Warning: I’m stressed and want to rant. Wall’o’text below.
I play Star Citizen (yes, I know, if you need proof my machine is real, at the very least I also play Stellaris and Cities: Skylines with hundreds of mods installed) successfully because I have 64GB of ram in my rig and a GTX 970, but so does my OneXPlayer have 64GB of RAM and it can’t run SC or anything else cutting-edge made in the last three years; it’s the GPU that makes the RAM worth it but its the RAM that is needed for it to work. This isn’t “butthurt”, this is a preparation to try and shift from an economy where people buy stuff like GPUs to an economy engineered so only rich people buy stuff like GPUs.
They knew damn well what they were doing when they jacked up prices mid-CoViD-19, because my devices are not there “because I’m rich”, they’re there because I’m disabled and can’t hold a job and I financially compensate for relying solely on what’s coming from my disability pension by only doing ANYTHING for entertainment through my computers. I have no TV that I personally own instead of using the living room (yes, I live with my parents, and no, you don’t get to judge that anymore when my non-disabled brother is living away from home and hasn’t been able to get a job in the largest city in the province for over 3 months and tons of layoffs are happening) and my personal living area is about the size of a hotel room and half-stuffed with things my parents are storing. I am not rich, I just know how to efficiently spend my disposable income, and even then I haven’t been able to buy anything since before December.
When someone who is a gamer by hobby, is mostly unstressed and intelligent enough to at least scrape together the hefty amount of cash to pre-order a portable gaming PC, can’t avoid the constant “limited edition”-ness in everything that the only way to enjoy most games is to start from its beginnings and stick with it while hoping it will pan out (I fully admit that I stuck with Star Citizen through some of the project’s most unflattering times, and that’s not a small risk or a reasonable luxury for most people), and the alternative is to learn how to program from modding communities that are often toxic or near-absent… This isn’t about “normal” profitering, they’re trying to go in for the fucking kill. Don’t let them, if they can take your circus away without you being able to stop them then they can take your bread too and you will starve to death, even if that is a starvation of the mind by forcing everything back into linear, cookie-cutter mass media. We have not always been at war with Capitalism, but we are at war with it now because Big Mun Mun is watching, Big Mun Mun knows no ideology and no nation, and Big Money has always wanted to be at war with us.
Power grabs ruin FUCKING everything. People who power grab ruined Communism (see: Stalin), and then Democracy (see: Nixon). Then they even ruined Capitalism (see everything that happened after 9/11). And if power grabs ruin everything, then powergrabbers are exactly the kind of assholes who want anarchy, because a baseline of anarchy is just a beacon of political power for selfish people to take by force and thus ruin as well.
God I hope I’m lucky enough to live to see some sort of actual standard for the metaverse version of the internet. It’s so much harder to dismiss someone and not get called out on it if you can only talk to them like a person and not a fucking png and a bunch of worthless words. Reality doesn’t like that I don’t like the society I live in but I don’t have the ability to simply make a society without spare land or shittons of money? Fuck reality. I’ll live in a metaverse the rest of my life, even if I have to do it with older equipment or give up every non-VR luxury I enjoy. The 4th Matrix movie had a point, escapism is escaping to true freedom, not “accepting” “reality” for what it currently is, but everyone in the writing industry has been shying away from escapism for like 8 years now and telling everyone to face reality no matter how painful, so that nobody has a “valid” reason to ask for things to be better other than “there’s no such thing as better in ANY reality” for who knows why.
Don’t worry too much, if a VR society happens I think it’ll likely arise from here, the FediVerse. I don’t think we’re doomed, I think we need to rollback the internet in some respects, make open source software the norm for all indispensable software, and that every time the corporations have gotten caught trying to rob us since ~1995, less people remain willing to trust centralized and closed-source platforms. I look forward to a future where we realize that what people feared VR would become is actually what Social Media is and what we hoped Social Media would do - circa the mid-00s - is what VR could actually do.
I’m just frustrated that at this point the reason there hasn’t been a fucking revolt is because in 1950 we thought for the first time that we had a perfect system and then whether you were in America or in the former USSR we all saw that system(s) break and realized we didn’t have a better option to replace it still and no one was going to be a George Washington or Karl Marx this time and risk a legacy of a failed society by proposing that a radical new way of life could make everything more fair. I think we as a species might need to start taking a cue from the Civilization series and classify governments as a technology that requires research efforts and periodic replacement, and as a utility and resource supply that must be maintained, not as an investment of any sort.
Government is SUPPOSED to lose money and cost businesses money. It’s SUPPOSED to either get taxes or maintain the amount of money in circulation so that taxes are unnescessary (Why not both? Redundancy is a good safety measure!). It’s SUPPOSED to be a job, and if that’s boring then at least have the f-ing decency to make your “game” have a high score based on “happiest unmanipulated population” and not “PvP Kill-to-Death Ranking”. I honestly don’t know why we let our politicians not be reduced to Tropico players and why our OpenTTD players aren’t hired to beautify our cities without overspending, but I will say this; If I break a campaign promise in a hypothetical political career, I’ll try to at least say “this is why” and “the reason I admit this won’t work is because if I or anyone else in this position has no consistent and good faith argument tendency to do so, they should be assumed to be hiding something because unabused power attracts bullies like honey”.
In short, humans don’t destroy everything we touch, we just forget or refuse to maintain what we create by our touch and that unfortunately applies to the on-topic GPUs as much as almost everything humans are failing at right now.
Wait, when I said game in quotes (“game”) I was referring to politics and Big Tech’s biggest players. Sorry about that, when it comes to actual video games I was not trying to demand particular content, just a movement away from grimdark.
To be fair, my OneXFly is a “third device” for me, I use a cheap laptop to write (yes, I write sci-fi) and the gaming rig has been a string of rigs since 2012 but I sold my share of a Steam Deck to my younger brother and my Rog Ally was supposed to replace it until two of them died on me (fortunately under warranty), so I’ve only owned a gamerdeck of any sort for the past 18 or so months.