Memorial for War of the Harvest Nobles Pt. 1

The opinions expressed in this and other writings on my website are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer.

June 2025. I finally got an opportunity to break out of the confines of my role as QA for the company and game I work on, Rec Room, and was allowed to serve as designer on a number of features and events. We were entering a period of time called the summer of urgency when my lead announced a shift in our development process. I was a member of the team that owned the development and maintenance of the in-game economy. At that point the future of the company was staked on the success of a few LLM projects that would eventually prove fruitless, while leaning on the income generated by the in-game economy or the monetization efforts coming from my team. To supplement that effort, our lead encouraged the formation of small squads, comprised of people with vision and capability, to pitch, design, own and implement features at a rapid pace, with very little oversight.

An engineer friend of mine already had a DM from me asking if they were interested in working on a pitch before the meeting with our lead was over. By the next day it was approved, and together we stood up a hidden shop, akin to Destiny's Zur, which sold rare and long unavailable clothing items and new remats that we created quickly, theming them like tacky bootleg designer items, since the two of us had limited time and artistic ability to make anything great looking. I managed the operation of the store between QA tasks, constructing the actual storefront using our UGC tools, selecting the items, creating the discounts, and, for the project's almost three month duration, I monitored public conversation about the store to drive hype among the community. Its success, proved through the income and buzz it generated, seemed to indicate to my QA supervisor and my lead that I should be allowed to try more design tasks.

During that Summer quarter and since then I have contributed to several projects either as owner and designer, or as assistant to another designer. But one project that this two-part reflection will go into detail about, my largest and most intricate commercial design thus far, one which time has revealed to have great personal significance to me, was a week long live event I owned which was called the War of the Harvest Nobles.

Simply stated War of the Harvest Nobles was a limited-time, competitive leader board event. It was both derivative and an iteration on another competition which ran earlier in the same summer. This predecessor, Glitch Grenades, invited players to compete for a high ranking score of unique targets hit by a fun grenade item which had to be purchased, using either in-game currency or real money. Many players interpreted Glitch Grenades cynically, as a design intended only to create revenue for the company by targeting the wallets of players who have the greatest sources of income, either through monetized creations of their own or influence through social media. I will not argue against this reading. It is not an entirely ungenerous interpretation, I believe. After all, the only kinds of players who proved able to compete for high ranking positions during the event were, in fact, the already wealthy and influential.

Among players of a less affluent demographic Glitch Grenades created cause for alienation while engendering resentment aimed at wealthy content creators paying out hundreds of dollars to hold onto their leaderboard positions at the top. I know strains of sentiment like this are common and flow through the diversity of probably every live-service game's playerbase. But at a time when both new and loyal players alike were begging for reasons why among a sea of similar games they should continue to invest their time into playing Rec Room, Glitch Grenades' single-minded purpose did not signal to such players a turning point for a company they would ordinarily, or once had been quite happy, to support.

I do not share with our community a reverence for playing Rec Room or its history. My relationship with the game is purely as a worker. But even as a worker, one who pragmatically hopes his contributions do not assist in the creation of more misery, I believe I shared with players at that time a deep dissatisfaction in the kinds of work I and my colleagues were tasked with producing. It was the summer of urgency. And it is my sincere belief that the cause for this urgency was that the company had spent too long investing resources and hope in expensive projects that players did not like and investors could not see any value in. Nearly everyone I knew found themselves at one time or another hostage to a clearly misguided AI project for weeks at a time which would launch to an inevitably negative scandal and then shortly after be quietly shut down. This was a constant throughout 2025. And I will never be persuaded that any of these LLM projects, spurred by a company mandate, ever had any true conviction behind them except for the possibility that perhaps there is an investor out there dumb enough to find them impressive. Little else offers a better simulation of what it must feel like being trapped inside the belly of a horrible machine that is bleeding to death than having your livelihood strapped to the success or failure of speculative applications of LLMs by a leadership who seemingly could care less if their business was selling literal shit so long as it made money. Produce something that will make us lots of money, or someone--170 of our colleagues, as it turned out--would be losing their jobs.

Chalk this up as another depressing side-effect of the capture of the creation videogames as an artistic practice by the tech industry and venture capitalism, I suppose.

It is unfair to fault the creators of Glitch Grenades for designing something that would play out like this, I think. That event, whose development I contributed to as well, and which, by any measure a business would care to use, was an actual success that some portion of the community did in fact enjoy--it was as undisguised about its ambitions to rake money from the pockets of wealthy players for a reason. And for anyone that would criticize Glitch Grenades because it systemically upheld a preference for wealth and influence among Rec Room's playerbase, my wish for them would be that they realize, and soberly accept, that the logic they feel this competition format bore out so harshly is totally pervasive in the economics of live service games and commercial videogame production in general. Its ugly, inhuman influence determines not just the development choices we make behind the scenes but also limits the contexts of our relationship with these games and to the community of players that play them. And Rec Room, despite its focus on sports activities and social creation, is no exception.

At the mid point of that dire summer I think the truth of this was becoming evident to players, perhaps, for many of them, for the very first time. And as the feeling of time running out was finally being spoken about out loud, I think many of us, employees of the company, began reflecting more upon this fact ourselves. Still, time wasn't completely run out yet. It was the beginning of the oddly timed Medieval Season and a pitch I had made for the next competitive event was approved and ramping into production fast. War of the Harvest Nobles would be produced in more or less the same conditions, inevitably bearing out the same preferences for wealth and influence that Glitch Grenades had. I knew this from the outset of my ideating that we would have to explore what else could be done using the format.

And this would prove to be one of those sublimely rare occasion in life. At the very moment a clear creative vision had grabbed hold of me I was being given the power of authority and resources and a team to act on it.

I wanted War of the Harvest Nobles to communicate something about the displeasure players felt was not being heard and that myself and my colleagues were so worried about speaking into reality. The class division and wealth disparity that Glitch Grenades drew our players' attention to would be at the fore of the story that this event would tell. And through their participation with the scenario we would wrap the competition in, I hoped, Rec Room players of all kinds would dramatically enact a playful critique of the dispiriting logic of wealth and power which at that very moment was figuring the numbers to determine who among us would be losing their jobs.

Of course, it was important to me that the event be fun too.