> Without scarcity, nothing is really valuable.

Ironically I learned this messing with game memory in the 90's. As soon as I could give my character whatever power-up or combination of power-ups I wanted, the game was only fun for 10 more minutes.

I avoid this by focusing on one or a handful of games at a time, sometimes for a year or more for games I particularly enjoy.

In addition to avoiding the problems you describe, it's quite cost effective, whether or not I buy games on sale.

Why would a new infinite runner be something anyone would actually want to play, instead of the hundreds of already existing infinite runners, unless there's a good addition to the core mechanics? How long did you actually want to play it yourself?

What makes or breaks just about any indie game is a brilliant core loop, or on the other end of the spectrum a novel "feeling" / aesthetic. Latter especially visible in the horror genre. Then after the original, there's the tail of variants that can do pretty well for the next 6 months of so, and it's exhausted, which is the part AI affects the most as of now.

There's countless examples of indie games crafted with care over multiple years, with great looking (but sort of bland) graphics, that have not done well.

Further, even before AI, a lot of people whose games didn't make it, did not at all have a grasp on what counts as a finished and well crafted game. Same applies to music. It's clearer in sports where (for example) the insanity of a marathon ran in 2:00-2:10 is easy for all to see.

Yeah, you can make more stuff , but no one cares. Plastic used to be so rare and luxury , now most of them are crap. Software is the same. Creating software is becoming a practice that produces a tiny bit convenience at the price of sustainability.

Yep, in hindsight, I think my dissatisfaction with games started when I could get pirates Dreamcast games. Then emulation meant that I had access to a ridiculous choice of games to play.

Hiroshi Yamauchi knew this when the Famicom / nes launched. There's a quote from him somewhere about it. Anyway that's why third party publishers were limited to a few games a year.

I need to find a way to lock down my steam deck to only one game a month.

AI let us conquer some squares in the game, but many others are still there: the software/game/picture ... you make is the result of your prompt which reflects your personality and creativity, it's where the "man bites dog" happens, whether the user or the machine made it, a carbon brain still thinks about it. Nobody complains about the vast majority of programmers not being able anymore to optimize their code by hand editing .asm sources produced by a compiler, just like nobody does if they can't place a bodge wire on a pcb to correct a bug, or for that matter doctors not being able to prepare penicillin at home or astronomers build their own lenses and telescopes. We moved forward; what makes all of this valuable is the ability to recognize the squares that follow in order to conquer them.

Music generation, image generation all suffer the same way. You can make some beautiful stuff sometimes, but it (almost) always comes out 'hollow'.

> Growing up, games were such a scarce commodity that you'd really suck all the marrow out and spend hours beating your best times, looking for Easter eggs, or messing with custom maps and mods

I can relate to this, today when I play games I do still try to get them 100% complete but new generations do not seem to appreciate that. I see that they complete the game with minimal hours and move on to the next one.

The music industry has already been through this gutting through hyper-abundance.

Huge numbers of people are going to spend billions of hours playing GTA6 though, and that won’t be scarce once it finally arrives.

I burned myself out of playing games end to end when piracy and always-on internet became ubiquitous - individual new games stop being novel if you've got a dozen others downloading and ready to play.

Yep. It's like when you discover emulation and ROMs for the first time. The initial thrill and excitement of all these games... then you play a few minutes on each and it feels pointless. AI is going to destroy so many things we love.

This sounds like something people would say about books in the 16th century after the printing press. revolution. How mass production and wide availability of books has led to people not appreciating books anymore.

And yet today, when we have more "great" books than can be read in 10 lifetimes, people still obsess over their favorites and re-read them 10s of times.

Scarcity forces us to search for depth (even where none may exist; case-in-point - people analyzing how hot the Dothraki drink their soup in Game of Thrones) whereas abundance alows us to choose depth

> Without scarcity, nothing is really valuable.

This is why we have to go to Mars.

I remember setting a "4 minute World 1 in Mario 3" as my personal "4 minute mile" in elementary school and the thrill of actually achieving it.

"Art is born of constraint, thrives on struggle, dies of freedom."

The real treasure is the friends we make along the way... Only: We would we even embark on a journey.

>The other night I carelessly made an infinite runner game while watching TV and the feeling of sheer abundance quickly faded into a bit of depression. Without scarcity, nothing is really valuable.

This is just a lack of ambition. LLMs allow one to make far more sophisticated games than ever before, even as a single developer, and if doing so development still takes many months even if running an agent 24/7.

> Without scarcity, nothing is really valuable.

That's subjective.

You can't compare enthusiasm you felt at 12 with the one you feel at 36 or 48.

Even if it's exactly the same, for a kid week of fun feels like life formative experience because it is. For adult a week of fun passes almost instantly because time itself is perceived differently. And you are back to baseline which might feel depressive if your baseline is not great.

That's not really true. Music is still valuable even though the value of music people write themselves is already practically 0 and has been for a very long time. Same with paintings. People are always looking for a connection. Just because some exists now doesn't mean it automatically earns it. It has to have something else going for it. I think that promises a bright future for creaters and consumers of that creativity.

"Without scarcity, nothing is really valuable."

My gosh this mindset and thought is profoundly toxic.

Humans really hate the idea that their fellow man might be able to get some dignity.

It's not enough that we have enough to live well. We must know that others are suffering!