Here’s the nightmare: every time I spend too long of a night playing videogames, I see them. The dude leading man: a hollywood chris standing on my chest. That leading man machismo that inspires the rotating front door of Superhero Front men. Country music by men who wear cowboy hats only in public and libertarian revolution musicians; Who else, but the future of the Western Man? I have these dreams about being pulled forward by a front-faced Chris and being told “We Have To Do This.”

It is then that the X button appears, that symbol now old enough that we can start seriously calling it a glyph in ways that don’t require a videogame character to be breaking the fourth wall. Maybe I’ve been coming down from a high after playing Marvel’s Square Enix’s The Avengers last year and still breaking out in cold sweats over it. A whole character action game featuring people who look somewhere between not enough like hollywood stars, and a little too much to not be unnerving. We can’t afford the stars, but there’s a hope for the fans of twinkle eyed men named Chris that we might one day own their digitized voices and bodies forever. We can have our Chris, and eat him too.

What follows the X button? A half remembered slurry of character action concepts that have been riding in my head all through the last few years. Covid has happened and all of us have had lots of time for videogames. Videogames in VR, videogames on PC, videogames on the console of your choice. We’re passed the movement to judge our own morals for wanting to play Returnal on a crisp, white shelled Playstation 5. We’re so far passed it we’re ready to celebrate whatever comes out next.
The future is here, again, and now: a new console generation, a new hardware war. All of this shit feels so desperate now, while we scream about the planet burning, isn’t there time for a little of The Avengers? There’s still DLC planned you know.

During a pandemic that caused one of the largest upward transfers of wealth we’ve ever seen, it also caused an almost entirely upward transfer of attention. If it wasn’t The Mandalorian it was Wandavision. I know I’m going off on a tangent about what’s on TV, but during the long haul there was exactly two things to do: go hiking and watch TV. Go outside, as long as you don’t see anyone else. I found myself in a situation where I was doing a lot of both and now here we are: getting fussy enough to write an article about it.

Here’s the real infinite promise of the metaverse – a place to live out all of your favorite TV shows. Don’t just pretend to be your favorite character, be the person who’s played them on the television too. Welcome to the future of videogames: it might looks like live action marvel movies with inserted setpieces.

Some cruel individual out there wants that for videogames. They want Halo Forever, The Halo TV Show, and the Halo TV show to seamlessly enter the world of videogames. We’re beyond skins and unlockables now, we’re so far beyond DLC and content packs and season packs that the future looks like an avalanche of digital playsets that get locked up and deleted forever as soon as the next thing comes around the corner. How can you get anyone to buy shit a second time if you can’t get them to accept that it needs to be thrown away, first?

We’ve finally done it – we’re decentralizing videogames. Pure big lettered Content is going into and out of the Vault so fast you can’t keep up. If it’s not X-Men characters in Fortnite, it’s gonna be Dune characters in Destiny. All we’ve gotta do is mine the well, make enough for everybody and then tell them there’s just not enough to go around. See, the gamers don’t get it: there’s not enough gigabytes flowing around to keep the uh, sky of Glass or whatever people who play Destiny get excited about. The metaverse is all around us, and it looks like videogames.

There’s less people in the real world than I remember. A whole lot less of friendly faces. Every time I make the stupid decision to go out for an after work beer, or go to the grocery store because you’re not the only one who fell down a culinary rabbit hole on youtube, I realize I see a lot less faces. Some of the friendly ones, some of the not so friendly ones. That infinite texture that other people provide, it’s like someone took a vegetable peeler to Planet Earth and just carved them right off.

While all of our attention was directed to (ire or not) bad pulp television and comic book storytelling, a whole lot of people will never come back: I can feel it on my body. My already weak skin has picked up a status effect from Coronavirus that leaves parts of my skin red and agitated. I’ve been carrying it around with me for months. Itchy. Tasty. I wish.

While we were all occupied with television or the wealth transfer there’s been a transfer of attention too, or pop culture – whatever we use to refer to the things that Americans believe in now. Don’t you know? Over the pandemic – the marvel superhero Falcon managed to solve Racism. If you say something loud enough into a camera that’s being recorded, it’s gonna be posted online long enough people might start to believe it.

Somewhere, someone’s doing yoga with money signs over their fucking eyeballs. We’ve all gotten into something holistic, now, right? I’m into holistic videogames: it’s still about telling stories and interacting with art. I hope so. During the Pandemic, we saw Ugly, Ugly videogames get released. There’s that whole part of our world that can only mythologize the past: what do we call them again? They released Pandemic Videogames too.

For a brief moment in our recent history, there were enough samurai games to sate a type of bloodlust that can only be resolved by brandishing a Katana at family members during a manic episode. It’s, at the very least, a prescient enough memory that reading a joke about it can put me right back into the place. Ghost of Tsushima and all of it’s pandering to the Past, a completely novel section of Nerds that we’re just now learning how to describe was all anyone was talking about.

There’s been an upward transfer alright, but I’m going to die making the same amount of money I’ve always managed to make, so who fucking cares? All everyone is talking about is if you’ve played Elden Ring, Returnal, Ghost of Tsushima, The Mandalorian and did you see who’s talking about it? All of your friends.

There’s too much happening, but not enough at the same time. We need a new console generation right? We’ve gotta have something normal: even if it’s a war, even if it’s a billionaire, we’ve gotta have something normal. We all agree that business is ugly, but let’s cross our fingers for a little business-as-usual around here.

Ghost of Tsushima and Sekiro aren’t the same game, but when a creator starts stealing from their past and doesn’t even know why, they’ve gotta fill up that blank space with everything around them. There might be two ideas of what videogames look like, and that’s terrifying, right? The games people I know talk about are so different from what I feel like, the pop culture ephemera choking retail worker and service worker apartments has to be some kind of escape, right? The hannya mask my relatives bought during the holidays because they just couldn’t get the Ghost of Tsushima off of their mind, that blank tapestry that manages to filter american nationalism through Samurai Movies has to mean something, right?

Press X to turn on the black and white filter. There’s the glyph. And for a brief moment, give me something to pay attention to.

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