It may seem unfair to say that Google Stadia has already failed, but the temporal rifts created by the platform have already revealed the future to highly-advanced organisms such as myself, and I feel it is necessary to comment on them.
We should, however, make note of the individuals who have made League of Legends and Diablo III and Fortnite some of the very most popular videogames on planet Earth, because they now have some choice opinions – “outrage”, if you will – over a platform that does not work correctly unless you are connected to the company’s servers.
Some academics and high-ranking military officials may suggest this is another example of the internet casting its “outrage”, a world where videogames are now so boring, the “real game” is to band against your alleged enemies and fight them in the digital streets with your most brutal messageboard posts.
And we certainly do not dismiss the concern that the destruction of art no longer comes down to freak accidents burning down film vaults filled with the finest silent Japanese pornographic cartoons, but rather, a world where some asshole who has never played a videogame looks up at the other board members and says “we are shutting down the game” because it threatens several percentage points of year-to-year operating revenues.
But nevermind Robert A. Kotick and his third yacht, the issues of Stadia are something very different, because many gaming historians (and particularly AnusMaster69) have spoken of videogames and platforms that were “ahead of their time”. I am proposing precisely that. Google Stadia is so far ahead of its time that no human will ever be able to appreciate what it has brought to the market.
Remember that during most of the 20th century, the mission of electronics companies was very simple: Create the hardware that will better facilitate the media and the software. This meant that these companies could focus on their niche, and as a general rule of thumb, they created bigger screens with better colors, powered by better hardware, leading to better experiences and bigger boobs.
But at the beginning of the 21st century, the hardware was not only beginning to reach physical and theoretical limits, where you can only fold the ones and the zeroes with your smithing hammer so many times. The progress in this field of technology has been so rapid, we are beginning to reach theoretical limits of BIOLOGY.
I give you the example that in the 2010s, Steve Jobs emerged from his home workshop with the “retina display”, a phone screen with such a high density of pixels that a human could not actually see them, a mirror and gateway into a lifelike digital simulacra, and for good reason, it was rated the top technology of 2012 by Apple Magazine.
These “hyperreal” technologies are having startling and profound impacts on the human brain, but they operate on much the same line as the uncanny valley. Think of a videogame so lifelike and realistic, it comes to supplant and replace reality, and with knowledge of the previous reality entirely eliminated, the videogame would seem normal and ordinary.
I am proposing those who have returned from use of Google Stadia with their lives intact have seen this effect in motion. We knew from the moment Mr. Google announced this platform’s revolutionary combination of “blast-processing”, “raytracing”, “the cloud”, and “games you already played five years ago”, that humanity was at a dangerous crossroads, and we are now seeing it.
The technology inside of the Google Stadia platform is so advanced, so in excess of human cognition and the senses, that to the unaided eye, it will often appear that Stadia is “upscaling” or “buffering” the images on your television screen, the increasing uncertainty of reality manifesting in “uncertain” picture quality.
A couple of saboteurs on Reddit and Twitter are spreading the slanderous lies that current internet solutions (and particularly American internet) do not provide the bandwidth necessary for a streaming product that is comparable to games played on home hardware. But the bottleneck is not the internet or computers, it is the humans themselves.
In the current era, the solutions for dealing with this paradox are limited, that sure, you can get the expensive laser-eye surgery, you can consume Mountain Dew and Doritos on the way to the improved nutrition for eye health, but these are temporary stopgaps on the path to finite reward and dew-tacular satiscrunchion.
Google would never publicly announce this, but Stadia is clearly and obviously in the Early Access phase of development, a cycle that will mirror modern society, in which we begin to modify human beings to fit the environment, through medication and various psychological manipulation techniques. And now, humans must now be ENGINEERED to work with Google Stadia.
I already expect that this newly-considered field of genetic and human modification is going to be pretty controversial, but we also thought that indiscriminate surveillance was going to be controversial, right before we turned it into portable phones and “personal assistants” and digital paper records, uploading the footage of grandma having a heart attack and scoring many “Likes” on social media.
So if Mr. Google knows what he is doing, then he knows fully and absolutely that human beings will submit to mechanical augmentation if it is the difference in experiencing Google Stadia the way it was meant to be experienced, something so liberating that no human would pass on the chance to graft the telescopes directly into their eyeballs.
It will all be on the path to something greater than humanity itself, and as individuals modify themselves to become “compatible” with Google Stadia, the process of modifying the human body will become commonplace, as players desire more and greater forms of modification that will facilitate more advanced versions of the Stadia platform.
When I think of this very possible future, I like to imagine a legion of metal supermen departing from planet Earth in pursuit of new species to enslave. But what will they do in the cold depths and darkness of space on their way to conquering every organism in the entire universe? They will be playing Google Stadia, of course.
And I know that journalists, especially in the “social media” era, have a habit of making stupid predictions that will blow up in their faces, but hear me out on this: Google Stadia will become the communications network that links all the metal supermen together all across the entire universe, as they engage in cutting-edge videogames like Tomb Raider, Rise of the Tomb Raider, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider.
But my imagination is running in wild directions right now, and it is a shame that we will never get to this, because videogame players are children who simply want interfaces and platforms which satisfy a psychological illusion that when you press the button, you are going to get responsive feedback that does not get in the way of controlling your destiny.
These are the same people who fear the flying metal canisters that are the safest form of transportation in human history, or the driverless vehicles that will soon one day make collisions with bicyclists and jaywalkers safer and more efficient than ever before. It seems fairly obvious Western societies will have to outlaw these deep-seated and ape-like impulses before Google Stadia (or something like Stadia) can finally succeed.
It is in this world that the subjugation of every human on planet Earth will be complete. I’d say such a world is true and utter bliss, but that would be Stadia the obvious.