Gaming

The original PlayStation model was introduced in Japan on this day in 1994!

[alt text: a photo of a wired Xbox 360 controller sitting on a table. The right thumbstick has been replaced or covered by a handle(slash)knob from a manual transmission shifter lever.]

World of Warcraft still exists in 2024. The game’s 10th expansion was released in August, and while it doesn’t command quite the same influence as it did during its early-millennium prime, millions of players still step through its portal every day. But the dynamic I’m describing—the complex social contract, the acquaintances waiting to be forged into brotherhood—is nowhere to be found. The chat box that used to chirp with shitposts, gossip, and hyperlocal banter is conspicuously barren. If you do partner up with someone for an adventure, words are rarely exchanged. When the final boss is toppled, everyone leaves the group and dissolves into the ether. It used to be something of a faux pas to play without a microphone, but I honestly can’t remember the last time one of my fellow dwarves has beckoned me to join a voice channel.

This is part of a shift that can be felt across video game culture writ large. Even though some of the biggest franchises in the world—Fortnite, Call of Duty, League of Legends—pit a server’s worth of players against one another in lethal combat, the softer interactions those places once fomented are on the decline. We are all in front of our computers, paradoxically together and separate, like ships passing in the night.

This is a difficult trend to prove empirically, but it certainly has been felt by lifelong gamers. There are multiple somber YouTube video essays about the lack of conviviality in multiplayer lobbies, and most of them bear titles that gesture toward an elemental wound in the culture. (One video, titled “Modern Gaming Is Becoming More and More Isolated,” has over 500,000 views.) A similar despondence has struck the domains of Reddit and GameFAQs, which have historically served as the premier watering holes for fans of the hobby. (“No one uses voice chat these days,” wrote one user. “People don’t chat in gaming anymore,” added another.) On a more macro level, about half of Americans are currently experiencing loneliness, particularly among millennials and Gen Z, who represent the industry’s primary consumers. All of this is evidence of a generation that has come to believe that a reliable source of intimacy—even if it’s down the scope of a sniper rifle—has gone awry. I would find it pathetic if I didn’t totally relate.

And, if they are, any recommendations for a gun controller?

Much has been made of the difficulty of these games—­it has been criticized as exclusionary, lauded as a return to gaming’s roots, used as a selling point. (prepare to die, declared the slogan of the first Dark Souls.) But “difficulty” is an elusive concept, one word standing in for a number of ways in which a game can resist its players.

Another way to put it is that the games can be, for the wrong person, or someone in the wrong mood, simply unpleasant. It is not always clear why one would want to spend one’s leisure time swearing at a screen, lost, stuck, dying over and over in the dark. More often, though, they provide something much more complicated: a paradoxical mix of joy and outrage, relief and despair. The repetitive drumbeat of failure, occasionally punctuated by success or disaster or revelation, batters you into a kind of gleeful serenity. Failure becomes funny, even soothing. The games are full of jokes at the player’s expense—­traps and dead ends and carefully orchestrated aggravations. Game after game runs variations on the comedic setup of an enormous stone ball rolling at you down a slope, for instance. It’s there in the opening level of Dark Souls, to teach you about dodging, and about the game designers’ malevolence; then it appears again and again in more complicated arrangements. By Elden Ring such traps have become familiar, even comforting—­until the moment when a boulder rolls past you, stops, and then rolls back, seemingly of its own free will, to crush you from behind. The only possible response is to laugh or give up.

Riot Games added some new clauses to its Terms of Service that could put some players in hot water for unbecoming behavior that occurs “across the various places that touch their gaming experience.” Players can face penalties, suspensions and even “Riot-wide bans” if they are caught violating these new rules.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/33837279

Now we just need more signatures.

Stop Killing Games is an European Citizens Initiative aiming to keep games playable even after their developers and publishers have stopped supporting it.

To get the initiative onto the EUs agenda so it has the chance to become EU law, it has to both reach 1 million signatures total and minimum thresholds in at least 7 countries. Ireland has just passed its threshold, becoming the seventh country to do so.

Even if you are from a country that already reached the threshold you can still sign. Your signature counts to the 1 million goal.

FAQ

Thank you to everyone who already took action

Relevant links:

• Sign the initiative here
• Initiative homepage
• Video FAQ by the initiator on YouTube
  • The same video on invidious

^^^^

[alt text: a screenshot from Roblox. A player character is sitting at a hi-tech console. In text chat, the player is saying, "they lower my wage, i lower the coolant to the nuclear reactor".]

What's all playing?

I've been playing more UFO 50, working my way through the RPG Grimstone.

Also beat Rise of the Golden Idol. A fantastic sequel that I highly encourage if you enjoyed the original.