It has been a year of anniversaries. Xbox. PlayStation. GameCube. In two months it will have been 20 years since I launched my first website and penned my first blog post. In that time, the dialogue on gaming has experienced an arc that I imagine will be not too far from the rise and fall of some of the great civilizations. It has been birthed, seen rabid uptake, fallen into chaos, anarchy, and warring, experienced moments of peace, and then been lit ablaze once again. Throughout that time, the dialogue on gaming has held value. But I believe that I have seen the apogee of that value, and am now seeing its final decline into putrefying decay.
A lot of this has been brought to the fore as one of my most prized intellects has left the field of social media this past week. In truth, this is not a singular cataclysmic event, but yet another perturbation in a gathering trend. One of the other mediums that I observe and have written extensively about is comic books, and those creators have been backing away from social media , as well. Long thought of as a way to make themselves more accessible to fans, many comic creators have realized that their relationship with anonymous personas hiding behind the veil of digital chasms and obfuscation, is just not healthy for them. And thereby impacts their livelihood by not allowing them to do their best work.
Work. The job. When I started blogging, my desire, as someone with backgrounds in finance and software development, and a lifelong love of games and the gaming industry, was to convey particular insights into gaming through those lenses, in an effort to better inform consumers without the motivations and incentives that drive larger sites to post the things they do in the manners in which they do. Monetization is a dynamic that I often demonize. But in truth, the errant vector is less about something so modern, but has its definitive roots in the factor that has always been the plague of journalists, writers, and any of those who attempt to convey thought, knowledge, and opinion in the written word or other mediums. Validation. The desire to have one’s promulgations corroborated by others by opinion, anecdote, or praise. It is the factor that has historically driven dictators and fascists to power, enabled psychopaths and sociopaths to capture our national attention, and given rise to the world’s infatuation with reality TV.
The great writers and creators know and have written and spoken on the Achilles’ Heel that is the want for commercial success. It is not solely evil, but it can, via obsessiveness, become the singular compulsion that drives all. And it is the sole currency that social media trades upon. We can trace its roots back through forums on popular technical sites like ArsTechnica and GameSpot, the flame-wars that eventually consumed Digg and begat Reddit, and have now taken up firm residence on Twitter.
And so, I have been given over of late to introspect on why I write. If the notion of a dialogue on games in the digital space has been smothered, and is increasingly of less and less value, and intellects of the highest mark are incentivized to depart the pattern, then writing is all that is left. I will add to that podcasting and video content as well, which, for me, has always followed that non-monetization model. One of my mis-steps has been in convincing myself of value in the use of Twitter under the concept of one of its past labels, as a micro-blog. I use it mostly as a means to jot down epiphanies and emergent thoughts that broach a cloudy veil during the day and in-between times of other practical mental gymnastics. But that path of connectivity has also led way to the infinite scroll. And the metric I key in on is how often and how far I scroll desperately searching for any meaningful conversation about games.
What serves as a dialogue today is largely represented by a breakdown into console Wars, game or franchise X is better than game or franchise B, and trying to tell people how they should spend their money. Those are the ones that are inherently malicious. The ones that come from a place of trying to do good but do not help me much are the dialogues that are constant applications of the label of GoTY, raising up developers and companies by sometimes standing on theories that are great reaches, and defaming any effort by any company because they are only “out to get your money”. It is difficult to gather and convey effective, critical thoughts on a medium without spending a lot of time in quietude, alone with your thoughts, and chewing through theories at great length. The speed to post and the thirst for first that were ushered in by the rise of Gizmodo and Engadget has just snowballed into faster and faster promulgation of information and opinion that is not deeply marinated in taste and cultivated steeping in the richest leaves of existentialism. Too many takes pointed as missiles on an audience without the payload of the writer really making an effort to find themselves.
And so the dialogue on gaming is largely dead. Not entirely. There are some rare pockets of the type of parlor talk that yielded some of our greatest works of literature and journalism. They are few and far between. And yet even I will have difficulty backing away from a feast of interaction that we have become institutionalized to feel is of value. The problem is not the platforms. The problem is in how we have fallen victim to some of the most primitive motivations that have plagued humanity throughout time, and weaponized those in a short-note coliseum in the fictionalized belief that our banter is increasing the dialogue on games, when in truth we have murdered it in its infancy.
Rounding Off Infinity 