I love how, more than a century after some French alcoholic put a toilet in an art gallery, artists have been continually asking the question “what is art, really?” only to discover the answer is that high art is a way for bored rich people to simulate meaning in their lives by turning the entire exercise into a contest of personal popularity and ego.
actually the point of duchamps fountain was to make idiots mad, which it still does a hundred fucking years later
Disney makes like a third of their revenue from their parks and it's like the only thing they've got that's still going strong with both their streaming service and their films being pretty big flops. Having to rehire and retrain 14k workers would have been so time intensive it would have been incredibly time intensive and would have probably forced them to close down the park for a really long time, not to mention losing thousands upon thousands in reservations, etc. Firing them was rally never an option at all.
Is genocide Europe's answer to everything?
can americans just once in a while look in a mirror and see this is all the entirety of the "the west" has ever been?
Oh no I was really looking forward to call of duty (and this is true) number 21
what will I do now
Hitler was really just playing the long game with the whole "unify Europe" thing
Frankly with how much they've changed the basic plot of Fallout for this show a line like that barely even registers. Whereas before the show the world of Fallout was one where unfettered capitalism and resource consumption inevitably lead to the great war and the destruction of life on earth as we know it, the show very specifically and deliberately goes full conspiracy-theory: A bunch of specifically very evil companies conspired together to sabotage peace talks with the specific intent to cause the great war. Reading about the show on some other website some guy asked why Amazon makes so many shows about evil corporations and the answer to that is obvious: If you show a clearly evil corporation doing clearly evil things you also imply that companies that do not do those clearly evil things are not evil, but are at least morally neutral. Really there's so much more stuff in the show that - deliberately or accidentally - muddles an anti-capitalist reading of the universe it's hard to know where even to start.
The only thing I can think about when I hear the name Elder Scrolls Online is this interview question from back when the game was first revealed that tells you all you need to know about the game and its complete lack of inspiration and spark:
"Q: Will we see the buildings of Alinor that look like they are “made from glass or insect wings?” And will we see the Crystal Tower for that matter?
A: When The Elder Scrolls Online launches, the playable part of the Summerset Isles will be Auridon, the big island between Summerset and the continent that includes the cities of Firsthold and Skywatch. The architecture of the High Elves is fanciful, certainly, but it’s also practical, constructed of real-world materials. Architects can’t make buildings out of poetry"
The kid will never have a father. Potentially an adopted one, but what guy is going to be like "sure, honey. Turkey baster your dead other husband's sperm right up in there. I will help raise his child."
there is nothing morally wrong with being a single mother
I'm going to out myself as somewhat of a contrarian here and say that most of the violence in videogames is bad. While drawing straight lines from media violence to real-life violence is basically impossible and ridiculous, I find it just as ridiculous to say that media representations of the world do not have any impact on the real world. And the fact that this newest medium that is videogames finds most of its interactivity in violence just seems plain not good to me.
There are reasons for it obviously, two of which are wonderfully laid out in these two videos, one of which tries to explain the prevalence of violence in games , basically arguing that violence has become so deeply ingrained in game design since it provides obvious win/lose-states, and this other one which tries to explain the prevalence of shooters in post-3d gaming, arguing that shooters best solve the issue of camera control in games by turning the camera into the main way of interacting with the game world (it is of course no coincidence that videogame controllers are used extensively in military applications).
This is of course not an indictment of the medium of videogames in themselves, but an indictment of the industry which has put profit over any sort of artistic intent probably more than any other media industry ever has. There is little to no incentive to try to make games with less or no violence - even games like stardew valley can't help but feature some sort of combat - when violence works. And it seems to work so well that videogames feature magnitudes more violence than any other medium.
The french director Truffaut famously said something along the lines of: "You can't make an anti-war film, because war will inevitably look exciting up on the screen." If there is a truth to this for movies, to me it seems almost undoubtedly true for games. Naughty Dog gave us the perfect example for it: The Last of Us 2. Created as both a response to the complaints of "ludonarrative dissonance" that were lobbed at Uncharted (this is conjecture on my part) and self-admittedly by the games director Neil Druckmann as a response to the 2000 Ramallah lynching. It's this stupid fucking "cycle of violence and revenge" bullshit story that only a zionist could write, but that's not really important for my argument.
TLOU2 is probably one of the most expensive, most prestigious games ever made, the absolute spearhead of "cinematic storytelling" in videogames, while also being one of the few to try to have an "important" real-life message. It's an incredibly brutal game, both the actions of the player and the non-player characters are incredibly violent and rendered in vivid detail (the devs here did also look at footage of mutilated humans for inspiration), presumably because the story they wanted to tell to them necessitated that level violence. As an interactive prestige videogame however, they also made sure that that violence is as satisfying and engaging as possible. The controls are as tight, the camera moves as smooth around the gameworld as it possibly could, there are no cuts when you go for an execution-style finisher, you can upgrade your weapons by scavenging for parts, there's a skill-tree, you can go into new game plus and keep your upgrades, etc. It's all designed to be as engaging and "fun" as possible. So is the extreme violence actually there to tell a story or to be satisfying and fun?
It's very obviously the latter and the devs couldn't be more upfront about it, since in January they released the remastered version of this game, which includes a roguelike mode, in which you battle against human and zombies in a classic horde mode. The same fucking violence, the same mechanics that were just previously there to tell a dark gritty and "important" story about revenge and israel and palestine are now there for you to enjoy in perpetuity. Violence all the fucking time, for your amusement again and again and with no end. The fact that they released it during the ongoing genocide in gaza is a genuine indictment for the videogame industry and community as a whole.