The figurative and literal dumbing down of video games

I barely play video games these days, and part of the reason is that I disapprove of publishers shoving a political agenda down my throat. Just look at The Last of Us or Uncharted 4! A related reason is that since gaming has become part of the mainstream there are just too many idiots involved in it. Case in point: look for a gaming forum online, or go to YouTube. You'll be surrounded by people who are unable to write properly or make a coherent argument, and then there is the SJW plague that has infested gaming journalism.


As a consequence, I avoid Western big budget games more or less completely. I also think very little of "indie games" made by talentless hacks with purple hair who fuck SJW "journalists" in order to get press coverage (cf. Zoe Quinn), or hacks who create "pixel art" games, not knowing that they know nothing about the art style they think they are aping. This is just a side note, but here is an example:

When I was a kid, gaming was a niche hobby. In Germany, a game for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System cost up to 180 DM (yes, this was what you had to pay for Mortal Kombat II), which is around 90 Euros --- in the early 1990s. That's equivalent to around 150 Euros today, if not more. If your family didn't have much discretionary income, gaming just wasn't something you would have gotten exposed to. It was a luxury.

Fast forward a decade, and people could play "retro games" on their computers for free, using emulators. Because the average Joe has no real interests and is clueless, he used emulators with default settings, which resulted in something like the picture above on the left. The picture on the right he would have seen on a CRT TV, or if he had set up the emulator software properly in order to approximate the output of a CRT TV. Years later, plenty of Joes apparently started producing their own "indie" games, and with it came a flood of "pixel art" that looks like a caricature of the style two-dimensional games had back then. If you're interested, look up, for instance, Hyper Light Drifter as a modern example, and then the highly detailed genuine pixel art of games like Dodonpachi or Metal Slug.

But where am I going with this? Well, what else comes with the unwashed, uncritical masses? Uncritical thinking. By now we all know that video games are sexist and objectify women. Yet, in basically any game you can find, your task is to shoot down hundreds of white men. For some reason this is never a problem. Well, they are men, and they are white, and they have all the privilege in the world, so what's the big deal anyway? In the last few years, the discourse shifted considerably from the question how fun a game and its mechanics are to the artistic vision or the political statement a game makes. Games were no longer about developing particular skills but about how many hours you needed to sink in in order to see the credits. Failure was no longer even an option. Game X takes 20 hours to complete, even if you are a low-IQ leftist. In the olden days, if you didn't bother to properly learn a game's mechanics, chances are you would never complete it. In fact, in many older games you would encounter a wakeup-call boss that showed you that you had two options: getting your act together, or pester mommy to buy you yet another game. Today, we have video game journalists who can't even control an avatar in 3D space, like in the infamous DOOM clip from Polygon or esteemed gaming journalist Jim Sterling who rated one of the best action games of the last decade a 4/10 because he was too lazy (stupid?) to learn the controls. But, hey, if you write about games for a living you don't need to be able to play them properly, right? You even get to talk badly about a video game because it is "too gamey". What a time to be alive.

These days, it's apparently enough to have been exposed to leftist propaganda to be qualified to have an opinion. Considering how fantastic Resident Evil 4 was, I had been looking forward to the sequel. I didn't like it. What I liked even less was that there was suddenly a debate about Resident Evil 5 being "racist". It is set in Africa, and, for a change, you don't mow down white dudes, but black zombies. You are playing a white dude, so killing black dudes is racist. Makes sense, right? Years later, The Witcher III came out. I hadn't played an RPG for years, and since my impressions were good, I bought a PlayStation 4 just for that game. I liked it. What I didn't like was that you couldn't look for information online without coming across idiots who were bitching about the fact that a game set in Medieval Eastern Europe doesn't have representatives of a bajillion races and trannies by the bucketload in it.

After finishing The Witcher III I took a break from gaming for a while, but now that it's getting colder in my corner of the world, I've been looking for something new to play. I came across Mafia III, which is what inspired me to write this post. Through watching some footage online, I learnt that this game has a black protagonist who gets to kill lots and lots of white people in very gruesome ways. I saw another clip in which the hero was shooting a bunch of KKK members in the back. I was wondering whether this game was supposed to be a power trip for black guys, and SJWs, and feminists, and lesbians. According to online sources, Mafia III is supposed to use "racism as a gameplay mechanic", and they meant that the protagonist apparently is exposed to unpleasant reactions by characters in the game. Presumably you get to hear the N-word once or twice. The creators, however, seem to be completely oblivious to the implications of the behavior of the protagonist. If a white guy shooting down black zombies in Resident Evil 5 is bad, it surely is even worse to have a black protagonist massacre white people in Mafia III. Apparently this is an opinion you're not supposed to have. Well, I better look for some new Japanese games, then, because I take great mechanics and an excuse plot over the Western recipe of mediocre mechanics and a plot with an SJW stench any day of the week.

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