Conspicuous Slop Consumption
How daily habits reproduce themselves...
Gamer-Americans are the most powerful race in the world and it’s time to rise up! Let’s take a mind expanding dip into smarmy pool where chud alienation, commodity fetishization, and Anarcho-Marxist theory intersect. Xbox marks the spot!
Enjoy!
The recent release of Starfield by blockbuster game developer Bethesda Softworks has produced an asteroid sized motherlode of gamer outrage and establishment countersignaling in response to the game featuring pronoun selection during character creation and unsubtle overrepresentation of homosexual, transsexual, and BIPOC folk™.
Leftist and self styled centrists treated us to the usual minimizing language about how little time it takes to select pronouns, or pretending that the various racial and sexual representation decisions made in the game’s development were anything but a calculated decision from Bethesda — in short, the classic defense of “it’s not happening, but it’s good that it is”. This is standard rhetoric, and reasonable considering they’re just retroactively justifying their own preferred culture.
The more alarming dysfunction is that any outrage is even occurring among ‘the right’ over a major video game release in the year 2023.
Once Were Gamers
Anyone conscious of gaming over the past decade will be familiar with the social messaging trends being pushed by large studios. The transition from the juvenile “big boobs and big guns” marketing of the 90s into the “a strong black woman on every cover” model was certainly complete by 2020 and has been exhaustively discussed. Whatever your feelings on Gamergate may be, it has long ago been squashed from the highest levels and all identifiable supporters driven into the hinterlands, far from mainstream game development and journalism. For several years now there has been a clear regime in charge of western game development, and it does not even pretend to offer anything outside the liberal worldview.
We’ve all seen it, and yet huge swathes of right-leaning men continue to buy and play major game releases. More than just play them, they conspicuously consume them by posting videos, screenshots, live reactions to various cringe-inducing spectacles. At this point there is a predictable surge in this activity surrounding every major game trailer and release.
And while there are fig-leaf excuses for exploiting faux outrage — namely that it raises awareness, is simply good entertainment, or perhaps pressures the company into moderating their message — these claims ring increasingly hollow after nearly a decade of uninterrupted losses. What has developed as a result is a bitter right-wing gaming culture that on the content creation side often relies on outrage towards the product itself to attract viewers, or on the consumer side attempts to cherry-pick from a dwindling selection of new releases for a game that directly insults the buyer the least.
Seeing all of this as a former gamer myself, who is still spiritually bound to the tribe, I feel a sorrow akin to Sitting Bull’s at seeing his once great people confined to reservations, living on the largesse of their oppressors. He once said, “God made me an Indian, but not a reservation Indian.” I was not made to be a consolidated corporate-era gamer.
I feel the sting of a collective humiliation watching my people habitually return to the same trough, served gloatingly by the very people who despise them. In bowing their head and making an offering of sixty dollars and forty hours of their life, the gamer reproduces their own low-status in a manner I can put no more succinctly than the opening of Fredy Perlman’s 1969 essay, The Reproduction of Daily Life:
The everyday practical activity of tribesmen reproduces, or perpetuates, a tribe. This reproduction is not merely physical, but social as well. Through their daily activities the tribesmen do not merely reproduce a group of human beings; they reproduce a tribe, namely a particular social form within which this group of human beings performs specific activities in a specific manner. The specific activities of the tribesmen are not the outcome of "natural" characteristics of the men who perform them, the way the production of honey is an outcome of the "nature" of a bee. The daily life enacted and perpetuated by the tribesman is a specific social response to particular material and historical conditions.
The everyday activity of slaves reproduces slavery. Through their daily activities, slaves do not merely reproduce themselves and their masters physically; they also reproduce the instruments with which the master represses them, and their own habits of submission to the master's authority. To men who live in a slave society, the master-slave relation seems like a natural and eternal relation. However, men are not born masters or slaves. Slavery is a specific social form, and men submit to it only in very particular material and historical conditions.
The practical everyday activity of wage-workers reproduces wage labor and capital. Through their daily activities, "modern" men, like tribesmen and slaves, reproduce the inhabitants, the social relations and the ideas of their society; they reproduce the social form of daily life. Like the tribe and the slave system, the capitalist system is neither the natural nor the final form of human society; like the earlier social forms, capitalism is a specific response to material and historical conditions.
While Perlman and I have very different ideas about the magical word “capitalism” and what is likely to succeed it, I’ve always found this essay fascinating and think he conceptually hits the nail on the head. We are what we eat. We are what we build. We are what we play.
This is literally true in the case of behavior modeling, as our children will instinctively observe and imitate our behaviors at a literal level; but also occurs at civilizational and subcultural levels, as higher status individuals can either normalize or make verboten activities such as bodybuilding, soy consumption, or certain assumed gender dynamics.
Within this framework, we must ask ourselves what tribe of man would voluntarily pay for the pleasure, and more importantly invest his limited attention, towards a game that is a monument to the creator’s hatred against his own tribe. If we view the act of play as a constructive one, then this tribe of men is building and rebuilding the same monument of gameplay and narrative experience in collaboration with the creator, again and again. Even if the right-leaning player is occasionally turning towards the camera for a wry comment and a smirk at the creator’s ideology, there is no mistaking who is the instructive master and who is the receiving slave in this situation.
How many times must this tribe of slaves rebuild this monument to their own reduced status? The work, as a reconstruction of our daily lives, is perpetually ongoing and self reifying by its nature. There will always be another plausibly politically-neutral game coming out in the future to delude ourselves with, just as there will always be easy outrage clicks for responding to the obvious rug-pull of its release. But by playing the game we are reproducing our own status as dopamine slaves to the existing power structure.
Reproduce Dignity
I’d like to show a touch of self awareness here by saying that I realize video games are not the most pressing issue in life, but they are important since I believe a daily dose of frivolous entertainment is a necessary and precious thing, regardless of form. But a tree is known by its fruits, and the defensive snark of the modern gamer-American is not an empowering thing, and neither is closing our eyes and pretending that the culture shift of the past decade has not already happened.
What I am asking my fellow tribesmen for is a zero-tolerance policy towards any form of entertainment that injures their dignity. We’ve all spent hundreds of hours in the slop trough, and what few novel surprises may remain there are simply not worth the injury. At a certain point the material conditions of the world may have made such gaming a seemingly necessary part of life, but at this point it is a relationship only maintained by your own unexamined habits, not a lack of alternatives.
So, at the risk of sounding trite, what I am suggesting is to break this cycle simply by engaging with entertainment that is less complex to produce yet still easily distributable, and thus less reliant on mega-corporations. This would include novels, comic books, board games, gardening, fitness, or even the products of independent video game studios. There is a deep well of material for any hobby that could keep you busy for an entire lifetime, and there are entire ecosystems of small scale alternative producers to explore, some of which may even be ideologically aligned with you, and many of which would actually be receptive to your thoughtful criticisms.
Lastly, it is equally important to avoid habitually engaging with “reaction media” to products that hate your tribe. At this late date, wasting more than a minute of your time dwelling on the latest desecration of Star Wars or some Bethesda property is the ultimate act of slave psychology. An unhealthy and completely unproductive cross of nostalgia and low personal agency wasted ruminating over failed sequels which are only granted legitimacy by intellectual property laws.
So let’s all be a little bit brave, try something new, and find joy in things we can respect ourselves for living within, rather than languishing unexamined in the same habitual gutter.
"If we view the act of play as a constructive one, then this tribe of men is building and rebuilding the same monument of gameplay and narrative experience in collaboration with the creator, again and again. Even if the right-leaning player is occasionally turning towards the camera for a wry comment and a smirk at the creator’s ideology, there is no mistaking who is the instructive master and who is the receiving slave in this situation."
This excerpt superbly points to more black pills than it cures. There is a concept known as the "male sedation hypothesis", that stipulates that the need to "play" is fundamentally a memetic drive for the intrinsically social animal that is man. "Play" creates and reinforces community bonding behavior through a reciprocal cycle of behaviors that serve as a form of simulcramated synonym for tribal behaviors such as warfare, group cohesion, status signaling, and genital grafting. Video games "hack" this intrinsic drive for action-oriented goal striving within men to force them to spend their energies within its self-exciting feedback loop; like the pubescent mormon and his mother's sock or the Turk and his particularly big buttocked boy, this innate drive for energy expulsion will go through any hurdle or bottleneck to see itself expressed. Videos, games, and porn can be filled to the brim with lizzo-fied females and portray all men of European descent as nothing but eunuchs and slaves for matriarchs and their morals, and men will still indulge in them—what else would we do? We need to release this energy somehow, and indulging in it with an ironic smile in solidarity with our brothers on how "woke" everything is gives us enough of a dopamine hit of clever criticism on the regime's hegemony without actually spending the necessary resources and time on choosing a path of "exit" and creating alternate forms of community and energy expression.
Great thoughts as always, and your closing thoughts are precisely why I gave up on my PubLunch reviews. Offenses to the modern man are in every new book, TV show, film, comic book, and even albums of music. To resist eating from the trough is mandatory in this world.
As an aside, I have always despised Bethesda. I'm waiting for the day they finally sink.