A video posted last month by a mid-sized video game review channel issued a scathing indictment of current AAA gaming.
It’s worth a watch, despite some crude language.
Watch it here:
The immediate reaction from anyone with the least bit of awareness is “He’s right! Video games suck now!”
But that’s an obvious take from people who’ve paid the least bit of attention to gaming. And in fact, the above video hints at subtler and more sinister social forces at work.
First, the video’s creator rightly trashes contemporary AAA gaming. Then he goes on to pine for games released ca. 2007.
Diligent readers will recall that 2007 is the year identified by author David V. Stewart as Gaming Ground Zero: The point after which we could no longer expect each new release to be better than the last.
But a connection I made while watching that video led me back to similar laments from much earlier – which featured the same laundry list of complaints.
What’s more, the features it reminisces fondly about used to be cited by Gen X and Gen Y gamers as part of the problem.
Take a look at these excerpts from a series on the degradation of gaming by top aughts web comic Penny Arcade:
Setting aside the Revenge of the Nerds mentality that Penny Arcade is known for, here we have stinging rebukes levied against the game industry for releasing unfinished products, obsession with tech innovation for its own sake, and deceptive marketing. Just like in the video published a month ago.
Yet the comic is from 2001.
Stop and think about that time frame for a second.
Also note that PA traces the start of gaming’s decline to the PS1 era.
Which coincided with Cultural Ground Zero.
A common misconception is that cultural decline is like falling off a cliff or sliding down a sheer slope.
In reality, it’s more like a series of terraced ledges. You roll off one ledge, land on the next one down, and stay there for a time. After a while, it starts to feel normal. But then you drop one more level, then another, etc.
So in that sense, the state of gaming in 2007 was objectively superior to Current Year vidya. It was several ledges up from where we are now.
But it was still well into the decline.
It’s probable that what gamers miss most about AAA gaming ca. 16 years ago was the relative absence of entryism.
That word got a lot of play in counterculture circles of the previous decade, often in an incomplete or incorrect sense.
In precise terms, entryism refers to an outside group or ideology infiltrates and takes over an organization without the target’s consent or understanding. Entryists aim to covertly realign the target organization’s goals and beliefs with their own. Through a gradual but accelerating process of making connections, gaining influence, and forming likeminded cliques, entryists finally acquire enough power to use the target organization as a vehicle for the infiltrators’ overarching goals – even if they’re diametrically opposed to or detrimental to the target’s original values.
One need only recall the “Gamers don’t have to be your audience” mantra parroted in the gaming press to know that the industry has succumbed to entryism. But to what end?
For the answer, we must look to Soviet defector and ex-KGB agent Yuri Bezmenov.
As far back as the 1980s, Bezmenov not only warned that hostile actors were intent on undermining America, he explained in detail how they planned to do it.
The first stage in this propagandization process is demoralization, which seeks to erode a target population’s culture and morality.
We needn’t look to the most recent woke signaling out of AAA to see that they’ve become a demoralization vector.
So if AAA studios have long since been taken over by entryists who hate and seek to demoralize their customers, why do gamers keep giving them money?
Despite his faults, Ted Kaczynski may have the answer:
A surrogate activity is an activity that is directed toward an artificial goal that the individual pursues for the sake of the “fulfillment” that he gets from pursuing the goal, not because he needs to attain the goal itself. For instance, there is no practical motive for building enormous muscles, hitting a little ball into a hole or acquiring a complete series of postage stamps. Yet many people in our society devote themselves with passion to bodybuilding, golf or stamp-collecting. Some people are more “other-directed” than others, and therefore will more readily attach importance to a surrogate activity simply because the people around them treat it as important or because society tells them it is important. That is why some people get very serious about essentially trivial activities such as sports, or bridge, or chess, or arcane scholarly pursuits, whereas others who are more clear-sighted never see these things as anything but the surrogate activities that they are, and consequently never attach enough importance to them to satisfy their need for the power process in that way.
That pretty much sums up contemporary gaming.
The sad state of affairs gamers now find themselves in is a recursive sand trap that strips their live of meaning through demoralization. They double down to fill the void with surrogate activities, only to get ever more demoralized.
Take a step back, take a long, hard look in the mirror, and ask yourself which surrogate activities you’re engaged in.
Because I guarantee you are. Everyone is.
Like all attempts to resolve the culturewide crisis of meaning with temporal things, the demon lurking behind surrogate activities is the sin of idolatry.
It’s no accident that consooming product has taken on religious fervor, particularly among members of Generation Y. They are indeed held captive in a Pop Cult.
But there is a way out. For individuals and society as a whole, the only way to solve our crisis of meaning is to seek the source of true meaning: Jesus Christ.
For a practical on how to leave the Pop Cult, read the counterculture phenomenon that’s helped countless people reclaim their dignity, live their faith in trying times, and have fun while they’re at it.
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I will never understand the Revenge of the Nerds-style blaming certain factions always throw out every time an industry is in decline. Normal people have been a part of the industry since Pong; normal people made SMB3 one of the best selling games of all time, selling more than any other game until like the 00s; normal people made the OG Mortal Kombat movie a hit. Everyone in my class was big into GTA (yes, before even 3) and Tony Hawk Pro Skater. They were always there.
The decline always occurs AFTER the normal people have already left. See: rock music, OldPub, and comics. It is when cultists are giving the reins to the industry and refashions it into their pet project no one wants that it begins its fall. Gaming is currently in decline because of the AAA mentality that came in because people who hate classic gaming want to make their trash movies with and anti-game mudgenre mechanics in its place. What happened here is no different than what occurred in every other space.
And just like every other industry, there are alternatives. Gaming has a robust and booming indie scene that is far beyond what AAA is currently offering. There is no excuse to be consuming the slop, and I guarantee that it’s not “normies” doing it (judging by declining software sales) but the same people who make it their entire identity to consume product.
As usual, it is the normal people who figure it out first.
That line about Sony having crossed some unspoken line by selling games to healthy, well-adjusted people is a sudden record scratch. It’s like the meme that starts with “As a clown fetishist …”
Selling games to normal people is a good thing.
Selling games to the people our Elite Masters in boardrooms and Hollywood believe and want us to believe are normal … that’s a problem.
(For another example of the contrast, compare Star Wars to most of Hollywood’s other 70s output.)
That’s a good benchmark. The Death Cult thought they’d won the culture with the overthrow of the Hays Code in the 70s, but the end of that decade and all of the next gave them serious pushback.
It’s worth noting that SW was pretty much an indie film.
The PS1 era was defined by chasing after 3D at the cost of everything else. Many games that didn’t need to be 3D were, despite the graphics being horrible at the time, and many of the classic 2D games (eg. Symphony of the Night) probably would have been 3D if the technology was a little better. You can compare and contrast with the FMV craze that took place in the Sega CD era (though mainly on PC, since most consoles were still cartridge based.)
The problem is that the obsession with 3D graphics didn’t fizzle out in the same way as previous fads. (I’m not saying that there shouldn’t have been 3D games, but many games shouldn’t have used 3D graphics but did so anyway, since that’s what was expected.) It was also something easy to show progress in; just crank out a few more polygons, increase the view distance, or increase the texture resolution. So the industry got more and more focused on that measurement as opposed to any other measure of quality.
The real problem happened around 2010 or so when increases in graphics technology were no longer obvious to the human eye. Yet that was the only measure that AAA could reliably succeed on, so companies just told the audience to be impressed (“there’s twice as many polygons! we have slightly better anti-aliasing! the textures take up literal gigabytes!”). The audience on the other hand was in cult mode and was perfectly fine to base their hype on those stats. Even today you have people complaining that things like the original Resident Evil 4 or Dead Space are unplayable due to their graphics, necessitating remakes.
But the “gaming ground zero” of 2007 does strike me as the point where it became clear that innovation was leaving mainstream games. One thing that demonstrates that is how much universal praise Bioshock got, despite being nothing but a polished shooter (with balance issues) whose “innovative” features were done better in System Shock 1 and 2. Contrast that with say 2004, which in addition to having a solid shooter in Half-Life 2 also had prominent games in other genres like Rome: Total War, Rise of Nations, and GTA: San Andreas (which was actually doing something new at the time.)
Another 2004 data point: Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines – a game that the industry, including the original writer, have made fumbling attempts to produce a sequel of without success.
Bioshock. Man. A beautiful, immersive game with the clunkiest, most tedious “shooting” I’d ever experienced. That game epitomized the triumph of style over substance.
When DOOM 2016 came out, it was a real breath of fresh air because it returned shooter gameplay to its roots after years of slow, tedious “action” in the vein of Bioshock.
I’m not sure why Bioshock is getting so much hate. I liked it a lot.
Then again, I find all shooters clunky and tedious.
Bioshock is not a BAD game. It’s above average. There are some serious design problems, such as how Vita Chambers warp the game, how most plasmids are useless compared to guns, or how the game stresses that being moral will be a death sentence due to not having enough ADAM, yet the game mechanics do not make having low ADAM much of a problem (and then the game gives you more of it for the moral choices anyway.) However, the creative locations and compelling characters make up for a lot of weaknesses and so on the whole it’s by no means bad.
The problem is that it was the choice of “game of the year” for 2007, and immediately praised as one of the best games of all time, despite only being above average in the genre of shooters. If you compare Bioshock to things like System Shock 1 and 2, Deus Ex, or Half-Life 2, and it comes up far short.
It marked a transition from the game to get hyped about being something hugely innovative (ex. Deus Ex, The Sims, Shadow of the Colossus, GTA: San Andreas, Rome: Total War, PoP: Sands of Time) or at least incredibly polished (ex. Half-Life 2, Resident Evil 4, LoZ: Twilight Princess) to having the game be hyped for its story or graphics (and almost always be a shooter or a GTA clone.) It says a lot that the main contender for hype in 2007 was Call of Duty 4.
A lot of the series’ goodwill was destroyed by Infinite, too. I still like the first two games decently enough (2 is better designed), but Infinite is one of the most bitter, hateful screeds against reality and the player itself I’ve ever seen in a video game.
It’s no wonder pop cultists that hate The Gamers love it so much.
If memory serves, even NK Jemisin found Infinite too nihilistic for her tastes.
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Growing up during the 2000s and 2010s, I always laughed at the graphics war that waged within the gaming community. People would base whole arguments about what game was better purely on the graphics quality. You still see a fringe bit of that today. For me, it was never about graphics or innovation, it’s always been about the fun factor. So that comment about innovation for the sake of it strikes a chord with me.
Even worse, videogames have fully integrated into the Internet of Stupid by requiring some kind of online access. If not the games themselves, the consoles you play them on (update console to play this game). There’s too much potential barrier to entry to play modern games. I think that’s also what personally makes me exhausted playing video games despite me liking the activity.
I can reach over next to me, switch on my SNES, and have instant fun. You’re right that the only argument made for putting up with Current Year micromanagement is “muh graphics,” yet High 90s 2D sprites still look better than refrigerator-shaped oafs tromping around used coffee filter-colored maps.
There are games that are literally vaporware now or will be in the near future. Games like Tony Hawk Pro Skater 5 were pressed to disc but are useless because you need to download an update that contains the game in the first place. Then there are games like the TMNT Turtles in Time remake that disappeared because Ubisoft lost the license. Neither of these are good games, but that’s beside the point.
Meanwhile, if you buy a Nintendo Wii game, it will work out of the box. And that was the system you were told to hate with the fury of a thousand suns.
I wonder why.
Back when online gaming through Live hit it big on the original XBox, I asked my FPS junkie friends what would happen when Microsoft inevitably shut down the servers. Their eyes glazed over.
Years later when it finally happened, many of them shook their fists as if suddenly betrayed without warning.
The comments about the cultural decline being a series of steps is quite apt.
Recently, YouTube has been recommending me all these videos about an aesthetic (weirdly) nicknamed “Frutiger Aero,” which is basically younger Millennials and older Gen Z getting nostalgic for the aesthetics and especially UI interfaces of the mid-2000s. The Windows XP “Bliss” background, the early versions of iOS, that cheesy Owl City “Ocean Eyes” album, The Sims 2/3, to name a few examples.
It’s pretty shocking to me that anybody is nostalgic for any aspect of such an utterly bland time, even those who were kids around then, but I guess it illustrates your point that things are so bad now, that even the moderately less bad of the fairly recent past seems like a huge improvement to the sufficiently demoralized.
It’s only “less bad” exactly right.
Which is why JD Cowan is correct that there will never be a full-fledged movement around aughts nostalgia.
Vague “internet stuff” is the only thing that musters any sort of nostalgia from that era and that, obviously, only goes so far.
I remember a couple of years ago people were trying to push the “Current Year? What are you talking about, it’s 2006!” meme with kids dressed like they were at Ozzfest and it died on the vine. Meanwhile 80s retrowave and 90s vaporwave are still around and still ubiquitous.
There just won’t be any real 2000s nostalgic movement, because missing things being “less bad” is not the same as missing something that no longer exists.
It’s gotten to the point that “I miss the bad old days of the internet when you could say gamer words online” gives me a reflexive urge to smack someone.