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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