Theory

[icycalm]

It never ceases to amaze me that the same person whose games dominated my life in 1990 at the age of 12, Chris Roberts, still does in 2026 at the age of 48. But, after all, this was inevitable. We are talking about a man who has been at the top of the videogame food chain, on and off, for nearly half a century. How could anyone beat him when everyone else quits after a mere 10 or 20 years? Take the BioWare founders. They released their first game in 1998, and a mere 14 years later they quit to make beer. How can you beat someone with 40 years' experience when you only have 14? You'd have to be a monster of talent compared to him, but the mere fact that you're quitting so quickly is because you have piss-poor passion, and that PROVES that your talent is far inferior, because talented people enjoy nothing in life as much as developing that talent! So not only is Chris Roberts far more talented than anyone else who ever made videogames, but ON TOP OF THAT he has worked on it for double, triple, quadruple the time compared to anyone else. How can you NOT win and dominate under these circumstances? It is inevitable. Everything seems to fit perfectly, in hindsight, within such a long life of developing your talent. When Roberts took a break from the game industry in the early 2000s to make and produce movies, everyone including me wrote him off as a has-been. We completely forgot about him. But the man had been burned out by a quarter century of cutting-edge game development by that point (more than both BioWare founders combined and he wasn't even at the halfpoint of his career lmao), so he followed his passion for cinema that had served him so well in his early career that had introduced cinema to 3D action games, and he just started to straight-up make movies. A decade later he returned to videogames and BOOM: his Squadron 42 boasted the most star-studded cast not only in all of games, but in all of movies too, and its cinematics look better than most movies. How would he have acquired the skills and know-how and contacts to pull that off without his decade in movie production? And which game director can now compete at it with him when they are all a bunch of brainless programmers whose idea of cinematic gaming is inviting Al Pacino to speak at the Game Awards despite his not being in any game? When you truly and fully consider the sheer amount of multidisciplinary experience that Chris Roberts has worked all his life to develop, it is a given that he'll end up at the top of the heap when no one else even tries half as much as him.

I see the exact same pattern in my development too. I must have outlasted four-plus generations of wannabe critics and theorists by now. There was one generation that held the field when I entered it in the mid-2000s, the independent bloggers, practically all of whom had quit a mere five-six years later. Then a new generation entered the field, no longer building their own sites but employed by publishing companies (Gamasutra/Kotaku/Forbes) or universities (Full Sail/DigiPen/Tisch). Then by the mid-2010s all of those had quit too, and been replaced by a brand-new generation of YouTubers, all of whom had quit by the early-2020s to be replaced by a new generation of Twitter/Patreon/Substack losers, and we are now on the SECOND generation of THEM. The only constant in game criticism and theory throughout these two decades has been... me. I have 20 years of experience thinking and writing about games on top of my 40 years of playing them, and my competition has... five? And they aren't even a hundredth as bright as me, so their five counts for... one month by my standard? So when you see me smashing the shit out of them with a mere sentence or two, what you are looking at is 40 years of experience smashing one mere month, that's why the carnage looks so horrific, the distance so cosmic. They picked up a game pad at 25 with their 120 IQs and they're going up against a 139 IQ that has been playing games for 40 years! (and this without even bringing T into it). Of course they'll be made to look like ants. Because they are.

What all this leads us to conclude is that, ultimately, we can deduce the quality of a work without reference to the work at all, merely by looking into its creators. Are the creators great talents that have been working for a long time? Then the work will be superior to that of lesser talents that have been working for less time; and for the ultimate work you need BOTH ultimate talent and MAXIMAL time, as in the case of Chris Roberts and me. Conversely, when you see a work pop up out of nowhere, without a long trail of effort behind it, you know automatically that it's crap, like all of those "indie" games or movies that pseudocriticism promotes as masterpieces every year, but which everyone completely forgets a few years later, and no one ends up building on because there's nothing to build on: it's dirt, and that's why it was able to appear so quickly. You can't build on dirt, you can only build on a solid base, and the base itself must be set deeper into the earth the taller the structure you're building. And this is where genetics and ultimately race come into it, this is the EARTH in the metaphor. Because genetics and race are precisely the foundations, the base, of all works. It's not an accident that Chris Roberts is Anglo-American and I am Greek. It is the very reason we're on top. Think for a moment: the most TECHNICALLY complex game in the world... who but an Anglo-American could make it? Then, the most CONCEPTUALLY complex game in the world... who but a Greek could make it? Conceptually, Star Citizen is very simple, even ridiculous in some aspects (for example when thousands of players play the same event over and over while the game pretends that the event only occurred once). Similarly, my game is so technically simple that much of it doesn't even require a computer, and can be played just fine on a table with some pen and paper. But conceptually my game is staggering, so complex that you need to read a whole book to even begin to grasp how it works. Hundreds of pages of theory, and that's only the grand outline, because each chapter of that book rests on top of dozens of other books for a total of tens of thousands of pages! You have a 4X with each POI in it being a full RPG campaign every event of which affects every event in every other across a metaplot that fuses together all the greatest fiction franchises ever! It's insane. And it could only have come from a Greek brain, just as Star Citizen's sheer technical scale and detail could only come from an Anglo-American brain: 64-Bit Worldspace, Object Container Streaming, Persistent Entity Streaming, Dynamic Server Meshing, immersive micro-mechanics, physicalized everything. It's ridiculous, so complex that journalists can't even report on it and have given up, and the industry pretends it doesn't exist because no one can grasp it. That's why they end up reporting on the only aspect of the project they can grasp: the funding (and even that not fully, which is why they're still wondering why people spend the money and what they get for it).

Comes the coup de grâce. Because you would think by this point that Chris and I are equal: operating at different frequencies, but at the same level. Yet the moment he turns his engine into a VTT, I can put it in my game instantly, with near-zero effort; whereas he will never be able to shove my design into his game, for very basic reasons that would never cross his Anglo-American mind (millions of protagonists mean story is impossible, for one, just Drama 101, which is Greek). So I win, and it's inevitable. The mind wins. The soul wins, if you prefer an older formula. Because it's older.


From Orgy of the Will §2036 Inevitable domination.