Chris Till

Tag: Politics

  • Gaming is Broken. Here’s how we Fix it

    A gaming keyboard with a Playstation controller behind it.
    Photo by Brian J. Tromp on Unsplash

    Gaming has more than its fair share of problems right now. It’s becoming increasingly difficult for me to find new games I really want to play. Practically nothing fits my actual values. And even games which fit enough for me to just about tolerate are becoming somewhat rare. And that’s before you get to the cost of everything. Hardware, software and services. At least in the 90s and 2000s, I would describe gaming as having been pretty centrist or even centre-left in some cases. Now it almost universally comes across as right wing or even fascist. And that’s not as far-fetched as it sounds. Jeffrey Epstein himself played a key role in fostering the free-to-play, microtransaction centric, greed dominated corporate hellscape gaming has become in the 2020s.

    It is true that bargains in gaming do still exist, although only really in software, and only really because of the sale culture that Steam has cultivated over decades, which has forced Playstation, Xbox and Nintendo to compete (if you can say Nintendo competes on price, which is debatable). I wasn’t kidding when I talked about how Steam is responsible for almost everything good that’s happened in gaming in recent times. But outside of that, you very rarely feel these days like you got a good deal. You generally feel as if you have to fight against the rip-off system. If you buy everything on launch day, and get the deluxe edition because you know you love this particular series; and you can save a little bit by paying up front for the DLC season pass; you still feel like you’ve paid too much. I almost never feel like I get value from a full price game. Pokemon Legends Z-A a recent example of one where I did feel like I got my money’s worth on the base game. But even then, the price of the DLC left a sour taste in the mouth.

    The thing is, it may not even be the case that all of those publishers are charging extortionately for the work that goes in to these titles. But that should then lead you to ask questions about the industry as a whole. Do games need to be this grand in scale? Do we need this many developers per game? Wouldn’t it make more sense to spread those developers out among more games? Clearly, something; or more likely many things, have gone very wrong to end up in this state. While neoliberalism is definitely to blame in large part, I think there’s definitely a lot more going on besides.

    In this article, I’m going to briefly outline my solutions to the issues I see as holding gaming back from its full potential; and even the reasonably gamer-friendly position it used to occupy during my childhood. I’m going to categorise them as either instant fixes, more mid-term challenging problems to solve; or dream scenarios that we’ll most likely need a form of revolution in order to make reality. In the vast majority of cases, it’s pretty self-explanatory as to what the problems are; and I’ve also touched on several of these points before. Therefore, I’m only going to get into the specifics where I feel I need to offer more context.

    Instant Fixes

    • More affordable games.
    • Phase out most free-to-play games (unless only cosmetics are paid for) – No paid unlockable characters, modes or areas. Certainly no micropayments to skip artificial waiting times.
    • No paid battle passes – Paying to be locked into playing the same game for many hours to unlock what you’ve already paid for makes no sense to me. Free battle passes are ok though. They’re more akin to traditional gaming progression or seasonal challenges.
    • Fairly priced DLC / season passes – I’m a casual Tekken fan. I’ve been waiting 2 years for the latest release to come down in price to a sufficient level for someone who will only play it very occasionally. At this rate, I’ll be waiting another year or two to get a fair price on the game with all the extra characters. Many of the DLC characters are core Tekken series returnees, and you can bet that’s not an accident.
    • Free online play and cloud saves – Steam offer these essential tools for free. Playstation, Xbox and Nintendo can and should do the same. PlayStation and Nintendo have in the past.
    • No “Pro” edition mid-generation console releases – They’re deeply unsustainable, add complication to game libraries and make the jump to the next full generation less of an exciting event.
    • Longer console generations (a full decade).
    • Less remakes and remasters – Let games become retro, and enjoy them as they were originally intended to be. Limit the practice to exceptional circumstances when dedicated long-time fans specifically ask for a remake for an older game. That’s how it used to be before we started seeing a deluge of remasters (because it’s relatively easy money and a sure thing for extremely risk-averse publishers)
    • Fewer sequels – unless they’re genuinely necessary rather than a “cash grab”.
    • More new IPs – more creativity in general.

    Challenging Problems – will take time even with widespread desire for change

    • A more affordable and more comprehensive cloud gaming service for PC games (I’m thinking of GeForce Now). Nvidia’s service has a lot of things going for it. Primarily how you own your games via Steam or other stores, so you can play them on future hardware you may end up owning. However, the game selection is far from comprehensive; which it needs to be for it to be any serious gamer’s primary platform. I also think going down the “install to play” route is a mistake. Cloud gaming needs to always be easy, and it needs to be significantly cheaper than buying the hardware yourself. “Install to play” compromises the core selling point. My main hope with regard to cloud gaming now is that Valve themselves come out with their own competitor directly built into Steam. That would be a hugely significant development and would be great for gamers.
    • Controllers, mice, keyboards, headsets and other peripherals must be compatible across all hardware and operating systems, and be built to last too.
    • Gaming peripherals must no longer require proprietary software like Razer Synapse or Logitech G-Hub in order to function fully. We should be able to fully customise them via a web-browser on any operating system. There are benefits to downloaded software, such as being able to automatically change DPI or polling rate settings when specific games are launched. But it shouldn’t be mandatory. And the software should also be available on Linux (especially Steam OS).
    • We need to have the option to choose between handheld and static “GameCube style” versions of systems like Nintendo Switch 2. The opposite of the Switch Lite concept. Why should you have to pay for a battery, screen and other hardware necessary for a handheld device, if you’re like me and always prefer to play on the TV. I wouldn’t exactly say Valve are doing this with Steam Deck and Steam Machine, since the hardware is different on both. But they are offering people the choice of a handheld or a static experience. They’re even offering in the Steam Machine a choice between living room and desktop use. They are undoubtedly catering to gamers like me more than the others. And I wouldn’t include the ROG Xbox Ally or Playstation Portal in this, because neither of them are truly doing what the Steam Deck is. The Portal is a cloud gaming and remote play device that requires ownership of a PS5. And the Xbox Ally is a Windows handheld from a 3rd party with Xbox modifications. It’s not a ground up Xbox handheld.
    • Games need to stop progressing graphically for a while, in order to allow storage and other hardware components to catch up, become cheaper and store more games again. People are never going to need 8K TVs; but I imagine that is going to be a big focus of Sony and Microsoft in the next generation. Games look good enough now. PS6 needs to reset the ratio of game size to default storage space to around the era of PS4, when managing storage internally and externally wasn’t the frustrating experience it became with PS5 and Sony’s move to NVMe SSDs. And actually this gets more important over time, as we all accumilate more generations of downloaded games that we have to fit on the new systems. All of which will undoubtedly be backwards compatible, as is now the industry standard. PS4 games are no trouble because they can be stored on a standard external hard drive. I still use the same one I used with PS4 and PS4 Pro (before I realised how bad of an idea mid-generation consoles are). But PS5 games will almost certainly need to be stored on the PS6’s SSD when you want to play them. If so, that’s going to cause yet more storage related headaches for Playstation gamers in future. If it turns out that they will be playable from an external SSD, then that doesn’t really alleviate the problem, since NVMe SSDs are still very expensive if you want a useful amount of storage (aka over 2TB).
    • A far better and industry collaborative method for preserving games for future generations.
    • DRM-free games (all games).

    Dream Scenarios – maybe in a degrowth communist world

    • A unified software store for every publisher – Yes, even Nintendo. (ideally a nationalised Steam). You’d buy a game once, and own it everywhere. And you’d be automatically entitled to any future remakes or remasters of that game. And we’d eliminate the problem that often occurs now where your DLC is stuck on one platform, so you can’t move to a different platform, unless you buy the same content again.
    • All consoles of the same generation would be built to equivalent specs; so as to make it seamless to release games everywhere.
    • A unified cloud gaming system available on any device, and with all games from all publishers available. That is unless there’s a good reason why they can’t be. For example a niche peripheral that’s no longer available or compatible with current devices; like a dance mat or lightgun.
    • All games preserved for future generations except possibly certain online only games. But even in that case, we should endeavor to preserve them, even if only for educational demonstrations rather than actual gameplay.

    If we were to see even half of the things I listed in the first category implemented, gaming would be in a far more tolerable situation. Clearly at this point we can’t just sit around and hope for the best. We need to push for these simple reforms by voting with our wallets and being vocal; while also keeping a socialist gaming future in mind. We’ve become far too used to the need to own specific, expensive machines to play specific, expensive games. And we barely bring up the fact that we have to pay subscription fees for each console’s online functions. Services that not only don’t need to be paid for, but that attempt to lock us in to playing primarily on that system. They essentially bully you into picking one platform to play all your 3rd party games on.

    It’s not a status quo that can continue that much longer. It’s going to get to the point where people will either get fed up of the toxic gaming trends, and stop playing. Or they’re going to be totally priced out of their hobby. Perhaps that could lead to a huge resurgeance of retro gaming, which could end up being very positive. As long as you already own the hardware that is. Otherwise cost is going to chase you down the retro rabbit hole too.

    There are definitely issues in other media. DRM in e-books, music subscriptions (not all of them, but certainly Spotify is problematic); cable and satellite TV being replaced by 10 different apps with subscriptions that add up to more than you were paying before. But no other group of media consumers get shafted more than gamers. This is another reason why we need to fight back. Otherwise we’ll end up with physical music from some labels you can only listen to if you buy a specific machine, or yet another separate subscription. You’ll need two different boxes to play your movies on. It’ll be like Blu-Ray and HD-DVD all over again. Except this time, there won’t be a definitive winner. There may even be three formats. If you want to watch those exclusive films, you’ll need another box. And if you’re thinking: yeah, these corporate goons are bad; but they wouldn’t stoop as low as reinventing CDs or vinyl records in order to capitalise on nostalgia and the physical media resurgeance; think again. Nothing is off the table when it comes to squeezing every penny out of us. Sony tried to stop you ripping CDs in the early 2000s, which didn’t go well for them thankfully. But now we live in a much more brainwashed world where the majority place far too much trust in these multinational conglomerates.

    Because gamers are so used to being treated with contempt by companies, we’re the guinea pigs. If we sit there and take it, the corporations will gain in confidence that they can do the same to everyone else. It’ll make the present day mess of endless streaming apps seem like nothing if they’re left unchecked and emboldened to do their worst.

  • UK Energy Strategy written by a Degrowth Communist

    I’m getting increasingly fed up of hearing so much bullshit in the media, and even from many on the left. So I’m going to lay out my personal energy strategy for this country (presumably can be applied to your country as well). So here’s what I’d do if I were Ed Miliband or equivalent useless dwebe from where you live.

    My kind of solar housing

    I’m having a hard time figuring out which would be the most important thing to start with. I think probably heavily subsidising the cost of solar installs for all properties and commercial, municipal buildings. And for those who live in apartments, I’d give them an equivalent subsidy off their energy bill. The energy bill subsidy would only need to be in operation for a year or so. Just until the other policies listed below had come into full effect.

    Next, I’d ban new nuclear energy (including the establishment’s new favourite bullshit talking point, SMRs (Small, Modular Reactors). This would be a priority because these things could cause huge headaches for a long time to come if they actually get built. So we need to make sure they don’t.

    I would also ban any kind of new coal (did they build that coal mine?) oil or gas development. We sometimes see oil powered grid backup sites, which are insanely polluting; and could obviously be replaced by grid battery storage. And we could do this very quickly. The only types of energy that I’d allow to be built would be Solar (domestic, municipal, commercial roofs, solar parks, farms etc); Wind (onshore and offshore as required, and as recommended by experts); and some other more niche renewables. For example: Geothermal, Tidal, Pumped Hydro and so on, where they would be more suitable than wind or solar. I don’t think they’d be used much, but there’s no reason to fully rule them out of the energy mix.

    The next policy would be to nationalise the National Grid (private company with misleading name), and the energy providers. Or I’d shut down all the energy providers except Ecotricity, and designate them as the UK’s sole nationalised energy provider.

    I would of course change the absurd policy that exists right now, which ties the cost of electricity to the cost of gas, so that we get actually affordable renewable energy. This is something Dale Vince constantly talks about, but is completely ignored by the media and our shitty establishment politicians. Including of course his beloved Labour Party. I’m sure they’ll get it together in another year or two Dale. Keep the faith…

    I would regulate that all new buildings be built to the highest environmental standards for insulation, energy generation and so on.

    I would ban new detached and semi-detached housing. Everything would be small apartment buildings and terrace housing. Everything much smaller and more energy efficient; built for people and nature to coexist in harmony. I don’t want to get any further into housing or other areas of policy though. I want to stick with specifically energy as much as possible.

    I would plan to have a mixture of domestic, municipal and large grid battery storage sites. Most homes won’t require it, but other types of buildings would benefit from battery backup.

    There would be a plan for the gradual phasing out of existing oil, gas and nuclear energy infrastructure. Gas would be last to go, because of the potential extended use of domestic gas boilers for heating. It’ll depend on the rollout of green gas, how hot it gets in summers, as to whether AC becomes a necessity; and if Heat Pumps start to make sense for mass adoption; which could happen with these policy changes. But this is an area where there are different potential paths to explore at a later date. There’s no real rush to settle on one technology. Especially when there’s so much else to do in the meantime.

    Wasn’t that nice? Considering what it’d be like living in a country with sane leadership that wants to solve problems.

  • Why the Left’s Strategy is Irrelevant

    Photo by Phil Hearing on Unsplash

    One of my biggest bugbears in recent years has been hearing this idea being banded around in socialist media; (I don’t want to say left because that can mean too many different things) that suggests that socialists are to blame for our lack of societal traction.

    To me, this is total nonsense. While you can argue, and I’d agree, that the Corbyn campaign didn’t do everything 100% perfectly strategy wise for example; the discourse amplifies tiny strategic errors as being the virtual sole cause of loss of support amongst the electorate. Societal political literacy and media influence get mostly overlooked with less importance placed upon them. People like Nigel Farage and Richard Tice get the opposite treatment. Some prominent British socialist journalists are quick to praise Nigel Farage in particular as a political strategic genius. I’m not saying he isn’t a shrewd operator and a great public speaker / showman. He is. But he, and most others like him generally find their popularity falls into their lap. All they have to do is avoid a mega blunder that would cut through to the mainstream and expose them for the anti-worker charlatans they are and always have been to a population that barely pays attention to politics at all. Apart from on polling day where about half of them can be bothered to actually turn up and express their anger at how much more shit the country has become since last time.

    And that’s in a country where we still have a modicum of common sense and we aren’t by and large a zombie wasteland like the United States. There, you don’t even have to avoid the mega blunder. You can be an out-and-proud fascist, rapist, fraudster and so on; and still win the popular vote. It’s almost as if the less strategy you have, the better. So, why do we allow Farage, or Tice, or any of the rest of them to get painted as strategic masterminds even by socialists like Aaron Bastani (who I generally like); and meanwhile someone like Jeremy Corbyn gets harsh criticism from the same journalists and outlets for tiny strategic errors that would never even make the news if Farage did them?

    We don’t like to blame the public. We don’t want to have to say that a large part of our electorate are blithering idiots (which often leads them to racism, bigotry and sometimes violence); but it’s true. Look at every man or woman on the street “vox pop” video that’s been released on youtube or broadcast on TV in the last few years. They almost seem to be getting stupider, more racist and more bigoted with every single video. Maybe they are. Take Bastani’s recent trip to Runcorn for example. The vast majority of the people he talked to were convinced that Britain is a poor country and we have to choose between either housing and supporting British born citizens, and treating “illegal migrants” (aka desperate asylum seekers who have been through a hell of a lot to even get here) to lavish lifestyles in hotels. And they also tend to think that the migrants don’t want to work, when they are literally being prevented from working. The government refuse to reverse a couple of decade old policy that stops refugees contributing to society because it allows them to more easily demonise the vulnerable people; which in turn benefits them politically. Although it will benefit Farage more obviously.

    Even the people he interviewed who weren’t entirely brain rotted didn’t have much of use to say. Out of the whole almost half an hour long video, only one person mentioned the Green Party (the only left of centre party in England), and he was basically the only person who made any cogent points at all. As far as the two women I think it was who said they were going to vote Labour in the parliamentary by-election; the best argument they came up with was that Labour just needed a bit more time to see if they could turn it around. Aaron mentioned this as notable in his summary of the video as well.

    We need to be honest about the fact that British people are very, very stupid and uninformed on average at this point. Yes, you can say that Farage and Reform are “strategic” in terms being best placed to manipulate fools into voting against their own interests. But they’re not strategic masterminds. They’re just benefitting from decades of societal decay. There’s nothing significantly wrong with the left’s strategy. It’s been more than good enough to win elections in 2017 and 2019. We’ve seen it in Canada and Australia in the last couple of weeks. I’m not saying those results were good for the left. They weren’t. But those countries show that the more educated a society is, the more likely it is that they will resist fascism. Canada and Australia have definitely fallen back in education standards and political knowledge as well, which is why the results were still bad for socialists and social democrats. The “Shit Lite” party (as The Juice Media would say) won in both of those cases. I think that’s a really good illustration though of what this is really about.

    Smart countries vote for socialists. Moderately intelligent countries vote for the neoliberals, and brain dead looney populations vote for obvious charlatans who offer nothing to them, and get propped up by the media, like Nigel Farage.

  • I’ll Never Forgive The Liberals

    A globe on fire, illustrating the mess the liberals (aka the neoliberal and fascist enablers) have done to humanity and our planet.
    Fascist enabling liberals are responsible.

    I saw some liberal responses to an Instagram video by Chris Packham; where they say basically “I voted for Labour because I thought they would turn it all around, but they turned out to be just as shit as the Tories”.

    This shit broke me. It’s the most angry I’ve felt for quite a while. I haven’t been that angry about Trump. I’ve just been like “ah yeah ok” every time I’ve been told about the latest executive action Trump has introduced. I’m just entirely apathetic about it. Obviously I’ve been feeling for those innocent people impacted by these fascist policies. But I knew everything they would do, and I just generally prepared myself mentally for the worst policies I could imagine. So nothing shocked or surprised me in the slightest.

    But when it comes to liberal voters and politicians; they really infuriate me. Obviously it’s the same all over the world; but considering I’m British, I’ll talk about the situation here specifically. The way Jeremy Corbyn and the left in general have been treated by so called Labour and the media is just nauseating. And then on top of that, the way we were ignored at every single point, when we were right at EVERY SINGLE POINT is unforgivable. This isn’t them saying “you were right about Jeremy Corbyn. You were right about Starmer. You were right to vote for Rebecca Long-Bailey.” This is “we fucked up by voting for Starmer” and nothing more. It’s like when they say nothing before October 7th is relevant when it comes to Palestine. They ignore history to justify the unjustifiable in their minds. They’ll never accept the left was right and they were wrong about anything (let alone everything).

    They would rather play dumb and pretend that Labour under Starmer was always a social democratic proposition; until it suddenly wasn’t. It wasn’t an extreme neoliberal government in waiting from the very beginning in 2020 (5 years ago!) It wasn’t a party that offered nothing to voters because they knew as long as they remained alive, and gave away practically nothing on future policy; that by election day that they’d be in number 10 and 11 Downing Street. We can talk about the Tories making it inevitable that Labour would take over, and the media who ignored the only party that had policies that made actual sense (or any serious policy at all), the Green Party.

    But at the end of the day, a special fuck you goes out to the liberal voters. The ignorant, insufferable morons who insisted that they knew better than us. They knew better about the economy. They knew better about the climate. They knew better about nature. They knew better about antisemitism. They knew better about protest. They knew better about politics and political strategy.

    Except they didn’t. And they still can’t accept that they don’t. They never will, regardless of what goes wrong.

    Fuck these people! I’m never listening to any of them again. Nor the liberal media, who are probably at fault more than any voters. I don’t know. There’s just something about liberal voters realising they fucked up but never taking any responsibility that particularly pisses me off.

    Either way, they all need to own everything that happens from here on in. It’s nothing to do with the left. Climate breakdown and collapse. It’s on them. Fascism and the removal of all of our rights in the meantime. It’s on them.

    If you’re reading this and you’re a neoliberalism enabler; it’s all on you. We’re always told that we need to go further to the right, even though capitalist ideology has failed time and time again. Ok, you win. The world is going fascist. You got what you wanted. Now let’s see you take responsibility for once. No one is going to believe you this time, when you inevitably try to blame the left for your utter failure; and the destruction of our only home.

    I’m not even sure how far fetched it is to imagine a TV newsreader in a destroyed and smouldering newsroom in the future blaming Jeremy Corbyn and the left for our destruction at the hands of the fascists. That’s how insane our world now is.

    Fediverse Reactions
Design a site like this with WordPress.com
Get started