Games for the 7.7 Billion

Two landmark announcements from the world of videogames: first, Scott Benson and Beth Hockenberry, two of the creators of the brilliant Night in the Woods, have formed a videogame cooperative called The Glory Society (their feed is here).

The videogame industry, like every other media industry, is a place where amazingly creative artists and fan communities are locked in struggle against toxic business models and ruthless corporate oligopolies. One of the best ways for those artists and communities to resist those models and oligopolies is to democratize the production of videogames.

For videogame artists, this means supporting crowdfunding sites such as Kickstarter, using software projects such as Unity, the world's leading open source videogame engine platform, and creating worker-owned videogame cooperatives (it is worth noting that Valve itself is run on cooperative principles).

The other major news is Google's announcement for Stadia, an online service which will let players play their games on any device which runs the Chrome browser. It is an online service, which means there's no box to purchase, just online experiences to jump into.

Stadia achieves this feat by running the game somewhere on Google's immense worldwide server network. Players connect to their game via Chrome, and can use any input device they wish -- an XboxOne or PS4 controller, a mouse and keyboard, etc. In theory, this should remove much of the pain and suffering involved in playing videogames, ranging from hardware and operating system compatibility to making backup copies of game files (there is the added bonus that Google's servers are 100% powered by renewable energy). We'll have more to say about this in the next issue of Uplink, which will be up this Friday.