Churning sands drained of life and echoing voices: just like the first few pages of Scott Pilgrim, some moron is once again alone in something that’s a metaphor for the subconscious. We’re playing another videogame, drifting logos in time block my vision and the start game scene appears again. It’s a character action game with snappy controls this time – a button for a wide heavy attack and a button for a light and direct attack. Camera’s turn on a dime around me, a snap swivel like I’m holding the tripod for my own health.

  Sony’s getting out of the hardware game, that’s the news. And who could blame them? We’re getting just old enough that the kind of people looking back at of seven generations of hardware now – more if you have hands firm around The Secret Truth and the old ways no I’m just kidding. The people I know who ascribe backlogg’d feeds for The Record of the Lodoss War aren’t buying Playstation branded windbreakers from limited run stores, or the merch, or the sneakers with Sega buttons on them. Less so are they really into branded character stuff that isn’t bought from an artist at a convention or a small press store online.

Meryl on a a knock-off Metal Gear Solid T-shirt, spread legged and sweating. It belongs next to a collection of shirts from fetish stores and lewd stickers of Cammy White from street fighter. Bara (erotic artwork of heavyset men) redesigns of the men of Metal Gear Solid – half of them already laced with homoeroticism by Kojima’s own design. When I think of Playstation I don’t really reach out for old memories of fuzzy carpets and box set TV’s. Now it means something to me, less than a brand but something more than a dusty console from yesteryear. Sometimes I’m Meryl, and sometimes I’ve got my own sneaking suit, babe. Want to try it on with me?

So, Sony’s focusing off of hardware again, why? The action games still only have four buttons you need to worry about. The camera hasn’t changed since we ‘figured it out’ enough that the problems have all stuck around since the era of the PlayStation two. Indie games are obsessed with the old paints, the old canvas. Self-serving and demanding of us to ask personal sacrifices made; nobody deserves the kind of praise and palace built for Toby Fox when it comes to the stuff they make. Artists often want to make stuff that bleeds and sings for themselves. Industries of cult-pop ask them to save us over and over again, If not with homage than in the commenting directly on social media. The action games still have four buttons, though.

Spreading out the Sony brand over different mediums, that’s the new name of the game. Well, it’s looking like a bad decade for the economy, housing, healthcare. Where’s a giant console you spent all that money for going to sit when it’s very likely we’re all going to spend the next few years moving around a lot. Nintendo figured it out a long time ago, and because I’m afraid to be alone my Switch comes everywhere with me.

When the character creator finally pops up, if I can’t hit random I usually don’t go much further. Too much time playing, fixing and dreaming about the latest wax-humans to pop up on my screen over twenty years. I did drop your game when it asked me to pick from a dozen hairstyles from the back of a great-clips, sports-clips, associated haircut salons. All the rendering power of several generations of Microsoft console now and we still haven’t tried to nail that waxy, semi-translucent way a Mohawk coated in extreme hold gel and Elmers Glue starts to get all crackly after the third day of the festival.

Video games seldom have an interest in the body modded, the body-fucked, those of weird gender. We see wire humans with white skin and whatever black hairstyle the developers have pulled from TV, oozing humans with smooth pores or face that’s like looking into the surface of an old sponge adrift in endless voids. So, Sony’s diversifying the brand now.

I’m punching a dozen identical beasts in Atlas Fallen: Reign of Sand. Commitment to the Playstation Brand sits in my bank account at -$149 dollars a year. Do I buy new video games? No, but I will play whatever I’m offered.

Playstation+, littered with the early offerings from the service: independent titles from small publishers. Games with rough, bright edges and the occasional larger offering. It slowly starts to look like an island of discarded toys as I flick the thumbstick down. A parade of what review websites describe as 6/10s and 8/10s. Some of them much more than that, every one of them bloodied by sweat and tears of developers paid too little. We know the score though, that’s what matters at the end of the day. Wring out as many little human beings and fingers on keyboards until they’re dust for as many 8/10’s it takes topay the bills. Fire the staff afterwards. Let’s be honest, if the type of beast-human it takes to be in charge of ten thousand people for eight years had their way they’d take out their anguish by putting a bullet in the head of each and every staff member that personally failed them. Don’t read comments about video games on Facebook, because that’s what you’ll find.

At some point after I kill the sand-monsters  I’ll tune into what the next hottest Fred Durst lookalike says there’s no way out of. Only if I press L1 and R2 to release all of my stored energy and activate Burst Mode can I hope to be free. I laugh, seeing it coming from a mile away. In tandem, in the cleared our rubble, we both say it: “It’s happening again.”

The secret is that every video game that’s lauded as the future( Dreams, Overcooked, PlayStation Home, Halo 3, Cyberpunk 2077) will be followed by a Call of Duty. So Sony’s thinking of getting out of the game. Konami got out of the game years ago to make pachinko machines. Now the newest shiny and soulless Metal Gear Solid Delta is a better lotus than any silver-levered, branded thousand pound buick with an LCD screen, an insert-yen glyph and Silent Hill Pachinko glowing neon on the side could be. Don’t you remember Metal Gear Solid? We’re going to give it back to you exactly how you imagined it. Do you remember what tomorrow is, Jack? Do you remember 1987?

There’s only so many roads not traveled you can take when you can’t afford gas in the first place. Just like with indie comics’ reluctance to give up the (comi)X, or the way mumblecore dusted off years of celluloid about natural lighting and dialogue-driven action in the age of early blockbuster. When artists struggle to keep the lights on, we start digging through the trophy case for the second and third place badges as our new trophies of honor. Look at what we were before greed got to us. So Sony’s getting out of the hardware industry: What’s next?

Media consumption is a 25-40 year old demographic now. It’s not so much the kids aren’t getting into the common shorthand references. Instead, while Millennials might be the generation most apt to write about feeling like they didn’t have a shared childhood, we are also the ones to cling the most desperately to the edifice of it as long as possible. Cultural memory has to keep eroding into self-referential television and artificial intelligence meat binding.

Everything has the texture and tinge of a Millennial patina about it now: we hate kids, and we hate the world they’ve gotta be saddled with that makes them refuse to grow up. Who wants to claim my generation either, but we might have to have a reckoning over why so many of The New Demographic are clutching their branded t-shirts and eBooks with never ending fantasy novels still looking for any possible way out. I mime to myself all the time I want to write a ‘what I talk about when I talk about video games’ article and it never goes beyond the horrible realization that I’m a 9-5 service worker. Even more of the long-term career path middle management types claim that video games are not there to be art to most of the demographic. They’re gauze for the deep wound inflicted by the sword of the world, and it’s made of glass. A trick of the light and it’s gone before you know it.

Culture war stacks up neatly to the side of class war all the time. A common grieving for something that has to go-without-saying in every fucking conversation. Did you see what they did to Ironheart? Honey, neither of us have read it and I’d rather make small talk about the weather. Can you believe this place? The only comic books they even carry anymore are all superhero stuff, anyway. Comics are $5 dollars a pop, a Sony is $599, rent is due and you need to keep typing your fan-fiction ideas into this machine so it can get parsed by a sweat-shop worker pretending to be a robot girlfriend.

Do you buy Woke games? Unwoke ones? Are you at the resistance Wallgreens? Is your mother worried? Would you like us to assign someone to worry your mother? I’m a little short on time, can we stop and ask for directions here?

Heard around the block that the chat-programs we call A.I. are turning up short on money, short on practical skill bases, and short on real progressive development. The danger in A.I. sometimes feels like it has a lot to do with the unequivocal way it proved to the money holders people actually DO want safety, all the time, and they want it as cheap and as sexy as possible. Everything in these videos has the velvet texture of frosting, from the people to the cars to the air. Now eat your sweets.

It’s worth saying, you know, that Sony is getting out of the hardware game. I’m looking for a new social network, a new movie, a new video game to play. How can I get it? Where do I find it? Do you have something for me? I run up the flagpole and see Playstation Network a fifth time: two god of wars to choose from, limited edition destiny crossover, prince of Persia, prince of Persia. The indie games are in troubled waters – they’re all slick but there’s that cultural shortening again. They will get to the era of the 2006 muddy brown shooter in time, the 2014 relaunch action game, the parry mechanic. Eventually we might even get to a place where the self-administering affirmations in our hands that exist to eat all culture ever made say “there’s never been anything but today.” and when we hit that, I wonder if we’ll all have our credit card information at the ready.

If we all bought a PlayStation 5 on Klarna,as many as we possibly could, maybe we could get the credit bureaus to prop up PlayStation like a show pony for the rest of the world. Throw that new Nintendo in there too! We play our cards right and we’ll have infinite consoles to swap at $50 dollars a month in infinite payments for the rest of our time on Earth. Unfortunately the temperature of the modern age is fantasy, and all fantasies in solitude have a tendency to turn into delusion. Cathedrals everywhere, etc.

I never did finish Atlas Fallen.