Invisibility, Exhaustion, and Loneliness

People have never been busier. The little free time people have left after work is fiercely contested by Big Tech companies. We live in the age of the "Attention Economy." Social media, gaming platforms, music services, and streaming services wage a war for a few seconds of your attention. Once they manage to capture it, they use increasingly aggressive mechanisms to keep it locked in. The more time you spend there, the greater these platforms’ ability to monetize your behavior through ads, usage-pattern collection, and inferences sold to advertisers.

In the middle of this war is your game project. Do not fool yourself into thinking you are competing in this war. In truth, you are another victim, collateral damage. You want to tell the world about your idea, your project, your art. Maybe you build a website to explain your game’s concept, share images, and keep a devlog. Then you discover that people browse the internet less and less, and are trapped inside a handful of platforms with automatic feeds where an algorithm decides what they should see. On top of that, the most widely used search engine seems to work less and less like a traditional search engine.

Well, if people are spending all their free time on social media, then maybe that is where you should be. So you create accounts everywhere: YouTube for videos, TikTok for short videos, X and Bluesky for short posts, and Reddit for discussions. You start posting and interacting, but without much success. Now your content is in the hands of the algorithm, and it gives preference to ads and content designed to keep people’s attention locked in. This is when you begin to experience the feeling of invisibility. You post, but no one sees it. You shout, but no one hears you. People are too busy.

At this point, you try to understand how you can gain visibility. Plenty of people will tell you it is your fault. Others will try to sell you a course. When you try to talk about it, many will treat it as a marketing "skill issue." So you make an effort, try to improve, post more often, follow the advice, take courses, invest some money. This is when exhaustion starts to set in. You spend hours making your game, and more and more hours producing content for several platforms. Over time, exhaustion becomes inevitable.

Still, you continue, and your project moves forward. You post about a new mechanic you created, and almost no one responds. You make videos no one watches and write an article no one reads. The little time someone might have had to talk to you is being consumed on some platform by some piece of content from a major influencer. It is not your fault, nor theirs. We are all victims. Most of the time, we also act this way toward other people’s work. Whether it is an illustration, a book, an article, or a game, we rarely stop to look, read, or comment. That is when loneliness starts to set in. On platforms with hundreds of millions of users, we are lonely.

Despite all of this, you continue with your project. You work all day and, when you get home, you find time to dedicate to it. But now you also set aside time to look at other people’s projects, leave a like, write a comment, and give them real attention. With luck, maybe you will find, somewhere on one of these networks, a small group of people who feel like we do: invisible, exhausted, and lonely. Then we support one another. We help each other remember that we are not invisible, and that, somewhere, someone is still listening.