Daniel Cook’s thoughts on the matter are blunt. “The games industry…is less a meritocracy than it is a reputation-based market,“ he says. "Are you hip? Are you, as a brand, culturally relevant? Is your work enlightened? Many developers are faking it till they make it and as such are immensely aware of showing certain weaknesses. There are certain standard roles that are acceptable, such as ‘Starving artist’ or ‘youth fighting the man.’ Breaking out of those roles in a public fashion can feel like a betrayal within some communities.”
“Business development is a particularly interesting example. In our rush to see games as ‘art,’ we imported a lot of shallow, stereoptypical concepts about what art is and how artists should behave,” Cook continues. “The media, the schools, and many developers are at fault here. There was never a real critique of the fine art industry as this $66 billion business machine that uses ‘artists’ as cheap disposable labor in the service of crushingly-powerful institutions. In another industry, we’d have labeled the folks making games on new digital platforms as ‘entrepreneurs,’ but because of the rush to be ‘art,’ mere discussion of business takes on a negative tinge. The result is a lot of very poorly-equipped folks trying to run businesses for the first time.”