Hi, and welcome back to Past & Future!

Today we will go back to everyone’s favorite scandal: the Epstein letters! Relax, you are reading no crime reporting here; there was, instead, a single, less shocking exchange that gave me the inspiration for this post. A gaming related one!

This is no outrage journalism applied to the videogame industry, either. When I stumbled on this exchange on X, the cultural background1 behind these ideas made me chuckle a little bit. Several accounts focused on Epstein’s possible role in pushing a larger implementation of micro-transaction in the gaming market through Kotick, but, whether this is actually true or not, nobody stopped to analyze the vision of entertainment that these people reveal.

The cultural context behind the exchange is that entertainment has no value in itself, or, at the very least, games have no value as games but only acquire weight as one among many gears in the economy machine. The real scandal here is this: what is being discussed is how to impose on the public the mindset of investors/publishers that can only see in games the monetary value they produce.2 Here, playing can only have value thanks to these “real prizes”; hence, entertainment in itself is a waste of resources, and the industry’s job is to give it value by applying material gain on it. Would you look at that! Play has just become work.

The ideas expressed in this e-mail are unfortunately largely shared by the people that work in the related industry. What I want to focus on is not this single exchange, but the fact that the craftsmen of a complex creative industry tend to share the same cultural foundation that an unscrupulous financier3 has.

We complain all the time about the loss of creativity in big productions, whether we are talking about videogames, or movies, or anything else. Once you deeply look into smaller productions, you discover that they suffer of the same illness, too. How many indie developers all conform to the same few habits? More than you believe. And again, this can be said for every medium.

A lot can be said about this cultural loss: political climate, economic pressure, loss of socio-cultural cohesion and so on. But what about the craftsmen’s philosophy?

I will never get tired to stress that I do not belittle the importance of money. Making money is a human need, and it is good when done in the right way. But all jobs require a certain philosophy guiding them; you have to make money in the right way. A very simple example: you cannot make money by breaking the law. It can be uncomfortable to have to follow a set behavior or practice, but nonetheless straying from the correct path will only make things worse, in the end.

If you make art, of any kind, even the lowest-grade one you can think of, even if it sucks, you need to follow a set code. Your job does not consist in just responding to emails during work-hours. It is to connect with the people, to capture their minds and souls.

At this point professional artists look at their creations only through the lens of monetary gain. They cannot conceive of making money by providing a set artistic experience: only their wallet matters. This attitude reflects not only the creative poverty of modern productions, but it also shows why creatives do not even talk about their work as creative work anymore. Only as a service rendered, as if art was insurance. The only exception is when AI is brought up, but we all know that their only problem is losing their own job, nothing more, nothing less. Everyone is on-board with AI if they keep getting that paycheck.

In the case of gaming, in particular, this twisted cultural foundation ruins the essence of what “play” or “game” mean.4 In itself, playing a game is not centered about concrete gain.5

This attitude has ultimately destroyed the film industry, ensuring that only a handful of movies in one year are able to reach the audience (while still remaining niche, in most cases). The irony is that now making a profit is more of an aspiration rather than the expected outcome. Even though the industry may still survive for much time, at some point private and public investors will close the valve and money will stop flowing into a sector whose impact is nonexistent. Literary publishers are stuck in the same conditions: eventually, “pornography but for women” will stop ensuring the industry’s survival. It is unsustainable and predatory: such behavior will make a profit at the start only to leave a burned wasteland later.

Professional creators must make peace with the double face of their job. As much as it is important to be able to make money, the work itself must have an intrinsic value regardless of profitability. Ignore this necessity at the expense of your own market.

Trying to force such a materialistic view of artistic creation on the customers themselves will not be a solution, either. There are specific reasons why people seek entertainment of any kind, and it is weird that professionals, who proud themselves of their higher expertise, fail to see them.

I am sure you are aware that, when you enjoy a work of art, you tend to exclude everything else going on in your life. You forget your own problems and issues. It is, usually, the very reason why you choose to spend your free time in such a way. People keep their interest and attention levels according to their own personality and needs, but this remains a staple of the artistic experience. The world has to stop existing to enjoy art.

It is also why sometimes, as an adult, you might choice to just do nothing instead of, say, watching a movie: for several reasons you cannot fully focus on the art, you cannot push the world out of the borders set around yourself and the screen. Without these borders, the movie is just white noise.

This apparently obvious reality has even been studied by several scholars of human behavior. Coincidentally, it is one of the first things that anthropology has studied about the subject of games and play. Johan Huizinga6 came out with the concept of the magic circle, a closed space (real or virtual), isolated from the rest of the world, where the game can take place and its rules can be properly applied. Those who enter the magic circle may not exist at the same time in the world outside, and the latter has only two ways to get you out: it can either pull you out “violently”, or it must wait for the game to end. Out of the magic circle, the game might remain as a concrete artifact but the activity of playing it ceases.

Do you understand where I am pointing at? Games cannot be tied to monetary concepts that apply to the real world, and the same can be said for all entertainment. You cannot impose the outside world on the magic circle, or else, the game stops being a game and it is just a job!

Is it not, in a more limited sense, what the industry has done with the introduction of daily missions and goals?

The prospect of getting “real world rewards” will attract a certain set of consumers, this is true. Once the production team has implemented them, it believes to have got a success when it sees an initial surge of profits and, especially, engagement. Such a set of consumers, though, is limited and exclusive: as in all things, you can only get so many people on board, and though they may seem at the start a large mass, at the same time the rest of your public will start walking out. This other crowd has a job already, and, if these people wanted a second one, they would apply to an actually profitable job. They play games because of the beneficial effect of entering the magic circle, not to get phone credits, and they will leave once the game is not fun anymore. They might do it slowly because of several reasons, but they will.

As I said, such a concept can be applied to games as well as to every other type of entertainment. You enter the magic circle when you read a novel, unless you have to do it as part of your job or your studies (and this is why reading as a reader is different than reading as an editor or as an academic). The same goes for film. Art has an impact on you because its enjoyment is detached from everyday life.

You cannot impose a materialistic view on the public if what you do is creative work. The best outcome you get from such an operation is to change its composition, but in the end you are not improving on the profits as much as you think. You might think that this second public that you got will easily spend more money, but they are as easy to leave you once someone else offers them more valuable rewards. This works for fandom, as well: the initial high of attachment and identity will soon wear off, the trend will pass, and your obsessed fans will forget you and move on.

Artists, remember that art has a value in itself, and that value is the only reason why people enjoy it. They do not pay you out of duty or charity, but because you are able to give them that intrinsic, immaterial value, and they want you to keep doing it.

It remains to talk about the bad relationship that professionals have with the concept of making art for money. Since the core idea of this post has been expressed already, we will leave this topic for another post later in the year. For the time being...

Thanks for reading!

Until next time.

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In the elder days people looked at things to come with anticipation and excitement. But now, whenever the collective mind of the West gazes into the future, it can only see hardship and despair.

Digital rivers of ink have spilled on the subject, and from many a spring. Events unfolding in the late ‘00s began harming our collective psyche, but the last 10 years have now broken the sanity of the Western World. We cannot look into the future anymore without a negative prejudice: we expect nothing but for things to get worse. Even our imagination can only see the grim darkness of the near future.

There is a genuine risk that such depression will bear fruit in a self-fulfilling prophecy: the future may suck because we have wished it so. The negativity stems from genuine stress and I can sympathize with the Everyman’s feelings, of course. It’s when even artists and writers are stuck in the same quagmire that I feel disappointed.

Years ago, I was trying to express why such negativity bothers me to a friend, his response was that “Writers can certainly think forward, but they must also look at reality as it is now”.1 I utterly hate that “must”; as a writer, you have no social obligations but to write a good and beautiful piece of work, and your subject is nothing less, nothing more than a possibility.2 You are free to talk about the here and now and its ugliness, if that is appropriate for your creative vision. But if by the end of your story you have not even pulled your own self out of this muddy pond, what was the point? This suffocating negativity is already shared everywhere on the Internet and the real world, so there is nothing to communicate here that you could not have said by sending tweets or Facebook posts.

If a writer cannot shake things up a little bit, then he has failed. You need no effort to keep the waters stale and muddy, they already are and no one is cleaning them, which is exactly what you should do! You can repeat what people are already saying only so much, at a certain point you have to show them another way, or you will be left behind.

That is why this essay exists. Its job is for me to list some ideas and reflections that can help us into building a positive vision of the future, and at the same time get feedback from other people. I wish to understand if I can come up with science fiction that is not dystopian in the year of Our Lord 2026, and if I can inspire a wave of positive energy and confidence that can push people out of the swamp.

The public and the market

Some of you might react with irreverence to what I am doing here. The shrewdest among you might argue that I am striving to be starry-eyed because I do not want to deal with uncomfortable things.3 On the contrary, I am tired of recursively going over the same uncomfortable things without anyone managing to come up with a solution.

I have grown up my entire teenage years believing to be intellectually minded. As a (young) adult I realized that I am more of a man of action than previously thought. There are some exceptions, but I am convinced that, usually, knowledge and understanding are worthless if they do not generate action. We have listed the problems of the world several times, we know which they are, we have understood that there is more than one cause, that each can be tackled from several different sides, and so on. At this point, it is better to shut up unless you have even the smallest hint of a solution, and let men with pulse do the rest.

Someone else might say that it is hard, borderline impossible, to come up with an alternative vision for the future when all that surrounds us is in a sad state. Or, that we must come to terms with the fact that at the moment people can only relate to a pessimistic vision; an optimistic science-fiction would leave them cold and uninterested because they cannot relate to it. In such a context, working to the post-2000 equivalent of old Star Trek is too much of a risk for anyone writing in any mainstream entertainment conglomerate, and a possible futile effort for the indie writer or the dilettante. Bright futures do not sell.

To tell you the truth, it is hard for me to respond to such an argument. I am not yet convinced that writing should be my full-time career, regardless of whether this is a possible path, today, for anyone who is not an affirmed author already. And I strongly believe that the primary purpose of any artist is to tell something, not to make money4. Sometimes, an artist should say what people do not want to hear at the moment (or maybe, what they believe they do not want to hear); sometimes, an artist might be speaking not for his contemporaries, but for generations to come.

The contemporary public has a deep need for someone that points his finger to the light at the end of the tunnel, rather than to the darkness close nearby. In fact, I feel like it is begging for it: we are aggressively waiting for someone to say that we do not have to suffer and suck it up forever.

On the strict business side, the problem is that so often our perception of the demand is skewed. When the offer is so uniformed to a specific set of values, goals, and aesthetics, it ends up generating an illusory picture of what the market wants. Are we really sure that only dark visions are currently interesting to the public? It might as well be that all those who wish for something else have left the market altogether.

Sometimes we do not really know what the public wants until a work of art comes out that catches on the market’s interest and ends up selling millions of copies (look at Harry Potter). Then the marketers discover a new mass of buyers who did not even exist in their minds, before. In summary, we cannot always be so sure of what can grab people’s attention or not; often the real problem is to find the right way to sell it. Both sellers and authors have certain responsibilities, and we can pretend they do not only so far; great authors have created their own audiences, and a lot of successful businessmen have become so by selling things that no one wanted before them.

If you are a creative mind today, your highest goal and challenge should be to change the taste of either your contemporaries or your successors. You should give it all to break the deadly stasis and bring energy again into culture and society as a whole.

The end of materialistic Progressivism

That said, if we want to imagine another world, we have so many challenges in front of us. The world that we were taught of in school is decaying, as most things do, and it is impossible to imagine a future where it finds the strength to survive.5

For generations, the pillar on which all visions of the future were built was the conviction that universal material abundance and comfort, and a State able to provide it all to the mass, were the only measure of progress. This has proven incorrect: we have sent Trouble away from the front door just to have him enter from the back showing off an unbearable sardonic smile. Materialistic Progressivism has not solved all of our problems and it may as well have generated new ones.

We cannot really base our new creative vision on these precepts anymore. A bright future will necessarily require a certain degree of wealth and comfort, sure, but what we must ask ourselves is: what for? We cannot really think to these things as an end on their own; they are but a basis for a meaningful existence which needs much more to manifest.

Younger people mock Gen X media that portrays young men unsatisfied by their cushy, well-paying, corporate job. “How lucky they were, if this was their only problem.” We can say this as much as we like, but the truth is that Gen X understood, maybe for the first time in our times, that our existence does not end with a full wallet and personal property. The body needs material goods to sustain itself, but the spirit aims beyond that. Let us listen to our elders. Even though they might have had it better, they still had a good intuition that we tend to miss.

Integral Human Development

Any new vision of the future must take into account that the well-being of Man derives from more than a single source. Along with the material there is the spiritual, which in turn is made of several things: from social relationships to culture to morals and faith.

Watering the current spiritual desert will be another of these great challenges that await us. We cannot run away from accepting this mission; what matters is not that we succeed in changing the world, but that we are able to think on a forward perspective, and to make people think their way into the future side by side with us.

To build a brighter vision of the future, we will adopt this idea of Man as an entity composed of several parts. We cannot really progress without an effort in improving our inner selves, rather than just the environment around us. That is, the bright future will take into the account that our environment must be able to nourish us in the entirety of our composition, and not just materially.

To make an example, part of the dystopia present in the cyberpunk genre is the isolation of the individual: man is fully detached from his neighbor and mutual existence is barely acknowledged. Creating a bright future will involve thinking about the way the future man will be able to form and maintain social bonds with. It might sound stupid or too base, but consider how the modern world is currently suffering from the death of Third Spaces. There is a dark tendency to remove environments where people can socialize and form bonds which are not inside the family (the house, first space) or the workplace (second space). In the meantime, most of the Western World has lost a genuinely mainstream culture able to unify strangers. Many people lash out at “sportsball” now, but sports were once an important aspect of the mono-culture:6 on meeting a new person, you would have easily broken the ice by talking about your favorite football team.

To cut it short, we need to elaborate ways in which the future men will form social groups and strengthen ties with their neighbors.

But a restorative future will have to face matters of faith, religion and civic morals as well. As we form bonds with other people, we will need a common ground and wise guidance that can regulate them.

The standard intellectual attitude in science-fiction circles is canonically spiteful against such things. Again, their approved philosophical premise has been materialistic Progressivism for decades; their aversion is, then, not surprising.7 All the more reason to use the imagination in exploring how the future man will form his bond with the transcendent.

As the internal affairs of the West proved that you cannot just base the existence of an individual or a nation on keeping their appetites constantly sated, the story of its dealings with the outside world reaffirmed that matters of faith and religion are not relics of the past which will be soon left behind, as our cultural elites believed. Recently, the very question of religion has revealed itself to be hot still even among the Western World’s native peoples, as Christianity starts re-catching the interest of younger generations.

How will the future man’s relationship with God be? The only assumption we might bring up is that he will not be able to just ignore His existence anymore. Our recent history has left a barren desert where once our ancestors saw green pastures; in our hands we have got but a wasteland, not only aesthetically crushing but also functionally useless, and the only way to get something out of it is to either find whichever oasis is left or to understand how to make the soil fertile again.

Do not misunderstand me, I do not mean that new faiths and religious practices will or should be created. This is a stupid remnant of that culture which we want to get out of,8 and a quick research will show to what level of ridicule this entire topic has devolved to, anyway. And in any case, very orthodox forms of religiosity are more likely to become stronger: they will provide deep, solid grounding onto which every other positive novelty can be built.

What I would ask is: how will it happen? Will the priests step into the world or will the future men run to the churches?

For example, I believe that the Catholic Church will undergo an interesting process. The majority of clergy will still cling for a while to their own kind of Progressive Liberalism, and the ecclesiastical hierarchy will be the last remnant or defender of its tenets... in the meantime, more and more people will get into the Church demanding more out of their pastoral activity. In many respects, it will be the people begging the priest to resume his traditional role, and maybe few will be the missionaries spreading the Word of God among the future men. The future men themselves will ask for It.

This homecoming is, I think, inevitable and necessary, as religion will be the sole provider of unified morals for people. And here we come to the last point of our paragraph.

Have you noticed how many extremely weird and abnormal lifestyles have arose to public consciousness once the one, mainstream culture had completely shattered in countless, minuscule niches? These are guided by principles and views of the world which, before, were at the very least kept to oneself; in general, they were not considered to be a part of normal civil society. Only people in the fringe dabbled in those things, whether you adopted one side or the other of the moral spectrum which was allowed in the mainstream.

On how and why these borders collapsed, many people have already written. I will limit myself to state that any further expansion of the Western moral spectrum will be unsustainable. Any further mitosis of the one culture will reduce it to isolated experiences with not much sense apart from defining a single individual. This might happen in the nearest future, but eventually, and probably sooner than we think, the moral islands composing Western society will start to coalesce again into defined, normal sets of principles. People will look again at what has defined the West before the one culture broke apart, and build atop those foundations.

Ancient relics will be the foundations that will allow the future men to face new challenges and redefine their existence.

This is the end of File 001, where we have briefly set a philosophical foundation to the task ahead. I am aware that it might have been boring, or that I might have dealt with themes already discussed, but I thought it necessary to be as clear as possible in defining goals and premises, so that we can focus on the fun part later.

More Files will be released in the course of this year, and - who knows? - maybe even in the next. In the meantime...

Thanks for reading.

See you next time!