Men · Open Post · Technology

The Allure of Open-World Games vs. the Drabness of Modern Life

A while ago, Pickernanny left two meaty comments on open world videogames and how they relate to the male existence. In particular, he draws attention how unsatisfying modern life is for men. I reproduce his comments below, followed by some remarks by myself. Even if you are not much of a gamer, you may find the content interesting as it touches upon our evolutionary nature, which you are not going to avoid in your day-to-day life, no matter how hard you may try.

Part 1:

I recently watched American Krogan’s video on bitchute on why men generally enjoy open world games more than women. The premise of the video is basically that it taps into man’s nature to go out into a dangerous world and gather resources for the tribe, or to support a pregnant or nursing woman and children.

Here is a mirror of American Krogan’s video, which is hard to track down due to our censorious tech elites:

If you enjoyed the first video, you may want to also watch his follow-up:

I honestly never thought about it in those terms before but I began drawing comparisons between that theory and the open world games I have personally finished. The only two true open world games I’ve played are The Legend of Zelda: BotW and MGSV:TPP.

In BotW, you’re immediately thrown into the open world mounted on a plateau that you can’t escape until you run around and complete a series of tasks that grants you a paraglider. From there, you can use the paraglider to navigate the world easier and you’ll eventually unlock limited fast travel and horses to help you traverse more efficiently. You’ll also be collecting tons of weapons and shields to do battle with, and you’ll need a lot of them because they break quite often, so always be on the lookout for better gear. In addition to that, you need to gather, hunt and prepare food products to keep your health up, as well as slay monsters for the items and monster parts they drop to fashion armor and other gear to make the game easier. The entire point of all this resource gathering and facing tough foes in the open world is to eventually defeat Calamity Gannon and save Princess Zelda. You learn this at the very beginning of the game, that Zelda is in trouble and you need to figure out how to save her, so that is your sole motivation — to get that Zelda pussy.

Contrast this to MGSV and not much has changed. Instead of being thrown immediately into an open world, the game eases you in over the course of hours if you count the prologue mission (which I do). From there you wake up and fight your way out of hospital, make your way into 1980s Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion where you’re introduced to the open world (and later Central Africa) save your best buddy, and learn that you have a massive out-at-sea military outpost that you need to expand. You do this by farming soldiers of varying abilities — some have combat expertise and some are more suited for research and development, for example. Sometimes you need a unique person with a specialized skill for a specific tool or weapon. Besides that, you’ll need to gather processed and unprocessed materials for base and weapons upgrades and raw diamonds for currency (GMP), as well as to prep your sortie, utilize a chopper, call in support etc. You’ll also be utilizing your combat specialists to procure more GMP and materials for you via the online feature, as well as invading other players online and stealing their stock (this is easy pickings in 2021 on the PS3). If you have too much of one type of material you can swap it for more GMP to put towards higher grade weapons, to help you achieve your goal. It’s really a vicious cycle.

Though there is no princess to save in MGSV, you save a chick during the prologue, watch your base be completely destroyed, then watch said chick explode in your face and put you into a nine year coma. Pretty fucked. It’s not unlike having an invading tribe come in to defeat you and pillage and rape what you have before burning it all down, so now you must spend the majority of the game rebuilding what you lost and getting revenge. Oh, and it’s kind of comical that you eventually acquire Quiet, a half naked and perfect titted woman who literally sits there and keeps her mouth shut (for reasons), who additionally helps you go around and gather more resources by being sniper support. You also get a dog to pet and sniff things out and a horse to ride. One other thing — you can spend time maxing out your bond with Quiet and she’ll stare at you lovingly during the aerial command sequence, as well as show off her tits and ass to you. In addition to that you can unlock cutscenes which show the two being semi-romantic together. Though I’m sure her interest in Snake has nothing to do with him being the biggest alpha of a multi-billion dollar military operation or anything.

Part 2:

I wanted to expand upon this by pointing out how much of a sub-par experience life has become for many guys. If you can’t personally go out into the real world gather lots of resources because you’re too stupid, anxious or timid, or just plain not motivated because of the current social climate and everything that entails, then you might just settle for open world gaming and gaming in general. Lots of guys seem to and if they don’t, they could very well turn to drugs and alcohol like some other guys I know. Instead of wasting their free time gaming, they’ll instead get off from work and spend all that time drinking in a dimly lit room.

For most guys it isn’t feasible to raise a family, or just seems like a real drag. You most definitely cannot raise a child today in good conscience without homeschooling and sheltering them, as well as securing a decent inheritance for them. That can be hard to pull off as the base requirements to participate in society are always changing and sometimes impossible to adhere to fully. For example, you are better suited for certain work environments if you’re non-white, LGBT, or female. Well, if all the fertile women are LGBT or working full time, that also makes things more difficult in terms of raising a well-adjusted family for a variety of reasons. Not to mention, (((they))) are currently pushing very hard to make societal participation impossible without routine vaccinations.

What to do instead? Well, if you’re just getting by comfortably on your own, that can be fine for a while. If you’re not an incel or too socially retarded, you can simulate reproduction by having sterile sex with as many women as you’re able. Then, you can supplement the whole resource gathering and management side of things with gaming. If you can’t get laid or enter a dry spell, then you’d instead spank off to porn, game and repeat.

The observation that open-world games fill a void in the life of modern men is a valid one. In fact, I wonder if the rise of the popularity of open-world games is due to the accelerating decline of modern society. There is probably a very high positive correlation with dating turning into a sh*tshow and open-world games really taking off. Another interesting aspect is that those games are so big that it is more or less impossible to completely explore them, with maps that are many dozens of square miles in size. Thus, as the real world for men gets smaller and smaller, with Covid lockdowns only exaggerating this, the virtual worlds they have access to get bigger and bigger.

Life is indeed a sub-par experience for many men. I would not only look at the “bottom 50%”, though. Life is arguably a pretty shoddy experience for almost every man. I don’t even think that “VIPs” have it much better. If their life was so fantastic, they would not need to do so much coke or get high on adrenochrome. The problem is not so much that there are challenges to overcome and that today’s men are all pussies. Instead, boomers have completely fucked us over. In real terms, you don’t make any more money than men in the 1970s, yet everything else got more expensive. You no longer compete with other men of your race, instead the elites bring in foreigners to flood the labor market at all levels. Illegals from Mexico do manual labor and pajeets vie for your software engineering jobs. Even if you manage to get a decent career going, you may top out very early due to diversity quotas. I’m not making this up. I know of plenty of companies in tech who have more or less halted promotions for men because they claim that they need “40 to 60%” of women in tech at all levels. This is not even a particularly new phenomenon. Dilbert creator Scott Adams wrote about quotas for women keeping him from advancing in his career at two companies. For him, this turned into a great opportunity because he became a full-time cartoonist, but not many men have such options. Outliers should not concern you at all for this discussion, however.

I think that the rise of the “doomer” is fueled by the insight that hard work does not really pay off anymore. This affects even the moderately successful ones. For instance, I have seen women advance in corporations more or less because they are women while highly competent men are stuck in their roles. In tech, there is sometimes an element of poetic justice as the more ambitious men invariably leave, normally ending up with a better paying job elsewhere. Yet, you do meet plenty of men who are demotivated. Some don’t dare looking for a new job because they have a mortgage, an expensive wife, two cars, and a kid. Yet, personal circumstances don’t even matter that much because I think that a fundamental implicit promise of society is broken if you cannot advance because of you are a man. Note that I’m not talking about roles where there is a bottleneck, e.g. there needs to be a position to become a line manager. Instead, I’m primarily talking about promotions from Engineer I to Engineer II, III, or IV where you tend to remain at the same spot in the org chart. I’ve seen women getting moved up one rung each year even though they still had problems with the basics of their craft but you have to pretend that it is normal that they make more money than male engineers who are more competent than those women but somehow sit one or two rungs below them. Meanwhile, those same women turn around and give talks about how much they have been, are, and will be discriminated in their career.

In short, I can readily understand why someone would rather explore the 29 square miles of Zelda: BotW than putting in extra effort at work. In the former, you’ll at least get virtual rewards and become the biggest Chad in the game world. In the latter, you’ll most often end up being a sucker because chances are high that there is a near-zero reward for your sacrifices. (I’ve been there myself a few times already.) Sure, do your job. But if you think that going the proverbial extra mile will lead to a bigger payoff at the same employer, you’ll sadly be mistaken. I think the most pragmatic approach to a career nowadays is to try to hit the glass ceiling at your company as soon as possible, and then jump ship for a pay raise. You do this two or three times, end up in a solid mid-career position, and then you can start coasting as you’ll then have reached the level where promotions are pretty hard to get, both at your current employer or as a vertical promotion by joining a different company. This only works in some industries, however.

Eventually, you’ll probably want to find some other source of meaning in your life as the game is rigged against you more or less everywhere. My suggestion is carving out a little niche. For instance, my current goal is having a small house in relative isolation, and a remote job to support myself, primarily so that I can limit contact with clown world. It would do me a lot of good to not have to see endless degeneracy and idiocy around me. The kind of blueprint for your life you get from society is pretty much bullshit, so you’ll need to find ways around it. Quite frankly, you’ll probably get more satisfaction from playing open-world games and working a job to meet your basic needs than to chase societal life goals that only ever seem to entail getting you deeper into debt.


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8 thoughts on “The Allure of Open-World Games vs. the Drabness of Modern Life

  1. Thanks for the follow-up and your additional points! I didn’t realize AK had a part two to that video.

    “In short, I can readily understand why someone would rather explore the 29 square miles of Zelda: BotW than putting in extra effort at work. In the former, you’ll at least get virtual rewards and become the biggest Chad in the game world…”

    This hits the nail on the head. I remember during my play through of BotW I had collected the ultimate armor and even got the max upgrades for it, as well as fully stocked my house in the game with all the strongest, rarest and most exotic weapons. I even had maxed out my ancient arrow supply which is a guaranteed one-hit kill on most enemies. Contrast that early on and midway through the game when you’re getting killed with a single hit by just medium strength enemies. Once I got to a level where the game was child’s play level difficulty (basically becoming the giga Chad of that world) it was no longer much fun.

    MGSV has the added online benefit that you can upgrade you FOBs and customize the level of security on them that make them less impregnable. You can later develop nukes which totally deter low level competitors from even being able to invade your base, but then high level players can come in to disarm them. The online feature seems totally dead on PS3 at this point, though. I don’t know if the online feature spans across platforms, but if so then the game is simply dead. I’ve only had one person retaliate against an invasion, and another hop on in real-time to combat me.

    I had another thought about survival horror type games and how they appeal mostly to East Asians and those of European descent. Games that pit you against a hostile environment (regardless of the horror factor) and require you to utilize efficient resource management to make it through the game mimic Winter survival. Of course, this is just a hypothesis of mine, but I’ve actually heard from people that they got stuck on such and such Resident Evil game because they weren’t able to beat a boss because of poor ammo conservation, or didn’t have enough heals to get through a certain section. Resident Evil 0 on the normal-hard difficulty was especially brutal in this regard, as not only is the difficulty of the game substantially higher than the other installments, but it also doesn’t have an item box feature making you have to drop items on the ground and back track later on if you need them.

    As a final note, although I enjoyed my experience with open world gaming initially, the grind factor get a bit old. Also worth mentioning is the fact that most open world games are pure garbage in my opinion (Assassin’s Creed).

    1. Can you invade other players’ bases in MGSV without them having to be online? If so, then this is a pretty brutal game mechanic because you could lose progress simply by not responding to an active invasion.

      Your point about survival/horror games seems valid. I had never thought about it, but it is indeed the case that Northern Europeans and South-East Asians had to survive in a hostile environment. In fact, probably the idea of video games as a mastery-based activity seems to appeal mostly to this crowd if you look at the demographics of speedrunners and high-score chasers. The Japanese and Chinese seem to be even more interested in the latter, if you consider the prevalence of arcade culture. There is hardly an arcade game where Westerners are anywhere near the top, if you look into the rhythm game or shoot-em-up scenes. Gaming is, overall, moving away from mastery anyway. It is all about instant gratification nowadays, with a few notable outliers. However, I would argue that many NES and SNES games are a lot more difficult than, for instance, Demon’s Souls. I remember a few classic games where even beating the first boss was not at all trivial, requiring many attempts to learn patterns of movement and openings for attack.

    2. Yes, you can invade player’s bases in MGSV even when they are not active, though they are given your ‘coordinates’ so a retaliation is at least possible. This won’t affect your story progress much if at all, and this feature isn’t even unlocked until you’ve gotten settled in the game quite a bit. You can extract unprocessed resources, staff, any artillery on site and disarm nukes. There is a pay wall feature that allows you to insure your base (it’s ridiculously expensive), but I’ve personally never been affected by it as no one hardly ever retaliates or invades me. This fact makes resource farming extremely easy at this time. Also, I believe invasion only affects your Forward Operating Bases which are online extensions of your in game Mother Base.

      If you log on to the servers every Wed, Thur, and Fri you get MB points you can use to purchase up to three or four FOBs total. The first one is free and you unlock it as your progress through story mode. They’re not necessary to complete the game but having more means you can house more staff, mine and process more resources at a time and ultimately have a higher level in any given department which can lead to better weapons upgrades etc. There really isn’t much of an incentive to keep acquiring better and better weapons and items (there are tons of them and some of the elite grade weapons require ridiculous amounts of resources to develop) unless you’re using them for online competition. You could easily beat the story with basic weapons and no upgrades.

      This whole aspect of the game is what I referred to in a distant post about how the game eventually sort of devolves into a cell phone app of a game. At least they tried to have a community and it was probably pretty wild back in the hay day, at least that’s what I gather from videos I’ve seen.

  2. Aaron, there is a worker revolt occurring right now. It isn’t just low wage jobs. No one in the media is talking about it. It turns out nebulous promises and empty threats don’t do anything as word as has spread that the threats to fire you mean nothing. The vaxx mandates were the final straw.

    1. There is the problem that people are not returning to work because they rather live on government handouts. This could be connected to a refusal to submit to vaxx mandates, but I’d like to see a bit more data on it. The same is happening in Europe, by the way. In the richer countries, like the Nordics or Germany, more and more people (men) prefer living off welfare than going to work, which leads to labor shortages. Unfortunately, all the doctors and engineers from Africa we have been getting neither work in their highly skilled professions not do they have any interest in learning a trade or doing unskilled labor.

  3. If the most productive engineers are being held down, why couldn’t they form their own company? I admit such a company, consisting of “deplorables” and dissidents, would still have trouble getting contracts and capital.

    1. Aren’t there plenty of examples of people starting off on their own and doing quite well? Most commonly, though, people switch over to contracting. After all, if they can’t advance internally, why not just keep doing your job but getting paid a small multiple for it? I have come across a few cases where guys had been working as contractors for several years at the same place.

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