#poll for all you beautiful hard working professional computer touchers out there:

[tomf@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@aeva I'm not curing cancer or anything, but people having fun counts as "better", right?

[lina@tech.lgbt]

@aeva the company is not exactly Good but the product is

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@lina god big mood

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@TomF as but a humble toy maker living a simple life, i certainly like to think so

[suetanvil@freeradical.zone]

@aeva

At least, I haven't yet been convinced that the evil uses of the product don't outweigh the good.

[c0dec0dec0de@hachyderm.io]

@aeva “worse” and my mental health would be better if I weren’t aware of that or believed otherwise, surely…

[youen@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@aeva @TomF I'd say yes, it is better for people to have fun, but I'm also very concerned about the ecological impacts of the video game industry (especially the hardware manufacturing side, which is fueled by power hungry games). If we have fun now, to discover in a few years that we have depleted all useful natural resources, destroyed vital ecosystems, and modified the climate at the same time, maybe we'll not be so happy we had that fun.

[youen@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@aeva @TomF Of course these problems are not specific to the video game industry, but it's certainly doing its part to make things worse.

So in the end I'm not convinced at all I'm helping to build a better world.

[d1@autistics.life]

@aeva great poll

[jonnyt@mastodon.me.uk]

@aeva My work should definitely make the world a better place for many but 'waves at senior management', nope.

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@suetanvil i can probably help with that :3 what's the product

[rupert@mastodon.nz]

@aeva I've spent most of the last 8 years trying to crack a monopoly on submitting dental insurance claims. It only reduces the cost of a dentist visit by about $1, though.

[egoldblatt@gardenstate.social]

@aeva Gotta love invasive health insurance marketing.

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@Hex malicious compliance. a classic tactic!

[kate@social.treehouse.systems]

@aeva honestly, i feel pretty privileged being able to do work that truly makes a difference. my mental health probably couldn't deal with spending so much time on something that makes the world worse or at least not better

[brennen@federation.p1k3.com]

@aeva where does "just barely keeping our heads above water sustaining a vital piece of public knowledge infrastructure which if we're honest is also sort of deeply implicated in the contemporary crisis of knowledge in various ways" fit on this scale

[et_andersson@idlethumbs.social]

@aeva Tricky... on one hand, our product is used in healthcare. On the other hand, the higher ups are really into AI...

[irgndsondepp@gts.da-miez.de]

@aeva I... don't know.
I work on a software for compliant archiving. That kinda sounds like it should make the world a better place, but it's also a bunch of boring legal stuff that I wish we wouldn't need and everybody was just nice and trustworthy to each other.

[pythno@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@TomF @aeva It does!

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@youen @TomF about a decade ago a friend made a compelling argument that the reciprocal relationship between the games industry and GPU manufacturers was directly responsible for driving the development of cheap powerful general purpose vector processors, which in turn enabled medical and scientific research to advance significantly faster. obviously much more recent developments make this observation more complicated, but ai data centers don't erase that past progress