thinking abt @saintwalker98's thoughts about the balkanization of gaming discourse away from any kind of coherent anti-corporatist message toward a more lowbrow "hardcore gnat vs art gamer" message:

honestly it's the AC:NH/Minecraft/Stardew Valley crowd I vibe with least of all

The second video gaming as a medium drifted more towards this "fuck good writing, build a house and have your friends over" paradigm, I felt more alienated from it than I had ever been before

That's not my ambition, in reality or in fantasy, I'm sorry

It wouldn't be such a problem except I've often felt more frequently castigated by dedicants to these games for who I am than I have by hardcore gamers, speedrunners, people who only like short VNs about coming out of the closet to your grandma, or even Gaters

I think what I resent is the tacit idea that this genre of game is exceptionally meditative in sort of crypto-eastern pop-Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh kind of way

That your little island in New Horizons is just a blue-collar Zen garden and you're attaining enlightenment and I'm not

You, making cute little costumes and hedge mazes, are much smarter and more productive than the lowly Penelope, who plays STRIDER 2

That's fucked, man

That's actually a whole lot more fucked than being scorned by speedrunners or people who like DEPRESSION QUEST or CoD gamers

Say what you will about "oldtype" gamers but they're not LESS well-adjusted about their gaming than the new blood or the converts

Or even "casual" gamers; somebody who plays some goof-ass puzzle game on their phone will generally be more well-adjusted than a Minecraft obsessive

"Garden gaming" has become this weird cult of enlightenment in this way that I never saw in gaming before Animal Crossing et al

Nobody ever played Sim City 2000 and came away from it thinking they were superior thinkers for it, but cute animal villagers somehow instigated this

there's also this idea that these games are "apolitical" and "wholesome" in a way that other stuff isn't, which, like... lmao

As if Notch could ever make something apolitical

I would generally agree with this, but for the fact that I've seen these people look down even on visual novel players/devs

Like it's not the violence per se, because these games are about agriculture and colonization, which are both inherently violent https://twitter.com/fiddlersgreen92/status/1329128035531026433

Tempting as it is to link the Stardew Valley obsession to the various puriteenical "make everything soft uwu" movements we see everywhere I don't think the violence is really the focus here

It's the idea these games facilitate bullshit self-help ideas of introspective betterment

People, even self-styled "self-aware" people, are not, in my experience, sufficiently critical of what kinds of ideas of themselves the things they purchase and play are selling to them