Like almost everybody else - Reddit is just too awful to make excuses for even if you want to.
It’s the same content posted over and over and over with people acting like it’s new each time (probably bots). It’s mindless or disingenuous content posted to evoke emotional responses. It’s everything you’ve ever commented or posted being used to train some corporate slop machine. It’s just… awful. I like the format (of old Reddit), so here I am!
I don’t really like the vibe of this article, mainly because it feels (to me at least) motivated by modern neo-puritanical thinking.
Having said that, I do resonate with some of what it’s saying. In recent years with those bodycam-FPS games specifically, I’ve found myself disturbed by the fidelity of violence, at times. I grew up playing shooters like Titanfall, Halo 3, Battlefield 4 - realistic in their own right, but no matter how often the adults in my life would tell me that they were too violent, they were always cartoonish and comfortably distanced from reality in my mind.
We are now hitting the era where photoreal gameplay is becoming feasible, and I don’t think I’m comfortable engaging with violence on that graphical level, at least not for mindless entertainment. That’s just my personal preference, and I understand others can choose what they’re comfortable with. I do however think that we’re gonna be seeing a lot more crackdowns and censorship in gaming in the near future - I think that’s already started with adult/sexual indie games being banned from sites like itch.io, and I wouldn’t be surprised if anything labeled “violent” will be the next target.
That’s them saying “I love you!”