Invited to play some Left 4 Dead with friends last night. Complex nostalgia: I was back in Boston the last time I played it. That was on Xbox 360, and I’m unsurprised to see that it plays great on #SteamDeck today.
It’s as fun as ever, with very minor mechanical nits. The aspects that felt most dated were philosophical.
First, the easiest skill level is called "Easy”, and beyond it being Rather Hard Actually, a modern game would pick a less dismissive description for it. 🧵#videogames
Spending a couple of hours rampaging down streets and mowing down thousands of people with obsessively detailed assault rifles, sending blood and bones and viscera aloft, forced me to think about how, for a long moment, this was videogames. L4D was widely agreed to be among the highest achievements of the form, for years, circa 2010.
Consensually produced pornography is fine. But looking at L4D through a modern lens, I kept thinking: is everyone who made this OK? Are we OK?
To fully enjoy this experience I had to really embrace the nostalgia to the point of mentally time-traveling a little, back to the earliest years of the Obama administration, when it felt like something terrible in the culture had been averted, and it was fine to regularly indulge in lurid, sociopathic fantasies like the one L4D offers.
I had a great time. Ended the session energized, happy, and also naggingly aware of how deeply fucked up it felt in ways that it didn't in 2010.
@jmac My sense of it is that games didn't change and the culture didn't change -- you did. The vast majority of video games are still built around violence as the default (or only) form of interaction. We had our moment (e.g. Spec Ops The Line) where we floated the idea that violence isn't something to celebrate and in my experience players are sick of the conversation now.
@victorgijsbers I doubt that, but I feel like there’s much less treating of on this kind of America-flavored gun-focused mass-murder fantasy as a kind of default. Fallout still exists, but there’s more room for Zelda and Horizon and Among Us and so on to be mega-hits. I’d even put Helldivers 2 outside of L4D’s category, for all of its gunplay.
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