Hideo Kojima - Xbox Presentation 2022

I’m going to pull back the curtain a bit. Half-Glass Gaming isn’t my full-time job. In fact, it isn’t even my part-time job. This is something I enjoy doing, so I take time out of my day in order to do it. I love video games and everything that comes along with their existence — playing them, reading about them, learning how they were made, and, of course, writing and talking about them. For my contributions to Half-Glass Gaming, which is run by my friend Josh, I get a pulpit from which to bully upon, and I typically make enough scratch to buy one or two games a month in order to continue my crusade.

Whether you love or hate what I write, I appreciate you reading it — especially if it gets a conversation going, or if, even in the slightest way, it gets you thinking differently about games.

To pay the bills, I work a full-time corporate job that has zero to do with video games. I have been working in this unexciting field for well over two decades, and I have reached a point where I make a decent income and can comfortably afford things that I realize not everyone else is able to afford. I grew up poor, though — like, poor poor — so I fully understand what it means to want things that are unobtainable financially.

Death Stranding - MGS box

For the record, I currently own a PS5, an Xbox Series S, a gaming laptop, and a Nintendo Switch. Just for giggles, I also have a Wii, a GameCube, and a PSVR, with plans to eventually purchase a Steam Deck when my number gets called. Even though I am by no means rich, I am certainly in the (ever-decreasing, it seems) minority of people with all of the latest consoles from the big three, as well as a gaming-capable PC. So platform exclusivity is not an issue for me.

That being said, when I was younger and was only making a couple hundred bucks a week at best, oftentimes overdrafting my checking account, I was still able to sacrifice things like three square meals a day and other “amenities” so I could own at least one gaming rig. But this, of course, meant missing out on an entire generation of console-exclusive games for whichever consoles I did not own. That sucked, and for those who are currently in that position, I’m sure it still sucks.

And perhaps those halcyon times I look back fondly on are simply rose-tinted delusions, but things definitely felt simpler, and people seemed to feel less entitled — at least they kept their entitlement in check while in the public arena.

Kojima Productions

So when I learned there was a petition on Change.org to cancel the recently announced Xbox-exclusive project from Kojima Productions (by way of an article on Tech Radar), I couldn’t help but get a little irritated. I mean, in what reality do so-called video-game fans feel they are entitled to disrupt the livelihood of hundreds of people they don’t even know, simply because a game might be exclusively available on a platform they may not own, or a format they might not have access to? And at the time of this writing, a little over 1,700 seemingly real people attached their names to this petition; it boggles the mind.

Look, I try not to be an elitist in my day-to-day life. I am a level-headed adult — at least, I mostly strive to be one as much as humanly possible. Have I been upset with trivial things in the past, perhaps devoting far more time to analyzing or even griping about said things that, in the greater scheme of life, don’t really matter all that much? Sure. I mean, one could even argue I am doing that very thing right now, since clearly this petition matters very little. But to create such a ridiculous document, which effectively is calling for the cancellation of something few people other than Kojima himself even know the scope or scale of, simply because you might not be able to enjoy it, despite the literal thousands — if not millions — of other people who can enjoy it, takes an amount of gall and hubris that is almost impossible to quantify.

And I’m sure there will be comments calling for my head just because I’m saying this. We humans are reactionary creatures, after all, and we don’t like when things don’t go our way — whether those things are fair or not.

Death Stranding

But consider this: There are people in this world who don’t have enough to eat, or who don’t have access to clean drinking water, or who don’t have healthcare, or who are discriminated against because of who they are. There are plenty of injustices that could be addressed on a platform like Change.Org, and quite a few that are being talked about but are struggling to find support. You know, meaningful things.

But instead, a video game that doesn’t even exist yet might be exclusively on Xbox, and some people only have a PlayStation. So, yeah, maybe that is worth crying about.

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