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Posted 01-30-2013 at 12:39 PM byMac Sirloin Updated 01-30-2013 at 12:44 PM byMac Sirloin
Stop playing fucking video games. What are you, nineteen? Twenty five? Enough already. Get an education, focus on friends. Read more. When you have a skill that makes you set for life, or a bunch of lottery money or a trust fund then you can pick that controller back up.
But why? You ask
Because it's childish and obscene and a complete waste of your time. Why don't you focus on bettering yourself a little more, young men? Why not get out into that sunlight and finish reading an author's entire body of work. Or take up painting.
But NO! The gamer heaves and haws Gaming has subtlety and merit and is art
Of course, but the same way dubstep is a shitty medium for shitty people to act shitty in clubs or on kitchen tables, videogames are just an externalized plastic box that you trasnmuted your feelings of wonder into. They're a chimera of smut, flashing lights and exquisitely designed figures that provoke a sense of uniqueness among a people so similar and self-sabotogingly boring that they can only label themselves in the broadest sense of what they share: Gamer. A title taken from people who used to share these same types of experiences in dimly lit rooms creating their own stories, their own adeventures, now catalogued and sold more expensively than a Hollywood film. Spend sixty, seventy dollars to punch a man over and over until you're the ULTIMATE man puncher.
I'm getting off track. What I need to be is more pretentious and critical of the single peer-group I've loathsomely shared for my time here on this planet.
There is no value communicable through the video game medium. No moral message or subtext, just the bluntly stated or needlessly convoluted concepts of WAR IS BAD and LOVE IS GOOD and TEAMWORK IS THE ANSWER, DUH! Emotionally manipulative caricatures of real things are all that seem to get through to the gamer, amid catastrophic damage to the eyeballs and higher faculties, an ape bred to read but swindled into pattern recognition and mashing buttons constantly reminding itself 'This is worthwhile, this is what I am good at.' It's not mind control or some conspiracy to render mankind a bunch of catatonic boymen, it's just the natural intelligence slope having 7 billion of us creates. 'Why bother finishing or developing that unbelievably imaginative idea I had? Better play that thing I've played a trillion times before in some other form.'
Decadent little nobodies devalue their loved ones and possessions seeking that perfect digital fix that by and large cannot exist. I have an uncle who believes if we could start teaching dogs to cook their own food we would see a massive uptake in canine intelligence and understanding of stupid rotten humans Hmm, I wonder if the same works on us, if brain-putrefying ramen and TV dinners really do make you a stupid lazy piece of flab because you can't contain your attention span long enough to assemble a meal for yourself with no parental intervention.
But fear not, because there are ponies and film and the skeleton of the former drug culture and supercomputer rendered music to envelop yourself in and scream "I'M UNIQUE! NOBODY'S LIKE ME!" from the shadows of your cloned home full of cloned furniture, fueled by cloned foods. The truth is nobody will miss you, nobody cares and nobody wants to care.
You make me sick and angry and only expelling the poisonous contents of my raging hateboner will make me feel even a little better. Get some sunlight, stop watching let's plays, get out.
And now that I think about it, you're right.
What am I? A 14 year old faggot who wants to fuck ponies, listen to shit music and make shit music. Sitting inside all day with no friends playing on Portal 2, over and over again, the same thing all the time. This is all of us, we don't mean nothing, and we're all made out of shit, we're not special, we aren't unique, we're nothing, and you know what? I don't care, I wouldn't have it any other way.
As long as you don't stay the course until you're 30.
But I will say this: Trolling blog or not, there are far more things one can do with their time that are much less productive than gaming, including many other recreational activities. Life is short, and at the end of mine I'll be happy that I had the opportunity to spend a lot of my free time doing something that I enjoyed.
It would be better for you to stop playing video games. Grow up out of the fantasy, face the real world and do something worthwhile. Steadfastly refusing to acknowledge the wisdom of this message based on your own preconceptions about the messenger is just an echo of that same juvenile refusal. Your brain creates a placebo idea, a totally fantastic excuse for you not to kick your digital addiction and move up. To transcend your adolescent urges and offer something of value to the people around you. Assuming I'm joking or in a state is a sadder version of this same denial. You can't give the problem the barest of glances so you tuck it away and roll your eyes before retreating into the darkness once again and experiencing that addicting glow. It is taking your imagination and slowing it to a crawl as the hallucination of creativity blasts its way into your skull and exacts a direct control. You would be better without them. You would be more unique without them. You would do more with your time without them. To say 'Ultimately it depends on the person' is utter nonsense, too. The person is subjected to the exact same spectacle as any other playing the game. The same messages are delivered, interpretation doesn't matter because the tools we use to hack apart the ideas presented have been provided in a ubiquitous format. Without video games, the application of those same accidental addictive properties would not be present in the cellphone world or the internet. Our society would have games as an internally devised co-op instead of externalized entertainment sliding down the loose birth canal of its own wildly unregulated industry.
There are hobbies that seem just as useless and time wasting, but most if not all of those are focused on some measure of tactile ability--paint strokes, the turning of a tiny screw. Practice for the hands. Gaming is subjecting yourself to a mutant plastic phallus for hours at a time while overstimulating your brain as much as you can. It is the media equivalent of eating nothing but chewing gum and energy drinks. And it's addictive. All consuming addiction that retards the senses and drives you mad when you can't sit there with your plastic penis interacting with it, mental masturbation of an unequivocal banality. Deny it all you want, flaunt excuses and explanations and overempathize with yourself thinking you're speaking for a crowd when all that isolation left you with no bridges that don't depend on audiovisual stimulation. There is only darkness at the end of a tunnel of blinding light.
The fact that their is a unified defiance of my point speaks volumes to the all encompassing personality sapping nature of this horrible passtime. All the rose-tinted glasses and revenge fantasies in the world will never get your time or youth back, but you can always relent and turn your system off for good. Don't look at it as criticism of yourselves as individuals, but the overall weakness of character and sloping ineptitude of us all that this awful entertainment spectre has taken advantage of. The times are not changing, they are relegating back to a point of lazy decadence assembled through history's most lackluster people. You can choose to acknowledge this universal fault and grow up, or you cannot. It is very simple that way.
Ergo: Make a reasoned counter-argument, and I'll ignore it. Hence why I haven't bothered.
Video games can be a crutch for the socially retarded, but so can, I don't know, stamp collecting. At the end of the day, people who hate interacting with other human beings will find any excuse not to do so. I don't deny that time I've spent playing video games hasn't massively nourished my intellect, but I deny that my time would have been spent more productively otherwise. Before I got a computer, it was usually comics.
I'm perfectly capable of becoming distracted in an empty room. And quickly.
Stamp collecting can be a gateway to other finer arts, sometimes a source for great fortune. A good stamp collector can provide geographic information or historic reference. Video games are a gateway to...video games. And talking about video games, thinking about video games, forcing conversation about video games upon others... it's an alienating piece of culture. Spending your life reading; even if it's comics, as opposed to burning your eyeballs out of your head watching muscleman go fishing for the vapid macguffin certainly sounds more worthwhile to me. You're almost there. It's like the sunlight came shining through but quickly got swamped out because a steam warning popped up. You can do it, you can be a better person. Start tomorrow.
I have seen the light. It's time to take up the hobby of stamp collecting. This way I know for sure that one day, I will be a fantastic human being. People all around the world will know my name. Slog Bait, the incredible stamp collector. He accomplished what no other human being was capable of. If only they had picked up stamp collecting. Then maybe they could have been just as great. But no, instead those poor misguided souls just sat there in their batcaves spending hours upon hours wasting their lives away playing shitty video games.
And I'll look back on my amazing life and give a single nod of approval to Mac for opening my eyes with that awful blog on some forum so many, many years ago.
I agree that people who call themselves "gamers" are useless wastes of skin, and the vast, vast majority of all video games are senseless trash. I have been buying less, and less games lately, and have been finding myself completely apathetic to most of the ones I do buy.
Ico, and Shadow of the Colossus are really great, though. Psychonauts, too.
My intention with this blog was somewhere between being a superdick and raising some actual criticism. I am being neither serious or facetious, I just feel that the way things are going will mean way more money spent on the hobby than entertainment derived from it and a lot of that entertainment will feel worn out and too similar to games I've already enjoyed.
This is not so much a reflection of the video game audience themselves as a general criticism of the industry becoming about blockbusting and gaining the favour of the Young Western Male demographic. There are casual titles and smartphone gaming, but those feel very empty and get boring pretty rapidly.
A few months ago I had this idea that if gaming hadn't caught on the way it had perhaps it would developed into an industry powered by frameworks that players bought and worked around themselves to share and create with. Basically the modding community that PC gaming wonderfully encourages but with floppy disks and greasy kiosks with bins full of things like 'GUN MODELS' and 'PHYSICS CODING' or something.
Eventually I realized this does exist in a closed format in Minecraft. It's nonlinear, depends on the player to seek entertainment than have it provided to them and is wonderful to play with friends.
The technology of the industry has shifted towards making people buy multiple copies of a game in order to play amongst themselves, splitscreen and local multiplayer seems very much an afterthought these days in the console market unless it's for casual titles, so removing that particular aspect has made things more antisocial. Sure, you're hooking up to millions of people online but it is more often than not impersonal and chances are someone's going to call you a nigger at least once.
Perhaps applying so many other stimulants to my brain has worn me out and made the medium seem like an incredible waste of time simply because I'm so burnt out and jaded. I'm hopeful the industry has a creative resurgence and bounces back in a way that I and everyone else can appreciate, but with so many studios like Capcom and Squeenix pumping out some serious hackneyed garbage with barely an imaginative thought put into it and let's be honest, the majority of indie games being gimmicky callbacks to the 90's it seems like we're trying to suck nostalgic moisture out of the dessicated corpse of what used to be a very creative industry.
I'm also out of referenceless philosophical diatribe.
