That sense of responsibility you allude to is definitely creeping up on me...or rather, I think it was probably there from the beginning, making me see trends that I couldn't engage with properly one way or another.

A lot of the last year I've spent away from games and studying comics, with the indirect help of Cartoonist Kayfabe and their many, many reviews of old comic books, and it's gotten me to see more of the big picture of culture to see all the overlaps in categories of media, the tropes of how things are positioned and communicated at various points on the timeline.

I've come around to the idea that it's not exactly markets or capital at the core of the issue, but the phrase "for the good of the nation, we must..." because if you go all the way back to 60's San Francisco and early Silicon Valley, what you have is the military-industrial complex enmeshed with the counterculture, in an exact parallel to your description of how the indie scene emerged with "frictional sparks". That was stuff like underground comix, the Whole Earth Catalog, phone phreaking. All stuff that curious engineers, just like today, looked at with interest and gradually folded into "hacker" identities that reconciled a volatile combination of "subverting power" and "taking power", justifying toxic chauvinism in the guise of romanticized self-improvement and mastery.

That wasn't a thing that emerged directly from capitalism - rather, like a New World exchange, capitalism successfully justified itself and remained useful within that conversation, but it also changed in the process, achieved reconciliations. What we ultimately got out of that era and its turbulence was a kind of mediation between "here are all these possibilities" and "here is what is good for the nation" (in the sense of great power competition, ideological goals, religious belief, etc.) - you couldn't make a hippie utopia, but you could make Atari, Apple, Lucasfilm, Dungeons & Dragons, the comics direct market. These are not good in the sense of being ethically good, but they are good in both a near sense of leveraging personal ambitions, and in a far sense of supporting hegemonic power projection. A redefinition of consumer markets towards intellectual property(Copyright Act of 1976) helped to allow ideas that were previously "too radical" to be subsumed to the market. By extending and clarifying regulatory protections, a larger number of economic actors could claim to be property owners and have a stake in the system, and those who disagreed were merely failing to "bootstrap" themselves. Thus, instead of turning to mutual aid systems, the norms dictated merchandising your values. That era started with the 70's, and immediately produced the refrain of complaint still heard today.

That's really where the Californian ideology is located - it's toeing that line of possibility and then doing some question-begging to ultimately justify itself as being "American values", to fall in line with consensus national myth and position itself as anti-communist, a combination of reaction to and co-option of the more radical elements of 60's counterculture. But the true intention was always to design a combination of technology and culture towards exerting centralized control, because that is something a nation-state will support, on so many levels - we've just taken the inverted totalitarian approach to contextualizing it, where everyone is made to believe along the way that they're acting independently yet are chasing the same goal, subscribing to the same power structure. Thus every "dystopian satire" of totalitarian, fascist surveillance states in our lifetimes was broadly misinterpreted as "wow cool future can't wait to rule it".

The specific nature of Atari being a consumer business is actually less relevant than the positioning of games as a way of motivating technological developments, a way to engage the nation in social labor for a generation of future Jonathan Blows and their equivalents in "serious" fields by framing them as "high-tech whiz kids, the next Bill Gates". All the proximal effects of having a "boys' club" industry focused on simulated violence and powermongering follow from that persistent shaping of the technology towards national interest, an effect which doesn't require a conspiracy to occur - just a persistent filter to the norm through all the various gatekeepers to resources and talent.

And I think that's why we had so many developers(myself included) that became enmeshed in the technology without clarity over what they're making or why: the reality was set up such that "real" games (according to the nation) should resemble AAA, the form that most concretely reproduces the belief system in play. But the blank canvas of the computer constantly whispers of other possibilities for defining what's real, which the developer has to be steered away from further engagement with, because they don't lead to those normalized virtues. The audience likewise was primed to expect games to look like "real" games, with a certain kind of production process and mode of engagement. The indie scene lit up some sparks that suggested other things, and they were quickly "corrected" to the "1CM" norm, but not before the norm itself shifted, at least a little bit. Cue the culture wars of the 2010's. What players, and occasionally game makers, would always say at the time: "this weird indie game is not a real game."

The emerging styles of game are easy to see as further attempts to find normalizing directions and craft identities that further the totality: if it is good for the nation to have queer people, then we should, rather than slow down and support any concrete needs, promote the creation of vibesy, unchallenging, high-profile queer games, movies, songs, cartoons, etc. The whole point is to make a show of saying "we hear you" and then do nothing that would change the power structure. But if it not good for the nation to have its queers...well, that is playing out right now. As I see it, we are no longer in the phase of "joining the conversation" in the way we experienced it in the 2000's and 2010's. Everyone has some access to the conversation at this point, and...what it did was unmask the "inverted" part of the totalitarian system, in critiques of grind culture, "the algorithm", various social justice issues, "cancellation", etc. It's the friction and sparks of a power structure that has had trouble maintaining "good for the nation" keyfabe since the 90's, and so is reducing itself to screaming mammalian emotion. America is always good because someone else is bad.

This has also left Silicon Valley at a loss: Since people have the access they want, they don't feel a great need for new gadgets, and it's showing up in the sales numbers, with multi-year declines in smartphones and computers from their peak, even after compensating for pandemic disruptions. If the consumer is indifferent, then the hierarchy within SV starts turning on itself: who is to blame for fewer chips being sold? Nobody, really - the world conquest is complete, that's all. But losing the consumer is nothing short of disaster for the whole project of Californian ideology - if we aren't making and selling more chips, the military-industrial complex has to justify itself in an higher-order sense than "more is better", which creates an examination of power that is precisely what it was trying to avoid by focusing only on replication.

There's a particular moment from one GDC that I remember where games/tech industry lines were blurred as Apple made some impactful keynote announcement that day, and later, at a corporate party for mobile games, there was a speaker who was like, "you heard the orders from the top, this is what we've gotta do now!" And this, for me, is the summary of the ahistorical forgetfulness that games seem to suffer from: as a technological dependent, the power relations are assumed to come from without, and therefore history is left to the victors, since they will be replaced with a slightly different set of victors a few years later. The direction is always the same - do something that reproduces and enlarges the system. If you're a winner you get awards and give talks at GDC. It's easy if you buy in, but crossing that threshold means you believe "for the good of the nation, we'll do this exploitative thing and trample over the past" and hardly anyone threads the needle to do otherwise. The market is not central to this dynamic, it's just a scorekeeper.

And that, I think, is some part of the unfolding crises of the 2020's. If the power structure isn't growing, then, just like historical empires, it can't continue the Ponzi that pays its troops, and the troops go find something else to do rather than walk into the same exploitative contexts. The system can't continuously point towards "the future of games" when it fails to offer a future that people buy into. So it's started burning through its scapegoats, derisking itself into remaking and reissuing old games, diffusing and fragmenting its ideology into forgettable apps and tiny Roblox worlds in which teenage cultists, fascists and hustlers try to predate each other.

And I believe that is leading gaming to the status of "cultural ronin". It still needs to serve some lord's interests to have access to resources, but the central assumptions it once worked with are fading. Games end up in alternative power centers, initially with less visible projects, unusual modes of financing, and a reframing of craft away from the bespoken technical traditions and into a more commoditized model. The punct of a punctuated equilibrium is here where we have careers being built outside of the alignment of corporate PR with corporate journalism, pieced together by people that don't have traditional games space connections. It may continue to reuse capitalist ideology, but it's in a moment of warring states, figurative and literal. That creates opportunities, lends support to the idea of "decentralizing", alternate economic models, etc. It most likely ends up in the same place that it did in the 70's - a broad realignment to new norms, another self-perpetuating mode of society, but different kinds of critiques.

In the end, I guess the best thing we could do is attempt to define a better-grounded virtue ethics for games, and perhaps to lead by example. For me that lies in making games that are studies of particular phenomena, exhibits that exceed what can be done just through storytelling and become something more meditative like a labyrinth walk. This is what traditional games always seem to gravitate towards, and it is always where I find the most compelling video games. And it allows openness to mode: there are simulationistic interpretations of this type, anarchic ones, 1GM ones, and vibey ones.