CONTENTSPrologueThe Insomnia Best Game of All Time Award: Star CitizenThank you God"There has never been anything like it"How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the WipeThe Chow Hall DramaToo Good to be TrueThe Most Released Game of All TimeThe Year of Chris RobertsThe Coolest Thing You'll Ever Own
The Coolest Thing You'll Ever OwnLike millions of other gamers, for years I didn’t understand why people were throwing so much money at
Star Citizen, and how the game was generating its unprecedented crowdfunding returns. When I learned that players were mostly buying spaceships, I became even more befuddled: What would there be left to buy in the game—since it was a spaceship game after all (or at least so I thought at the time)—if they bought everything before even starting playing?
For years this made no sense to me, until I played the game. And even when I started playing, it took a while for me to get it. I remember telling my clan right at the outset to buy the cheapest ships they could so as to leave more to buy later in the game, and therefore enjoy the game longer. I even cringed inwardly when some of them chose to buy the Titan for a few bucks more despite my advice to the contrary: I was sure I’d have more fun than them working up to it in my Mustang.
We played like this, zero-to-hero essentially, for a few weeks, until one day I saw... the Scorpius with the Stinger paint. It was the coolest spaceship I’d ever seen: a stunning mix of X-wing and TIE fighter reimagined for the 21st-century. The design was so versatile that the look of the ship would change between Evil and Good depending on what paint you had on! I had to have it no matter what—and
immediately—along with its evilest paint; and when I learned that, at the time, it couldn’t be purchased in the game—and moreover the paint, which basically made the ship for me, would likely never be available in the game—I pulled out my credit card and threw it at the first grey market store that carried it. And once I took the ship on its maiden flight and realized that, far from lessening my excitement to continue playing, it heightened it tremendously, I started buying ships and vehicles left and right, and today I fully plan to one day cash-own every vehicle and piece of gear that will ever be put into the game all the way down to coffee mugs—not to speak of hangars, apartments and base modules, to afford which I am prepared to live in a
van down by the river if need be.
But let’s constrain this analysis to ships for the time being. Is there some way of explaining even to the ignorant befuddled gamer that I used to be before playing the game the extraordinary appeal of buying these ships, and especially of buying them with real cashmoney?
I think there is, and this is what I’ll try doing here. But I don’t think anyone will fully get it before playing the game for themselves. It’s like trying to explain the appeal of sex to virgins. Proust himself could write thousands of stunningly illuminating lines on it, but you would still have to do it to fully get it. But, after doing it, I don’t think Proust’s words would have been rendered futile. I think you’d come to understand them, and sex, even more, and more deeply appreciate it—which is the power of criticism, and why Whites read it, and write it.
So to cut, at last, straight to the chase, the reason so many hyperintelligent and hyperdiscerning gamers (
Star Citizen has the smartest community in all of traditional gaming) are throwing so much money on these ships is because these ships are THE COOLEST THING THEY’LL EVER OWN—the coolest thing ANY human will ever own in our lifetimes: even Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. Or what? You think either of them owns, or could ever own, anything cooler? Like what? A stadium-sized mansion, for example? But the coolest room in that mansion would be the
Star Citizen simpit room lol, and the coolest thing you could do inside the mansion is to dim the lights in that room and play
Star Citizen. Same with a superyacht: coolest thing you could do in it is play
Star Citizen in the middle of the ocean, and the boat itself would never so much as compare to a
Star Citizen ship. It doesn’t even have any guns lol! It’s illegal to mount guns on yachts. Torpedoes? Forget about it. It can’t even leave the water lolz. These guys spend a small nation’s entire GDP to buy a ship that can’t even fly, while
SC players own space superyachts with swimming pools and basketball courts that can carry the lovechild of Darth Vader’s and Luke Skywalker’s ships. In
Star Citizen we can own capital ships hosting dozens of fighter craft and hundreds of our friends in their own bedrooms with lockers for their guns and armor and with mess halls the size of Bezos’s superyacht. Even MOVIES don’t have ships this cool, or so extensively and painstakingly designed and rendered, and you wonder why people buy them? Are you fucking kidding me?
And that’s not all. That’s not even half of it. Because OUR ships can travel anywhere inside a GALAXY. Where the fuck can Bezos’s superyacht go? Back and forth across the Atlantic? Even if it could go ON THE MOON, THERE IS NOTHING THERE. I mean there are dozens of points of interest on
Star Citizen’s every moon and planet, and people are STILL complaining that there aren’t enough things to see and do, so can you imagine if we sent those people on the actual moon where there is literally NOTHING? Mars is the same issue, and the gas giants are even worse. But the gas giant in Stanton has a whole flying city above it which is cooler than any place I’ve ever lived in (and I’ve lived in all the coolest places on Earth). And you’re telling me that for a thousand dollars I can fly my space superyacht there and live there forever?
It’s a steal! It is literally the biggest bargain in the entire history of trading! I’d pay $100,000 for this privilege, let alone one k lol. You must be kidding! And THAT is why some people ARE paying $100,000 in
Star Citizen.
So you see, the solution to this riddle has two parts. The one part is simply the coolness of the vehicles themselves. These are hands down the coolest vehicles any of us will experience in our lifetimes. I wouldn’t drive a Lamborghini in
Star Citizen even if it were free, because it can’t go anywhere on these wild planets. Even on Earth, a Lambo can only go on roads, and well-maintained roads too, because of its tiny ground clearance. If you drove it in a brown “country” you’d ruin it. Not to mention the locals would pull you out of it and eat you. But a Cyclone with two buddies: you could kill a lot of browns before they got at you. And with a few Atlas Platforms you could take over their “country”. And that’s before you’ve brought in any ships, let alone cap ships that carry enough ordnance to level small cities.
But even beyond that, a Cyclone is simply such a cooler-looking vehicle than a Lambo. There’s no comparison. The super-aggressive styling made for war not touring, the wild science-fictional tyres, the thick leather seats and full-throated engine sound. I’ve been in a Lamborghini, they could take design cues from the Cloud Imperium designers. And you can have a Cyclone for 50 bucks lol. Andrew Tate can keep his Lambo.
Note that I’ve been comparing
Star Citizen’s ships with real vehicles, not with videogame ones. I won’t even bother comparing them with videogame ones, because it’d be a ridiculous comparison: the videogame ones are like matchbox toys that Musk’s son would carry in Musk’s Lambo. Every other game vehicle feels like a child’s plastic toy when compared to a
Star Citizen vehicle. Halo, Far Cry, PlanetSide, Crysis: forget about it. They aren’t competing at all. I’d gladly take even a cheap used Ford over any videogame vehicle ever. And besides, what would I do with a vehicle inside an invisible wall game like Halo, Far Cry, PlanetSide or Crysis: bump it against the invisible walls until falling asleep from the sheer boredom?
So you can see that the second part of the equation is the environment: it must be open so you can be free in it, enormous so you can keep traveling across it without ever getting bored, and stunning so you can enjoy yourself in it. And
Star Citizen’s environment is all three of these things, and it’s the ONLY traditional game for which this is true.
In short, this is the Matrix, it is the promised metaverse that’s better than reality, and of course its vehicles will also be better than real vehicles, so of course people who love vehicles—meaning the high-IQ/high-T straight White males who invented vehicles in the first place—will quickly recognize this and flock to this universe and these vehicles en masse, and throw tons of money at them—some of them practically everything they own.
And of course anyone who isn’t a high-IQ/high-T straight White male will have no idea wtf is going on with this game and these crazy-“expensive” vehicles (they are dirt cheap for what they are), and no use for it, or them. They won’t even be able to get immersed in the game’s world at all, so they’ll quit playing after a couple of sessions—if they even bother to try the game at all—which is the subject I will analyze in the next chapter.
P.S. As for why buy the vehicles with real money when they can (mostly) be purchased in the game: They wipe in-game purchases roughly twice a year, and lie that it’s for technical reasons. This is how the greatest real-time artwork ever is funded: by lies, because humans can’t handle the truth, not even White ones. Well, the rich can handle it, but the poor can’t, and CIG isn’t yet ready to tell the poors to piss off, as I do in my
Battlegrounds. So we get lies.
