This is going to turn into what might seem like a massive exercise in hypocrisy, so I’m going to lay out the receipts of myself falling for this blunder ahead of time just to make it clear where we all stand. But before I get into the content of the discussion, I will say this: I don’t think it’s okay for people in a position of authority or insight to just ask questions, feigning ignorance about the subject. Just, generally speaking.
I’ve struggled with this in no end of contexts, but a weird example comes to mind: My brief attempts at getting involved in local political activism. Tl;dr a Meta hyperscale datacenter was snuck into a development in my area, completely under NDA and without public knowledge or approval, and the ramifications will be enormous and generational. A local activism group formed a dedicated… committee? sub-group? (not sure of the correct identifier here) to help raise awareness of this and to try to get people active and involved in doing something about it. Despite the fact that the group is seemingly led by competent, smart individuals with activism and political experience both on their own and with this group – and that there were many politically-charged parties involved in early meetings, including former office-running candidates – they decided the best style of leadership here was to simply ask the group of only-just-recently-informed people what they “think we should do about this.” Meeting after meeting, it was thrown to the layman to come up with solutions, strategies, etc. despite the people “in charge” clearly having vastly more experience and relevant connections that might help put together a more winning strategy.
Feigning ignorance to ask the layman “What’s up?” pretends to empower the average person while contributing nothing to any cause or conversation aside from indirect raising of extreme and undesirable voices. That’s literally what Tucker Carlson’s whole shtick was.
Anyway…
I’ve been down the “why does everyone keep saying gaming is bad now?” rabbit hole for a few years now. The YouTube algorithm will spoon feed you so many videos about how much “modern gaming sucks” and how “buying a 3DS [or insert any random system here] changed my life” or that there is no solution and all of life sucks now as a consequence of gaming sucking that you get over-stuffed, vomit it all back up, and get your first 10K subscribers making your own YouTube videos about why gaming sucks now, only to end up crying that YouTube has shadow-banned you the moment you make a video about anything else and no one watches. It’s nothing new.
I made a video about how YouTube’s algorithm is poisoning your brain, about how feelings about games change over time, a video about those very “Gaming ISN’T FUN ANYMORE” videos, about how a healthy enriched life can make gaming more fun, about how you can revitalize some of those feelings through routines and rituals, not to mention an entire podcast show all about intentionality and healing your relationship with gaming. On the discourse side, I literally made a whole video about the mess that is Halo discourse (something I’ve been talking about in videos literally since 2012 when Halo 4 released), and half of my Halo: Campaign Evolved review video was spend trying to put answers to much of the dumpster fire discourse around the game, again. Hell, I literally just wrote up an entire forum post about healthy gaming hours and habits and how overinvestment can cause one to turn toxic on games yesterday. This is a topic near and dear to my heart, one I’m not immune to asking questions about. But I always do so with the intent of providing answers – whether personal, researched, socially-informed, or sometimes even just wrong – because an attempt at providing answers is always better than looking at one’s reflection in the pond and shrugging. I have decades of experience in this space. I’ve delved into the depths of these conversations. I’ve pondered the questions endlessly, and I’ve done the work to fix these problems within myself. It would be a great disservice to everyone involved to act like I don’t have any potential answers.
I do recognize, however, that I don’t always have complete answers, but I do try to give the most-complete answer that I have available at the time.
So when I encounter someone – someone who, by all accounts, should be more in tune with the scene, more involved, more informed than myself – write for a major outlet asking these questions without providing the obvious, meaningful answers, I get quite frustrated.
To ask questions without giving the minimum/obvious answers is to give merit to alternative perspectives or the idea that it’s an unanswerable question, which has some pretty rough downsides.
This is what happened upon reading Jez Corden’s recent piece for Windows Central: Is gaming discourse more negative than ever? — And if so, is it deserved? How did we get here?.
Now, it should have been easy to write off this piece. First, because it’s obviously some sort of engagement-driving piece – and I don’t mean that inherently negatively, either. Whether it’s a written outlet, a YouTube channel, TV station, anything, the occasional post that specifically calls for feedback or answers or engagement is nothing new or noteworthy. It is what it is. I shouldn’t take it too seriously. But also second, the piece opens with Jez referencing what the Twitter algorithm has been serving him lately. Gee, the Nazi social media hellsite where people are paid more based on their ability to rage bait you is serving you negativity? What the fuck are you still even doing there? But trying to engage in good faith, I wanted to see what the issues being brought up actually were.
[I guess I should also note that Jez does address the fact that Twitter continues to spiral downhill due to its own policies, but the same kind of “bad thing is bad, but let’s sit in it and ask why” is on theme for my problems with this piece and doesn’t excuse the behavior.]
Three games are primarily referenced as being victims of disproportionate and misplaced gamer rage: Halo: Campaign Evolved, Grand Theft Auto VI, and Marvel’s Wolverine.
I have to admit: Not spending any time on Nazi site, I actually haven’t seen a single bit of this supposed gamer rage about Wolverine. Like… at all. So that one’s easy enough to write off, but again we can engage a bit longer.
Jez correctly identifies that some of the misplaced feelings about Wolverine stem from PlayStation’s announcement that they’re killing physical game releases – and referencing a time where other games were “unfairly” criticized because of a similar move by Xbox back in the day. Yes, that absolutely plays a role, people are dunking on anything PlayStation because engaging in good faith with the company set on taking away your physical games (and damaging the entire industry as a result) is just not possible. There are similar issues with Xbox, but we’ll get to that.
“I’m curious if those users have ever played a cinematic action game before … because these sequences are hardly representative of the full package.”
This is where having spent… any amount of time listening to feedback and sentiment on games would better inform your perspectives here.
I’m one of those Certified Sony AAAA Walkie Talkie Game Haters. I think Horizon: Forbidden West is an incredible game buried under a devastating (and embarassing) mountain of bloat, feature creep, accessibility overcompensation, and mismanagement that nearly ruins the game for half of its overly-long play time. I think God of War (2018) is borderline unplayable for the first couple hours due to how slow and overstimulatingly-chatty it is. I won’t go near The Last of Us and I think more and more those games just… aren’t for gamers. But I still recognize that they’re amazing games with some impressive stuff in there, wonderful storytelling and music and character development, and the occasional five minutes of gameplay (or so) for every hour of everything else. While I’ve taken to the extreme with my stances on these AAAA Walkie Talkies, the sentiment continues to hold as a not-uncommon feeling to have about these games.
So when you combine that growing sentiment + a growing distrust of the publisher/console manufacturer releasing the game + an expectation that a game about motherfucking WOLVERINE is going to be bombastic and over-the-top, gameplay-wise, it all = some justified mockery on social media when most of what they show is “cinematic action” and QTEs. Boo hoo, poor tiny studio making their widdle game.
I say all this mostly in jest, as Wolverine will obviously sell like hotcakes and will probably be incredible – we don’t need to spare Insomniac’s (or Sony’s) feelings.
[This is most of the kinds of posts I see about Wolverine on BlueSky!]
Jez continues to state that GTA6’s “hate” is because of the Netflix-exclusive trailer and the pricing. Sure that’s touching the tip of the iceberg, I guess? I really don’t understand how we can make it to the point of having recurring conversations about the state of discourse while acting like we’re completely oblivious to the decade’s worth of discourse attached to any given game or franchise. That’s ultimately my whole problem with this article – and so many like it.
GTA6 didn’t show up in a vacuum with a Netflix trailer and people are being mean to it. The game has been in development for 3 console generations’ worth of time, meanwhile the last game released on 3 different console generations. Thirteen years later, expectations for this game have ballooned out of control and the reported $2 billion dollar development budget in an industry continuing to cripple under its own over-budgeting and mis-management weight makes it the poster child for “what the fuck are we doing anymore?” talks. We had entire console generations’ worth of games be developed for the cost of this singular game, at no point should we be taking anything about it at face value.
None of this to mention that Rockstar itself has lost most of its favor for anything from disappointing support for GTA Online in recent years, to the controversial sentencing of a hacker teen to indefinite hospital order, and outright union busting. When a studio tells us they’ve spent $2b on a game and are laying people off while shutting down a union, we should be looking at everything they do with the most critical (and, arguably, cynical) eye possible – to do anything but is just plain irresponsible.
So yeah, when they delay the game numerous times (and it feels like the entire AAA space is holding their breath – and their games – until after it releases), release a fucking trailer for the cover art, refuse to release physical copies of the game to avoid leaks, and have a Netflix-exclusive trailer reveal event – all to fluff up how self-important their game is and how we should all be privileged to even know its name… people are going to go out of their way to dunk on it. Good on them. Fuck GTA6.
And then we get to Halo: Campaign Evolved. The game this article happily named as having been “picked apart and torn to shreds” while not even attempting to address the obvious reasons why. (Is it unfair to assume that being posted to a site called “Windows Central” played some role in this?) There’s so much context to why Halo is the source of negativity that one could make a four hour “Kingdom Hearts Story So Far”-style video essay on it, and yet you need only have paid a little attention to have at least some clue as to why.
Let’s see… perhaps the 14 years of Halo’s adoptive parents fumbling the bag and disappointing fans with nearly every new release. Or the massive gaps between games and elimination of spinoffs to help fill the time. Or the fact that Campaign Evolved is a remake of a remake – which will never not be meme-worthy? Or maybe that the remake is moved to Unreal Engine 5, often cited as a “solution” to the constantly-referenced tech debt from engines past – which was the same claim made about the “Slipspace Engine” which turned out to not be all that new, and was still (somehow) holding the developers back with Halo: Infinite? Or the fact that the remake does avoid fixing many of the visual identity and style-based concerns about the last remake?
If not that, then maybe the fact that the game is extremely buggy and runs like absolute dogshit, meanwhile the versions in The Master Chief Collection (available for $20 less) run well on just about anything and it would have been far more cost-effective and respectful of the players to just port MCC to PlayStation 5 (and maybe Switch 2!) and add the bonus missions there? Or the sharp growth in resistence to the push for “new graphics” all the time, to making older stylistic works “more realistic” (a trend that’s gotten far worse with the rise in generative AI) – especially at a time when hardware is getting less and less accessible? When people are realizing that wanting every old piece of media made photorealistic or “modernized” just hurts them, and is just a literacy issue?
Or perhaps because not a single sane gamer on the planet would trust Xbox anymore after the mass acquisition of studios and IPs, decade of mis-management and lack of game releases, followed by wave after wave of mass layoffs and studio shutdowns? Or the fact that Microsoft itself is obsessed with AI to the point of destroying any good name it had with Office, Xbox, or Windows – with Windows getting more and more spyware added to it every month?
Or… I don’t know… the fact that Microsoft itself is directly powering genocide at the moment?
Somehow that last one is the least likely to influence gamers’ opinions, despite being the most deadly, literally.
I covered this in the first half of my Halo: Campaign Evolved review, but there is no way to engage with AAA studios and games “in good faith,” or devoid of all of the baggage anymore. It’s just not possible.
This is where I really struggle to grapple my feelings with the piece.
There’s a concept in therapy called “Content vs Process” which is basically just the idea that often the process of working through one’s feelings is the real “meat” of an exchange, a therapy session, etc. rather than the content of it. To Jez’s questions: Most people on social media aren’t truly responding to a specific game or franchise or subject on its own, but they’re working through their bigger feelings. Life is harder, more expensive, and the world is in chaos right now. Tech is getting more gross as egomaniac AI bros are set on destroying the world’s books and water supplies to feed you hallucinogenic summaries of everyone’s posts, we can’t afford to own things anymore, gas is getting more expensive while people are dying, and our healthy food options keep getting poisoned since the big orange oaf keeps gutting essential services. Games were once an escape from reality, but reality’s problems keep seeping in and people are further disregulated when they find a reflection of the thing they’re escaping from in the thing they’re escaping to.
Similarly, one could look at Jez’s article as a “Process” post, rather than a “Content” one. But to me, this is more damning. If I don’t debate the content and instead debate the sentiment, then Jez has spent his time in the Nazi lobster pot as the water has long since boiled over, most of the other lobsters have escaped or been eaten, and he’s floating in the soup of over-cooked lobster carcasses asking why the vibes are weird.
Yeah, people respond disproportionately to things, and it sucks sometimes. As someone with a real case of “literal brain,” I physically recoil when trying to engage with people and it’s clear that the reality of the thing they’re talking about doesn’t matter. When, to them, the “pink-haired women and homos” of the world have “ruined gaming” – instead of the greedy capitalists running AAA publishers and making all of the decisions they’re complaining about – there’s no talking someone out of that. Engaging in good faith with someone who’s operating from a place of bad faith is a paradoxical task which has no productive end. But maybe that’s the pitfall I’ve fallen into while writing this. We’re all guilty of it sometimes.
It’s perhaps most frustrating that these kinds of pieces only seem to come out when the “boys toys” games that need no white knights to defend them in the first place are what come under fire. Microsoft’s bottom line is not affected by your silly game purchases, they’re funded by government contracts with genocidal nations. GTA6 is going to sell more copies than we can imagine, regardless of the bad press. And Wolverine is, in all likelihood, going to be a fantastic game and sell really well, too. Poking a little fun at them on social media doesn’t hurt their feelings. And, at the same time, with the AAA industry being so obviously unsustainable – and abusive to its workers and players – can you really be mad at anyone cheering for it to fail? In some ways, we need someone doing that at all times.
But these posts only happen when these kinds of games come under fire. Where were these kinds of posts when Forspoken was being dogpiled on, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, Assassin’s Creed Shadows, or when the countless videos get plastered all over YouTube citing Aloy as the “feminism shoved in games” or showing the Halo Studios staff photo as these morons reference “insecure game devs” blaming them for publisher and exec-mandated changes?
Trying to find the source of a paricular kind of poison when you’ve spend all your time swimming in a sea of poison doesn’t really work.
The frustrating thing is, I do think gaming discourse is unnecessarily toxic right now. I do think that vast amounts of anger and “hate” is completely misplaced – and that people would be far more happy and healthy if they could actually process their feelings, develop some self-awareness to realize where these feelings come from! That’s why I’m constantly making videos and posts trying to answer these questions. My entire pivot from (toxic) tech to gaming has been so that I can focus on proper gaming hygeine and helping people reconnect in a more positive and productive way. Hell, I started a whole fucking print publication because I feel like the very vehicle of short-form social media discourse inherently skews things away from nuance and critical thought and that focusing on just the good things in long-form coverage is something we need right now.
But that’s why I also find it somewhat inexcusable to ask these questions while pretending to lack any insight into the answers is inherently problematic. It’s stirring the pot, the pot that’s already biased towards the worst of the worst floating to the top, rather than trying to bring balance or turn down the heat.
As I opened with, I can recognize that it might seem hypocritical to complain about someone else asking questions that I have also asked. I’m judging someone basically just for approaching things differently than how I approach them. But I hold those in positions above mine to a higher standard, as we all should. And seeing something you’ve done mirrored by someone you expect more of does tend to help you highlight the problems more.
[begin edit]
I managed to write this whole thing without adding in critical context. I originally shared Jez’s piece with some feelings (process over content, you know) as I was trying to grapple with the reality of these questions being relevant with the obvious answers being ignored.
But Jez seems to have felt that I didn’t read his article and felt he fully addressed everything well enough:
He didn’t write about “all this in the article.” He touched on the lowest-hanging fruit he possibly could, while missing some of that, even. He left out the most obvious contexts and answers that would at least provide a lot of grounding to the questions and instead chose to pretend to be naive to help sell the questioning.
This is what I have a problem with. This is performative naivete, not good faith questioning or authority writing.
[end edit]
Let’s do better. Let’s not “vibe check” the room and ask “YUMAD?” and actually contribute something worthwhile. Let’s also stop acting like it’s okay, sane, or well-adjusted to still even have an active Twitter account in 2026. Holy shit lol.