DunDunDunpachi
Banned
Incoming 30yr old Boomer riding his mower past the Zoomers...
The original Portal and Dark Souls is where I saw this ratcheting up into obnoxious territory. Videogame players have always had their strange in-jokes, but the social-media internet seemed to drain all the humor out of gaming culture.
"Git gud" was never a thing in Demons' Souls. It wasn't until Dark Souls hit the market and millions of new players arrived that it became the overused catchphrase. Git gud wasn't trashtalk coming from the top players, either. Those veterans were too busy figuring out no-level naked runs, decrypting the terribly-explained stat system, finding secrets, documenting the Covenants, and fleshing out the wikia for the normies to use. Rather, "git gud" is what people on Facebook and the gaming forums would say to newcomers who asked any question or expressed any frustration over the same hurdles they'd only overcome a few weeks or months earlier.
Instead of... you know... providing knowledge to the newcomer, those who grew up playing Roller Coaster Tycoon and Halo: CE could finally try their hand at the trashtalk thing that'd been a part of fighting game culture for 10 years and running. "Git gud lololol" and back to their mediocre Dark Souls playthrough while they looked up the best character builds on wikia articles published by the vets.
Oh, and praise the sun was never funny either. LE EPIC MAY MAY.
Portal is a pretty darn good puzzle game (probably because Valve didn't design it). But everything about that game worth caring about was scrubbed away by "the cake is a lie". OMG XD XD XD
Then, the memes began to infest the games themselves. The first one I noticed where memes became a selling point was Guacamelee:
I didn't mind the nod to "Super Hermanos" and the Majora's Mask vs "Mega Hombre" stuff because that was game-related, but the grumpy cat, ORLY owl, and Insanity Wolf was nothing more than "LOL YOU'VE SEEN THIS MEME, RIGHT?"
Nowadays, you can even purchase memes: funny Fortnite dances, funny TF2 hats, funny Overwatch costumes, funny emotes across various titles. All the better to pick up more Twitch and YouTube subscribers.
Memes. What was once the internet's non-funny backlash to established humor has now become the de facto flavor of videogame "comedy". Instead of allowing videogame communities to come up with their own humor and in-jokes, memes infected all communities with the generic template of
[Top Text]
[picture of game character]
[Bottom Text]
Dab me off a cliff.
The original Portal and Dark Souls is where I saw this ratcheting up into obnoxious territory. Videogame players have always had their strange in-jokes, but the social-media internet seemed to drain all the humor out of gaming culture.
"Git gud" was never a thing in Demons' Souls. It wasn't until Dark Souls hit the market and millions of new players arrived that it became the overused catchphrase. Git gud wasn't trashtalk coming from the top players, either. Those veterans were too busy figuring out no-level naked runs, decrypting the terribly-explained stat system, finding secrets, documenting the Covenants, and fleshing out the wikia for the normies to use. Rather, "git gud" is what people on Facebook and the gaming forums would say to newcomers who asked any question or expressed any frustration over the same hurdles they'd only overcome a few weeks or months earlier.
Instead of... you know... providing knowledge to the newcomer, those who grew up playing Roller Coaster Tycoon and Halo: CE could finally try their hand at the trashtalk thing that'd been a part of fighting game culture for 10 years and running. "Git gud lololol" and back to their mediocre Dark Souls playthrough while they looked up the best character builds on wikia articles published by the vets.
Oh, and praise the sun was never funny either. LE EPIC MAY MAY.
Portal is a pretty darn good puzzle game (probably because Valve didn't design it). But everything about that game worth caring about was scrubbed away by "the cake is a lie". OMG XD XD XD
Then, the memes began to infest the games themselves. The first one I noticed where memes became a selling point was Guacamelee:
I didn't mind the nod to "Super Hermanos" and the Majora's Mask vs "Mega Hombre" stuff because that was game-related, but the grumpy cat, ORLY owl, and Insanity Wolf was nothing more than "LOL YOU'VE SEEN THIS MEME, RIGHT?"
Nowadays, you can even purchase memes: funny Fortnite dances, funny TF2 hats, funny Overwatch costumes, funny emotes across various titles. All the better to pick up more Twitch and YouTube subscribers.
Memes. What was once the internet's non-funny backlash to established humor has now become the de facto flavor of videogame "comedy". Instead of allowing videogame communities to come up with their own humor and in-jokes, memes infected all communities with the generic template of
[Top Text]
[picture of game character]
[Bottom Text]
Dab me off a cliff.
