psychology

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

False Geniuses And Not Idiots

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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)

My friend Serdar had another banger post “Maybe we need fewer not-idiots.” He discusses many things, from how we keep the worst out of power to our weird worship of so-called geniuses. It’s worth reading on it’s own, but I want to zero in on something – America’s worship of supposed “geniuses” and treating them like divinely-appointed rulers. I find this strange because America also has a strongly anti-intellectual streak that you’d think would make people wary about such “geniuses”

Thing is, the worship of “genius” in America isn’t about intelligence.

Let’s take a look at the “lauded genius” of the last few years. Inevitably a “move fast and break things” person. Iconoclastic yet somehow worshipped by those who are supposedly “conservative.” Also, inevitably, kind of an a-hole. Also, sometimes dumb and clueless and even self-destructive, with an unsurprising side of drug abuse. Also on top of that, why do they have a business major yet talk science and so on?

Those following these supposedly superior humans sound suspiciously like the “cult of the auteur,” where someone is a creative genius, supposedly above us all, and thus not bound by our rules. It’s often been applied to artists and writers, excusing bad or even horrific behavior. “What would we do without them,” is what said cult essentially says, while the truth is such people’s destruction destroys more than it creates – if said creation was even worth it.

Yet this praise of geniuses (and thus auteurs) exists alongside anti-intellectualism. We are in an age where science and education is under attack by people who will them praise ketamine-fueled techbros and their supposedly brilliant ideas. Scientists who raise valid concerns on health or the environment are sidelined, while a business major who spends a family’s inheritance to buy a company is considered our intellectual better. The love of the genius and the hatred of intellectualism seem to go hand in hand.

I think this is obvious when you look how the cult of the “genius” and the cult of the auteur are similar – they praise someone for being an asshole. It’s not about brains, it’s about cruelty

These cultists do not want someone civil or functional, but someone brutal and uncaring. They want something “muscular” in the most insulting way, someone who is about force not thought, someone to hurt the other and rally the us. Saying such people are “geniuses” is a way to provide the veneer of intelligence while valorizing behavior that should land someone in therapy, rehab, or jail – or all three.

Such people see actual intelligence as weak, you know all beholden to facts, understanding, and – horrors – empathy that helps them understand how people work. Those worshiping the faux geniuses don’t want actual knowledge or wisdom, but a regressed-adolescent image of strength. Which is why so many lauded geniuses turn out to be both not that smart but remarkably weak as they are performers first and foremost.

We don’t need these “geniuses.” We need real intelligence of all kinds, from the understanding of math to the understanding of people. We also need the maturity to step outside of the games of the emotionally arrested who want a “genius” to worship.

And that, to go back to my good friend Serdar, is why we need less not-idiots.

Steven Savage