There’s a growing movement of people going off the grid and leaving the modern world behind and retreating to the simplicity and serenity of the wilderness. In the old days of corporate America, it was called leaving the rat race.
Many people are finally realizing that modernity in all its seductive forms is a banquet of empty promises. Numerous studies have shown that technology is not making us happier, it’s making us depressed and anti-social. Technology is altering our brains. Smartphones are making people stupid. To remedy this, many people are going on digital fasts, cutting cable, eschewing popular culture and giving up the Internet and the notion of connectivity altogether.
The major institutions with their pious TED talk thought leaders and the global elites have failed and betrayed us. Corrupt people do not bear good fruit. Decrepit and decadent civilizations do not bear good fruit either. Most everything you see on film, TV, the Internet is a lie or infused with some agenda all courtesy of perpetual children in their 20s fresh out of college with a liberal arts degree in gender studies or intersectional underwater basket weaving.
Risk averse video game conglomerates do not make great games. Instead, they make mediocre games and proceed to milk gamers and give them the empty calories of pyrotechnic effects, unearned heroism and more deranged LGBTQ characters.
Most professional game designers are corrupt as well. They all play the same games, have the exact same politics, say the same things, and design the same games but with different titles and narratives. Garbage in, garbage out.
Viewpoint diversity — the only diversity that matters — does not exist in the entertainment industry. Homogeneity and groupthink are the order of the day.
The next breakthrough video game will not come from the lemming-like cowards in the AAA industry who do business with bloodthirsty, repressive communist regimes like China. It will not come from the likes of Activision/Blizzard, Daybreak Games, Amazon Games, Electronic Arts, or even the newly woke bootlickers at CD Projekt Red. It will not come from fading luminaries like Rob Pardo or Raph Koster. Bad trees do not produce good fruit. Innovation is not possible when artistic independence is prohibited.
The only hope for video games lies in the indie game movement. Indie games are where real innovation, risk taking, and experimentation are alive and well.
Indie game developers are free to make good games. They not beholden to the dictates of the trans-fascists and neo-Marxists on Twitter. They could care less about what HR departments, the bullies at GLAAD and the Human Rights Campaign want. They don’t stay awake at night worrying about losing blessing of the frauds and phonies at the worthless DICE Awards. They don’t give a damn about about having to impress the self-appointed overlord of video games Jeff “Doritos” Keighley and his pretentious Game Awards traveling freak show. Indie game devs don’t want to change the world — they just want to make good games.
Most of the designers and artists involved in the indie games movement have not been completely corrupted by the scourge of identity politics and superhero culture that is the current fixation of Hollywood, woke California-based video game industrial complex, and the social media scolds.
As of today, I’m done caring about and reporting on AAA games. They’ve taken far too much of my time and bandwidth. The AAA video game industry is a sausage factory run by greedy buffoons and populated with bright-eyed sweatshop workers, talentless diversity hires, scheming grifters, and vapid dilettantes. It’s entirely worthless and unsalvageable and deserves to die in a forgotten shallow grave.
Most of the problems in the video game industry today were caused by so-called gaming journalists and game critics. These people are responsible for the Metacritic scores that game studios obsess over. These journalists stopped caring about their target audience of gamers and instead corrupted video games with social justice and identity politics tribalism. Now every AAA studio is eager to please these cultural terrorists.
I’m hoping for a populist revolution that will topple this cadaverous monster once and for all. This industry — I hate that word — needs an upheaval similar to the digital music revolution that killed the bloated and corrupt music industry.
There’s no point in writing about AAA video games anymore. It’s a lost cause with no hope of redemption. No more pointlessly ruminating about the state of World of Warcraft. No more endlessly pondering the future EverQuest. I’m tired of playing their games and I’m tired of playing their games. I’m done with these ungrateful clowns. I’m going off the AAA video game grid.
I have a quite a few unfinished articles in the vaults that I may release in the future that deal with big picture topics. When I have time, I’ll polish and publish them. I will continue to write articles of cultural significance when I have the time. Thanks to all my readers for your continued loyalty.
