"Every single audience in history has traded permanence for convenience, every single time it was offered the choice, in every medium, without exception, and has then complained about the consequences from within the arrangement it chose."
An Obituary, Written Late
There is a particular cruelty in being the one who notices.
Everyone else is still talking about the thing as though it were alive. They are making plans around it, buying tickets to its conventions, arguing about its future. And you are standing at the back of the room with the terrible knowledge sitting in your chest like a stone, and you cannot say it out loud because to say it out loud is to be the crank, the reactionary, the man who complains that music was better before, that films were better before, that everything was better before.
But I am going to say it out loud anyway (to a different tune than a few years ago, where I still had hope), because I have carried it for long enough and it has not gotten lighter.
Video games were a medium. Past tense.
They were a medium for roughly sixty years, from the middle of the twentieth century to somewhere in the middle of the second decade of the twenty-first, and then they stopped being one, and what we have now goes by the same name and occupies the same shelf space and employs many of the same people, but it is not the same thing. It is a different thing wearing the skin of the old thing. It has the vocabulary but not the grammar. It has the iconography but not the faith.
I want to be precise about this, because imprecision is how these arguments get dismissed. I am not saying that nothing good has been released since 2016. I am not saying that the people making things today are less talented or less sincere than the people who came before. I am not saying that I personally have stopped having fun, which would be a small and boring claim about my own tastes. I am saying something structural. I am saying that the conditions that allowed video games to function as an art form — the material, economic, technical, and cultural conditions — were dismantled, deliberately and profitably, and that when you dismantle the conditions for an art form you do not get a worse version of that art form. You get something else entirely
You get a product category.
That is what we have. A product category. A very large, very lucrative, extremely well-lit product category, with an enormous press apparatus devoted to reviewing the products and an enormous influencer apparatus devoted to demonstrating the products and an enormous discourse apparatus devoted to litigating the products, and none of it, not one single part of it, is about a medium anymore, because there is no longer a medium there to be about.
The corpse is still warm and it is still moving and this confuses people. Bodies do that. There are electrical impulses that continue after the fact. There are twitches. What I am going to try to do in the following pages is walk back through the whole thing, from the room-sized machines to the present ruin, and show you where the wound was and when it opened and why it could not close.
I am not going to offer you a silver lining at the end. I want to be honest about that upfront, so you can stop reading now if that is what you came for. There is no silver lining. There is no scrappy underdog movement that is going to restore what was lost. There are a handful of ghosts, and I will talk about the ghosts, and they are beautiful, and they are ghosts, and a ghost is not a person.
The Machines That Filled Rooms
It began, as most things in the twentieth century began, in the gap between what an expensive machine was purchased to do and what a bored engineer wanted to do with it after hours.
In 1947, Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann filed a patent for what they called a cathode-ray tube amusement device. It was, functionally, a missile simulator: you turned knobs, a beam of light moved across the face of a tube, and you tried to make it intersect with a target that was not even rendered by the machine — the targets were drawn on a transparent overlay and taped to the glass. This is worth sitting with for a moment. The very first thing that resembles a video game required a piece of paper stuck to the screen with adhesive, because the machine could not yet imagine the world it was supposed to be depicting. The world was outside the machine. The machine only knew how to move a dot.
Everything that follows is the story of the world moving inside.
In 1950, at the Canadian National Exhibition, an engineer named Josef Kates built a machine called Bertie the Brain that played tic-tac-toe against fairgoers on a fourteen-foot-tall display of light bulbs. It was a demonstration of vacuum tube technology, a technology showcase, an advertisement. It was dismantled and forgotten almost immediately. In 1951, at the Festival of Britain, Ferranti exhibited the Nimrod, a computer built for the sole purpose of playing the matchstick game Nim, and the exhibition literature made a point of explaining to the public that the machine was doing serious mathematics and merely condescending to play. In 1952, at Cambridge, a doctoral student named A. S. Douglas programmed noughts and crosses into the EDSAC as part of a thesis on human-computer interaction. In 1958, William Higinbotham, a physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory who had worked on the timing circuits for the first atomic bomb, connected an analog computer to an oscilloscope so that visitors to the lab's annual open house would have something to do besides look at static displays about nuclear physics. He called it Tennis for Two. Visitors lined up around the building. He did not patent it. He did not think it was important. He thought of it, by his own later account, as a way of making a very dull afternoon slightly less dull, and he spent the rest of his life somewhat bemused that anyone cared
And in 1962, in the Kluge Room at MIT, a group of young men with access to a brand-new PDP-1 wrote Spacewar!.
I want to dwell on Spacewar! because everything is already there. Two ships. A star in the middle with real gravity that pulls you in and kills you. A hyperspace button that will save you from an incoming torpedo but might, at random, destroy your ship for no reason at all — a mechanic they included because they thought a game should have an element of desperation in it. Steve Russell wrote the core of it. Peter Samson, dissatisfied with the randomly scattered dots that served as the starfield, wrote a subroutine called Expensive Planetarium that plotted the actual night sky, accurate to the fifth magnitude, scrolling correctly as the field of view moved. Nobody asked him to do that. Nobody was going to pay him for it. It did not improve the gameplay in any measurable way. He did it because the sky was wrong and it bothered him.
That impulse — the sky is wrong and it bothers me — is the entire art form in embryo. It is not a commercial impulse. It cannot be reverse-engineered from a spreadsheet. It is the thing a person does when they are making something they believe in and they have decided, privately, that it will be correct even in the places nobody will look.
Spacewar! spread across the country on paper tape, hand to hand, for free, because there was no mechanism to sell it and nobody had thought to try. DEC eventually started shipping it with the PDP-1 as a diagnostic program. That was the whole economy: a thing so good that it became infrastructure.
The medium was born in an environment of total non-commerciality, on machines that cost as much as houses, made by people who had nothing to gain. It would spend the next fifty years trying to preserve some fraction of that condition inside a commercial container, and it would succeed, remarkably, for a long time. Longer than it had any right to. And then it would fail completely.
The Coin Slot and the Cabinet
The 1970s did something to the medium that we do not talk about enough: it gave it a body.
Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, having played Spacewar! on university hardware, understood that the thing had commercial potential and that the only way to deliver it to the public was to put it in furniture. Computer Space, in 1971, was a beautiful fibreglass cabinet in a swooping, molded shape that looked like something from a spaceport lounge, and it was a commercial disappointment because the controls were incomprehensible to anyone who had not grown up around a terminal. The following year Pong appeared, and Pong could be explained in a single sentence printed on the cabinet — avoid missing ball for high score — and it made a fortune.
The same year, Magnavox released the Odyssey, built from Ralph Baer's Brown Box prototypes, and it too came with plastic overlays that you taped to your television screen, because the machine still could not draw the world. Twenty-five years after Goldsmith and Mann, we were still sticking paper to the glass. The medium's entire technical history is the story of removing those overlays one at a time.
What the arcade gave the medium was physicality and, crucially, *finality*. A cabinet was a manufactured object. It was welded and bolted and shipped on a pallet. It sat in a bowling alley in Ohio and it did exactly what it did, forever, without revision. If Tomohiro Nishikado's Space Invaders sped up as you destroyed the aliens because the hardware could render fewer sprites faster — an accident, a limitation, a bug that became the most famous difficulty curve in the history of the form — then it sped up, permanently, everywhere, in every cabinet on earth. Nobody was going to patch it. Nobody could. The accident became canonical. The accident became the *point*.
Think about how much of what we love in this medium came from that arrangement. Pac-Man's kill screen at level 256, an integer overflow that renders the right half of the maze into garbage, is not a flaw that was tolerated; it is a place. It has a geography. People made pilgrimages to it. Billy Mitchell built a reputation on reaching it. It exists in the cultural memory as a location, a genuine frontier, the edge of the map where the world runs out — and it exists that way *only because it could not be fixed*. A modern developer would have shipped a hotfix within a week and issued an apology on social media, and the edge of the world would have been quietly paved over, and something irreplaceable would have been lost without anyone noticing it was there
This is the first principle I want to establish and it will run through everything that follows: finality is not a limitation on the art form. Finality is the art form.
A film is a fixed sequence of frames. A novel is a fixed sequence of words. A painting is a fixed arrangement of pigment. Every art form we take seriously is defined by the fact that at some point the artist stopped, and what they stopped at is the work, and the work includes the mistakes, and the mistakes are frequently the best part. The moment you introduce infinite revisability you have not improved the art form. You have destroyed the possibility of a work existing at all. There is only ever a current build.
We will come back to this.
1983, and the Sealed Object
In 1983 the North American market collapsed. Too many consoles, too many publishers, too much shovelware, retailers drowning in unsellable inventory, Atari burying its unsold cartridges in a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico — a story that everyone assumed was apocryphal until archaeologists dug them up in 2014 and found that the industry had, in fact, literally buried its failures in the desert.
The recovery was engineered by Nintendo, and the mechanism of the recovery deserves attention because it set the terms for the next thirty years.
Nintendo's insight was that the crash had been a crisis of trust, and that trust could be manufactured through control of the physical object. The Famicom cartridge, and after 1985 the NES cartridge, was a sealed unit. It contained a lockout chip. It bore a Seal of Quality. It could not be manufactured without Nintendo's permission and it could not be altered after manufacture by anyone, including Nintendo. When a game shipped, it shipped. The developer's last chance to be right about anything was the moment the ROM was burned.
We now regard this as a constraint that developers laboured under. I want to suggest that it was closer to a covenant.
Because here is what that constraint produced. It produced a generation of developers who understood, in their bones, that they were making an object that would outlive their ability to touch it. It produced testing regimes of genuine seriousness. It produced designers who thought about the whole shape of a thing before they built it, because you could not discover the shape through post-launch iteration. It produced the phrase "going gold," which is one of the most beautiful pieces of industry vocabulary ever coined — a reference to the gold master disc, the final authoritative copy, the version from which all others would be pressed. Going gold meant: it is finished. It has left us. It belongs to the world now
Nobody goes gold anymore. The phrase survives vestigially in press releases but it means nothing, because the disc that gets pressed is not the game; it is a coaster, an installation stub, an object that requests the real game from a server. The gold master is dead. We killed it and we did not hold a service.
And the object itself — the cartridge, and later the jewel case, and later the big cardboard PC box — was not incidental packaging. It was part of the work. Consider what shipped in a PC box in 1993: the disks, yes, but also a two-hundred-page manual with lore and illustrations, a cloth map, a code wheel, a novella, a set of blueprints, a fake newspaper. Infocom shipped feelies — physical props from the fiction, a matchbook, a piece of stone, a vial of liquid. Ultima shipped cloth maps and metal coins and pewter figures. These were partly anti-piracy measures, sure. They were also worldbuilding delivered through the postal system. The game began before you turned the computer on.
Nothing today is an object. Everything today is an entry in a list on a server that belongs to a corporation, and the corporation can remove the entry, and when it does, the thing is simply gone, and there is nothing on your shelf to prove it ever existed. We will come to that. I am trying to keep it in order.
The Long Golden Afternoon: 1985 to 2000
I do not want to write a nostalgia piece. Nostalgia is a cheap drug and it makes bad arguments. So let me be careful here and say what was actually good about this period in terms that would survive a hostile reading.
What was good was that the medium had, briefly, all of the following at once:
Sufficient technical capability to express nearly any idea. By the mid-nineties the hardware had escaped the era where every design decision was a negotiation with the sprite limit. Not entirely — never entirely — but enough that a designer could conceive of a thing and then build approximately that thing.
Insufficient budget to require mass appeal. This is the crucial one and it is almost never stated properly. A Super Nintendo game could be made by a team of fifteen people in eighteen months. A PlayStation game could be made by a team of thirty. At those budgets, a game did not need to sell to everyone. It needed to sell to *someone*. And when a work only needs to find its audience rather than the entire audience, you get specificity, and specificity is the precondition of every good thing that has ever been made in any medium at any time.
A distribution system that rewarded completed objects. Retail. Shelf space. A thing in a box that had to be worth the money on the day it was purchased, because there was no second chance, no roadmap, no season one.
A critical culture in its infancy that had not yet been captured. Magazines, mostly. Frequently corrupt, frequently stupid, but operating in a market where the review arrived after the object was already fixed, which meant reviews described a thing that would still be that thing when you got home.
Look at what came out of that configuration.
Look at 1998 alone: Ocarina of Time, Half-Life, Metal Gear Solid, Grim Fandango, Baldur's Gate, Thief, Resident Evil 2, Panzer Dragoon Saga, Banjo-Kazooie, StarCraft, Xenogears. That is not a good year. That is an eruption. That is what a medium looks like when it has found its footing and has not yet been financialised, when a form is mature enough to do anything and not yet valuable enough to be worth destroying.
And note the shape of those things. They are *complete*. Grim Fandango has an ending, and the ending is the ending, and Tim Schafer did not return two years later with a narrative expansion pack that recontextualised Manny's fate for $19.99. Metal Gear Solid ends. Thief ends. Half-Life ends, and its ending is a strange, hostile, deliberately unsatisfying conversation on a train, and Valve shipped it that way and let it stand, because in 1998 you shipped the thing you meant and then you lived with it.
That is what an artist does. An artist makes a decision and then does not get to take it back. Everything about the modern arrangement exists to spare people from that experience, and the sparing is precisely the damage.
The Tether
I have thought for a long time about where to date the wound, and I keep arriving at the same unglamorous place: not a game, not a scandal, not a single betrayal, but an infrastructure decision.
In November 2002, Microsoft launched Xbox Live.
Everyone remembers this as the arrival of console multiplayer, headsets, voice chat, teenagers screaming slurs into the void of Halo 2. That is the surface. What actually happened is that a console was permanently connected to a server owned by its manufacturer, and once that pipe existed, everything that could travel down it eventually did. Patches. Content. Advertising. Telemetry. Revocation. Every subsequent development in this story is just water finding the channel that was dug in 2002.
In September 2003, Valve launched Steam. It was, at the time, universally loathed. It was slow, it was buggy, it broke games that had previously worked, and its principal function from the user's perspective was to prevent you from playing a product you had purchased until it had finished talking to Bellevue, Washington. When Half-Life 2 shipped in 2004 and required Steam activation even for the retail boxed copy, the discourse was ferocious. People understood exactly what was happening. They said so, loudly, in the plain language of people who have not yet been trained out of it: *I bought this and I cannot play it and a company I did not agree to deal with is now standing between me and my property.*
They were right. They were completely right. And they lost, and they lost so thoroughly that within a decade the same population would be defending the arrangement, evangelising it, mocking anyone who raised the objection they themselves had raised, and treating a seasonal discount on a licence that can be revoked at will as a form of consumer liberation.
That is how these things go.
Then, in April 2006, Bethesda put a set of decorative armour for a horse in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion on the Xbox Live Marketplace for two dollars and fifty cents.
The horse armour is a joke now, a meme, a punchline so worn down by repetition that it has lost the capacity to mean anything. I want to try to make it mean something again. What the horse armour established was not that publishers were greedy — everyone already knew publishers were greedy. What it established was a *category*: content that exists, that is finished, that is on the disc or could have been on the disc, and that is nonetheless not part of the work, because the publisher has drawn a line around it and priced it separately.
Once that category exists, the work has no boundary. And a thing with no boundary is not a work. It is a supply.
Follow the logic forward and you get everything. If content can be carved out and sold separately, then the correct commercial strategy is to design games that maximise the carvable surface area. If the game can be updated after release, then the correct strategy is to release before it is finished and let the audience do the quality assurance, unpaid, as a community. If the game can be tethered to a server, then the correct strategy is to tether it, because tethering permits measurement, and measurement permits optimisation, and optimisation of a game means optimising the extraction of money and time from a person, which is a different activity from making something good and is in most cases directly opposed to it.
None of this required villains. That is what people misunderstand when they want to name a bad executive. It required only a set of incentives and about ten years, and by the end of that decade the incentives had eaten the medium down to the bone with the polite, patient thoroughness of a fungus.
The Decade of Enclosure: 2007 to 2015
Watch the enclosure happen. It is almost tidal in its regularity.
2007. The Orange Box ships and Team Fortress 2 begins receiving free content updates, which everyone correctly perceives as generous. Two years later it will receive a hat economy and an item drop system, and the generosity will have been the loss leader
2008. Development budgets for major releases cross the eight-figure line as standard. The number of publishers capable of financing a top-tier release contracts sharply. Studios that had made three idiosyncratic games in five years begin making one enormous game in five years, and the one enormous game must sell four million copies to break even, and a thing that must sell four million copies cannot afford to be strange.
2009. Fumito Ueda's Team Ico shows a boy and an enormous feathered animal at the Tokyo Game Show. Hold that thought. We are coming back to it. It is the hinge of this entire essay.
2011. Sony's PlayStation Network is compromised and taken offline for twenty-three days. Seventy-seven million accounts. For over three weeks, people who had purchased digital games discovered the terms of the arrangement they had entered into: the games were not theirs, the library was not a library, and when the server was down the shelf was empty. There was outrage. There were free games as compensation. Nothing changed. Everyone went back.
2013. Two events in the same year, four months apart, which together constitute the last moment the audience had any leverage. In March, EA and Maxis released SimCity with a mandatory always-online requirement, justified by claims about server-side simulation that were shortly demonstrated to be false when players discovered the game ran perfectly well disconnected. The launch was a catastrophe; nobody could play; the servers buckled. In May, Microsoft revealed the Xbox One with a licensing regime that would have required a periodic online check-in and restricted the resale and lending of physical discs. The backlash was violent enough that Microsoft reversed the policy within six weeks.
That reversal is the last victory. I want to state that plainly. June 2013 is the last time the audience for this medium collectively refused something and the industry retreated. Everything the Xbox One was pilloried for in 2013 is now simply the ambient condition of the medium, adopted voluntarily, universally, without a fight, because it arrived slowly rather than all at once and because the generation that would have objected had by then aged into irrelevance.
2014. Assassin's Creed Unity ships in a state that produced screenshots of faceless characters — eyes and teeth floating in the void where a head should be — and the images went around the world as comedy. But look at what the reaction actually was. Not this should not have been sold. The reaction was they will patch it. And they did patch it, and the patches were themselves enormous, and the story ended with a shrug. The Overton window had moved. The unfinished product was no longer a scandal; it was a phase.
The same year, Bungie released Destiny, and the phrase "live service" entered the general vocabulary, and a game became a place you were expected to return to daily, forever, on a schedule set by someone else, in exchange for numbers that increase.
2015. The year everything ends, and it ends four separate times.
In February, Ready at Dawn released The Order: 1886 — an original property, no sequel, no franchise, a self-contained ten-hour story about a Victorian London of half-breeds and arc-lightning rifles, presented in a fixed cinematic aspect ratio with black bars its creators refused to remove. It was destroyed. Not criticised — destroyed, culturally, on the grounds that it was too short and too linear and did not offer sufficient value per dollar. There would be no sequel. The studio moved to contract work and virtual reality. The lesson was legible to every publisher on earth: a bold, complete, finite, authored object is a financial liability, and the audience will punish you for making one.
In April, Konami removed P.T. from the PlayStation Store. Not delisted-but-redownloadable — removed, unobtainable, gone. A playable teaser, one of the most formally inventive pieces of interactive horror ever constructed, and it ceased to exist for anyone who had not already installed it. Consoles with it still on the drive began selling for thousands. That is not a market anomaly. That is a medium discovering that its works can be *unmade*, retroactively, by an accountant, and that there is no library, no archive, no vault, no Criterion, nothing standing between any of it and deletion.
In September, Metal Gear Solid V shipped visibly incomplete, its third act existing as unfinished assets on the disc, while its director's name was being systematically scrubbed from its own marketing materials by a publisher that had decided the prestige game business was less profitable than pachinko.
And in November, Fallout 4 arrived to enormous sales and a season pass, and the arrangement was complete, and no one was angry anymore.
Four events. An original work punished for being finished. A work erased. A work amputated. And a work absorbed. That is the whole disease presented in a single year, in sequence, like a demonstration.
The Last Guardian, or: The Boy and the Animal at the End of the World
On the sixth of December, 2016, Sony released The Last Guardian.
It had been in development, in one form or another, since roughly 2007. It had been announced in 2009. It had changed hardware generations. It had been declared dead, publicly, more than once. Its trademark had lapsed. Its director had left the employ of the company making it and had come back as a contractor to finish it, because he would not let it go and they would not let him have it. It arrived seven years late into a market that had reorganised itself completely in the interim, and it arrived exactly as it had been conceived, which is to say: as an object from a dead world, carried forward intact, like something recovered from a shipwreck.
I want to say why I have chosen this as the terminus, because I know that a lot of people did not like it and I am not making an argument about quality.
Here is what The Last Guardian is. It is a game in which you are a small boy, and there is an enormous animal, and the animal is not a mechanic. That is the whole thing. The animal does not obey you reliably. You issue a command and Trico ignores it, or misinterprets it, or does it forty seconds later after becoming distracted by a butterfly. Players complained about this constantly. Reviewers complained about it. There were long, patient discussions about whether the "AI was broken."
The AI was not broken. The AI was the argument. Fumito Ueda had spent a decade building a system whose entire purpose was to deny you the sensation of control, because the subject of the work was the difference between commanding a creature and being trusted by one, and you cannot make a game about earning trust if the creature does what you say. The friction was the thesis. The frustration was load-bearing. Every complaint about the controls was a complaint about the presence of an idea.
And it was finished. It ended. It had an ending, and the ending was devastating and complete and did not set up anything, and there was no season pass, no roadmap, no live-service layer, no cosmetic store selling alternative feather patterns for Trico, no post-launch content cadence, no engagement loop, no daily login. It was a story that a man had wanted to tell for ten years, and he told it, and then it stopped, and that was all.
Nothing like it has been made at that scale by that kind of company since, and nothing like it will be, and I do not say that rhetorically. The financial conditions that permitted a first-party platform holder to fund a decade-long personal project with no franchise potential and no monetisation surface no longer exist. They did not degrade. They were removed. Sony's own subsequent output tells you exactly what replaced them, and it is not shameful work, and it is not the same species of thing.
So that is where I am putting the stone. December 2016. The boy and the animal.
You could argue for other dates. You could put it in 2015, with The Order buried and P.T. deleted. You could put it in 2017, when Star Wars Battlefront II shipped with a progression system so nakedly predatory that governments began writing gambling legislation about it, and the response of the industry was not to stop but to get subtler. You could put it in 2019, when Google announced that games would be streamed from a data centre and you would own nothing at all, an experiment that failed only because Google is bad at finishing things and not because anyone objected to the principle.
But I like the boy and the animal, because a medium should be allowed a proper funeral, because of the 'Last' in the name evoking the last of something, and because a proper funeral has a body. That is the last body we got. Everything after is exhumation.
What Occupies the Grave
Let me now describe, without euphemism, what the thing called "video games" actually consists of in the present day.
You do not own anything. This is not a philosophical provocation; it is the plain text of the licence agreement you accepted, and in the last two years it has stopped being subtext. In 2023 a publisher announced it would terminate the servers for a racing game and render it permanently unplayable — a single-player-capable game, purchased, installed, on people's machines, revoked. In 2024 an executive at that same publisher said publicly that players would need to get comfortable with not owning their games. He was not being sinister. He was describing the business he works in accurately, and the only surprising thing about the statement was the frankness. Storefronts for two entire console generations have been closed. Thousands of works are now unpurchasable by any legal means and exist only because of criminal activity by unpaid volunteers who will themselves eventually die or lose interest.
Imagine a film medium in which the negatives are destroyed by the studio on a rolling basis for tax reasons and the only surviving copies are bootlegs, and in which this is not a scandal but the ordinary operation of the industry. That is the situation. There is no Library of Congress here. There is no BFI. There is a handful of exhausted archivists and a legal regime that classifies their work as piracy.
Nothing is finished. The release date is now the beginning of the development cycle rather than its end. Day-one patches larger than the entire product they are patching. Roadmaps published in advance, so that the audience knows what the work will eventually become and can therefore never experience it as a thing that *is*. Early access as a permanent condition. Games that have been "in development" and simultaneously on sale for eight, nine, ten years. Games whose ending is added in a subsequent chapter. Games that are silently rebalanced in the night, so that the version you played and the version your friend played and the version you will replay in five years are three different objects with the same name, and no one of them is authoritative, and criticism therefore becomes impossible because there is no fixed text to criticise.
That last point is more serious than it sounds. Criticism requires an object. When the object mutates continuously, the critical apparatus collapses into consumer advisory — is it worth your money *right now* — which is exactly what happened, and it is why almost nothing written about games today is criticism in the sense that a person writing about a film or a novel would recognise. It cannot be. There is nothing to hold still.
The work is designed around extraction rather than expression. The battle pass. The daily. The weekly. The seasonal reset. The engagement metric. The retention curve. There are people employed in this industry whose job is to determine the optimal interval at which a reward should be granted to sustain a behavioural loop, and they are drawing on the same literature as slot machine designers, because it is the same literature and the same loop. This is not a fringe practice. It is the dominant revenue model of the largest products in the medium, and the largest products in the medium constitute the overwhelming majority of the hours played.
A form in which the most-consumed works are optimised for compulsion is not an art form having a bad period. It is a gambling industry with a rendering pipeline.
The economics have eaten the people. Between 2023 and 2025 something on the order of thirty thousand people were made redundant across this industry, including entire studios shut down in the same week they shipped critically acclaimed work, including studios shut down *by owners who had bought them eighteen months earlier*. Budgets of two hundred million, three hundred million dollars for single releases, which means that a release must reach an audience of a size that forbids specificity, which means every one of them is the same, which is why they are the same. It is not a failure of imagination. It is arithmetic. You cannot spend three hundred million dollars on a strange idea. You can only spend it on a familiar one, executed at a level of surface fidelity that nobody asked for and that has never once been the reason anybody loved anything.
And...there are no more new things. Look at the release calendar of any given year now and count the works that are not sequels, remakes, remasters, adaptations of existing properties, live-service entries in an existing ecosystem, or franchise extensions. In the golden period, a major publisher would launch several genuinely new properties a year as ordinary business. Now a new property from a major publisher is an *event*, discussed in the press as an act of institutional courage, and it usually fails, and its failure is then cited internally as evidence for never doing it again.
The Order: 1886 is the ghost that haunts every greenlight meeting in this business. Not because it was good — it was uneven, and its critics were not simply wrong — but because it was the last major publisher-funded attempt at a self-contained original work with a defined ending and no monetisation apparatus, and the market taught everyone the lesson it was always going to teach.
On the Objection That I Am Simply Old
I want to deal with the counterargument honestly, because I have made it to myself many times at three in the morning and it deserves better than to be strawmanned.
The counterargument goes: every medium has a period that its adherents believe was the peak, and that period is always coincident with the adherent's adolescence, and therefore the claim is not about the medium but about the adherent's own diminishing capacity for wonder. You are not mourning video games. You are mourning being fourteen.
I have interrogated this and I do not think it holds, for one specific reason.
The nostalgic complaint is a complaint about *quality*: they don't make them like they used to, the new ones are worse, the writing is lazy. My complaint is not about quality. It is about *ontology*. I am not saying the products are worse. Many of them are astonishing. The craft on display in a major release today would have been science fiction in 1998. The animation systems, the lighting, the density, the sheer number of extraordinarily skilled people bringing their whole lives to bear — it is genuinely magnificent and I do not sneer at it.
I am saying that the thing they are making is not the same *kind of thing* anymore.
If you told me that novels still existed but that they were now sold by the chapter, that the chapters could be revised by the publisher after purchase without notice, that the ending was released eighteen months after the beginning, that your copy would be recalled if you stopped paying a monthly fee, that the author's name was removed for legal reasons, that the text contained periodic prompts to purchase additional descriptive adjectives, and that all previous novels had been destroyed except for illegal photocopies — you would not say "the novel is going through a rough patch." You would say the novel, as a form, had ended, and that a different commercial product had taken its distribution channel.
That is my claim. It is not about taste. You can test it structurally. Take any work from the medium's mature period and ask whether it could be greenlit, funded, completed, and released today in its actual form. Not a version of it. It. The answer, for very nearly all of them, is no — and the reasons are never artistic. The reasons are always that it is too short, too finite, too specific, too uncommercial, too unmonetisable, too unlikely to sustain a two-year content roadmap. Which means the form has lost the ability to produce its own canon. A medium that could not make its own masterpieces if it tried is not a living medium. It is a genre that used to be one.
And the second objection: *but there is more good stuff released now than ever before.* True in raw volume, and irrelevant. The medium did not die of scarcity. It died of the conditions under which things are made. A thousand small good things do not add up to a form. They add up to a scene, and a scene is what remains after a form collapses.
Which brings me to the ghosts.
The Ghosts
There are still people making complete objects, and I want to be careful here because this is the place where an essay like this usually turns and offers you the consolation, and I am not going to do that. I want to describe the ghosts accurately, which means describing both what they are and what they are not.
In 2024, a man named Billy Basso released Animal Well. He had worked on it alone for approximately seven years. It is a metroidvania of extraordinary density, built on a custom engine, in which almost nothing is explained and the world is layered with secrets nested inside secrets to a depth that the community required weeks of collective effort to reach, and there is a final tier that was designed to be unreachable by any individual player working alone. It shipped finished. It fits on a floppy disk's worth of ambition and a lifetime's worth of craft. It is one of the best things this medium has produced in twenty years and I say that without qualification.
And it is a ghost. Here is why.
It is a ghost because it is *one man*, working for seven years, in isolation, on a thing that no institution would have funded and that no structure exists to reproduce. There is no pipeline behind it. There is no studio that will now make five more of these. When Basso is finished, that is the end of the lineage; there is no apprentice, no house style, no accumulating institutional knowledge, none of the things that make a form rather than a series of miracles. The golden period was not golden because individual geniuses existed — individual geniuses always exist. It was golden because there were *institutions* that could take a talented twenty-four-year-old, put them on a team, ship three games in five years, and produce a designer at thirty who knew how to build a whole world. Those institutions are gone. What remains is people teaching themselves in the dark, alone, for a fraction of a wage, and occasionally one of them emerges holding something perfect, and we all crowd around it like villagers around a saint's relic, and then it is over.
That is not a medium. That is folk art after the fall of the empire that supported the cathedrals.
And there are others. There will keep being others (I myself have designs, through The Quantumyth, to this end: 100 individual self-created, one-man-audience titles, all developed through this blog).
Every year or two something arrives that is finished, and specific, and made by people who believed in it — a game with no roadmap, no season, no store. And each time, the reaction is instructive: the entire discourse treats it as a *miracle*. As a rebuke. As proof that it can still be done. And that reaction is itself the evidence for everything I have written here, because you do not call a thing a miracle when it is the normal operation of the world. In 1998 nobody wrote three thousand words about how remarkable it was that Grim Fandango was finished when you bought it. It was finished when you bought it because everything was. The miracle framing is an autopsy report.
So: the ghosts are real, and they are beautiful, and they are ghosts. A ghost is not a person. A ghost is the shape a person left in the air. You can love it. You should love it. But you should not mistake the loving of it for the presence of the thing that made it, because that thing is not coming back, and pretending otherwise is how you spend the rest of your life waiting at a station for a train that was decommissioned.
Why It Cannot Come Back
I am asked, when I say these things aloud to people who are kind enough to indulge me, what would have to happen for it to return. As though the question were open. So let me close it.
For the medium to return, the following would have to occur simultaneously:
Ownership would have to be restored, which would require legislation against the licensing model in every major market at once, against the unified opposition of every software company on earth, an industry with vastly more lobbying capacity than the audience has organisational capacity. Efforts exist. Petitions exist. They are the political equivalent of the ghosts: sincere, admirable, and structurally incapable of reversing a settled arrangement that generates hundreds of billions of dollars annually.
Post-release revisability would have to become socially unacceptable, which is impossible, because it is convenient, and every single audience in history has traded permanence for convenience every single time it was offered the choice, in every medium, without exception, and has then complained about the consequences from within the arrangement it chose.
Budgets would have to collapse back to a level where specificity is survivable, which would require the audience to stop rewarding surface fidelity, which it will not do, because surface fidelity is legible in a thirty-second clip and specificity is not.
The archive would have to be reconstructed from a position where most of the material is already lost and the legal framework criminalises the reconstruction.
And an entire generation would have to develop a taste for finitude — for works that end, that do not want anything further from them, that offer no progression outside themselves — having been raised from childhood inside systems specifically engineered to make finitude feel like deprivation. You cannot un-train that. It is not a preference. It is a nervous system.
Every one of those is individually impossible. They would all have to happen together.
It is over. Not "over unless." Over.
Coda
I keep thinking about Peter Samson and the starfield.
A young man in 1962, working on a machine the size of a wall, in a room he did not own, on a program with no commercial purpose whatsoever, decides that the fake sky is not good enough. So he sits down and encodes the real one — the actual constellations, magnitudes correct, scrolling properly — into a toy that will be given away for free to anyone who asks. There is no money in it. There is no credit in it; his name is a footnote and most people who have played the descendants of that program have never heard it. He did it because the sky was wrong.
That is the beginning of this medium. A man correcting a sky that nobody was going to check.
And the end of it, sixty-odd years later, is a boy and an animal, made by another man who spent a decade on a creature that would not obey, released seven years late into a market that had stopped having any use for such a thing, and then silence.
Between those two points there was an art form. It was young and vulgar and frequently stupid and it produced perhaps twenty or thirty works that will stand as long as anything from the twentieth century stands, and it did this in about forty years, which is an astonishing rate, and it did it under conditions that were themselves an accident — a brief window in which the technology was capable enough to say anything and the money was small enough to let you.
The window closed. It closed the way windows close: because someone found it more profitable shut.
What remains is not nothing. It is worse than nothing, in a way, because it is *almost* the thing. It has the same names on it. The same studios, some of them, the same franchises, the same faces at the same conferences saying the same words. It is a very good imitation and it is getting better at imitating every year, and there are children being born right now who will grow up inside it and will never know that there was ever anything else, and they will be perfectly happy, and their happiness will not be a refutation of anything I have said. They will simply have been born after.
I do not have advice. I am not going to tell you to support the indies, though you should, or to buy physical, though there is barely any such thing anymore, or to keep hope alive. Hope is a discipline appropriate to situations with uncertain outcomes and this outcome is not uncertain. This one is settled. The right response to a settled loss is not hope; it is grief, and then, eventually, accurate memory.
So that is what this is. Accurate memory.
There was a medium. It began with a dot on an oscilloscope in a physics lab because a man wanted the open house to be less boring. It ended with a bird-dog the size of a house who would not come when called. In between, for about half a century, people put things in boxes and sold them and could never take them back, and because they could never take them back, they meant them.
That is all a work of art has ever been. Something a person meant and could not retract.
We do not make those anymore.
