0000 - Later Work

Currently Playing: What’s With All the Sorting Games?

What’s With All the Sorting Games? #cosy #sorting #organization Thank you, Bee, for script editing and thumbnail creation: https://bsky.app/profile/crasscookie.bsky.social The music: https://open.spotify.com/artist/5svm2Q9vsIyIFrNhr50XO8?si=XNTHq1QARx6PsIA_h2l0Wg On September 20, an X user called IndieGameJoe shared a trailer for an indie game where you peel thousands of potatoes for the Russian army, peeling them by hand so as to waste as little potato as possible. What makes this in any way different to mass of sorting games is the fact that you can seemingly spot keys, toes, and other assorted bits in them. That game is called Potato Please. One day later, this was followed by X user Radoslaw Klasa saying their game about peeling thousands of potatoes for the russian army was ripped off by Potato Please and likely assisted by AI to get the Steam store page live sooner. So now we have two different games where the main goal is simply to peel potatoes over and over and over again. It only feels right to note that Potato Please denies both the plagiarism accusation and the generative AI one, and cites the inspiration for the game being 'a potato meme and video popular in our community', which they later confirmed is this one from a 2005 movie, which saw a reupload in 2019. They don't substantiate when this became a meme and why that inspiration took hold so long after the fact. They haven't shared any documents on production either. Rado seems to have shared their game publicly in July this year, so one would assume that Potato Please would simply have to show some evidence of the game being worked on before then to entirely clear itself, though no evidence has been given just yet. Three months is very short dev time so far, but not impossibly so, especially if AI is used as speculated. Though, it is also worth noting that Potato Please did demonstrate that some assets were handmade, and it also showed a generative AI disclosure in Rado's game over on Itch, citing the use of Claude for code. But my point isn't necessarily to litigate this drama, and is just to express that there's competition, and generative AI has not only shortened dev time, I'd argue often at the expense of the work and artistic vision, but in turn made it easier to copy ideas. Especially if those ideas are simple by nature. And this same thing happened with Needle in a Haystack Simulator, which now says original on the cover image on Steam, as it too has been ripped off. Admittedly, this one is closer to the intentional monotony of power wash simulator than the menial organisation of a librarian, but it’s still fundamentally about fixing a big mess That's before mentioning the prevalence of Roblox versions of these games, though that's not particularly new for Roblox, a game that has seen versions of Peak, Dead by Daylight, and even Call of Duty Then, there's Dice Hoarder, a game about organising dice in a dice shop and, well, normally I'd put an extra sentence explaining more about the game, but it seems like there's almost nothing else to say. Its simplicity is the point. But one look at the store shows this genre of likely quickly produced games focused on single menial tasks is everywhere. We have Screw, a game about sorting 777 nails and one screw; Supermarket Chaos, which is about organising a supermarket that has had all its inventory smashed onto the floor; Tidy Up History, which is about putting artefacts back; Cellar Keeper, which is about organising bottles that have been scattered on the ground; and My Cat Scatter Games: Tidy Videogame Supermarket, which is about putting games away. All five of these have generative AI disclosures, and they were among the first I clicked on in the store. And that feels indicative of something to me. They are speedily produced games, often lacking in original artwork, that are designed to trap you in it for hours at a time, so that when you clock out from your job, you have another job to attend. And I'd argue all of these owe their business model to Librarian, a game about sorting magic books that launched in April of this year to a huge player count and many Steam reviews. It's likely no surprise this one also has a generative AI disclosure.