The smallest trespasses become the biggest issues.


Also known as “The Blue Shell Effect”

While I was reading this article by Luke Plunkett about the state of video game blogs in the early aughts, he mentions how much of a shit show it was back then, in trying to generate traffic with a constant stream of content. The article was not about just him personally doing this, and not even Kotaku specifically, though they were all involved in the heart of the still born supernova of gaming journalism at the time, and the fallout that followed. Not that the 24/7 news cycle is anything new to me, nor is the state of gaming journalism, as I would be one of those readers, even before I was consuming the media through the discourse of the online space, furiously enjoying my copies of Electronic Gaming Monthly, Nintendo Power, and Edge magazines on the regular, way back at the turn of the twenty first century, eager to eventually get my chance to join the fray.

Eventually I did, through various freelance opportunities, and then as my turn of editor-in-chief of Gamersyndrome for multiple years. Having been a part of the machine at one time, I definitely get it, as I have direct, first hand experience with the process, too. So in this moment, when I sit back and am still struck by kind of the hollow pointlessness of it all, I’m shocked at me being shocked, which is…kind of shocking, to be honest. Not to say anyone who writes about video games is just some click bait provocateur, ambulance chasing menace, or attention whore grabbing charlatan, and there are plenty of writers who bring fresh perspective, talent, and light to stories of value and worth involved with the talent of the industry, but to stand in awe of the demented machine of the internet and realize the depraved nature of how a lot of it works…staggers me.

Borrowing a gross over-simplification and sense of reductionism overlayed on writing about video games in general, and maybe more so a critique aimed and pointed at online content at large, I can see why the pomp and circumstance of the entire affair is more akin to over-dramatic advertising, catastrophizing incarnate, and a visual eyegasm more akin to intrusive, sadomasochistic voyeurism, of what is essentially new-age gossip rag tripe, and it’s due to the notion pretending things are important and full of content is actually a lot easier than finding things that are important and full of content. Not that there aren’t people that deserve attention, stories worthy of investigation, nor topics that would help make the difference in terms of where investigation is concerned, but if you are trying to keep people constantly engaged, always on the edge, and bringing them basically a non-stop stream of info or happenings for them to feast upon, you literally take any and all of the shit you can find, throw it against the wall, and then run around screaming “FIRE!” at the tops of your lungs to see who looks your way.

And a lot like a kid who falls over, pretending they are getting hurt for attention, due to the notion they realized that is how they’ve grabbed attention in the past, and simulating the event is less painful then actually hurting themselves to get the same reward, the quest for the spotlight, or in a more modest sense, of acknowledgement, interaction, etc, gives way to similar methodology, among many other toxic habits and points of nefarious play, in order to generate similar kinds of reactions. Leading back to generating the sense of importance over sheer nothingness, cause simulating the act of importance, and being performative about what matters, creating the theater of relevancy, ends up feeding into this simulacra of existence, where we end up creating this sense of reality, based on willing our own desires of the not-real, into the now hyperreal, as we all participate in this farce of surrogate existence, which then supersedes the relevancy or non-relevancy of what may or may not have been relevant.

In the same way that a lot of sports broadcasting relies on creating a narrative around numbers, finding ways to highlight the human element of rivalry that maybe is more real in the news report than is in real life, and elevating a sense of drama between conflicting fanbases of teams playing off each other, you see much of the same in video games with console wars, fanboyism, game launch sales numbers, you name it, the narratives will their way into existence in very much the same way, because it’s a strategy that works. For all of our talk of wanting to dive deep into our escapism to get a sense of relief from the pressures of reality, we end up then manufacturing a hyperreal version of the superfake that haunts us, and arguably one that is far more intense and terrifying than the reality that acts as totem for the echo that ends up supplanting the original in a mad replacement scheme, surrounded by drama, the illusion of high stakes tension, and the sense of combat with an us vs them mentality in what feels like an ego struggle of life and death proportions, all in the name of entertainment and enjoyment, while simultaneously just using the already real that bores us, and simulating some warped, bizarro “realer” version of it in our own…same? images.

Needless to say, a large topic worthy of further positing, especially when one considers the premise that reality is stranger than fiction. Given the state of media, video games or otherwise, at this point, and upon closer inspection, one would be convinced we actually use reality as the escapism for our fiction, at this point, and possibly try to make too real with is the fake and mutilate what is the real in an attempt to fictionalize it. When I read another article about the prevalent issues sweeping across the land, with so many being entirely desensitized to the every day, an untethered lack of care for what occurs around them, and attention spans that are as sporadic as the feeds that they inhabit, permeating their free time with doomscrolling that represents a hyper-advanced version of a fidget spinner, after further consideration, I don’t think I will be as shocked anymore.

Will you?

~Pashford