Forum Overview :: Peter Molyneux's The Movies :: I saw this recently. Mostly painless.

[quote name="Diehard Gamefan DVD Review"]It got me thinking about where video games went wrong. In the early days, there were clear financial incentives for arcade developers to make good games. They wanted to win your money, so they had to play hard, but they also wanted you to come back for more, so they had to play fair. Perfect! Cut it, print it, put a bow on it, video games are done. Of course, it didn't take long for the situation to degenerate. Developers soon realized they could con players out of their quarters with mindblowing audio-visual presentation and assblasting hydraulic cockpits. That's where consoles came in to save gaming. (Home computers were almost as bad as the arcades at this point, only there developers were preying on readers and simmers instead of children and teenagers.) No one was going to be putting a playable Don Bluth cartoon on a console, and the only successful console peripherals were provided by the platform holders. Literally the only thing developers had to offer was an appealing challenge. So while not all the early console games were good, players could at least mostly agree on which ones weren't. But it wasn't to last. People started playing console games who would've never set foot in an arcade. They would've been too busy working summer jobs, and putting all their money in the bank. Going to the gym. Doing homework! Essentially, they were sheep. Developers started building virtual hamster wheels for these poor, stupid bastards to run in place on. They hit first in Japan, where the conformist wage-slave culture was less reflexively hostile to the idea of crawling inside a stacked sleeping capsule and roleplaying a pretend job. Once affordable CD-ROM drives finally made the dream of pressing buttons to make pre-recorded cartoons play on your own TV a reality, the two most exploitative design tracks in gaming converged, and the modern AAA formula was born. Portable consoles held out for a while, inferior technology and limited storage capacity forming a bulwark against the spread of lifelike chore-ventures. Even early phone games offered some respite, but those developed their own poison; a poison which eventually made its way back into the noxious chemical cocktail that video games have become. That poison is known as feminism, and the only cure is the "in-gasm", the practice of withholding one's precious lifegiving fluids at the moment of climax, channeling them back into the masculinatory system and thereby increasing one's own power while denying it to the enemy. It is perhaps, then, divinely fortunate that a lifetime of classic arcade gaming has inculcated in us the self-discipline to control our injaculation at a 17th-grade level. Real video games will rise again, this I promise you. God and Q-Bert are on our side. Two stars out of four.[/quote]