jamesfmarkey

I have to imagine that the list is short of people who would watch any part of this docuseries. It likely includes those few fans of esports who are aware of (and upset about) the Saudi Arabian foray into sports washing with esports as its unlikely vessel, the employees of the western companies who enabled it, followed by the immediate family of R. J. Cutler, then by the few ghosts on couches in dimly-lit rooms with televisions left on auto-play drowning out the spectral pleadings of "turn it off!".

The series is comprised of a sequence of dull, repetitive, un-curious drivel. It is made for the benefit of no-one, an empty shell which could only ever realistically avoid being so empty if it were allowed to be honest about the subject matter. But the point of the documentary is to be dishonest about the subject matter; to be coy with utmost intention.

Amongst a sea of irony (in both this documentary and with the subject it covers), perhaps the most profound is the attempt of using documentary, a form of journalism, as a veil to shed better light on an entertainment event whose express purpose is to improve the general outlook toward Saudi Arabia by young westerners after the crown prince (who was involved with the event) ordered the murder and mutilation of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

The esports industry is particularly sensitive right now after perhaps a decade of steady growth and a struggle toward legitimization, followed by five-or-so years of huge inflation in both of those categories thanks to crypto sponsorships, followed by a commiserate crash in both of those categories. Esports, at its core, is an enterprise which requires little to no funding to exist in a meaningful way. There will always be nerdy teenagers and twenty-somethings looking to get together to prove their capacity to waste their early life away to get good at a video game. Just look at the fringes of esports today and I will still find it: games without funding, thousands of Twitch views, and people still find a way to figure out who's best.

At some point, game developers (the smart ones) realized that this eternal (if dimly-lit) flame could be used to stoke the fires of their own respective furnaces. It turns out, when 10,000 nerds get together to watch a game with a clear "pinnacle", populated by players with quickly-appreciable skill, and there are teams to root for and become tribalistic about, those players are going to sink more time into your game, make more in-game purchases, and make your game a bigger part of their life.

At some point along the way, the executives in these large game companies (Riot Games, Blizzard, Valve) misinterpreted this type of fan engagement as evidence that they had themselves a proper entertainment product on their hands. A, dare-I-say, sports entertainment product. Soon convention sports owners (and players) started to dive in, convinced that the "growth" of esports was an indication of the future of sports entertainment, where your neighbor asks you if you caught the Cloud 9 Team Liquid nail-biter last night and your grandmother prepares dips for when the family comes over to watch the ESL final. Hundreds of millions, billions, were put into the market hedging a type of growth that could never be met. Imagine everyone's surprise when esports, beautiful and entertaining as it is, turned out to be what it always was: A bunch of young, terminally-online, typically un-wealthy, socially awkward gamers huddling around a CRT TV watching pixels on a screen. For these kids (and people like myself), esports is a euphoric experience. But a universally palatable product, it is not.

So the corporate developers need to figure out a way to keep growing. The snake of capitalism will always devour itself own tail if the pace it swallows is not outmatched by the rate the tail grows. So then came crypto sponsors, who were willing to hold the industry's growth on their back in exchange for access to the impressionable young people that its industry needed to scam to keep itself afloat. Then came the gambling sponsors. And now, like a mirage in the desert you first see as an ice cream truck only to walk closer and realize is a rock, come the Saudis, eager to fill the pockets of executives and talent alike in an inflated industry whose value is not in its product but in its difficult-to-conventionally-reach viewer base of young (mostly) men. The Saudi Arabian state is an evil, autocratic, theofascist state run by a pampered crown prince confident enough in his immunity from criticism and consequences enough to murder journalists in foreign countries. It is a country where to be gay is to be a criminal of the worst order. A country where to be a woman is a cruel fate of non-agency, to be treated like chattel. And this documentary is meant to convince you that they're not so bad.

It is a good thing that this documentary is soulless and nearly-unwatchable. It is a good thing that this documentary can never be anything but that. The poison chalice is not worth drinking, and never will be.

The Witcher novels are not high-brow literature. The books are straight forward, tropey, but still fun with good pacing and an engaging story. We follow funny, lively characters through different threads and timelines. But the stories are not The Lord of the Rings in terms of detail. They are books that anyone can pickup and run through in a few evenings. The characters are rememberable, the stories are fun, and you want to know what happens next. But complicated, reflective, esoteric fiction, it is not.

All in all, this makes The Witcher an excellent candidate for television. Comparing it to A Song of Ice and Fire, the stories are much more palatable and digestible for a general audience. Yet for some reason, the folks over at Netflix decided to take this already watered down, simple series of Fantasy novels and short stories to the metaphorical industrial-grade sander that is poor, oversimplified, uninspired writing by a team of writers who seem to believe they are writing for an audience with grade school story comprehension levels.

Instead of expanding on areas that the books lacked the scope to delve into, the show decides to essentially wipe away the nuanced story and give us charactatures of the unique characters we meet in the books. We get characters who make decisions inconsistent with their core respective characterizations. We get rough exposition through dialogue. Speaking of dialogue, the tone of the show feels very cold and imprecise compared to the books. Characters are not believable, they overdramatize, they over-act, they are given dialogue that is inconsistent with real human speech. Nothing is believable.

Considering how much of a layup the source material is, I should really be shocked by how they mucked this up. But when are adaptations actually done well? Especially by Netflix, or other streamers for that matter. Slowly we are learning that these services just simply either don't know how to handle nuanced dramas, or they don't think their viewers are smart enough to digest it. On both ends, those of us fans looking for interesting, well-written stories are left out in the dry.

But hey, there are books and video games to fall back to. And they're pretty darn good.

At the surface, Diablo Immortal is clean, has good graphics, is moderately fun albeit watered down and plays worse than other Diablo games. All in all, it has the makings of a pretty good mobile game.

But why do these giant conglomerate behemoths of the gaming company insist on making predatorily-designed games and never again serving an audience that wants to spend a moderate amount of money for a complete game? Diablo Immortal is pretty and it is fun those qualities are the flickering light at the bottom of the ocean to the true anglerfish, the microtransactions. Never before has a 1st party game been so pay-to-win. It is nauseating and Blizzard should continue to be embarrassed after an already embarrassing last few years. And the worse part is that the bottom line will love this game and more resources will be funneled into it and away from Diablo 4 and similar projects.

Nowadays the only alternative to 1st party greed is indie titles, and honestly, that's fine by me. Diablo Immortal is terrible and should be avoided at all costs.