Gaming Thinkpieces

Morning folks. I am still playing an excessive amount of Destiny 2, but I am not sure if I have any new thoughts to add to it. Right now I want to be talking about how I wish Blizzard would pull their heads out and do the right thing so we could be friends again, however I get the distinct feeling you are sick to hell of talking about it. I know this because anytime I mention or forward it, I slowly bleed a few more followers in the process. I care less about that than it sounds, because really… I have no clue why the majority of you follow me at all at this point. You are either in it for me and my nonsense or you are probably one foot out the door already.

Instead of writing something on my own I am going to share a few things with you. I have a fondness for YouTube think pieces. A lot of the conversation that happens back and forth between myself and the AggroChat crew is discussion of the pieces that make up gaming. Sometimes we record an episode that goes down these avenues, but more often than not that discussion just dissipates into the ether because it was for our own benefit and not necessarily something we wanted to share with the world. That is not to say that there are not an awful lot of great think pieces out there so this morning I am going to drop a few that I find cogent.

First off let me state that I have some issues with the presentation of this video. It bugs me to no end that he keeps saying the phrase “the lady that I live with”, but what he is saying is nonetheless interesting and a conversation that I have had a few times with Tam especially. Gaming has a vocabulary that we are just arguably better at speaking and comprehending now than we were at the dawning age of MMORPGs for example. There are extreme hurdles for someone to get up to that level of fluency and the games we play really don’t do any favors in that department. I dislike tutorialization as much as the next person, but this is still a worthy watch as it talks about the struggles of someone with minimal exposure to these “rules”.

Folding Ideas is a great think piece channel, and one of the better ones is once again relevant with all of the discussion of Fornite over the last few days. The video presents the treatise that modern games set out to create just a tiny bit of discomfort and shame so that we will spend more money in order to remove that. That they set us up for a world where we are constantly dissatisfied with the state of affairs and the only way out is to spend more money. I think this is key to understanding the “seasonal mastery track” thing that is infecting games, and why skins matter.

Since I am playing an awful lot of Destiny, I have also been getting quite a lot of Destiny videos suggested to me. This one is worth a watch because honestly it feels a lot like how I feel at times about the game. I am super positive about what the future for this franchise might hold in their presently untethered from Activision state. Shadowkeep in its “smaller size” is actually quite possibly the best expansion that Bungie has come out with yet. I feel like I have so many options at any given time and they are all equally rewarding with different sets of items that I could be chasing. The game feels better than it has since the end of Destiny 1, and personally hope they abandon the notion of ever creating a Destiny 3 and just keep making this version of the game better.

That is all I have to share this morning. If you have some really good think pieces, feel free to share them in the comments below.