What a glorious gaming age we live in.
Games are mainstream, ever more accessible and seemingly everywhere. Game on your PC, your TV, your phone, at home or away. There’s a game for every type of gamer, solo or social, casual or committed. Gaming has never been better.
Gamers, on the other hand, have never been more insufferable.
Gamer circles are dominated by partisan gamers who see the world only in three shades: Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony. These are gamers who played games as kids, grew older but no wiser. No issue is so complex that it cannot be boiled down to whether the outcome is pro or con in the favour of Nintendo, Sony or Microsoft.
And the really sad thing is the gaming industry is pandering to these idiots.
Idiots, they most assuredly are. They never have anything meaningful or interesting to say about the games they play so they contribute in the most inane ways. They think getting emotional over sales figures is the way to demonstrate they’re more hardcore, more gamer than the rest.
“Oh no! <some unremarkable derivative game> sold 1,000 less copies this week! No-o-o-o!”
This is the highlight of their contribution to gaming discussion which is otherwise limited to three-line posts about how something “sucks” and “rules”. For these gamers, thinking is hard, writing is harder, and reading is impossible. For them, “tl;dr” is not a tongue-in-cheek joke; it’s a way of life.
What did a game review actual say? No matter. The important thing is all those words are reduced to a score more or less pulled out of the reviewer’s ass. This score will be vigorously debated with emphatic statements about how the review, reviewer, publication or game “sucks” or “rules”, declarations informed primarily by the poster’s console manufacturer of choice.
Console manufacturers absolutely love these idiots, of course. Gamers like these aren’t simply a target audience easily manipulated by marketing drones; this is a drone-like audience desperately eager to do your marketing for you. The Hidden Persuaders are now openly among us and they are us.
They’re abetted in their zealotry by a gaming media which is now down to reviewing E3 press conferences and presentations. “I give the Nintendo press conference a B+!” Well, hand Bob Woodward there a Pulitzer. The only way this could get any more absurd if Metacritic, in its earnestly helpful (and insidiously dangerous) manner, collates reviews of press conferences and slaps on metascores pulled out of the ether.
Who won E3? No one did. Everyone loses when they play co-op with gaming idiots.
