Avatar photoSteven Savage

The Rapture for the Disconnected

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

As all my regular readers know, I get obsessed with things, which finds its way into my blog posts. I’d like to share my latest obsession, Ed Zitron’s comments about how terrible leaders in the business world are what he calls Business Idiots.

The Business Idiot is going to sound familiar to a lot of people – and you, my regular readers, are almost certain to have met these people. People who are completely outside of (and unfamiliar with) actual productive work, focused on things like “growth” and “market share” but not doing things, and absolutely out of touch with reality. They may be lauded by the business press for their genius, but what we don’t have any proof they actually know how to do anything. They probably have business majors and have never not been in some kind of management.

They don’t actually do anything, but want to enter the world of vibes and powerpoints and that’s it. They move things around and get press, money, and venture capital. Any actual useful product, anything for community, is at best a side effect.

Business Idiots, worse, are aspirational for people. Their goal is to get away from people doing actual work as soon as possible so you can enter the airy world of management. It’s like some kind of Rapture for the Disconnected.

You’re probably nodding, if only in your head. You’ve dealt with people like this. You might even be trapped in a Business Idiot job and hate it. We’ve all been there.

I got Zitron’s post and am going to be chewing this one over for awhile – and for several blog posts doubtlessly. Beyond bringing it to your attention, I wanted to note the importance of being good at something. That’s a good reminder of why these Business Idiots are dangerous – the contrast.

I work in IT, in medicine and academia, as a Project Manager. Now the best Project Managers are people who’ve done something else before being a Project Manager. You were good at something and you can in turn apply that to managing things. I used to code, still mess around a bit and do websites, as well as my art under a pen name and other project. I get doing something and still do, and thus I can be old and crotchety and complain about web frameworks.

I also work with a variety of doctors, nurses, researchers, and so on who moved into management, leadership, and so forth. Some of them still practice their previous profession, but all of them knew how to do something and the results it had for other people. As I put it to a friend, when you work with someone who has reached into a human torso or handled deadly chemicals, you pay attention to them.

That old joke about people getting overpromoted to management ignores the problem of management that never knew how to do anything. I’ll take the people who have done surgery, written code, or had to ask the safest way to handle acid, thanks. They get results and they get who they work for and what their co-workers are like.

And yes, I’ve dealt with people promoted over the heads. But upon reflection I’d rather deal with the formerly competent who may be so again, who get how things run, than those that never did. It’s also a reminder to value real leaders.

The Business Idiot reminds me of distant royalty – inbred, pampered, only knowing how to lead their lives moving people around like chess pieces. We have, unsurprisingly, re-created royalty, and as royalty does, it’s pretty inbred – only this time it’s mental. Well, for now.

It’s also not just Business. But that’s for later discussions.

I think Zitron’s definition is something that needs to get out there, become part of the lingo. Business Idiots. We have name for the people running huge companies and more that make horrible decisions to the applause of a sycophantic press. Because naming it is the start of addressing it – and if you look at the state of economics and government, we’ve got issues.

Now prepare for more posts on this subject over the next few months. You’ve been warned.

Steven Savage

Video Games: People Care

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

I’m my previous column I discussed the weird state of “people caring less” from the blog post “The Who Cares Era” and the value of having things be BY people and FOR people. Yeah, it involved AI, but also general issues in our culture.

So I was thinking about areas I saw a lot of care, a lot of involvement. One of them – perhaps the largest I could discuss – is video games.

Video games are things that people experience very hands-on. You guide things, you type, you make choices. You may have involving stories, if not stories that at least keep you moving ahead. There’s music to enthrall you, there’s graphics to show the story, there’s UI design to help you play. Video games are involving as a form of media – in many ways they are an intersection of media.

Getting this right takes work. Yes you can use pre-existing frameworks. Yes you can use premade music. There’s plenty of tools to help you. But that also means so many other people can do it. To make a game people care about you have to make something for someone, you have to at least give enough of a damn to make something people will want and pay for.

That’s because with games you are having a highly interactive experience and one where multiple forms of technology and art come together. Everything has to come together to make the experience work because that is what you are getting – an experience. If you’ve ever played a game that just compelled you, you know what I mean.

I think because of all of these interacting elements, because of the hands-on nature, gaming is one area where you can feel the care. Even if such care is a good job of engineering Space Shooter Knockoff Whatever, you can at least feel that. A game is something you live in with relative ease, and you want to belong there.

I’d also add that games take so much effort to make, to make really good ones, there’s a boundary to not caring. If you just want to grift or something, games are too much work.

So let me close up with a reflection on a few games I enjoyed the last few decades that I felt showed people cared (Most are indie)::

Approaching Infinity: A vision created by one author, a space Roguelike that got “rebuilt” with over a decade of history, released in 2025. A roguelike space adventure with classic graphics that has multiple plots, spaceship management, planets to explore, sci-fi drama to experience, and just about everything you’d imagine in a space adventure. The author cares and you cannot only feel it, but they even have a Discord.

Dungeonmans: A comedy Roguelike fantasy RPG that is also a serious game where you build a Dungeonmans Academy which continues even when characters die, create adventurers, build equipment, and so on. It’s both funny and an actually good game, and one I played in multiple times in Early Access and after release. The author has even updated it since it dropped in 2014.

Our Adventurer’s Guild: A game of, well, managing an Adventurer’s guild. It’s chock full of the things people that like fantasy adventures want – crafting, characters, adventuring, etc. Your growing teams have their own independent personalities, turning the game into a kind of procedural soap opera. It also has plot twists that really hit me in the gut, all with a kind of 80s-90s anime aesthetic. You can feel the care, a game that felt like someone saying “this is what I want and I bet others do to.”

Shadow Hearts (Series): A classic-type JRPG series, but with a kind of horror/macabre mix with humor. You assemble a team of weirdos to fight some evil supernatural force, and there’s all the classic JRPG elements, but with more horrific monsters and interesting twitch-click gameplay. The games all feel like they’re taking chances with their strangeness and weirdness, and it’s clear each one was fun to make. (Also, oddly, the only big name game I mention here).

The Slormancer: An ARPG released in 2025, a humorous game of battling the evil Slormancer (Slorm being a powerful magical substance), but the game is hardcore. You customize characters with complex interacting abilities, you build equipment, and everything interacts. It’s a game where someone had a vision, a vision so good a friend and I both had the game and obsessively swapped tips for weeks – we even won the game on the same day.

Star Traders: Frontiers: A spaceship management game in the Star Traders universe. Open-ended with a plot that repeats each game, you can choose your profession, make alliances, run a starship, and manage a crew where each member has a personality. The creators have done multiple games in this setting, and this one is a compelling space manager game.

Hope this gives you some food for thought. I’d love to hear your thoughts on games, caring – and ones that you enjoyed where you know people cared.

Steven Savage

We Stopped Caring. We Can Again.

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

Am I going to talk about AI? Sort of, yes! But mostly I’m going to talk about caring and people, inspired by Dan Sinker’s blog post “The Who Cares Era” – just go read it.

We live in an era that doesn’t seem like people care. Market-tested perfectly created media is there, completely designed to interest us no matter what its content is. Extended cinematic universes calculated carefully enough enthusiasm has become drudgery. Politics are publicity stunts, religion is a lifestyle brand, nothing is what it is.

Finally we’ve got AI, and you can use AI to generate content for someone else – who might then use AI go get a summary of what you didn’t create.

So many people don’t seem to care. We’ve got all sorts of content, writing, media, but so much of it isn’t made by people who care or even consumed by those who care. AI is a pain in my backside, but its the result of where we were slowly heading.

(And as I note, I don’t consider AI new or always bad, but by now you know that, so let me keep ranting).

What I think we’re missing is that good art, or writing, or media is by someone and for someone. There’s an intimately involved creator who gives a damn and someone who wants that media. Real, meaningful creativity and communication is about people on both ends.

Every now and then people rediscover Ed Wood, a man with many flaws, erratic talents, and an unstoppable desire to make things. There is a reason he had and has fans, because he was doing something – if not well – and that connects with people. I say this as a person who has watched his films without the Rifftrax treatment.

I get zines and the sheer personal feel of them is amazing. I love getting to know people, and the personal nature of zines lets me connect with people who want connection. I have a shelf that includes strange collage art, speculations on podcasts, street photography, and more. There’s people on both ends.

On a very personal level, I had a friend who got inspired to change jobs in part due to my book Fan To Pro. That’s what I’m talking about: a person really wants to say something, another wants to listen, and in some cases a dialogue ensures.

AI in the way it’s often deployed messes it up, creating both generated content without a person and summing up data so people don’t have to connect. But that’s been an issue of mass media for awhile, with calculated marketing, mass efforts, calculated creations, and plenty of imitators. We’ve industrialized our arts too much, and AI just slots in there really well.

If you feel that dissatisfaction, that there is something missing in culture and arts and just talking to people, you get it. We’ve industrialized, and misuse of AI takes it farther.

It’s time to care, to care enough to create – and care enough to pay attention.

Steven Savage