I don’t play a lot of video games anymore. I used to be quite the little game junkie, back in the day, but, these days… not so much. I still dabble, here and there.

Every now and then, I’ll turn on the Nintendo Switch and revisit my island on Animal Crossing and see if my villagers are enjoying the floating gulag I lovingly crafted for them and continue to make little improvements in the lives of my dear citizens. Do I rule my island of upright, sentient animals like a dictator? Yes. But I am a benevolent one. I have never once been so shallow and soulless as to dismiss a villager on account of being ugly, like so many Animal Crossing fans on Twitter are quick to do in pursuit of the perfect island, especially the truly dedicated e-girl types who labor away for days and days on their islands and persecute any and all villagers that don’t meet their arbitrary and nebulous definition of cute, all the while posting sad girl and Hello Kitty shit on their Twitter feed pages… well, I don’t know Ms. Kitty personally, but I do not think she would approve of banishing citizens from their homes on account of being visually disagreeable.

About once a year, I’m also seized by the inexplicable urge to get back on Minecraft and feverishly continue the seemingly never-ending sprawl of the monolithic city that I’ve been working on for over a decade now. I’ll spend a few days laboriously constructing sky-scrapers and apartment blocks for no one for no other purpose than to sate my apparent appetite to just do and, then, the need to stack blocks will subside, I’ll stop, and I won’t touch the game for another year. Apparently the only games that I still find any joy in are games in which you’re effectively working.

That’s my inner-Sigma, I suppose. It’s not a mindset - it’s a grindset. And it never sleeps.

The last game that wasn’t Animal Crossing or Minecraft I actually played in it’s entirety was the last installment of Pokemon, because I’m not just on that neverending hustle - I’m also a glutton for punishment. For a franchise that’s as robust, long-standing, and packed with potential as Pokemon, it’s rather awe-inspiring just how lazy the developers at GameFreak can be. With every new installment, I think they’ve hit the event-horizon of Not Giving A Shit, and yet, year after year, I’m left amazed by just how much more room to fuck off and not try they manage to find. And trust me - this may come as a surprise, but I’m a slacker by nature; I know how to min-max the effort-to-output ratio for just about anything I do, but these guys have taken the fine art of not trying and elevated it to a precise and exact science. Given that I seem to categorically care about things that don’t matter, and the less something matter, the more effort I seem willing to put into it, I think Nintendo should take the rights away from GameFreak and put me in charge of the franchise.

I have ideas. I’d get that ship going in the right direction again.

But, at some point several years ago, I realized that I was wasting way too much time on video games. And for what? What was the return on my investment for the myriad of hours I sunk into a game? Shiny pixels on a screen? Bragging rights? Was that worth the fact that I’d eschewed the opportunity cost to do something that could have made me actual money or acquired tangible things? I imagine that if I’d spent even a fraction of the time I dumped into blasting pixelized zombies or palling around Azeroth with a bunch of strangers on learning a new skill, I’d not only be wealthy, but I’d also speak five different languages, be able to strip a car down to it’s constituent pieces and reconstruct it, and I reckon I could have penned the finest opera of the 21st century. If not for my chronic addiction to the dopamine rush of hearing bing bing wahoo! and epically pwning n00bs in the PVP arenas of World of Warcraft, why… I think I could have been the next Puccini.

Truly, I am not the victim; it is the the world that has been robbed.

This is not to say that I didn’t have fun with it. On the contrary, I had loads of fun. Oodles of it. A barrel of monkeys doesn’t even come close to matching the sheer ecstasy of playing virtual golf on increasingly absurd mini-golf courses with my friends at three in the morning, or smoking fools with my pimped-out, Red-Tiger-Camo’d P90 in Modern Warfare and laughing raucously as I listened to children throw every racial epithet known to man at me as they shrieked into their grainy, five-dollar Xbox headset. It got even better when one of their parents came in, and you could hear them yelling SHUT THAT GOD DAMN THING OFF ALREADY, or some such. This may be a bit sad to admit, but I still hold to many memories in my illustrious career as a layabout gamer as some of the most fun I’ve ever had in my life. World of Warcraft was a riot. Modern Warfare and the subsequent Call of Duty games were a blast. That’s to say nothing of the absolutely transcendental glory that was Halo 3.

But, there comes a time where you have this… certain epiphany in your life that mirrors a certain bible verse. Unless you go to Reddit too much, or collect Funko Pops, because I think that demographic overlaps pretty heavily with People Who’ve Never Cracked a Bible Before, and therefor never read 1 Corinthians 13:11 (KJV): When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

And, look - not to contradict scripture right after quoting it, but I think it’s less about taking your Legos and NES collection down to Goodwill, and more about just learning to prioritize your life. It’s about not letting those material things rule your life, you know? Not being beholden to childish things when matters of adulthood take precedence. I’m not qualified for teaching a bible study, but I think the more pressing parts of that passage are I spake as a child and I understood as a child, and often, too much emphasis is put on the putting away part, and disregarding the fact that childish things include a childish view of the world that keeps you from prioritizing what an adult should prioritize. If one were to sell off their video game collections because it’s a childish thing and then promptly took the funds to build a man-cave that looks like this:

I’d say that the meaning of that verse flew clear over their head.

I digress.

Aside from the memories of playing video games… what else did I have to show for it? Well, while those memories are important in their own right, but, ultimately, they offer very little utility other than eliciting the odd smirk and a brief exhale of amusement when I remember them. I call this period of my life my Opium Den in Morocco phase1. Like an opium den in Morocco circa the turn of the 19th century, I spent way too much time and money there for fleeting, ephemeral pleasures, and got myself hooked on something deleterious in the process.

Ever since I had this epiphany, I’ve never touched a video game console or built a new gaming computer.

Well, okay, I did buy a Nintendo Switch, obviously, but I find that, after years of temperance, I don’t have trouble controlling myself and the time I spend with the it, and it usually sits alone and unloved, along with all those poor, poor villagers still stranded on my island dystopia in Animal Crossing, waiting for their Dear Leader to return home. It wasn’t consoles so much as the computer, after all, that was my drug of choice. PC Gaming was my crack cocaine. I don’t even have anything more than a laptop that can barely run Minecraft in my house; not because I’m some enlightened Bodhisattva, divorced from material desires, but rather because the first step to beating an addiction, and the best way to keep it beat is to not even have the object of your desires around to tempt you in the first place. It’s similar to how I managed to wean myself off junk food; if you don’t buy it, it won’t be in the house, and when it’s not in the house, you can’t eat it.

This isn’t to say that I haven’t been tempted to relapse before. Oh, believe me - I have been tempted mightily. This may be difficult for you to grasp, but, believe it or not, I am but a simple simian, at the end of the day, and I do often struggle with temptations of the flesh and material, worldly, frivolous things. I watched a friend of mine play Baldur’s Gate III recently, and I felt that old familiar itch… that little oily voice whispering in the back of my mind, Damn… this looks kinda fun. Fun story. Fun characters. And that elf chick… she’s pretty cute, don’t you think? Don’t ya wanna… play it? Just a little bit. C’mon. It wouldn’t hurt.

You know, when you hear that voice? That’s the devil talking to you.

Fortunately, relapsing on PC gaming is not nearly as easy as relapsing on alcohol or ice cream. If I were a recovering alcoholic, I could stop at any of the fifteen gas stations on my way home, pick up a forty for a few bucks, and fall off the wagon hard enough to fracture my skull and precede to be trampled over by the horse pulling the next one. Building a gaming rig is not nearly so simple, nor is it as cheap. If there’s ever been a time that my natural thriftiness and penchant towards parsimony has come in handy, it would be keeping my ass out of a gaming chair, because, for as much as I’d just love to go to Best Buy and start collecting the parts to cobble together a rig so I can fire up Baldur’s Gate III and lay the moves on Shadowheart, I could not, in good conscious, drop the money necessary to do so.

Worse still, like any recovering addict, I know that if I walk back into that opium den in Morocco again… I won’t be coming out. Not easily. Perhaps not at all. And that, more than anything, is what keeps the temptation at bay.

Video games are, first and foremost, a time sink. They’re a distraction. And, despite everything I said above, a little bit of distraction here and there? That’s fine. I’m all for good entertainment. In fact, I think we need good, quality entertainment. The cabal of ghouls that currently hold the reigns of power want you to think that humans have never had any time for leisure and didn’t even have a concept of fun or entertainment while they hacked out a short, brutish existence in squalor and poverty, but the truth is that people have always had need for entertainment, recreation, and leisure. Mostly because they needed something to get their minds off the fact that they did usually live short, brutish existences in squalor and poverty, but the point is that for as long as people have been people, they’ve had games. Humans really, really enjoy imposing challenges on themselves just for the sake of completing them, like, Who can his this ball with a stick the furthest? or Who can throw more balls into this hoop? We really, really like throwing balls around. We get it natural, I suppose.

The old Andrew Breitbart truism goes, Politics is downstream of culture, which, in the modern era, is more appropriately extrapolated to Politics is downstream of entertainment.

Currently, I’d say that we’re bearing terrible witness to the consequences of outsourcing our culture and entertainment to the least capable and woefully inadequate dregs of society and the catastrophic results of doing so in our political sphere. If you ever feel like the country’s laity is treating the kabuki theater that is American politics like a life-or-death struggle between the Avengers and Voldemort caked with the same sentimental cheese, overwrought schmaltz, obnoxious snark, and uh, so that just happened humor that typifies their favorite Reddit-tier cape flick, they are, and that’s the reason why.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again; trash in, trash out. It’s elementary, my dear Watson.

I’d make the argument that, more than any other form of media, video games are by their very nature more addictive than any other entertainment medium, and it’s very easy to not even realize you’re tumbling down the slippery slope of wasting too much time shooting aliens or stacking blocks in Minecraft while your bills pile up and your income dwindles to a pittance, but, I really don’t think it’s the addictive quality that’s the problem. I’m not calling for some kind of fatwa on the entire medium of video games. Pretty much anything can be addictive, if not judiciously managed. Like all things, it’s about moderation and self-control. As with any addictive substance, the individual has a personal responsibility to practice temperance and self-discipline, and I’ve always thought that it’s unfair and unethical to punish those who can temper their appetites because of those who can’t. Then again, I’ve got a stack of seven empty Zyn packs on my kitchen counter, a fully stocked humidor, and enough hard liquor on top of the fridge to stock a bar, so, maybe I’m hurling medicine balls inside a house made of glass2.

But I’d also argue that there is a difference between booze and nicotine and video games. Don’t get me wrong, they’ll all destroy your life in spectacular fashion when consumed in excess, but at least we, as a society, recognize the dangers of the first two and, as tobacco and alcohol consumption decreases among younger generations, over indulgence in them is becoming increasingly frowned upon. Video games, however… not so much. In fact, an over-consumption of video games is becoming more and more fashionable as they’ve graduated to a preeminent form of distraction for the American people. In fact, for the past decade or so, gaming is the most profitable and lucrative medium of entertainment.

Since my father made the ill-advised decision to buy me a Nintendo Gameboy and a copy of Pokemon Red in 1998 (he could have done less damage by handing me a crack pipe), I’ve watched gaming evolve from a niche hobby for a relatively small audience into a bloated, ugly, monstrous and cancerous blob that’s increasingly being pushed by market forces as a lifestyle. You don’t game as a means of escape from the stressors and turmoil of your every day life, or unwind for a bit after work; increasingly, the corporate powers that be want gaming to be your life.

Gamers - a term I’ve always been loathe to use - always had a bad habit of making their hobby an outsized part of their identity.

It’s why you’ve always seen people wearing shirts like this in public without a shred of irony or self-awareness:

Like, you don’t really see guys who are really into, say, building car models or recreational piloting wearing shirts that say, A DAY WITHOUT BUILDING A CAR MODEL IS… JUST KIDDING, I HAVE NO IDEA, or I PARKED MY PLANE TO BE HERE. You certainly don’t see alcoholics or cigarette smokers advertising their addiction of choice through their fashion or choice of home decor. I’ve never seen a smoker wear a t-shirt that says, I FUCKING LOVE CIGARETTES.

The only other hobby - or perhaps addiction - I can think of that drives people to wear silly graphic tees similar to gamers is fishing. But I know a lot of avid anglers, and, even if they do wear shirts like this -

They still don’t describe themselves as an angler or a fisher the same way someone who is really, really into video games describes themselves as a gamer, nor do they orient their entire lives around fishing. Though, I suspect they would, if given the choice.

So, yeah, there was always a degree of gamers conflating their hobby with their identity, but it was never as aggressive or widespread or all-encompassing as it is now.

However, in the aftermath of legendary titles like Halo 3 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, which opened gaming to a much wider market, there was an aggressive marketing attempt to expand the core consumer base of video games beyond the narrow demographic of boys and young men around the late 2010’s. Increasingly, being a gamer changed from something you did to something you were, and it wasn’t just something young men and boys did, but everyone did. This idea was, in large part, perpetuated by Nintendo, which breached the demographic divide with the Wii console. It may seem bizarre to younger kids who have probably grown up with everyone in their lives playing or at least knowing what a video game is, but, back when the Wii launched, it was truly a novel idea to get grandma on her feet and playing virtual tennis with bobblehead-cartoon characters. Hell, I remember even finding a Wii at launch was impossible for months because every fucking nursing home was buying them in bulk to keep the cranky octogenerians off their dusty asses and movin’ those old bones. I’m sure more than one elderly individual broke a hip in a gruesome Wii Bowling accident.

With other titles like Rock Band, Guitar Hero, and Just Dance releasing around a similar time to great acclaim and popularity from a segment of the population that had never touched a game console before, gaming was rapidly growing beyond the previous boundaries that had containment as every grandma had a Wii in her house, every soccer mom had traded pilates for Wii Exercise, and every podgy dad in Middle America could reignite his desire to form a garage band with Guitar Hero and bang out the greatest boomer staples without ever touching a guitar. And, don’t mistake me - that in and of itself was not a bad thing. Making gaming more accessible or more appealing to a wider audience; that much is fine. There were a lot of families spending a lot of quality time around their newfound shared interest in video games, and I don’t think that was a bad thing.

This shift in consumer demographics not what the event that turned gaming from a hobby to a lifestyle for the masses. What it did, however, was normalize the consumption of video games for something that was for one group of people and to something that was for every, and, by proxy, make it much more socially acceptable to be a gamer in the process.

I think there’s another reason, more pernicious reason that this shift in gaming culture began around 2007 and 2008, as well.

I find that the younger generations often forget that, back in the ye olden days of the early to mid 2000’s, if you wanted to use the internet, you had to go somewhere like this to do it.

There was a specific room in the house where you had to be to access it, and, often times, only specific times you even could access it. Believe it or not, young ones, but if someone was on the phone, you weren’t gonna be able to log on to the world wide web and play Runescape. Also, when you tried to access the internet, demons started screaming at you, which I think was probably a sign that we had hit the safe and sensible limits of the internet, and everything that’s come after has been a mistake.

But, with the advent of the smartphone circa 2007, you were able to access the internet anytime, anywhere. To quote Douglas Adams, This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move. Just like video games evolved from a hobby to a lifestyle, being online wasn’t something you only did when you were sequestered away in an office or private study in the comfort of your own home, but something that never fucking stopped.

What I’m saying is that the internet used to have a specific time and place that was divorced from your broader life. There was a clear demarcation between online and offline.

We do not have that clear delineation anymore. The consequences for society have been both dire and too numerous to recount here, but I do believe it was also the catalyst that took gaming from a simple hobby to the miserable, cynical, hyper-corporatized nightmare that it is today. Again, it wasn’t something you did sometimes, but something you did all the time, and something that fewer and fewer people thought was weird or anti-social or even had the potential to be bad in any way.

This shift isn’t particularly uncommon in the media landscape post-2012. This manner of turning media consumption into a lifestyle, in the Satanic domain of advertising and marketing, is literally called lifestyle marketing, and it is something that has really took off in the later Obama years, when being political also went from being something that had a time and place to something that saturated the very fabric of our society. Again, it may sound strange, but I remember being raised in a world where talking politics was not something you did in polite company, and was really only reserved for family and close friends to be debated over beers in the backyard or the Thanksgiving dinner table. Hell, my parents always stressed that it was out and out rude and boorish to ask someone who they voted for or what political leanings they possessed. These days, it’s not just enough to keep your political ideology to yourself - in some cases, you’re expected to voice it, and God help you if you don’t voice the right one.

Curious how all this shit happens right around the time smartphones and the internet became widespread, isn’t it?

Now, these companies realized that they couldn’t allow these various hobbies, activities, intellectual properties, and even political parties to be just things you did some times - they need them to be crucial, lode-bearing pillars in your life that you’ll spend a king’s ransom on and always occupy a part of your mental bandwidth. Because, you know.

Lifestyle Marketing is a particular pernicious and pervasive school of advertising that has come to define the corporate dystopia we currently languish in that I’d like to come back to another time, but, for now, if you want to know why it’s so important that these companies make sure that you know that buy a new Apple iPhone is so pronouns or using the hot new Chinese shopping scam breakthrough online discount retailer du jour like Temu.com is touted as an expression of identity, it’s because it is imperative that they align with the values of the consumer.

Or, so they say.

Given that most consumers demonstrably proved that they don’t want Skeletor hawking their cheap piss beer -

Or Target selling their kids pride merch designed by a lunatic Satanist -

I think it can be safely said that it’s less about aligning with customer values and much more about social engineering to get the customer to align with corporate values. Or, more accurately, the values that they, in turn, are taking from the powers that be, who have a very keen interest in breaking down every identity into tiny, atomized fragments that can be reconstituted into gray, amorphous consumer units. This will, hypothetically, work out very well for corporations in the end, because when there’s no particular demographic to market your shit to, you can market to everyone. The one thing that corporations fear the most is a demographic that won’t buy their product. I think there’s probably a crack team of scientists being funded by Stanley 1913 trying to figure out how they can rehabilitate the image of those giant, overpriced sippy cups to be cool for men after the worst women everyone knew made a show about buying them as a new status symbol on TikTok. Because that’s the world we live in, now.

There are few industries that have taken these marching orders from insipid neo-liberal corporate think-tanks more enthusiastically quite like that of video game development. Now, the industry always canted leftwards in their political slant, as most big entertainment industries do. This has always been the case. But left-leaning is not synonymous with leftist ideologue. Yes, studios may have been staffed by people who’d tended to vote Democrat, but, those of you oldheads out there probably remember a time not all that long ago where most people - yes, even entertainers and creatives - did not make their political affiliations their entire identity.

Noticing a trend, here?

But, in the post-Gamergate era, it’s not enough for a studio or game developer to just keep their head down, their mouth shut, and work; no, complete, total, and vocal obedience to the party line is required, and the party line is that of the Progressive Bloc. Silence, in many cases, it taken as defiance. Ambivalence is not good enough. One must actively and enthusiastically go along with the new talking points du jour, lest they risk being black-balled from the industry.

The only people that seem to be able to skate by are those too small to be bothered with - tiny indie devs that market to a niche audience that the mob would gain no real value from scalping - or too large to touch, like, say, Valve3 or Bethesda. Yes, Valve and Bethesda both pay lip service to the ideals of identity politics, but at the same time, I haven’t seen Gabe Newell or Todd “the God” Howard out there going above and beyond for the cause, or, if they have, I’m unaware. And, don’t get me wrong - Newell has a history of donating to Democrat politicians in Washington state as a private citizen, though the only time I’ve ever heard him speak on politics, he’s sounded more libertarian than anything else. I couldn’t find much on Howard’s political affiliation save for this one Q&A article in which he simply states, I hang left, which is about as informative as an anarch-capitalist saying, I hang right.

The point is, Newell isn’t out there bandying about how much money he donated to Chairman Govenor Inslee, and lecturing the Steam userbase on why they need to get out and vote blue no matter who, nor is Howard using his platform to preach the glory of Biden to his audience.

There’s also the caveat that this ideological capture really only applies to developers and studios in the West; this really isn’t something you see in the video game industries of China, Eastern Europe, or Japan. No guesses as to why.

Again, the why’s and how’s as to why this tectonic seachange in the western Gaming industry occurred are better suited for another time, as much of it has to do with GamerGate, which, I mean… not here. Not now. We’re not really here to discuss the broader gaming industry, at the moment. Right now, we’re here to talk about one studio in particular. There’s really only one studio that begets talking about for the topic at hand - London-based Rocksteady Studios.

Founded in 2004, Rocksteady has a surprisingly illustrious career for a studio that only has six games under their belt. After their debut outing with the 2006 game Urban Chaos: Riot Response - an unremarkable game that I can only assume was a prescient prediction of what modern day London looks like - they were hired by British publisher Eidos Interactive to develop a game based on Batman in 2007. Obviously, getting the opportunity to develop a game based on the second most profitable individual superhero in the world is an opportunity that doesn’t present itself more than once, and the team at Rocksteady seemed to understand that. They went all in on the project.

In 2009, they released their second game, Batman: Arkham Asylum, to both popular and critical acclaim. The following installments of Batman: Arkham City and Batman: Arkham Knight were equally well received. I never played these games, but the trilogy is held in high regard as the best superhero themed games available. Some even consider them something of spiritual successors to Bruce Timm’s revered Batman: The Animated Series, as the games maintain a similarly dark, gothic atmosphere, and both Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill reprise their standard-setting roles as Batman and the Joker, respectively.

In 2020, after a few years of radio silence, Rocksteady revealed that their next project would a game that tackled none other than the bête noires of the DC Universe, the Suicide Squad… because that is just one thing that Warner Brothers really wants to make happen. For some reason.

Scratch that - I know the reason.

They would not continue to try and push this group of D-listers if Harley Quinn wasn’t a part of it. No one cares about Deadshot, no one cares about Captain Boomerang, no one cares about King Shark, who’s basically just Drax the Destroyer-lite or Dollar Store Groot, depending on the adaptation. No. People are coming for Harley Quinn. There’s a reason that, when DC made a new animated series, they made Harley Quinn: The Animated Series and not The Suicide Squad: The Animated Series.

Harley Quinn, for reasons that I will never understand, fucking prints money. She’s like the Deadpool of DC - you could sell a bag of dogshit with her branding, and some fools would line up to buy it. It’s also worth noting that they Warner Brothers has a vested interest in keeping the character in the spotlight since they have Margot Robbie - a.k.a. the most bankable woman in Hollywood at present - under contract to keep coming back and putting on clown make-up. And, don’t get me wrong - Margot Robbie is… well, I get it, but what I don’t get is the appeal Margot Robbie dressing like a slutty, annoying clown harlot.

This announcement, of course, got people excited, because DC fanboys will lap up any old slop with Harley Quinn’s clown cake slapped on it. But I reckon they might not have been so enthusiastic if it had been disclosed up front that, by the time the game was announced at the media expo DC FanDome 2020, the game was already ten years into development. The game had actually been set into motion in 2010, helmed by WB Games Montreal, which developed other games in the Batman: Arkham franchise. For reasons unknown, the project was passed on to Rocksteady around 2016, who in turn had to turn to L.A. based Unbroken Studios for assistance in order to actually finish the stupid thing around 2022.

Development was… rocky, to say the least. Due to a lack of experience in the Looter-Shooter genre, popularized by the Borderlands series, the studio found themselves struggling to meet the demands such a game required to produce, while internal personnel issues plagued the development from the start. The worst of them would come when English gossip rag The Guardian published a report that the studio had failed to address claims of sexual harassment and other transgressions that had been presented to the management in 2018. This letter was supposedly signed by over half of Rocksteady’s female workforce, and alleged improper sexual behavior, unwanted sexual advances, and casual use of transphobic slurs by senior management. Rocksteady, of course, claimed that these allegations were internally addressed and, having been lodged in 2018, were well behind them in August of 2020.

Hm. So, this Suicide Squad game was announced in August of 2020. Shortly after, the Guardian publishes leaked allegations of workplace misconduct that took place two years prior.

Why, if I didn’t know any better, I’d say that timing was… well, no, no. I don’t want to be a conspiracy theorist. I’m sure no one with an axe to grind against the management conveniently leaked that story to the Guardian to torpedo the press around the game and screw over their former employee.

That would be silly.

The studio continued to bleed talent in the wake of these allegations, with reports of an outright cull among some senior staff taking place, which eventually culminated in the departure of founder Sefton Hill and Jamie Walker from the company in 2022, eighteen years after establishing the studio. Again, another exodus was sparked.

As of 2024, Hill and Walker have founded another studio - Hundred Stars Studio - which, curiously, opened up with a pre-baked staff of over a hundred people, many long-time vets in the gaming space. Now, I’m not saying that anyone with any talent or competency left with Hill and Walker to establish Hundred Stars Studios. But I am saying it’s kind of weird that there was a mass resignation of employees right after they left, and, suddenly, the two men just pop up again with a ready-to-go staff of over a hundred seasoned industry veterans.

Regardless, it is said that most of those who departed from Rocksteady in the wake of Hill and Walker’s resignation were those that had been with the studio the longest, and, no matter where they went, the already imperiled development of the Suicide Squad game was thrown into further turmoil. I’m unsure of just how many times the game was delayed, but it there were at least three extensions added to the release window before, finally, after a grueling fourteen years development, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League finally limped onto store shelves.

Long before the game ever launched, the excitement surrounding the project was stricken ill with the plague and died, screaming in terror and soiling itself with crippling bouts of dysentery. If the personnel woes of Rocksteady Studios weren’t concerning enough, every piece of news about the game was; not only were fans disappointed to hear that only four of the expansive, revolving roster of the Suicide Squad would be available to play, but it would also be a live service game. If you want another example of live service, you need look no further than cultural juggernaut, Fortnite, and Bugnie’s post-Halo endeavor, Destiny. And, uh… yeah, that’s just about the only two that I can think that have been overly successful.

Live service games have a bad rap in the gaming space. Not only do they require an internet connection to play, since they rely almost exclusively on multiplayer gameplay, but they also are notorious for nickel and diming players to death with microtransactions, as well as leaning heavily on the dreaded battle pass method to rake in more cash, where content is locked behind a paywall that then necessitates further grinding to unlock. In games like Fortnite, that prioritize quick, rapid-fire games in which a multitude of matches can be completed in a short span of time, this grinding system can work, as one can rapidly chew their way through the rewards in not a lot of time. It also works in Fortnite because, unlike the Suicide Squad game, the game itself is free. The only time you pay for Fortnite is when you want to, and, really, they have to make money somehow, so people are willing to buy the battle passes to keep the game afloat and get the extra content on the side. An extra fifteen or twenty bucks for extraneous content is a tough sell when a game comes with a seventy dollar price tag. It especially does not work when the Collector’s Edition that comes with all the goodies will cost you a crisp Benny.

Ironically, only a scant few years prior, Square Enix bungled their Avengers based title, simply titled Marvel’s Avengers, by making a game that had no excuse being a live service game, which was dogged by spotty internet issues and an expansive on-line store that charged ludicrous sums for effectively nothing. Games that are heavily campaign based with long stories that can be played alone do not usually translate well to live service business models.

Hilariously, I also saw a compilation of streamers playing the game that were disconnected from the servers and unable to play the game that many had just shelled out over a hundred bucks for… but they could still connect to the store! Priorities, right?

But, Rocksteady was undeterred by this dearth of excitement. They should have been, though.

This isn’t a game review, or anything, since I haven’t played the game and I’m not going to, but I watched enough coverage of this trash fire to see that it was a mess from beginning to end. Not only did it have the same issues as Marvel’s Avengers, but the game was just horribly designed. From poorly thought out movement dynamics to a HUD that looked laughably amateur and overly cluttered, and a nauseatingly simple, repetitive, and mind-numbingly boring core gameplay loop, the game was a dud. Like, if you want a good representation of just how bad the HUD was cluttered, here’s a good comparison.

This is not real. It’s supposed to be a joke. Apparently, no one told the geniuses at Rocksteady that.

This is to say nothing of the bugs that riddled the game, which made getting trapped in the geometry common, left enemies invisible, and, most damningly of all, on release day, everyone that booted up the game was automatically transferred right to the end of the game. Congrats! You beat the game just by starting it! How generous of Rocksteady.

If the game had any saving grace, it was that, if nothing else, it looked good. Rocksteady has a reputation of making games with stellar graphics, and this was no exception. The facial-tracking, motion-capture, and voicework are all top-notch. Even I have to say that the cutscenes are impressively well done.

Unfortunately, absolutely nothing of value happens in them. In fact, the story is where the game goes from just bad and underwhelming to outright terrible. The uproar over it was the only reason this game even came onto my radar.

And, I’ll admit, while I think the controversy is a bit overstated, especially by some people… I also get why people are mad.

Simply put, the story of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is another bargain bin subvert-the-audience exercise, in which - if the name didn’t give it away - the Suicide Squad kills the Justice League. Y’see, in this story - which is set in the same universe as the Batman: Arkham games, mind you - the Justice League is brainwashed and mind-controlled by perennial Superman baddie, Braniac, who, like all supervillains these days, opens up a portal in the sky and has a big, ugly, floating supervillain base parked above the city while his cyber-minions wreak havoc on Metropolis and the Justice League genocide civilians. Because that’s exactly what fans of the Justice League want to see, right? Superman razing buildings, Flash ripping out the still-beating hearts from people’s chests, and Batman hanging people.

Oh, but not Wonder Woman. Wonder Woman managed to escape and is the one hero that isn’t controlled by Braniac. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that she’s got two X chromosomes. I dunno.

This story is, of course, every bit as laughable as every Suicide Squad story that involves a jumped-up woman on adderal in a clown suit with a wooden mallet and a guy who throws boomerangs fighting people who have super-strength and can literally eat bullets. And, really, I don’t think it’s a bad conceit for a game. I think it should have been saved for a roster of villains who, y’know, actually have super powers and could feasibly go toe-to-toe with demi-gods, but, hey. Whatever.

The issue most people took with the story was not the fact that the Justice League are the antagonists, but just how little respect was paid to the characters. When the Flash is killed - again, how you can shoot a guy that moves so fast he can effectively stop time is a mystery to me - Captain Boomerang literally pisses on his corpse. And everyone makes jokes about how large his, er - well, let’s just say that they make plenty of comments about the prodigious size of his digeridoo4, which, I’ll admit; better than making jokes about the opposite, but still such low-hanging fruit that it’s practically sitting on the ground, decomposing and growing mold. The Green Lantern is personified as an abusive space cop, so they can get some thinly veiled stabs at the police in there, and, when he dies, his corpse is just left sitting on the ground in his underwear. Seems kind of racist to me, since this is the black Green Lantern, John Stewart, but, again - whatever. Superman says, like, two words throughout the entire game and, when he’s finally, unceremoniously put down in a miserably boring slog of a boss battle, he just… dies. He doesn’t even get a send off. They don’t even really comment on the fact they just killed Superman, who’s the one guy out of all of them they shouldn’t be able to kill.

But, the one that really got people going - the death that truly got the audience’s hackles up - was that of Batman.

In the story, to lure out Superman, the Suicide Squad captures Batman to use as bait, since, at his core, Batman is just a normal guy that knows martial arts and has a bunch of tricky gadgets, and is the only one that these guys could realistically not be killed in two seconds by. So, they tie him up… put him on a park bench… and, as he’s throwing verbal abuse as Harley Quinn, she just executes his bat-ass gangland-style with a bullet between the eyes.

Fans were understandably upset. This was a pretty egregious breach of Batman’s infamous trait of being probably the only member of the Justice League who actually does, on some level, in his own way, care about the well-being of his rogue’s gallery. Batman isn’t a person who takes joy in what he does, or does what he does out of spite or malice. None of the Justice League do, really, but I doubt Clark Kent has any secret sympathy for Lex Luthor, or Aquaman for… whoever Aquaman fights.

Time and time again, in his better stories, Batman been shown to try and help his enemies, who he understands are often hurt, damaged, and broken people that need a psychologist more than they need a bullet.

Hell, how many times has he tried to get Harley Quinn the mental help she clearly needs, or at the very least try and convince her that she needs to leave the Joker’s bum ass?

I understand that, in the game, it’s supposed to be Le Evil Brainwashed Batman, but… I dunno. The whole thing puts a bad taste in my mouth.

But what made it all feel particularly disrespectful was the fact that this was the same Batman from the Arkham games. Remember how I said that those games were considered a spiritual successor to the much beloved Batman: The Animated Series? Remember how I said that Kevin Conroy - the definitive voice of Batman for several generations, reprised his role in this game?

Yeah, well, he died in November of 2022.

This was his last role. Ever.

And, yes - I know that the people at Rocksteady were not aware the guy was on death’s door. Nobody even knew that the man had been suffering from intestinal cancer until he was already dead, and he was both working and beating the convention circuit right up until the very end. Given it took seven years for Rocksteady to finish what they inherited in 2016, it’s likely Conroy recorded the lines years ago, and even though this may be his last role published, it might not be the last thing he ever did. I think it’s foolish to say that this was some calculated attempt by the developers to sleight Conroy.

But it was meant to sleight the character of Batman.

The whole conceit Batman getting killed by Harley Quinn kind of comes off as a poorly-conceived gotcha directed at fans of the character by the developers that aged very, very poorly. Which, y’know, may or may not be part of why these sorts of things are ill-advised. Like, it’s all fun and games to take turns pissing on a beloved, established character, right up until the de facto actor behind of them fucking dies while you’re still laughing about how epic it was to subvert everything about said character.

As if things couldn’t get worse for Rocksteady Studios, it came to light that, after Hill and Walker’s departure, the company Sweet Baby Inc. was called in for consultation work for the game. Despite what the name may lead you to believe, Sweet Baby Inc. does not make sweet, sugary treats for infants, nor is it a call girl service. The Montreal-based organization bills itself as a narrative development and consultation studio. They state the following on their website:

Our mission is to tell better, more empathetic stories while diversifying and enriching the video games industry. We aim to make games more engaging, more fun, more meaningful, and more inclusive, for everyone.

A more honest statement would just be to come out and say, We make your game a joyless slog, or, If you ever wanted to write a story written by a hand-wringing, finger-wagging schoolmarm spinster, we’ll show you how! I’ve spoken many times about my dislike for the term woke, but I really can’t think of a better or more succinct way of summing up their entire modus operandi in a way that doesn’t boil down to, They make things woke.

Though Sweet Baby Inc. has been in operation for a while now, they’ve really made a name for themselves over the past couple years by worming their way into some high profile releases. God of War 2, Alan Wake 2, Insomniac’s Spider-Man II - they seem to be on a streak of infesting sequels and assisting in the stripping down of formerly respectable titles and rendering them unpalatable to anyone who doesn’t have a septum piercing and unconventionally-colored hair.

Indeed, all the above mentioned titles suffered their fair share of criticism, whether it be accusations of Kratos in God of War 2 being a push-over - you know, something a God of War would not be - or the now infamously bad side-missions of Spider-Man II, in which the web-slinging adventure slams to a halt so the player can take on the role of a deaf black woman spraying tacky graffiti on a street corner. Also, for half the game, the player is made to play as Miles Morales, who, for those unaware, is also Spider-man, but black. But, hey - at least Miles can, y’know, do spider-shit, and isn’t just some rando fucking street person that has nothing to do with the story and has no super powers.

I don’t know much about Alan Wake 2, but apparently the game is split into two different single-player campaigns; one where the player plays as the eponymous Alan Wake, and the other where they take control of a strong and independent lady cop of color.

Notice a pattern?

The game got good reviews, but, like pretty much every game these days, while the professional critics raved about it, many fan reactions seemed to be summed up by this image taken from the game’s trailer:

It’s worth noting that, in the aftermath of this fiasco with Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, Sweet Baby Inc. has locked their social media accounts and removed the game from the list of scalps they’ve collected - sorry, the high-profile titles they’ve worked on from their website.

Needless to say, the game’s already bad press went from poor to scathing. Even the usual suspects in the games journalism industry (which, I will always say, is just silly to begin with) that usually run defense for these kinds of back-handed stunts by developers against fans were unable to back this up. These same outlets are infamous for juicing up reviews or outright lying about the quality of games, especially when they get a little cheddar on the side from the developers, but this time, they didn’t bother trying.

Most outlets that would normally receive review copies of upcoming games, including industry titan, IGN, were not given pre-release access for the purposes of reviews. The very few that did were overwhelmingly negative in their assessment of the game. IGN ended up giving the game a a 5/10, which, by their standards, is abysmal. On Metacritic, the professional critic’s score is only at 61%. Even the critics that did try to write apologia for the story had to admit that the core game itself was boring, repetitive, and clunky.

Upon release, the game made a paltry gross of less than three million dollars in sales. Given the sheer excess of negative press surrounding the game, I doubt that those numbers are ever going to go up much more. On the day of release, the game peaked on Steam with 13,459 concurrent players. Less than two weeks later, it sits at less than 4,000. Though the final budget for the game is unknown, I’ve seen safe speculation that the price tag for completing this mess of a game comes in somewhere around two hundred million dollars once it was all said and done - a number that will increase due to the live service model of the game and all the extra downloadable content planned for the future.

You can do the math. This game isn’t just a bomb - it’s a certified flop.

I’d say a failure of this magnitude would be certain to kill Rocksteady studios. But, the thing is, Rocksteady studios was already dead. Rocksteady Studios has been dead for a while, now. It was in turmoil before, but when Walker, Hill, and almost all of their veteran talent departed from the company in 2022, it was all over but the crying. Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is nothing more than one last spasmodic twitch of a corpse.

The tragic fate of Rocksteady Studios is a perfect encapsulation of the dilemma of Theseus’s ship; if all the people who made Rocksteady Studios what it was left, was it really Rocksteady Studios in anything but name?

When the people who made Rocksteady Studios what it was departed, all that was left was a dead body that interlopers took, propped up, and marched around, Weekend at Bernie’s style, hoping to fool consumers into thinking that the same studio that made the Arkham games was still alive. This, unfortunately, is not uncommon in today’s entertainment scene. Many prestigious studios and outfits, in video games, film, music, and even literature, are nothing more than hollowed-out corpses, staffed by the greedy, the duplicitous, and the inept, seeking to wring a few more pennies out by riding the rapidly diminishing goodwill attached to the names they managed to inherit, or, in some cases, swindle out of the hands of the founders.

Even though this is endemic across the various spectrum of entertainment industries, it seems most virulent in video games. Bioware, Blizzard, THQ, Turtle Rock, Bungie, 2K, even the game engine developer Unity; all of these outfit had their founders depart, or, in more than a few cases, run out, and when they jump ship to form a new studio, they often taking the best and the brightest among their previous staff with them. This usually coincides with a marked decline in quality of games that come after.

A particularly striking example is BioWare. In 2012, founder Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk left the company after the release of Mass Effect 3 over reasons that are speculated to stem from the games tumultuous development cycle. Even though Mass Effect 3 was… disappointing, to say the least, it was nowhere near the failure that was Mass Effect Andromeda, which was so poorly received that all future plans for the entire franchise were put on hold. Indefinitely.

I will absolutely never forgive them for tanking what was my favorite Sci-Fi IP of the modern age so hard. But, at the same time, I’m somewhat grateful that they did. It’s kind of like being glad that your grandmother died when she did because, at the very least, she didn’t live long enough to see some particular train-wreck that would have devastated her emotionally. Why, if I ever had to see my main girl Tali spout of some generic sassy Yass-kween-slay never the less she persisted girlboss bullshit… well, I just don’t think my poor heart could take it.

I’d argue that the only reason Valve and Bethesda still retain some modicum of (diminishing) competency is because their respective founders are still active in the studios, and they’ve yet to experience an out-and-out color revolution amidst the staff5.

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is just one in a long-line of failures in what the games industry calls a Triple A Game; an informal industry term for a game that has a large budget and a resource-heavy development, published by a large developer. In 2007, arguably the apogee of the entire scene, Triple A games included Halo 3, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Assassin’s Creed, Gears of War, and Elder Scrolls: Oblivion6. There’s a strong argument to be made that it was something of a golden age of game development.

Triple A Games today are almost synonymous with failure. Formerly untouchable studios and publishers like Blizzard, BioWare, Activision, and EA are now radioactive to most consumers.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t Triple A Games that are both good and successful. Just the previous hit machines aren’t cranking out winners like they used to. The only people still putting out home run titles are ones that most people haven’t heard of, or, more commonly, aren’t American.

One of the biggest titles of 2023 was Hogwarts Legacy, which was developed by no-name studio Avalanche Software out of Salt Lake City, but boasted an eye-watering budget and expansive development staff that could rightly be classified as Triple A.

Most other successful Triple A Games that year came from across the Pacific, with Capcom continuing their win-streak with Resident Evil 4: Remastered and Nintendo doing what the others Nintendon’t, because, in Japan, they just don’t fuck around with the same hand-wringing, mealy-mouthed nonsense they do here. Sure, they have their own issues, don’t get me wrong - I don’t think it’s right to push a guy to work sixty hours in a cubicle so Mario’s mustache bounces when he jumps - but at the same time, I don’t ever see Capcom or Nintendo hiring Sweet Baby Inc. to come in an make sure that Leon Kennedy is properly respectful when he domes a female zombie with a shotgun slug, or Princess Peach gives Mario a verbal tongue lashing on the dangers of chauvinism.

Last year, South Korean studio Neowiz Games - a company effectively unknown outside of their home country - outperformed all expectations with a Dark Souls-esque reimagining of fucking Pinnochio, of all things, with The Lies of P, while industry giant Blizzard’s long-awaited Diablo IV was so mired in controversy that they removed the ability to return and refund the game from their store upon release.

What I’m getting at here is that the once reliable names in this industry are, for all intents and purposes, dead. Blizzard, BioWare, and the rest - they exist, but only as a reanimated, shambling husk of a thing, pitiable and grotesque. They’re staffed by people that hate not just the average video game player, but by people who hate just about everything. They’re staffed by people who think hiring Sweet Baby Inc. is a good idea, and if you labor under any delusion that these studios still harbor some modicum of goodwill towards their consumers, you can rest easy knowing Sweet Baby Inc. hates the average gamer’s fucking guts.

These studios don’t see players as customers. They don’t even see them as an audience. They see them as paypigs that will cough up seventy bucks a pop so they can keep up with the gaming lifestyle they’ve been sold by dancing fools on Twitch and Kick and other streaming platforms, and they can discuss the new hotness with all their faceless, digital Potemkin friends on Twitter and Discord. So, of course the studios and their sensitivity consulting firm cronies have no respect for these people. They know they can kick and kick and kick these people and, every time, most of them will be crawling back, begging for more. Does a con-man respect a dupe? Does a thief respect someone who leaves their door unlocked at night?

This, it seems, has been a lesson that pop culture acolytes, gamers, and quote-unquote nerd culture has struggled with ever since the industry’s shift in direction to come to grips with. Is Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League abject failure an indication that this might finally be changing?

I’m of two minds.

Bad press and negative word of mouth meant that Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League was doomed to be dead on arrival. Those that purchased the Collector’s Edition for the low, low price of a hundred plus dollars were granted early access to the game three days before it’s official launch. Why Rocksteady would do this is beyond me, because that was three days prior to release that potential customers could see just how bad the game was and make the decision to not buy, or, in some cases, refund pre-purchases or cancel pre-orders. Within hours of the early access launch, gifs of Harley Quinn blowing Bruce Wayne’s brains out saturated Reddit and Twitter, and pretty much cemented the game as a solid pass for most people. This, I’m sure, played no small part in the dismal sales numbers.

However, I’m also sure that there was a decent contingent of people who, despite the warning signs, would have bought the game anyways just to try it out and be part of the conversation around a hot new release, had the early access not spoiled the whole thing. That’s the problem with this whole gamer lifestyle bit; if gaming is who you are, and you don’t keep up with the latest and hottest releases… are you really a gamer7? Would that contingent have been enough to bump the numbers up? I doubt it would have gotten the game to clear the two-hundred million dollar mark, but I certainly think it would have performed better than it did.

Ultimately, I suspect that Rocksteady Studios did more damage to themselves with the early release scheme. I wouldn’t bet on the likelihood gamers that have been laboring underneath the yoke of this industry abuse just woke up to the fact that they were being pissed on and game journalists were calling it rain, like they have been for the better part of a decade now.

After all, if you look at other projects tainted by the touch of Le Doux Bébé - God of War 2, Spider-Man 2, and Alan Wake 2 - they all did numbers in spite of bad word of mouth and controversy among the fans. Partially because they were, unlike Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, competently made games at their core. Not well written - just well made.

Mostly.

There’s been a lot of talk in certain spheres of the gaming space in how this kind of cultural vandalism can be put a stop. The solution has always been obliquely clear, and it’s the exact one that David V. Stewart put forward - stop giving these people money. Stop giving these people support. Don’t buy their games. Don’t even talk about them more than necessary. Point, laugh, move on, but don’t engage with them beyond that. Without money or attention, their fruits will wither on the vine. If that means putting away childish things once and for all… well, so be it. It’s better than letting these cultural vandals and malicious ghouls continue to get fat on ill-earned money.

I don’t think it has to come to that; as I illustrated above, if someone just absolutely must get their fix from the electric skinner boxes, there were plenty of other games in 2023 that were very well received and sold very well that had no such taint to them, made by developers who have some iota of respect for their customers.

But gamers… well, they’re not the most judicious bunch when it comes to what they consume, and they are a very forgiving lot. So long as the games themselves are fun, like a battered wife, they’ll suffer through a lot of abuse. Walking away from the mire of cultural rot and decay would require them to shed some of their favorite intellectual properties, which, if the continued survival of Star Wars is any indication, is a very difficult task for many to commit to. Especially when, with something like Star Wars, the veneer between hobby and lifestyle is infamously and perilously thin. How many fans were burned by the Disney-era sequels and swore they’d never watch another Star Wars project, only to come limping back when The Mandalorian wasn’t even good, but just competent? And, how did that end up working out?

Oh. Right.

It would also require some legwork on their part to discern which studios are doing what, and, more importantly, know who is really working at these studios, and what happened to their favorite properties. Like Rocksteady Studios, they need to be aware of which companies and intellectual properties have been effectively stripped down and reconstituted to be mouthpieces for ideologues and cudgels to be used against them by people who hate them.

Make no mistake - and I cannot labor this point enough - the people who are responsible for these train-wrecks hate the average consumer. And they don’t just hate the average consumer; they hate the broader culture around them. When the people who wrote Batman getting domed by Harley Quinn, they didn’t just do it because they don’t like Batman. They don’t like Batman, but they also don’t respect the character, the character’s history, the character’s legacy, what that character means to people, and, in essence, the culture, country, and people that gave rise to Batman to begin with. And it may sound silly to put this much emphasis on Batman, or a comic, or a game, or anything that just seems like a silly piece of write-off media for children and Redditors. But Breitbart was right - politics is downstream of culture.

Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, World of Warcraft, Diablo, Mass Effect, The Witcher, Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, Mickey fucking Mouse, even, you name it - these pillars of culture in both gaming and beyond are emblematic of these Progressive ideologues’ own personal Four Olds. They want to take these things and co-opt them in order to make them suitable for the new order of things. And if they can’t co-opt them…

History doesn’t repeat itself. But it does rhyme.