I've worked at both and between both the games industry and SV. Given the presence of Roblox, EA and the Playstation unit in SV it is a bit odd to consider them such outsiders, but in a real sense they are.
Broadly though, the problem is SV in a business culture sense conflates fun with role playing, expressing yourself, generating and consuming UGC, and feeding the beast. Play in the sense of discovery without any external side effects confuses it. If you are in games you see more and more of this tendency infesting western games production too, and it's largely down to those versions of fun being far easier to monetize.
The blind spot of this article is a huge amount of the "productivity" users are larping as PMs and using Notion etc. in a manner completely consistent with their sense of play, while acting seriously about it in order to maintain their ludic circle. To say they are not gamers is false; their entire lifestyle is the game.
The huge reason the games industry hasn't been completely overwhelmed by SV types is it contains a critical mass of idealists that genuinely care about the player and player experiences, even in the most cynical companies.
Broadly though, the problem is SV in a business culture sense conflates fun with role playing, expressing yourself, generating and consuming UGC, and feeding the beast. Play in the sense of discovery without any external side effects confuses it. If you are in games you see more and more of this tendency infesting western games production too, and it's largely down to those versions of fun being far easier to monetize.
The blind spot of this article is a huge amount of the "productivity" users are larping as PMs and using Notion etc. in a manner completely consistent with their sense of play, while acting seriously about it in order to maintain their ludic circle. To say they are not gamers is false; their entire lifestyle is the game.
The huge reason the games industry hasn't been completely overwhelmed by SV types is it contains a critical mass of idealists that genuinely care about the player and player experiences, even in the most cynical companies.