Gaming is Dead and Other Frivolous Stories

The trailer for Fallout 4, the Steam Summer Sale, the announcement of a fourth installment in the venerable Doom series. Lessons from the past like The Elder Scrolls Online, Sim City 5, Duke Nukem Forever... All overseen by a hype-filled industry that is fueled and supported by an uncritical following eager to accept anything resembling a game as long as there's something new around each corner. It's almost like the industry has grown too big, too cynical – too content to simply make money and purely technical advances.

There will never be another 'Alpha Centauri Moment' in gaming. There will never again be a genuinely intelligent, original, and compelling game from a major studio. If it happens it will be purely by chance. Formula-tweaking will not allow it to happen. Meantime you get to enjoy your bloated, lifeless, stagnant franchises. Billion dollar abortions litter the new scene.


Fallout 4 looks like Fallout 3 with 'next-gen' wankery like modular building, a deeper crafting system, a voiced protagonist, and all the other embellishments that make a person excited for a Bethesda game until they remember the previous four Bethesda games and also that distractions are great for padding a game that may include: a terrible story, a pissy and clunky engine, dialogue from hell's anus, formulaic combat, a big world full of the mostly identical things, annoyance.
I can't believe they're going for the interactive introduction again, after it pissed off just about everyone who played Fo3 more than once. Spending months programming a cool way to customize the PC's face is kind of a hint about the pathology of modern game design. There's a weird kind of narcissism where the way your character looks becomes more important than doing cool things, a fatal passivity for a pastime that used to promise ridiculous, cool, and/or interesting situations of greater and greater complexity over time.


Doom 4. Oh cool, another lame shotgun. Demons drop bullets? Where's the zombie troopers? Looks like it could be more or less mediocre than Doom 3 but I will gladly bet one conciliatory blog post that Doom 4 will miss the point just as badly. Larger teams and more money only diluted everything and added dozens of useless features, but at least Doom 4 won't have crafting bolted onto it, so the team isn't completely incompetent. The idea of context sensitive executions is kind of cool but it's So Not What Doom Was Ever About and Reduces Player Agency so I'm not excited and in fact disappointed already.
You can't exploit nostalgia forever. Let some of these franchises die. They deserve rest.

Remakes and re-releases of old games are big news, but they're only important because they reveal an industry that's nearly flatlined in terms of creativity. Every new piece of shit game is celebrated and overhyped by a toothless, uncritical, and quite frankly spoiled consumer base. You get a new installment in your franchise every year and some people have been patiently waiting for something interesting to play for a decade, while secretly understanding that it'll never happen, that there will only be hollow and pretty experiences from now on, that getting interested in a game and playing it for years is something of the past. Player agency is in decline. Everything's a mile wide and an inch deep. At this point I'd pay more for a closed-world, non-emergent, non-feature-cluttered game with tight gameplay and focused mechanics. I've seen two decades of failed promises and I don't get the culture anymore, I really don't like its self-regarding nature or its identity crises, and I'm extremely skeptical of its offerings.


The Steam Summer Sale. No prominent, relatively recent game under $5. I saw System Shock 2 for a dollar. I first finished that game over 10 years ago, and I'm ready to let go, even though my suspicions about nostalgia are repeatedly proven wrong when I return to a clunky, ugly, kind of pain-in-the-ass game and it's immediately more compelling than Borderlands 2. Currently I don't know if I'll ever need to upgrade since apparently the majority of good games already exist and were made what seems like eons ago.
At least let me try a modern game for cheap, Steam. That's what the deal used to be, remember? Let it be an indie game, I don't care, but one really good deal a day would be great. I guess now that steam money is basically free you will never allow a great deal to happen again, which is a pity because I've been saving card money for months in hopes I can spend it on something cool, but I just play an old game and complain to my small handful of friends who still game.
I got Just Cause 2 for something like $1.75 three years ago and there hasn't been an equivalent deal since –  the game is probably more expensive right now. I realize the business model Steam adopted doesn't work like I think it should, but even non-perishable products should get cheaper after they've been on sale a dozen times – even if it's only the sale price. Steam has realized that savvy gamers are becoming hardened towards hype and ready to wait months if not years to buy new games, because the price will drop so much more than when we traveled to physical locations to buy our interactive videogaming products. We are extremely spoiled, but if the general quality and inventiveness of these products doesn't increase we will probably stop caring about them entirely, and it will spare us a lot of disappointment.


On the plus side: I'm saving money and spending it in more interesting and dynamic ways and I have a lot of freed-up time to spend on actual life. Turns out life is actually very interactive, with: numerous challenges, emergent situations, and high stakes. Still I'd like a cool game, please. Doesn't have to be super complex, doesn't need the best A.I. in the business, it just needs to be fun to play. Gameplay first; dorky kid shit like graphics and hype last.

YouTube Hates....

...any attempt at a serious erection. I'm not going to write a disclaimer. Let's get to this article. Do you like to laugh and cry uncontrollably when you masturbate? Are there not enough low points in your life? YouTube's got your back, son.

I've been lulled into watching a video playlist that has included incomprehensible low points of male fixation. By this I mean video game females, the unparalleled nadir of modern sexualization. There are enough points of contention for research, and if anything the inventiveness of cyber hussies is something... impressive. And I mean impressive in the way that any delusion, nurtured enough, becomes impressive - the sort of impressed where you feel happy to merely be an onlooker, but there's that knowledge that will never be erased from your mind or anybody else's.

In other words, if you spend enough time looking into the smut abyss... you will see lowest points. The nadirs. This is no byssus moment (internet high-five!) but this is the moment where you have to accept without going mad the fact that the human race is so goddamn weak and dissipated that lonely men don't drown themselves in alcohol and self-loathing and outrageous one-liners and hopeless chases or gun clubs anymore, and instead form constructive sexual fantasies including (but not limited to) inanimate objects, cartoon characters, animals, humans posing as animals, video game 'babes', stuffed animals, and probably at least four hundred other paraphilias. Leave it to YouTube to know what's up. Let's leave downright criminal things out of this and still be depressed. I feel I had to post this analysis. I know it'll be incoherent.

Now I was just looking casually for some smut, and the playlist started out innocently enough. French commercials for dreamcasts featuring models spraying water on each other. Brasilian butt-model videos, and generally just videos of very beautiful women in very artificial scenarios. Things involving real, paid, adults, nothing particularly schlocky except for a 'lesbian kiss' or two for the deluded, credulous homophobes with the stunted minds.

The video playlist goes downhill right around the time it uses models from the Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball. Beach Volleyball videos are only just being understood by scientists, and this sport is still being played by actual women, so it's not like anybody really needed a video game about it. Well that's Japan, right?

Reality check. Japan has several thousand words for 'uncanny depressing adolescent fantasy' and about three hundred for 'creepy pitiful fixation'. Japan knows the dice are loaded. Just ask the octopus and the fisherman's wife. Is it a parable? Is it prophetic? What.

I don't even care. It's too tragic. I'm sorry, Japan. Moving on, there are videos about teen models. So obviously the video playlist is depressing here, because, hey, immaturity. I'm not kidding myself, reader. This is an obscure blog post about what gets wanked to on about the last place a mature discerning adult human being would look for smut, and this blog post isn't even even half as depressing as the innocent video playlist it critiques. I'm not going to talk about the inherent sexism in all of the videos. Some of the videos actually celebra–

This entry in the field of depressingly amateur, terrible music, insane costume design, weird postures and facial expression smut is noteworthy, because it sees you and just laughs. Try to get hard to this? That one girl knows your dirty business and thinks you are lower than a worm. Look at her face – she isn't pretending to be overly serious, she just thinks you're a dork. Didn't you know YouTube hates you? It's got your back when you look for soft-core smut, but it is not playing the game seriously at all.

You better just find somebody, even if she's bigger than society tells you she should be, has bad skin and a shitty attitude and a decrepit materialist's soul. Then you learn your lessons from her and never, never allow yourself to fall this low again. You hear me? You work your way up. We can all be better, but you are making so many people feel better about themselves that you have to improve yourself before they feel any shame. Depressing man-children of the world, you have three years to get your shit together or nobody will ever take you seriously again.

First step. Do what the Italian woman in the video is telling you with her facial contortions to do, and delete your weak, tepid, depressing store of soft-core YouTube internet smut.

Here's a final link to the playlist, so you can witness the witless for yourself. Women, if you're going to watch this.... I know this rejoinder is weak, but you do some stupid god damn things too.