Manager? Is something wrong?
Money is the death of joy
Recently two things happened, one good and one less good. The first good thing is that I got into the Project Moon games, three games (so far) — Lobotomy Corporation, Library of Ruina, and Limbus Company — which make up a larger, science-fiction cum dystopian vision of a world run by massive corporations called Wings, mercenaries called fixers, and abnormalities/monsters that terrorize the populace, particularly those who are not fortunate enough to be wealthy and safe in the “nests,” the elite living areas for those who might be good enough to work at a Wing. At its core there’s nothing particularly novel about this concept — there’s a lot of Blade Runner and William Gibson there to be sure — but these games made by Korean developers Project Moon do a remarkable job pairing form and function, making the intricacies and (especially in the case of Lobotomy Corporation) the frustrations of playing their games mirror the content and critiques they put forth.
So, for instance, in Lobotomy Corporation, you’re tasked with managing a corporation that houses horrible monsters who produce energy for the world via some transmission of fear, conversation, and violence (no spoilers here, but the game does expand on this in some interesting ways to be sure). As you work more on building and staffing your corporation, you meet your managers, your close confidant Angela (a hyper-intelligent AI), and your employees who are a rotating cast of randomly generated little cartoony guys and gals walking around and interacting/fighting/being killed by the abnormalities. When the game began, I was deeply concerned to not let any employee die, resetting and replaying in order to attempt to get around this inevitability. But as the departments grew, and the obstacles got worse and worse, I rapidly lost sight of this. So when the main theme of the game — that the original sin of humanity is a tendency to allow the ends to justify the means — really crystallizes at the end, the manager and the player don’t get out unscathed. While this isn’t a unique narrative twist — Spec Ops: The Line also does this, and more famously — the frustrating and micromanaged quality of the game makes Lobotomy Corporation a much more immersive sort of sim. You feel almost responsible for the little sprites. In fact, the image above is from a moment in the game that the cartoony filter fails, and Angela tells you that everything in the facility looks as it does because it would be impossible to manage the reality of the carnage. Hard to argue!
In the sequel game, we get more of this kind of form and function play, though I’ll freely admit I haven’t finished this one yet. They’re long games! But Library of Ruina picks up with the group Lobotomy Corporation stops with, though the player is given a protagonist with his own backstory as a fixer. He is working for Angela in a library that is attempting to establish itself as a Wing, and he is tasked with facing visitors to the library, who are killed and turned into books that line its shelves. The Library consumes the good and the bad, and the player themselves has to turn more and more mobs of characters into cards to put in their own decks to perform combat, as well as books to continue the plotline. As unfortunate as it feels to kill these innocents after hearing their stories, the killing continues simply because its the only way to continue the story of this world. Ruina focuses far more on the world outside of Lobotomy Corporation, and the expanding sense of the space is wonderful to experience, a really lovely feat of narrative work.
Now we come to Limbus Company, a game I have not played yet and don’t have much to say on other than that it’s a big part of that second thing that happened, the bad one that I mentioned above. With Limbus Company, Project Moon shifted from its standard game release style to a gacha game. A gacha game, for those who don’t know, is a typically free game which has elements of, uh, chance involved in what characters or weapons or traits the player can unlock. If we’re being less euphemistic, it’s a gambling mechanic, which encourages gambling. In-game currency is purchased by feats within the game or by actual real-world money, and the money gets you a lot more of it a lot faster. There’s nothing constitutively wrong with gacha games of course. Two of my favorite games of the past five years — Arknights and Honkai Impact 3rd — are gacha games, and I think they have some of the best storytelling I’ve seen in a long time. But there are pitfalls.
The biggest pitfall is that, well, you’re beholden to your audience in a big way when you make a gacha game. When you make a normal game, people have a claim to your attention because they paid 20 or 40 or 60 bucks for it, but you’re also essentially the same level of invested as anyone making any commodity. If 10000 people buy your game, 100 mad ones can cause a scene, but it’s very unlikely they’ll be that influential. Now imagine that your game has a massive userbase, but a small group of them pay for it. And a smaller group of that smaller group pays a LOT of money to play your game. Euphemistically called whales, players who dump hundreds and hundreds of dollars into these gacha games wield a ton of power over developers. If you’re one of the top 1 percent of spenders, it’s tough to ignore your voice. This is an issue when that voice is toxic.
Over the past few months, Project Moon have had a bunch of dustups in the community that they have not come out of looking very good. An illustrator who had worked with them for a while was fired after male fans complained about the conservative nature of a swimsuit she’d illustrated, as well as past statements she’d made against women being filmed illegally. This, the fans said, was proof of her being a feminist. Project Moon insists that these aren’t the reasons she was fired, but it’s hard to see this as anything but PR CYA (it was the 70s, we didn’t have a second to spare). More recently, the primary English translator for Project Moon, Watson, left his position after harassment from the community and massive amounts of work expectations from Project Moon themselves. Fans of the series of games and the studio itself are rightfully upset and worried about the future of Limbus Company, and worried for the treatment of the people who make the games they love. Some have suggested the turn to gacha has poisoned the well, and while it’s probably a bit of a strong reaction, we can see why they’d think so! The company is not exactly making a lot of great decisions after their financial successes.
I don’t have a ton of insight into this controversy that you, the reader, doesn’t — I’m not friends with anyone in Project Moon or any of the translators or illustrators that have felt distanced or have been fired by the developers. So as far as that goes, consider this a long news post. But I do think it’s interesting and a bit sad, as the good parts of Project Moon, specifically Lobotomy Corporation and Library of Ruina, aren’t made bad just because the Limbus Company reception has produced this new approach from Project Moon. Nor, even, is Limbus Company particularly poisoned as a project. What is clearly poisoned or, perhaps better put, what is clearly demystified is the status of Project Moon as a scrappy, progressive, and ultimately supportive studio. And at least a part of what generated this demystification is money, namely the introduction of massive profits and the potential for continued profits in perpetuity.
It has struck me recently that there’s a danger in making money off of what you love. Don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled if you, reader, have been able to do it; I’m grateful for the ways I’ve made money here and there on what I’ve loved as well. But while I’m certainly not going to be a GOP shill and say everyone needs an engineering or STEM degree (business degrees are fake, unfortch), I will say that getting a PhD in English was a joy in process and a devastating experience in practical terms. To fail at achieving a dream sucks, for sure; to have one of the great joys of my life, literature, forever tainted by the profit motive and the perpetual question of what will make people notice my writing, my scholarship, my thinking is something I’m still getting over. I haven’t read seriously, or really even at all outside of games since I got my PhD, and burnout is only part of the problem.
And sure, I’m a bit of a hypocrite saying this — I took videogames and made them into a profitable little side hustle, and for that I am grateful to everyone who supports me. But the fact of the matter is, there is something very dangerous in turning every single thing we are passionate about into something that makes us profits. Obviously, we can’t make art if we can’t eat, and in a perfect world, we’d have our funds, our food, our shelter, et al parceled out equally. To each according to their need or some such — someone German from the 19th century should work on that one. But in all seriousness, everyone should have the opportunity to do art, but as we live in a culture that does not grant such egalitarian opportunities, many of us attempt to split the difference by making our jobs and our passions the same thing. This can be a wonderful marriage, and some of my favorite people have made this work in amazing ways. But the flip side is something like the monkey’s paw of Project Moon, whose projects have such wonderful energy that stands in direct opposition to their current choices and environment after financial success.
The short version, I guess, is money changes people. But I think that’s a bit misleading. It’s not that money changes people per se; it’s that it changes the way they approach the things that matter to them. Even if 90 percent of what matters is “the thing itself, and the people who make it”, that 10 percent of “the money that this thing can make” is still hanging out, clouding the air and changing the focus of the work in subtle and often toxic ways. Once the view shows the uncensored vision behind the chaos, it’s tough to forget how the sausage is made. And of course, no one should feel their work isn’t worth money — get paid for your labor! — but I think we need to acknowledge the ways that profit as a motive can influence the way we approach our art and the people in our communities who help us make it.
Anyway, I hope Project Moon can recuperate and realize where they’re at; even if they do not, I hope you will check out their work, particularly the standalone games, as they’re wonderful pieces of storytelling and thinking. And thank you for being here as well — this Wednesday release means we’re doing a Friday-Sunday release for the next two, so stay tuned and let me know what you think. Night!