Perhaps it’s just because I heard a clip from “This American Life†last night portraying the geniuses of Wall Street as the most self-pitying sons of bitches in the universe. They haven’t been victimized so much as the remaining 99% of America, much citizens of developing nations upon which the US squats, but they see themselves as unfairly targeted, standing right in the crosshairs of a witch hunt led by President Obama of all people, to destroy America starting with the wizards of Wall Street.
Recorded conversations from the show captured an almost pathological inability to recognize that Wall Street failed, that it was rescued at public expense, or that a lot of little people were severely hurt in the fallout even as Wall Street was rescued from its own greed and irresponsible behavior. There is no gratitude, no sense of having dodged a bullet, no sense of responsibility, either in having made the mess or to help recover from it. The closest the interviewees come is an abrasive, even abusive belief that they came out on top because they’re “smarter†than the rest of the country—that is, they ripped us off more skillfully than the rest of us could rip off someone else. Coupled, of course, with an unassailable sense of the unfairness of the general public trying to get some of the money back, like some kind of rip-off.
The journalist reporting on these abusive little turds likened them to the former inner circle of Saddam Hussein, on which he’d also reported, thieves and murderers who consider themselves the greatest victims in the world. It was an infuriating expose, and pushed a lot of my buttons.
So maybe I’m just hyper-sensitive right now to the presumption of privilege as a fundamental right among the privileged. Maybe I’m already primed to notice it in the game community after reading a complaint about Dragon Age II spending too much attention on anyone but straight males. Or maybe, as a fan of dead and buried 4x and puzzle-adventure genres, I’d get cheesed off anyway. But the leading letter to the editors inPC Gamer magazine this month cheesed me off. It begins, “Is it just me, or has the PC been experiencing a dearth of decent shooters lately?†and goes on to accuse shooters of being Call of Duty clones and decry the lack of novelty.
Cry me a river, shooter boy. Imagine what it must feel like to the rest of the game world, as first-person shooters, and fantasy games made with a FPS engine, and puzzle games made with an FPS engine, and adventure games made with an FPS engine, have taken up 95% or more of the gaming shelves for, oh… the past ten years. And if it isn’t a shooter, it’s a first-person stabber. If there’s no innovation in FPS, perhaps it’s because there’s nothing left to innovate. It’s been done! Because almost every big budget game in the world is a shooter! You’ve got FPS in renaissance Italy, FPS in outer space, FPS in the wild west, FPS with bows, FPS with bazookas, FPS with zombies, FPS with robots, FPS with flashlights, FPS upside-down, FPS with respawning, FPS with scoring, FPS with teams, FPS online, FPS in chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry, and then all over again in reverse alphabetical order just for the nostalgia of it. Shooters, with a little help from WoW, have sucked all the air, and money, out of the gaming industry, and you’re the poor guy who isn’t getting enough attention? Boo fucking hoo.
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