CW: Global Warming, NFTs, Neoliberalism

Played out of curiosity from Dan Olsen's latest video The Future is a Dead Mall which dedicates its entire runtime to a thorough analysis of it. Decentraland is an NFT focused social oriented MMORPG where the point is that you have to buy the land and assets through crypto. He does more justice to the abomination than I ever could, focusing primarily on its 'post scarcity' economic model and corrupted 'landlord moderators' style system of so called 'governance'.

Anybody who has either watched Olson's other videos on NFTs or Fortnite is already going to be well aware of the systems of commercial artifice, fragmented 'community building', and desperate ponzi delusions that underline a lot of these. To such an extent that the video itself might seem redundant especially after NFTs already had their big crashpoint recently. That's the thing though, this place is still alive and still functioning in 2023, crypto is not your typical product rugpull its a system of, I guess I would call, 'post nostalgia. I saw on one mans plot all these billboards and banners of the bored ape yacht club and ETH and thought on the one hand the guy who put this all up may not have been on in a while, but on the other hand the people who believe in the future of this stuff have built such an insecure sense of identity out of advertising products that I wouldn't be surprised if it was built yesterday as a 'shrine' of how far they've come. We are coming into the era of advertisement as interactive experience. I teleported randomly into an event at one point where people were all talking on a zoom meeting about the value of Metaverse. Everyones avatar was just standing around as these blown up zoom conversation was displayed on the side. Afterwards, everyone was ushered inside and the worst fashion show/ball music started playing that I left.

Elsewhere the place is littered with these disturbing nouve riche ideas of immaculate sci fi casino spaces, bars, auction house etc usually empty of furniture with just PNG images on the wall. An important point here is that all of them had to have 1 wall open so that the camera doesnt freak out when you're inside meaning all the buildings feel less like buildings and more like Kiosks or Booths which is great because well, thats kinda what they are.

One really interesting point that leads into this feeling of haunted fragmentation is that the music is also a pay to use. So it will randomly play as an asset without fading in properly, often needing a moment to properly generate in, so you're always being startled by the worst house music you've heard. Along with that almost nobody is on and outside of prerecorded messages nobody talks 1 to 1 as avatars despite there being a voice chat button which gives everything a 'dead' quality to it. The space is absolutely gigantic so at best you'll find 1 person in a random area from teleport who is AFK, so its mostly just a museum of garbageart.

There's something inherently amusing about touring a space that isn't meant for you though, being able to gawk at unfinished architechture and the frantic aspirations backing them. That sense of hauntedness and fragmentation is usually referenced as a marker that something is 'bad' but I'm not so sure. Decentraland operates to me as such a unique attempt at upselling entertainment service as a possession product that to simply discard it and call it bad is to do it a minor disservice. The function of this feels like a tacit parody of all the other social MMOs that are less forthright about doing the same thing, it feels 'unreal' in spite of the fact these are real people operating and who bought all this stuff. For instance, the commodification of fashion attire in VR Chat and Second Life are equally as absurd. Along with the desire in a lot of more objective oriented MMOs like FF 15 explicitly trying to upsell you on the idea that if you buy the full version you can own your own house. These strange fauxscarcity trends are everywhere. Hell even discord nitro has it, there's no bandwidth being hurt by having animated gif emotes for unpaid users, its privatized only for the bottom line. It's worth noting then that Decentraland and its advocates are not just profiting off this, the sell value comes in imagining a future for which all their obnoxious advertising becomes justified. They are selling a future even if they don't implicitly believe in it.

Peter Fraise refers to the concept of the clash of abundance with hierarchies as 'Rentism'. He says that

"But an economy based on artificial scarcity is not only irrational, it is also dysfunctional. If everyone is constantly being forced to pay out money in licensing fees, then they need some way of earning money, and this generates a new problem. The fundamental dilemma of rentism is the problem of effective demand: that is, how to ensure that people are able to earn enough money to be able to pay the licensing fees on which private profit depends." link

The point here is that it's within this reference point of abundance that people are thinking. I really do think you see stuff like this in the crypto imagination because literally never is their concern on food or energy crises, they assume a utopian system in which these logistics are already taken care of. All that's left then for them is a series of entertainment identities to choose from. I don't find these people inherently ridiculous for this, after all is this not how we are generally trained to think? Cultural consumption under neoliberalism is bargaining constantly about which choice out of a line to vote for and what the new blockbuster movie is like. It's a constant pull of selling something now to ignore the larger issue, for example energy crises under global warming.

It's just that in order for this system of thinking to work, everything has to constantly be in a state of cultural trend adoption and abandonment. Nostalgia has to constantly be working faster and thus, reappeal these relics to somebody down the line. In order for it to work people have to change fortnite and roblox and only after a few years, rather than decades, get you to say 'remember old fortnite'?

In the same way people buy into the fiction of there being isolated news stories that only refer to local narratives of crime or devastation rather than any understanding of it coming out of environmental forces, class antagonisms, and the violence over resources, the adoption of fast fashion market identity experiences is a similar distraction technique. Countries see a world in which water becomes scarce, they are already fighting over it. People trapped into digital delusions don't think twice about it. They sell the idea that neoliberalism as a model of self pimping and privitization is actually going towards making everyones lives better as a whole, that there's more of an abundance of resources when in fact the opposite is true. The environment is decaying at a literally unsustainable rate and there's not enough abundance to keep up with that. They tell people that because having to make things out like problems are getting worse and that wars may be unevitable with the current system lead to uprisings. Countries and the people that lead them only believe in their own domination and territory, there's no dream of 'future' up there.

People who buy into the progressive reasoning don't see it that way. In order to believe in the delusion that you can merge accumulation of physical into the digital entirely, you have to believe in these Thiel-esque forms of psychotic utopianism and immortalism. This is 'your' ladder to climb, and thus you don't have to settle on any preferences or identity, that there's almost more to consume. Just ignore death, we will fix that to, everything can last for which you can continue on this trend of fast fashion and control.

The world of Decentraland is sad, silly, and pathetic, but I'm glad I got to see it, because in my view it's the end states of merging your sense of self with the internet under neoliberalist notions of the future. There's an implicit understanding that you aren't meant to appreciate these 'sincere parodies' but I'm not so sure. The design of things in this world is fucked up in such a specific way that it would make for a rich inspiration point for almost any game dev out there. This stuff is trash but its the trash of an ideological monopoly worth reinterpreting. We need stuff like this around, and for people like Dan Olson to put a microscope to it so we can see the larger world for the rotting machine that it is.

I love racing games, but at someone who doesn't like to play them online, there's a huge issue that they all have to end up grappling with. How does it stay fun when you're in the lead? Sure, you can find fun in trying to optimise the laps, but it feels hollow when you already know you're going to win. You're just driving around a circuit, by yourself.

TrackMania avoids this problem completely by laser-focusing on the idea of optimisation. There's no other cars - save for a ghost opponent to compare yourself against - and instead makes the tracks themselves your opponent; a time trial racer with hundreds of tracks over different gamemodes, that encourages and expects you to fully master each crazy track it has to offer. It's incredibly compelling and only makes me yearn for more games like this!

United Forever also feels like a true perfection of the series' own formula. Not only are there a huge amount of tracks in this game, but they're pretty much all good! I only remember a single track I thought was bad (and that was only a particular part of it that sucked), which is pretty amazing considering the sheer volume. It also bundles in all the environments from the previous games, each having entirely unique identities. Not only does each one have you drive a different car, which all perform noticeably differently, but the track pieces in each environment are all unique and play into the environments' own identities - contrast the extreme high-speed Island cars with freakishly fast boosters and mile-long jumps with the satisfaction of taking a slow Coast car around a tricky set of bends and you'll realise how much variety the game has to offer.

TrackMania is a series that set out with one specific goal, and aimed to work its one core idea to absolute perfection. United Forever is where they managed to achieve their goal, and it sits as not only my all-time favourite racing game, but also one of my favourite games. An absolute necessity for any arcade racing fan.

Played on Nintendo Switch.

A nice and simple game. Considering this was one of the release titles for the NES, it's actually quite impressive. The design mode is actually quite advanced for such an old title and I enjoyed my limited time toying around with it.

I would've rated it higher but unfortunately this age of games isn't really my favorite alongside it not necessarily being my favorite genre.

Still a great experience though and worth playing compared to some of the other games on the NOS.

This game is an absolute gem that truly deserves recognition. Initially, I must admit that the controls and camera angles did not feel natural to me and seemed to be working against my actions, which made it challenging to get into at first. However, after spending some time with it, I found myself having a genuinely enjoyable experience. Although I still believe that RE2 is currently the pinnacle of the series (at least until I give RE4 a try), this game is undoubtedly a remarkable achievement and easily one of the best debut games in the history of gaming.

If you're already a fan of the Resident Evil franchise, or even if you're looking for a new game to delve into, I highly recommend giving this one a shot. The remaster treatment it received is fantastic, and the game boasts a plethora of charm and soul, not to mention an expertly crafted immersive atmosphere. It's a truly masterful example of how to make a game that truly immerses the player and draws them in.