Wednesday, February 21, 2018

Yes, the Future (part two)

DQ Legal Advisor Lee Rawles, who has always been one of the best people, said this to me a few years ago: "the game industry is searching for a business model that works, and none of them work."

Ah, that explains quite a lot, doesn't it?

It has been extraordinarily painful for me to realize two things in the last few years:
1. Gaming culture is a cesspool of misogyny, racism, and white nationalism.
2. Gaming companies have increasingly begun making products where there is no game, only behavioral manipulation.

Those both hurt, don't they?

I remember back in the long-ago 1980s, playing games and being absolutely amazed at how wonderful they were. PC gamers were different, it seemed. We were almost uniformly bright--elevated, even--and what worlds we could access!

Created by wonderful people, seemingly, incredibly creative people who were experimenting with an incredibly powerful new tool.

Maybe gaming culture was always full of assholes, and I just didn't know it because we weren't all connected back then, but it feels like at some point, it all went bad.

Things fall apart, as a nod to Chinua Achebe.

So I look back on something I've truly, truly enjoyed for over four decades, and it feels poisoned, to some degree. I still know deeply intelligent, thoughtful people who play games, but their voices have been drowned out by the braying shouts of idiots.

Now, instead of experiencing everything that gaming has to offer, instead of living all over the gaming world, I spend my time in secret gardens, places that haven't been trampled.

Little indie games, probably made by people somewhat like me, who played and loved games before the fall.

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