Former Nippon Ichi Software President Sohei Niikawa talks shares his opinions on the current state of Japan's game industry.
“When asked how he feels about there being less prolific “auetur” developers in the scene, like Hideo Kojima, Suda51, SWERY, and Kenji Eno, Niikawa suggests that this might be due to the “corporate” nature of the video game industry. “That’s a bit unfortunate, to be honest. To put it in my own words, I feel like the salaryman-ification of creators keeps progressing,” he says. For context, a “salaryman” in Japan refers to white-collar workers, employed at large corporations, who stereotypically prioritize work over anything else and are subservient to their organization.”
“On the other hand, when you’re a developer who works for a company, various other factors, like company policies and decision-making, as well as profitability, come into play, making it more difficult for “individuality” to come through…”
Isn’t this also happening in the West? In any case, AAA rarely appeals to me; almost underground-like indies/mods/Foss games are the places to find the really experimental works.
Isn’t enshittification about products and services? I’ve never heard anyone use it for work culture, and I think “salaryman-ification” is more descriptive here.
i always thought of it as the general worsening of something in the pursuit of the short term increase in capitalist benefits (or the delusion of such).
It’s used a lot for products and/or services but underlying those is probably the enshittification of all the supporting structures, mental and physical health of the workers etc.
It is. They’re being pedantic. It’s a complete made up term within the last few years to describe anything getting shittier for the benefit of shareholders. Applying it to a specific thing and saying it can’t be used to describe what this article is talking about is silly.
Here’s a quote from Cory Doctorow himself at the end of his book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It:
The longer I think about this, the more names I come up with. I’m going to stop now, but I’ll leave you with one final word: enshittification.
Specifically, I am giving you explicit permission to use this word in a loose sense, whenever you think it makes sense to do so. As I wrote in my essay “Dirty Words Are Politically Potent”:
The fact that a neologism is sometimes decoupled from its theoretical underpinnings and is used colloquially is a feature, not a bug. Many people apply the term “enshittification” very loosely indeed, to mean “something that is bad,” without bothering to learn—or apply—the theoretical framework. This is good. This is what it means for a term to enter the lexicon: it takes on a life of its own. If 10,000,000 people use “enshittification” loosely and inspire 10 percent of their number to look up the longer, more theoretical work I’ve done on it, that is one million normies who have been sucked into a discourse that used to live exclusively in the world of the most wonkish and obscure practitioners. The only way to maintain a precise, theoretically grounded use of a term is to confine its usage to a small group of largely irrelevant insiders. Policing the use of “enshittification” is worse than a self-limiting move—it would be a self-inflicted wound.
Enshittification, also known as platform decay, is a process in which two-sided online products and services decline in quality over time. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to both users and business customers to maximize short-term profits for shareholders.
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“Enshittification.” It’s called enshittification, Kenji.
Isn’t enshittification about products and services? I’ve never heard anyone use it for work culture, and I think “salaryman-ification” is more descriptive here.
i always thought of it as the general worsening of something in the pursuit of the short term increase in capitalist benefits (or the delusion of such).
It’s used a lot for products and/or services but underlying those is probably the enshittification of all the supporting structures, mental and physical health of the workers etc.
I could be wrong however.
It is. They’re being pedantic. It’s a complete made up term within the last few years to describe anything getting shittier for the benefit of shareholders. Applying it to a specific thing and saying it can’t be used to describe what this article is talking about is silly.
Here’s a quote from Cory Doctorow himself at the end of his book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It:
Yeah, it’s mostly about platforms:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
I’m pretty sure it can be used for anything that is getting shittier.