First Scenario: The year is 198X, you're a young boy or girl who's come to know video games and love what you've experienced. You have friends that have a Nintendo Entertainment System just like you and every day after school, and on the weekends, you try to convince your parents to let you play some video games, or to go over to your friends house so you can play them there. You finished your homework, you deserve a reward, and your parents agree to your request. You have so much fun playing Super Mario Bros. 3, or Metroid, or Castlevania and you talk about it forever with your friends. Gaming is your favourite thing to do, and the thing you talk about the most.
Your discussions range from "were you able to beat that boss?" to "I found this awesome secret the other day" to "so who's your favourite character?"
You are at a pure state of gaming enjoyment. The kind of euphoria that only children can fully experience and fully comprehend. You hope this feeling lasts forever.
Scenario 2: The year is 20XX and you've been gaming for decades. You never lost that passion you had, and you made many friends because of it. You seek out different types of games, and all kinds of experiences because, hey it's what you love. But something is different. You notice that many of the friends you've had hardly talk about how fun a game is anymore. Instead they're saying that Mario makes women look weak, Resident Evil is racist, Assassin's Creed is sexist, etc...
You look around the internet to see that the discussion is now how terrible games and those who make them, or even play them, are and we should all be ashamed of ourselves and everything needs to change. You see people saying that the only way games can truly be fun is if these specific groups are represented in these specific ways and that there is one specific group that's preventing that from happening and have been the problem with gaming for 40 years.
You see people say these things under the idea that because gamers want games to be considered an artform, to be able to freely express themes and ideas that only artforms can be allowed to express, that games should be criticized in some all-encompassing "this is what this game is actually expressing to me" kind of way and that this line of thinking has made so many people invent new, politically or financially driven, narratives that have nothing to do with 40 years of electronic entertainment.
You're now an adult that has lived to see political and ideological agendas inserted into the critiquing methods of the now vastly sensationalist "enthusiast press" that covers gaming. You wonder which new bit of coverage of a game will contain some kind of message that said game is misogynist, racist, or homophobic. You grow tired of being labeled in the same way because you are a gamer. You wonder when games ceased being about the fun and instead being about how some random person feels about the representation of some group in the game. You ask yourself, always with utter bewilderment, "Doesn't anyone remember how much fun games were when we were kids? Don't people know that these games contain characters and places that aren't actually real?"
And you lament about what you see. You just wish that you could go back in time and relive that pure enjoyment again.
That is what gaming has become today. People who are easily manipulated by people who may or may not be gamers have allowed politics and social justice agendas to pollute the ecosystem of the gaming industry. People who grew up playing games, never once thinking about things like a character's outfit or fictional body proportions, never thinking about whether or not you could visit an NPC who was beaten by another NPC in a hospital, or whether or not that NPC you just murdered should have had a deep and compelling backstory for you to feel bad about afterwards, have completely forgotten how playing games with their friends when they were kids made them feel.
Nowadays we have people not viewing games as electronic entertainment, but instead looking at games through the lenses of things like "feminist theory" or "queer theory" or some other abuse of the word theory; trying to legitimize angry people looking for reasons to make everyone else feel bad so they can force situations that make them personally feel good, or even just cash in.
And this is spreading. So many people who have been gaming for a very long time have forgotten the pure euphoric joy of a good gaming session, whether alone or with friends, where you weren't thinking of anything else but how much fun you were having trying to beat this area, or find that secret. Now, industry and gaming veterans are complaining about such trivial nonsense as the name of a trophy or the fact that a female character might *gasp* wear pink. They're taking a game MEANT to showcase the absolute worst forms of humanity that exist, and harping on and on about the fact that a specific group of people are being mistreated, in a game where EVERYONE is mistreated. Of course another group, that aforementioned "40 year old problem" group's, mistreatment doesn't matter at all.
This is an infection, one that can only be considered to be institutionalized amnesia. There's no other explanation for the sheer volume of people who will, with one breath talk about their extensive background in gaming, and with the other completely dismiss any memories of the enjoyment they had as children by insisting that there is this pervasive toxicity within the gaming culture and the gaming industry to purposely create some kind of environment of hatred and disdain for a group of people. The fact that gaming has always been an inclusive medium is lost on them, they have all forgotten that they would game with anyone that had games to play with them.
The friendships created between sexes and races all thanks to gaming are completely lost on these people. Insistent are they that people who don't share their thoughts are blind or simply don't know any better and that gaming needs to change to suit some vaguely defined, militantly expressed and defended ideal arising from a consciousness filled with an unending sense of complete displeasure. Only good can come from that right?
When people insist that gaming should no longer be about fun (seriously, read about that here... http://www.gamasutra.com/bl... and instead be about tackling and examining real world social issues, I don't think I'm the only one that questions what has happened to the child inside of them who only wanted to pick up a controller and have fun persevering through a game as awful as Castlevania 2 or as great Megaman.
If any of you with this mentality actually thinks that gaming will be better thanks to your ideas, ask yourself 2 questions. First. Have you ever even once thought about the people that don't share your ideas and your measuring stick of appropriate gaming? Second. How can you please the unpleasable?
The problem with attitudes like this is that there will always be a problem to argue about. The saying goes "You can't please everyone" so why are you trying to force an impossible situation and ruin the basic fun of playing, and talking about, games?
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Microsoft announced its financial results for Q3 of fiscal year 2026, including an update on its gaming Xbox business and more.
Not looking good. Hopefully Asha Sharma is able to turn Phil’s disaster around.
To me it's still quite remarkable how they can cash-in 5.3bn in revenue in a single quarter, since their hardware is basically dead.
The stock mark is what makes Microsoft remarkable, They have convinced every institutional and retail investor to just keep piling money into them. Like many big tech giants they are just a big growing pyramid scheme. As long as people keep dropping money into ETF's that cover the market Microsoft will always be liquid. At the same time it is completely stifling innovation and competition. People need to start being more discreet in how they invest their money as it's killing the system.
Riiiiight because people will just flock back to them for one or two games per year.
15+ years of bad performance is what they call irreparable in business. It is time for them to sell off the assets and get out of entertainment.
These declines are on the back of extra revenue received from releasing games like Forza horizon 5 on PlayStation. So I’m being sarcastic here when I said they should go back to exclusives. Killing off a revenue stream from Ps5 sales will only make things worse
The charity event will be streamed live from Gamescom in August.
Thanks to the slip-up of an artist working on the title, we now have more evidence that a new Injustice game is in the works.
The solution to scenario 2 is to get new friends who arent mindless drones that let the manstream media do their thinking for them.
Luckily for me these topics never come up in real life conversation, either face to face or over steam or psn. In fact if it wasnt for this site i doubt i would be aware of this issue.
All artforms go though these growing pains. What we have to do is explain our side of the story and add positives to the conversation.
Do more charity based gaming, get politically involved, educate our fellow gamers. Individuals may go away, but attacks will only improve.
Having grown up in the 90's, i can without a doubt say that i miss gaming before it became so mainstream. There may not have been so many gullible people playing games, but it was certainly a more pure experience. I wouldn't trade that experience for anything.
With that said, it saddens me to see how easily people accept mediocrity, and i've taken a stand myself by not supporting companies with my wallet.
The Gaming Media is currently so rotten to the core, that i doubt anything short of a major shakeup can change things. Right now we have the SJW issue, and more and more clueless sites supporting something they don't even understand. They're creating a perception for people, both inside and out, that gamers are absolutely terrible.
Oh, and Castlevania: LoS2 was terrible, but that's mainly because of problems with MercurySteam, which caused people to leave.
Me and my friends have been playing sports games, since ATARI FOOTBALL in the ARCADE in 1978 . We all played MARIO on NES . We also played all the sports games on the SEGA GENESIS . Most of us played RESIDENT EVIL, TOMB RAIDER , CRASH BANDICOOT, MORTAL COMBAT , STREET FIGHTER games on the PSX . We all played 4player split screen QUAKE 2 on PSX , We have been playing EA NHL HOCKEY games on PS3 at least a couple times a week .
Maybe because sports games in AMERICA features players from all different backgrounds and most of my friends ,who i grew up , and still play video games are not white . But the the topic of racism , femininity, sexism, in games , has never come up. We play video games because their fun . I believe 80 to 90 percent of gamers, play video games because their fun. And really do not care about all this other stuff, that has been going on , in the video game industry , these past 2 weeks.
I believe, only 10 to 20 percent of all gamers, go to websites about the video game industry .
We should also note that ar revenue over the past few years has dried up. What once was a lucrative industry has been replaced by livestreaming. Its no suprise that the characters who are only in it for money are willing to throw an entire industry under the bus for some controversy generated $$$.
If we as gamers allow it then the industry will be lost. This feminist nonsense will not go away its going to get worse in the next 2 years and attmpting to appeal to these trolls only makes them more rabid so we have to resist.