doom as a power fantasy

If by power fantasy, he means easier, I remember a lot of games back in the 80s and 90s being a lot harder than Doom. But only because of shitty design, and clunky controls.

I feel powerful when overcoming challenges, but overcoming doesn't mean "Power Fantasy" if you have to work for it.

The bigger question is "What the fuck is wrong with power fantasies?" That reviewer sounds like a cucked, boring loser. All video games are fantasies where the player becomes someone or something else. What good video game doesn't involve you taking the role of someone with at the very least a very, very above-average set of skills? Furthermore, the enemies in Doom are hellspawn bent on destroying Earth, I think that justifies killing them all savagely, no more "background" on the foes is necessary. I really don't get why people feel the need to apologize for playing Doom or any other game. If some doesn't approve, they're trash, simple as that.

I bet that reviewer will LOVE this game :

Funny thing about the gladiatorial games was that they were not in practice for hundreds of years before Caligula revived them. To the Roman people, it must have been absolutely outrageous (and awesome) to see such a spectacle that they had only heard of from history.

oddly enough I agree with memfis. there's been studies that show games can increase aggression in the short term (although nothing that would indicate long-term personality warping effects a la jack thompson) so they clearly do affect one's mood. see also world of warcraft and other games that exercise a compulsion on the player.
as another example, I once saw a steam review for age of empires 2 in which the reviewer opined that playing aoe2 was a better way to learn history than paying attention in school, so people are obviously drawing information about the world from them too. This is probably way sjw types and other goobers are/were so interested in them, ie. they have propaganda value, perceived or real.

calling games 'art' is 100% gay though. Things that resemble art aren't necessarily art -- art is supposed to communicate timeless truths aka be beautiful (which is why most historical monumental art pieces are religious in nature. See eg. the parthenon, medieval cathedrals, mosques, buddhist sculptures, byzantine icons etc. etc.) -- and games are amusements, and as such are more of a craft. And no plop eggs (https://jezebel.com/heres-a-woman-plopping-paint-eggs-out-of-her-vagina-1566693939) and other worthless, degraded and degrading modern 'art' isn't either.

man I know you're just trollin me (it's working btw) but this was what I was talking about. The moment I realised I hated modern art was when I was at a friend's, and some other people's, exhibition opening and I asked his gf what this cloth sculpture of a stump she'd made was supposed to represent and she told me that it was a stump she remembered playing by as a kid. I mean that's nice but you're selling that shit so why should anybody else care? paint a picture of something cool like a naked viking babe fighting a neanderthal instead (also NOT ART but better than a stump, ffs).
in any case what we have there exists to help some dipshit live out his stupid fantasy of slobbering over some uncanny valley looking motherfucker's piss-dripping but blessedly aids free glock (content removed). Yang's so far up his own arse he doesn't even realise that glocks didn't even exist until like the 80s, get some attention to detail cunt.

a while ago I read most of George Catlin's indian portrait travelogue (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Catlin) -- fyi, volume one goes into lots of detail and is dope, volume two is pretty much just 'I went here and saw these dudes, then I went there and saw those dudes' so I tapped out halfway through that one -- and it's a pretty good example of what I'm talking about, the indians thought representational painting was magic and would flip their shit if Catlin tried to paint one of the pathetic effeminate men or icky icky chicks since something so obviously numinous should be reserved for people who are worthy of respect and allowing others to access such a wellspring would degrade the former. Closer to my home the whole 'aboriginal dot painting' thing originally started as a means to conceal the actual, magically significant art underneath (https://www.aboriginal-art-australia.com/aboriginal-art-library/aboriginal-dot-art-behind-the-dots/). As I mentioned in another thread I'm currently (v. e. r. y. s. l. o. w. l. y.) reading C. P. Fitzgerald's China : a short cultural history, and one of the things he talked about a bit was how vastly technically superior the 'terracotta army' was to later chinese sculpture (not an art form the chinese have ever had much of an interest in, to be fair, since it was an imported form and generally only associated with weirdo foreign bullshit), which was primarily buddhist and not particularly anatomically accurate. But then the terracotta army was just plain chucked in a hole and forgotten about since it didn't have any real symbolic meaning (beyond it's practical value as servants in the afterlife ofc.) while the technically crappy stuff meant something.
anyway blah blah look at my incredible erudition, the point I'm trying to make is even art made by primitive and/or ancient societies was about more than just the artist's whims.

this is mostly an error within the English language, probably replicated in continental babble too but who cares about that, like we're using this word 'art' to refer to stuff that is produced in the same way that art is produced, ie. with hammer and chisel, brush or pen blah blah. This is the renaissance's (aka the worst shit that ever happened) fault, since that was when the technical sophistication of art and it's imitators shot through the roof so it became worthwhile to use art-like activities to do stupid shit like feed the egos of retarded late-period oriental despot wannabes by painting them looking all cool shootin some b ball outside of the school, and eventually this kind of self-aggrandising garbage came to be associated with art in general. So how can we talk about these distinctions without massive confusion?

thanks for reading this bizarre stream of consciousness rant btw. You did well to get this far

well, that does add a bit of depth to the game but just to be clear, ART in the sense I insist on using the term is a vessel of cultural continuity rather than just something that makes reference to another cultural artifact.
Out of the examples I used above the one where this is clearest is the Aboriginal dot painting thing where the gentleman who started the whole thing was looking for a way to keep secret cultural knowledge out of the hands of others (the fact that very few westerners would be able to decode Aboriginal sacred art notwithstanding). Another example would be medieval Christian art, particularly Orthodox art, which was quite specifically intended as a means to transmit Christian legendry to illiterates who couldn't participate in the written culture. Catholicism had similar debates regarding opulence in churches, which while less obviously didactic than Eastern forms, was still intended to provoke a feeling of awe in the peasantry and other churchgoers (I don't think necessarily as a prelude to obedience to church figures, which is excessively cynical and ignores that people really believed in this stuff back then, including if not especially the people doing the building, but rather to ensure the correct posture towards God).

I'm leaning hard on the religious aspects here but really religion and culture are the same thing (I know this might be controversial to Westerners, but frankly the 'separation of Church and state' is a product of our specific historical circumstances; see the specific ritual role of early, and probably later but I'm not that far in the book yet lolololol, Chinese emperors, Islam in it's entirety, and the fact the upper classes in pre-Christian Roman and Norse cultures, at the very least, were also the priesthood. Actually getting back to Catlin, one of the things he mentions is that someone who displays magical prowess will quickly rise in esteem, so the links between religious and temporal power seem pretty universal across cultures). I was tempted to call secular art an oxymoron in my last post, but it's just as well I didn't since I would have made myself look stupid(er) -- paintings of historical events would be one such example, as they can connect someone with their history. This kind of art seems to have been quite popular in the 19th century for some reason.


Just because something is Not Art doesn't mean it can't be awesome, of course. I'm a big fan of the paintings of Frank Frazetta even though the themes are generally trite* and of course Doom rules the school. There seems to be a widespread school of thought that implies that something must be ART to be legitimate in some way (eg. that film critic, I think Roger Ebert, who said games aren't art, causing a massive spergsplosion?), but fuck that. These things should be evaluated on their own merits.

Anyway I'm not sure that's any clearer than the above. I'm kinda organising my thoughts about this as I go. At least I used capitals this time.

* this is my desktop rn: