The Most Impactful Change is No Change at All
2Gaming Under the Influence @ Green Dragon CVR with Mike + Alex; F**kin' Video Games.
Sometimes, says Zizek, the “first gesture to provoke a change in the system is to withdraw, to do nothing”[i]; some times, “doing nothing”, making no change at all, can be the most violent or [counter-] revolutionary thing to do[ii].
In an age where journalists think describing something as proper to “two generations ago” or “off the pace of other games” is a slight[iii]; where an incessant desire to inflate the reach of the medium and provide a force to “change the world”[iv] has precipitated some of the worst, subscription-based, live-service, hollywood-chundering empty husk games history has seen; in such an age, perhaps the best thing to do is NOTHING [new] AT ALL: to return to the old, to the games that informed our very conception of what the medium was capable of to this point [which we have since failed and departed from].
2019 signified a general revival of autotelic game design, with major publishers like EA and Activision leaving live service behind in favor of traditional, novel-style experiences like Sekiro & Jedi Fallen Order. Control, Death Stranding & the Outer Worlds, along with Final Fantasy VIIIR, Nioh 2, Ghosts & Cyberpunk in 2020, further demonstrated against the “professionals” that AAA single-player games are very much alive, Now in 2021, after a bevy of remakes and aggressively referential works like Bravely Default II, we are in a position to understand that the counter-revolution that began in 2019 has consisted in one episode after another of developers doing NOTHING [new] AT ALL. Our cultural taste for spectacle and novelty is displaced while culture surrounding games is plunged into the the game, not as a marketing event but a transhistorical form that persists through time. Inactivity in terms of addition or superficial progress is warranted by the persistent ontological texture and value of the [form of the] game itself outside the cycle of hype and economic preponderance that tends to accompany major game releases.
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