hey I'm gonna make a big, sour and sad thread about being a brazillian gamer, my feelings on gaming culture and the gaming industry, and AAA games and why I don't like them. here it comes

it's not really new that I don't particularly like big AAA games, or "prestige" games, whatever you call them, they tend to be enormous timesinks that I mostly find boring to play. for a while I chalked up my disdain for them solely on taste but there's something deeper

they're incredibly expensive games to make, and they just keep getting more expensive in search of more realness, grittiness, and prestige. they keep demanding pricier more powerful hardware to play, and as the dollar gets more expensive, they're less feasible for me to play

and they dominate conversation online. being in gaming culture feels like you're being obliged to play the newest releases to be a part of the conversation. but i don't have the time, money or interest to invest in them, and whatever I can afford gets ignored to the wayside

plus by next month, nobody is talking about that game anymore because another big game came and dominated the conversation instead. this makes me feel so alienated from my own interest. who is gaming culture for? who has the time and money to play these games?

60 dollars is somewhere around 300 brazillian reais now. that's a 1/3, 1/4 of a pitiful minimum wage of 1000 BRL that can barely cover a roof, food, water and electricity. and that's just the game, you'd have to waste a couple minimum wages just for the machine to play it on

these are insane costs for someone who doesn't live in anglosaxon America, or the rich parts of Europe, or Japan. isn't gaming supposed to be much bigger than just these places? yet all the conversation about games are dominated by games that most of us can barely even play

I've wanted to make games my whole life. all I wanted was to be employed as an artist or a game designer in a big company and make the game of my dreams, but if playing big games over here is barely feasible, making them is even less so.

if we make it to a big company, we're relegated to be shadow developers who don't get to have our names in the credits, and whose only purpose is to be human asset farms, never meaningfully involved beyond that

but let's say you're a '3rd worlder' who has had the incredible socio-economic privileges to make a good shot at immigration and you have worked your ass off to have perfect English & show an immaculate portifolio to be hired at a big company's HQ, what then?

then, apparently, you get to experience unholy amounts of crunch, have your life and passion withered and wasted away on overwork, or even harassed and bullied if you're somehow part of a minority on top of being an immigrant that did the herculean work of getting there

sexual harassment too if you're a woman. plus you get to watch corporate throw it under the rug, and if you're lucky, you get to watch your harasser be seen as a rockstar by the media while you're bullied by management for speaking up, or outright fired

or you get traumatized for working hard at the horrific gore that a prestige game employs for dramatic impact. and for who? these games are not being made for the market you came from in mind at all. they don't represent you

and yet your whole life, because you're a gamer, you've been made to feel that these games are all that matter, because they're the ones that permeate conversation, even though you could barely buy them, and you only could because you were incredibly privileged back home

and now a new console generation is around the corner and none of the console manufacturers wanna say their price because it'll be too expensive for EVEN the 1st world market. where does that leave your home? nothing, you don't matter

and yet we must keep talking about those games that we can't play and keep outright ignoring that they're made in a perpetual machine of overwork of people who get none of the accolades or recognition for their prestige

and the fact that these situations don't ever seem to change, that the big shots richer while the people below them keep being harassed and having their lives thrown away to make these games even bigger and less accessible to someone like me, just makes me feel sour about gaming

so that's why I feel like I'm feeling more alienated and more sour over gaming and gaming culture, I just don't know if I can do it anymore. end of thread

anyway I'm selling out, I made a ko-fi for myself if you enjoyed what I had to say and wanna throw a bit of money my way. since the dollar is really expensive like I said so in this thread, a small amount would go a longer way than you'd think https://ko-fi.com/morkitten