My heart goes out to all of the game developers who put in more hard work than the gaming masses will ever realize, all in the service of making something just for their enjoyment.


How I imagine a lot of game developers feel right after launching a game with the crowded masses of fans doing nothing but bitching after waiting years for it to release

I feel as if my random perusals online have seen the discourse on Silksong die down a little, at least, outside of the now dedicated circles of players still either making their way through the endgame, with the rest perhaps realizing this wasn’t the game for them in the first place, something I’ve detailed a great many times at this point. Yet, I feel like I have more to say about the title without being repetitive or redudant, as Silksong has brought many realities of both game design and player interaction into focus, so there is a lot of framework thinking worthy of discussion, that completely eclipses the game itself.

I usually interject how I’m feeling somewhere at the beginning of my philosophical musings, as I feel the need to clear the air about where my head space is at. Unfortunately, another weekend has brought with it, more mundane mood and sullen energy with it, hence me feeling completely off as a result. I would like to say gaming is a great distraction, but unlike many others who seem to prefer gaming as a way to shut off for awhile, I’m the complete opposite, with gaming being the thing that really activates me, so without the focus and energy to go along with it, I’m totally lost in the shuffle, much like attempting to write in a similar state. I’m not usually left that happy with the results, but there isn’t much else for me to do but to push forward.

I think one idea I brought up, way before Silksong was even on my radar, was breaking down the notion of the gaming press being involved with the “hyperreal”, which was an idea that I borrowed from Jean Baudrillard, who went on at lengths about how the mass media and press can often create a replication of reality that becomes more real, or in essence, a replacement for the thing it is copying by days end. He did this in his book Simulacra and Simulation, and it is a book I regard with great respect in terms of its insights, which is saying something, as I have a great many tomes that run adjacently in the field of anthropology and philosophy I greatly enjoy, with that particular one still standing out more than most.

This “hyperreal” scenario (I think) extends to social media as well, with the amorphous crowds online kind of contributing or generating their own narrative. Sometimes, that can take the form of a highly targeted form of harassment, other times a calculated effort to either bolster an individual, concept, property etc, or destroy the credibility of one. I’m not even yet diving into the realm involving stuff like bots being used for nefarious purposes, more so speaking of ideas bubbling up, and popular lines of thought taking over front and center as the real, becoming more real than the real in the process.

I say this out loud, and at the moment, writing this down to share with you now, cause being online for any length of time can be a jarring, disorienting process, and I think many forget about just how “connected” they are, with their phones being just one motion away from force feeding them custom built realities with personally tailored algorithms that service their every whim. This can be highly problematic in a myriad of ways, and the delusion of relating to any number of pretenses that can set in when one is not truly thinking about or considering the content they’re engaging with necessarily, but can even co-opt, or to use a more malevolent term, even high-jack their better sense of judgement through simple matters such as group think, propaganda, and even dopamine manipulation.

There are other times when the realities are not so serious, and instead involve matters such as minority opinions being the loudest detractors helping to build up a narrative. I think this relates to Silksong with the idea of difficulty in mind, though this is not my way of saying the ideas of the difficulty of it are overblown. I have concurred with the assessment the game is hard, but I think others still insist it is too hard, and round and round we go with the subjective merry-go-round of inanity. I suppose my mention of the hyperreal, with Silksong’s difficulty in mind, and due to my lack of mood and energy, in not being able to once again write the article I wanted to, leaves me with a more meager dissection of what is expected, in a sense, of the crowds and masses that are involved with the narrative around Silksong, in a certain way, as if it is all custom built into the experience.

To take a moment to extrapolate, I posit that perhaps, much like one knows about the line wait times at amusement parks being long, or car rides being uncomfortable when going on a trip, or even the previews of movies in a theater, part of the malaise of the experience is so expected, these moments of drudgery are a part of the experience, with the bitching that comes with it kind of involved in the catharsis of doing the thing. I know many of you could point out the obvious: purchase fast passes to skip lines, take planes to shorten travel, wait to stream movies. Yes, I know there are a number of ways to get around most of these downsides. They are merely examples of things that do happen, that are often associated with an activity, that not everyone can pay to avoid, or necessarily thinks it’s worth paying to avoid.

Another example I can think of, though I feel as if I’ve made my point, is when I worked as a shoe salesman, customers would come in and “showroom” at the store, a term referring to people who had no intent of buying shoes in the first place, and literally just wanted the experience to bitch endlessly about how nothing ever fit, them knowing their standards were next to impossible to placate. Not only was this obviously so regular a reality it had a term named after it, I had multiple conversations with individuals who were so unabashed in their approach of the act, they would willingly share they were doing it just to “pass the time”, for their own amusement or free entertainment, and in the most insidious cases, willingly volunteer the notion of taking advantage of staff, because “that’s what we were paid to do”, in a sense.

When you take this mentality, and combine it with previous ones I’ve mentioned, about some ot the misery and the mire being “built in” to the experience, and even something I’ve brought up in the past, involving “disaster tourism” of sorts, but in the gaming equivalent, with those passing by just getting off at gawking at a less than experience cause it was something to do, all of this rolls up into one with reference to Silksong. Some of the bitching isn’t even real, meaningful, or even looking for change, it is merely a cacophony of morbid passivity related to voyeuristic or schadenfreude like tendencies, involving those who just actively enjoy the engagement of reveling in the conversation, thriving off of the exchange for the sake of it, but not really having any skin in the game, while still marveling at the train-wreck or getting a perverse satisfaction at the suffering of others.

This is the hyperreal I speak of, and it it always important to remember that within the idea of a social construct, reality is stranger than fiction, and many will often contribute to creating their own, and to attempt to parse where the real ends and the fake begins is the essence of understanding the human condition.

~Pashford