Platforms are Casinos for Artists

I won Twitter four years ago. A little bit. This was back when Twitter was merely a hell-site and not X, a post-apocalyptic-wasteland-ruled-by-mutant-marauders site. It was a small win, but after years of barely getting any response on my tweets – and for a while, I was tweeting daily – I casually posted a tweet that went viralish.

The rise of this tweet took me completely by surprise. I didn’t think it was my best tweet, or my funniest tweet, or even my most helpful tweet, but suddenly it was my best performing tweet by far at 13K likes. The response was overwhelming. I was getting constant pings to my phone. Comments that needed to be answered. Retweets from people sharing my joke – people I admired, people in other countries! It was a rush, like the whole world was applauding one of my okay-est ideas.

The high lasted a few days as the tweet bounced around different corners of Twitter like a pinball, lighting up my brain with dopamine. And then, when the tweet’s ride around the platform was over, the pinball went into the gutter and I crashed. In the aftermath, I noticed that I got few if any new followers. No signups for my newsletter. Nothing real changed. It was a fun few days! But I started questioning how spending a lot of time and energy writing tweets I thought would “do well” was going to help my writing career, which was the main reason why I was doing it.

Online platforms are like casinos for artists. We exchange our time, energy, and artistic talent on content chips, then upload our chips into the slot machine. The artist pulls the handle and the algorithm determines whether you win the ultimate prize: attention! Ding, ding, ding! Oooh, flashing colors!

Maybe you’ll get lucky, like the artist three slots down who’s getting so much attention it’s spilling onto the grubby casino floor. Or maybe you’ll be like the vast majority of the other artists seated around you: mesmerized by a screen, feeding chips into their machines, hoping to exchange their artistic gifts for likes, retweets, and subscribes.

By the way, I think casinos – and making art for platforms – can be fun! It’s fun when you win, as I found out. It’s fun when you don’t care whether you win or lose, you just like the excitement of being in a room with a bunch of slot jockey grandmas. But the frustration I’ve had with platforms is one I believe many artists share. You create work intended for success on the platform, like tweets or YouTube videos. You put time and effort into making something great. You release it and… crickets. Crickets aren’t fun! I hear they like to eat cotton and other fabrics? Stay away from my Vaporwave hoodies, crickets! Meanwhile, a piece of content you think is unworthy of attention is racking up all the views. Why did that artist win and not me? I think sheer luck is part of the answer and the odds aren’t in an individual artist’s favor.

Do I think some artists have better odds than others at winning? Absolutely. Just like a professional poker player is more likely to come out ahead at the end of the night, I think a very talented artist has better odds of attracting attention for their art via social media than a beginner with less polished craft. A very talented pixel artist is more likely to create stunning work that’ll stop me from scrolling for a moment. A hilarious comedian is more likely to write a Tweet that I’ll laugh at and share. But their talent is no guarantee of success, and I would argue their network is a greater predictor of whether they’ll win attention. The extremely talented artist with few followers will most likely get out-gamed by a beginner artist with 1.2 million followers acquired by memeing about crypto.

Like casino games, I think platforms have different odds. For example, my wife Amanda and I are making a mobile visual novel for Dorian. We’re engaging with Dorian primarily as a publisher, but they’re also a platform. Dorian is a platform hungry for new content. I can tell by the focus of their website being geared towards creators and that their VP of Content reached out to me directly to collaborate. The early days of Substack were similar, where I knew members of their community team by name and they sent me a tote bag full of swag. That’s potentially a good sign. It means there won’t be as many creators competing on the platform for the user base’s attention. However, if the platform is brand new and only has a tiny user base, even if you technically “win” by getting spotlighted by the platform itself, you might not feel like you’re winning much attention at all.

Whereas “winning” in games like Instagram and Twitter mean the algorithm chose to feature your content over thousands – millions? – of other pieces of content. Those are long odds. And the quality of the attention you get might be fleeting or even toxic.

I was tweeting because I wanted attention. And I wanted attention, so I could build a platform. And I wanted to build a platform to get the kinds of writing jobs that require having a large following, such as professional novelist or TV writer. And I wanted those particular writing jobs because they’re prestigious and come with respect. And I wanted respect because there was a part of me that felt like I needed to prove something to my father and grandfather who didn’t support my aspirations of being a professional writer when I was a kid. And that hurt me deeply.

Just like casinos prey on our gambling addictions, social media preys on our attention addiction. We want everyone to know we’re smart, talented, and beautiful, so we feel like it ourselves. What actually made me feel better about the lack of paternal support I got when I was young was… drumroll, please… therapy! As an artist, social media has largely been a distraction for me, and success bias aside, I’ll bet it’s a distraction for most artists looking for success on a platform. If you’ve ever stopped yourself from working on a dream project because it wouldn’t share well, like I have, maybe the platform is the problem, not your idea.

In a casino, the house always wins. When you make art for your own satisfaction, you increase your odds.

🎲 Your Turn: What social media sites are you on regularly these days? Do you enjoy using them?

🔌 Plugs: I’ll be speaking at Narrascope in the Museum of Play in Rochester this Sunday! My presentation is called First Person Talkers and it’s about games that focus on simulating conversation. If you’re planning to attend, I’d love to see you there.

📨 Next Week: I’ll give you a sneak peek at the VR and console games I’ve been working on…

Image by macrovector_official on Freepik