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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.
I found the thread, but I can't seem to find his profile, has it been erased?
Mac is Kastere. He had his name changed.
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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.
This^
"Everything is shit with a few exceptions" is my rule of thumb for all media, movies and games especially. It's boggling how many games there are now. Never mind if they're indie or mainstream or whatthefuckever, there's easily a hundred more every few months, and they're all pretty bad. It's much easier to assume they're all garbage until proven otherwise, and I'd say my assumption is correct about 70% of the time.
An indie game doesn't come with the stamp of quality that "indie" used to denote. I remember not so long ago I said I liked Steam because it gave indie developers their time in the limelight. Now it's gotten to the point where any goober with a poorly drawn flash game can get their shit published, and it's really muddied the spectrum.
That's just indie games, mind you, which even with their negligible dev time come in at less than half the output of the mainstream tripe. Of course, that's because every single game is now built from your pick of like... three engines.
For me, it's all about the art. The Ico and Oddworld series are pieces of world-building art, baked with love (and cinnamon) by artists with pure intent and a message. Psychonauts, and arguably anything by DoubleFine, dishes up great characters and story, and unique play mechanics that require you to use your brain (in the -fun- way, not the -pixel-clicking, write down this puzzle and come back to it, fuck it I'm looking up a walkthrough- kind of way). If there ain't no purdy artworkz, or I'm not giving the devs a mental pat on the back for their cleverness, then it's a shitty game.
Someone earlier in this blog brought up books, which isn't the topic, but whatever. Just remember that books have the fringe benefit of lubricating the gears in your brain regardless of their content. Kids are told constantly to "pick up a book". What they should be told is "Read something, anything, and save your nosediving generation, you little shit".
The overweight 13-year-old goth chick who reads Twilight is smarter than the overweight 13-year-old goth chick who watches the Twilight movies.
I'd say the shittest games today are mainly Halo 4 and Fifa. I used to really dislike CoD but really loads of mainstream FPS games are giving up any originality they had in them to be like a game that has had the same formula and play style for years. To me that is worse than simply being unoriginal.
And Fifa, I don't really need to say much about aside from it's all anyone ever fucking talks about at school.
AWW YEEAH GUYS I GOT RVP FOR 30K! AND I STILL HAVE 400K ON MY ACCOUNT. YESTERDAY I SPEND £200 ON SOME FIFA PACKS NOW I CAN MERK YOU.
Actually I like Fifa, it's one of the games I can still stomach. I tried to stick CoD 4 on today, really didn't like it much. I'm not a fan of the CoD franchise but I was always of the opinion that up until 4 it was okay. Nope. I tried Resident Evil 4 for the first time as well and that was pretty horrible - though that's in part down to the terrible Wii controls. What else? Oh, Mario Kart Double Dash, Sonic Adventure 2 Battle and one other game I forget, staples of my younger years which upon recent inspection are just dull as dishwater. Pikmin still hold up though imo.
Right now the only games I can still enjoy are the Oddworld games, the AoE series and Fallout 1 and 2. It's kind of depressing though because I always identified myself as a gamer, even Minecraft doesn't hold up like it used to. Not sure what I'll do for escapism now...boourns.
Not being able to identify yourself as a gamer anymore is not something to lament. It's a triumph.
I've never met anyone who identified his/herself as a gamer whose company was not unsavory. There are plenty of people who call themselves gamers but also have social lives, but they are few and far between, and are arguably not really gamers as much as they are people who sometimes play video games.
However, I'm not looking down my nose at gamers because they're antisocial. I'm antisocial too, but I like to pretend I spend my free time on more worthwhile endeavors.
I still play Doom a lot, mainly because the levels people come up with are amazing to play.
This might sound hypocritical, but I always liked Gears of War 1. I love how fast-paced the shotgun action is, fucking brilliant even if that's not what the devs wanted it to play like.
Aaaand then you have Gears 2 which sucked so much, even back then when I was really a Gears fanboy, I absolutely hated it. Mostly because the chainsaw was utter glitchy balls and the shotgun was inconsistent as hell. No more wallbouncing for me.
And Gears 3 is too modern, it doesn't have the same feel that the original had. You can wallbounce, the chainsaw and shotgun work most of the time as well. I think it's the colour is waayyyy too over-saturated and in-your-face now. That's good for games like Banjo-Kazooie, but not for a game where you're chainsawing people into fleshy pieces.
Fifa to me just feels like an average football game, it might not be my type of game but I really don't see the need for people to constantly focus on it as a subject. That's like if all I talked about was my retro shit. Gets boring.
Sports games are one of the best examples of virtual entertainment gone awry. I sincerely hope that those who play shit like FIFA are also playing the game for real, whether through their school, or even just backyard tag football. I can't comprehend anyone who derives pleasure out of a sports simulator if they aren't intimate with the actual sport.
I'm in the same boat as everyone else who changed to agreeing with Mac this page. Gamers are stupid. Most games are stupid. When a good enough game finds me I will set aside some time from my schedule to play it when I can. On the off chance that I get to do something socially that always gets priority. Over my Christmas holiday I spent way more time gaming that I would have liked and I still had enough time to be productive in a few ways.
Not being able to identify yourself as a gamer anymore is not something to lament. It's a triumph.
I've never met anyone who identified his/herself as a gamer whose company was not unsavory. There are plenty of people who call themselves gamers but also have social lives, but they are few and far between, and are arguably not really gamers as much as they are people who sometimes play video games.
Oh I dunno, I used to be a massive gamer but I still went out every day and met up with friends. I had an active social life and still do, I'm not saying correlation implies causation but my social life grew with my intake of gaming.
It's a good way to relieve stress and escape from all the shit that life throws at you. Trust me, I know some gamers who have no social life and not ability to do anything important with their lives and gamers who have kicked the habit and are much happier for it but some of cleverest people I know spend a few hours a day on WoW or Skyrim or whatever.
Basically do whatever makes you happy, that's the golden rule I live by.
In that case, EA is the leading producer of video games for the physically disabled. Maybe they aren't the bad guys after all!
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some of cleverest people I know spend a few hours a day on WoW or Skyrim or whatever.
See, for me this still falls under the category of a normal individual who occasionally plays video games. "A few hours" is a healthy intake time for any hobby. This doesn't fit my definition of a 'gamer' but the term is relative.
I tried Resident Evil 4 for the first time as well and that was pretty horrible
Oh god, if you could see my face right now, you would die. You would die so hard.
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I'm saying it would be better if we eliminated this accursed waste of time altogether and focused on something more worthwhile. A leisure activity it is, but just as indulgent and masturbatory as UFC is to closet homos Gaming has turned into an escape route for people who never grew up past high school. They spend the rest of their lives brutalizing fantasy bullies and savin' the world while collectively reaching the mental singularity of FULL SPECTRUM AUTISM. Instead of moving out of the hobby and finding a path they just coast and never clear the mental hurdle leading into adulthood, wherein if they did and then returned to the hobby would appreciate how valueless and wasteful it is.
Hey, my brother's an avid gamer who plays loads and loads of games, of all different types. And he's a successful musician, there is no correlation between videogames and being a fat slob who sits in front of the box all day. If videogames didn't exist, that fat slob would just be sitting in front of a TV instead.
Posted 02-01-2013 at 03:48 PM byNepsotic Updated 02-01-2013 at 03:51 PM byNepsotic
What if the thing that makes you happiest is killing things?
There's a second rule which acts as a failsafe. It's like the rules of robotics. Except they're not so much as rules as guidelines.
1. Do whatever you like so long as it makes you happy.
2. You may do this so long as it does not detriment others enjoyment of life.
3. Do not severely detriment your own health if the long term negative externalities outweigh the short term enjoyment.
Full proof!!
Posted 02-02-2013 at 03:50 AM bySTM Updated 02-02-2013 at 03:55 AM bySTM
Mac's point was that video games are categorised as #3.
I'm not suggesting they're perfect or even that life ever makes it simple enough to follow them, but they're a good basis from which I base some of my actions and so far I end up better for it.
