Journalism Difficulty Setting

Choose Your Difficulty: 

Death Incarnate

Impossible

Very Difficult

Difficult

Not As Difficult 

Easy

Don’t Hurt Me

Journalist

Elden Ring is annoyingly successful.  Everyone.  Simply everyone is playing it.  Including me and I do not have time to cope with a life sponge of a game right now. 

The game is as addictive as it is hard.  Just about every fight feels like a boss-fight.  You will die constantly, even the pros are grinding their teeth on this one.

“Git Gud!” The gamer cries out as he strikes the Godrick Knight.

“That’s r-a-c-i-s-t!!!” The Journalist cries out as xhe strikes the gamer.

“How that hell is that racist?”  The average human asks in stunned confusion.  

The confusion of the average human is understandable, but you, my Unfallen Darklings are by now familiar enough with The Children of the Tik Tok to comprehend if not understand (because sane people can’t duplicate the thought process) that in 2022 all gaming journalists view the world through the Sarkissian Prism of “everything is racist, everything sexist, everything is homophobic, and you have to point it all out!”  They have to start everything from that baseline.

And then they figure out how everything fits inside it.

Git Gud is a form of merit, and few things are more racist than merit.  Nothing destroys equality of result faster than someone being demonstrably better at something than someone else.  The question of “why does this automatically apply to race?”  Is just a bit too ticklish for a journalist to face head-on, as that brings up the subject of their own inherently lowered estimates for individuals based on nothing but race

You’d think since everything is racist it would be easier for them to deal with but sadly, no.

Which brings us back to Elden Ring.  The other reason it’s racist, is, of course, privilege.  If you are good enough to finish a game, that is clearly the result of privilege. 

The other argument is inequity.  If you have paid $60 for a game then you have the right to finish it.  

You also have the right to not buy it.  You also have the additional right to watch someone else play it for you on YouTube if you are that interested in seeing how it ends.  Hell, that’s how I finally finished Getting Over It.

The fundamental problem here is a collision of two cultures.  Gamers are addicted to having achievement chemicals vomit all over their brains when they finally kill the mega-super-ultra-death boss. 

I remember when that buggy disaster Fallout 76 dropped, there was one gamer who was suffering from the curse of immortality. “My character currently is unkillable and I mean really unkillable. She can even eat a nuke blast to the face and be fine. There is literally zero ways that she can die even if I wanted her to (which I very much do at this point).”

Gamers hate easy games.

Social Justice Gaming Journalists want life on a plate more for themselves than for anybody else.  My favorite so far was the writer for The Verge (remember the video I posted about their tech expert building a computer?), was complaining bitterly in her review because the character creation didn’t feature a kinked hair option.   That was the complaint, she personally wasn’t represented in a Japanese game that was built around a European setting.  There wasn’t much of a Japanese preset either.* But then Asians never really count.

And the tragic part is that they are being handed a major win.  And it’s an appropriately low-energy win at that.  The head of Microsoft Gaming, Phil Spencer has effectively said, he wants an end to Git Gud in gaming culture.

I knew Microsoft was going to screw up their gaming division beyond human belief, but I didn’t think they were going to be this fast about it. 

Who would want to be a developer for a mainstream company in this wicked world?

Okay, I’m done here.

*Except for some Samurai armor.