CAN WE PLEASE HAVE BETTER VIDEOGAMES YET?

I don't care for success as the industry defines it, but I do care about viability, and I still want people to play my work. Some other manifestos say you shouldn't care about (or hope for) even viability, but I don't agree, survival is important.

It's not satire, but also the manifesto is (silently) addressed to creators rather than players, so I think you're not really the audience I had in mind when writing it. But I will say that when I say "better games", I imagine something greater than Silksong or other well known titles. This is not to say that these games aren't good, just that we could have even better, if creators (myself included) let themselves detach from industrial thinking and put in the hard work  to go beyond what we know and have today.

I'd rather not define exactly what "better " looks like to me because really I just want people to be more ambitious with the intentions of their work, but my thinking goes something like   Veselokov's "Gameplay Never Mattered" manifesto (https://veselekov.itch.io/gameplay-never-mattered) though I don't agree with the title, but I do want games that transcend gameplay, which I think is what Veselokov is really getting at.