How do you view video games? The average video game player is probably the one who just plays the latest Call of Duty or whatever shooter that’s popular these days, and that’s probably all they will play. And this is especially true if you’re in a third-world country. Most people I know who “play video games” don’t even know major video game franchises outside of their competitive shooter niche and even if they do know they exist, they probably haven’t bothered to sit down and, say, play a single-player campaign from start to finish.
No matter how hard you try to spin it, a Shipment TDM game will never have the same amount of weight as watching a movie, or listening to an album from start to finish. And if this is what the average gamer’s experience of a video game is, it’s no wonder why video game discourse is the way it is. When EA shut down Bioware a while back, most people on Twitter and other online spaces are somehow cheering for it. The same happened when Halo got assigned to Activision. But I’m sorry, no one outside of Bioware knows how to make a Mass Effect title, and even tho 343 Industries Halo Studios fucked up time and time again making Halo, their latest entry, Halo Infinite, is very close to being a classic Halo title and I doubt Activision would be able to figure this out in a short amount of time. To these people, video games are as disposable as McDonald’s, when a video game franchise dies, it simply doesn’t matter as they will just move on to the next big thing.
And this kind of disposable mentality has crept into video game design as a whole. Disbanding lobbies in modern multiplayer shooter is probably the best example of this. You literally just throw away every match you play, you don’t get to see them again and since the people you play with only last for one match anyways, no one uses text chat or voice chat. Games have no community features like community servers, clans or mod tools. Most games that come out nowadays also seem to blend in as a whole, and they just feel like a different spin on something you’ve already seen before.