In 2024 Alex Green Disconnected From The Discourse | Winter Spectacular 2024
You may have noticed, the world is pretty bleak out there. We live in a world of warmongers, charlatans and wealth hoarders - all reserved for the political class. More than ever, we need entertainment, whether intelligent, funny, bold, or occasionally stupid and silly. Games had that in spades this year, notably not really in the AAA space.
Don’t get me wrong, there were some games that fit that bill that were also exceptional. There were also the usual disappointments. Yet I find myself more than ever trying to escape the cultural zeitgeist, because 2024 showed me the online gaming space is not just worse than ever, in fact, it feels like it's actively damaging to the real-world gaming industry. But crucially, we aren’t totally in the generic cyberpunk dystopia we’ve been hurtling toward just yet. We have the option to turn it off.
I’m still not fully tuned out. I find myself doom scrolling through everyone’s every other thought. There’s still plenty out there within reason to be aggrieved by. However, a few events and a few games reminded me that the online discussions around gaming are just that. A discussion restricted to an online space occupied by terminally online people. Whether it be segments of the press required by the constraints of SEO to publish every 30 minutes without interrogation, whether it be some influencers/streamers required to push out every thought regardless of quality to “get that bag”, whether it be a YouTube space increasingly less curated and more “Content” driven than ever before with videos longer than a slow motion race at Le Mans, this space has reduced in quality discussion and has become an impossibly fast zeitgeist predicated on reaction above all. It truly does feel like, that in many ways, the internet is at the apex of its enshitification. Luckily, games and non-gaming events reminded me that we all still have the option to turn it off.
As I look at the games I loved this year, I find myself looking to the ultimate expression of rebellion over history in 1000xResist. Towards its climax, we see the Allmother, Iris, have a chat with her own mother. In a long overdue and touching conversation, the mother discusses the human body and brain as “too capable of storing ” with a recommendation to always “move forward”. The thing that strikes me though is the pace of that movement is reflected more in Iris’ father who after a rebellion in Hong Kong, seeks a peaceful existence as the fruit of work, more importantly, a life lived in the environment around him.
Perhaps the strongest scene about our need to connect beyond our online spaces is when he returns to Hong Kong, pulling up a deck chair and chatting with the place he called home and revolted for. In particular, he mentions going to a food stall and saying “Finally… we can eat together”. A sentiment that hits the human need to connect with people and places, the spaces we call home, the memories we create. For me this year, that extended to the joys of holidays I had, including my first-ever friends holiday to Amsterdam. A trip with great memories of sitting in Vondelpark and eating Kibberling.
I think of Dungeons of Hinterberg, a game literally framed around a lawyer holidaying in rural Austria to escape. I think of how - beyond its commentary on the commercialisation of nature - the game places great emphasis on connection. Rewards and bonuses come from interacting with side characters, empathising with their plights and quibbles regardless of their scale or sensibility. You earn stat increases by going to relaxation spots instead of doing the rat race of the dungeons, where Luisa can reflect on her holiday and her life of law. All of it is pure gameplay designed to reward players taking time to break from patterns, who embrace slowing down and connecting beyond superficial elements.
Yet for all these games, what actually mattered was the non-gaming experiences that made me realise how sheltered the online gaming zeitgeist is from the world we live in. Truly divorced from reality in the largest sense.
Getting a subscription to the excellent Edge Magazine brought back the usual stress of having a backlog to rush through on train journeys and work breaks. Yet, I found myself oddly enjoying being three months behind. The reminders of games that passed me by at the time and seeing previews before their release helped me understand the cultural and industrial context of the games currently out.
Being in a full-time job outside of gaming is also an excellent reminder of how insular online gaming discussion is, of how the indies and 17,000 games released on Steam this year struggle to break out of the bubble we live in. We often forget about how unequal marketing budgets are and that with more people gaming than ever, we have more casual players who check out the newest PlayStation exclusive widely advertised on buses on billboards and may not know anything about the games I’ve mentioned thus far. In a sense, this is the true problem we all face. Smaller games, even AA games face the issue of not being the big topics for SEO, not big enough to generate endless half-an-hour videos. All the more reason for smaller gaming magazines, and more focused YouTube content that can break us out of the usual loops.
That brings me to one area that I have cut myself off from and that's wrestling. Since its latest boom period, the online zeitgeist and social media activity around wrestling has exploded with an endless chatter of demands that you like one wrestling promotion and take a Big-Show-sized dump on everything else. That we are required to be in the know 24/7 about every wrestler's booking plans and that contractual negotiations are more important than who appears on screen. In short, it's a zeitgeist that like all of our reaction culture, discourages raw emotion in favour of what looks good on a camera.
However, none of that mattered as I watched All Elite Wrestling's All In 2024 event at Wembley Stadium. An evening full of spectacle, massive emotional moments and returns capped off with Bryan Danielson, my favourite wrestler of all time and possibly the best wrestler of the last 20 years, winning his final World Championship. I could wax lyrical about the technical qualities of his match with Swerve Strickland, but what mattered was how I was swept up in emotion like never before. I sang joyously to the Final Countdown. I screamed and wanted to throw a hat as Strickland kicked out of a sure-fire pinfall. I wildly demanded him to tap out when Danielson locked in the Lebell lock and when he did, I cried tears of joy like so many in that stadium as the American Dragon stood in triumph with his family, his career having another joyously defiant night as he continued to rage against the dying of the light of his full-time career.
All those raw, positive, messy emotions are all delightfully human, all borne of a desire to connect with the stories and people around us and in front of us. Not out of the need to react, but a want to feel. So in 2025, I urge everyone to disconnect with our increasingly online zeitgeist. The issues we all face aren't solved online and certainly aren’t being solved on Twitter, the raw emotion that defines our experience isn't a reaction, but a feeling.
