Just watched this 5 minute video:
“Why Aren’t Games Fun Anymore?” by Jackus
And it pretty clearly lays out the Hedonic treadmill and describes depression and alienation under capitalism, even calling out the companies who are just churning out games for profit. But then he blames the games and says he doesn’t enjoy them anymore because they’re not as good.
Is that the point and I’m just taking it at face value when I shouldn’t be? It’s just super sad for someone to basically express the experience of becoming an adult under capitalism, but then completely externalize the cause.
Yeah at one point he complains about only being able to play for an hour. Playing a videogame for an hour sounds extravagant to me
complaining of body aches when they’re 24.
yeah, I have been tired of hearing 20-somethings complain of "feeling old" since before I was in my 20's myself... honestly can't relate
I think a huge part of it is the removal of a wider community/human interactions.
People always joke about “lmao MW2 lobbies” but the reason that is such a common shared experience is the game forced you to be in game chat, you could mute sure, but the default was you were talking to other people. Now even though you are in a lobby of 8-12 people you may aswell be playing with bots. There is no human interaction
There's also not lobbies anymore, you go back to the homescreen between games. Really felt this with the new Halo.
So many incredible indie games out there and yet gamers will buy ubisoft open world game number 492 and be dissapointed every time. And then proceed to blame the sjw's or smthn idk
Seriously, there are so many good indie games that people have zero excuses to pay $60 for a worse product in 2021
thats TF2 and you can install your own custom hud if you want, they are just playing it on the default hud.
Reminds me a bit of Godot Engine's documentation on encrypting save games:
Encrypting save games
Why?
.. This introduction is an Easter egg and is not intended to be taken seriously. .. Please don't remove it :) Because the world today is not the world of yesterday. A capitalist oligarchy runs the world and forces us to consume in order to keep the gears of this rotten society on track. As such, the biggest market for video game consumption today is the mobile one. It is a market of poor souls forced to compulsively consume digital content in order to forget the misery of their everyday life, commute, or just any other brief free moment they have that they are not using to produce goods or services for the ruling class. These individuals need to keep focusing on their video games (because not doing so will fill them with tremendous existential angst), so they go as far as spending money on them to extend their experience, and their preferred way of doing so is through in-app purchases and virtual currency.
But what if someone were to find a way to edit the saved games and assign the items and currency without effort? That would be terrible, because it would help players consume the content much faster, and therefore run out of it sooner than expected. If that happens, they will have nothing that prevents them from thinking, and the tremendous agony of realizing their own irrelevance would again take over their life.
No, we definitely do not want that to happen, so let's see how to encrypt savegames and protect the world order.
Japanese devs have (so far) mostly confirmed the miserable gambling stuff to spin off phone games and literal slot machines, so the mainline stuff tends to be less soulless corporate skinner box than their western counterparts
so I've had this remembrance of some old pre-adult times when me and the chums would talk about the potential for games in the future, combining genres and basically dreaming about things akin to VR and Star Citizen, etc
and I think this 'dreaming' aspect of play/fun has really been what is lost in many ways, and it has been replaced with this jaded melancholy that's very much part of the capitalist realism brain worms
this is why I still think the mods/indies are the real fertile living soil of the gaming world, it's not some monetized investment vehicle tied to a valuable IP, it's just 'creators' trying to build some version of that dream-place where play/fun are very much at home
I think this might be part of the appeal of rogue-likes/lites, and maybe generative/procedural games as well, they are more about the experience than some winning strategy or being some god-like power/savior
I've always enjoyed competitive games, but only ones that have minimal persistence, so there's always a reset back to the start for everyone involved, which in many ways mirrors an equitable perspective
it's just not very fun to stomp other people to me when they don't at least have a fair chance to stomp me too, so I mostly just play Rocket League to scratch that itch these days
