For years I’ve been charting the decline of all pop culture media while urging people to stop consuming content by companies that hate them. Recent days have provided a plethora of case studies illustrating why.
Take this exchange on X from just yesterday:
Related: Mark Kern – Calling All Gamers
The reaction from commenters with the least shred of awareness was “They’re right. Games and movies suck now!”
But that’s just stating the obvious. And outrage YouTubers have most people convinced that Big Brand X was fine ca. 2007, then the wokists barged in and wrecked everything.
Related: Ground Zero
Loyal readers know 2007 as the year that author David V. Stewart has identified as Gaming Ground Zero: The point after which we could no longer expect each new release to be better than the last.
But if you go back a decade before that, you’ll find that gamers issued familiar complaints. Take another look at this series of strips by web comic Penny Arcade:
Related: Web Comics Autopsy: Penny Arcade
Mind you, those aren’t empty gripes from a couple of cranks. The guys behind Penny Arcade run multiple industry expos and have influenced several AAA games. It’s not beyond the pale to call them gaming thought leaders.
Setting aside Penny Arcade’s pop cult mentality, the tongue lashing they gave studios for launching unfinished games, fetishizing novelty, and using false advertising in 2001 could have been issued yesterday.
Related: Revenge of the Nerds
Also of note: those comic s trips pinpoint the start of gaming’s decline in the original Play Station era: dead bang on Cultural Ground Zero.
Neckbeards that called the Slippery Slope a fallacy may have been shouted down, but they made an unintended point. Cultural decline isn’t like sliding down an icy hill. It’s more like rolling off a series of ledges. We drop from one, land on the next ledge down, and settle there temporarily. Pretty soon, people get used to the new normal. But then they go down another level, and the process repeats all the way down into the abyss.
Related: Gaming Ground Zero
You won’t hear me argue that gaming in 2007 was worse than in Current Year+. The aughts were several ledges back upslope. But we were still far into the decline.
Relevant to the X post that kicked off this one, what 2007 gaming had going for it was relative freedom from entryism. Back then you didn’t have rabid ideologues infiltrating companies to bring the host corporation’s culture in line with their own. That slow but accelerating process of building secret influence took about a decade to hit critical mass. By the time normal folks noticed entertainment companies’ perversions from their original ends, it was too late.
Related: Nostalgic for Stage Three Cancer
Look around on social media, and you’ll see the Death Cultists waving their latest bloody scalp. I’m old enough to remember when they’d answer claims of entryism by insisting that game/movies/books had always been woke. Now they feel comfortable enough to drop the mask quicker than an NPC switching from a COVID to a Ukraine avi.
It’s the propaganda method Yuri Bezmenov warned us about back in the 80s. Phase 1 is always demoralization, which attacks the target’s culture and morality. AAA gaming has long since been repurposed as a demoralization tool.
Related: The 1990s – Decade of Despair
AAA studios are skinsuits worn by woke entryists bent on demoralizing the customers they hate. So why do gamers keep paying them? Let us turn once again to Ted Kaczynski and his theory of surrogate activities:
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.
And that, dear reader, is the impetus behind the Pop Cult.
Related: The Riddle of the Pop Cult
AAA gaming is now a quicksand trap where gamers compulsively pursue the allure of false meaning while real meaning is stripped from their lives. Doubling down in an attempt to fill the void with more surrogate activities just demoralizes them further.
For the folks in the cheap seats, the solution is not to “fix” the mass entertainment complex. There is no de-wokifying AAA gaming. Bringing back classic Star Wars is pining for a meaningless spook. Campaigning for Netflix to stream a series that insults you a little less is just masochistic.
Related: The Nostalgia Jukebox Effect
What YouTube culture warriors missed for years is that trying to resolve a crisis of meaning with more, but less depraved, consumerism is just idolatry.
Nor is it a coincidence that consooming product has taken on religious overtones, especially among members of Generation Y.
Related: Gen Y – The Plan Is Terrifying
Stop seeking false meaning in surrogate activities. Engage in pursuits that give you some degree of real control over your situation. Take off that shirt branded with another man’s name.
The only way to solve the crisis of meaning is turning back to the source of all meaning: Jesus Christ. Because your heart is where your treasure is.
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Isaac has been doing some great cultural commentary lately and it’s been a joy to see the people he angers seethe and cope. The man knows who to hit those pain points.
The whole demoralization in gaming has been annoying because they try to make trivial which has been innately of value and unique importance. For instance, Warhammer just announced that “there have always been female Custodes” and the community is rightfully ticked. It’s a tongue and cheek, taking advantage of vagueness in the WH40k lore to insert a DEI agenda. As I see it, it’s just another example of the industry trivializing exclusively male spaces and roles in a universe. “The future is female” has infected so many IPs, I roll my eyes in disgust every time I see it.
While I do agree turning to Christ is the only way to be filled with meaning, as an artist, I see not everyone responds with on the nose religious tactics. Even the most areligious people I’ve met have their eyes lit up when they see religious designs in games inspired by Catholicism. For me, I see that as an opportunity to work with the current habits of the average consumer to build that road to Christ. Give them the art that acts as breadcrumbs to the ultimate meaning in existence.
Good post as always.
Thanks. And you touched on a major symptom of the pop idolatry that’s infesting mainstream hobbies. “Community” has been a Death Cult shibboleth for years now. Using it in reference to online parassocial interactions has always been nonsensical. So its embrace by normie hobbyists, and even anti-woke Conservatives, shows just how compromised the whole culture is.
“Even the most areligious people I’ve met have their eyes lit up when they see religious designs in games inspired by Catholicism. ”
Part of what people hate in their “woke” games, movies, etc is that the last whisps of the Christian worldview have been banished. The Hero’s journey is our collective journey toward God.
The woke philosophy is the one behind communism/atheism. Ideologues love stories about power politics where the “hero” was perfect to begin with. The rest of the human race, not so much.
I’d argue it’s simpler than that. Gamers miss beauty in their games. The catholic aesthetic is a beautiful one.
Shakespeare provides a historical case study. As a Catholic writing in a hostile nation, he included elements that would have been alien to post-Protestant Revolt England. Yet audiences ate up his tales of ghosts, sympathetic friars, and Roman glory.