RND// Good article by RE:BIND on Doom Eternal: The Need For Speed Part 3 – DOOM: Eternal Repeat
Some notes:
- Baudrillard did not see himself as a postmodernist.
- Simply consider Hyperreality as ‘more real than real’ – ala Coke’s ‘It’s the real thing’. The model or map is now totally supplanted the territory – an ‘original without a copy’.
- Hyperreality / videogames are affectless, rather than have ‘effects’, as such. At best, they express what Baudrillard calls ‘the charm of the real’, a seductive surface gloss romantically harking back to a Real (‘before videogames’) that never existed.
- Rather than some hyperreal simulation, consider Doom as already containing and expressing an entire universal Doom aesthetic from the very outset. Simulations have no past or future, but (much like garish neon signs advertising obscure products, they flash in the darkness and are their own and only referent.)
- Doom is about as ‘gory’ as He Man was violent. Rather, it’s more akin to Zizek’s notion of decaffination. Gore-lite; a passing gory notion.
- ‘Ripping and Tearing’ are Doom’s marketing equivalent of the ‘fake’ 90’s style trailer for Strafe – equally without irony or possible ironic distance.
- Doom as apparent for ‘REAL’™ (ie. hardcore) Players, except for the fact oldskool Original™ Doom players consider it ‘Nu Metal Doom’ – a dumbed-down (!), consolized, casual, platformy, resource managed Mario power-up filled heresy. And yet these two positions are exactly the same. Doom Lite – a zero calorie apocalypse.
- Indeed, Doom is not power (obviously, considering you have to pay an evil megacorp to play it) but a fantasy of the illusion of power.
- Note how the Doom Slayer slays doom; constantly slays what is actually or potentially doomful or doomy in Doom. Those desperate creatures he slays without mercy (some of which are actually cute and cuddly) express absolutely no free will and appear entirely unmotived, like clones, or puppets. What to call someone who takes an oversized shotgun to demonic looking store front dummies – except an idiot, acting without reason or meaning. Consider Doomguy perhaps the biggest source of plotless meandering emptiness and synthetic motivation in the entire game. (Heck, at least the Praeleanthor gave up their entire alien civilization to be finally rid of bullshit undead white-nerd-overrated 90’s arcade shooters.)
- Perhaps the only thing truly doomful about Doom Eternal is Mick Gordon’s ambient track Exultia.