" is certainly something I endorse artists trying to do, but I think there are a couple things that require careful and conscious steps to avoid looking like an Active Shooter or Hatred kind of game. I think it is very important to tackle hard subjects, but I think it is equally important to take those subjects seriously enough to do them a service. Those two previously mentioned games don't really engage in the subject matter - they're built to shock, as you pointed out.
More or less, no topic should be off limits, but context matters. Nobody wants a game about flying planes into a skyscraper that presents itself as a distraction. Nobody wants a game about blindly shooting people, but has nothing to say. Hatred, for instance, has no real message. You can read that as a message in itself, sure, but the art itself isn't doing anything to engage in the topic. In fact, imagine if the character in Hatred was more clearly presented as a member of either a real or fictional hate group, even if that is just in the form of a poster on the wall. Just that could have been enough to make it more clearly a commentary about senseless violence, rather than just presenting itself as "a video game where you shoot guns in the streets".
I want to talk about some examples of subject matters that aren't taken seriously that you probably haven't seen, as they're from the board game realm, rather than video games. Board gamers have a descriptive phrase, "Pasted-on theme". This refers to a game being about a topic, but the game itself feels like it could be about anything. Sure, the game calls them "spices", but really it just feels like I'm converting two yellow cubes into one red cube, which I sell for 3 green cubes, which I can use to buy 5 yellow cubes, rinse and repeat. I mention this because I think Active Shooter would probably be considered a pasted-on theme, as the game as presented could be about many things other than a school shooting. Also, none of these things were big ticket controversies. All of them were the subject of very adult and reasonably civil discussions, many of them involving the designers of the games. Board games are much more niche than video games, after all.
"Five Tribes" is a board game set in a sort of Arabian Nights setting. Mechanically, it is about distributing pieces around the board to collect stuff, like a juiced up version of Mancala. One of the types of pieces are Merchants, which let you take cards from the market. Market cards come in two varieties: Commodities, which you collect and sell large sets of them for points, and Slaves, which are used as more or less a disposable resource. And it is those slave cards where all of the outrage was pointed towards. Slavery, while a pretty distant memory in a lot of ways, isn't the kind of topic that I think people like to see taken lightly. And here comes a game that uses slaves as a mere token, meant to be discarded. Five Tribes is an abstract enough game that those slave cards could have been anything, and it would have felt similar in terms of serving the theme of the game. It could have been called "Assistants", "Magic Rubies that summon Genies" (because slave cards could be used to conjure Genie cards), or even just "1 Gold Coin, good for buying any sort of thing you want". It didn't have to be a slave, so why make it a slave? The publisher's response to this was to offer replacement cards, "Fakirs", to replace the slave cards. This confirmed, for some people, the notion that there really wasn't any real thought put into the idea to make those cards specifically slaves. Five Tribes wasn't about slavery, but still, it treated slaves on the same mechanical level as a Wild Card in Uno.
Just as video games have a million games about "shooting stuff to win the day", board games have a million "trade spices around the Mediterranean Sea" games. But they also have a lot of games about Colonialism. Both of those themes are commonly used as a lightweight wrapper to apply theme to a game that would otherwise have no art. Collect resources to build houses -> "explore" new territories to put those houses -> set up trade routes to score points. If you want to Google some of these games just to read the back of the box descriptions, I'm pointing at "Santa Maria", "Puerto Rico", and "Manitoba". Manitoba in particular is a fun little read, to see how they (failed to) pay respects to the subject matter in the box art.
Secret Hitler is a perfect example of a game trying to engage in a touchy topic, and failing or succeeding with people. Nobody in the game knows who is and who isn't part of the Fascist and Liberal parties, and certainly nobody knows who is Hitler, who is played by a player that can end the game prematurely if they are either shot or elected Chancellor, after a certain amount of government policies take place. It's a game about deception and trust, listening to people's words and translating them in your head. Obviously, WW2 is a theme done in every art medium, but not as many of them put you in the shoes of the Axis power government. And certainly not in the way Secret Hitler does it, which is in a very "drink beers and have a party" kind of game.
"This Guilty Land" is a game about American politics leading up to the Civil War. One criticism I've heard leveled against it is that it doesn't convincingly engage with the theme. Slightly abridged quote from a podcaster, Mark Bigney - "Very quickly, you feel like you are just pushing pieces around. Which isn't just a miss opportunity , but desperately unfortunate. The game is about the political struggle around slavery, and the moment you write slavery out of the narrative and [the game] becomes a purely mechanical experience, that gets straight into problematic territory." He goes on to talk about how the game felt detached from the theme.
All of this is meant to be a different kind of take. None of these games were censored, and none of them were going for shock value. But, in one way or another, they fail to engage in their chosen theme. If you want an example of a board game that does engage with its theme well, "Twilight Struggle" is a classic Cold War board game that does engage with the theme in a pretty good way.
I hope that wasn't too boring to read! I really enjoy your essay work.
I thought the song you made was a blank banshee track when it first started
10/10
Sounds like system boot by banshee. I think they are both sampling windows boot up sfx
If I could have one request it would be for video game essays like these to include links in the description to content referenced in them (like the VideoGameDunkey one) so we can easily check those out. Thank you.
Great essay. I've been thinking about this topic a lot, especially about finding value in trash and how it seems a lot of people are too easily jumping to the "X means Y" conclusions. You've given me a little more arguments to chew on. And I LOVE when people present multiple viewpoints and are not afraid of uncertainty and lack of final solutions. Such a rare and valuable thing.
I just put it under the acknowledgements, thanks
@@Patricia_Taxxon Cool! But just for completeness you also mentioned some video about the Jim Sterling/Digital Homicide thing and your own video about art and subjectivity. Links are good, links are nice. More links make the world a better place. Or maybe it's just me. I hope it's not just me. Peace.
i keep coming back to this video and song. how is something so simple as two starry sky photos layered over each other spinning slowly one of the most beautiful things i’ve seen on youtube? like it gives me an acid flashback.
I'm listening to that song next time I try anything new. It's really inspiring to me, it makes me feel better about my incompetence and stuff.
How will the "objective critics" recover from this?
Easy, they’ll gang up on him.
@@ArachnidoComics actually dismantle him with logic and non-gaslighting tactics.
this is where the theory of analyzing and creating art start to rubs up against the actual material consequences of art in the real world. let's not beat around the issue, art can be a powerful recruitment tool, and allowing hate speech to run rampant on one of the largest distribution platforms for games is not just reckless, it potentially physically dangerous for those in the line of fire from these movements. then again, even things not produced with the intention of being hate speech can be co-opted and used as a rallying cry by bigots. does this mean we should we should ban anything that can potentially be read as hate speech? how do we draw a distinction between something like fight club, a deliberate satire of masculinity worshiping proto-fascism that was widely interpreted by many as a genuine endorsement of said ideology, and something like birth of a nation, which was intended as genuine propaganda and is largely credited with inspiring a resurgence in the kkk as a movement? i honestly have no idea, but the question keeps me up at night.
Every once in a while, I return to this video just to listen to the song. It makes me feel emotions I cannot describe and it is just. The best thing
I come back to this video incredible often, mostly because of that little song in the middle. It's so catchy and heartwarming
A lot of this can be said about almost any current trend. Is lo-fi hiphop and vaporwave bad genres of music? No, in fact there are some tracks I like. It's just a lot of people in the genre are very... mediocre at making a compelling piece of it. They're not bad, but they're also not good, and sure you could say "that's the point, it's ironic and a parody" but that's a cop-out if you ask me. Punk rock went through this same phase back when it was starting to become mainstream (which was somewhere in the mid 70s into early 80s I believe?) where a lot of new sceners had the voice, the structure, etc. down, but they never had a clear or interesting message, nor did they establish any new or groundbreaking techniques. Did they have to? No, not really. But you still have to try to differentiate yourself, even in a saturated environment where that becomes increasingly difficult. This also happened with Radiohead. I remember A LOT of people got pissy about Thom Yorke taking a weird experimental route with Kid A, but I loved it, because by the time that dropped, there all of these alt rock bands that were starting to mimic his sound. Couple that with some failed deals and writer's block, and you got an impressive piece of history. Asset flips, in short, are similar to most types of art, wherein the concept itself isn't inherently bad, just how it is used.
Genres are irrelevant. Ony artworks and artists matter. There is a ton(A TON) of shitty baroque music,but the brandenburg concertos are still among my favorite of all time.
@@stevenempolyed9937 That's my point exactly.
9:10 asset flip song "lets kick it up!"
Video essays with musical detours is the hot new wave i hope you invent
saw this for the first time since it released again because you referenced the video on twitter and I'm happy to say I agree way more with your point now than I did three years ago
These videos you do on art are some of my favorites on this whole site. They've really made me do a lot of thinking about my opinions on objectivity and 'merit' in the arts in the last year or so; your takes on this matter are extremely deep and powerful.
And also, the songs you put into these are super, super good. Seriously they blow my mind.
I love this video so much it's so warm and comforting and inspires me to build something new!
I never thought to question the value of asset flips, so in that sense you’ve given me a lot to think about.
I think your premise is flawed in that you’re conflating “asset flips have the right to exist.” With “asset flips have the right to exist on steam.” In which I disagree. Broken, awful games may have value, but they obscure and clog the storefront and make it nigh impossible to navigate without algorhmic suggestions. This denies visibility to struggling developers with talent.
No one can be the objective gatekeeper of talent. But Games are held to standards, art is held to standards and those standards may be malleable, they may change - but that doesn’t give games a free pass onto Steam’s library.
Also as a platform, if Steam abdicates any curational responsibility then it fails its audience and allows for a toxic environment to develop. Just look at the swathe of broken, irresponsible, or hateful games Valve tacitly endorses.
It's not just that asset flips have the right to exist, they deserve a platform. It's the christopher hitchens reasoning.
@@Patricia_Taxxon Contrapoints went into this and showed plenty of times that Hitchens would deplatform people when they interrupted his talks even after telling people to do so during one of his arguments.
Not that I'm trying to pull a GOTCHA!, but it seems even Hitchens held standards as to what he was and wasn't going to platform.
@@Patricia_Taxxon
Edit: Whoops just read the description.
That platform could be something like Itch Io, or maybe to a lesser extent newgrounds. But the design ethos of Itch is to publish indie games, and a lot of devs put out experimental or first-time projects on there. The audience they cultivate is receptive and expecting that kind of content.
Steam's a hot mess because it doesn't know what it wants to be. I mean, Hunt Down the Freeman's probably the funniest disaster from an irony perspective.
Oh! And on the subject of asset -flip artistry have you seen any of Kitty Horrorshow's stuff? Seems right up your alley.
Counterpoint: Assuming authorial intent and trying to understand it is infinitely more fun, rewarding and makes art more way interesting than taking whatever baggage you have with you into a piece of art and only ever viewing things through the logic and thought process you would have naturally. I've learned so much from wanting to understand something, reading up on the historical context of it and the life of it's creator. I think if I'd attempted to search for the meaning of a piece of art solely within myself, I wouldn't have grown or changed for the better in the ways I have.
My main artistic outlet is the poetry night at the Cantab Lounge, whose main event is the open mic. This makes me think of two things:
One: it is vitally important to provide platforms for bad art, because the more space you provide for bad art, the more space you provide for good art. And most good artists start out as bad or mediocre. In the wise words of Jake the Dog: "sucking at something is the first step towards being kinda good at something." If you don't like a poem, just go to the bathroom or something.
Two: at the beginning of the open mic, the host lays out some ground rules, three minutes on the mic, etc. One of the things they say is that this is an exercise in free speech: that does not mean freedom from the consequences of your speech. Also this does not include hate speech. Hate speech will get you booted. Do they define what hate speech is? No. You know what it is, and you will be booted.
Brilliant video man. I've been modding the Jim Sterling discord for a bit while also trying to make the case for asset flips myself since I feel it's one of his positions that can indeed get very gatekeepy and dissuade folks from ever attempting to create games. It's so good now to be able to use this video as an example of points I've tried making, but put so much better and more succinctly with your branded Eric Taxxon aesthetic.
"hey to the kid throwing ott on the mix" legendary
Brilliant video, comrade. Didn't even know I'd watch a 20 min video on this subject. Amazing as always.
this is really touching as someone who has spent a long time working on Unity thank you again
Aye Patricia, when are you going to release a single for "rocket ship" on bandcamp or something?
I keep re-watching this video because it's so dope
here's a link to the mp3 file if you want to download it
we.tl/t-AwUkzsWgJl
Loved the fact that you used the same "let's kick it up" sample as in Dead Inside
can I just say that I love the fact that you are actually an artist yourself and not solely a media critic? we need more of people like you
The song you made for this is making me cry happy tears, thanks!!!!
Eric I just wanted to let you know this video is what inspired me to finally start working on making my own games
I love that there are 4 minutes of music in between
Holy shit man, that song in the middle was fucking transcendental.
Gotta say, this changed my mind about the utility of asset flipped games. I mean, I'm still VERY squeamish about asset flipping myself, but I at least don't judge other people for doing it now.
After binging all unwatched essays I noticed this one isn't on the playlist
*scrambles to rewind the last 5 seconds*
Eric, I just want to say regardless of your topic I always find your work incredibly inspiring, especially your candid honesty. Thank you.
I just woke up from a pretty bad nightmare and this video is what I'm watching first thing. The song in the middle really made my morning better. Your channel is insanely under subbed but I'm trying by watching through your backlog as I just found your channel myself a few days ago 💜💜
referring to videogamedunkey as Mr Dunkey is one of the most absurd and hilarious things ive ever heard
That song really energized and made me happy, which was nice since I'm recovering from surgery and have felt like shit all day.
this video is objectively good
your intellectual integrity and honesty is incredibly admirable, man. you pointing out your own errors of judgement in the past (the chiptune thing) and being willing to move past them in order to have a more holistic approach to art is really something i respect. i love your video essays.
leT'S KICK IT UP
Vampire Survivors was literally an asset flip that went on to become a sensation
for anyone interested the main question for part 1 of this video and Taxxon's Golden Calf one is explored extensively by Kant in the Critique of Judgment and well summarized by Luc Ferry in i don't know what book. I had that as reading material for an Aesthetics class in college a few years ago. I don't know if he mentions this later in the video, I apologize if he does.
My favorite quote and one of my favorite defenses for pretty much any artistic sub group of is "90% of everything is crap." Even if there are a lot of bad asset flips, there are also a lot of bad games that aren't. If the issue is that bad games are getting on Steam, then there's no real reason to target asset flips specifically because there will continue to be bad games regardless.
great video as usual eric
I spent the opening of this video going mad as to exactly where I had heard that music before only to find it’s from an old album released by a mate of mine. Hey Guido your band got on Taxxon!
This is inspiring and beautiful. Thank you.
Wasn't expecting that Nineouh verse
Really changed my mind here. Good video :)
I think for the sake of archiving and research and just the fact that book burning of any kind is bad. I think with warnings clearly labeled that said content has been deemed hateful then it could be available to download on steam but cannot be profited off of. Saying there is content we cant see because the goverment or corporation deemed it bad for us puts them in a powerful position too that's far too dangerous imo.
I'm not entirely sure if I agree, but this is a really good video that gave me a bunch to think about
Thankyou for making this.
I believe "Hatred" used the selective coloring motif to evoke the idea of an event viewed through security camera footage. Most Americans are familiar with the idea of seeing this kind of violence recorded from security cameras in the area, especially before the wide-spread use of cellphones with cameras. At least that's what I took from it. If this is the case, the game didn't just use it to look cool but actually actively chose it to compliment the game's style and theme. Even in a crappy game made only the stir up controversy, there is still one choice made with artistic merit.
What if Eric Taxxon is a multimedia interactive art piece
So like, here's a thought: have one Steam for everyone, where you banish shoddy asset flips and hate speech to the shadow realm, and another Steam that's only moderated in cases of direct user to user harassment. There isn't a finite amount of space on the Internet. We can have our cake and eat it too.
Granted that might well not work, but it's just an idea off the top of my head.
i wish the single on this video was in your bandcamp
The song in this is a fucking banger. Good shit man
Some of the most fun and memorable experiences I've had from Steam were bargain bin asset flips, and I appreciate that asset stores exist for creators that don't have the time or resources to hire dedicated artists or a coding team to build everything, especially solo acts and those just dipping their toes. It's not difficult to get a feel as a player whether a flip is a cynical cash grab or a genuine effort within Steam's refund threshold, and even then, such games are often cheaper than food. Steam's become more and more ill-suited to expressing as much, unfortunately.
I also lean pretty hard toward the "keep hate off storefronts" end of things, but if we can't just keep it clean, I kind of like your points re: hate speech often undermining itself. It'd be kind of nice to see more work showing just how hate often shoots its own attempts at message in the foot, if it even bothers having a message at all. Something along the lines of how hateful TH-camrs get picked apart and shown for what they are rather than just mocking their production values and calling it a day.
This is an excellent video. I agree with you about keeping hateful garbage off Steam, though an alternative might be to implement filters for such content. Depends on what lengths the developers might go to get around them, I suppose.
I think we all know that people who make hate speech will go to great lengths to have it be seen by those who they're slinging it at.
I'm genuinely grateful people like you exist, your video response "the truth about why your mixes are GREAT" helped convince me to start recording music again and putting it out there, such as it is. I'm not sure how you feel about that video now or if you'll read this, but it described a feeling I'd had for a long time about most mainstream music understanding, make the music sound as crispy as possible whilst ignoring wider elements that something not quite so crispy would achieve. Which helped me listen past the cruder elements of my recordings, and over time making me a better musician overall for just giving it a damn try. This video cemented that over 2 years later, and I want to thank you very much for it. Please continue doing excellent music and inspiring people!
Honestly, some cynical cashgrab asset flips can actually be kinda fun. Played a few multiplayer asset flips with a friend once that we got in a pack of like, 50 games for a dollar, and despite how clearly awful they were, we still had a good time playing them, even though the games barely worked. In fact, a lot of asset flips would make a great framework for a more serious game and I feel like there will be great devs in the coming years, if they aren't already around, who got their start making asset flips to sell on steam for 50 cents.
as somebody who's been making games as a hobby their entire life, the song in the middle resonated with me deeply. I've been part of numerous online communities through the years, and some of the best and most inspiration work I've ever seen has been the stuff that is rough around the edges -- yet, you can see the effort and inspiration behind it. I've since lost those projects to my old harddrive, and I'm pretty sure they don't exist on the internet anymore, but they exist through the work me and many other people who were once part of those communities put out. to say that work like that shouldn't be exposed to consumers is stifling the potential mix of influences that could lead to something truly remarkable someday. I watched this video a year ago but I wanted to drop this comment because I've been thinking a lot about the fragmented game development community, and I found myself watching this video again. thanks for the content.
Really fascinating! I've never really considered the concept of taking hate-speech games and reworking them into more useful products. I still lean on banning them, but I think even then positives can come from it. It's a perspective I didn't think of previously.
One thing I do wonder is that there's one pro-QC argument you didn't address: Visibility. It's a very common fear among a lot of developers for steam games that, with literal hundreds of games being released per day, that no one will take notice of their art.
the term asset flip has become really muddled but i consider the common usage to be in a similar ballpark to plunderphonics
Important to note that the dude that masterminded Hatred ended up being outed as a neo-nazi, as well. We truly do live in a society.
man, eric, the musical number is a confidence contagion machine. it has this way of quieting my artistic 'mister-not-good-enough' (see philosophy tube). thanks.
So far, after watching a bunch of your content, most of the music I've heard from you gives me a weird feeling of weird, "anxious" nostalgia. It gives me the feeling of something comforting that I know but I can't put my finger on what it's making me try to remember and, with one of my biggest fears being forgetting important things/being forgotten, it really fucks with me. This isn't a critique or criticism, your work is amazing, it just garners a very strange reaction for me. Love your stuff, keep doing what you're doing, and my apologies if this is incoherent. 🧡
I like how the latter half of this argument is a song
You put a random song in the middle of this video, wow. I would love to be that good at makinh music
holy fuck that mukokuseki verse
well done, big fan
In the anime-esque space, Voltron and Robotech ar good and bad examples of how an asset flip can become its own thing.
Voltron was an asset flip of two different anime that has now become its own fully fleshed out entity. Robotech as well for all its flaws is a hell of an asset flip of 3 different shows made into one grand epic that I still think can stand on its own
Oh see Power Rangers too.
This is a really eye-opening video and you presented an argument that I hadn't really given much thought - a counterargument to the old "too many bad games on Steam, it needs quality control" point of view which I never began to question until now, but if all art is subjective then it can hold value for different people so it can't be objectively worthless. Even a terrible, cynically designed game can be valuable and I can personally attest to this. Looking at the works of Digital Homicide and other infamous asset flip authors I can't help but be imbued with a hopeful sense of "I could do better!" and want to pick up a game development kit like Unity and play around, not even out of oneupsmanship, but for the sheer joy of discovery. Games that are labelled "bad" can still have a positive effect on people who aren't judging them solely as a well polished piece of interactive entertainment that seeks to create value for money, but as an artistic expression that is left open to interpretation and could create a completely different response in an individual, so long as they haven't been told that "bad steam game is bad".
I think you can argue for "propaganda games" or games with hatespeech and deplorable moral implications to a certain extent. They do a great job of satirising themselves as you said, and can be valuable when looked at analytically instead of judged in its own context. I think where games like Hatred or Active Shooter can do the most harm is when it is taken at face value and people buy into the outrage and controversy. I feel stupid for being taken for a ride by the media's response to the game which gave it the attention it was looking for in the first place, even though I wasn't too vocal about it. A game being reduced to being judged as only one thing is a shame.
Of course this doesn't give every game containing hatespeech or unsavoury content a free pass - there's plenty of it in the world right now, and it wouldn't be right to simply permit it across the board, using "artistic expression" as an excuse. The best way to reduce the harm that these games can cause is not to buy into the controversy they are trying to put forward and judge them more objectively. Then perhaps a bit of value can be taken from them while ignoring the message it's trying to put forward. While we can't, and maybe shouldn't, forbid or restrict the tools to allow people to create like this, Steam really needs a better interface so that people can see more of what they want to see, while still encouraging people to explore on their own.
This got super rambly but it really helped open my mind to new possibilities in ways that I find hard to explicitly express. The music part in the end was really nice and made me feel relaxed. It's tiring to hate on "bad" things just because they are "bad". I have realised before that whether you like something or not doesn't necessarily have a bearing on its objective quality or worth.
Great video Eric. I'll be sure to check out more of your music next.
Damn, you formulated things better than I ever could!
Btw, great video, Eric!
Hey, nice to see Nine0uh is still alive
I love every video more than the last one ❤💛💙