# about garmes writing by garmes critics to consider garmes critics and their garmes criticism as some of the lower possible life forms despite a few gems of excellent writing and actually philosophical critique we're generally talking truly wretched sad desperate lonely and cosmically useless in which to admit 'nobody gets up one morning and says i want to be a garmes critic'(tm) it seems more a mutant parasitical mis-relationship arising pseudo-spontaneously as an unwanted offshoot of the inherently awful vidyagarmz industry (that is the 'global hyperreal ludocapitalist neurospectacle') in which people who enjoy vidyagarmz falsely assume that "well there are movie critics why not garmes critics" oh dear what a mess we're in now never once realizing the true extent to which both vidyagarmz the vidyagarmz industry and ir little chalk dust marks on dusty dry pavement just before the terminal acid rains are only ever stale fart smells in the terminal winds of an entire uncivilized civilization permanently changed for the worse by the ceaseless playing of vidyagarmz another more concise way to say this is to say "no ludonaut never took neil postmans 'amusing ourselves to death' seriously" that is they falsely consider 'vidyagarmes' some permanent / actual reality rather than the too-often mere tawdry sideshow illusion they are - mere smoke and mirrors for the terminally bored masses video garmes are by and large incredibly boring because the global hyperreal ludocapitalist neurospectacle is terminally boring; dead systems cannot help but produce soulless product a failure to see this results in foolish 'ludonauts' blinded by all the pretty pixels somehow remotely imagining whatever they're busy yabbering on about in the undead vidyagarmz _culture_ industry is actually real solid and to be taken remotely seriously when in fact the only thing to be taken seriously is the fact vidyagarmz are almost never serious of course we're not talking about small or casual indie garmes made by individuals but even then there's a strong tendency to champion the individual in the thatcherite-regan era 'entrepreneur' sense - a rose vaseline smear of 'passion' instead of a collective critique (/of a total lack of collective unity) a quick litmus test: if holy 'vidyagarmz' are entirely where it's it if they're the all-encompassing art of the zeitgeist then make a vidyagarm directly discussing capitalism vidyagarmz inherent garmes industry greed and stupidity and the constant rounds of layoffs and maltreatment of employees here how about a garme in which you're forced to grind away your life for months realtime only to end up getting shitcanned with your company simply because some neckless exec upstairs thinks it won't make _all_ the money (as opposed to simply _some_ of the money) see it just can't be done - the tiny warped world of 'garmes' cannot encapsulate fully express or encompass it's own inherent limitations of course the worse kinds of articles one reads are those which take the following format: "vidyagarmz make me realize / helped me cope with x" yeesh. one - as if they did - and two 'vidyagarmz' could be replaced with anything else they aren't special and neither are those poor terminally bored citizens of capitalist cultures which play them andor unceasingly write about them after all it's just more arbitrary 'content'(tm) for the 24/7/365 vidyagarmz media grinder right so what make me write about vidyagarmz other than the fact so-called 'life' under capitalism is terminally boring and there's nothing much else to do other than stare at interactive pixels on a dead black rectangle? well not only was i busy playing a 'strange imaginary pastime' back in the day - an absurdist art practice i used to call 'big science' (which eventually evolved into 'republic of bob') i genuinely thought most of the vidyagarmz criticism i'd read up till then was a bunch of safe toothless spineless industy-pandering cobblers that should have been balled up and bounced back of the empty skulls of the poor souls who considered it 'a good take' like if you want the worst writing imaginable you don't have to go much father than garmes (/pseudo) criticism 'pseudo' because the degree to which modern ludonents systematically fail to mention the global hyperreal ludocapitalist neurospectacle is incredible it's like everything exists in a nonlinear series of taste free generic freeze-dried food stuffs in silver packets once belonging to a long-forgotten civilization on an unfashionable arm of a distant spiral galaxy - only now discovered by passing alien anthropoligists from an impossibly distant hyper-utopian megafuture for them 'vidyagarmz' even as a concept are long gone - only these tiny packets of mostly corrupted data survived and so they look at them with bemused mild confusion asking precisely what all the fuss was about and here are several examples in this folder - equally dreadful admittedly but at the time written with honest philosophical concern and genuine passion for pixels that's right in other words written like a dim schmuck that nobody online even failed to not notice or to take remotely seriously notice how these articles refer to garmes and developers now long gone - vanished into the frozen neon blue charged electronic aether - so there's also a kind of useless desperate longing and retro-romantic something / whatever hanging about them not an air of mystery the kind found around impossibly ancient mayan temple ruins rather the sadness of the seeming importance given to the subject by the long-gone author now set against the ruined reality of the present (hyper-mediated) moment - in this case with 'the republic of bob' a high desert plain with low shrubs rocks stones and the occasional mesa rising above the digital expanse it's the (entirely synthetic) nature of unlinked text files found online - it's like one is cyborg killy in the classic near-future dystopian manga 'blame!' who types something on a random nearby console linked to the dead yet forever expanding city megasphere - some text comes up and you're temporarily forced to remotely imagine if any of it means anything or if it's just more dead noise static on a deliberately scan-lined crt screen // republic of bob