I think this is your best essay yet, Ape. Maybe it just spoke to me personally as a recovering gamer, but the long journey to the essay's conclusion was fascinating and enjoyable all the way through.
You're the only essayist on Substack I've found trying to write a history of the Internet. It's important work. I have no idea how historians in a hundred years will even make sense of the deluge, but I get the sense a source like yours will be a critical part.
As an aside, you pretty much perfectly expressed my feeling on games, especially how little they give back, considering how much they take. There are few hobbies that can consume hundreds, or even thousands, of hours and return basically no proof of the time committed. Model train guys at least have a cool model train layout, painters have portraits, audiophiles have their collection and setup, and so on. But gamers? All they have is the Number of Hours Played clock on Steam. Which bizarrely is a badge of honor for gamers that I’ve never understood.
Anyway, thanks for your hard work. This essay is the product of your victory over addiction. It wouldn't exist if you hadn't have made the choice to put aside childish things. You have proof that, indeed, the Ape was here.
Thank you, this is an incredibly humbling and deeply appreciated compliment. Honestly, I think about the archiving of internet history much more than I should. I speak more on it in the third part of my brony series that, one day, I'll get around to finishing, but the old adage of "The internet is forever" is rapidly being proven false, with prejudice. Like, sure, some things become infamous and stick around forever, but one must take into the count the sheer, incomprehensibly large size of the internet. YouTube alone sees roughly 3.7 MILLION uploads a day for an approximate total of 271,330 hours of content. Again, per day. You could never watch even a fraction of the entirety of YouTube in a human lifespan. Naturally, things are going to slip through the cracks. And there's been so much great art, interesting people, and generally what I'd consider beautiful, worthwhile things that continue to slip between the cracks of history. It can all be deleted with a button - lost forever, like tears in the rain. The worst part is now Google is doing away with it's cache service, which will effectively erase over a decade of archived sites, making research all that more difficult to do. This is to say nothing of Google, Meta, Xitter, Reddit, and other monolithic sites continuing to reign in the internet into separate, segregated walled gardens, leaving everything outside of their purview to basically rot. There's an entire concept called internet rot or decay, now, which... well, not right now. But suffice to say, yes, this stuff is important to me, as I think it will be important to future generations. As a history buff, nothing ticks me off like reading about an event that's not belabored upon by historians of the time, and being left sitting there like, "Why the hell did no one decide to write down the details of that one? That seems kind of important?" Which I'm sure someone did, but, at the same time, much like pieces of the internet gradually blink out of existence, one by one, so too did the writings of the ancients, until we only have a fraction of what they left behind still in existence.
And I'm pretty sure future generations are going to be agonizing over some of the wild shit that happens on the internet and, in many ways, shape the future in odd and unpredictable manners we probably can't foresee. So, hopefully, one day, I do hope that some curious historian will be able to turn to my articles on the bronies to understand what exactly drove that particular case of societal mania. Will my writings make it that far? Who knows. But I hope it does.
Also, The Ape Was Here would make a killer name for this publication if I ever changed it. Again, thanks for the words of support. They're appreciated.
2023 really was a poor year for vidya, it must be said. My personal favourite fiasco was the Goodbye Volcano High/Snoot Game one. Not as flashy as other rings in the circus, but very entertaining.
Video games are near-perfect lotus-eater machines in my mind. They eat time and attention and put out vanishingly little in the way of returns. In this they are similar to TV or movies, but video games are really more potent than either of those. They demand a much greater time commitment, but they also lack the vestigial social aspect of the television screen. One might watch a movie with family - for one to play games in the same room as people you know is increasingly rare.
I personally wonder whether this increase of social emphasis on time-wasting machines and fake jobs is an evolved civilisational response to the massively increased productivity of farming and industry in the last century-and-change. As the labour of fewer and fewer men is necessary to sustain society, something must be found to employ the rest of us and to consume the surplus of materials. Video games consume immense amounts of time in their consumption and a huge amount of materials in their creation and playing (the logistic chain behind each new graphics card, for instance, boggles the mind)
Ah, Snoot Game. Funny that a (I believe) Bolivian who doesn't even speak English unless prompted to managed to write circles and tell a genuinely engaging and emotional story using anthro fucking dinosaurs, and also ride circles around the caterwauling dev team that came up with the idea in the first place. Honestly one of the best arguments for "loosening" copyright one could possibly use.
I would actually argue that they do have a social aspect more unique than a shared screen, what with online multiplayer that can connect people from opposite ends of the planet, but at the same time, it is still inherently a simulacra of social interaction conducted through a screen, which is categorically and scientifically proven to not be the same as person-to-person communication, so... maybe I'm just splitting hairs. Split-screen, however, is more or less dead though, you're right about that. I never considered that video games may be a necessary opium to keep people doped up and distracted in a society with a surfeit of human labor, but that's a really interesting angle to look at it from. I think it would certainly explain the meteoric rise of the streaming phenomenon - as gaining meaningful, well-paid employment becomes increasingly difficult due to a shrinking labor market and other constraints, it makes sense that the people who "check out" of society decide to turn to streaming to make a few extra bucks. I'd say that keeping those drop-outs and their ilk distracted wouldn't even be a bad thing, if it hadn't breached containment, and now you have characters of ill-repute like Ninja influencing an entire generation and Pokimane and Amouranth getting fabulously wealthy off betabucks, all examples of which will only perpetuate the cycle and, in my opinion, draw perfectly capable and productive members of society down the drain rather than serve as simple entertainment for society's failures-to-launch.
It was 4chan's /v/ board which put out Snoot Game, which is surprisingly unsurprising, all things considered (eg Katawa Shoujo was also fantastic).
The consumption of surplus labour through frivolous jobs or consumption is just one half of my pet theory. The other half is that these frivolities are also intended to consume the excess material produced by modern industrial production. Mechanised resource extraction and industrial production methods are certainly efficient and productive, but they require a certain base level of production to be cost-effective. This could I guess also be cast as a labour issue, but I think that it's not quite the same thing
Part of the reason games are more engaging than other media is that you're actively learning skills and solving problems in them, which young men in particular are hard-wired to do. Whether most of those skills are useful in any way is debatable. But it does help to explain what the driving force is. Of course there's also accumulation and in multiplayer games, gaining status.
I've always liked Richard Bartle's take, roughly paraphrased, that games at their best provide a hero's journey experience for the player. It's the roadmap for what growing up means to men. Unfortunately so many games fail at this, and others ruthlessly exploit this to pump engagement (besides all the other psychological abuse they engage in). But this is the curse of technology in general: it can be used for good or ill, and unchecked, it will be mainly for ill.
RE: labor saving and surplus labor, yeah. It doesn't have to be soaked up by pointless activities, that's just what we chose as a society. All other things being equal, if we didn't have video games, we'd probably be living out Clockwork Orange right now, because crime and violence is the other thing young men do when they're not permitted to meaningfully participate in society.
Great insight here. Video games can be used to tell good, worthwhile stories through an interactive medium... or they can be turned into tedious time and money sinks.
BioWare could do no wrong in my book until Dragon Age: Inquisition came around. Everyone was going apeshit over it and I'm like, "Uh...this game kinda blows." Even after that, I had high hopes for Andromeda, but it was tedious and nonsensical.
Plus (and I cannot stress this enough) Kumail Nanjiani is fucking annoying and really needs to stop being shoehorned into every Goddamn IP in existence.
I never played Dragon Age but by the time I was even in a position to do so Inquisition was out and that was the prevailing opinion I heard. The worst part about Andromeda is that, watching cutscenes, there is some small fragment of what made the original games great in the dialogue and interactions between the characters... some of them. But overall, it was a shamefully buggy hot mess that didn't even come close to sniffing the quality of the first.
Also, you know that mean comments like that sent Mr. Nanjiani to seek therapy, right? It's not his fault he's so funny and attractive and charming and charismatic and dashing and wonderful in every way that he keeps bagging roles left and right - you're just jealous, is all, and you don't understand how difficult it is to be a successfully psy-opped celebrity that collects an eight figure income. Seriously though they've been writing about how terrible the backlash was for the Eternals and Nanjiani was seriously blubbering like a seal about how it drove him to seek therapy, which is like... look, I get the internet can be cruel, but grow up. He's definitely near the top of my list of "People I'd Be Okay Never Seeing Again".
It is my fervently held opinion that all these crybaby stories about such and such celebrity being driven off of social media/seeking therapy/crying into their toilet bowl after their morning constitutional because of "cruel" fans are 100% bullshit. I've noticed that the whiny celebrities never once provide examples of such extreme cruelty, which leads me to believe it's nothing more than a cynical marketing ploy to generate faux outrage/interest over whatever lame horseshit the parent media company is peddling.
I've heard mixed things. But it doesn't matter, though I enjoy the genre I'm not giving skinsuit Blizzard a dime or a minute ever again. Everyone (*everyone*) who built that company is gone. The whole crew who made Diablo and Diablo 2 have been gone for 15 years. As are the crews from all their other classic games. Some run out, some retired, some left to start their own things. There's nothing left there but a smoking crater full of betabux and bluehairs.
In nearly every paragraph I found a phrase I really wanted to quote in a restack, but soon there were too many to choose from. In nearly every paragraph I thought of a comment I wanted to leave in agreement or in attempt to contribute to a point the Ape made, but soon there were too many to choose from, and he had basically headed me off at every pass, brilliantly explicating every point.
So, for our favorite Ape when reading this in the comment section: thank you for the fantastic article! And for everyone reading this comment on my timeline, give the article a read yourself if you want to know what I think about modern gaming, cultural subversion, the entertainment industry... all of that except written far better than I could have haha
I stopped playing video games some years back. Like you said, it was as though a switch flipped, and I realized I needed to start working on adult stuff, or else remain trapped a false adolescence.
From time to time, I think back fondly to Dawn of War and Counter-Strike and X-Com. But also, in retrospect, I'm struck by the sheer unbridled rabid-hyena nature of marketing (including ads and reviewing) for games. It was never not a degenerate hellscape - we're just arriving at the foregone conclusion.
Also, it seems to me that there was a turn in DC comics in the past decade, where for some reason they decided that they were going to invert their whole fictional cosmos, essentially declaring "Evil be thou my good."
That ship was already sinking, but they've decided to set it on fire and chop holes in the bottom, and I tend to think Scott Snyder was leading the charge. It fits with the whole antinomian feeling of the 2020s, but it's not a good sign and I ain't gotta like it.
And a final weird thought: Could the Penny Arcade webcomic (which I read for far, far too long) be a potential subject for one of your posts?
I have fond memories of all those games myself. X-Com was a riot. We used to watch my friend stream it and use a stable of custom characters based on us and people we knew - it was great fun watching the one based on my roommate that I didn't like whiff a 99% shot and then get blown up by aliens.
As for DC Comics, I'm unfamiliar with the politics behind the scenes there, but it always seemed to me like they lose dollars chasing pennies dropped in Marvel's wake when they try to do what Marvel's doing and then inevitably mess up the end result. Marvel Comics are subsidized by the movie studio despite operating at a loss, which allows them to keep making boneheaded decisions with no fear of repercussions. How DC manages to stay afloat is beyond me.
As for Penny Arcade, it's a possibility. I used to read Penny Arcade way back in the day, and they're presence in the meme culture of the mid-2000's was pretty notable, and they were really one of the first pieces of internet media I can recall making the transition from online to success to real life success. Not that they're really the titans of gamer culture (so far as it can be said to exist anymore) they used to be, but given that they still founded PAX, I'd say that's a pretty lofty achievement. Never been to either myself, but... well, PAX West is in August, and I am in the general area.
As a younger man, I used to consider myself a gamer. I still very much enjoy playing video games, and I'll usually do so for a couple hours each night after my wife goes to sleep. I'm nowhere near pulling the idiotically wasteful 48 hour benders I used to pull off in my teens through to my mid twenties. (Last time I pulled one of those was when I beat God of War 3 in a single night about a decade ago. You know, back before they confused the titles by naming the 4th game the same as the 1st game.)
As a wiser man nearing middle age, I look at the way my younger friends greedily sup from that skinner box and shake my head every time they end up surprised when most of the Western games they were excited to see ends up being about 35% garbage at minimum. There's an element of denialism inherent in the way they consume these products, and in the cases of many young twenty-somethings I think it's the fact that things have been tracking in this direction for most of their lives. One of my closest friends of the last couple years is a very smart and passionate early twenties Gen-Z kid who's a talented writer that's been working damn hard to expand his skill sets into illustration, programming, 3D modelling, and other facets of filmmaking and video game design in order to have at least some understanding of all of these things. His hope is to achieve his dream of making his own game one day. His passion for gaming burns very hot, and I'd 100% say that he is a gamer, because while he uses that passion to fuel his drive to learn the ins and outs of how games are made, he also throws himself hard into burning hours upon hours in them, just like I did.
The big difference between he and I in that latter regard, though, is the fact that I largely realized that most new games weren't worth my time by my mid twenties, which was about 12 years ago. (Still a better time for gaming quality than today I'd argue.) He still hasn't realized this yet. Or, rather, he still clings desperately to those shreds of false hope, only to turn back to me pikachu-faced when the games often end up being middling experiences at best, as I often warn him they're going to be. (Instances of full on denial to defend the bad parts of a mid game have also occurred.)
Apparently I'm a too-verbose mother fucker. I exceeded the comment word limit. In any case, the habit's deeply ingrained among many within the wider spectrum of game enjoyers, not just the young-uns. I've seen it in Gen-X-ers and Millennials, too. One can only hope that we can slowly wake some of these people up to the reality that they're being used and abused. In the case of my friend, it's a slow process, but at least he does recognize the faults within many of these games as he plays them. Even if he's still just a bit too trusting and not quite willing to leave his wallet shut just yet, I'd like to think that's a good first step.
Well, we're two of a kind, in that respect. Obviously, I'm a verbose mother fucker, myself. It's not a bad thing. Usually. Honestly, I didn't even know there was a comment word limit, but let's see if I break it here.
Anyways, I generally think a lot of gamers are like Star Wars fans - if they haven't put the pieces together yet, they probably never will. My first instinct is to call these people stupid, but I think that might be a bit harsh. Sure, some of these overly trusting gamers are, but all of them? Probably not. Just stuck in their ways, as you point out. If you've been a die-hard gamer since '93 and bought every hot title and new release in the intervening years... yeah, I can imagine walking away might be difficult. I know plenty of people like your friend who just, for whatever reason, can't stop letting EA and Blizzard and the like fool them, time and time again. I suppose I get it more than I pretend not to. Like I said, I keep buying every new mainline Pokemon game, even though GameFreak is steadfastly committed to doing the least amount of effort possible while still technically turning out a new game. Not to immediately disqualify what I said, too, but I also think it's somewhat different because I don't get the sense that GameFreak is a malicious studio - just lazy. When they have millions of die hard paypiggies that will buy anything with Pikachu's face on it, yeah, why bother trying? You know you're gonna make beaucoup bucks anyways.
Either way, I also hope that, one day, there will be a shift in the gaming culture consciousness, and for all the progress that's been made and all the people who have moved on, the vast majority are still shoveling lotuses down their gullet, and more and more people are being brought into the fold every day. It'll be interesting to see how things go. The industry is top-heavy, bloated, over-saturated, and unsustainable. But, like most unsustainable things these days , they dump a staggering amount of money into keeping that precariously tilting tower standing for as long as they possibly can.
No, no. The game didn't even look good. Not by the studio's own standards: look for comparison videos between this and the last Arkham game. It's actually shocking how much worse it looks than a 10 year old game. Not by the standards of the genre either; compare to the last Spiderman game.
But most of all, not even on its own terms. They turned Metropolis into a bugman dystopia Los Angeles deep in the throes of Neon Pride Century. Horrific purple-and-orange-and-mud palettes, buildings that look like rescaled asset flips from a failed Fortnite-meets-Overwatch clone. Signage that looks like boomer meme-tier Photoshop mockups of rejected Idiocracy joke businesses. A HUD and UI that looks like it was built from the cheapest "sci fi hud elements vector collection" on Shutterstock. Other than the cutscene mocap which they clearly spent a fortune on, even the character design and animations are kind of goofy and stiff compared to its ten year old predecessor and most big studio games today. And they somehow managed to make Harley look just very slightly dumpy (muh male gaze!)
I don't play capeshit games, don't like the movies, don't like comics and don't really care about any of the drama there, but I was aesthetically offended by clips of this game and insist someone be held accountable.
In my defense, I don't have much else to compare it to since I never played the Arkham games... but I did watch footage from the new Spiderman game after I finished writing this, and I'd say that's not wrong. The general setting of New York, being... well, New York, cesspit that it is, still looked a lot better than the Metropolis of Suicide Squad, which is a tacky, cluttered eyesore. I saw some reviewers praising the design of it, saying it was "art deco in a stark contrast to Gotham's gothic look", which, while I can't say I'm overly familiar with the Arkham take on Gotham, the Metropolis I saw was best described as "bargain bin art deco on a budget". Like, technically, yes, I guess there's a few buildings that maybe look art deco-lite and there are a few towering statues, but overall it's pretty bland. I suppose I should have clarified that I thought the animation and characters looked good, not so much the muddled and ugly setting around them or generic stock bad guys, and even then, I can't say I find Harley's look in the game to be easy on the eyes (I also really don't like the voice actor, either. Apparently it's Tara Strong, who I can only assume they told to be as annoying as humanly possible in the recording booth).
I wouldn't sully art deco by calling whatever that was remotely related to deco. It was more like some perverse combination of soviet brutalist and McDonalds Playplace with random neon trim. - Oh and lots of beehive patterns. Bugmen love that hexagonal grid look.
Batman the Animated Series was very deco, and the first Arkham game had some deco touches (the only one I played, a nice Batman reskin of OG Assassin's Creed). I was a little disappointed that the first Arkham game didn't lean into the aesthetic more.
TBF to the voice actress, Harley is canonically obnoxious. As I understand it she was created by the Animated Series and that's the way she was there, too (but this is where my whole concept of Batman comes from, that cartoon and the goofy old live action show; like I said, not into comics).
Playing through the original ME recently filled me with immense optimism for the future.
Of course, the future already came, and it was Red, Green, and Blue.
Still, continuing through the series, there's clearly a lot of love put into it. American Krogan (rip) had some disparaging takes against the progressive slant of the writing, if only he knew how bad things would become.
There's no hope for the next ME game, and I really can't imagine how so many people can believe it will be anything but low quality prog trash.
As an aside, I wonder, is it possible or profitable for the right to co-opt these IPs, ME, Star Wars, superheros, etc, and make them based and authentic? Or do we leave them to the progs and try to create something new?
Every now and then I go back and revisit clips from ME just to remind myself that, yes, there was a time and place where games were competently made and fun. Like, the original ME games were flawed, very, but overall you don't even see games of that caliber anymore. The world building, the characters, everything about it really does radiate with the effort and care the designers put into it. And as much as I hated the ending of Red, Green, and Blue... well, the Citadel DLC was good. They should have done more to make up for it and just added a whole new set of ending. I will never not be mad that we there wasn't an ending where Shepherd and Garrus (my main man) are sitting on a tropical beach drinking cocktails out of coconuts or some shit, basking in victory and watching the rest of the crew play volleyball with a giant dead reaper sticking out of the ocean in the distance. That's all I wanted. I don't think it was too much to ask for.
Honestly, at this point I hope there ISN'T another ME game. I'd rather it remain dormant than resurrected and defaced. Andromeda was already not good, but wedged sporadically throughout were flashes of the ME experience that, with a little bit of effort and genuine care from the dev team, could have actually been turned into something good if only someone at the top gave a shit. I have zero faith that Bioware, being the trash fire that they are at present, would even be capable of making a game with glimpses of promise. I did some research and, apparently, only three months ago Bioware said that, at soonest, the next ME game would not be ready until 2028 or 2029, and that they've effectively scrapped the entire Andromeda concept since it was received so poorly. Assuming we even make it to 2028 or 2029... well, I'm not holding my breath for quality.
That all being said, David V. Stewart actually addresses this in his own writings. Take Star Wars for example; he posits that there isn't going to be a consumer revolt big enough to convince Disney to change course, none of us have the funds to take the IP from them, it probably never will, and, even if anyone did, the damage is already done and the franchise is irrevocably stained. The best thing we can do is create something new and support new, independent authors and creators and leave the big IPs to flounder and wallow in their own filth. There's no shortage of new and unappreciated stories, games, what have you, waiting to be discovered by a wider audience - things that a lot of these people would probably enjoy more than Star Wars or Marvel or whatever if only they'd just nut up and finally find the strength to abandon these legacy IPs. But, unfortunately, I don't think there's any saving these legacy IPs. Not to say that I don't think a good, authentic, and worthwhile story couldn't be told using the symbology and characters in them - I still think that, if someone really tried, they could make a good movie featuring Marvel superheros - but under the current leadership, it's never going to happen, and it's best just left alone and our attention and efforts go to new creations.
Bioware had their B-team on Andromeda while their A-team was running around like headless chickens trying to figure out what Anthem was. Or rather, trying to turn it into the Destiny killer that the EA suits wanted. Spoiler: they never did, and they lost a lot of their talent over it. I think Jason Schreier's Blood, Sweat and Pixels covers some of that drama, or at least the preceding drama over Inquisition that fed into it.
Oh yeah, I remember Anthem. I remember it tanking miserably and could probably be rightly accused for killing the entire studio since they've done effectively nothing but rerelease ME since.
Yeah it was a mess. That and the various fiascos involved with Dragon Age: Inquisition and Andromeda pretty much hollowed them out on talent. Full skinsuit now. My hope is they get done consuming Bioware's brand value quickly so that someone else can buy the rights and do something interesting with their franchises again.
But like you say at the top of the article, they've destroyed gaming so thoroughly at this point that I hardly bother with it anymore. So who knows if I'll care by the time it's done. I pick up promising indies every once in a while when I feel like it, but these are few and far between compared to the staggering pace of big kill-a-couple-months releases we saw during the 2010s peak.
I have a bad feeling that just won't happen. EA are jealous masters and, like dragons, hoard their IPs. They could give it to another subsidiary, I suppose, but I have little faith in any of them doing good with them. I've heard that EA can still make games that are... competent, sometimes even good (with some major caveats), but they are exceedingly rare. That and, apparently, Bioware is still working on new Mass Effects and a new Dragon Age game. If a new ME project does materialize in 2029, it'll have been in development for almost fifteen years, which, in my opinion, is intolerable. And, you're right - who would even care by that point?
Still, like I said about Pokemon - they should just give them to me. Or at least Mass Effect. I have big ideas. I'd get things going in the right direction again.
"it'll have been in development for almost fifteen years"
Shit, talk about stuck culture. I remember the six years between Half-Life and Half-Life 2 feeling like an eternity. At least there we got a decent game out of it.
Yeah EA is the Disney of game publishers. Once they own something, they never, ever let it go. But like the other big publishers (and Disney, and all zombie companies) they have a handful of still-profitable IPs they pour all their investment into, and aren't much interested in innovating. So they're on a slow downward spiral of profitability, because nothing, not even sports sims, can sustain them forever.
The tech company-pioneered strategy of letting innovation happen in "start-ups," which they then acquire and scrap for parts to feed the machine, has taken over everything. In gaming and film it's indie studios. Some indies know how to tell the monsters "no", but I understand it's difficult to resist when someone offers you more money than you ever dreamed of for the low, low price of destroying your passion. I don't know if anything I've ever made is so precious to me that I wouldn't take a couple hundred million dollars to walk away from it.
I think this is your best essay yet, Ape. Maybe it just spoke to me personally as a recovering gamer, but the long journey to the essay's conclusion was fascinating and enjoyable all the way through.
You're the only essayist on Substack I've found trying to write a history of the Internet. It's important work. I have no idea how historians in a hundred years will even make sense of the deluge, but I get the sense a source like yours will be a critical part.
As an aside, you pretty much perfectly expressed my feeling on games, especially how little they give back, considering how much they take. There are few hobbies that can consume hundreds, or even thousands, of hours and return basically no proof of the time committed. Model train guys at least have a cool model train layout, painters have portraits, audiophiles have their collection and setup, and so on. But gamers? All they have is the Number of Hours Played clock on Steam. Which bizarrely is a badge of honor for gamers that I’ve never understood.
Anyway, thanks for your hard work. This essay is the product of your victory over addiction. It wouldn't exist if you hadn't have made the choice to put aside childish things. You have proof that, indeed, the Ape was here.
Thank you, this is an incredibly humbling and deeply appreciated compliment. Honestly, I think about the archiving of internet history much more than I should. I speak more on it in the third part of my brony series that, one day, I'll get around to finishing, but the old adage of "The internet is forever" is rapidly being proven false, with prejudice. Like, sure, some things become infamous and stick around forever, but one must take into the count the sheer, incomprehensibly large size of the internet. YouTube alone sees roughly 3.7 MILLION uploads a day for an approximate total of 271,330 hours of content. Again, per day. You could never watch even a fraction of the entirety of YouTube in a human lifespan. Naturally, things are going to slip through the cracks. And there's been so much great art, interesting people, and generally what I'd consider beautiful, worthwhile things that continue to slip between the cracks of history. It can all be deleted with a button - lost forever, like tears in the rain. The worst part is now Google is doing away with it's cache service, which will effectively erase over a decade of archived sites, making research all that more difficult to do. This is to say nothing of Google, Meta, Xitter, Reddit, and other monolithic sites continuing to reign in the internet into separate, segregated walled gardens, leaving everything outside of their purview to basically rot. There's an entire concept called internet rot or decay, now, which... well, not right now. But suffice to say, yes, this stuff is important to me, as I think it will be important to future generations. As a history buff, nothing ticks me off like reading about an event that's not belabored upon by historians of the time, and being left sitting there like, "Why the hell did no one decide to write down the details of that one? That seems kind of important?" Which I'm sure someone did, but, at the same time, much like pieces of the internet gradually blink out of existence, one by one, so too did the writings of the ancients, until we only have a fraction of what they left behind still in existence.
And I'm pretty sure future generations are going to be agonizing over some of the wild shit that happens on the internet and, in many ways, shape the future in odd and unpredictable manners we probably can't foresee. So, hopefully, one day, I do hope that some curious historian will be able to turn to my articles on the bronies to understand what exactly drove that particular case of societal mania. Will my writings make it that far? Who knows. But I hope it does.
Also, The Ape Was Here would make a killer name for this publication if I ever changed it. Again, thanks for the words of support. They're appreciated.
2023 really was a poor year for vidya, it must be said. My personal favourite fiasco was the Goodbye Volcano High/Snoot Game one. Not as flashy as other rings in the circus, but very entertaining.
Video games are near-perfect lotus-eater machines in my mind. They eat time and attention and put out vanishingly little in the way of returns. In this they are similar to TV or movies, but video games are really more potent than either of those. They demand a much greater time commitment, but they also lack the vestigial social aspect of the television screen. One might watch a movie with family - for one to play games in the same room as people you know is increasingly rare.
I personally wonder whether this increase of social emphasis on time-wasting machines and fake jobs is an evolved civilisational response to the massively increased productivity of farming and industry in the last century-and-change. As the labour of fewer and fewer men is necessary to sustain society, something must be found to employ the rest of us and to consume the surplus of materials. Video games consume immense amounts of time in their consumption and a huge amount of materials in their creation and playing (the logistic chain behind each new graphics card, for instance, boggles the mind)
Ah, Snoot Game. Funny that a (I believe) Bolivian who doesn't even speak English unless prompted to managed to write circles and tell a genuinely engaging and emotional story using anthro fucking dinosaurs, and also ride circles around the caterwauling dev team that came up with the idea in the first place. Honestly one of the best arguments for "loosening" copyright one could possibly use.
I would actually argue that they do have a social aspect more unique than a shared screen, what with online multiplayer that can connect people from opposite ends of the planet, but at the same time, it is still inherently a simulacra of social interaction conducted through a screen, which is categorically and scientifically proven to not be the same as person-to-person communication, so... maybe I'm just splitting hairs. Split-screen, however, is more or less dead though, you're right about that. I never considered that video games may be a necessary opium to keep people doped up and distracted in a society with a surfeit of human labor, but that's a really interesting angle to look at it from. I think it would certainly explain the meteoric rise of the streaming phenomenon - as gaining meaningful, well-paid employment becomes increasingly difficult due to a shrinking labor market and other constraints, it makes sense that the people who "check out" of society decide to turn to streaming to make a few extra bucks. I'd say that keeping those drop-outs and their ilk distracted wouldn't even be a bad thing, if it hadn't breached containment, and now you have characters of ill-repute like Ninja influencing an entire generation and Pokimane and Amouranth getting fabulously wealthy off betabucks, all examples of which will only perpetuate the cycle and, in my opinion, draw perfectly capable and productive members of society down the drain rather than serve as simple entertainment for society's failures-to-launch.
It was 4chan's /v/ board which put out Snoot Game, which is surprisingly unsurprising, all things considered (eg Katawa Shoujo was also fantastic).
The consumption of surplus labour through frivolous jobs or consumption is just one half of my pet theory. The other half is that these frivolities are also intended to consume the excess material produced by modern industrial production. Mechanised resource extraction and industrial production methods are certainly efficient and productive, but they require a certain base level of production to be cost-effective. This could I guess also be cast as a labour issue, but I think that it's not quite the same thing
Part of the reason games are more engaging than other media is that you're actively learning skills and solving problems in them, which young men in particular are hard-wired to do. Whether most of those skills are useful in any way is debatable. But it does help to explain what the driving force is. Of course there's also accumulation and in multiplayer games, gaining status.
I've always liked Richard Bartle's take, roughly paraphrased, that games at their best provide a hero's journey experience for the player. It's the roadmap for what growing up means to men. Unfortunately so many games fail at this, and others ruthlessly exploit this to pump engagement (besides all the other psychological abuse they engage in). But this is the curse of technology in general: it can be used for good or ill, and unchecked, it will be mainly for ill.
RE: labor saving and surplus labor, yeah. It doesn't have to be soaked up by pointless activities, that's just what we chose as a society. All other things being equal, if we didn't have video games, we'd probably be living out Clockwork Orange right now, because crime and violence is the other thing young men do when they're not permitted to meaningfully participate in society.
Great insight here. Video games can be used to tell good, worthwhile stories through an interactive medium... or they can be turned into tedious time and money sinks.
BioWare could do no wrong in my book until Dragon Age: Inquisition came around. Everyone was going apeshit over it and I'm like, "Uh...this game kinda blows." Even after that, I had high hopes for Andromeda, but it was tedious and nonsensical.
Plus (and I cannot stress this enough) Kumail Nanjiani is fucking annoying and really needs to stop being shoehorned into every Goddamn IP in existence.
I never played Dragon Age but by the time I was even in a position to do so Inquisition was out and that was the prevailing opinion I heard. The worst part about Andromeda is that, watching cutscenes, there is some small fragment of what made the original games great in the dialogue and interactions between the characters... some of them. But overall, it was a shamefully buggy hot mess that didn't even come close to sniffing the quality of the first.
Also, you know that mean comments like that sent Mr. Nanjiani to seek therapy, right? It's not his fault he's so funny and attractive and charming and charismatic and dashing and wonderful in every way that he keeps bagging roles left and right - you're just jealous, is all, and you don't understand how difficult it is to be a successfully psy-opped celebrity that collects an eight figure income. Seriously though they've been writing about how terrible the backlash was for the Eternals and Nanjiani was seriously blubbering like a seal about how it drove him to seek therapy, which is like... look, I get the internet can be cruel, but grow up. He's definitely near the top of my list of "People I'd Be Okay Never Seeing Again".
It is my fervently held opinion that all these crybaby stories about such and such celebrity being driven off of social media/seeking therapy/crying into their toilet bowl after their morning constitutional because of "cruel" fans are 100% bullshit. I've noticed that the whiny celebrities never once provide examples of such extreme cruelty, which leads me to believe it's nothing more than a cynical marketing ploy to generate faux outrage/interest over whatever lame horseshit the parent media company is peddling.
Also, while I 100% agree that Blizzard has fallen pretty far, I must admit that I'm enjoying Diablo IV.
I've heard mixed things. But it doesn't matter, though I enjoy the genre I'm not giving skinsuit Blizzard a dime or a minute ever again. Everyone (*everyone*) who built that company is gone. The whole crew who made Diablo and Diablo 2 have been gone for 15 years. As are the crews from all their other classic games. Some run out, some retired, some left to start their own things. There's nothing left there but a smoking crater full of betabux and bluehairs.
In nearly every paragraph I found a phrase I really wanted to quote in a restack, but soon there were too many to choose from. In nearly every paragraph I thought of a comment I wanted to leave in agreement or in attempt to contribute to a point the Ape made, but soon there were too many to choose from, and he had basically headed me off at every pass, brilliantly explicating every point.
So, for our favorite Ape when reading this in the comment section: thank you for the fantastic article! And for everyone reading this comment on my timeline, give the article a read yourself if you want to know what I think about modern gaming, cultural subversion, the entertainment industry... all of that except written far better than I could have haha
And thank you for reading and the support. It's greatly appreciated, as always, and I'm glad that you enjoyed!
I stopped playing video games some years back. Like you said, it was as though a switch flipped, and I realized I needed to start working on adult stuff, or else remain trapped a false adolescence.
From time to time, I think back fondly to Dawn of War and Counter-Strike and X-Com. But also, in retrospect, I'm struck by the sheer unbridled rabid-hyena nature of marketing (including ads and reviewing) for games. It was never not a degenerate hellscape - we're just arriving at the foregone conclusion.
Also, it seems to me that there was a turn in DC comics in the past decade, where for some reason they decided that they were going to invert their whole fictional cosmos, essentially declaring "Evil be thou my good."
That ship was already sinking, but they've decided to set it on fire and chop holes in the bottom, and I tend to think Scott Snyder was leading the charge. It fits with the whole antinomian feeling of the 2020s, but it's not a good sign and I ain't gotta like it.
And a final weird thought: Could the Penny Arcade webcomic (which I read for far, far too long) be a potential subject for one of your posts?
I have fond memories of all those games myself. X-Com was a riot. We used to watch my friend stream it and use a stable of custom characters based on us and people we knew - it was great fun watching the one based on my roommate that I didn't like whiff a 99% shot and then get blown up by aliens.
As for DC Comics, I'm unfamiliar with the politics behind the scenes there, but it always seemed to me like they lose dollars chasing pennies dropped in Marvel's wake when they try to do what Marvel's doing and then inevitably mess up the end result. Marvel Comics are subsidized by the movie studio despite operating at a loss, which allows them to keep making boneheaded decisions with no fear of repercussions. How DC manages to stay afloat is beyond me.
As for Penny Arcade, it's a possibility. I used to read Penny Arcade way back in the day, and they're presence in the meme culture of the mid-2000's was pretty notable, and they were really one of the first pieces of internet media I can recall making the transition from online to success to real life success. Not that they're really the titans of gamer culture (so far as it can be said to exist anymore) they used to be, but given that they still founded PAX, I'd say that's a pretty lofty achievement. Never been to either myself, but... well, PAX West is in August, and I am in the general area.
As a younger man, I used to consider myself a gamer. I still very much enjoy playing video games, and I'll usually do so for a couple hours each night after my wife goes to sleep. I'm nowhere near pulling the idiotically wasteful 48 hour benders I used to pull off in my teens through to my mid twenties. (Last time I pulled one of those was when I beat God of War 3 in a single night about a decade ago. You know, back before they confused the titles by naming the 4th game the same as the 1st game.)
As a wiser man nearing middle age, I look at the way my younger friends greedily sup from that skinner box and shake my head every time they end up surprised when most of the Western games they were excited to see ends up being about 35% garbage at minimum. There's an element of denialism inherent in the way they consume these products, and in the cases of many young twenty-somethings I think it's the fact that things have been tracking in this direction for most of their lives. One of my closest friends of the last couple years is a very smart and passionate early twenties Gen-Z kid who's a talented writer that's been working damn hard to expand his skill sets into illustration, programming, 3D modelling, and other facets of filmmaking and video game design in order to have at least some understanding of all of these things. His hope is to achieve his dream of making his own game one day. His passion for gaming burns very hot, and I'd 100% say that he is a gamer, because while he uses that passion to fuel his drive to learn the ins and outs of how games are made, he also throws himself hard into burning hours upon hours in them, just like I did.
The big difference between he and I in that latter regard, though, is the fact that I largely realized that most new games weren't worth my time by my mid twenties, which was about 12 years ago. (Still a better time for gaming quality than today I'd argue.) He still hasn't realized this yet. Or, rather, he still clings desperately to those shreds of false hope, only to turn back to me pikachu-faced when the games often end up being middling experiences at best, as I often warn him they're going to be. (Instances of full on denial to defend the bad parts of a mid game have also occurred.)
Apparently I'm a too-verbose mother fucker. I exceeded the comment word limit. In any case, the habit's deeply ingrained among many within the wider spectrum of game enjoyers, not just the young-uns. I've seen it in Gen-X-ers and Millennials, too. One can only hope that we can slowly wake some of these people up to the reality that they're being used and abused. In the case of my friend, it's a slow process, but at least he does recognize the faults within many of these games as he plays them. Even if he's still just a bit too trusting and not quite willing to leave his wallet shut just yet, I'd like to think that's a good first step.
Well, we're two of a kind, in that respect. Obviously, I'm a verbose mother fucker, myself. It's not a bad thing. Usually. Honestly, I didn't even know there was a comment word limit, but let's see if I break it here.
Anyways, I generally think a lot of gamers are like Star Wars fans - if they haven't put the pieces together yet, they probably never will. My first instinct is to call these people stupid, but I think that might be a bit harsh. Sure, some of these overly trusting gamers are, but all of them? Probably not. Just stuck in their ways, as you point out. If you've been a die-hard gamer since '93 and bought every hot title and new release in the intervening years... yeah, I can imagine walking away might be difficult. I know plenty of people like your friend who just, for whatever reason, can't stop letting EA and Blizzard and the like fool them, time and time again. I suppose I get it more than I pretend not to. Like I said, I keep buying every new mainline Pokemon game, even though GameFreak is steadfastly committed to doing the least amount of effort possible while still technically turning out a new game. Not to immediately disqualify what I said, too, but I also think it's somewhat different because I don't get the sense that GameFreak is a malicious studio - just lazy. When they have millions of die hard paypiggies that will buy anything with Pikachu's face on it, yeah, why bother trying? You know you're gonna make beaucoup bucks anyways.
Either way, I also hope that, one day, there will be a shift in the gaming culture consciousness, and for all the progress that's been made and all the people who have moved on, the vast majority are still shoveling lotuses down their gullet, and more and more people are being brought into the fold every day. It'll be interesting to see how things go. The industry is top-heavy, bloated, over-saturated, and unsustainable. But, like most unsustainable things these days , they dump a staggering amount of money into keeping that precariously tilting tower standing for as long as they possibly can.
No, no. The game didn't even look good. Not by the studio's own standards: look for comparison videos between this and the last Arkham game. It's actually shocking how much worse it looks than a 10 year old game. Not by the standards of the genre either; compare to the last Spiderman game.
But most of all, not even on its own terms. They turned Metropolis into a bugman dystopia Los Angeles deep in the throes of Neon Pride Century. Horrific purple-and-orange-and-mud palettes, buildings that look like rescaled asset flips from a failed Fortnite-meets-Overwatch clone. Signage that looks like boomer meme-tier Photoshop mockups of rejected Idiocracy joke businesses. A HUD and UI that looks like it was built from the cheapest "sci fi hud elements vector collection" on Shutterstock. Other than the cutscene mocap which they clearly spent a fortune on, even the character design and animations are kind of goofy and stiff compared to its ten year old predecessor and most big studio games today. And they somehow managed to make Harley look just very slightly dumpy (muh male gaze!)
I don't play capeshit games, don't like the movies, don't like comics and don't really care about any of the drama there, but I was aesthetically offended by clips of this game and insist someone be held accountable.
In my defense, I don't have much else to compare it to since I never played the Arkham games... but I did watch footage from the new Spiderman game after I finished writing this, and I'd say that's not wrong. The general setting of New York, being... well, New York, cesspit that it is, still looked a lot better than the Metropolis of Suicide Squad, which is a tacky, cluttered eyesore. I saw some reviewers praising the design of it, saying it was "art deco in a stark contrast to Gotham's gothic look", which, while I can't say I'm overly familiar with the Arkham take on Gotham, the Metropolis I saw was best described as "bargain bin art deco on a budget". Like, technically, yes, I guess there's a few buildings that maybe look art deco-lite and there are a few towering statues, but overall it's pretty bland. I suppose I should have clarified that I thought the animation and characters looked good, not so much the muddled and ugly setting around them or generic stock bad guys, and even then, I can't say I find Harley's look in the game to be easy on the eyes (I also really don't like the voice actor, either. Apparently it's Tara Strong, who I can only assume they told to be as annoying as humanly possible in the recording booth).
I wouldn't sully art deco by calling whatever that was remotely related to deco. It was more like some perverse combination of soviet brutalist and McDonalds Playplace with random neon trim. - Oh and lots of beehive patterns. Bugmen love that hexagonal grid look.
Batman the Animated Series was very deco, and the first Arkham game had some deco touches (the only one I played, a nice Batman reskin of OG Assassin's Creed). I was a little disappointed that the first Arkham game didn't lean into the aesthetic more.
TBF to the voice actress, Harley is canonically obnoxious. As I understand it she was created by the Animated Series and that's the way she was there, too (but this is where my whole concept of Batman comes from, that cartoon and the goofy old live action show; like I said, not into comics).
Edit: here's the side-by-side comparison between Suicide and Arkham Knight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iocRbdvUgJ4
Every year I get the urge to play Transport Fever. No idea why.
Currently sinking my time in to the Legend of Heroes: Trails series of games. Class stories in my view.
We all have that one siren that always call us back, that's why. The one by which all others will be judged.
>Tali mentioned
I knew you were a man of refined taste.
Playing through the original ME recently filled me with immense optimism for the future.
Of course, the future already came, and it was Red, Green, and Blue.
Still, continuing through the series, there's clearly a lot of love put into it. American Krogan (rip) had some disparaging takes against the progressive slant of the writing, if only he knew how bad things would become.
There's no hope for the next ME game, and I really can't imagine how so many people can believe it will be anything but low quality prog trash.
As an aside, I wonder, is it possible or profitable for the right to co-opt these IPs, ME, Star Wars, superheros, etc, and make them based and authentic? Or do we leave them to the progs and try to create something new?
Every now and then I go back and revisit clips from ME just to remind myself that, yes, there was a time and place where games were competently made and fun. Like, the original ME games were flawed, very, but overall you don't even see games of that caliber anymore. The world building, the characters, everything about it really does radiate with the effort and care the designers put into it. And as much as I hated the ending of Red, Green, and Blue... well, the Citadel DLC was good. They should have done more to make up for it and just added a whole new set of ending. I will never not be mad that we there wasn't an ending where Shepherd and Garrus (my main man) are sitting on a tropical beach drinking cocktails out of coconuts or some shit, basking in victory and watching the rest of the crew play volleyball with a giant dead reaper sticking out of the ocean in the distance. That's all I wanted. I don't think it was too much to ask for.
Honestly, at this point I hope there ISN'T another ME game. I'd rather it remain dormant than resurrected and defaced. Andromeda was already not good, but wedged sporadically throughout were flashes of the ME experience that, with a little bit of effort and genuine care from the dev team, could have actually been turned into something good if only someone at the top gave a shit. I have zero faith that Bioware, being the trash fire that they are at present, would even be capable of making a game with glimpses of promise. I did some research and, apparently, only three months ago Bioware said that, at soonest, the next ME game would not be ready until 2028 or 2029, and that they've effectively scrapped the entire Andromeda concept since it was received so poorly. Assuming we even make it to 2028 or 2029... well, I'm not holding my breath for quality.
That all being said, David V. Stewart actually addresses this in his own writings. Take Star Wars for example; he posits that there isn't going to be a consumer revolt big enough to convince Disney to change course, none of us have the funds to take the IP from them, it probably never will, and, even if anyone did, the damage is already done and the franchise is irrevocably stained. The best thing we can do is create something new and support new, independent authors and creators and leave the big IPs to flounder and wallow in their own filth. There's no shortage of new and unappreciated stories, games, what have you, waiting to be discovered by a wider audience - things that a lot of these people would probably enjoy more than Star Wars or Marvel or whatever if only they'd just nut up and finally find the strength to abandon these legacy IPs. But, unfortunately, I don't think there's any saving these legacy IPs. Not to say that I don't think a good, authentic, and worthwhile story couldn't be told using the symbology and characters in them - I still think that, if someone really tried, they could make a good movie featuring Marvel superheros - but under the current leadership, it's never going to happen, and it's best just left alone and our attention and efforts go to new creations.
Bioware had their B-team on Andromeda while their A-team was running around like headless chickens trying to figure out what Anthem was. Or rather, trying to turn it into the Destiny killer that the EA suits wanted. Spoiler: they never did, and they lost a lot of their talent over it. I think Jason Schreier's Blood, Sweat and Pixels covers some of that drama, or at least the preceding drama over Inquisition that fed into it.
Oh yeah, I remember Anthem. I remember it tanking miserably and could probably be rightly accused for killing the entire studio since they've done effectively nothing but rerelease ME since.
Yeah it was a mess. That and the various fiascos involved with Dragon Age: Inquisition and Andromeda pretty much hollowed them out on talent. Full skinsuit now. My hope is they get done consuming Bioware's brand value quickly so that someone else can buy the rights and do something interesting with their franchises again.
But like you say at the top of the article, they've destroyed gaming so thoroughly at this point that I hardly bother with it anymore. So who knows if I'll care by the time it's done. I pick up promising indies every once in a while when I feel like it, but these are few and far between compared to the staggering pace of big kill-a-couple-months releases we saw during the 2010s peak.
I have a bad feeling that just won't happen. EA are jealous masters and, like dragons, hoard their IPs. They could give it to another subsidiary, I suppose, but I have little faith in any of them doing good with them. I've heard that EA can still make games that are... competent, sometimes even good (with some major caveats), but they are exceedingly rare. That and, apparently, Bioware is still working on new Mass Effects and a new Dragon Age game. If a new ME project does materialize in 2029, it'll have been in development for almost fifteen years, which, in my opinion, is intolerable. And, you're right - who would even care by that point?
Still, like I said about Pokemon - they should just give them to me. Or at least Mass Effect. I have big ideas. I'd get things going in the right direction again.
"it'll have been in development for almost fifteen years"
Shit, talk about stuck culture. I remember the six years between Half-Life and Half-Life 2 feeling like an eternity. At least there we got a decent game out of it.
Yeah EA is the Disney of game publishers. Once they own something, they never, ever let it go. But like the other big publishers (and Disney, and all zombie companies) they have a handful of still-profitable IPs they pour all their investment into, and aren't much interested in innovating. So they're on a slow downward spiral of profitability, because nothing, not even sports sims, can sustain them forever.
The tech company-pioneered strategy of letting innovation happen in "start-ups," which they then acquire and scrap for parts to feed the machine, has taken over everything. In gaming and film it's indie studios. Some indies know how to tell the monsters "no", but I understand it's difficult to resist when someone offers you more money than you ever dreamed of for the low, low price of destroying your passion. I don't know if anything I've ever made is so precious to me that I wouldn't take a couple hundred million dollars to walk away from it.