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The enshitification of video games with microtransactions and other corporate garbage: I sleep
(hexbear.net)
Women wearing slightly more clothes in video games: REAL SHIT?
Lol this will always be funny because she's doing exactly what "Gamers" wanted, which is treating video games like an actual art form (it is imo) and critiquing it like any other art. And then they lose their minds because they have exactly 2 braincells
Exactly. Gamers conflate having something be an "art form" with "you're not allowed to make fun of my hobbies".
I remember this one time in a literature review class, we were critiquing this one work (I can't remember what it was, sadly), and this one guy was clearly new to higher-level English and Lit classes. So he puts his hand up after about 20 minutes of discussion and goes, "I don't get it. Are we, like, making fun of the book? I don't understand."
It was just funny to me that someone who had never experienced literature discussion before genuinely thought the professor was mocking the book for a laugh, and that's it. I don't blame the guy at all, he wasn't a chud and was actually eager to learn. It just goes to show that there are so many people out there that fundamentally do not understand art or discussion. Especially, capital-G Gamers will throw a massive fit whenever someone attempts to publically move gaming past "consume product".
I failed college English 101 bc I failed to understand that I wasn't supposed to write some sort of deductive proof based on the work. My TA was also bad at telling me this; I think bc they failed to understand how my approach wasn't the typical one.
What gamers wanted was for a conga line of NYT Op-Ed writers to treat E3 like the Met Gala and shamelessly fawn over their own fan-list of creepy online weirdos like they're Manhattan royalty.
They didn't want games treated like art. They wanted their niche hobby to be drooled over like a collection of Fabergé eggs.
I grew up on a lot of gaming pundits, back in the 90s/00s, who bemoaned the wretched state of the industry and attributed that to many of the shortfalls and self-sabotage that ruined the industry. Critics like Lum the Mad (Scott Jennings) and Mr. Destructoid (Yanier Gonzalez) and the Penny Arcade folks were all in or adjacent to the industry and were mostly speaking out as enthusiastic-but-jaded fans.
But there's not a ton of money in honest game criticism or shameless QA horror stories. So they either faded away or sold out.
Sarkassian was in this tradition for a minute, and garnered a pretty active following as a consequence. But because she was an EW GIRL and because her criticism was feminist rather than merely technical, she became a victim of her own success.
These people aren't stupid. They're very canny with their delivers. They just recognize that going ham on the industry itself isn't where the money is at. You can both get a large audience AND avoid pissing off the advertising money by playing inside baseball and screeching at THE GIRL ad nauseum. And as The Algorithm rewards homogeneity and length, you end up with these increasingly absurd "Look What ANNA SARKASSIAN did THIS TIME!" four hour long rants. This shit will end up sounding stupid because there's nothing left to be said that isn't pure fabrication or long-winded rehashing of the original afront.
But they do get people exposure, which gets them money, which allows them to climb the ladder into more prestigious positions.
Which is all any of these losers really want.