The Most Impactful Change is NO CHANGE At All

Sometimes, says Zizek, the “first gesture to provoke a change in the system is to withdraw, to do nothing”[i]; some times, “doing nothing”, making no change at all, can be the most violent or [counter-] revolutionary thing to do[ii].

In an age where journalists think describing something as proper to “two generations ago” or “off the pace of other games” is a slight[iii]; where an incessant desire to inflate the reach of the medium and provide a force to “change the world”[iv] has precipitated some of the worst, subscription-based, live-service, hollywood-chundering empty husk games history has seen; in such an age, perhaps the best thing to do is NOTHING [new] AT ALL: to return to the old, to the games that informed our very conception of what the medium was capable of to this point [which we have since failed and departed from].

2019 signified a general revival of autotelic game design, with major publishers like EA and Activision leaving live service behind in favor of traditional, novel-style experiences like Sekiro & Jedi Fallen Order. Control, Death Stranding & the Outer Worlds, along with Final Fantasy VIIIR, Nioh 2, Ghosts & Cyberpunk in 2020, further demonstrated against the “professionals” that AAA single-player games were very much alive. Now in 2021, after a bevy of remakes and aggressively referential works like Bravely Default II, we are in a position to understand that the counter-revolution [which began in 2019] has consisted in one episode after another of developers doing NOTHING [new] AT ALL. Our taste for spectacle and novelty is displaced while culture surrounding games is plunged into the the game, not as a marketing event but a transhistorical form that persists through time. Inactivity in terms of addition or superficial progress is warranted by the persistent ontological texture and value of the [form of the] game itself outside the cycle of hype and economic preponderance that tends to accompany major game releases.

References

[i] Zizek Violence 214 (https://www.amazon.ca/Violence-Big-Ideas-Small-Books/dp/0312427182)

[ii] ibid 217

[iii] https://www.ign.com/articles/biomutant-review

[iv] https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2019/05/20/video-games-a-unifying-force-for-the-world/