Lapis the Nevrean

⋮Anonymous

This is gonna be a story in three acts but bear with me.

>be gamer in 1980s

>tabletop games are swell, D&D is your favorite

>chatting with a buddy of yours

>"hey there's this cool new game that came out for the Apple II, you should try it"

>buy the game

>load it

>it's a text adventure

Everybody following along so far? This is totally cool and normal. These are normal people playing normal video games. Normal house, with a normal little window, and a normal Corvette, and everything is normal

>be gamer in 2000s

>grew up playing Nintendo

>disappointed by the shitty Doom port you got in a thrift shop

>IMing with a friend of yours

>"hey there's this cool new game that came out for Windows 2000, you should try it"

>look it up on the World Wide Web TM

>the system requirements are kinda steep

>build a gaming computer with a Pentium 4 and two graphics cards

>full of little bitch whiny fans and makes the room hotter than Satan's balls

>ispentallmymoneyonthis.gif

>insert CDROM

>it's an open world online 3D game with incredible graphics and it's super cool and gets free updates all the time and turns the gaming landscape inside out

Super cool and relatable right? Still following me?

>be gamer in 2020s

>the golden age of gaming is long gone and everything is shit now

>microtransactions, loot boxes, predatory game design practices

>absolutely sick of corporations mining personal data

>fuckme.webp

>looking for something new and different

>read a bunch of news about these newfangled AI things

>all of them are a website

>ignore them because you have to sign up and log in and OBVIOUSLY they want to mine your data

>walkin into the group chat like what up I got a big [BUZZER]

>"hey there's this cool new AI that came out that you can run locally on your own computer, you should try it"

>look it up and see the system requirements

>oh my god

>oh my FUCKING god what the fuck

>build an absolutely ridiculous high end workstation with two CPU sockets and a used data center GPU with an obscene amount of video memory

>well and truly broke now

>boot the game

>it's a text adventure