When the Gaming Ends

Spending my lunches and dinners watching YT videos about console homebrews, weird easter eggs and histories of copy-protections.
This is the form of gaming an adult can look at and not feel embarrassed.... I'm learning about the hardware, programming, and industry ...
...and it is still such A WASTELAND

Watching an adult talk about looking forward to the next playstation....watching footage from the endless murder-junkie game industry... listening to the rightwing rants against everything....

Gaming is too much a WASTELAND to pretend otherwise. Ever the most erudite host, with intimate knowledge of the hardware and code, is still just talking about a fighting sim, war sim or gangster sim. Maybe some fantasy killing, maybe some weird Japanese anime-based game, maybe some debt-based farm sim. But it is always embarrassing to me. Too much of our modern culture is based on acceptance of super realistic, highly-rendered turds (with lootbox turds if you pay extra).

It's pathetic. Even brief exposure to art or nature reveals gaming's deep moral ugliness.  The second I see 'murder' as a core mechanic I'm gone, and so I leave 95% of gaming behind.

I think back to the Roger Ebert v. Clive Barker debate over "whether video games can be art?" Roger said no, Clive said yes, but neither were 'gamers' so they made intelligent points, their brains weren't formed in a orgy of simulated killing and grinding quests. [https://www.rogerebert.com/roger-ebert/okay-kids-play-on-my-lawn] I used to side with Clive but I'm beginning to see Roger's point.

Roger Ebert wrote:At a 2007 "Hollywood and Games Summit" conference, the filmmaker and game auteur Clive Barker responded to some of my statements. Under the circumstances, he was quite civilized. I responded, and you will find the link below. Barker studied English and philosophy at Liverpool, and understood where I was coming from.

[...]

If I should dislike 'gaming', I already had a preview of the response awaiting me: I was too old, I was over the hill, I was too aged it "get it." That became the mantra: "Ebert doesn't get it." I disagreed with them about age, which I know more about than most of them, but I had some sympathy about the concept of not "getting it." There are many, many things I believe many members of our society don't "get," but I don't think they're too old or too young to "get" them, only differently evolved.

The weirdest part is that Ebert mentions a old game that I spent many hours playing after spending many hours getting an emulator working.....

Roger Ebert wrote:In my actual experience, I have played "Cosmology of Kyoto," which I enormously enjoyed, and "Myst," for which I lacked the patience.

Me, Ebert, a few sane 'gamers' like Clive Barker and Cosmology of fucking Kyoto...

I think my relationship to "gaming" is like my relationship to the Catholic church, both of them got to me when I was young, now they have to deal with me as an adult.
But the illusions is gone, the scales have fallen from my eyes (like Saul of Tarsus), the bones shine through the polygonal flesh.
I still have spiritual longing, I still read Christian texts and I'll still 'game' - but as a heretic. The organized systems about church and gaming are corrupt to their cores.