DISCLAIMER: Yes, We applied to work for Kotaku dot. com when we were still Young, Dumb, and Full of Cum. It wont happen again.

I come from a relatively bog-standard midwestern working class family. The way I landed in the lap of videogames has less to do with a life of social inequity and more one where, well, my parents played videogames.
As an escape from flagging traffic or ranch work, or serving dirty old men – my parents (before I existed) would waste hours at night either on Theraflu or with “The Legend of Zelda”. It was an escape from the doldrums of life. Economic crashes, heroin crisis and job shortages.

Videogames haven’t changed in three decades. What changes is the audience: like comic books, like bad television, Videogames have become the pursuit and hobby of a hollowed out middle class. With nothing else in America (or wherever((*or whoever))) to turn to, the Middle Class love videogames. Consoles bring new progressive advances. Graphics chase impossible ends. Favorite stories from growing up get recycled endlessly. You Can Feel Like Batman, or Nathan Drake, or Indiana Jones, or any of these pop culture figures. Why look for warmth under a blanket before you go to bed? Star Wars is here to keep you warm forever.

The United States is in decline. We can all see it, no matter where we turn to or get the answer from. None of us are working, and the ones that do have jobs are too rich. The ones that don’t are going to be poor forever. Empathize with television writers, tech brothers and middle-managers in middle-managed economies. Clock in and go home if you can, do the job in your underwear. You can work from home (if home is close enough to us) as long as you want.

The Playstation Five will release (at the time of writing this) in less than three days. By the time someone’s reading this before they go to work, it’ll probably be out already. Here’s the deep-hell . com review of the Playstation Five: if you have 500$ to spend on a Playstation Five, nothing I can say will convince you to not buy it. You should probably just do it to spite me. There’s literally nothing I have to gain from telling you one way or another to think about a piece of hardware.

When the Playstation Five releases, we will still be in the grip of a deadly pandemic. Thousands of people are losing jobs: anyone fortunate enough to be employed is incredibly lucky. Or maybe unlucky, as the world will grind them into dust to keep some stocks afloat elsewhere. Maybe they’re unlucky because every interaction they have with someone will be colored with the paranoia of another test for the disease.

I don’t know anything about the person that wrote the Kotaku Review of the Playstation 5. I know they have 3,000 twitter followers: I know that everyone who works in media says “after 2,000 followers twitter becomes Hell.” I know that without any other definitions, they have to be a White Guy who’s Middle Class.

I know this, because I spend every day of my life surrounded by Middle Class White Guilt. I see it as a white person: rarely do I call it out. Calling it out means losing jobs, and god, we all have bills to pay now don’t we?

Videogames are a Middle Class hobby. Sure, there might be some racist good ol’ american’s playing whatever First Person Shooter we’ve all decided rightfully to denigrate as propaganda. By and large, though, it’s all for the Middle Class. People who have shelf space and the biggest TV’s to take advantage of the most surround sound. Like all Middle Class Hobbies, it has Middle Class reporters and journalists. The people looking for any sense of ethics. Sure, they’ll abuse writers and underpay interns and handshake developers that harass staff behind close doors. It’s all in the hope of chasing after some kind of professional high.

You need shelf space to be middle class. Maybe a little debt to throw around too. A few credit cards that get balanced out at the end of every month.
More than anything, you need a profound sense of self hatred. All of that needs to be squashed out by medical marijuana and craft beer and and and. This time it will be different: we’re not going to gentrify a ____ we’re going to respect it.

If you’re new to America, or god forbid, from one of those countries that still has an intact working class, this picture might seem peculiar to you. American Managers or maybe we can call them the “Financial Sinners” or something that’d make adbusters proud, well, they don’t have shit. The most civic interaction any of them get is being afraid of their neighbors and voting every four years. If I were them, I’d be afraid of everything too.

I know Kotaku’s writers are all middle class, because to write for these expensive websites that seem to float by on advertising and being bought out, you’ve gotta live there. There is a profound place, I imagine it’s filled with whatever a bodega is. There is where you have to live already, or be willing to go to. Sure, they want us to stay up late hours or travel on our own dime or as they always do, shop whatever we’ve written out to a copyeditor or ghostwriter to finish, but it’s worth the glamour.

The Middle Class has nothing. Nothing but spending all day online and worrying about where they spend their money. It’s why someone can claim to be a writer, but never put more than 3,000 words on something and get paid. All of that guilt about doing nothing can bubble up to the surface. Don’t you worry about where your hard earned money is going towards? What about the environment? There’s nothing but doom. Buy the console anyway. Who cares. If you live like me you can do it and not even have to think about it.

Of course the only moralizing possible is about how we all spend our money. When you sat and waited during the highlights of a pandemic to be able to go “back to work” or start your business again, or fuck me, god forbid, afford a copy of whatever hot holiday game is getting a PS5 update – all you have left is how you vote with your dollar, because all that gets left behind is an identity wrapped up in the ephemera consumed. I didn’t go see Christopher Nolan’s movie during Coronavirus, and that makes me a good person. Please buy the videogame anyway.

Let’s not mince words. I consider these people to be spineless advertisers. Maybe a little lower than that, after all. Advertisers at least go to work knowing they’re trying to sell every single person alive spectacular bullshit. Only a pop-journalist does it under the auspice of some kind of profound social justice.
I work for an anti-union abusive megalith. The New Console is Bad, but you don’t have to be bad for enjoying it. You just need to be like me: comfortably employed and willing to deal with a little internalized self loathing.

What the Playstation Five represents is the further decline of the Middle Class. We can’t deal with ourselves participating in the market, any more than we can go live in the woods and stop participating in the market entirely. The people I know who have cabins in the forest still spend fifteen dollars a month to stream The Walking Dead. It’s a perfect kind of life in perpetuity, go to the polls, vote with your dollar.