These days, when a big new game comes out, you can pretty much roll the dice on what kind of reactionary controversy it will produce. Are we looking at a moral panic over trans characters? Diversity consulting? Games journalists being too positive? Games journalists being too negative? Some other quibble that will be forgotten in a week, interchangeably swapped out like grains of sand dragged away by the unrelenting tide? Anyway, the usual suspects got mad about Dragon Age: The Veilguard reviews this week.
You can listen to this week’s episode of Aftermath Hours for a full rundown of why, but the whole thing is illustrative of a larger, more important issue: Thanks to algorithmic prioritization on sites like YouTube and Twitter, this is how a growing number of people engage with video games. Plenty of normal people still manage to tune it out the hours-long rants and conspiracy theories, but at what point does this rancid flavor of brain rot go from a vocal niche to a borderline-mainstream position? And what are the long-term consequences of that?
Also on this week’s episode: We lament the untimely end of Firewalk, the studio that made Concord to Sony’s specifications and then promptly got dumpstered for it. Will the industry actually learn from this? We can only hope. Then we move on to more media layoffs, this time at Fandom, which owns GameSpot, among a sometimes-baffling lineup of other properties (TV’s Guide’s website? Huh!). Oh, and we solve the hell out of what would seem to be an impossible puzzle: How does a worm drive a little apple car?
You can find this week's episode below and on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you prefer to listen to podcasts. If you like what you hear, make sure to leave a review so that Aftermath can grow so large that it becomes the entire internet, supplanting YouTube and other platforms with the kinds of refreshingly chill conversations we regularly have in our Discord (which you can join by subscribing to our “member” tier).
Here’s an excerpt from our conversation:
Nathan: I guess my doomer-pilled concern about all of this is that as the American fascist project continues to grow in power and all of these platforms facilitate these ways of talking about things – conspiratorial thinking and whatnot – do we reach a point where [this becomes the default]? Because I would say that right now, this is still not the way most normal people talk about games or engage with them. A lot of people, as we see even based on Dragon Age’s Steam numbers right now, saw this game, thought it looked cool, bought it, and now they’re playing it. If you look at Asmongold’s most-viewed video about all of this, it has around one million views. One million sounds like a lot! But this game will probably be bought by north of ten million people. So it’s a fraction. And even then, a lot of the people who watched that video were probably never going to buy the game anyway.
So it’s not negligible, exactly, but it’s still a niche. But as these things continue to have relatively convenient onramps – like searching “Dragon Age” on YouTube and getting pulled down this rabbit hole – do we reach a point where this is the predominant mode of conversation around games? Inmates taking over the asylum or whatever; is that where we’re headed? Because we’ve seen this in American politics: The more you enable these people structurally or systematically, the more footing they gain until they become a default.
Are we looking at that in the conversation around games, too? Are we already a large part of the way there? And then to what extent are the people who are engaging with this stuff and dunking on these people constantly also facilitating it? I don’t know. I hate to use this phrase, but I’m just asking questions. It’s one of those things that… I wouldn’t say it keeps me up at night, but when I can’t sleep, I’m like “I may as well also make myself feel bad.” And so I start thinking about things like this.
Riley: I want to say that it’s still a small number of people broadly. And I was talking to someone else this week about how we see the internet, but there are also millions of people playing video games who are not on the internet. So what are people actually doing? To some extent, you’ll never know. And I want to say that at least on Twitter, it’s an echo chamber. But I don’t know. This conspiracy about Sweet Baby, is it this widespread conspiracy, or is it three loud guys and their friends? I think seeing this colloquial usage of it in this DualShockers review makes me think “Oh God, maybe it’s a bigger thing.” Who just says that?
Luke: I think an important thing to remember is, we work in video games, and we work directly with people who know as much about video games as possible and as much about the video game media ecosystem as possible. The people who follow us on social media, all they do is talk about video games all day. Our peers and colleagues and former colleagues, that’s all we talk about. As a sample of the game-playing public, we are a tiny fraction of people. All my IRL friends will talk to me about a Call of Duty game once a year. Everyone I play football with will talk to me about EA Sports FC once or twice a year to complain about it. They don’t play Dragon Age. They don’t know what it is. They barely know what Fortnite is.
It’s the same for everything: It’s music. It’s movies. People don’t consume media about these things constantly on a daily basis. It’s easy for us to lose track of that because we think everybody does, because everybody around us does. But my experience with this stuff – because I make it my point to know as many people outside of games as possible to avoid becoming a broken husk of a person – is [that] it’s really important to get that perspective. It’s fucking video games. No one cares. Play a game you like or don’t. You don’t need to go online and talk about it for 18 hours a day or whatever.
So yes, people like Asmongold are out there making these videos, but like Nathan said, what’s a video like that going to top out at? A million? Worldwide? Among English-speaking people? That’s not shit.
Nathan: Right. There are well over 300 million people in the United States alone.
Luke: Right, and that doesn’t include English-speaking people in Europe and the rest of the Anglosphere. I don’t think it’s something to be worried about as a discourse-shaping trend; it’s more just a bummer for that type of content on that type of medium. It’s gonna go on its own journey, and during that time people are going to be put off it. People might stop watching that kind of content and look somewhere else. They might look on TikTok or on blogs like Aftermath dot site.
It’s not a given that every 13 year-old boy watching an Asmongold video is going to turn into someone who thinks like that. Most people are relatively normal, and there’s a point where once people with a certain kind of hateful or twisted or conspiratorial view start to get oxygen and start to get enabled, their views become increasingly bizarre to a normal person. People aren’t so easily brainwashed that they’ll all just go along with that.
Obviously the political situation in the United States shows that lots of people can if they’re subjected to it long and hard enough, but on a global basis, on a normal-person basis, a lot of people will eventually be like “I think this guy’s fucking weird” or “Who cares? It’s Dragon Age” or “Not everything has to be a conspiracy and a political gesture.” I’m more optimistic than other people are with that stuff, but it’s more of a YouTube problem than a societal problem. They need to sort that out.
Nathan: True, but in addition it’s a Twitter problem, it’s a Facebook problem, with Asmongold there it’s a Twitch problem, it is to some extent a TikTok problem.
Luke: But Facebook is a great example because kids don’t use Facebook anymore. It’s boomer shit, and it’s full of weirdos, so they stopped using it.
Nathan: But it’s a radicalization engine for boomers. All of these things are radicalization engines. They all ended up at the same place despite starting at different starting points. If we’re just talking on radicalization engines – those are our main means of communication – then how long until everyone is some flavor of radicalized, and not for the better? And again, you talk about polarized politics in our country; we’re already part of the way there. I hope that things get better, but I think that will require a concerted effort on the part of those who want them to be better to build something else. I think as long as we’re doing it all [on these platforms], there will be a slow but steady downward trend.
