Your sarcastic take is billionaire propaganda
Carrying water is just free labor
Virality is meaningless in this era of hyperspecific algorithms. Besides, you can just pay $8 to force your drivel onto everyone still clinging to the sinking ship that is X the everything-especially-Nazis app. So I don’t actually know if the post I keep seeing from the Legit Gaming Leaks gimmick account is viral or not. But I’ve seen it enough — and it’s bothered me enough — that we’re going to talk about it. I know Twitter isn’t real life. I know I’m terminally online. But I had to see it and now I’m making it your problem.
The Legit Gaming Leaks account is generally anti-joke one-liners about gaming — “Xbox has no current plans to expand into the tractor industry” and “GTA 6 Trailer 3 will have audio.” It’s fine. I get it. I’ll even say that it’s successful satire of the breathless gaming journalism of the algorithm-driven clickbait reality we live in. I don’t like it, per se, but I appreciate the commitment to the bit.
This post, though — one of Twitter’s new pseudo-article monstrosities — wants to be a satirical takedown of the gaming fandom. It’s presented as a dangerous exposé on the real truth behind the video game industry: “Industry giants, corporate suits, and marketing departments … want you to believe the gaming industry is all about making video games.” It goes on to deliver a series of shocking truths like “video game companies are a business … with the intent of generating revenue” and “if you disconnect your console or PC from the internet, you will no longer be able to access servers.”
This post isn’t funny. This post isn’t satire. This post fails at even being anti-humor. Even if its appearance on my feed is artificial and the responses are promoted by the blue checkedness of it all, the article worked in that it ragebaited me into engaging with it. But that’s mostly because it clumsily finds its way close to some actual points that I care about before veering off into propaganda. And, worse yet, it does so while failing to be funny.
It was never going to be funny, though, because it’s impossible to be tongue-in-cheek when you can’t tell the difference between farce and fellatio.
The premise returned to throughout the post is, in effect, consumers — gamers — shouldn’t complain when video game businesses make business decisions, you rubes. Because video game companies want to make money, developers are employees, and “if a video game fails to reach financial benchmarks … the company may choose to not produce a sequel.” These are mockingly presented as shocking revelations and hard truths.
But it’s really just … doing the Mister Gotcha meme with no self-awareness. Everyone knows that video games are a business. Everyone knows that money exists and businesses make money. The criticisms about those business decisions are about scale.
TR-49 — one of my favorite games of the year — costs $7 and made its budget back in three hours. Bungie’s Marathon had a budget of $250 million, has earned an estimated 20% of that back, and has hemorrhaged about 90% of its players since launch. Both Bungie and inkle made business decisions in creating and releasing Marathon and TR-49. But only one of them is going to cost hundreds of people their jobs.
Think of those napkin math examples that pop up sometimes. If you earned $1 per second every second starting at your birth, you’d become a billionaire at 31. After making $3,600 per hour for three decades, you’d have 0.4% as much money as Jeff Bezos. Meanwhile, at the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, earning the same billion dollars would take 16,000 years. Meaning you would’ve had to start earning around the time humans got pet dogs and blond hair.
That’s what I mean by scale.
Criticism like saying Sony’s purchase of Bungie for $4 billion was a recipe for disaster is not the same as criticizing the concept of making money off of a video game like Legit Gaming Leaks’ misguided satire suggests. To say that it is is reductive, dismissive, and exploitation class apologia. My criticism isn’t about the money. It’s aimed at the corporation’s parasitic and ruinous expectation of endlessly extractable profit. (It’s as true of video games as it is of movies and television.)
Because, yes, video game devs are employees. But they’re also creative people, in a creative industry, performing a creative task. To criticize their need for money to survive in a capitalist society without taking that last tiny step to a criticism of the monetization and commodification of artistic pursuits misses the point entirely. Stopping before that realization just addresses the symptom without addressing the root cause.
Pretending they're the same is a backbreaking level of water carrying for the concept of capitalism.
The second half of the article is more of the same sarcastic dismissals. It makes points like you need an internet connection for multiplayer games, you need an internet connection to download updates, and consoles require electricity. This is delivered in the same tone as “water is wet,” but it’s just self-important egocentrism. It’s clearly aimed at movements like Stop Killing Games, but misses the fact that we needed a law to stop game publishers from lying about whether or not you owned the games you bought.
Besides, the article got a positive response from Tim “we’ve had challenges delivering consistent Fortnite magic with every season” Sweeney. That means you’re doing something wrong.
Now that I’ve spent more words complaining about the article than the article itself contains, here’s a different example of satire from an actually funny outlet.
Do you not hear the drum and the fife beckoning you towards glory as you spend half of your paycheck on taxes to a government run by child rapists while billionaires buy up all media and technology systems so they can control every possible thing you do and believe?
I can’t believe you don’t feel the beautiful winds of patriotism under your wings as you are robbed of upward mobility, a livable planet, or public forest lands.
Mocking the very concept of daring to imagine a better version of the world is lazy, hackneyed, and the very definition of punching down. But before you put in the newspaper that I got mad, I’m not.
I’m sad. It’s sad when someone can’t believe in something better. It’s heartbreaking when someone's spirit gets broken. Because a better world is possible and your ability to imagine it is just one more thing that’s been stolen from you.