Games

Gamergate is what made me quit games.

Games have long since peaked. The days of the 90s are long gone. Good games in 2026 are restoration mods or rom hacks of games from the 90s. People who were around from 1985-2005 had it good.

Gamergate, like most reactionary movements involving dipshit g*mers, try to pin the decline of gaming on the wokes and women. The real reason is the same reason why almost everything sucks relative to before. It's due to enshittification wrought by capitalism.

Gaming once wasn't a masculine hobby at all until the combination of the game crash of 1983, which wiped out a branch of gaming that didn't try to appeal to just dudes (read up on the development history of Ms Pac-Man) and Nintendo aggressively marketing games as "toys for boys" so consumers would buy (Nintendo) games because it didn't have the stigma of being videogames. The infamous horse armor DLC dropped in 2006, and everything got much worse since then.

Arcades, which were a third space for gaming, started to be usurped by consoles and PCs during the late 90s until it's mostly dead. Matchmaking destroyed player-run servers, which had actual communities with mores and communal understanding on how people should act like all communities. I genuinely do not think Gamergate would a thing if arcade third spaces were still a thing.

Arcades declined in the same exact way malls and other third spaces have declined, crushed under the weight of neoliberalism which seeks to turn every person into an atomized consumer with no sense of community. Games themselves turn into SaaS in the same exact way other software have pivoted towards Saas.

And the thing is it's not like game devs back then were somehow purer or anti-capitalist (The original design doc of Diablo 1 had the game devs envision selling game items through real life booster packs like Magic). What happened is that the finance bros eventually figured out how to milk people dry, figured out how to get people addicted through dark patterns (euphemistically described as "maintaining player retention"). There is a big difference between people being addicted to Diablo and people being addicted to some bullshit gacha even if the success of Diablo did pave the way towards the gacha bullshit we see today. Diablo was addictive because it's a Skinner box, and while the original devs might not have intentionally set out to make an addictive game (but note their original design doc as mentioned above), subsequent developers would very intentionally use dark patterns as part of their game mechanics.