The hard core gamer walk-throughs presented on YouTube are instructive.
Back in my youth, I was a serious fanatic of Science Fiction. I could get lost in novels and short story anthologies for days at a time. I bought a lot of paperbacks because they didn’t keep me busy that long. Of course, I also consumed some limited fantasy stuff, but that genre went bad by the time I was 30, suffering the first wave of Social Justice Warrior (SJW) politics. I also read a good bit of historical and military fiction, but I could handle them only in small doses because they seemed rather shallow, rather like Western novels.
During the difficult years when I was struggling with the call to serious moral development, I lost my taste for just about all of that kind of reading. At the time I could not have told you why, but some of my favorite authors became quite repugnant to me. The longer I studied what it meant to think like a Hebrew and developed a sensitivity to conviction, the more I despised my previous favorite entertainments.
It was the same recently when I explored the game walk-throughs. I’d get just so far and the story line betrayed something that turned me off. However, now I am fully conscious of why.
For example, Fallout 4 — it’s one of the few games with a serious karma component. However, the whole thing is structured around karma traps. The storyline authors betray a moral nihilism, in that there is a pretty clear underlying moral value system, but you cannot play the game through without betraying it. Unless you turn to the dark side, you cannot hope to experience much of the game. You might finish and get to the big finale, but you’ll miss at least half of the adventures.
So far, none of the games are any better. It’s bad enough that most of the YouTubers who offer these videos are typical gamer dweebs in the first place, the Gamma and Omega males who annoy everyone who isn’t like themselves. And boy, do they love to hear themselves chatter. Only a few are properly socialized and decent, friendly guys. They have their place and their audience, but I’m not part of it.
At any rate, I’ve completely lost interest in those videos. It was quite disappointing when I realized players were being channeled into some of the worst flavors of Western mythology. It’s the same reason I started writing my own fiction: Nobody else presented stories against a realistic moral background. Most published fiction is morally offensive, and I suspect most heart-led folks would feel about the same. So I wrote some stuff with a different moral reality just to see it available.
I’m not suggesting you have to be offended by the same stuff that makes me so uncomfortable. I am increasingly annoyed by the false morality and it’s gotten to the point I can barely tolerate much of anything that is offered as entertainment. Even a lot of documentaries are blatantly anti-Christian. They can’t just tell the story; they just can’t resist poking at faith. Some of it is bearable, but it’s getting harder and harder to find stuff I can tolerate.
I’m becoming a real fan of videos presenting funny animal antics.
Over on Jay’s site he posts the occasional snippet of video game related or anime material. I try – every time – to watch, because this is something so many people enjoy and I want to try to find out why. However, I can never get more than 20-some seconds in before I get a serious case of the creeps and have to switch off. It’s in the voices. There is something to them, just below the surface, that repels me. You know how sometimes there’s a person everyone really likes but you just get a really bad, dangerous vibe off them? It’s like that.
I confess to enjoying the cats vs cucumber videos. And there are animal cams, like the bears fishing in Alaska, that are fascinating.
“increasingly annoyed by the false morality”
Without any idea of objective morality and spiritual significance your ethical system gets to be all about “new effects” or raising a stirr in your readers/watchers/listerners. Especially because it really seems that ethics and morality don’t matter in the real world and the worst people can succeed in their enveavors. Some sort of nihilism is easy to develop even if you don’t succumb to it entirely. Sure, morality isn’t entirely thrown overboard, but its role in art becomes different, I think.
I believe morality is particularly rootless in the entertainment sector of art. Entertainment seems to make reference to tradition as a source of morality, but seeks to deconstruct tradition for a selective, cherry-picking of one kind of moral tradition. And isn’t it rather odd that in these days, “progressivism” is now old and traditional in itself? Where’s the leading edge of progressive social activism now? There’s nothing they haven’t tried to color one way or another, and nihilism is all they have left.