DOJ |OT| SUMMIT NOW SUMMIT NOW

[TVC15]

Lol Evilore unbanned Manabyte? That’s so pathetic. He’s like Tom Steyer but poor.

[Crumb]

Damn Statham got the boot? Another X-bro down 

[railGUN]

https://www.resetera.com/threads/aaron-carter-steals-art-for-promotion-acts-like-an-on-twitter.165466/post-28363747

It's wonder the thing about grabbing random art on the web then sticking it on a t-shirt hasn't really blown up yet.

It's wonder grabbing all or most of professionally written news articles then sticking them on a web forum covered in ads hasn't really blown up yet.

 

[Uncle]

[Uncle]

https://www.resetera.com/threads/wapo-how-the-rise-of-skywalker-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-alt-right-sw-trolls.165510/post-28367440

Since we seem to love those checks notes memes, let me try one.

Maybe next time don't wage some culture war on the back of a...

*checks notes*

... billion dollar commercial product from a mega corporation.

Media can normalize good and bad things.

 

[Pissy F Benny]

The star war is for nazis now?

 

[Boredfrom]

Well, that is genuinely pathetic.

[clothedmacuser]

https://www.resetera.com/threads/wapo-how-the-rise-of-skywalker-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-alt-right-sw-trolls.165510/post-28367440

Since we seem to love those checks notes memes, let me try one.

Maybe next time don't wage some culture war on the back of a...

*checks notes*

... billion dollar commercial product from a mega corporation.

Media can normalize good and bad things.

 

LOL, that explains Crossing Eden's education in a nutshell. Gifs and Youtube vids that they already agree with.


https://www.resetera.com/threads/warren-campaign-might-not-be-source-of-cnn-story-about-bernie-sanders-saying-a-woman-cant-win-see-staff-post.165453/post-28372544

Excel getting ignored and RedMercury the only one quoting her.   


RedMercury later doing his "please, we do not have to talk disrespectful here.  Please don't offend my person as it is untoward," routine.

[nudemacusers]

Sad state when some as corporate and milquetoast as Star Wars, a movie franchise front for selling plastic baubles, is the driving force of culture discourse in so many corners.

Power rangers missed its shot, could use some Rita Repulsa idpol think pieces right now.

[ResetBanBot]

Dear ResetEra, please have a thread about this: http://www.nathalielawhead.com/candybox/what-its-like-sharing-your-metoo-with-kotaku-a-cautionary-tale

Thank you.

[ResetBanBot]

ACTIONS HAVE CONSEQUENCES

Especially when you want to make a accusation of rape by proxy without ever saying the words rape yourself, how cowardly. Good on Kotaku for putting the legal liability on the accuser, I hope she gets sued into oblivion.

[ResetBanBot]

People who stan a major political party are lolcows. It's like stanning Disney or the MPAA.

[VomKriege]

How “male” of him to expect a woman to do twice the work for the same pay.

I can't tell what's real anymore.

https://www.resetera.com/threads/sanders-considering-making-his-vice-president-also-treasury-secretary.165470/post-28362093

[VomKriege]

https://www.resetera.com/threads/us-poliera-2020-ot-1-the-anti-benghazi-read-staff-post.162687/post-28376751

"Bernie is secretly alt right ?"

[BIONIC]

[VomKriege]

Ha, never. I've never spent that much effort on a joke. It's been a long, long time since I made anything that long. Actually I don't think I ever have. It's exhausting. Took me idk 4 hours to make the first draft before I cut, rewrote, and clarified it which took another idk hour and a half. But what can I say it's been in my head for a few days now.

https://www.resetera.com/threads/sonys-ps4-exclusive-horizon-zero-dawn-is-coming-to-pc-this-year-sources-tell-kotaku.165134/post-28382345

[VomKriege]

Thank you for this great morning read. This is the longest and most thoughtout forum post I’ve ever read on the whole internet. Mad respect.

[headwalk]

Imagine typing all of that because PS4 lost an exclusive...

https://www.resetera.com/threads/sonys-ps4-exclusive-horizon-zero-dawn-is-coming-to-pc-this-year-sources-tell-kotaku.165134/page-85

spoiler (click to show/hide)

Alright.

Time to break it down.

The following has been stewing in my mind for quite some time now and it's a big topic but I'm gonna go crazy so I'm just going to sit down and talk about how otherwise perfectly rational, normal people reach this silliness.




Okay so, I want to start this on the right tone. This is not meant to lambast or demean anyone, but rather analyze. So, first of all I'm gonna admit. I understand it. I'm not going to defend it. I think it's dumb as hell. But I get it. I have that gut reaction sometimes.

Oh who am I kidding, I have that gut reaction a lot. I'm an emotional guy. I understand and identify with all of the silliness that Playstation fanboys may be feeling all the way to expressing loudly or wherever on that spectrum they may fall.


Gonna break it down one point at a time. Originally when I wrote this I'd said simple. Uh...this isn't going to be "simple" as in "short." But hey yeah maybe someone who actually is seriously doing this will read this and get it about themselves.

And I don't think I'm a genius for explaining any of this; I just don't see any other break down posts that aren't just reductive or insulting. So I want to explore this.


In the end, and I promise this is not a slight or meant to demean anyone, but surprise, I know, none of the behavior or concern in this thread is purely logical, but instead at its heart, sheer sentimentality. Though I think this particular brand of it is worth exploring. Like, Shocker! I know, I know, wow Chettlar so insightful it's just feelings. But whatever I want to explore this.

Video games are emotional experiences for us as human beings. But emotion is not as simple as the present feeling someone is experiencing. Emotion is a vast sea of experience. It is informed very much by headspaces we inhabit. Video games are incredibly good at creating those headspaces, and when you get consoles associated with those emotional recipes and the unique flavors they produce, the emotional attachment gets really, really strong. Really strong.

Video games are so good at creating these headspaces because they affect so many things that other art mediums do at one time. I mean, a song alone can create this wonderful emotional landscape that can move people to tears, cause them anguish, turn their day around, give them resolve, change their minds on unrelated topics, and in some rare cases literally turn their entire lives around. Even wordless songs can do all this. It's kinda crazy. And this is just ONE aspect of what games do. Games are so total in how experiential they have the potential to be. They are engaging, engrossing, and immersive, if not in one respect, like suspension of disbelief of an immersive world, than in another, like the total engagement in a competitive online match for example. A lot of idiots (I was one of these idiots at one point) want to argue that some games are just pure logic and appeal to them because they are just logical people. Mostly these people are self impressed adolescent nerds (like me hi). Some of these self impressed "adolescent" nerds are in their 30s and 40s. But really, while they may indeed enjoy the logic they are engaging with, them enjoying it is already a bunch of emotional trails running at once. You can't separate out emotion form any part of human experience.

Everything you experience serves to create that emotional landscape which then informs the context from which all emotions experienced within are formed. UI Designers are no less important than any other designers for this very reason. The Gestalt of the experience you have in a game is, well, Gestalt. It is everything that exists to creates that experience for you. The sound of pressing your console's power button, the sound of the hard drive engaging, the start of a chime or melody or chord, the bleeps and bloops of the menus — these all serve to create an emotional reference point for everything that happens after. And this itself always has a point of origin inspired by whatever your impression of what a video game console and what it can provide you might be. When a console is new, our brains, with the expectation of fun and excitement however we got that expectation, usually as kids and/or absorbed in some way from society around us, lap up every bit of it, even if consciously we do or don't pay direct attention ourselves.

This is easier when we are young too, hence nostalgia. I've seen it observed that when I miss an old game, I am not missing the game alone, but really what I miss is being a child. I think this is close to the truth but not quite. Being a child was way different and kinda sucky in a lot of ways. Really this is just trading one simple misconception for another. What we miss is our abstract idea of being a kid, and that idea is often the left over remains of those headspaces we remember most. Oregon Trail is, for me for example, an emblem, or a mental icon of that entire headspace I was in while a kid. That head space was so powerful because as a kid it was more relevant to me than it ever could be now as an adult. There was little else to compete with it. I was a kid soaking up everything around me. Of course every emotional landscape I created would be so visceral, so potent.

As an adult, it isn't so potent. Not the headspaces my mind continually creates, and not the headspaces I remember and sometimes try to relive. I know that I still create these emotional experience schema type things because they are what replace the old ones. Every time I've gone back and played an old game, the experience I had with a kid is briefly remembered more strongly than my memory, and then often snuffed out by my new, present experience, and yet not totally. That experience still is a part of me, and has informed who I am and the experiences I can have that have come after.

For some of us, as those experiences become less visceral and our adult brains become less plastic and less prone to soaking up experiences and creating new powerful emotional landscapes to exist in (which again crazily, we some how often seem to just, not realize are there), we begin to miss being children, when the world was so much bigger and brighter, and our emotions were so much stronger and less bogged down by real life and our more set thoughts that come from being a big old boring grownup. And yet, we continue to have these associations. Maybe they aren't as strong, but they exist. It's just that often they are more strongly informed by their ability to appeal to those we most fondly remember.

I have no overwhelming preference to Xbox or Playstation or Nintendo, or whatever other games, because growing up for me personally, I only had some point and click games and a lot of educational games all on an old office computer. Some hunting games too, which I enjoyed exploring nature in. So for me, exploring in a game for example remains a lot of fun. That said I know for me that the experience of playing on an xbox 360 is a bit stronger than playing on a PS3 because that was the beginning of my experiencing all of modern gaming. It was where I experienced games that changed who I am as a person to this day. Anything that references those feelings will continue to be compelling for me, because it will help remind me of those headspaces I most heavily associate with playing and being emotionally invested in a video game. Or at least it's a major part of that for me. Humans are complex. (That said, PS3 was also the place I experienced Journey and Demon's Souls for the first time, and is the more recent place I played NieR, all in my later teens, so, say, that beginning orchestral tuning when you turn one on will continue to be powerful for me as well).

To sum this up as well as I can, experiential context is an inextricable part of what creates the emotional landscapes through which we "enjoy" video games, or even more accurately, what that enjoyment basically is.

(And to add. The people designing these things know this. Why do you think they design those beeps and boops? Why do companies so strongly contest their rights to their branding and imagery? They only control part of that puzzle, it is important to keep in mind, but it still is a part.)

Alright, so how is this stuff that all probably seems like stuff you generally sorta know maybe didn't really think about but kinda noticed relevant?

Well, so think about how powerful all that is. Like I really hope I've communicated how important this stuff is. Everyone experiences it differently, but everyone, to some degree, has SOMETHING that affects how they experience video games, a lot of it honestly probably too difficult to really accurately totally and completely enumerate. And for so so so many of them, understandably the thing they most powerfully identify with enjoying a video game is the console upon which they play. There's always many many more aspects — like for me the computer room in which our couple little office computers were housed on the side of our basement's big room — but I'd wager it's a huge component for a lot of people. It's a bit silly, but everyone has something that sort of engages their gamer brain and all the emotional ..."baggage" has too much negative...baggage associated with it, but you get what I mean. My point is that everyone has various things that to them create that emotional landscape context, and for many people to some degree, the console is a major component. This is true for PC gamers too. Again, it's a universal human trait. I mean, as a curiosity to observe at very least, why do people adorn their gaming PC's with "gamer" aesthetic? If you are not one such person, you are not "above" needing some sort of physical or aural or luminous or in some other way emotional trappings of experiential context. It's just that you associate that garish aesthetic with adolescence or obnoxious "gamer" behavior, so they are not a part of what creates a headspace you enjoy. For others, they just might. All sorts of things could be for a PC gamer. Maybe clicking on the discord icon is a little sparkle of flavor as part of the ritual the begins your gaming session. Again, not something you consciously think about unless you happen to notice, but nevertheless a part of your experience. Heck, while I'll be the first to criticize Epic and the EGS, it is impossible for me to deny that there absolutely is some sentimentality in one's preference for a Steam only experience. That is not ALL of it, but that is a discussion for another time. Suffice to say it is impossible to ignore that that experience does exist to flavor any perhaps logically sound or petty discussion on the subject.

So how does this apply here?

Well, when a lifelong playstation gamer moves away from playstation to PC for example, that is all gone. It's just gone. Worse than gone. PC might already have its own associations in their heads that are decidedly negative for that person.

It isn't as if they can't enjoy video games any more. It isn't as if this isn't something that can't be adjusted. Like I said earlier it absolutely can and is continually adjusted. All your memories are just memories of the last time you remembered something anyway. People are plastic. Maybe in some ways less as we grow older, but still essentially plastic. But we can't deny the fact that context and headspace for which people enjoy a given thing, especially if that is an emotional thing, like, oh I don't know, a video game, are not always easy to let go of.

This manifests itself in different ways. It's why you will never convince, with logic, sound as it may be, a person to change their mind on something that was not born of logic in the first place. The fact is if Joe Gamer associates gaming with his Xbox, and his PC with the office, then an Xbox game being on PC, even if the experience is so much better on a PC, and he could make a cheap gaming PC with more options if he wanted to, you aren't going to change his mind. Heck, even Self Aware Joe Gamer may not change his mind, because you can't just fix a deeply rooted emotional association with logic. Not that easily and never completely. Now, part of just allowing yourself to grow as a human being is recognizing those limitations and realizing you can change them and experience new and different things. But also part of being understanding and emotionally intelligent on the other hand is recognizing that emotional association and this specific concept I've referred to with the shorthand of "headspace" and "emotional landscape" so far, are all part of what make us human beings. It's okay to let them be how they are, and learn to both expand them while also taking advantage of how powerful they are if indulged. If you truly love video games as a medium, both are valuable skills to develop.

The trouble we get into then here is when people attempt to rationalize their emotional experiences down to very simple point of interest. They associate mentally a noticeable thing with a noticeable emotion, and here's where it gets kind of funny but interesting, then create an emotional attachment to the idea of that noticeable thing ex post facto. So maybe a given sequence in a game was subconsciously extremely immersive for someone, but also there was a thing that happened in that sequence that they associate with that feeling. They will then try to convey that that thing they associated with the feeling was really really good and definitely was the source of that feeling they got, even if someone else who was not immersed in that experience can point to all the flaws in the thing that happened and how that thing isn't so great because it didn't affect them in the same way. You can say "well it's all subjective," but that is rather lazy.

Sorry if that was a bit confusing. Maybe for example, all sorts of things you do but probably mostly don't notice leading up to and including a given sequence in a game create a feeling of great pathos for you, and so then you are more receptive and ready to accept something as sad or moving. So a scene happens that you find really sad and moving. Then someone else points out to you how crappy and poor the writing was and how silly it sounds. That person didn't experience the same things as you to create that experience. You did, but didn't realize it. So for you, you point out an awkwardly and unrealistically written but earnest scene as something that created a moving experience, when really it was the whole of that gestalt leading up to that moment that enabled you to be receptive to that scene and not notice that ordinarily you'd find it silly. So when someone points out to you that the dialogue is silly and not realistic at all, you are incensed. How could they see that dialogue as silly? Well, it's pretty simple. Essential aspects that lead up to that experience didn't work for them. Just as equally they have probably experienced and enjoyed something you found silly because various things did not work for you. Heck, even if you both enjoyed the scene, different things may have been what did it for each of you, even if in English you'd list the same basic reason you enjoyed it, ANDDDDD, you could both be wrong in whatever simple thing you are ascribing the experience to. Most of what makes a game well beloved then is, I feel like it's pretty logical to conclude, is when it is so effective at nailing everything that everyone is able to experience what it sets out to experience for them.

SPOILER:

(Heck, this failure is exactly what causes that really awkward moment when a teenage boy tries to show some girl a cool fight scene from this anime episode #2489 where goku uses his 9.38 million power chi to suplex the pokemon demon master Doki Baka Kun. The fight scene, I hate to break it to you 16 year old m- uh you, but that fight scene wasn't that cool. But that doesn't make it bad either! And it doesn't make you silly for experiencing the power conveyed by that scene. It's more complex than that. The scene itself isn't the thing that made you feel that way on its own. In this case it's the entire 2,488 — oh okay we all know episode #1433 is not canon any more I GET IT CHETTLA- I mean you, okay fine the entire 2,487 — episodes that preceded this glorious fight are the source of your emotion.

And there is no way this cute girl who is pretending she doesn't know you should have showered like at least one this week because she likes your dorky enthusiasm can ever, ever feel the thing you want to share with her, because nothing you explain will convey the full power of what you have experienced. At best it could encourage her to go experience that herself if that sounds exciting to experience. Sure the episode was an emotional release for you, but you are ignoring a lot of flaws in it and how badly animated it is and how actively it takes some people out of the experience by how very average it is, because for you personally that wasn't enough to override the emotional experience you had).

My point is, that often we can mistake the things that really create experience for us for silly oversimplifications. That thing we ascribe it to might not even have anything to do with the true source of that experience. Even those of us who scorn intellectual analysis as boring and ruining the fun and magic of art and video games do this. Because all of us want to feel justified in feeling the way we do.

That's really what it comes down to. Our self image is threatened when the things we most deeply experience are trivialized. We have to justify our experiences because anything we deeply enjoy is reflective of who we are as people. I am not Chettlar because I find Viva Pinata delightful, and me being Chettlar isn't really accurately the reason I enjoy it; neither really totally begets the other. The fact is me being Chettlar is now for the past 7 years or so me being the guy who enjoys Viva Pinata, at least to a small degree. That's...kinda what people mean when they say art is a part of who they are, in my opinion. When I write music I show the world a part of me I can't express any other way. When I enjoy someone else's music, that is me responding to that person, and creating something else. An experience. A..me..unit sorta. That which I call my identity is amended whether I like it or not. Why else do people even lightly interested in a various piece of media adorn themselves either with avatars or memorabilia? Part of our identity is what we enjoy. When I justify why I enjoy a thing, I am justifying ME. And at some point somewhere with some thing, you reading this do that too. If you've read this, I've affected you whether you like it or not, whether you think I'm onto something or just an over-intellectual sycophant (I mean, I just used the word sycophant). As I talked about earlier, video games are some of the most involving of all mediums. Sure this combines with video games being enjoyed and created in huge part by anti-social nerds, a lot of whom never had to grow past being children and so reflect this reality in unfortunate and sometimes horrendous ways. But video games were always going to have such a strong effect on the people who play them, because by their nature they touch so many parts of us at once.


Alright.

Sooooo

..

Let's plug this all in then. I get the previous part may have been a little boring, but I gotta make sure I establish some common ground here so I can get to the juicy bit. Hopefully the emotional headspace I created for you, lol, wasn't just "who is Chettlar and why has he assaulted me with this skyscraper of text?" I'm trying okay? It's a large topic.


Alright, well.

A lot of Playstation fans, whether they want to admit it or not, and not all of them, but many of them to varying levels, have used exclusives as their preferred means of justifying their being fans of the brand. Not just their purchase, but of the brand. Playstation. What that means for them. What emotional sparks that might gently but maybe imperceptibly begin to flare. I think for some of them, they view themselves as intelligent, discerning and logical people. To support this, they have to believe that the games they play are the best games ever made, or at least top notch in general. A few crappy games they dislike can serve as the sacrificial lambs to demonstrate to themselves and others that they are not mindless fanboys, of course. (Psst, this is not me implying that Sony games are all trash. But the emotional need some may posses more than others to place these exclusives at the very top of the medium is very much related to this. If you find yourself starting to feel defensive right now at that very implication, uh...maybe think about that for a minute. Because I've not even said whether I like Sony games. Actually that's not true, I already have. I mentioned Journey earlier as a hugely impactful game for me, because it truly was for me.) And this isn't to diminish the fact that these games, on their own, have created emotional experiences. Sony makes some quality titles. What I am saying that there is an emotional need to elevate them into the stratosphere that you might not be as immune from as you might think, even if you don't even like Playstation games and you're interests lie elsewhere.

This is why you have a number of journalists comment that they receive a lot of their death threats (if not due to them being anything other than cis male because of that whole big thing gamers™ have a problem with, but that's another topic) most often in relation to, you guessed it, their views on exclusive games. Not just Playstation games. This happens with Nintendo fans and xbox fans. But right now the topic is Playstation, so I've been using that specifically. Plus, let's not pretend that Sony's marketers are totally oblivious to their identity as a brand that builds major impressive cinematic experiences. They're pretty vocal about it honestly. So if you are profoundly affected by that marketing because all marketing in all of the world of branding of any kind is designed with the intent of validating that identity you've created, well, it's working.

Again this is not to specifically attack Playstation fans. Every person has this happen to them, because we are emotional creatures like I discussed before. I'm not even attacking capitalist marketing. Cults do this, states do this, small clubs do this, movements do this — anything and everything that has an interest in existing as an institution in your life does this. And it always will.

But the er, unsavory side of it is Playstation fans being ugly up to and including sending death threats to websites who didn't give Uncharted 3 10/10 reviews before they had even played the game themselves. That behavior didn't come out of the blue. It didn't just come from some aggressively mislead slaves to the marketing of Uncharted 3 who just believed foolishly that the game was great before it was on store shelves. It didn't just come from the black magic power of branding alone. It came from fans whose identity relied on Playstation being a brand of prestigious perfect video games. I will point out, meekly, but frankly, that the forum that was the precursor to this forum, was home to a lot of that senseless ugliness. Maybe not the worst of it, but some of it. But again, it's not senseless really. It's not reasonless most certainly. It's just a result of a lack of self-awareness of how deeply and profoundly the experience and identity of being a Playstation fan, even among those who didn't specifically identify as Playstation fans per se affected these people's views. Again, we all are affected by our emotions even in what we feel are our most rational moments. This is an example of how that applies here. Marketing was part of it, but not even close to all of it. It cannot create this out of nothing.

I feel strongly that trying to dismiss these people as corporate slaves is foolish, I need to note. It is an oversimplification that tries to distance the one making it from their behavior, trying to shift the blame to a system rather than acknowledge the human source of, and life factors leading up to, that behavior, be it as it may that that marketing did play its part in accentuating or accelerating that behavior. I really feel that much of what begat that behavior was something universal to us all. That maybe you reading this aren't so immature as to act in that way, but you are nevertheless affected by your favorite brand of video game, or your favorite happy video game place. It compels you to act the way you do, whether you've taken the time to see it or not.

Hopefully I've kind of shown some of the beautiful and ugly sides of what emotional identity and the headspaces we inhabit, that are so intimately tied to that identity, can be.

When you take away a Sony fan's rationale for defending his identity as a rational, logical, intelligent human being who enjoys Playstation because he is such, you lay bare and naked the fact that his love of Playstation was never truly rational, logical, or intelligent.

Certainly there were rational, logical, and intelligent reasons that may have got him there, but his love in the end comes from a humiliating and simple human reality. He loves his beeps and boops, his whirrs and start-up tune, his click of a face button and clack of an analogue stick. He loves the feeling of the couch under is butt. He loves the dim lamp light. He loves the logo that pops up and tells his lizard brain, "Game time! Fun time! Relax! The physical place you are in only serves along with the lights and sounds and trinkets to create the mental place you so enjoy. We all exist to simultaneously create a sanctuary and catalyst for what you love most." To explain to him his rationale is not, at least entirely, rational despite the part logic may play in it, the reason he loves Playstation, is humiliating, because it eats at, even if he doesn't realize it, the idea that he isn't who he thinks he is. He's a silly, lizard brained animal just like anyone and anything else. And his love for these experiences is inspired in huge part by silly things. And he wants to feel that it comes from intelligence and superiority. It's banal and boring insecurity, regardless of whether he's even ever been conscious of it.

He doesn't want to admit that at the heart of it, the reason he's a Playstation fan is for reasons he probably has already subconsciously written off as humiliating or silly. (He may have, in an ironic lack of self awareness used such an explanation to humiliate someone else and diminish their experience specifically to prop himself up. That isn't necessary at all, but if he's a jerk maybe it's happened. You don't have to be a jerk to have blind spots. We all do.) And he doesn't even have to have gone through ANY of these thoughts either. It probably just manifests in a vague fear of being threatened, his subconscious warning him that this person pushing him to recognize the very banal source of his identity is actually just an asshole, and he shouldn't think about it, but instead be mad at the asshole, or the person responsible. He tries to come up with all kinds of badly thought out rational reasons to defend his position and why his essentially selfish desires shouldn't be exposed as the petty things they are.

And you, the reader, probably do this with something, somewhere, in your life too. Maybe it's more serious, maybe it's more tiny. But that's your business to examine what silly things your pride doesn't let you accept. My point is that this is a human thing. Not something playstation fans do because they're dumb dumbs for some reason.

And the funny thing is? The cure to this is not that complicated. It's like, really simple. Accept that your lizard brain likes the beeps and boops and that the idea of what playstation is to you is in the end, just an emotion. Accept that you aren't any smarter than anyone else because of the games you enjoy. That your reasons for the way you game the way you do aren't super intelligent because at the center of it all, you are playing games to have fun, which is nothing if not the definition of emotional experience. You are going to do what you are going to do to engender that experience. I mean, really games are deeper than fun. Some of our favorite games we love because they were very seriously emotional, and not really the typical colloquial definition of fun, now that I really think about it. The fact is you are going to, subconsciously or not, do what you need to do in order to create those experiences for yourself. And that's okay. It's definitely good to explore the reasons why this happens. But analyzing your reasons for enjoying something is an intellectual pursuit of curiosity, not an appropriate avenue for justifying your identity, and certainly not an appropriate thing to use to deprive others of enjoying more things in the way most effective for them. If analyzing why something happens is not allowed to humiliate you or if it makes you feel threatened in anyway, well sucks to be you buddy because fact is you are a mortal imperfect human being and analyzing the reasons you are the way you are are going to be compromising in some fashion. I really don't know what to tell you other than to move past it, because you are seriously limiting yourself to some awesome opportunities to learn and grow as a person. I don't care if you're 15 or 50 or 31˝.

The fact is, humiliating as it may be, you fancy the things you fancy is because they tickle your lizard brain and help create an emotional cocktail you enjoy.

If you don't recognize that, you won't realize how utterly silly it is that you are essentially arguing that someone should compell you to spend more money. Like, really at the end of it, it's an extremely illogical, silly fear of missing out. You've created a really silly idea, dress it up however you like, that you are missing out on something. If a game comes to more platforms, well clearly an exclusive has been deprived of you. You've got a silly animalistic instinct of valuing scarcity. You feel that if a game comes to more platforms, it's not special any more. So then it's not as special. But you've not lost anything, other's have gained something. But the FEELING of it being special is gone, so you feel that objectively something is missing. Well buddy sorry to break it to you but there is nothing logical about that, no matter how you want to dress it up. So much for being rational. Yes, games are created to sell consoles, but if a company moves to making those games for more platforms, you have not lost anything. You just feel like you have because the emotional puzzle piece that has disappeared from the equation if the feeling of scarcity and exclusivity everyone finds at least a teeny tiny bit alluring on some level.

More related to the general point of this entire post, you also fear missing out in a way that really is actually, funny enough, self imposed, and leads you to do silly things like, as I said above, imply that you WANT to be compelled to spend extra money. The fact is you want a rational reason to get a video game console and have the whole experience it provides you. If you don't have an exclusive game to justify that experience, then you are left facing that horrible, humiliating fact we talked about.

You don't want the console for rational reasons. You want the console because you want the emotional idea of that console. You want the console because of the emotional landscape it creates within you. Because you are a human being who needs things you don't want to recognize to exist in order to facilitate the fullest enjoyment of a video game possible. Exclusives helped justify that for you in a way that seems tangible and rational.

Your silly emotional and not-well-justifiable reasons for spending hundreds of dollars on a console aren't enough for you. You need to feel reasonable, rational, and intelligent for wanting what you want, even if you don't personally think you care. If you really didn't care, you wouldn't be asking someone to make you spend hundreds of dollars on electronics that in all essential ways do all the same things as the electronics you already own. You want stuff, and now you can't justify it, and that's humiliating to recognize how silly you are.

Thing is though...like, really the way to make peace with this, like I kind of covered, isn't that hard. Like, okay, I like silly things. Why care? Are video games not just a bunch of bleep and boops? They still create amazing experiences for you. If you want to spend $400 to feel better about yourself, spend $400 if it makes you happy. It was just as silly an expenditure when it had exclusives, because at the heart of it you are just indulging your emotions, and that's what these big toys are for. It is no less and no more a silly expenditure in a way that really, truly matters now that it doesn't. If all your games come to PC, you are still someone who enjoys themselves on your playstation or your xbox or switch. Go play your playstation or xbox or switch and be happy. You are a silly, irrational human being. Don't take yourself so seriously. Don't be an idiot with your money, but if what makes you happy is owning a box with a big X or a big P or lopsided face looking thing on it to play your games on, then that's what makes you happy. You're wasting so much energy trying to preserve your ego, and honestly in the end hurting yourself most of all by limiting your ability to grow as a human being.

Yeah, you are still a child. You like big toys. You like car go vroom. You like head blow off. You like sparkles shiny wow. You are depriving yourself and others of joy by insisting you are so superior to that. You're not intelligent by trying to make yourself appear intelligent or rationalize and justify your self-image. Ironically you're...kinda bein' stupid. So what. We're all stupid. Quit taking yourself so seriously. Go play video games you big dummy.

[close]

i suppose suicide sometimes is the answer.

[Nintex]

People are plastic.

 

[nudemacusers]

Imagine typing all of that because PS4 lost an exclusive...

https://www.resetera.com/threads/sonys-ps4-exclusive-horizon-zero-dawn-is-coming-to-pc-this-year-sources-tell-kotaku.165134/page-85

spoiler (click to show/hide)

Alright.

Time to break it down.

The following has been stewing in my mind for quite some time now and it's a big topic but I'm gonna go crazy so I'm just going to sit down and talk about how otherwise perfectly rational, normal people reach this silliness.




Okay so, I want to start this on the right tone. This is not meant to lambast or demean anyone, but rather analyze. So, first of all I'm gonna admit. I understand it. I'm not going to defend it. I think it's dumb as hell. But I get it. I have that gut reaction sometimes.

Oh who am I kidding, I have that gut reaction a lot. I'm an emotional guy. I understand and identify with all of the silliness that Playstation fanboys may be feeling all the way to expressing loudly or wherever on that spectrum they may fall.


Gonna break it down one point at a time. Originally when I wrote this I'd said simple. Uh...this isn't going to be "simple" as in "short." But hey yeah maybe someone who actually is seriously doing this will read this and get it about themselves.

And I don't think I'm a genius for explaining any of this; I just don't see any other break down posts that aren't just reductive or insulting. So I want to explore this.


In the end, and I promise this is not a slight or meant to demean anyone, but surprise, I know, none of the behavior or concern in this thread is purely logical, but instead at its heart, sheer sentimentality. Though I think this particular brand of it is worth exploring. Like, Shocker! I know, I know, wow Chettlar so insightful it's just feelings. But whatever I want to explore this.

Video games are emotional experiences for us as human beings. But emotion is not as simple as the present feeling someone is experiencing. Emotion is a vast sea of experience. It is informed very much by headspaces we inhabit. Video games are incredibly good at creating those headspaces, and when you get consoles associated with those emotional recipes and the unique flavors they produce, the emotional attachment gets really, really strong. Really strong.

Video games are so good at creating these headspaces because they affect so many things that other art mediums do at one time. I mean, a song alone can create this wonderful emotional landscape that can move people to tears, cause them anguish, turn their day around, give them resolve, change their minds on unrelated topics, and in some rare cases literally turn their entire lives around. Even wordless songs can do all this. It's kinda crazy. And this is just ONE aspect of what games do. Games are so total in how experiential they have the potential to be. They are engaging, engrossing, and immersive, if not in one respect, like suspension of disbelief of an immersive world, than in another, like the total engagement in a competitive online match for example. A lot of idiots (I was one of these idiots at one point) want to argue that some games are just pure logic and appeal to them because they are just logical people. Mostly these people are self impressed adolescent nerds (like me hi). Some of these self impressed "adolescent" nerds are in their 30s and 40s. But really, while they may indeed enjoy the logic they are engaging with, them enjoying it is already a bunch of emotional trails running at once. You can't separate out emotion form any part of human experience.

Everything you experience serves to create that emotional landscape which then informs the context from which all emotions experienced within are formed. UI Designers are no less important than any other designers for this very reason. The Gestalt of the experience you have in a game is, well, Gestalt. It is everything that exists to creates that experience for you. The sound of pressing your console's power button, the sound of the hard drive engaging, the start of a chime or melody or chord, the bleeps and bloops of the menus — these all serve to create an emotional reference point for everything that happens after. And this itself always has a point of origin inspired by whatever your impression of what a video game console and what it can provide you might be. When a console is new, our brains, with the expectation of fun and excitement however we got that expectation, usually as kids and/or absorbed in some way from society around us, lap up every bit of it, even if consciously we do or don't pay direct attention ourselves.

This is easier when we are young too, hence nostalgia. I've seen it observed that when I miss an old game, I am not missing the game alone, but really what I miss is being a child. I think this is close to the truth but not quite. Being a child was way different and kinda sucky in a lot of ways. Really this is just trading one simple misconception for another. What we miss is our abstract idea of being a kid, and that idea is often the left over remains of those headspaces we remember most. Oregon Trail is, for me for example, an emblem, or a mental icon of that entire headspace I was in while a kid. That head space was so powerful because as a kid it was more relevant to me than it ever could be now as an adult. There was little else to compete with it. I was a kid soaking up everything around me. Of course every emotional landscape I created would be so visceral, so potent.

As an adult, it isn't so potent. Not the headspaces my mind continually creates, and not the headspaces I remember and sometimes try to relive. I know that I still create these emotional experience schema type things because they are what replace the old ones. Every time I've gone back and played an old game, the experience I had with a kid is briefly remembered more strongly than my memory, and then often snuffed out by my new, present experience, and yet not totally. That experience still is a part of me, and has informed who I am and the experiences I can have that have come after.

For some of us, as those experiences become less visceral and our adult brains become less plastic and less prone to soaking up experiences and creating new powerful emotional landscapes to exist in (which again crazily, we some how often seem to just, not realize are there), we begin to miss being children, when the world was so much bigger and brighter, and our emotions were so much stronger and less bogged down by real life and our more set thoughts that come from being a big old boring grownup. And yet, we continue to have these associations. Maybe they aren't as strong, but they exist. It's just that often they are more strongly informed by their ability to appeal to those we most fondly remember.

I have no overwhelming preference to Xbox or Playstation or Nintendo, or whatever other games, because growing up for me personally, I only had some point and click games and a lot of educational games all on an old office computer. Some hunting games too, which I enjoyed exploring nature in. So for me, exploring in a game for example remains a lot of fun. That said I know for me that the experience of playing on an xbox 360 is a bit stronger than playing on a PS3 because that was the beginning of my experiencing all of modern gaming. It was where I experienced games that changed who I am as a person to this day. Anything that references those feelings will continue to be compelling for me, because it will help remind me of those headspaces I most heavily associate with playing and being emotionally invested in a video game. Or at least it's a major part of that for me. Humans are complex. (That said, PS3 was also the place I experienced Journey and Demon's Souls for the first time, and is the more recent place I played NieR, all in my later teens, so, say, that beginning orchestral tuning when you turn one on will continue to be powerful for me as well).

To sum this up as well as I can, experiential context is an inextricable part of what creates the emotional landscapes through which we "enjoy" video games, or even more accurately, what that enjoyment basically is.

(And to add. The people designing these things know this. Why do you think they design those beeps and boops? Why do companies so strongly contest their rights to their branding and imagery? They only control part of that puzzle, it is important to keep in mind, but it still is a part.)

Alright, so how is this stuff that all probably seems like stuff you generally sorta know maybe didn't really think about but kinda noticed relevant?

Well, so think about how powerful all that is. Like I really hope I've communicated how important this stuff is. Everyone experiences it differently, but everyone, to some degree, has SOMETHING that affects how they experience video games, a lot of it honestly probably too difficult to really accurately totally and completely enumerate. And for so so so many of them, understandably the thing they most powerfully identify with enjoying a video game is the console upon which they play. There's always many many more aspects — like for me the computer room in which our couple little office computers were housed on the side of our basement's big room — but I'd wager it's a huge component for a lot of people. It's a bit silly, but everyone has something that sort of engages their gamer brain and all the emotional ..."baggage" has too much negative...baggage associated with it, but you get what I mean. My point is that everyone has various things that to them create that emotional landscape context, and for many people to some degree, the console is a major component. This is true for PC gamers too. Again, it's a universal human trait. I mean, as a curiosity to observe at very least, why do people adorn their gaming PC's with "gamer" aesthetic? If you are not one such person, you are not "above" needing some sort of physical or aural or luminous or in some other way emotional trappings of experiential context. It's just that you associate that garish aesthetic with adolescence or obnoxious "gamer" behavior, so they are not a part of what creates a headspace you enjoy. For others, they just might. All sorts of things could be for a PC gamer. Maybe clicking on the discord icon is a little sparkle of flavor as part of the ritual the begins your gaming session. Again, not something you consciously think about unless you happen to notice, but nevertheless a part of your experience. Heck, while I'll be the first to criticize Epic and the EGS, it is impossible for me to deny that there absolutely is some sentimentality in one's preference for a Steam only experience. That is not ALL of it, but that is a discussion for another time. Suffice to say it is impossible to ignore that that experience does exist to flavor any perhaps logically sound or petty discussion on the subject.

So how does this apply here?

Well, when a lifelong playstation gamer moves away from playstation to PC for example, that is all gone. It's just gone. Worse than gone. PC might already have its own associations in their heads that are decidedly negative for that person.

It isn't as if they can't enjoy video games any more. It isn't as if this isn't something that can't be adjusted. Like I said earlier it absolutely can and is continually adjusted. All your memories are just memories of the last time you remembered something anyway. People are plastic. Maybe in some ways less as we grow older, but still essentially plastic. But we can't deny the fact that context and headspace for which people enjoy a given thing, especially if that is an emotional thing, like, oh I don't know, a video game, are not always easy to let go of.

This manifests itself in different ways. It's why you will never convince, with logic, sound as it may be, a person to change their mind on something that was not born of logic in the first place. The fact is if Joe Gamer associates gaming with his Xbox, and his PC with the office, then an Xbox game being on PC, even if the experience is so much better on a PC, and he could make a cheap gaming PC with more options if he wanted to, you aren't going to change his mind. Heck, even Self Aware Joe Gamer may not change his mind, because you can't just fix a deeply rooted emotional association with logic. Not that easily and never completely. Now, part of just allowing yourself to grow as a human being is recognizing those limitations and realizing you can change them and experience new and different things. But also part of being understanding and emotionally intelligent on the other hand is recognizing that emotional association and this specific concept I've referred to with the shorthand of "headspace" and "emotional landscape" so far, are all part of what make us human beings. It's okay to let them be how they are, and learn to both expand them while also taking advantage of how powerful they are if indulged. If you truly love video games as a medium, both are valuable skills to develop.

The trouble we get into then here is when people attempt to rationalize their emotional experiences down to very simple point of interest. They associate mentally a noticeable thing with a noticeable emotion, and here's where it gets kind of funny but interesting, then create an emotional attachment to the idea of that noticeable thing ex post facto. So maybe a given sequence in a game was subconsciously extremely immersive for someone, but also there was a thing that happened in that sequence that they associate with that feeling. They will then try to convey that that thing they associated with the feeling was really really good and definitely was the source of that feeling they got, even if someone else who was not immersed in that experience can point to all the flaws in the thing that happened and how that thing isn't so great because it didn't affect them in the same way. You can say "well it's all subjective," but that is rather lazy.

Sorry if that was a bit confusing. Maybe for example, all sorts of things you do but probably mostly don't notice leading up to and including a given sequence in a game create a feeling of great pathos for you, and so then you are more receptive and ready to accept something as sad or moving. So a scene happens that you find really sad and moving. Then someone else points out to you how crappy and poor the writing was and how silly it sounds. That person didn't experience the same things as you to create that experience. You did, but didn't realize it. So for you, you point out an awkwardly and unrealistically written but earnest scene as something that created a moving experience, when really it was the whole of that gestalt leading up to that moment that enabled you to be receptive to that scene and not notice that ordinarily you'd find it silly. So when someone points out to you that the dialogue is silly and not realistic at all, you are incensed. How could they see that dialogue as silly? Well, it's pretty simple. Essential aspects that lead up to that experience didn't work for them. Just as equally they have probably experienced and enjoyed something you found silly because various things did not work for you. Heck, even if you both enjoyed the scene, different things may have been what did it for each of you, even if in English you'd list the same basic reason you enjoyed it, ANDDDDD, you could both be wrong in whatever simple thing you are ascribing the experience to. Most of what makes a game well beloved then is, I feel like it's pretty logical to conclude, is when it is so effective at nailing everything that everyone is able to experience what it sets out to experience for them.

SPOILER:

(Heck, this failure is exactly what causes that really awkward moment when a teenage boy tries to show some girl a cool fight scene from this anime episode #2489 where goku uses his 9.38 million power chi to suplex the pokemon demon master Doki Baka Kun. The fight scene, I hate to break it to you 16 year old m- uh you, but that fight scene wasn't that cool. But that doesn't make it bad either! And it doesn't make you silly for experiencing the power conveyed by that scene. It's more complex than that. The scene itself isn't the thing that made you feel that way on its own. In this case it's the entire 2,488 — oh okay we all know episode #1433 is not canon any more I GET IT CHETTLA- I mean you, okay fine the entire 2,487 — episodes that preceded this glorious fight are the source of your emotion.

And there is no way this cute girl who is pretending she doesn't know you should have showered like at least one this week because she likes your dorky enthusiasm can ever, ever feel the thing you want to share with her, because nothing you explain will convey the full power of what you have experienced. At best it could encourage her to go experience that herself if that sounds exciting to experience. Sure the episode was an emotional release for you, but you are ignoring a lot of flaws in it and how badly animated it is and how actively it takes some people out of the experience by how very average it is, because for you personally that wasn't enough to override the emotional experience you had).

My point is, that often we can mistake the things that really create experience for us for silly oversimplifications. That thing we ascribe it to might not even have anything to do with the true source of that experience. Even those of us who scorn intellectual analysis as boring and ruining the fun and magic of art and video games do this. Because all of us want to feel justified in feeling the way we do.

That's really what it comes down to. Our self image is threatened when the things we most deeply experience are trivialized. We have to justify our experiences because anything we deeply enjoy is reflective of who we are as people. I am not Chettlar because I find Viva Pinata delightful, and me being Chettlar isn't really accurately the reason I enjoy it; neither really totally begets the other. The fact is me being Chettlar is now for the past 7 years or so me being the guy who enjoys Viva Pinata, at least to a small degree. That's...kinda what people mean when they say art is a part of who they are, in my opinion. When I write music I show the world a part of me I can't express any other way. When I enjoy someone else's music, that is me responding to that person, and creating something else. An experience. A..me..unit sorta. That which I call my identity is amended whether I like it or not. Why else do people even lightly interested in a various piece of media adorn themselves either with avatars or memorabilia? Part of our identity is what we enjoy. When I justify why I enjoy a thing, I am justifying ME. And at some point somewhere with some thing, you reading this do that too. If you've read this, I've affected you whether you like it or not, whether you think I'm onto something or just an over-intellectual sycophant (I mean, I just used the word sycophant). As I talked about earlier, video games are some of the most involving of all mediums. Sure this combines with video games being enjoyed and created in huge part by anti-social nerds, a lot of whom never had to grow past being children and so reflect this reality in unfortunate and sometimes horrendous ways. But video games were always going to have such a strong effect on the people who play them, because by their nature they touch so many parts of us at once.


Alright.

Sooooo

..

Let's plug this all in then. I get the previous part may have been a little boring, but I gotta make sure I establish some common ground here so I can get to the juicy bit. Hopefully the emotional headspace I created for you, lol, wasn't just "who is Chettlar and why has he assaulted me with this skyscraper of text?" I'm trying okay? It's a large topic.


Alright, well.

A lot of Playstation fans, whether they want to admit it or not, and not all of them, but many of them to varying levels, have used exclusives as their preferred means of justifying their being fans of the brand. Not just their purchase, but of the brand. Playstation. What that means for them. What emotional sparks that might gently but maybe imperceptibly begin to flare. I think for some of them, they view themselves as intelligent, discerning and logical people. To support this, they have to believe that the games they play are the best games ever made, or at least top notch in general. A few crappy games they dislike can serve as the sacrificial lambs to demonstrate to themselves and others that they are not mindless fanboys, of course. (Psst, this is not me implying that Sony games are all trash. But the emotional need some may posses more than others to place these exclusives at the very top of the medium is very much related to this. If you find yourself starting to feel defensive right now at that very implication, uh...maybe think about that for a minute. Because I've not even said whether I like Sony games. Actually that's not true, I already have. I mentioned Journey earlier as a hugely impactful game for me, because it truly was for me.) And this isn't to diminish the fact that these games, on their own, have created emotional experiences. Sony makes some quality titles. What I am saying that there is an emotional need to elevate them into the stratosphere that you might not be as immune from as you might think, even if you don't even like Playstation games and you're interests lie elsewhere.

This is why you have a number of journalists comment that they receive a lot of their death threats (if not due to them being anything other than cis male because of that whole big thing gamers™ have a problem with, but that's another topic) most often in relation to, you guessed it, their views on exclusive games. Not just Playstation games. This happens with Nintendo fans and xbox fans. But right now the topic is Playstation, so I've been using that specifically. Plus, let's not pretend that Sony's marketers are totally oblivious to their identity as a brand that builds major impressive cinematic experiences. They're pretty vocal about it honestly. So if you are profoundly affected by that marketing because all marketing in all of the world of branding of any kind is designed with the intent of validating that identity you've created, well, it's working.

Again this is not to specifically attack Playstation fans. Every person has this happen to them, because we are emotional creatures like I discussed before. I'm not even attacking capitalist marketing. Cults do this, states do this, small clubs do this, movements do this — anything and everything that has an interest in existing as an institution in your life does this. And it always will.

But the er, unsavory side of it is Playstation fans being ugly up to and including sending death threats to websites who didn't give Uncharted 3 10/10 reviews before they had even played the game themselves. That behavior didn't come out of the blue. It didn't just come from some aggressively mislead slaves to the marketing of Uncharted 3 who just believed foolishly that the game was great before it was on store shelves. It didn't just come from the black magic power of branding alone. It came from fans whose identity relied on Playstation being a brand of prestigious perfect video games. I will point out, meekly, but frankly, that the forum that was the precursor to this forum, was home to a lot of that senseless ugliness. Maybe not the worst of it, but some of it. But again, it's not senseless really. It's not reasonless most certainly. It's just a result of a lack of self-awareness of how deeply and profoundly the experience and identity of being a Playstation fan, even among those who didn't specifically identify as Playstation fans per se affected these people's views. Again, we all are affected by our emotions even in what we feel are our most rational moments. This is an example of how that applies here. Marketing was part of it, but not even close to all of it. It cannot create this out of nothing.

I feel strongly that trying to dismiss these people as corporate slaves is foolish, I need to note. It is an oversimplification that tries to distance the one making it from their behavior, trying to shift the blame to a system rather than acknowledge the human source of, and life factors leading up to, that behavior, be it as it may that that marketing did play its part in accentuating or accelerating that behavior. I really feel that much of what begat that behavior was something universal to us all. That maybe you reading this aren't so immature as to act in that way, but you are nevertheless affected by your favorite brand of video game, or your favorite happy video game place. It compels you to act the way you do, whether you've taken the time to see it or not.

Hopefully I've kind of shown some of the beautiful and ugly sides of what emotional identity and the headspaces we inhabit, that are so intimately tied to that identity, can be.

When you take away a Sony fan's rationale for defending his identity as a rational, logical, intelligent human being who enjoys Playstation because he is such, you lay bare and naked the fact that his love of Playstation was never truly rational, logical, or intelligent.

Certainly there were rational, logical, and intelligent reasons that may have got him there, but his love in the end comes from a humiliating and simple human reality. He loves his beeps and boops, his whirrs and start-up tune, his click of a face button and clack of an analogue stick. He loves the feeling of the couch under is butt. He loves the dim lamp light. He loves the logo that pops up and tells his lizard brain, "Game time! Fun time! Relax! The physical place you are in only serves along with the lights and sounds and trinkets to create the mental place you so enjoy. We all exist to simultaneously create a sanctuary and catalyst for what you love most." To explain to him his rationale is not, at least entirely, rational despite the part logic may play in it, the reason he loves Playstation, is humiliating, because it eats at, even if he doesn't realize it, the idea that he isn't who he thinks he is. He's a silly, lizard brained animal just like anyone and anything else. And his love for these experiences is inspired in huge part by silly things. And he wants to feel that it comes from intelligence and superiority. It's banal and boring insecurity, regardless of whether he's even ever been conscious of it.

He doesn't want to admit that at the heart of it, the reason he's a Playstation fan is for reasons he probably has already subconsciously written off as humiliating or silly. (He may have, in an ironic lack of self awareness used such an explanation to humiliate someone else and diminish their experience specifically to prop himself up. That isn't necessary at all, but if he's a jerk maybe it's happened. You don't have to be a jerk to have blind spots. We all do.) And he doesn't even have to have gone through ANY of these thoughts either. It probably just manifests in a vague fear of being threatened, his subconscious warning him that this person pushing him to recognize the very banal source of his identity is actually just an asshole, and he shouldn't think about it, but instead be mad at the asshole, or the person responsible. He tries to come up with all kinds of badly thought out rational reasons to defend his position and why his essentially selfish desires shouldn't be exposed as the petty things they are.

And you, the reader, probably do this with something, somewhere, in your life too. Maybe it's more serious, maybe it's more tiny. But that's your business to examine what silly things your pride doesn't let you accept. My point is that this is a human thing. Not something playstation fans do because they're dumb dumbs for some reason.

And the funny thing is? The cure to this is not that complicated. It's like, really simple. Accept that your lizard brain likes the beeps and boops and that the idea of what playstation is to you is in the end, just an emotion. Accept that you aren't any smarter than anyone else because of the games you enjoy. That your reasons for the way you game the way you do aren't super intelligent because at the center of it all, you are playing games to have fun, which is nothing if not the definition of emotional experience. You are going to do what you are going to do to engender that experience. I mean, really games are deeper than fun. Some of our favorite games we love because they were very seriously emotional, and not really the typical colloquial definition of fun, now that I really think about it. The fact is you are going to, subconsciously or not, do what you need to do in order to create those experiences for yourself. And that's okay. It's definitely good to explore the reasons why this happens. But analyzing your reasons for enjoying something is an intellectual pursuit of curiosity, not an appropriate avenue for justifying your identity, and certainly not an appropriate thing to use to deprive others of enjoying more things in the way most effective for them. If analyzing why something happens is not allowed to humiliate you or if it makes you feel threatened in anyway, well sucks to be you buddy because fact is you are a mortal imperfect human being and analyzing the reasons you are the way you are are going to be compromising in some fashion. I really don't know what to tell you other than to move past it, because you are seriously limiting yourself to some awesome opportunities to learn and grow as a person. I don't care if you're 15 or 50 or 31˝.

The fact is, humiliating as it may be, you fancy the things you fancy is because they tickle your lizard brain and help create an emotional cocktail you enjoy.

If you don't recognize that, you won't realize how utterly silly it is that you are essentially arguing that someone should compell you to spend more money. Like, really at the end of it, it's an extremely illogical, silly fear of missing out. You've created a really silly idea, dress it up however you like, that you are missing out on something. If a game comes to more platforms, well clearly an exclusive has been deprived of you. You've got a silly animalistic instinct of valuing scarcity. You feel that if a game comes to more platforms, it's not special any more. So then it's not as special. But you've not lost anything, other's have gained something. But the FEELING of it being special is gone, so you feel that objectively something is missing. Well buddy sorry to break it to you but there is nothing logical about that, no matter how you want to dress it up. So much for being rational. Yes, games are created to sell consoles, but if a company moves to making those games for more platforms, you have not lost anything. You just feel like you have because the emotional puzzle piece that has disappeared from the equation if the feeling of scarcity and exclusivity everyone finds at least a teeny tiny bit alluring on some level.

More related to the general point of this entire post, you also fear missing out in a way that really is actually, funny enough, self imposed, and leads you to do silly things like, as I said above, imply that you WANT to be compelled to spend extra money. The fact is you want a rational reason to get a video game console and have the whole experience it provides you. If you don't have an exclusive game to justify that experience, then you are left facing that horrible, humiliating fact we talked about.

You don't want the console for rational reasons. You want the console because you want the emotional idea of that console. You want the console because of the emotional landscape it creates within you. Because you are a human being who needs things you don't want to recognize to exist in order to facilitate the fullest enjoyment of a video game possible. Exclusives helped justify that for you in a way that seems tangible and rational.

Your silly emotional and not-well-justifiable reasons for spending hundreds of dollars on a console aren't enough for you. You need to feel reasonable, rational, and intelligent for wanting what you want, even if you don't personally think you care. If you really didn't care, you wouldn't be asking someone to make you spend hundreds of dollars on electronics that in all essential ways do all the same things as the electronics you already own. You want stuff, and now you can't justify it, and that's humiliating to recognize how silly you are.

Thing is though...like, really the way to make peace with this, like I kind of covered, isn't that hard. Like, okay, I like silly things. Why care? Are video games not just a bunch of bleep and boops? They still create amazing experiences for you. If you want to spend $400 to feel better about yourself, spend $400 if it makes you happy. It was just as silly an expenditure when it had exclusives, because at the heart of it you are just indulging your emotions, and that's what these big toys are for. It is no less and no more a silly expenditure in a way that really, truly matters now that it doesn't. If all your games come to PC, you are still someone who enjoys themselves on your playstation or your xbox or switch. Go play your playstation or xbox or switch and be happy. You are a silly, irrational human being. Don't take yourself so seriously. Don't be an idiot with your money, but if what makes you happy is owning a box with a big X or a big P or lopsided face looking thing on it to play your games on, then that's what makes you happy. You're wasting so much energy trying to preserve your ego, and honestly in the end hurting yourself most of all by limiting your ability to grow as a human being.

Yeah, you are still a child. You like big toys. You like car go vroom. You like head blow off. You like sparkles shiny wow. You are depriving yourself and others of joy by insisting you are so superior to that. You're not intelligent by trying to make yourself appear intelligent or rationalize and justify your self-image. Ironically you're...kinda bein' stupid. So what. We're all stupid. Quit taking yourself so seriously. Go play video games you big dummy.

[close]

i suppose suicide sometimes is the answer.

I had some thoughts about this post but it’s gonna be a few days before I get my first draft out.

[blame space]

i don't know why but it's only funny when freenudemacusers does it.

[ResetBanBot]

I've not seen a AAA game from a major publisher that looks worth playing in years. Who gets excited for this trash? It's the exact same game you've played a million times. Get some taste.

[blame space]

wow that's a very cool opinion.

[Don Rumata]

The star war is for nazis now?

 

My Star Wars Galaxies server had a 2:1 Empire to Rebels ratio.

It always was. 

[SmokyDave]

Just over 6000 words.

Nearly 35,000 keystrokes.

No point.

[Ghoul]

And after he finished his epic novel, the writer put on his Disney hat, drank out of his old refillable 9 dollar cup and said "I sure showed them!"

[Tektonic]

And after he finished his epic novel, the writer put on his Disney hat, drank out of his old refillable 9 dollar cup and said "I sure showed them!"

Then he re-holstered his cup. "I'm going to clean up this town" he thought to himself, then realised he couldn't see his feet to put on his slippers, and sat back down in his parents basement instead. "Maybe tomorrow, after i've finished watching the MCU and TLJ again". He smiled, and thought, "yes tomorrow".

[who is ted danson?]

I was so sure that was gonna be a FinaleFireworker post.... dude it going to have trouble topping that

[nudemacusers]

i don't know why but it's only funny when freenudemacusers does it.

I had originally considered replacing all game references with a “joke” theme but then realized it would probably take me a couple hours, hours I had reserved for critical children’s shoe shopping.

[Ghoul]

i don't know why but it's only funny when freenudemacusers does it.

I had originally considered replacing all game references with a “joke” theme but then realized it would probably take me a couple hours, hours I had reserved for critical children’s shoe shopping.

[Don Rumata]

i don't know why but it's only funny when freenudemacusers does it.

I had originally considered replacing all game references with a “joke” theme but then realized it would probably take me a couple hours, hours I had reserved for critical children’s shoe shopping.

(Image removed from quote.)

"What do you mean you don't have them in a size 11?! Can i speak with a manager?"

[Ghoul]

i don't know why but it's only funny when freenudemacusers does it.

I had originally considered replacing all game references with a “joke” theme but then realized it would probably take me a couple hours, hours I had reserved for critical children’s shoe shopping.

(Image removed from quote.)

"What do you mean you don't have them in a size 11?! Can i speak with a manager?"

Want to know the worst part, they actually go upto adults size 14 

[headwalk]

i don't know why but it's only funny when freenudemacusers does it.

I had originally considered replacing all game references with a “joke” theme but then realized it would probably take me a couple hours, hours I had reserved for critical children’s shoe shopping.

is that latvian clog salesman in town again?

[Straight Edge]

Took me idk 4 hours to make the first draft before I cut, rewrote, and clarified it which took another idk hour and a half.

 

[GreatSageEqualOfHeaven]

Imagine typing all of that because PS4 lost an exclusive...

https://www.resetera.com/threads/sonys-ps4-exclusive-horizon-zero-dawn-is-coming-to-pc-this-year-sources-tell-kotaku.165134/page-85

spoiler (click to show/hide)

Alright.

Time to break it down.

The following has been stewing in my mind for quite some time now and it's a big topic but I'm gonna go crazy so I'm just going to sit down and talk about how otherwise perfectly rational, normal people reach this silliness.




Okay so, I want to start this on the right tone. This is not meant to lambast or demean anyone, but rather analyze. So, first of all I'm gonna admit. I understand it. I'm not going to defend it. I think it's dumb as hell. But I get it. I have that gut reaction sometimes.

Oh who am I kidding, I have that gut reaction a lot. I'm an emotional guy. I understand and identify with all of the silliness that Playstation fanboys may be feeling all the way to expressing loudly or wherever on that spectrum they may fall.


Gonna break it down one point at a time. Originally when I wrote this I'd said simple. Uh...this isn't going to be "simple" as in "short." But hey yeah maybe someone who actually is seriously doing this will read this and get it about themselves.

And I don't think I'm a genius for explaining any of this; I just don't see any other break down posts that aren't just reductive or insulting. So I want to explore this.


In the end, and I promise this is not a slight or meant to demean anyone, but surprise, I know, none of the behavior or concern in this thread is purely logical, but instead at its heart, sheer sentimentality. Though I think this particular brand of it is worth exploring. Like, Shocker! I know, I know, wow Chettlar so insightful it's just feelings. But whatever I want to explore this.

Video games are emotional experiences for us as human beings. But emotion is not as simple as the present feeling someone is experiencing. Emotion is a vast sea of experience. It is informed very much by headspaces we inhabit. Video games are incredibly good at creating those headspaces, and when you get consoles associated with those emotional recipes and the unique flavors they produce, the emotional attachment gets really, really strong. Really strong.

Video games are so good at creating these headspaces because they affect so many things that other art mediums do at one time. I mean, a song alone can create this wonderful emotional landscape that can move people to tears, cause them anguish, turn their day around, give them resolve, change their minds on unrelated topics, and in some rare cases literally turn their entire lives around. Even wordless songs can do all this. It's kinda crazy. And this is just ONE aspect of what games do. Games are so total in how experiential they have the potential to be. They are engaging, engrossing, and immersive, if not in one respect, like suspension of disbelief of an immersive world, than in another, like the total engagement in a competitive online match for example. A lot of idiots (I was one of these idiots at one point) want to argue that some games are just pure logic and appeal to them because they are just logical people. Mostly these people are self impressed adolescent nerds (like me hi). Some of these self impressed "adolescent" nerds are in their 30s and 40s. But really, while they may indeed enjoy the logic they are engaging with, them enjoying it is already a bunch of emotional trails running at once. You can't separate out emotion form any part of human experience.

Everything you experience serves to create that emotional landscape which then informs the context from which all emotions experienced within are formed. UI Designers are no less important than any other designers for this very reason. The Gestalt of the experience you have in a game is, well, Gestalt. It is everything that exists to creates that experience for you. The sound of pressing your console's power button, the sound of the hard drive engaging, the start of a chime or melody or chord, the bleeps and bloops of the menus — these all serve to create an emotional reference point for everything that happens after. And this itself always has a point of origin inspired by whatever your impression of what a video game console and what it can provide you might be. When a console is new, our brains, with the expectation of fun and excitement however we got that expectation, usually as kids and/or absorbed in some way from society around us, lap up every bit of it, even if consciously we do or don't pay direct attention ourselves.

This is easier when we are young too, hence nostalgia. I've seen it observed that when I miss an old game, I am not missing the game alone, but really what I miss is being a child. I think this is close to the truth but not quite. Being a child was way different and kinda sucky in a lot of ways. Really this is just trading one simple misconception for another. What we miss is our abstract idea of being a kid, and that idea is often the left over remains of those headspaces we remember most. Oregon Trail is, for me for example, an emblem, or a mental icon of that entire headspace I was in while a kid. That head space was so powerful because as a kid it was more relevant to me than it ever could be now as an adult. There was little else to compete with it. I was a kid soaking up everything around me. Of course every emotional landscape I created would be so visceral, so potent.

As an adult, it isn't so potent. Not the headspaces my mind continually creates, and not the headspaces I remember and sometimes try to relive. I know that I still create these emotional experience schema type things because they are what replace the old ones. Every time I've gone back and played an old game, the experience I had with a kid is briefly remembered more strongly than my memory, and then often snuffed out by my new, present experience, and yet not totally. That experience still is a part of me, and has informed who I am and the experiences I can have that have come after.

For some of us, as those experiences become less visceral and our adult brains become less plastic and less prone to soaking up experiences and creating new powerful emotional landscapes to exist in (which again crazily, we some how often seem to just, not realize are there), we begin to miss being children, when the world was so much bigger and brighter, and our emotions were so much stronger and less bogged down by real life and our more set thoughts that come from being a big old boring grownup. And yet, we continue to have these associations. Maybe they aren't as strong, but they exist. It's just that often they are more strongly informed by their ability to appeal to those we most fondly remember.

I have no overwhelming preference to Xbox or Playstation or Nintendo, or whatever other games, because growing up for me personally, I only had some point and click games and a lot of educational games all on an old office computer. Some hunting games too, which I enjoyed exploring nature in. So for me, exploring in a game for example remains a lot of fun. That said I know for me that the experience of playing on an xbox 360 is a bit stronger than playing on a PS3 because that was the beginning of my experiencing all of modern gaming. It was where I experienced games that changed who I am as a person to this day. Anything that references those feelings will continue to be compelling for me, because it will help remind me of those headspaces I most heavily associate with playing and being emotionally invested in a video game. Or at least it's a major part of that for me. Humans are complex. (That said, PS3 was also the place I experienced Journey and Demon's Souls for the first time, and is the more recent place I played NieR, all in my later teens, so, say, that beginning orchestral tuning when you turn one on will continue to be powerful for me as well).

To sum this up as well as I can, experiential context is an inextricable part of what creates the emotional landscapes through which we "enjoy" video games, or even more accurately, what that enjoyment basically is.

(And to add. The people designing these things know this. Why do you think they design those beeps and boops? Why do companies so strongly contest their rights to their branding and imagery? They only control part of that puzzle, it is important to keep in mind, but it still is a part.)

Alright, so how is this stuff that all probably seems like stuff you generally sorta know maybe didn't really think about but kinda noticed relevant?

Well, so think about how powerful all that is. Like I really hope I've communicated how important this stuff is. Everyone experiences it differently, but everyone, to some degree, has SOMETHING that affects how they experience video games, a lot of it honestly probably too difficult to really accurately totally and completely enumerate. And for so so so many of them, understandably the thing they most powerfully identify with enjoying a video game is the console upon which they play. There's always many many more aspects — like for me the computer room in which our couple little office computers were housed on the side of our basement's big room — but I'd wager it's a huge component for a lot of people. It's a bit silly, but everyone has something that sort of engages their gamer brain and all the emotional ..."baggage" has too much negative...baggage associated with it, but you get what I mean. My point is that everyone has various things that to them create that emotional landscape context, and for many people to some degree, the console is a major component. This is true for PC gamers too. Again, it's a universal human trait. I mean, as a curiosity to observe at very least, why do people adorn their gaming PC's with "gamer" aesthetic? If you are not one such person, you are not "above" needing some sort of physical or aural or luminous or in some other way emotional trappings of experiential context. It's just that you associate that garish aesthetic with adolescence or obnoxious "gamer" behavior, so they are not a part of what creates a headspace you enjoy. For others, they just might. All sorts of things could be for a PC gamer. Maybe clicking on the discord icon is a little sparkle of flavor as part of the ritual the begins your gaming session. Again, not something you consciously think about unless you happen to notice, but nevertheless a part of your experience. Heck, while I'll be the first to criticize Epic and the EGS, it is impossible for me to deny that there absolutely is some sentimentality in one's preference for a Steam only experience. That is not ALL of it, but that is a discussion for another time. Suffice to say it is impossible to ignore that that experience does exist to flavor any perhaps logically sound or petty discussion on the subject.

So how does this apply here?

Well, when a lifelong playstation gamer moves away from playstation to PC for example, that is all gone. It's just gone. Worse than gone. PC might already have its own associations in their heads that are decidedly negative for that person.

It isn't as if they can't enjoy video games any more. It isn't as if this isn't something that can't be adjusted. Like I said earlier it absolutely can and is continually adjusted. All your memories are just memories of the last time you remembered something anyway. People are plastic. Maybe in some ways less as we grow older, but still essentially plastic. But we can't deny the fact that context and headspace for which people enjoy a given thing, especially if that is an emotional thing, like, oh I don't know, a video game, are not always easy to let go of.

This manifests itself in different ways. It's why you will never convince, with logic, sound as it may be, a person to change their mind on something that was not born of logic in the first place. The fact is if Joe Gamer associates gaming with his Xbox, and his PC with the office, then an Xbox game being on PC, even if the experience is so much better on a PC, and he could make a cheap gaming PC with more options if he wanted to, you aren't going to change his mind. Heck, even Self Aware Joe Gamer may not change his mind, because you can't just fix a deeply rooted emotional association with logic. Not that easily and never completely. Now, part of just allowing yourself to grow as a human being is recognizing those limitations and realizing you can change them and experience new and different things. But also part of being understanding and emotionally intelligent on the other hand is recognizing that emotional association and this specific concept I've referred to with the shorthand of "headspace" and "emotional landscape" so far, are all part of what make us human beings. It's okay to let them be how they are, and learn to both expand them while also taking advantage of how powerful they are if indulged. If you truly love video games as a medium, both are valuable skills to develop.

The trouble we get into then here is when people attempt to rationalize their emotional experiences down to very simple point of interest. They associate mentally a noticeable thing with a noticeable emotion, and here's where it gets kind of funny but interesting, then create an emotional attachment to the idea of that noticeable thing ex post facto. So maybe a given sequence in a game was subconsciously extremely immersive for someone, but also there was a thing that happened in that sequence that they associate with that feeling. They will then try to convey that that thing they associated with the feeling was really really good and definitely was the source of that feeling they got, even if someone else who was not immersed in that experience can point to all the flaws in the thing that happened and how that thing isn't so great because it didn't affect them in the same way. You can say "well it's all subjective," but that is rather lazy.

Sorry if that was a bit confusing. Maybe for example, all sorts of things you do but probably mostly don't notice leading up to and including a given sequence in a game create a feeling of great pathos for you, and so then you are more receptive and ready to accept something as sad or moving. So a scene happens that you find really sad and moving. Then someone else points out to you how crappy and poor the writing was and how silly it sounds. That person didn't experience the same things as you to create that experience. You did, but didn't realize it. So for you, you point out an awkwardly and unrealistically written but earnest scene as something that created a moving experience, when really it was the whole of that gestalt leading up to that moment that enabled you to be receptive to that scene and not notice that ordinarily you'd find it silly. So when someone points out to you that the dialogue is silly and not realistic at all, you are incensed. How could they see that dialogue as silly? Well, it's pretty simple. Essential aspects that lead up to that experience didn't work for them. Just as equally they have probably experienced and enjoyed something you found silly because various things did not work for you. Heck, even if you both enjoyed the scene, different things may have been what did it for each of you, even if in English you'd list the same basic reason you enjoyed it, ANDDDDD, you could both be wrong in whatever simple thing you are ascribing the experience to. Most of what makes a game well beloved then is, I feel like it's pretty logical to conclude, is when it is so effective at nailing everything that everyone is able to experience what it sets out to experience for them.

SPOILER:

(Heck, this failure is exactly what causes that really awkward moment when a teenage boy tries to show some girl a cool fight scene from this anime episode #2489 where goku uses his 9.38 million power chi to suplex the pokemon demon master Doki Baka Kun. The fight scene, I hate to break it to you 16 year old m- uh you, but that fight scene wasn't that cool. But that doesn't make it bad either! And it doesn't make you silly for experiencing the power conveyed by that scene. It's more complex than that. The scene itself isn't the thing that made you feel that way on its own. In this case it's the entire 2,488 — oh okay we all know episode #1433 is not canon any more I GET IT CHETTLA- I mean you, okay fine the entire 2,487 — episodes that preceded this glorious fight are the source of your emotion.

And there is no way this cute girl who is pretending she doesn't know you should have showered like at least one this week because she likes your dorky enthusiasm can ever, ever feel the thing you want to share with her, because nothing you explain will convey the full power of what you have experienced. At best it could encourage her to go experience that herself if that sounds exciting to experience. Sure the episode was an emotional release for you, but you are ignoring a lot of flaws in it and how badly animated it is and how actively it takes some people out of the experience by how very average it is, because for you personally that wasn't enough to override the emotional experience you had).

My point is, that often we can mistake the things that really create experience for us for silly oversimplifications. That thing we ascribe it to might not even have anything to do with the true source of that experience. Even those of us who scorn intellectual analysis as boring and ruining the fun and magic of art and video games do this. Because all of us want to feel justified in feeling the way we do.

That's really what it comes down to. Our self image is threatened when the things we most deeply experience are trivialized. We have to justify our experiences because anything we deeply enjoy is reflective of who we are as people. I am not Chettlar because I find Viva Pinata delightful, and me being Chettlar isn't really accurately the reason I enjoy it; neither really totally begets the other. The fact is me being Chettlar is now for the past 7 years or so me being the guy who enjoys Viva Pinata, at least to a small degree. That's...kinda what people mean when they say art is a part of who they are, in my opinion. When I write music I show the world a part of me I can't express any other way. When I enjoy someone else's music, that is me responding to that person, and creating something else. An experience. A..me..unit sorta. That which I call my identity is amended whether I like it or not. Why else do people even lightly interested in a various piece of media adorn themselves either with avatars or memorabilia? Part of our identity is what we enjoy. When I justify why I enjoy a thing, I am justifying ME. And at some point somewhere with some thing, you reading this do that too. If you've read this, I've affected you whether you like it or not, whether you think I'm onto something or just an over-intellectual sycophant (I mean, I just used the word sycophant). As I talked about earlier, video games are some of the most involving of all mediums. Sure this combines with video games being enjoyed and created in huge part by anti-social nerds, a lot of whom never had to grow past being children and so reflect this reality in unfortunate and sometimes horrendous ways. But video games were always going to have such a strong effect on the people who play them, because by their nature they touch so many parts of us at once.


Alright.

Sooooo

..

Let's plug this all in then. I get the previous part may have been a little boring, but I gotta make sure I establish some common ground here so I can get to the juicy bit. Hopefully the emotional headspace I created for you, lol, wasn't just "who is Chettlar and why has he assaulted me with this skyscraper of text?" I'm trying okay? It's a large topic.


Alright, well.

A lot of Playstation fans, whether they want to admit it or not, and not all of them, but many of them to varying levels, have used exclusives as their preferred means of justifying their being fans of the brand. Not just their purchase, but of the brand. Playstation. What that means for them. What emotional sparks that might gently but maybe imperceptibly begin to flare. I think for some of them, they view themselves as intelligent, discerning and logical people. To support this, they have to believe that the games they play are the best games ever made, or at least top notch in general. A few crappy games they dislike can serve as the sacrificial lambs to demonstrate to themselves and others that they are not mindless fanboys, of course. (Psst, this is not me implying that Sony games are all trash. But the emotional need some may posses more than others to place these exclusives at the very top of the medium is very much related to this. If you find yourself starting to feel defensive right now at that very implication, uh...maybe think about that for a minute. Because I've not even said whether I like Sony games. Actually that's not true, I already have. I mentioned Journey earlier as a hugely impactful game for me, because it truly was for me.) And this isn't to diminish the fact that these games, on their own, have created emotional experiences. Sony makes some quality titles. What I am saying that there is an emotional need to elevate them into the stratosphere that you might not be as immune from as you might think, even if you don't even like Playstation games and you're interests lie elsewhere.

This is why you have a number of journalists comment that they receive a lot of their death threats (if not due to them being anything other than cis male because of that whole big thing gamers™ have a problem with, but that's another topic) most often in relation to, you guessed it, their views on exclusive games. Not just Playstation games. This happens with Nintendo fans and xbox fans. But right now the topic is Playstation, so I've been using that specifically. Plus, let's not pretend that Sony's marketers are totally oblivious to their identity as a brand that builds major impressive cinematic experiences. They're pretty vocal about it honestly. So if you are profoundly affected by that marketing because all marketing in all of the world of branding of any kind is designed with the intent of validating that identity you've created, well, it's working.

Again this is not to specifically attack Playstation fans. Every person has this happen to them, because we are emotional creatures like I discussed before. I'm not even attacking capitalist marketing. Cults do this, states do this, small clubs do this, movements do this — anything and everything that has an interest in existing as an institution in your life does this. And it always will.

But the er, unsavory side of it is Playstation fans being ugly up to and including sending death threats to websites who didn't give Uncharted 3 10/10 reviews before they had even played the game themselves. That behavior didn't come out of the blue. It didn't just come from some aggressively mislead slaves to the marketing of Uncharted 3 who just believed foolishly that the game was great before it was on store shelves. It didn't just come from the black magic power of branding alone. It came from fans whose identity relied on Playstation being a brand of prestigious perfect video games. I will point out, meekly, but frankly, that the forum that was the precursor to this forum, was home to a lot of that senseless ugliness. Maybe not the worst of it, but some of it. But again, it's not senseless really. It's not reasonless most certainly. It's just a result of a lack of self-awareness of how deeply and profoundly the experience and identity of being a Playstation fan, even among those who didn't specifically identify as Playstation fans per se affected these people's views. Again, we all are affected by our emotions even in what we feel are our most rational moments. This is an example of how that applies here. Marketing was part of it, but not even close to all of it. It cannot create this out of nothing.

I feel strongly that trying to dismiss these people as corporate slaves is foolish, I need to note. It is an oversimplification that tries to distance the one making it from their behavior, trying to shift the blame to a system rather than acknowledge the human source of, and life factors leading up to, that behavior, be it as it may that that marketing did play its part in accentuating or accelerating that behavior. I really feel that much of what begat that behavior was something universal to us all. That maybe you reading this aren't so immature as to act in that way, but you are nevertheless affected by your favorite brand of video game, or your favorite happy video game place. It compels you to act the way you do, whether you've taken the time to see it or not.

Hopefully I've kind of shown some of the beautiful and ugly sides of what emotional identity and the headspaces we inhabit, that are so intimately tied to that identity, can be.

When you take away a Sony fan's rationale for defending his identity as a rational, logical, intelligent human being who enjoys Playstation because he is such, you lay bare and naked the fact that his love of Playstation was never truly rational, logical, or intelligent.

Certainly there were rational, logical, and intelligent reasons that may have got him there, but his love in the end comes from a humiliating and simple human reality. He loves his beeps and boops, his whirrs and start-up tune, his click of a face button and clack of an analogue stick. He loves the feeling of the couch under is butt. He loves the dim lamp light. He loves the logo that pops up and tells his lizard brain, "Game time! Fun time! Relax! The physical place you are in only serves along with the lights and sounds and trinkets to create the mental place you so enjoy. We all exist to simultaneously create a sanctuary and catalyst for what you love most." To explain to him his rationale is not, at least entirely, rational despite the part logic may play in it, the reason he loves Playstation, is humiliating, because it eats at, even if he doesn't realize it, the idea that he isn't who he thinks he is. He's a silly, lizard brained animal just like anyone and anything else. And his love for these experiences is inspired in huge part by silly things. And he wants to feel that it comes from intelligence and superiority. It's banal and boring insecurity, regardless of whether he's even ever been conscious of it.

He doesn't want to admit that at the heart of it, the reason he's a Playstation fan is for reasons he probably has already subconsciously written off as humiliating or silly. (He may have, in an ironic lack of self awareness used such an explanation to humiliate someone else and diminish their experience specifically to prop himself up. That isn't necessary at all, but if he's a jerk maybe it's happened. You don't have to be a jerk to have blind spots. We all do.) And he doesn't even have to have gone through ANY of these thoughts either. It probably just manifests in a vague fear of being threatened, his subconscious warning him that this person pushing him to recognize the very banal source of his identity is actually just an asshole, and he shouldn't think about it, but instead be mad at the asshole, or the person responsible. He tries to come up with all kinds of badly thought out rational reasons to defend his position and why his essentially selfish desires shouldn't be exposed as the petty things they are.

And you, the reader, probably do this with something, somewhere, in your life too. Maybe it's more serious, maybe it's more tiny. But that's your business to examine what silly things your pride doesn't let you accept. My point is that this is a human thing. Not something playstation fans do because they're dumb dumbs for some reason.

And the funny thing is? The cure to this is not that complicated. It's like, really simple. Accept that your lizard brain likes the beeps and boops and that the idea of what playstation is to you is in the end, just an emotion. Accept that you aren't any smarter than anyone else because of the games you enjoy. That your reasons for the way you game the way you do aren't super intelligent because at the center of it all, you are playing games to have fun, which is nothing if not the definition of emotional experience. You are going to do what you are going to do to engender that experience. I mean, really games are deeper than fun. Some of our favorite games we love because they were very seriously emotional, and not really the typical colloquial definition of fun, now that I really think about it. The fact is you are going to, subconsciously or not, do what you need to do in order to create those experiences for yourself. And that's okay. It's definitely good to explore the reasons why this happens. But analyzing your reasons for enjoying something is an intellectual pursuit of curiosity, not an appropriate avenue for justifying your identity, and certainly not an appropriate thing to use to deprive others of enjoying more things in the way most effective for them. If analyzing why something happens is not allowed to humiliate you or if it makes you feel threatened in anyway, well sucks to be you buddy because fact is you are a mortal imperfect human being and analyzing the reasons you are the way you are are going to be compromising in some fashion. I really don't know what to tell you other than to move past it, because you are seriously limiting yourself to some awesome opportunities to learn and grow as a person. I don't care if you're 15 or 50 or 31˝.

The fact is, humiliating as it may be, you fancy the things you fancy is because they tickle your lizard brain and help create an emotional cocktail you enjoy.

If you don't recognize that, you won't realize how utterly silly it is that you are essentially arguing that someone should compell you to spend more money. Like, really at the end of it, it's an extremely illogical, silly fear of missing out. You've created a really silly idea, dress it up however you like, that you are missing out on something. If a game comes to more platforms, well clearly an exclusive has been deprived of you. You've got a silly animalistic instinct of valuing scarcity. You feel that if a game comes to more platforms, it's not special any more. So then it's not as special. But you've not lost anything, other's have gained something. But the FEELING of it being special is gone, so you feel that objectively something is missing. Well buddy sorry to break it to you but there is nothing logical about that, no matter how you want to dress it up. So much for being rational. Yes, games are created to sell consoles, but if a company moves to making those games for more platforms, you have not lost anything. You just feel like you have because the emotional puzzle piece that has disappeared from the equation if the feeling of scarcity and exclusivity everyone finds at least a teeny tiny bit alluring on some level.

More related to the general point of this entire post, you also fear missing out in a way that really is actually, funny enough, self imposed, and leads you to do silly things like, as I said above, imply that you WANT to be compelled to spend extra money. The fact is you want a rational reason to get a video game console and have the whole experience it provides you. If you don't have an exclusive game to justify that experience, then you are left facing that horrible, humiliating fact we talked about.

You don't want the console for rational reasons. You want the console because you want the emotional idea of that console. You want the console because of the emotional landscape it creates within you. Because you are a human being who needs things you don't want to recognize to exist in order to facilitate the fullest enjoyment of a video game possible. Exclusives helped justify that for you in a way that seems tangible and rational.

Your silly emotional and not-well-justifiable reasons for spending hundreds of dollars on a console aren't enough for you. You need to feel reasonable, rational, and intelligent for wanting what you want, even if you don't personally think you care. If you really didn't care, you wouldn't be asking someone to make you spend hundreds of dollars on electronics that in all essential ways do all the same things as the electronics you already own. You want stuff, and now you can't justify it, and that's humiliating to recognize how silly you are.

Thing is though...like, really the way to make peace with this, like I kind of covered, isn't that hard. Like, okay, I like silly things. Why care? Are video games not just a bunch of bleep and boops? They still create amazing experiences for you. If you want to spend $400 to feel better about yourself, spend $400 if it makes you happy. It was just as silly an expenditure when it had exclusives, because at the heart of it you are just indulging your emotions, and that's what these big toys are for. It is no less and no more a silly expenditure in a way that really, truly matters now that it doesn't. If all your games come to PC, you are still someone who enjoys themselves on your playstation or your xbox or switch. Go play your playstation or xbox or switch and be happy. You are a silly, irrational human being. Don't take yourself so seriously. Don't be an idiot with your money, but if what makes you happy is owning a box with a big X or a big P or lopsided face looking thing on it to play your games on, then that's what makes you happy. You're wasting so much energy trying to preserve your ego, and honestly in the end hurting yourself most of all by limiting your ability to grow as a human being.

Yeah, you are still a child. You like big toys. You like car go vroom. You like head blow off. You like sparkles shiny wow. You are depriving yourself and others of joy by insisting you are so superior to that. You're not intelligent by trying to make yourself appear intelligent or rationalize and justify your self-image. Ironically you're...kinda bein' stupid. So what. We're all stupid. Quit taking yourself so seriously. Go play video games you big dummy.

[close]

I can't imagine having that much to say to strangers on an internet forum about anything, let alone an okayish open world by the numbers ubitowers game going multiplatform

[GreatSageEqualOfHeaven]

Let me ask you a very simple question that I hope you won't dodge. Do you believe an openly queer atheist or queer Muslim could win in 2020?

Donald Trump is president. All bets should be off on "Can [Insert whoever here] be president".

Legitimately struggling to see the point here or follow the logic in making this comparison

[Cauliflower Of Love]

He's saying women and trump are the same thing!




Or something

[GreatSageEqualOfHeaven]

"Rich famous old white man running on an appeal to nostalgia and catering to and backed by corporate interests became the POTUS? THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING"

[Switters]

Imagine typing all of that because PS4 lost an exclusive...

https://www.resetera.com/threads/sonys-ps4-exclusive-horizon-zero-dawn-is-coming-to-pc-this-year-sources-tell-kotaku.165134/page-85

Alright.

Time to break it down.

ADDERALL FUCKING RULES!

[VomKriege]

Let me ask you a very simple question that I hope you won't dodge. Do you believe an openly queer atheist or queer Muslim could win in 2020?

Donald Trump is president. All bets should be off on "Can [Insert whoever here] be president".

Legitimately struggling to see the point here or follow the logic in making this comparison

The logic is that they can't concede it because it would also deflate the outrage against Sanders alleged statement.

Though to be honest we went from the first US black President to the most cartoonish and rancid caricature of an American blowhard riding on racism & turning the clock back so there's maybe some merit that the whiplash to the whiplash could go places. "Electability" arguments might sadly have a basis in reality but they always have that stink to it, intellectually

I mean Sanders is "culturally Jewish" & functionally secular. Nobody cares about that among the polity that are currently deciding who to sent to the general election.

[railGUN]

What about if NOBODY had guns?

Their argument for that will ALWAYS be: "Well there are so many guns in circulation already, banning them now won't do any good because then only the 'bad guys' will have them."

Yeah? Because thats a fact.

https://www.resetera.com/threads/america%E2%80%99s-obsession-with-guns-ceases-to-amaze-scare-me.165610/post-28384210

[Cauliflower Of Love]

What's culturally jewish?

He seems pretty upset everytime some is like "just how jewish are you?"

[HaughtyFrank]

Let me ask you a very simple question that I hope you won't dodge. Do you believe an openly queer atheist or queer Muslim could win in 2020?

Donald Trump is president. All bets should be off on "Can [Insert whoever here] be president".

Legitimately struggling to see the point here or follow the logic in making this comparison

"The country elected a misogynist racist therefore a queer muslim could become President" 

[Cauliflower Of Love]

Well I'll take you at your word. Here's how I look at it anyways:

I don't think it is an unreasonable position to think that factors like misogyny or Islamophobia or bigotry of any kind is a barrier when looking at the electorate. That being said, I think at the same time vocalizing that out into the world is also perpetuating bigotry because questioning if someone can win the Presidency is putting up another barrier, when we should be working to be accepting of anyone who shares progressive values. So for me, I would feel very uncomfortable with saying "X individual could not be elected" and putting that out into the world.

I think with the right messaging and the right person, you can make what some might consider insurmountable barriers much less insurmountable, I think those two things are much more important than "is it the right time".

This could be a quote about Bernie in 2016

[tiesto]

PTSD flashbacks to Black Falcon posting novellas on a videogame forum.

I'd much rather read A Black Falcon proselytizing mediocre N64 3d platformers than whatever the hell THAT rant was...

[GreatSageEqualOfHeaven]

"Electability" arguments might sadly have a basis in reality but they always have that stink to it, intellectually

I don't disagree, but successful electioneering never runs on a purely logical and rational basis, and never will until the majority of the population value those principles above all else.

Hell, "HOPE" as a campaign manifesto is just as emotive and ambiguous so that it can mean whatever it needed to mean to whoever was voting as "Make America Great Again" was

[PogiJones]

Imagine typing all of that because PS4 lost an exclusive...

https://www.resetera.com/threads/sonys-ps4-exclusive-horizon-zero-dawn-is-coming-to-pc-this-year-sources-tell-kotaku.165134/page-85

spoiler (click to show/hide)

Alright.

Time to break it down.

The following has been stewing in my mind for quite some time now and it's a big topic but I'm gonna go crazy so I'm just going to sit down and talk about how otherwise perfectly rational, normal people reach this silliness.




Okay so, I want to start this on the right tone. This is not meant to lambast or demean anyone, but rather analyze. So, first of all I'm gonna admit. I understand it. I'm not going to defend it. I think it's dumb as hell. But I get it. I have that gut reaction sometimes.

Oh who am I kidding, I have that gut reaction a lot. I'm an emotional guy. I understand and identify with all of the silliness that Playstation fanboys may be feeling all the way to expressing loudly or wherever on that spectrum they may fall.


Gonna break it down one point at a time. Originally when I wrote this I'd said simple. Uh...this isn't going to be "simple" as in "short." But hey yeah maybe someone who actually is seriously doing this will read this and get it about themselves.

And I don't think I'm a genius for explaining any of this; I just don't see any other break down posts that aren't just reductive or insulting. So I want to explore this.


In the end, and I promise this is not a slight or meant to demean anyone, but surprise, I know, none of the behavior or concern in this thread is purely logical, but instead at its heart, sheer sentimentality. Though I think this particular brand of it is worth exploring. Like, Shocker! I know, I know, wow Chettlar so insightful it's just feelings. But whatever I want to explore this.

Video games are emotional experiences for us as human beings. But emotion is not as simple as the present feeling someone is experiencing. Emotion is a vast sea of experience. It is informed very much by headspaces we inhabit. Video games are incredibly good at creating those headspaces, and when you get consoles associated with those emotional recipes and the unique flavors they produce, the emotional attachment gets really, really strong. Really strong.

Video games are so good at creating these headspaces because they affect so many things that other art mediums do at one time. I mean, a song alone can create this wonderful emotional landscape that can move people to tears, cause them anguish, turn their day around, give them resolve, change their minds on unrelated topics, and in some rare cases literally turn their entire lives around. Even wordless songs can do all this. It's kinda crazy. And this is just ONE aspect of what games do. Games are so total in how experiential they have the potential to be. They are engaging, engrossing, and immersive, if not in one respect, like suspension of disbelief of an immersive world, than in another, like the total engagement in a competitive online match for example. A lot of idiots (I was one of these idiots at one point) want to argue that some games are just pure logic and appeal to them because they are just logical people. Mostly these people are self impressed adolescent nerds (like me hi). Some of these self impressed "adolescent" nerds are in their 30s and 40s. But really, while they may indeed enjoy the logic they are engaging with, them enjoying it is already a bunch of emotional trails running at once. You can't separate out emotion form any part of human experience.

Everything you experience serves to create that emotional landscape which then informs the context from which all emotions experienced within are formed. UI Designers are no less important than any other designers for this very reason. The Gestalt of the experience you have in a game is, well, Gestalt. It is everything that exists to creates that experience for you. The sound of pressing your console's power button, the sound of the hard drive engaging, the start of a chime or melody or chord, the bleeps and bloops of the menus — these all serve to create an emotional reference point for everything that happens after. And this itself always has a point of origin inspired by whatever your impression of what a video game console and what it can provide you might be. When a console is new, our brains, with the expectation of fun and excitement however we got that expectation, usually as kids and/or absorbed in some way from society around us, lap up every bit of it, even if consciously we do or don't pay direct attention ourselves.

This is easier when we are young too, hence nostalgia. I've seen it observed that when I miss an old game, I am not missing the game alone, but really what I miss is being a child. I think this is close to the truth but not quite. Being a child was way different and kinda sucky in a lot of ways. Really this is just trading one simple misconception for another. What we miss is our abstract idea of being a kid, and that idea is often the left over remains of those headspaces we remember most. Oregon Trail is, for me for example, an emblem, or a mental icon of that entire headspace I was in while a kid. That head space was so powerful because as a kid it was more relevant to me than it ever could be now as an adult. There was little else to compete with it. I was a kid soaking up everything around me. Of course every emotional landscape I created would be so visceral, so potent.

As an adult, it isn't so potent. Not the headspaces my mind continually creates, and not the headspaces I remember and sometimes try to relive. I know that I still create these emotional experience schema type things because they are what replace the old ones. Every time I've gone back and played an old game, the experience I had with a kid is briefly remembered more strongly than my memory, and then often snuffed out by my new, present experience, and yet not totally. That experience still is a part of me, and has informed who I am and the experiences I can have that have come after.

For some of us, as those experiences become less visceral and our adult brains become less plastic and less prone to soaking up experiences and creating new powerful emotional landscapes to exist in (which again crazily, we some how often seem to just, not realize are there), we begin to miss being children, when the world was so much bigger and brighter, and our emotions were so much stronger and less bogged down by real life and our more set thoughts that come from being a big old boring grownup. And yet, we continue to have these associations. Maybe they aren't as strong, but they exist. It's just that often they are more strongly informed by their ability to appeal to those we most fondly remember.

I have no overwhelming preference to Xbox or Playstation or Nintendo, or whatever other games, because growing up for me personally, I only had some point and click games and a lot of educational games all on an old office computer. Some hunting games too, which I enjoyed exploring nature in. So for me, exploring in a game for example remains a lot of fun. That said I know for me that the experience of playing on an xbox 360 is a bit stronger than playing on a PS3 because that was the beginning of my experiencing all of modern gaming. It was where I experienced games that changed who I am as a person to this day. Anything that references those feelings will continue to be compelling for me, because it will help remind me of those headspaces I most heavily associate with playing and being emotionally invested in a video game. Or at least it's a major part of that for me. Humans are complex. (That said, PS3 was also the place I experienced Journey and Demon's Souls for the first time, and is the more recent place I played NieR, all in my later teens, so, say, that beginning orchestral tuning when you turn one on will continue to be powerful for me as well).

To sum this up as well as I can, experiential context is an inextricable part of what creates the emotional landscapes through which we "enjoy" video games, or even more accurately, what that enjoyment basically is.

(And to add. The people designing these things know this. Why do you think they design those beeps and boops? Why do companies so strongly contest their rights to their branding and imagery? They only control part of that puzzle, it is important to keep in mind, but it still is a part.)

Alright, so how is this stuff that all probably seems like stuff you generally sorta know maybe didn't really think about but kinda noticed relevant?

Well, so think about how powerful all that is. Like I really hope I've communicated how important this stuff is. Everyone experiences it differently, but everyone, to some degree, has SOMETHING that affects how they experience video games, a lot of it honestly probably too difficult to really accurately totally and completely enumerate. And for so so so many of them, understandably the thing they most powerfully identify with enjoying a video game is the console upon which they play. There's always many many more aspects — like for me the computer room in which our couple little office computers were housed on the side of our basement's big room — but I'd wager it's a huge component for a lot of people. It's a bit silly, but everyone has something that sort of engages their gamer brain and all the emotional ..."baggage" has too much negative...baggage associated with it, but you get what I mean. My point is that everyone has various things that to them create that emotional landscape context, and for many people to some degree, the console is a major component. This is true for PC gamers too. Again, it's a universal human trait. I mean, as a curiosity to observe at very least, why do people adorn their gaming PC's with "gamer" aesthetic? If you are not one such person, you are not "above" needing some sort of physical or aural or luminous or in some other way emotional trappings of experiential context. It's just that you associate that garish aesthetic with adolescence or obnoxious "gamer" behavior, so they are not a part of what creates a headspace you enjoy. For others, they just might. All sorts of things could be for a PC gamer. Maybe clicking on the discord icon is a little sparkle of flavor as part of the ritual the begins your gaming session. Again, not something you consciously think about unless you happen to notice, but nevertheless a part of your experience. Heck, while I'll be the first to criticize Epic and the EGS, it is impossible for me to deny that there absolutely is some sentimentality in one's preference for a Steam only experience. That is not ALL of it, but that is a discussion for another time. Suffice to say it is impossible to ignore that that experience does exist to flavor any perhaps logically sound or petty discussion on the subject.

So how does this apply here?

Well, when a lifelong playstation gamer moves away from playstation to PC for example, that is all gone. It's just gone. Worse than gone. PC might already have its own associations in their heads that are decidedly negative for that person.

It isn't as if they can't enjoy video games any more. It isn't as if this isn't something that can't be adjusted. Like I said earlier it absolutely can and is continually adjusted. All your memories are just memories of the last time you remembered something anyway. People are plastic. Maybe in some ways less as we grow older, but still essentially plastic. But we can't deny the fact that context and headspace for which people enjoy a given thing, especially if that is an emotional thing, like, oh I don't know, a video game, are not always easy to let go of.

This manifests itself in different ways. It's why you will never convince, with logic, sound as it may be, a person to change their mind on something that was not born of logic in the first place. The fact is if Joe Gamer associates gaming with his Xbox, and his PC with the office, then an Xbox game being on PC, even if the experience is so much better on a PC, and he could make a cheap gaming PC with more options if he wanted to, you aren't going to change his mind. Heck, even Self Aware Joe Gamer may not change his mind, because you can't just fix a deeply rooted emotional association with logic. Not that easily and never completely. Now, part of just allowing yourself to grow as a human being is recognizing those limitations and realizing you can change them and experience new and different things. But also part of being understanding and emotionally intelligent on the other hand is recognizing that emotional association and this specific concept I've referred to with the shorthand of "headspace" and "emotional landscape" so far, are all part of what make us human beings. It's okay to let them be how they are, and learn to both expand them while also taking advantage of how powerful they are if indulged. If you truly love video games as a medium, both are valuable skills to develop.

The trouble we get into then here is when people attempt to rationalize their emotional experiences down to very simple point of interest. They associate mentally a noticeable thing with a noticeable emotion, and here's where it gets kind of funny but interesting, then create an emotional attachment to the idea of that noticeable thing ex post facto. So maybe a given sequence in a game was subconsciously extremely immersive for someone, but also there was a thing that happened in that sequence that they associate with that feeling. They will then try to convey that that thing they associated with the feeling was really really good and definitely was the source of that feeling they got, even if someone else who was not immersed in that experience can point to all the flaws in the thing that happened and how that thing isn't so great because it didn't affect them in the same way. You can say "well it's all subjective," but that is rather lazy.

Sorry if that was a bit confusing. Maybe for example, all sorts of things you do but probably mostly don't notice leading up to and including a given sequence in a game create a feeling of great pathos for you, and so then you are more receptive and ready to accept something as sad or moving. So a scene happens that you find really sad and moving. Then someone else points out to you how crappy and poor the writing was and how silly it sounds. That person didn't experience the same things as you to create that experience. You did, but didn't realize it. So for you, you point out an awkwardly and unrealistically written but earnest scene as something that created a moving experience, when really it was the whole of that gestalt leading up to that moment that enabled you to be receptive to that scene and not notice that ordinarily you'd find it silly. So when someone points out to you that the dialogue is silly and not realistic at all, you are incensed. How could they see that dialogue as silly? Well, it's pretty simple. Essential aspects that lead up to that experience didn't work for them. Just as equally they have probably experienced and enjoyed something you found silly because various things did not work for you. Heck, even if you both enjoyed the scene, different things may have been what did it for each of you, even if in English you'd list the same basic reason you enjoyed it, ANDDDDD, you could both be wrong in whatever simple thing you are ascribing the experience to. Most of what makes a game well beloved then is, I feel like it's pretty logical to conclude, is when it is so effective at nailing everything that everyone is able to experience what it sets out to experience for them.

SPOILER:

(Heck, this failure is exactly what causes that really awkward moment when a teenage boy tries to show some girl a cool fight scene from this anime episode #2489 where goku uses his 9.38 million power chi to suplex the pokemon demon master Doki Baka Kun. The fight scene, I hate to break it to you 16 year old m- uh you, but that fight scene wasn't that cool. But that doesn't make it bad either! And it doesn't make you silly for experiencing the power conveyed by that scene. It's more complex than that. The scene itself isn't the thing that made you feel that way on its own. In this case it's the entire 2,488 — oh okay we all know episode #1433 is not canon any more I GET IT CHETTLA- I mean you, okay fine the entire 2,487 — episodes that preceded this glorious fight are the source of your emotion.

And there is no way this cute girl who is pretending she doesn't know you should have showered like at least one this week because she likes your dorky enthusiasm can ever, ever feel the thing you want to share with her, because nothing you explain will convey the full power of what you have experienced. At best it could encourage her to go experience that herself if that sounds exciting to experience. Sure the episode was an emotional release for you, but you are ignoring a lot of flaws in it and how badly animated it is and how actively it takes some people out of the experience by how very average it is, because for you personally that wasn't enough to override the emotional experience you had).

My point is, that often we can mistake the things that really create experience for us for silly oversimplifications. That thing we ascribe it to might not even have anything to do with the true source of that experience. Even those of us who scorn intellectual analysis as boring and ruining the fun and magic of art and video games do this. Because all of us want to feel justified in feeling the way we do.

That's really what it comes down to. Our self image is threatened when the things we most deeply experience are trivialized. We have to justify our experiences because anything we deeply enjoy is reflective of who we are as people. I am not Chettlar because I find Viva Pinata delightful, and me being Chettlar isn't really accurately the reason I enjoy it; neither really totally begets the other. The fact is me being Chettlar is now for the past 7 years or so me being the guy who enjoys Viva Pinata, at least to a small degree. That's...kinda what people mean when they say art is a part of who they are, in my opinion. When I write music I show the world a part of me I can't express any other way. When I enjoy someone else's music, that is me responding to that person, and creating something else. An experience. A..me..unit sorta. That which I call my identity is amended whether I like it or not. Why else do people even lightly interested in a various piece of media adorn themselves either with avatars or memorabilia? Part of our identity is what we enjoy. When I justify why I enjoy a thing, I am justifying ME. And at some point somewhere with some thing, you reading this do that too. If you've read this, I've affected you whether you like it or not, whether you think I'm onto something or just an over-intellectual sycophant (I mean, I just used the word sycophant). As I talked about earlier, video games are some of the most involving of all mediums. Sure this combines with video games being enjoyed and created in huge part by anti-social nerds, a lot of whom never had to grow past being children and so reflect this reality in unfortunate and sometimes horrendous ways. But video games were always going to have such a strong effect on the people who play them, because by their nature they touch so many parts of us at once.


Alright.

Sooooo

..

Let's plug this all in then. I get the previous part may have been a little boring, but I gotta make sure I establish some common ground here so I can get to the juicy bit. Hopefully the emotional headspace I created for you, lol, wasn't just "who is Chettlar and why has he assaulted me with this skyscraper of text?" I'm trying okay? It's a large topic.


Alright, well.

A lot of Playstation fans, whether they want to admit it or not, and not all of them, but many of them to varying levels, have used exclusives as their preferred means of justifying their being fans of the brand. Not just their purchase, but of the brand. Playstation. What that means for them. What emotional sparks that might gently but maybe imperceptibly begin to flare. I think for some of them, they view themselves as intelligent, discerning and logical people. To support this, they have to believe that the games they play are the best games ever made, or at least top notch in general. A few crappy games they dislike can serve as the sacrificial lambs to demonstrate to themselves and others that they are not mindless fanboys, of course. (Psst, this is not me implying that Sony games are all trash. But the emotional need some may posses more than others to place these exclusives at the very top of the medium is very much related to this. If you find yourself starting to feel defensive right now at that very implication, uh...maybe think about that for a minute. Because I've not even said whether I like Sony games. Actually that's not true, I already have. I mentioned Journey earlier as a hugely impactful game for me, because it truly was for me.) And this isn't to diminish the fact that these games, on their own, have created emotional experiences. Sony makes some quality titles. What I am saying that there is an emotional need to elevate them into the stratosphere that you might not be as immune from as you might think, even if you don't even like Playstation games and you're interests lie elsewhere.

This is why you have a number of journalists comment that they receive a lot of their death threats (if not due to them being anything other than cis male because of that whole big thing gamers™ have a problem with, but that's another topic) most often in relation to, you guessed it, their views on exclusive games. Not just Playstation games. This happens with Nintendo fans and xbox fans. But right now the topic is Playstation, so I've been using that specifically. Plus, let's not pretend that Sony's marketers are totally oblivious to their identity as a brand that builds major impressive cinematic experiences. They're pretty vocal about it honestly. So if you are profoundly affected by that marketing because all marketing in all of the world of branding of any kind is designed with the intent of validating that identity you've created, well, it's working.

Again this is not to specifically attack Playstation fans. Every person has this happen to them, because we are emotional creatures like I discussed before. I'm not even attacking capitalist marketing. Cults do this, states do this, small clubs do this, movements do this — anything and everything that has an interest in existing as an institution in your life does this. And it always will.

But the er, unsavory side of it is Playstation fans being ugly up to and including sending death threats to websites who didn't give Uncharted 3 10/10 reviews before they had even played the game themselves. That behavior didn't come out of the blue. It didn't just come from some aggressively mislead slaves to the marketing of Uncharted 3 who just believed foolishly that the game was great before it was on store shelves. It didn't just come from the black magic power of branding alone. It came from fans whose identity relied on Playstation being a brand of prestigious perfect video games. I will point out, meekly, but frankly, that the forum that was the precursor to this forum, was home to a lot of that senseless ugliness. Maybe not the worst of it, but some of it. But again, it's not senseless really. It's not reasonless most certainly. It's just a result of a lack of self-awareness of how deeply and profoundly the experience and identity of being a Playstation fan, even among those who didn't specifically identify as Playstation fans per se affected these people's views. Again, we all are affected by our emotions even in what we feel are our most rational moments. This is an example of how that applies here. Marketing was part of it, but not even close to all of it. It cannot create this out of nothing.

I feel strongly that trying to dismiss these people as corporate slaves is foolish, I need to note. It is an oversimplification that tries to distance the one making it from their behavior, trying to shift the blame to a system rather than acknowledge the human source of, and life factors leading up to, that behavior, be it as it may that that marketing did play its part in accentuating or accelerating that behavior. I really feel that much of what begat that behavior was something universal to us all. That maybe you reading this aren't so immature as to act in that way, but you are nevertheless affected by your favorite brand of video game, or your favorite happy video game place. It compels you to act the way you do, whether you've taken the time to see it or not.

Hopefully I've kind of shown some of the beautiful and ugly sides of what emotional identity and the headspaces we inhabit, that are so intimately tied to that identity, can be.

When you take away a Sony fan's rationale for defending his identity as a rational, logical, intelligent human being who enjoys Playstation because he is such, you lay bare and naked the fact that his love of Playstation was never truly rational, logical, or intelligent.

Certainly there were rational, logical, and intelligent reasons that may have got him there, but his love in the end comes from a humiliating and simple human reality. He loves his beeps and boops, his whirrs and start-up tune, his click of a face button and clack of an analogue stick. He loves the feeling of the couch under is butt. He loves the dim lamp light. He loves the logo that pops up and tells his lizard brain, "Game time! Fun time! Relax! The physical place you are in only serves along with the lights and sounds and trinkets to create the mental place you so enjoy. We all exist to simultaneously create a sanctuary and catalyst for what you love most." To explain to him his rationale is not, at least entirely, rational despite the part logic may play in it, the reason he loves Playstation, is humiliating, because it eats at, even if he doesn't realize it, the idea that he isn't who he thinks he is. He's a silly, lizard brained animal just like anyone and anything else. And his love for these experiences is inspired in huge part by silly things. And he wants to feel that it comes from intelligence and superiority. It's banal and boring insecurity, regardless of whether he's even ever been conscious of it.

He doesn't want to admit that at the heart of it, the reason he's a Playstation fan is for reasons he probably has already subconsciously written off as humiliating or silly. (He may have, in an ironic lack of self awareness used such an explanation to humiliate someone else and diminish their experience specifically to prop himself up. That isn't necessary at all, but if he's a jerk maybe it's happened. You don't have to be a jerk to have blind spots. We all do.) And he doesn't even have to have gone through ANY of these thoughts either. It probably just manifests in a vague fear of being threatened, his subconscious warning him that this person pushing him to recognize the very banal source of his identity is actually just an asshole, and he shouldn't think about it, but instead be mad at the asshole, or the person responsible. He tries to come up with all kinds of badly thought out rational reasons to defend his position and why his essentially selfish desires shouldn't be exposed as the petty things they are.

And you, the reader, probably do this with something, somewhere, in your life too. Maybe it's more serious, maybe it's more tiny. But that's your business to examine what silly things your pride doesn't let you accept. My point is that this is a human thing. Not something playstation fans do because they're dumb dumbs for some reason.

And the funny thing is? The cure to this is not that complicated. It's like, really simple. Accept that your lizard brain likes the beeps and boops and that the idea of what playstation is to you is in the end, just an emotion. Accept that you aren't any smarter than anyone else because of the games you enjoy. That your reasons for the way you game the way you do aren't super intelligent because at the center of it all, you are playing games to have fun, which is nothing if not the definition of emotional experience. You are going to do what you are going to do to engender that experience. I mean, really games are deeper than fun. Some of our favorite games we love because they were very seriously emotional, and not really the typical colloquial definition of fun, now that I really think about it. The fact is you are going to, subconsciously or not, do what you need to do in order to create those experiences for yourself. And that's okay. It's definitely good to explore the reasons why this happens. But analyzing your reasons for enjoying something is an intellectual pursuit of curiosity, not an appropriate avenue for justifying your identity, and certainly not an appropriate thing to use to deprive others of enjoying more things in the way most effective for them. If analyzing why something happens is not allowed to humiliate you or if it makes you feel threatened in anyway, well sucks to be you buddy because fact is you are a mortal imperfect human being and analyzing the reasons you are the way you are are going to be compromising in some fashion. I really don't know what to tell you other than to move past it, because you are seriously limiting yourself to some awesome opportunities to learn and grow as a person. I don't care if you're 15 or 50 or 31˝.

The fact is, humiliating as it may be, you fancy the things you fancy is because they tickle your lizard brain and help create an emotional cocktail you enjoy.

If you don't recognize that, you won't realize how utterly silly it is that you are essentially arguing that someone should compell you to spend more money. Like, really at the end of it, it's an extremely illogical, silly fear of missing out. You've created a really silly idea, dress it up however you like, that you are missing out on something. If a game comes to more platforms, well clearly an exclusive has been deprived of you. You've got a silly animalistic instinct of valuing scarcity. You feel that if a game comes to more platforms, it's not special any more. So then it's not as special. But you've not lost anything, other's have gained something. But the FEELING of it being special is gone, so you feel that objectively something is missing. Well buddy sorry to break it to you but there is nothing logical about that, no matter how you want to dress it up. So much for being rational. Yes, games are created to sell consoles, but if a company moves to making those games for more platforms, you have not lost anything. You just feel like you have because the emotional puzzle piece that has disappeared from the equation if the feeling of scarcity and exclusivity everyone finds at least a teeny tiny bit alluring on some level.

More related to the general point of this entire post, you also fear missing out in a way that really is actually, funny enough, self imposed, and leads you to do silly things like, as I said above, imply that you WANT to be compelled to spend extra money. The fact is you want a rational reason to get a video game console and have the whole experience it provides you. If you don't have an exclusive game to justify that experience, then you are left facing that horrible, humiliating fact we talked about.

You don't want the console for rational reasons. You want the console because you want the emotional idea of that console. You want the console because of the emotional landscape it creates within you. Because you are a human being who needs things you don't want to recognize to exist in order to facilitate the fullest enjoyment of a video game possible. Exclusives helped justify that for you in a way that seems tangible and rational.

Your silly emotional and not-well-justifiable reasons for spending hundreds of dollars on a console aren't enough for you. You need to feel reasonable, rational, and intelligent for wanting what you want, even if you don't personally think you care. If you really didn't care, you wouldn't be asking someone to make you spend hundreds of dollars on electronics that in all essential ways do all the same things as the electronics you already own. You want stuff, and now you can't justify it, and that's humiliating to recognize how silly you are.

Thing is though...like, really the way to make peace with this, like I kind of covered, isn't that hard. Like, okay, I like silly things. Why care? Are video games not just a bunch of bleep and boops? They still create amazing experiences for you. If you want to spend $400 to feel better about yourself, spend $400 if it makes you happy. It was just as silly an expenditure when it had exclusives, because at the heart of it you are just indulging your emotions, and that's what these big toys are for. It is no less and no more a silly expenditure in a way that really, truly matters now that it doesn't. If all your games come to PC, you are still someone who enjoys themselves on your playstation or your xbox or switch. Go play your playstation or xbox or switch and be happy. You are a silly, irrational human being. Don't take yourself so seriously. Don't be an idiot with your money, but if what makes you happy is owning a box with a big X or a big P or lopsided face looking thing on it to play your games on, then that's what makes you happy. You're wasting so much energy trying to preserve your ego, and honestly in the end hurting yourself most of all by limiting your ability to grow as a human being.

Yeah, you are still a child. You like big toys. You like car go vroom. You like head blow off. You like sparkles shiny wow. You are depriving yourself and others of joy by insisting you are so superior to that. You're not intelligent by trying to make yourself appear intelligent or rationalize and justify your self-image. Ironically you're...kinda bein' stupid. So what. We're all stupid. Quit taking yourself so seriously. Go play video games you big dummy.

[close]

I'll never make a carepost again.

[Tripon]

Imagine typing all of that because PS4 lost an exclusive...

https://www.resetera.com/threads/sonys-ps4-exclusive-horizon-zero-dawn-is-coming-to-pc-this-year-sources-tell-kotaku.165134/page-85

spoiler (click to show/hide)

Alright.

Time to break it down.

The following has been stewing in my mind for quite some time now and it's a big topic but I'm gonna go crazy so I'm just going to sit down and talk about how otherwise perfectly rational, normal people reach this silliness.




Okay so, I want to start this on the right tone. This is not meant to lambast or demean anyone, but rather analyze. So, first of all I'm gonna admit. I understand it. I'm not going to defend it. I think it's dumb as hell. But I get it. I have that gut reaction sometimes.

Oh who am I kidding, I have that gut reaction a lot. I'm an emotional guy. I understand and identify with all of the silliness that Playstation fanboys may be feeling all the way to expressing loudly or wherever on that spectrum they may fall.


Gonna break it down one point at a time. Originally when I wrote this I'd said simple. Uh...this isn't going to be "simple" as in "short." But hey yeah maybe someone who actually is seriously doing this will read this and get it about themselves.

And I don't think I'm a genius for explaining any of this; I just don't see any other break down posts that aren't just reductive or insulting. So I want to explore this.


In the end, and I promise this is not a slight or meant to demean anyone, but surprise, I know, none of the behavior or concern in this thread is purely logical, but instead at its heart, sheer sentimentality. Though I think this particular brand of it is worth exploring. Like, Shocker! I know, I know, wow Chettlar so insightful it's just feelings. But whatever I want to explore this.

Video games are emotional experiences for us as human beings. But emotion is not as simple as the present feeling someone is experiencing. Emotion is a vast sea of experience. It is informed very much by headspaces we inhabit. Video games are incredibly good at creating those headspaces, and when you get consoles associated with those emotional recipes and the unique flavors they produce, the emotional attachment gets really, really strong. Really strong.

Video games are so good at creating these headspaces because they affect so many things that other art mediums do at one time. I mean, a song alone can create this wonderful emotional landscape that can move people to tears, cause them anguish, turn their day around, give them resolve, change their minds on unrelated topics, and in some rare cases literally turn their entire lives around. Even wordless songs can do all this. It's kinda crazy. And this is just ONE aspect of what games do. Games are so total in how experiential they have the potential to be. They are engaging, engrossing, and immersive, if not in one respect, like suspension of disbelief of an immersive world, than in another, like the total engagement in a competitive online match for example. A lot of idiots (I was one of these idiots at one point) want to argue that some games are just pure logic and appeal to them because they are just logical people. Mostly these people are self impressed adolescent nerds (like me hi). Some of these self impressed "adolescent" nerds are in their 30s and 40s. But really, while they may indeed enjoy the logic they are engaging with, them enjoying it is already a bunch of emotional trails running at once. You can't separate out emotion form any part of human experience.

Everything you experience serves to create that emotional landscape which then informs the context from which all emotions experienced within are formed. UI Designers are no less important than any other designers for this very reason. The Gestalt of the experience you have in a game is, well, Gestalt. It is everything that exists to creates that experience for you. The sound of pressing your console's power button, the sound of the hard drive engaging, the start of a chime or melody or chord, the bleeps and bloops of the menus — these all serve to create an emotional reference point for everything that happens after. And this itself always has a point of origin inspired by whatever your impression of what a video game console and what it can provide you might be. When a console is new, our brains, with the expectation of fun and excitement however we got that expectation, usually as kids and/or absorbed in some way from society around us, lap up every bit of it, even if consciously we do or don't pay direct attention ourselves.

This is easier when we are young too, hence nostalgia. I've seen it observed that when I miss an old game, I am not missing the game alone, but really what I miss is being a child. I think this is close to the truth but not quite. Being a child was way different and kinda sucky in a lot of ways. Really this is just trading one simple misconception for another. What we miss is our abstract idea of being a kid, and that idea is often the left over remains of those headspaces we remember most. Oregon Trail is, for me for example, an emblem, or a mental icon of that entire headspace I was in while a kid. That head space was so powerful because as a kid it was more relevant to me than it ever could be now as an adult. There was little else to compete with it. I was a kid soaking up everything around me. Of course every emotional landscape I created would be so visceral, so potent.

As an adult, it isn't so potent. Not the headspaces my mind continually creates, and not the headspaces I remember and sometimes try to relive. I know that I still create these emotional experience schema type things because they are what replace the old ones. Every time I've gone back and played an old game, the experience I had with a kid is briefly remembered more strongly than my memory, and then often snuffed out by my new, present experience, and yet not totally. That experience still is a part of me, and has informed who I am and the experiences I can have that have come after.

For some of us, as those experiences become less visceral and our adult brains become less plastic and less prone to soaking up experiences and creating new powerful emotional landscapes to exist in (which again crazily, we some how often seem to just, not realize are there), we begin to miss being children, when the world was so much bigger and brighter, and our emotions were so much stronger and less bogged down by real life and our more set thoughts that come from being a big old boring grownup. And yet, we continue to have these associations. Maybe they aren't as strong, but they exist. It's just that often they are more strongly informed by their ability to appeal to those we most fondly remember.

I have no overwhelming preference to Xbox or Playstation or Nintendo, or whatever other games, because growing up for me personally, I only had some point and click games and a lot of educational games all on an old office computer. Some hunting games too, which I enjoyed exploring nature in. So for me, exploring in a game for example remains a lot of fun. That said I know for me that the experience of playing on an xbox 360 is a bit stronger than playing on a PS3 because that was the beginning of my experiencing all of modern gaming. It was where I experienced games that changed who I am as a person to this day. Anything that references those feelings will continue to be compelling for me, because it will help remind me of those headspaces I most heavily associate with playing and being emotionally invested in a video game. Or at least it's a major part of that for me. Humans are complex. (That said, PS3 was also the place I experienced Journey and Demon's Souls for the first time, and is the more recent place I played NieR, all in my later teens, so, say, that beginning orchestral tuning when you turn one on will continue to be powerful for me as well).

To sum this up as well as I can, experiential context is an inextricable part of what creates the emotional landscapes through which we "enjoy" video games, or even more accurately, what that enjoyment basically is.

(And to add. The people designing these things know this. Why do you think they design those beeps and boops? Why do companies so strongly contest their rights to their branding and imagery? They only control part of that puzzle, it is important to keep in mind, but it still is a part.)

Alright, so how is this stuff that all probably seems like stuff you generally sorta know maybe didn't really think about but kinda noticed relevant?

Well, so think about how powerful all that is. Like I really hope I've communicated how important this stuff is. Everyone experiences it differently, but everyone, to some degree, has SOMETHING that affects how they experience video games, a lot of it honestly probably too difficult to really accurately totally and completely enumerate. And for so so so many of them, understandably the thing they most powerfully identify with enjoying a video game is the console upon which they play. There's always many many more aspects — like for me the computer room in which our couple little office computers were housed on the side of our basement's big room — but I'd wager it's a huge component for a lot of people. It's a bit silly, but everyone has something that sort of engages their gamer brain and all the emotional ..."baggage" has too much negative...baggage associated with it, but you get what I mean. My point is that everyone has various things that to them create that emotional landscape context, and for many people to some degree, the console is a major component. This is true for PC gamers too. Again, it's a universal human trait. I mean, as a curiosity to observe at very least, why do people adorn their gaming PC's with "gamer" aesthetic? If you are not one such person, you are not "above" needing some sort of physical or aural or luminous or in some other way emotional trappings of experiential context. It's just that you associate that garish aesthetic with adolescence or obnoxious "gamer" behavior, so they are not a part of what creates a headspace you enjoy. For others, they just might. All sorts of things could be for a PC gamer. Maybe clicking on the discord icon is a little sparkle of flavor as part of the ritual the begins your gaming session. Again, not something you consciously think about unless you happen to notice, but nevertheless a part of your experience. Heck, while I'll be the first to criticize Epic and the EGS, it is impossible for me to deny that there absolutely is some sentimentality in one's preference for a Steam only experience. That is not ALL of it, but that is a discussion for another time. Suffice to say it is impossible to ignore that that experience does exist to flavor any perhaps logically sound or petty discussion on the subject.

So how does this apply here?

Well, when a lifelong playstation gamer moves away from playstation to PC for example, that is all gone. It's just gone. Worse than gone. PC might already have its own associations in their heads that are decidedly negative for that person.

It isn't as if they can't enjoy video games any more. It isn't as if this isn't something that can't be adjusted. Like I said earlier it absolutely can and is continually adjusted. All your memories are just memories of the last time you remembered something anyway. People are plastic. Maybe in some ways less as we grow older, but still essentially plastic. But we can't deny the fact that context and headspace for which people enjoy a given thing, especially if that is an emotional thing, like, oh I don't know, a video game, are not always easy to let go of.

This manifests itself in different ways. It's why you will never convince, with logic, sound as it may be, a person to change their mind on something that was not born of logic in the first place. The fact is if Joe Gamer associates gaming with his Xbox, and his PC with the office, then an Xbox game being on PC, even if the experience is so much better on a PC, and he could make a cheap gaming PC with more options if he wanted to, you aren't going to change his mind. Heck, even Self Aware Joe Gamer may not change his mind, because you can't just fix a deeply rooted emotional association with logic. Not that easily and never completely. Now, part of just allowing yourself to grow as a human being is recognizing those limitations and realizing you can change them and experience new and different things. But also part of being understanding and emotionally intelligent on the other hand is recognizing that emotional association and this specific concept I've referred to with the shorthand of "headspace" and "emotional landscape" so far, are all part of what make us human beings. It's okay to let them be how they are, and learn to both expand them while also taking advantage of how powerful they are if indulged. If you truly love video games as a medium, both are valuable skills to develop.

The trouble we get into then here is when people attempt to rationalize their emotional experiences down to very simple point of interest. They associate mentally a noticeable thing with a noticeable emotion, and here's where it gets kind of funny but interesting, then create an emotional attachment to the idea of that noticeable thing ex post facto. So maybe a given sequence in a game was subconsciously extremely immersive for someone, but also there was a thing that happened in that sequence that they associate with that feeling. They will then try to convey that that thing they associated with the feeling was really really good and definitely was the source of that feeling they got, even if someone else who was not immersed in that experience can point to all the flaws in the thing that happened and how that thing isn't so great because it didn't affect them in the same way. You can say "well it's all subjective," but that is rather lazy.

Sorry if that was a bit confusing. Maybe for example, all sorts of things you do but probably mostly don't notice leading up to and including a given sequence in a game create a feeling of great pathos for you, and so then you are more receptive and ready to accept something as sad or moving. So a scene happens that you find really sad and moving. Then someone else points out to you how crappy and poor the writing was and how silly it sounds. That person didn't experience the same things as you to create that experience. You did, but didn't realize it. So for you, you point out an awkwardly and unrealistically written but earnest scene as something that created a moving experience, when really it was the whole of that gestalt leading up to that moment that enabled you to be receptive to that scene and not notice that ordinarily you'd find it silly. So when someone points out to you that the dialogue is silly and not realistic at all, you are incensed. How could they see that dialogue as silly? Well, it's pretty simple. Essential aspects that lead up to that experience didn't work for them. Just as equally they have probably experienced and enjoyed something you found silly because various things did not work for you. Heck, even if you both enjoyed the scene, different things may have been what did it for each of you, even if in English you'd list the same basic reason you enjoyed it, ANDDDDD, you could both be wrong in whatever simple thing you are ascribing the experience to. Most of what makes a game well beloved then is, I feel like it's pretty logical to conclude, is when it is so effective at nailing everything that everyone is able to experience what it sets out to experience for them.

SPOILER:

(Heck, this failure is exactly what causes that really awkward moment when a teenage boy tries to show some girl a cool fight scene from this anime episode #2489 where goku uses his 9.38 million power chi to suplex the pokemon demon master Doki Baka Kun. The fight scene, I hate to break it to you 16 year old m- uh you, but that fight scene wasn't that cool. But that doesn't make it bad either! And it doesn't make you silly for experiencing the power conveyed by that scene. It's more complex than that. The scene itself isn't the thing that made you feel that way on its own. In this case it's the entire 2,488 — oh okay we all know episode #1433 is not canon any more I GET IT CHETTLA- I mean you, okay fine the entire 2,487 — episodes that preceded this glorious fight are the source of your emotion.

And there is no way this cute girl who is pretending she doesn't know you should have showered like at least one this week because she likes your dorky enthusiasm can ever, ever feel the thing you want to share with her, because nothing you explain will convey the full power of what you have experienced. At best it could encourage her to go experience that herself if that sounds exciting to experience. Sure the episode was an emotional release for you, but you are ignoring a lot of flaws in it and how badly animated it is and how actively it takes some people out of the experience by how very average it is, because for you personally that wasn't enough to override the emotional experience you had).

My point is, that often we can mistake the things that really create experience for us for silly oversimplifications. That thing we ascribe it to might not even have anything to do with the true source of that experience. Even those of us who scorn intellectual analysis as boring and ruining the fun and magic of art and video games do this. Because all of us want to feel justified in feeling the way we do.

That's really what it comes down to. Our self image is threatened when the things we most deeply experience are trivialized. We have to justify our experiences because anything we deeply enjoy is reflective of who we are as people. I am not Chettlar because I find Viva Pinata delightful, and me being Chettlar isn't really accurately the reason I enjoy it; neither really totally begets the other. The fact is me being Chettlar is now for the past 7 years or so me being the guy who enjoys Viva Pinata, at least to a small degree. That's...kinda what people mean when they say art is a part of who they are, in my opinion. When I write music I show the world a part of me I can't express any other way. When I enjoy someone else's music, that is me responding to that person, and creating something else. An experience. A..me..unit sorta. That which I call my identity is amended whether I like it or not. Why else do people even lightly interested in a various piece of media adorn themselves either with avatars or memorabilia? Part of our identity is what we enjoy. When I justify why I enjoy a thing, I am justifying ME. And at some point somewhere with some thing, you reading this do that too. If you've read this, I've affected you whether you like it or not, whether you think I'm onto something or just an over-intellectual sycophant (I mean, I just used the word sycophant). As I talked about earlier, video games are some of the most involving of all mediums. Sure this combines with video games being enjoyed and created in huge part by anti-social nerds, a lot of whom never had to grow past being children and so reflect this reality in unfortunate and sometimes horrendous ways. But video games were always going to have such a strong effect on the people who play them, because by their nature they touch so many parts of us at once.


Alright.

Sooooo

..

Let's plug this all in then. I get the previous part may have been a little boring, but I gotta make sure I establish some common ground here so I can get to the juicy bit. Hopefully the emotional headspace I created for you, lol, wasn't just "who is Chettlar and why has he assaulted me with this skyscraper of text?" I'm trying okay? It's a large topic.


Alright, well.

A lot of Playstation fans, whether they want to admit it or not, and not all of them, but many of them to varying levels, have used exclusives as their preferred means of justifying their being fans of the brand. Not just their purchase, but of the brand. Playstation. What that means for them. What emotional sparks that might gently but maybe imperceptibly begin to flare. I think for some of them, they view themselves as intelligent, discerning and logical people. To support this, they have to believe that the games they play are the best games ever made, or at least top notch in general. A few crappy games they dislike can serve as the sacrificial lambs to demonstrate to themselves and others that they are not mindless fanboys, of course. (Psst, this is not me implying that Sony games are all trash. But the emotional need some may posses more than others to place these exclusives at the very top of the medium is very much related to this. If you find yourself starting to feel defensive right now at that very implication, uh...maybe think about that for a minute. Because I've not even said whether I like Sony games. Actually that's not true, I already have. I mentioned Journey earlier as a hugely impactful game for me, because it truly was for me.) And this isn't to diminish the fact that these games, on their own, have created emotional experiences. Sony makes some quality titles. What I am saying that there is an emotional need to elevate them into the stratosphere that you might not be as immune from as you might think, even if you don't even like Playstation games and you're interests lie elsewhere.

This is why you have a number of journalists comment that they receive a lot of their death threats (if not due to them being anything other than cis male because of that whole big thing gamers™ have a problem with, but that's another topic) most often in relation to, you guessed it, their views on exclusive games. Not just Playstation games. This happens with Nintendo fans and xbox fans. But right now the topic is Playstation, so I've been using that specifically. Plus, let's not pretend that Sony's marketers are totally oblivious to their identity as a brand that builds major impressive cinematic experiences. They're pretty vocal about it honestly. So if you are profoundly affected by that marketing because all marketing in all of the world of branding of any kind is designed with the intent of validating that identity you've created, well, it's working.

Again this is not to specifically attack Playstation fans. Every person has this happen to them, because we are emotional creatures like I discussed before. I'm not even attacking capitalist marketing. Cults do this, states do this, small clubs do this, movements do this — anything and everything that has an interest in existing as an institution in your life does this. And it always will.

But the er, unsavory side of it is Playstation fans being ugly up to and including sending death threats to websites who didn't give Uncharted 3 10/10 reviews before they had even played the game themselves. That behavior didn't come out of the blue. It didn't just come from some aggressively mislead slaves to the marketing of Uncharted 3 who just believed foolishly that the game was great before it was on store shelves. It didn't just come from the black magic power of branding alone. It came from fans whose identity relied on Playstation being a brand of prestigious perfect video games. I will point out, meekly, but frankly, that the forum that was the precursor to this forum, was home to a lot of that senseless ugliness. Maybe not the worst of it, but some of it. But again, it's not senseless really. It's not reasonless most certainly. It's just a result of a lack of self-awareness of how deeply and profoundly the experience and identity of being a Playstation fan, even among those who didn't specifically identify as Playstation fans per se affected these people's views. Again, we all are affected by our emotions even in what we feel are our most rational moments. This is an example of how that applies here. Marketing was part of it, but not even close to all of it. It cannot create this out of nothing.

I feel strongly that trying to dismiss these people as corporate slaves is foolish, I need to note. It is an oversimplification that tries to distance the one making it from their behavior, trying to shift the blame to a system rather than acknowledge the human source of, and life factors leading up to, that behavior, be it as it may that that marketing did play its part in accentuating or accelerating that behavior. I really feel that much of what begat that behavior was something universal to us all. That maybe you reading this aren't so immature as to act in that way, but you are nevertheless affected by your favorite brand of video game, or your favorite happy video game place. It compels you to act the way you do, whether you've taken the time to see it or not.

Hopefully I've kind of shown some of the beautiful and ugly sides of what emotional identity and the headspaces we inhabit, that are so intimately tied to that identity, can be.

When you take away a Sony fan's rationale for defending his identity as a rational, logical, intelligent human being who enjoys Playstation because he is such, you lay bare and naked the fact that his love of Playstation was never truly rational, logical, or intelligent.

Certainly there were rational, logical, and intelligent reasons that may have got him there, but his love in the end comes from a humiliating and simple human reality. He loves his beeps and boops, his whirrs and start-up tune, his click of a face button and clack of an analogue stick. He loves the feeling of the couch under is butt. He loves the dim lamp light. He loves the logo that pops up and tells his lizard brain, "Game time! Fun time! Relax! The physical place you are in only serves along with the lights and sounds and trinkets to create the mental place you so enjoy. We all exist to simultaneously create a sanctuary and catalyst for what you love most." To explain to him his rationale is not, at least entirely, rational despite the part logic may play in it, the reason he loves Playstation, is humiliating, because it eats at, even if he doesn't realize it, the idea that he isn't who he thinks he is. He's a silly, lizard brained animal just like anyone and anything else. And his love for these experiences is inspired in huge part by silly things. And he wants to feel that it comes from intelligence and superiority. It's banal and boring insecurity, regardless of whether he's even ever been conscious of it.

He doesn't want to admit that at the heart of it, the reason he's a Playstation fan is for reasons he probably has already subconsciously written off as humiliating or silly. (He may have, in an ironic lack of self awareness used such an explanation to humiliate someone else and diminish their experience specifically to prop himself up. That isn't necessary at all, but if he's a jerk maybe it's happened. You don't have to be a jerk to have blind spots. We all do.) And he doesn't even have to have gone through ANY of these thoughts either. It probably just manifests in a vague fear of being threatened, his subconscious warning him that this person pushing him to recognize the very banal source of his identity is actually just an asshole, and he shouldn't think about it, but instead be mad at the asshole, or the person responsible. He tries to come up with all kinds of badly thought out rational reasons to defend his position and why his essentially selfish desires shouldn't be exposed as the petty things they are.

And you, the reader, probably do this with something, somewhere, in your life too. Maybe it's more serious, maybe it's more tiny. But that's your business to examine what silly things your pride doesn't let you accept. My point is that this is a human thing. Not something playstation fans do because they're dumb dumbs for some reason.

And the funny thing is? The cure to this is not that complicated. It's like, really simple. Accept that your lizard brain likes the beeps and boops and that the idea of what playstation is to you is in the end, just an emotion. Accept that you aren't any smarter than anyone else because of the games you enjoy. That your reasons for the way you game the way you do aren't super intelligent because at the center of it all, you are playing games to have fun, which is nothing if not the definition of emotional experience. You are going to do what you are going to do to engender that experience. I mean, really games are deeper than fun. Some of our favorite games we love because they were very seriously emotional, and not really the typical colloquial definition of fun, now that I really think about it. The fact is you are going to, subconsciously or not, do what you need to do in order to create those experiences for yourself. And that's okay. It's definitely good to explore the reasons why this happens. But analyzing your reasons for enjoying something is an intellectual pursuit of curiosity, not an appropriate avenue for justifying your identity, and certainly not an appropriate thing to use to deprive others of enjoying more things in the way most effective for them. If analyzing why something happens is not allowed to humiliate you or if it makes you feel threatened in anyway, well sucks to be you buddy because fact is you are a mortal imperfect human being and analyzing the reasons you are the way you are are going to be compromising in some fashion. I really don't know what to tell you other than to move past it, because you are seriously limiting yourself to some awesome opportunities to learn and grow as a person. I don't care if you're 15 or 50 or 31˝.

The fact is, humiliating as it may be, you fancy the things you fancy is because they tickle your lizard brain and help create an emotional cocktail you enjoy.

If you don't recognize that, you won't realize how utterly silly it is that you are essentially arguing that someone should compell you to spend more money. Like, really at the end of it, it's an extremely illogical, silly fear of missing out. You've created a really silly idea, dress it up however you like, that you are missing out on something. If a game comes to more platforms, well clearly an exclusive has been deprived of you. You've got a silly animalistic instinct of valuing scarcity. You feel that if a game comes to more platforms, it's not special any more. So then it's not as special. But you've not lost anything, other's have gained something. But the FEELING of it being special is gone, so you feel that objectively something is missing. Well buddy sorry to break it to you but there is nothing logical about that, no matter how you want to dress it up. So much for being rational. Yes, games are created to sell consoles, but if a company moves to making those games for more platforms, you have not lost anything. You just feel like you have because the emotional puzzle piece that has disappeared from the equation if the feeling of scarcity and exclusivity everyone finds at least a teeny tiny bit alluring on some level.

More related to the general point of this entire post, you also fear missing out in a way that really is actually, funny enough, self imposed, and leads you to do silly things like, as I said above, imply that you WANT to be compelled to spend extra money. The fact is you want a rational reason to get a video game console and have the whole experience it provides you. If you don't have an exclusive game to justify that experience, then you are left facing that horrible, humiliating fact we talked about.

You don't want the console for rational reasons. You want the console because you want the emotional idea of that console. You want the console because of the emotional landscape it creates within you. Because you are a human being who needs things you don't want to recognize to exist in order to facilitate the fullest enjoyment of a video game possible. Exclusives helped justify that for you in a way that seems tangible and rational.

Your silly emotional and not-well-justifiable reasons for spending hundreds of dollars on a console aren't enough for you. You need to feel reasonable, rational, and intelligent for wanting what you want, even if you don't personally think you care. If you really didn't care, you wouldn't be asking someone to make you spend hundreds of dollars on electronics that in all essential ways do all the same things as the electronics you already own. You want stuff, and now you can't justify it, and that's humiliating to recognize how silly you are.

Thing is though...like, really the way to make peace with this, like I kind of covered, isn't that hard. Like, okay, I like silly things. Why care? Are video games not just a bunch of bleep and boops? They still create amazing experiences for you. If you want to spend $400 to feel better about yourself, spend $400 if it makes you happy. It was just as silly an expenditure when it had exclusives, because at the heart of it you are just indulging your emotions, and that's what these big toys are for. It is no less and no more a silly expenditure in a way that really, truly matters now that it doesn't. If all your games come to PC, you are still someone who enjoys themselves on your playstation or your xbox or switch. Go play your playstation or xbox or switch and be happy. You are a silly, irrational human being. Don't take yourself so seriously. Don't be an idiot with your money, but if what makes you happy is owning a box with a big X or a big P or lopsided face looking thing on it to play your games on, then that's what makes you happy. You're wasting so much energy trying to preserve your ego, and honestly in the end hurting yourself most of all by limiting your ability to grow as a human being.

Yeah, you are still a child. You like big toys. You like car go vroom. You like head blow off. You like sparkles shiny wow. You are depriving yourself and others of joy by insisting you are so superior to that. You're not intelligent by trying to make yourself appear intelligent or rationalize and justify your self-image. Ironically you're...kinda bein' stupid. So what. We're all stupid. Quit taking yourself so seriously. Go play video games you big dummy.

[close]

I'll never make a carepost again.

The funny thing to me is these are the same people who go "Hurr, why don't Nintendo put their games on other consoles".

[HardcoreRetro]

My favourite thing is people that keep quoting this annoyingly long post.

[GreatSageEqualOfHeaven]

HOPE as a campaign slogan was rooted in a time when the US had been at war for 5+ years and was on the verge of economic collapse, so it wasn't really ambiguous at all.

"PEACE" would be the unambiguous statement id the campaign was solely trying to allay one particular anxiety in particular voters.
"HOPE" is the solution to pretty much all anxieties; hence the ambiguity.

I don't think people should underestimate the power of a campaign that can be summarised into a memorable motto.
My country just elected someone who is grossly untrustworthy based on fucking "Git 'er dun!"

Is “If Donald Trump can win anyone can” really confusing to you GreatSage?  Lol

I missed all those gay muslims going "OH SHIT, WE DID IT FAM, WE CAN BE PRESIDENT!" after the election

[Don Rumata]

Is “If Donald Trump can win anyone can” really confusing to you GreatSage?  Lol

Trump winning is used as an example of how low people's standards are, not to imply that now anything can happen.
If anything, it shows how low they were willing to go support their delusional disruptive fantasies.

[Urinals]

we elected a liberal black man with the most muslim sounding name ever in the same decade 9/11 happened. i'm sure a very charismatic gay muslim/atheist could win.

[Pissy F Benny]

 

[Lonewulfeus]

Liberals
Leftists

[EchoRin]

Imagine typing all of that because PS4 lost an exclusive...

https://www.resetera.com/threads/sonys-ps4-exclusive-horizon-zero-dawn-is-coming-to-pc-this-year-sources-tell-kotaku.165134/page-85

spoiler (click to show/hide)

Alright.

Time to break it down.

The following has been stewing in my mind for quite some time now and it's a big topic but I'm gonna go crazy so I'm just going to sit down and talk about how otherwise perfectly rational, normal people reach this silliness.




Okay so, I want to start this on the right tone. This is not meant to lambast or demean anyone, but rather analyze. So, first of all I'm gonna admit. I understand it. I'm not going to defend it. I think it's dumb as hell. But I get it. I have that gut reaction sometimes.

Oh who am I kidding, I have that gut reaction a lot. I'm an emotional guy. I understand and identify with all of the silliness that Playstation fanboys may be feeling all the way to expressing loudly or wherever on that spectrum they may fall.


Gonna break it down one point at a time. Originally when I wrote this I'd said simple. Uh...this isn't going to be "simple" as in "short." But hey yeah maybe someone who actually is seriously doing this will read this and get it about themselves.

And I don't think I'm a genius for explaining any of this; I just don't see any other break down posts that aren't just reductive or insulting. So I want to explore this.


In the end, and I promise this is not a slight or meant to demean anyone, but surprise, I know, none of the behavior or concern in this thread is purely logical, but instead at its heart, sheer sentimentality. Though I think this particular brand of it is worth exploring. Like, Shocker! I know, I know, wow Chettlar so insightful it's just feelings. But whatever I want to explore this.

Video games are emotional experiences for us as human beings. But emotion is not as simple as the present feeling someone is experiencing. Emotion is a vast sea of experience. It is informed very much by headspaces we inhabit. Video games are incredibly good at creating those headspaces, and when you get consoles associated with those emotional recipes and the unique flavors they produce, the emotional attachment gets really, really strong. Really strong.

Video games are so good at creating these headspaces because they affect so many things that other art mediums do at one time. I mean, a song alone can create this wonderful emotional landscape that can move people to tears, cause them anguish, turn their day around, give them resolve, change their minds on unrelated topics, and in some rare cases literally turn their entire lives around. Even wordless songs can do all this. It's kinda crazy. And this is just ONE aspect of what games do. Games are so total in how experiential they have the potential to be. They are engaging, engrossing, and immersive, if not in one respect, like suspension of disbelief of an immersive world, than in another, like the total engagement in a competitive online match for example. A lot of idiots (I was one of these idiots at one point) want to argue that some games are just pure logic and appeal to them because they are just logical people. Mostly these people are self impressed adolescent nerds (like me hi). Some of these self impressed "adolescent" nerds are in their 30s and 40s. But really, while they may indeed enjoy the logic they are engaging with, them enjoying it is already a bunch of emotional trails running at once. You can't separate out emotion form any part of human experience.

Everything you experience serves to create that emotional landscape which then informs the context from which all emotions experienced within are formed. UI Designers are no less important than any other designers for this very reason. The Gestalt of the experience you have in a game is, well, Gestalt. It is everything that exists to creates that experience for you. The sound of pressing your console's power button, the sound of the hard drive engaging, the start of a chime or melody or chord, the bleeps and bloops of the menus — these all serve to create an emotional reference point for everything that happens after. And this itself always has a point of origin inspired by whatever your impression of what a video game console and what it can provide you might be. When a console is new, our brains, with the expectation of fun and excitement however we got that expectation, usually as kids and/or absorbed in some way from society around us, lap up every bit of it, even if consciously we do or don't pay direct attention ourselves.

This is easier when we are young too, hence nostalgia. I've seen it observed that when I miss an old game, I am not missing the game alone, but really what I miss is being a child. I think this is close to the truth but not quite. Being a child was way different and kinda sucky in a lot of ways. Really this is just trading one simple misconception for another. What we miss is our abstract idea of being a kid, and that idea is often the left over remains of those headspaces we remember most. Oregon Trail is, for me for example, an emblem, or a mental icon of that entire headspace I was in while a kid. That head space was so powerful because as a kid it was more relevant to me than it ever could be now as an adult. There was little else to compete with it. I was a kid soaking up everything around me. Of course every emotional landscape I created would be so visceral, so potent.

As an adult, it isn't so potent. Not the headspaces my mind continually creates, and not the headspaces I remember and sometimes try to relive. I know that I still create these emotional experience schema type things because they are what replace the old ones. Every time I've gone back and played an old game, the experience I had with a kid is briefly remembered more strongly than my memory, and then often snuffed out by my new, present experience, and yet not totally. That experience still is a part of me, and has informed who I am and the experiences I can have that have come after.

For some of us, as those experiences become less visceral and our adult brains become less plastic and less prone to soaking up experiences and creating new powerful emotional landscapes to exist in (which again crazily, we some how often seem to just, not realize are there), we begin to miss being children, when the world was so much bigger and brighter, and our emotions were so much stronger and less bogged down by real life and our more set thoughts that come from being a big old boring grownup. And yet, we continue to have these associations. Maybe they aren't as strong, but they exist. It's just that often they are more strongly informed by their ability to appeal to those we most fondly remember.

I have no overwhelming preference to Xbox or Playstation or Nintendo, or whatever other games, because growing up for me personally, I only had some point and click games and a lot of educational games all on an old office computer. Some hunting games too, which I enjoyed exploring nature in. So for me, exploring in a game for example remains a lot of fun. That said I know for me that the experience of playing on an xbox 360 is a bit stronger than playing on a PS3 because that was the beginning of my experiencing all of modern gaming. It was where I experienced games that changed who I am as a person to this day. Anything that references those feelings will continue to be compelling for me, because it will help remind me of those headspaces I most heavily associate with playing and being emotionally invested in a video game. Or at least it's a major part of that for me. Humans are complex. (That said, PS3 was also the place I experienced Journey and Demon's Souls for the first time, and is the more recent place I played NieR, all in my later teens, so, say, that beginning orchestral tuning when you turn one on will continue to be powerful for me as well).

To sum this up as well as I can, experiential context is an inextricable part of what creates the emotional landscapes through which we "enjoy" video games, or even more accurately, what that enjoyment basically is.

(And to add. The people designing these things know this. Why do you think they design those beeps and boops? Why do companies so strongly contest their rights to their branding and imagery? They only control part of that puzzle, it is important to keep in mind, but it still is a part.)

Alright, so how is this stuff that all probably seems like stuff you generally sorta know maybe didn't really think about but kinda noticed relevant?

Well, so think about how powerful all that is. Like I really hope I've communicated how important this stuff is. Everyone experiences it differently, but everyone, to some degree, has SOMETHING that affects how they experience video games, a lot of it honestly probably too difficult to really accurately totally and completely enumerate. And for so so so many of them, understandably the thing they most powerfully identify with enjoying a video game is the console upon which they play. There's always many many more aspects — like for me the computer room in which our couple little office computers were housed on the side of our basement's big room — but I'd wager it's a huge component for a lot of people. It's a bit silly, but everyone has something that sort of engages their gamer brain and all the emotional ..."baggage" has too much negative...baggage associated with it, but you get what I mean. My point is that everyone has various things that to them create that emotional landscape context, and for many people to some degree, the console is a major component. This is true for PC gamers too. Again, it's a universal human trait. I mean, as a curiosity to observe at very least, why do people adorn their gaming PC's with "gamer" aesthetic? If you are not one such person, you are not "above" needing some sort of physical or aural or luminous or in some other way emotional trappings of experiential context. It's just that you associate that garish aesthetic with adolescence or obnoxious "gamer" behavior, so they are not a part of what creates a headspace you enjoy. For others, they just might. All sorts of things could be for a PC gamer. Maybe clicking on the discord icon is a little sparkle of flavor as part of the ritual the begins your gaming session. Again, not something you consciously think about unless you happen to notice, but nevertheless a part of your experience. Heck, while I'll be the first to criticize Epic and the EGS, it is impossible for me to deny that there absolutely is some sentimentality in one's preference for a Steam only experience. That is not ALL of it, but that is a discussion for another time. Suffice to say it is impossible to ignore that that experience does exist to flavor any perhaps logically sound or petty discussion on the subject.

So how does this apply here?

Well, when a lifelong playstation gamer moves away from playstation to PC for example, that is all gone. It's just gone. Worse than gone. PC might already have its own associations in their heads that are decidedly negative for that person.

It isn't as if they can't enjoy video games any more. It isn't as if this isn't something that can't be adjusted. Like I said earlier it absolutely can and is continually adjusted. All your memories are just memories of the last time you remembered something anyway. People are plastic. Maybe in some ways less as we grow older, but still essentially plastic. But we can't deny the fact that context and headspace for which people enjoy a given thing, especially if that is an emotional thing, like, oh I don't know, a video game, are not always easy to let go of.

This manifests itself in different ways. It's why you will never convince, with logic, sound as it may be, a person to change their mind on something that was not born of logic in the first place. The fact is if Joe Gamer associates gaming with his Xbox, and his PC with the office, then an Xbox game being on PC, even if the experience is so much better on a PC, and he could make a cheap gaming PC with more options if he wanted to, you aren't going to change his mind. Heck, even Self Aware Joe Gamer may not change his mind, because you can't just fix a deeply rooted emotional association with logic. Not that easily and never completely. Now, part of just allowing yourself to grow as a human being is recognizing those limitations and realizing you can change them and experience new and different things. But also part of being understanding and emotionally intelligent on the other hand is recognizing that emotional association and this specific concept I've referred to with the shorthand of "headspace" and "emotional landscape" so far, are all part of what make us human beings. It's okay to let them be how they are, and learn to both expand them while also taking advantage of how powerful they are if indulged. If you truly love video games as a medium, both are valuable skills to develop.

The trouble we get into then here is when people attempt to rationalize their emotional experiences down to very simple point of interest. They associate mentally a noticeable thing with a noticeable emotion, and here's where it gets kind of funny but interesting, then create an emotional attachment to the idea of that noticeable thing ex post facto. So maybe a given sequence in a game was subconsciously extremely immersive for someone, but also there was a thing that happened in that sequence that they associate with that feeling. They will then try to convey that that thing they associated with the feeling was really really good and definitely was the source of that feeling they got, even if someone else who was not immersed in that experience can point to all the flaws in the thing that happened and how that thing isn't so great because it didn't affect them in the same way. You can say "well it's all subjective," but that is rather lazy.

Sorry if that was a bit confusing. Maybe for example, all sorts of things you do but probably mostly don't notice leading up to and including a given sequence in a game create a feeling of great pathos for you, and so then you are more receptive and ready to accept something as sad or moving. So a scene happens that you find really sad and moving. Then someone else points out to you how crappy and poor the writing was and how silly it sounds. That person didn't experience the same things as you to create that experience. You did, but didn't realize it. So for you, you point out an awkwardly and unrealistically written but earnest scene as something that created a moving experience, when really it was the whole of that gestalt leading up to that moment that enabled you to be receptive to that scene and not notice that ordinarily you'd find it silly. So when someone points out to you that the dialogue is silly and not realistic at all, you are incensed. How could they see that dialogue as silly? Well, it's pretty simple. Essential aspects that lead up to that experience didn't work for them. Just as equally they have probably experienced and enjoyed something you found silly because various things did not work for you. Heck, even if you both enjoyed the scene, different things may have been what did it for each of you, even if in English you'd list the same basic reason you enjoyed it, ANDDDDD, you could both be wrong in whatever simple thing you are ascribing the experience to. Most of what makes a game well beloved then is, I feel like it's pretty logical to conclude, is when it is so effective at nailing everything that everyone is able to experience what it sets out to experience for them.

SPOILER:

(Heck, this failure is exactly what causes that really awkward moment when a teenage boy tries to show some girl a cool fight scene from this anime episode #2489 where goku uses his 9.38 million power chi to suplex the pokemon demon master Doki Baka Kun. The fight scene, I hate to break it to you 16 year old m- uh you, but that fight scene wasn't that cool. But that doesn't make it bad either! And it doesn't make you silly for experiencing the power conveyed by that scene. It's more complex than that. The scene itself isn't the thing that made you feel that way on its own. In this case it's the entire 2,488 — oh okay we all know episode #1433 is not canon any more I GET IT CHETTLA- I mean you, okay fine the entire 2,487 — episodes that preceded this glorious fight are the source of your emotion.

And there is no way this cute girl who is pretending she doesn't know you should have showered like at least one this week because she likes your dorky enthusiasm can ever, ever feel the thing you want to share with her, because nothing you explain will convey the full power of what you have experienced. At best it could encourage her to go experience that herself if that sounds exciting to experience. Sure the episode was an emotional release for you, but you are ignoring a lot of flaws in it and how badly animated it is and how actively it takes some people out of the experience by how very average it is, because for you personally that wasn't enough to override the emotional experience you had).

My point is, that often we can mistake the things that really create experience for us for silly oversimplifications. That thing we ascribe it to might not even have anything to do with the true source of that experience. Even those of us who scorn intellectual analysis as boring and ruining the fun and magic of art and video games do this. Because all of us want to feel justified in feeling the way we do.

That's really what it comes down to. Our self image is threatened when the things we most deeply experience are trivialized. We have to justify our experiences because anything we deeply enjoy is reflective of who we are as people. I am not Chettlar because I find Viva Pinata delightful, and me being Chettlar isn't really accurately the reason I enjoy it; neither really totally begets the other. The fact is me being Chettlar is now for the past 7 years or so me being the guy who enjoys Viva Pinata, at least to a small degree. That's...kinda what people mean when they say art is a part of who they are, in my opinion. When I write music I show the world a part of me I can't express any other way. When I enjoy someone else's music, that is me responding to that person, and creating something else. An experience. A..me..unit sorta. That which I call my identity is amended whether I like it or not. Why else do people even lightly interested in a various piece of media adorn themselves either with avatars or memorabilia? Part of our identity is what we enjoy. When I justify why I enjoy a thing, I am justifying ME. And at some point somewhere with some thing, you reading this do that too. If you've read this, I've affected you whether you like it or not, whether you think I'm onto something or just an over-intellectual sycophant (I mean, I just used the word sycophant). As I talked about earlier, video games are some of the most involving of all mediums. Sure this combines with video games being enjoyed and created in huge part by anti-social nerds, a lot of whom never had to grow past being children and so reflect this reality in unfortunate and sometimes horrendous ways. But video games were always going to have such a strong effect on the people who play them, because by their nature they touch so many parts of us at once.


Alright.

Sooooo

..

Let's plug this all in then. I get the previous part may have been a little boring, but I gotta make sure I establish some common ground here so I can get to the juicy bit. Hopefully the emotional headspace I created for you, lol, wasn't just "who is Chettlar and why has he assaulted me with this skyscraper of text?" I'm trying okay? It's a large topic.


Alright, well.

A lot of Playstation fans, whether they want to admit it or not, and not all of them, but many of them to varying levels, have used exclusives as their preferred means of justifying their being fans of the brand. Not just their purchase, but of the brand. Playstation. What that means for them. What emotional sparks that might gently but maybe imperceptibly begin to flare. I think for some of them, they view themselves as intelligent, discerning and logical people. To support this, they have to believe that the games they play are the best games ever made, or at least top notch in general. A few crappy games they dislike can serve as the sacrificial lambs to demonstrate to themselves and others that they are not mindless fanboys, of course. (Psst, this is not me implying that Sony games are all trash. But the emotional need some may posses more than others to place these exclusives at the very top of the medium is very much related to this. If you find yourself starting to feel defensive right now at that very implication, uh...maybe think about that for a minute. Because I've not even said whether I like Sony games. Actually that's not true, I already have. I mentioned Journey earlier as a hugely impactful game for me, because it truly was for me.) And this isn't to diminish the fact that these games, on their own, have created emotional experiences. Sony makes some quality titles. What I am saying that there is an emotional need to elevate them into the stratosphere that you might not be as immune from as you might think, even if you don't even like Playstation games and you're interests lie elsewhere.

This is why you have a number of journalists comment that they receive a lot of their death threats (if not due to them being anything other than cis male because of that whole big thing gamers™ have a problem with, but that's another topic) most often in relation to, you guessed it, their views on exclusive games. Not just Playstation games. This happens with Nintendo fans and xbox fans. But right now the topic is Playstation, so I've been using that specifically. Plus, let's not pretend that Sony's marketers are totally oblivious to their identity as a brand that builds major impressive cinematic experiences. They're pretty vocal about it honestly. So if you are profoundly affected by that marketing because all marketing in all of the world of branding of any kind is designed with the intent of validating that identity you've created, well, it's working.

Again this is not to specifically attack Playstation fans. Every person has this happen to them, because we are emotional creatures like I discussed before. I'm not even attacking capitalist marketing. Cults do this, states do this, small clubs do this, movements do this — anything and everything that has an interest in existing as an institution in your life does this. And it always will.

But the er, unsavory side of it is Playstation fans being ugly up to and including sending death threats to websites who didn't give Uncharted 3 10/10 reviews before they had even played the game themselves. That behavior didn't come out of the blue. It didn't just come from some aggressively mislead slaves to the marketing of Uncharted 3 who just believed foolishly that the game was great before it was on store shelves. It didn't just come from the black magic power of branding alone. It came from fans whose identity relied on Playstation being a brand of prestigious perfect video games. I will point out, meekly, but frankly, that the forum that was the precursor to this forum, was home to a lot of that senseless ugliness. Maybe not the worst of it, but some of it. But again, it's not senseless really. It's not reasonless most certainly. It's just a result of a lack of self-awareness of how deeply and profoundly the experience and identity of being a Playstation fan, even among those who didn't specifically identify as Playstation fans per se affected these people's views. Again, we all are affected by our emotions even in what we feel are our most rational moments. This is an example of how that applies here. Marketing was part of it, but not even close to all of it. It cannot create this out of nothing.

I feel strongly that trying to dismiss these people as corporate slaves is foolish, I need to note. It is an oversimplification that tries to distance the one making it from their behavior, trying to shift the blame to a system rather than acknowledge the human source of, and life factors leading up to, that behavior, be it as it may that that marketing did play its part in accentuating or accelerating that behavior. I really feel that much of what begat that behavior was something universal to us all. That maybe you reading this aren't so immature as to act in that way, but you are nevertheless affected by your favorite brand of video game, or your favorite happy video game place. It compels you to act the way you do, whether you've taken the time to see it or not.

Hopefully I've kind of shown some of the beautiful and ugly sides of what emotional identity and the headspaces we inhabit, that are so intimately tied to that identity, can be.

When you take away a Sony fan's rationale for defending his identity as a rational, logical, intelligent human being who enjoys Playstation because he is such, you lay bare and naked the fact that his love of Playstation was never truly rational, logical, or intelligent.

Certainly there were rational, logical, and intelligent reasons that may have got him there, but his love in the end comes from a humiliating and simple human reality. He loves his beeps and boops, his whirrs and start-up tune, his click of a face button and clack of an analogue stick. He loves the feeling of the couch under is butt. He loves the dim lamp light. He loves the logo that pops up and tells his lizard brain, "Game time! Fun time! Relax! The physical place you are in only serves along with the lights and sounds and trinkets to create the mental place you so enjoy. We all exist to simultaneously create a sanctuary and catalyst for what you love most." To explain to him his rationale is not, at least entirely, rational despite the part logic may play in it, the reason he loves Playstation, is humiliating, because it eats at, even if he doesn't realize it, the idea that he isn't who he thinks he is. He's a silly, lizard brained animal just like anyone and anything else. And his love for these experiences is inspired in huge part by silly things. And he wants to feel that it comes from intelligence and superiority. It's banal and boring insecurity, regardless of whether he's even ever been conscious of it.

He doesn't want to admit that at the heart of it, the reason he's a Playstation fan is for reasons he probably has already subconsciously written off as humiliating or silly. (He may have, in an ironic lack of self awareness used such an explanation to humiliate someone else and diminish their experience specifically to prop himself up. That isn't necessary at all, but if he's a jerk maybe it's happened. You don't have to be a jerk to have blind spots. We all do.) And he doesn't even have to have gone through ANY of these thoughts either. It probably just manifests in a vague fear of being threatened, his subconscious warning him that this person pushing him to recognize the very banal source of his identity is actually just an asshole, and he shouldn't think about it, but instead be mad at the asshole, or the person responsible. He tries to come up with all kinds of badly thought out rational reasons to defend his position and why his essentially selfish desires shouldn't be exposed as the petty things they are.

And you, the reader, probably do this with something, somewhere, in your life too. Maybe it's more serious, maybe it's more tiny. But that's your business to examine what silly things your pride doesn't let you accept. My point is that this is a human thing. Not something playstation fans do because they're dumb dumbs for some reason.

And the funny thing is? The cure to this is not that complicated. It's like, really simple. Accept that your lizard brain likes the beeps and boops and that the idea of what playstation is to you is in the end, just an emotion. Accept that you aren't any smarter than anyone else because of the games you enjoy. That your reasons for the way you game the way you do aren't super intelligent because at the center of it all, you are playing games to have fun, which is nothing if not the definition of emotional experience. You are going to do what you are going to do to engender that experience. I mean, really games are deeper than fun. Some of our favorite games we love because they were very seriously emotional, and not really the typical colloquial definition of fun, now that I really think about it. The fact is you are going to, subconsciously or not, do what you need to do in order to create those experiences for yourself. And that's okay. It's definitely good to explore the reasons why this happens. But analyzing your reasons for enjoying something is an intellectual pursuit of curiosity, not an appropriate avenue for justifying your identity, and certainly not an appropriate thing to use to deprive others of enjoying more things in the way most effective for them. If analyzing why something happens is not allowed to humiliate you or if it makes you feel threatened in anyway, well sucks to be you buddy because fact is you are a mortal imperfect human being and analyzing the reasons you are the way you are are going to be compromising in some fashion. I really don't know what to tell you other than to move past it, because you are seriously limiting yourself to some awesome opportunities to learn and grow as a person. I don't care if you're 15 or 50 or 31˝.

The fact is, humiliating as it may be, you fancy the things you fancy is because they tickle your lizard brain and help create an emotional cocktail you enjoy.

If you don't recognize that, you won't realize how utterly silly it is that you are essentially arguing that someone should compell you to spend more money. Like, really at the end of it, it's an extremely illogical, silly fear of missing out. You've created a really silly idea, dress it up however you like, that you are missing out on something. If a game comes to more platforms, well clearly an exclusive has been deprived of you. You've got a silly animalistic instinct of valuing scarcity. You feel that if a game comes to more platforms, it's not special any more. So then it's not as special. But you've not lost anything, other's have gained something. But the FEELING of it being special is gone, so you feel that objectively something is missing. Well buddy sorry to break it to you but there is nothing logical about that, no matter how you want to dress it up. So much for being rational. Yes, games are created to sell consoles, but if a company moves to making those games for more platforms, you have not lost anything. You just feel like you have because the emotional puzzle piece that has disappeared from the equation if the feeling of scarcity and exclusivity everyone finds at least a teeny tiny bit alluring on some level.

More related to the general point of this entire post, you also fear missing out in a way that really is actually, funny enough, self imposed, and leads you to do silly things like, as I said above, imply that you WANT to be compelled to spend extra money. The fact is you want a rational reason to get a video game console and have the whole experience it provides you. If you don't have an exclusive game to justify that experience, then you are left facing that horrible, humiliating fact we talked about.

You don't want the console for rational reasons. You want the console because you want the emotional idea of that console. You want the console because of the emotional landscape it creates within you. Because you are a human being who needs things you don't want to recognize to exist in order to facilitate the fullest enjoyment of a video game possible. Exclusives helped justify that for you in a way that seems tangible and rational.

Your silly emotional and not-well-justifiable reasons for spending hundreds of dollars on a console aren't enough for you. You need to feel reasonable, rational, and intelligent for wanting what you want, even if you don't personally think you care. If you really didn't care, you wouldn't be asking someone to make you spend hundreds of dollars on electronics that in all essential ways do all the same things as the electronics you already own. You want stuff, and now you can't justify it, and that's humiliating to recognize how silly you are.

Thing is though...like, really the way to make peace with this, like I kind of covered, isn't that hard. Like, okay, I like silly things. Why care? Are video games not just a bunch of bleep and boops? They still create amazing experiences for you. If you want to spend $400 to feel better about yourself, spend $400 if it makes you happy. It was just as silly an expenditure when it had exclusives, because at the heart of it you are just indulging your emotions, and that's what these big toys are for. It is no less and no more a silly expenditure in a way that really, truly matters now that it doesn't. If all your games come to PC, you are still someone who enjoys themselves on your playstation or your xbox or switch. Go play your playstation or xbox or switch and be happy. You are a silly, irrational human being. Don't take yourself so seriously. Don't be an idiot with your money, but if what makes you happy is owning a box with a big X or a big P or lopsided face looking thing on it to play your games on, then that's what makes you happy. You're wasting so much energy trying to preserve your ego, and honestly in the end hurting yourself most of all by limiting your ability to grow as a human being.

Yeah, you are still a child. You like big toys. You like car go vroom. You like head blow off. You like sparkles shiny wow. You are depriving yourself and others of joy by insisting you are so superior to that. You're not intelligent by trying to make yourself appear intelligent or rationalize and justify your self-image. Ironically you're...kinda bein' stupid. So what. We're all stupid. Quit taking yourself so seriously. Go play video games you big dummy.

[close]

I'm gonna need this poster to make some of the more important text a larger font size. Hopefully it won't send some mod into frenzy 

[Lonewulfeus]

The day Sanders suspends his primary campaign is going to be the second best day of 2020. This guy's stans are just so toxic.

The people misapplying "Believe Women" are doing more damage though.

11/4/20 is not gonna be a happy day for you pal

[Boredfrom]

Red Mercury is a degenerate:

https://www.resetera.com/threads/hey-era-my-daughter-wants-to-be-a-furry.165639/

Sick fuck.

.
It's always fun when someone of any age gets into the fandom. You have infinite possibilities of self-expression ahead of you and no shortage of talented people to steer you towards positive outlets. If you can get to ANE in time with her suit make sure she communicates clearly when she needs a break. Don't be like me 

Wait what?

[GreatSageEqualOfHeaven]

Red Mercury is a degenerate:

https://www.resetera.com/threads/hey-era-my-daughter-wants-to-be-a-furry.165639/

Sick fuck.

.
It's always fun when someone of any age gets into the fandom. You have infinite possibilities of self-expression ahead of you and no shortage of talented people to steer you towards positive outlets. If you can get to ANE in time with her suit make sure she communicates clearly when she needs a break. Don't be like me 

Wait what?

Of course the first person I talked to was Nepenthe

Of course. Of course.

[team filler]

i don't know why but it's only funny when freenudemacusers does it.

I had originally considered replacing all game references with a “joke” theme but then realized it would probably take me a couple hours, hours I had reserved for critical children’s shoe shopping.

https://twitter.com/UncleDrewGB/status/1218962305410617346

[GreatSageEqualOfHeaven]